Neoliberalism as Economic Pornography

Rob Urie

Two weeks after a former Obama administration official who helped engineer the bailout of General Motors sought a seat on GM’s Board of Directors to force an $8 billion share buyback to benefit hedge funds, General Motors joined the also bailed out Ford Motor Company to announce the intention to add yet one lower paid tier to the existing two-tiered wage structure. Citing overseas ‘competition,’ General Motors executives are using $8 billion in retained earnings to raise the value of company shares owned by hedge funds and to benefit themselves directly. The role of the Obama administration in retaining the two-tiered wage structure when bailing out General Motors and in sending one of its former members to ‘harvest’ the residual should raise fundamental questions about the intersection of politics and economics?

This intersection is supported by the economic theology of neoliberalism now some decades embedded into the major institutions of the West. Through its reduction of the breadth of human experience to the dull economism of market relations, neoliberalism most closely resembles economic pornography. A defining characteristic is de-contextualization for re-contextualization, removal from the breadth and depth of human relations to posit family, friends, neighbors and community as consumers to be conned, scammed and exploited. And to provide the punchline at the outset: there is nothing brilliant or insightful about the political success of neoliberalism. History is replete with totalizing ideologies that support an existing status quo until their limitations force reclamation of broader possibility.

Graph (1) above: the resurgence of neoliberalism in capitalist theory has none-too-ironically coincided with severely diminished economic performance by metrics preferred by the liberal wing of the capitalist church. Inflation-adjusted GDP (Gross Domestic Product) growth has been declining steadily since the neoliberal resurgence began in the 1970s. While historical circumstances, the aftermath of WWII, go far in explaining this performance, of what relevance is history when God is running the economy? As with explaining genocide and slavery as ‘God’s will,’ diminished economic performance is reason for more and ‘purer’ markets for true believers. The question for the left is: which makes more sense, arguing with true believers or getting them out of the way to make peace with the world more broadly considered? Source: St. Louis Fed.

With the American left now nearing a half century in the proverbial wilderness the temptation to point to a brilliant and immutable opposition is rising. Ignoring for the moment the tendency toward ideological tribalism, a question worth asking: is the problem an absence of influence over the existing order or is it having a wholly different conception of what the world could be? From inside the existing order political participation is totalizing— participation by degree has no bearing, it is all de facto consent. American citizens who aren’t politically active are considered citizens nevertheless, by internal measures the best citizens among us. The question then isn’t how the left is internally defined, but rather how it is defined through the residual of possibility that stands outside of the existing order.

The temptation to assign a totalizing brilliance to modern capitalism, to the systematic instantiation of the corporate model of neoliberalism ever further into the ‘public’ and ‘private’ realms, confuses local with global intelligence. By analogy, the Catholic Church spent two millennia fitting the inconvenient facts of existence into the idea of God’s will. The capitalist path of secularizing this God as ‘external’ intelligence is: God > Nature > Markets, with markets representing an ‘external’ totalizing intelligence. The question for the left, strategy aside: is accedence to this secular god intellectually and theoretically coherent or is it a sociological response to deeply held nonsense? The strategic question is: from the outside of this totalizing logic should the focus be on changing minds or changing circumstances?

The success of neoliberals in imposing their vision on ever greater parts of the world can be attributed to strategic aforethought, but the strategy itself is quite old. Modern Republicans have understood the political benefits of deep embedding of sympathetic bureaucrats along with patronage through loyal networks for some decades now— George H.W. Bush got his son appointed to the Presidency a dozen years before the fact through his Supreme Court appointments. In The German Dictatorship Karl Bracher details the years senior Nazis spent embedding sympathetic bureaucrats and operatives across Western Europe prior to the rise of the Third Reich. In The Crisis of the German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich George Mosse traces the origins of this political long game back to the Roman Empire.

Graph (2) above: the mythology that the 1970s was a decade of economic catastrophe is widely off the mark. As Graph (1) above illustrates, as measured by Real GDP growth, economic performance in the 1970s was significantly stronger than that of the last one-and-one-half decades in the U.S. What did suffer, as illustrated in Graph (2) above, is Net Worth relative to economic production, largely a measure of how much economic production is converted to ‘savings’ by the very rich. By this measure, which can be largely explained by fluctuating financial asset prices, the 1970s were a disaster. Neoliberalism rose as of political and economic force in conjunction with the financialization of Western economies. Since the mid-1990s the rise in Net Worth has outpaced economic production due to financial asset price gains. Source: St. Louis Fed.

