Tuesday, February 20, 2007

BIG MEN, SMALL PEOPLE



My encounter with real physical pain was bad enough.  But the semiprivate hospital room exposed me to mental pain as well:  forced to watch the endless parade of “sex and violence” (there’s no other way to put it) on my neighbor’s TV screen.
Used to watching a select few channels, I never realized the pervasiveness and the weight of what goes on over the vast number of other outlets.  While I’m carrying on about the failings of NBC, ABC, CBS (the sisters, I believe they’re called)  this daily diet that reaches milli

While I rejoice at Ken Silverstein’s persistence in getting his interviews of Islamists to the public (why did it take so long for Harpers to print them, he’s been the DC bureau chief for months?), recognizing the similarities between these rebels and the Cuban revolutionaries I interviewed forty years ago, the picture expands, as in a nightmare, and I get to this: big men, small people.
The world is ruled by a clique of big men and women; masses of people are always ruled by a small number of individuals, and this makes “the people”, who should be big, small. The problem for rulers today, is the sheer size of the world’s population. They will tell you they have to use every means at their disposal or there would be mayhem.
As if to confirm this, “Democracy Now” interviews Maureen Webb, a Canadian lawyer, who just wrote a book entitled “Illusions of Security” that details all the ways the big men do not love the small people.
While we anxiously follow the half dozen or so daily episodes in the permanent world sit-coms, as if individually they were really meaningful, we are oblivious to the fact that electronic bees are busy twenty-four seven mining data about everything we do, the better to know what we think, and be able to pick us up at an airport as we return from grandmothers across the woods or the seas, and lock us up in some unknown place, just in case we didn’t internalize the message on the TV.

Monday, February 19, 2007

OBAMA'S BREATH OF FRESH AIR, HILLARY'S DRAFT FROM THE PAST AND PUTIN'S CREDO

A medical emergency has delayed this comment, but it’s going to have long legs.
Maybe you didn’t see Senator McCain and a republican colleague whose identity I have forgotten sitting in the front row of an international meeting on Iran as Vladimir Putin got up and declared the era of American supremacy over.  The camera shot couldn’t have been more eloquent.
Essentially Putin stated publicly what everyone knows: America is on a descending curve, and the rest of the world is collectively in the ascent.  It doesn’t mater whether they’re communists, ex-communists, moderate or less moderate Islamists, Latin Americans rallying round Chavez’ Bolivarian revolution (better late than never), doing business with the Chinese who are also doing business in Africa.
Ken Silverstein’s lead article in the new Harpers, plugs right into the world’s declaration of independence.  A dispassionate look at the Islamist bogeyman that the Los Angeles Times would have edited beyond recognition, we can hope its publication by Harpers will move the so-called liberal media a step closer to objectivity (a loaded word, I know, but our media is so far from it...).
With the complicity of that media, the Bush administration thinks it can still behave as if Iran were not, in classical geopolitical terms, the dominant power in the Middle East, asserting its position by sticking to its legal right to nuclear technology.  We were not privy to the rest of Putin’s speech, but Putin was implying that the U.S. can no longer come from across the seas to dictate relationships between Iran and its neighbors.  Any meddling by powers outside the Middle East is going to be done by those directly concerned, Russia and Europe, thank you very much.
The upward and downward trends in history are as inexorable for individuals as for nations. Whatever one may think of her, it’s painful to watch Senator Clinton’s forced cheer, as Obama continues what is likely to be a graceful yet powerful surge to the White House.  A surge made all the more imperative by Putin’s credo.

Sunday, February 4, 2007

Truth or Consequences about Iraq

Senator Edwards should not be counted out, in all the hype surrounding Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.  If Paul Street’s article on Obama in the latest issue of Z magazine is right, Edwards may be closer to the rank and file ethos of the Democratic Party - and those to the left of it - than Obama.
One can fault him for thinking that health care, while universal, should still produce a profit, or that keeping American troops in the Middle East will not complicate efforts by the countries located there to settle their differences. But in the absence of Paul Wellstone, and given Dennis Kucinich’s lack of mass name recognition, at this stage of the game, Edwards appeared this morning on “Meet the Press” as a more genuine person than either of the two who are getting most of the media attention.
When it comes to Iraq, I think he’s on the right track, but his thinking is still a bit fuzzy, even assuming he isn't’ ready to take on big oil.  I don’t think any major figure has thought through what would be likely to happen if we pulled out.  Here’s how I see it:
1. Since the end of colonial rule, the various religious and political factions in the Middle East have been vying for supremacy within the different countries colonialism bequeathed them.  American involvement is correctly seen as succeeding to the British presence, which succeeded five hundred years of Ottoman, i.e., Turkish, as opposed to Arab or Persian Islamic rule (historians, don’t nit pick my figures, it’s the gist that counts).
2. The principal religious factions, Sunnis and Shias, overlay political tendencies, which, as elsewhere, fall into two groups, the elites and the underclass, with members of a rising intellectual and professional class siding with one or the other.
3. Each individual country has to evolve some kind of reasonably democratic rule in order to be be a more effective participant in the international political order.
4.  This task cannot be entirely divorced from the presence of neighbors who either share the dominant religious orientation, or belong to the opposing one.
5.  Invasion and occupation by the most powerful nation on earth inflicts great damage on infrastructure, and turns populations against everything that nation represents.
6. Retreat by that nation will strengthen sense of worth, and favor internal and cross border cooperation.
7. Fighting between Sunni and Shia in Iraq might elicit support from Sunni and Shia neighbors, but all the contenders will sense that they are fighting their own wars.  And they will not be able to inflict the kind of massive infrastructure damage our sophisticated weapons do.
8. Help from the United States, China, or the Soviet Union will be comparable to that given client states during the Cold War: it will not determine outcomes.
9. Support for secular moderates will be more important, but the United States will have to recognize that these moderates may be socialists, as is the Kurdish PUK, or the Ba’ath, which -though run by a brutal dictator in Iraq - brought development and women’s liberation to that country (the development President Bush cited when imagining what adding democracy would mean).
10.  Only grass roots pressure can persuade the American political class to return to the ideals of the Founders, who, in the 21st century, would support international democratic socialism over feudal  - or imperialist - capitalism.
11.  Bottom line: the Middle East is going to have to sort itself out: it’s going to be a bloody mess for a while, but our presence only protracts the agony.
12.  We will not be allowed to take over the oil, but they will just as soon sell it to us as to others, on condition that we stay out of their affairs.