Does ideology ‘cause’ political economy or does political economy facilitate the social apologetics that support it? The absence of arguments from the left in mainstream discourse coincident with the ascendance of radical capitalism over the last forty years is evidence for the latter. This causal direction was well-covered by Antonio Gramsci some decades past. It was without public expression of irony that free-marketeer Ronald Reagan had the most protectionist economic policies in modern history. The anarcho-libertarianism of Newt Gingrich was likewise skin deep— both Mr. Reagan and Mr. Gingrich used government as a patronage system for their own political ends. The ‘do as I say, not as I do’ tendencies of neoliberalism point to the ruling class whimsy driving it.

As a branch of the scientific and academic practices of modernity, economics shares the conceit, with varying degrees of plausibility, of intellectual and theoretical ‘progress.’ As a process individuated from other disciplines and interconnected social outcomes by its practitioners, the question of why history better explains long term economic performance (Graph (1) above) than shifting economic theories has bearing. Academic theorist Philip Mirowski follows the (Michel) Foucauldian / (Thomas) Kuhnian idea of structural break— that neoliberalism represents a fundamental break from earlier capitalist theory. While I am highly sympathetic to the inclination toward break, capitalism has been totalizing ideology since its inception through its basis in Cartesian dualism.

At the level of theory, the God > Nature > Markets conception of ‘nature’ as an external intelligence precedes even Adam Smith. As Smith does, readers can leave the deistic migration at the level of ‘nature’ without loss of further inference to markets.

From Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Part IV, paragraph 9.

“By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.”

The starting premise is Cartesian dualism, an inside / outside that has people acting in their own self-interest organized by an external intelligence toward the betterment of society. Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ is the metaphorical manifestation of this external intelligence. The base social actor is the individual to whom the invisible hand is external— ‘external’ intentions by individuals are hindrance to social outcomes best left to a benevolent nature. This is an important point: while Smith argues that self-interest is the motivating factor for good social outcomes, “he intends only his own gain,” he expresses broader understanding of the social interest elsewhere. By ‘external’ allocation of social production, which Smith alludes to several times in this same chapter (link above), the invisible hand acts as an intelligence that stands outside of human intentions and understanding.

When Philip Mirowski (link above) argues that neoliberalism is an amalgamation of Austrian and American social philosophy as it has developed since the 1940s, left unreported is the residual of social possibility— it isn’t an amalgam of Tunisian and Ugandan social philosophy— the point being that the schools are not randomly associated. Austrian economists, including Friedrich Hayak, were imported by dispossessed American plutocrats in the 1940s and 1950s to resurrect primitive capitalist ideology. Mr. Hayek is one of the more interesting examples— he understood and articulated the social consequences of capitalist production, including pollution, until he was paid not to by Fred Koch, father of his litigious, dystopian Koch Brothers. This is to suggest that modern neoliberalism was considered primitive even by committed capitalist ideologues of past decades.

This history is important because the argument of a structural break between the pre-Keynesian orthodoxy that preceded the ‘bastard’ Keynesian of the New Deal and neoliberalism requires a parsing of history that has alternative explanation. Irrespective of the value one assigns to science, its base frame is dualistic, a relationship of observer to observed. In territory reportedly well covered by Mr. Mirowski; in the mid-late nineteenth century economists William Stanley Jevons and Leon Walras co-opted physics models and backed their economic theories into them. The premise that economic ‘systems’ are analogous to physical systems necessarily preceded the co-optation. These models are metaphors for the physical / economic processes they are claimed to represent; they proceed from a metaphorical ‘inside’ that in theory represents aspects of an external world.

This conception of economics as a natural system follows the God > Nature deistic migration of Western modernity. Much as with the Physiocrat idea of a ‘natural order’ that preceded Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Jevons and Walras’ deference to a rule-based ‘natural’ system of economics has economic actors acting apart from an externally given system. Adding paradox to neoliberal theory is that markets are the organizing ‘structure’ that is itself organized from without. By analogy, within the dualistic frame people aren’t gravity, there are people and there is gravity. And by extension, people aren’t nature, there are people and there is nature. Of note is that this dualism leaves no place for people— we are eternally ‘inside’ some nebulous space apart from the world.

Herein lies the paradox, as an ‘external’ organizing force, or as Mr. Mirowski has it, an information processing system, neoliberal markets are external to human affairs. Reorganizing social relations to facilitate this external intelligence either assumes perfect knowledge of it or social reorganization premised on it is ludicrous on its face. What is assumed is specific form and content of the information that markets process that the breadth of human experience renders reductive to the point of leaving an economic pornographer in charge of social organization. Creative thoughts / acts are achieved using intelligence of form and content that bears no relation to the concept of economistic information processing. The conceptual circle from people to markets back to people is empty tautology, not profound insight.

While Adam Smith and the capitalist economists who followed him maintained different realms of state and market, implausibly so as Marx and Lenin, had it, once the idea of a benevolent external intelligence is granted the distinction appears arbitrary. If the state exists to serve ruling class interests, admittedly a crude formulation of the Marxist / Leninist explanation of the capitalist state, then the state serves an economic role— its role in participatory politics is largely illusory. Conversely, if markets ‘work’ in the realm of the economic, why wouldn’t they work in the realm of the political? The answer back that they don’t, at least not as advertised (see Graph (1) above), points to the ethereal nature of totalizing ideology. A fundamental flaw of neoliberalism is that its ‘facts’ in terms of social outcomes can’t be forever held at bay.

In the 1950s and 1960s ‘rocket scientists’ were considered the zenith of human intelligence because they could launch missiles from one location and have them land in another. That many of the best rocket scientists had been committed Nazis before they were committed to developing nuclear weapons for the U.S. draws a circle around this conception of intelligence. Before financial markets went awry in 2008 bankers and financial engineers were considered the ‘best and brightest’ for participating in what in hindsight was the creation of very narrowly distributed prosperity. The Department of Justice report on the use of the Municipal government in Ferguson, Missouri as a revenue center is testament to the ‘brilliance’ of neoliberalism. A group of slimy white guys in suits used embedded history to claim privileges for themselves at the expense of the people they claim to govern.

Neoliberalism is the metaphorical equivalent of ‘shitting’ pornography, reduction of the structure and purpose of human existence to endless images of people shitting on one another. From within this worldview alternatives are limited to other pornographic genres. The irony of the ‘envy’ critique of socialist and communist alternatives is that they predominantly come from people whose conception of social possibility is limited to people endlessly shitting on one another. What is depressing about this worldview and its deep instantiation is that young people don’t have the historical memory and life experience to put it in perspective. In this sense neoliberalism is conceptually predatory. But ultimately it is poorly conceived— as the citizens of Ferguson are demonstrating, you can ‘legally’ shit on people for a while, but not forever. And the narrowness of the neoliberal vision leaves room for social possibility, for intelligence that isn’t limited to excrement as the sole ‘currency’ of social relations.

A Conversation With CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou

Douglas Valentine

John Kiriakou is widely known as the former CIA case officer who, in an interview with ABC News in late 2007, confirmed that the CIA had tortured prisoner Abu Zubaydah, an alleged member of al Qaeda, on the waterboard.

Kiriakou was aware of only one instance in which Zubaydah was waterboarded, but his revelations set off a slew of investigations that sent America’s secret clique of torturers and their political bosses running for cover. Even the Senate, with feigned sincerity, initiated an investigation in 2009.

The vicious CIA wasn’t pleased, to put it mildly, nor was the Obama administration, which sicced the FBI on Kiriakou. As the controversy percolated and the authorities closed in, Kiriakou became a bit of a media sensation. Caught off guard by the flurry of attention (wanted and unwanted), he perhaps inadvertently violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by disclosing, among other things, the name of a covert CIA officer.

Facing 40 years in stir, Kiriakou copped a plea in October 2012. In February 2013 he entered the federal prison in Loretto, Pennsylvania. He was released in February 2015 with an entirely new perspective on America’s racist, sadistic, but highly profitable “corrections” industry.

John Kiriakou, however, was not an ordinary convict. While in prison he enjoyed the blessings of the Reverend Farrakhan and, as an acknowledged “human rights guy” was protected from many of the harsh realities most inmates endure. He received mail from thousands of supporters and maintained a popular blog, Letters from Loretto that got him in trouble with the Bureau of Prisons. But as a celebrity with a powerful attorney, he escaped additional punishments.

That doesn’t mean Kiriakou has it easy. The fascist law enforcement establishment considers him a traitor who got off easy and would love nothing better than to get its claws in him again. Many of his former CIA colleagues feel the same way, and the unforgiving CIA reviews and censors his writings. So he must be cautious in his statements about the CIA (including, one might deduce, those he made in this interview), and thus his answers sometimes have the intonations of a talking head issuing well-practiced sound bites.