So the Iraq war, like most other political issues, boils down to the question of equity, haves vs. have-nots, whether it be at the local, national or international level.
The question now is whether the specter of climate change that is stalking the planet will be more persuasive than “morality”.

Saturday, February 3, 2007

SAND IN OUR EYES

Several days heavy on bureaucratic matters - that left no time for blogging, alas - culminated in a health provider insisting that I pick up a form for my son to sign in order to release his medical records.  A release in his own handwriting won’t do.  They need his signature on a form

I took refuge in a Hollywood musical never shown on TCM, one with Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly before they became famous.  The subplot revolved around the difference between the kind of people who require written contracts and those who do things out of mutual trust. How not to regret the good old days?  But in one sense the old days were no different from now:  the lovers are both in good faith, but they almost lose each other because, like all antagonists each one is programmed to up the ante.  Bush and Ahmadinejad are unlikely to spare us a widening Sunni-Shia conflict because they have no underlying motivation to cooperate.

The "so-called liberal media"  having finally decided it could no longer keep its head in the White House sandbox, the news today was about the warning issued by a global scientific panel about the very real danger the world is facing from global warming.  As if on cue, central Floridians were hit with a monster tornado: 19 dead. Alas, the latest issue of Z magazine warns that carbon exchange and other measures discussed during the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Nairobi last year will be counterproductive.

The players in the sandbox don’t see what either climate change  or all-out war in the Middle East means for our survival.

Tomorrow I’ll spell out my plan for Iraq.

Thursday, February 1, 2007

Global Warming Trimming Middle East Sails?




Hear for the first time yesterday on Democracy Now, a new buzz-word: radical populism.  As yet another obfuscation of the fact that we live in a class society, I predict it wil have long legs.

Yesterday's Democracy Now's linkage of the New Orleans news item with an interview on peak oil resulted in the following link for me:

Middle Eastern scholar Dilip Hiro wrote a book about the crucial importance of oil starting even before the twentieth century in Ajerbaijan, and leading to the all but incestuous ties between the Saudi royals and the Midland royals.  (If the Saudis were Protestants, we'd surely have seen marriages by now...)

Coming right after the testimony of activists arrested for trying to prevent perfectly good low income housing in New Orleans from being demolished, it inspired the following insight:  the administration wants to turn New Orleans into the equivalent of the Emirates where the officially puritanical Saudi royals go to indulge in forbidden pleasures, when those same Saudis visit Midlands. (According to Hiro Midlands is the oil center of the world, with Houston the oil financial center...)

My vision of the "new" New Orleans is undoubtedly inspired by Sandra Mackey's book on Saudi Arabia.  As someone who lived there for two years in the seventies, she describes the almost unimaginable lengths to which the Saudis go to prevent their population from adopting modern sexual mores.  In the recent paperback edition, she doesn't tall us whether anything has changed since then, but in any case as a starting point for understanding the oil kingdom, this book is a must.

The New New Orleans




Hear for the first time yesterday on Democracy Now, a new buzz-word: radical populism.  As yet another obfuscation of the fact that we live in a class society, I predict it wil have long legs.

Yesterday's Democracy Now's linkage of the New Orleans news item with an interview on peak oil resulted in the following link for me:

Middle Eastern scholar Dilip Hiro wrote a book about the crucial importance of oil starting even before the twentieth century in Ajerbaijan, and leading to the all but incestuous ties between the Saudi royals and the Midland royals.  (If the Saudis were Protestants, we'd surely have seen marriages by now...)

Coming right after the testimony of activists arrested for trying to prevent perfectly good low income housing in New Orleans from being demolished, it inspired the following insight:  the administration wants to turn New Orleans into the equivalent of the Emirates where the officially puritanical Saudi royals go to indulge in forbidden pleasures, when those same Saudis visit Midlands. (According to Hiro Midlands is the oil center of the world, with Houston the oil financial center...)

My vision of the "new" New Orleans is undoubtedly inspired by Sandra Mackey's book on Saudi Arabia.  As someone who lived there for two years in the seventies, she describes the almost unimaginable lengths to which the Saudis go to prevent their population from adopting modern sexual mores.  In the recent paperback edition, she doesn't tall us whether anything has changed since then, but in any case as a starting point for understanding the oil kingdom, this book is a must.