This is not a typical interview with someone who has freedom of speech. But then again, John Kiriakou is an unusual man accustomed to navigating dangerous waters.

After being recruited into the CIA by a college “talent scout”, Kiriakou spent his first eight years in the Agency as a Middle East analyst specializing on Iraq. In 1998 he transferred to the sexier Operations Division and later its premier counter-terrorism branch. The 9-11 terror attacks catapulted him into prominence as chief of CT Ops in Pakistan, in which capacity he ran an agent network that located numerous Al Qaeda safehouses. Kiriakou and his unit were responsible for apprehending dozens of “enemy combatants” in high tech paramilitary raids that included US and foreign Special Forces.

This is heady stuff, the Rambo kind of marauding that births CIA legends and leads to rapid career advancement. But for Kiriakou the adventure was short-lived, and in 2002 he returned to CIA headquarters. In 2004 he resigned to spend more time with his children, who were 9 and 6 at the time. He had recently divorced, the kids were in Ohio, and he couldn’t risk being sent overseas again for years at a time. So he took a job in the accounting firm Deloitte & Touche’s “competitive intelligence practice” section, which meant spying on the company’s competitors – Ernst & Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG, Accenture, IBM, etc.

In 2009, through political connections to Senator John Kerry, Kiriakou became an investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Two years later he returned to a job in the private sector, while engaging in public speaking and media consulting (including Hollywood).

John Kiriakou walks a fine line. On the on hand he is an icon to idealists, in the mold of Dan Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, and Ed Snowden. As a whistleblower who has been persecuted for acts of conscience, he is a celebrity of sorts – a position that can be intoxicating and corrupting. On the other hand, Kiriakou is still recovering from the shock of being in a cage for two years. More determined than ever to help America become a better place, he has dedicated his life to prison reform.

John Kiriakou is not, however, dedicating his life to CIA reform. He’s certainly not in a position to whack that particular hornet’s nest, not unless he wants to revisit Loretto.

But a journalist must be careful too, and I wondered if Kiriakou still felt a romantic attachment to the CIA. In a recent interview with Ken Klippenstein, he acknowledged that the war on terror is as much a war of revenge as it is a paramilitary police and espionage action designed to protect Americans from harm. He acknowledged that drone strikes have killed “dozens” of innocent people at wedding celebrations and “do more to help recruitment for groups like al-Qaeda or ISIS than anything they could do.” He even equated the Al Qaeda fighters he captured with the average American prisoner or soldier – functionally illiterate, lacking job skills, propagandized and manipulated. “So these were not hardened terrorists,” he told Klippenstein, “these were just confused young men.”

But in that interview, Kiriakou also exhibits signs of remaining a dedicated and indoctrinated legionnaire. He described ISIS as “created solely out of a hatred for the United States….in American military prisons in Iraq.” A statement seems somewhat true. But when it comes to dealing with ISIS, his inclination is standard imperial CIA: “We should be encouraging and supporting the militaries of our friends in the region – the Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, the Turks – and we should be encouraging them to send their troops. After all, it’s their countries that are under threat. Why is this our problem? Why is this our undertaking, that we have to send Americans to die in Iraq and Syria? For what?”

Is it really better to send “our friends” in Egypt and Saudi Arabia after ISIS? How are “we” in a position to even imagine sending other nations to do our dirty work and clean up our imperial messes? Remember, these are same “friends” the CIA hired to torture a lot of innocent people.

I recently had the privilege of asking John Kiriakou some questions. His answers are below.

DV – Democracy is defined as, “A system of government in which power is vested in the people, who rule either directly or through freely elected representatives.” America prides itself on being the freest democracy in the world. Is that a mass delusion, given the overarching power of the CIA, which American citizens have no control over?

JK – I don’t think we’ve ever had a truly free—or even exemplary—democracy. Just look at the oppressed people throughout our history. What would African-Americans, the poor, immigrants, and workers say about the strength of our democracy, especially throughout history. I think it is indeed a mass delusion.

DV – We only ever hear of the CIA sabotaging and subverting Leftist governments. As an institution, what is the CIA’s political ideology? Is it as extreme right as seems to be the case?

JK – I think the institutional ideology of the CIA is an extreme right-wing ideology. Throughout history it has been the CIA leading Presidents, not Presidents leading the CIA. It is the CIA that presents to the president the idea of covert action, not the other way around. This has led to nothing but disaster, such as in Iran, the Dominican Republic, Greece, Chile, and Central America.

DV – Our government has stated policies, which people associate with democratic values; and it has unstated policies. For example, Ronald Reagan said he would never negotiate with terrorists, a promise that ensured his re-election. Meanwhile he had the CIA sell weapons to Iran and used the money to fund the CIA’s army in Nicaragua. Is that what the CIA is: a mechanism our rulers use to make us believe they are moral and truthful, when in fact they are pursuing illegal activities that further only their own interests?

JK – That is exactly what the CIA is—a “fixer” for Presidents. Unfortunately, most of the CIA’s fixes have very serious and severe long-term consequences. Look at Greece as an example. Don’t like Communism? Overthrow the government and replace it with a military dictatorship that still, more than 40 years later, traumatizes society. Don’t like the Iranian government taking “our” oil? Overthrow the democratically-elected Prime Minister and replace him with a fascist dictator, which leads to a theocracy that we are still fighting. These poor decisions, internationally-criminal decisions in some cases, have very long-term consequences, which the CIA doesn’t seem to care about.

DV – As the primary mechanism of pursuing unstated policies that benefit only the rich ruling elite, what effect does the CIA have on our so-called democratic institutions, in particular on our “representatives” in Congress, and our so-called government watchdogs in the media?

JK – Our representatives in Congress are little more than cheerleaders for the CIA. They are afraid of being labeled “weak” on national security, and as a result, there is no oversight. There are certainly a handful of courageous Congressmen and Senators, but they are few and far between, and, as far as the CIA goes, they are ineffectual.

DV – After your CIA service, you served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. How does the CIA impose its will on the committees that affect its legislated mission, budget and operations?

JK – First and foremost, the CIA “recruits” select members of Congress. They get special briefings; they are brought “inside” the circle. Their delegations get the red carpet treatment overseas. It’s very well thought-out. The CIA really knows how to cultivate people on the Hill.

DV – You have also had extensive dealings with the print and TV media, as well as Hollywood. How does the CIA bend the media and Hollywood to its will?

JK – The CIA can use a heavy hand with the media. If a reporter is writing a story that makes the Agency look bad, the Agency can threaten to withhold any future cooperation. If a Hollywood producer is making a movie about the Agency or an Agency operation, so long as it’s pro-Agency, the producers can get insider briefings (classified briefings, in the case of Zero Dark Thirty.) If an author writes a book critical of the CIA, the Agency will tell newspapers and other outlets to not review the book. It’s all very heavy-handed.

DV – We have seen presidents use the CIA for self-serving, nefarious purposes. We’ve seen these same presidents protect CIA officers who get caught. Bush 1 pardoned CIA officers involved in the Iran Contra scandal, and Bush 2 commuted Scooter Libby’s sentence for outing CIA officer Valerie Plame. Obama continues the pattern of our leaders protecting CIA officers and punishing whistleblowers. How does this reality affect the recruitment and backing of candidates for national election by the Republican and Democratic parties?

JK – I think every candidate for office at the Congressional level wants to court the Agency. Everybody wants to look like they’re tough on national security. So in that inherently authoritarian narrative, there is no room for whistleblowers. Anybody who sheds light on the darkness is the enemy.

DV – The CIA is the organized crime branch of the government, conducting every crime imaginable. How does this immersion in illegal activities – the success of which relies upon deceiving the American public – coupled with the blanket legal protection they receive in return, affect CIA officers as individuals?

JK – Well, first let me say that I’m a realist. There will always be a CIA, even if I think that the organization is no longer necessary. The only way to change the CIA is from the inside. With that said, on the operations side of the CIA, every employee is taught to lie, about everything, to everyone. Some officers do not know when to, or cannot, turn the lies off. That leads to policy disasters. It leads to cover-ups. It leads to Congressional investigations. The only way there can be justice is if the President lets the legal system run its course. But Presidents don’t do that. They participate in the cover-ups. They issue pardons to the wrong people. It’s bad for the country, and it’s bad for democracy.

DV – An agent with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics once said to me that most agents “were corrupted by the lure of the underworld. They thought they could check their morality at the door – go out and lie, cheat, and steal – then come back and retrieve it. But you can’t. In fact, if you’re successful because you can lie, cheat, and steal, those things become tools you use in the bureaucracy. You’re talking about guys whose lives depended on their ability to be devious and who become very good at it. So these people became the bosses, and undercover work became the credo – and a source of boundless, profitable hype. Meanwhile the agents were losing their simplicity in subtle ways.”

The CIA’s top managers and executives likewise succeed through their ability to corrupt and deceive. Our ruling class behaves the same way, and values the CIA for its expertise. Do we as American citizens also embrace this ‘dog eat dog” philosophy, and thus tacitly understand and approve of the CIA and the established pattern of not confronting us (and our fragile consciences) with the knowledge of its various crimes?

JK – We can never accept this kind of behavior. Never. It is this kind of sociopathy that throughout history has led us into wars, coups and countercoups, and the defense of fascist dictatorships. Your FBN friend is exactly right.

DV – You were involved in operations against the Taliban in 2001, when John Lindh was captured at the Battle of Qala-i-Jangi. Did the CIA and its allied forces summarily execute prisoners during and after this battle, in which CIA officer Mike Spann was killed?

JK – I was not involved in this. I was in Washington at the time, and then I transferred to Pakistan in early 2002. When I was at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I initiated an investigation into the Dasht e-Leili Massacre, to which you refer. I have no idea of CIA officers were present at the massacre. I believe they probably were. But I don’t think we’ll ever know the truth about what happened there.

DV – Apparently all but a few dozen of the 500 prisoners Qala-i-Jangi were killed. The survivors were loaded onto boxcars with several thousand other Taliban prisoners and, reportedly, suffocated to death. Those who emerged from the boxcars were gunned down and buried in mass graves by the Junbish-i Milli faction of the Afghan Northern Alliance under General Abdul Rashid Dostum. Is it true that CIA officers were advising Dostum’s forces and were complicit in the Dasht-i-Leili massacre?

JK – I think it was closer to 2,000 people who were killed. There is no evidence that anybody was “gunned down.” Instead, according to survivors interviewed at Guantanamo, most of the prisoners suffocated in the boxcars. I don’t know if there were any CIA officers advising Dostum, nor is there definitive evidence that CIA officers were present at the box-up. That is what I wanted to investigate. But my investigation was killed.

DV –Former Ohio Senator Stephen Young revealed in 1965 that CIA “black propaganda” tactics included having its mercenaries pose as enemy guerrillas and commit ghastly atrocities. Does the CIA engage in these types of “black propaganda” tactics in its war on terror? Does it infiltrate groups like ISIS, and seek to control and direct their leadership, for the undemocratic purpose of fueling conflicts and enriching its patrons in the war industry?

JK – I have not heard of the CIA participating in atrocities like those described by Senator Young in the years after the Church Committee.

DV – Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in one month, but he also “lost an eye” while in CIA custody. Given the ferocious nature of the fighting in Afghanistan, and given what we know about CIA practices in other conflicts, including Vietnam, was our national attention focused on waterboarding to deflect us from the more horrible atrocities CIA officers were committing (like, perhaps, gouging out eyes) in secret black sites and in the field, fighting enemy guerrillas?

JK – Abu Zubaydah had a diseased eye when we caught him in Faisalabad, Pakistan in March 2002. I know that his diseased eye was removed by CIA physicians sometime after his capture, but I don’t know why. It’s my understanding that the CIA does not do things like gouge out eyes. Certainly waterboarding, cold cells, and sleep deprivation are bad enough.

DV – All sorts of crimes occur within the realm of espionage. CIA and military counter-intelligence officers have traditionally had the right to terminate by murder their agents, and agent accomplices, in the field, without legal review? Is that still the case?

JK – That has not been the case since the Ford Administration.

DV – CIA officers, and the institution itself, seem sadistic in nature, taking perverse delight inflicting pain and death upon people, directly or through intermediaries in foreign police forces and secret services. Is that so? How does that mean-streak affect out national self-image and our so-called democracy?

JK – This is a broad generality. I personally did not know anybody at the CIA who delighted in inflicting pain and death upon anybody. Certainly those officers exist. But they are few and far between. Either way, though, when a CIA officer commits torture or when the CIA as an organization sends a prisoner to a third country, where he is tortured, that weakens the Agency. It doesn’t strengthen it. And it weakens our democracy.

DV – You were a consultant on the movie “Kill the Messenger.” To what extent are CIA officers facilitating the drug trafficking activities of warlords on its payroll in Afghanistan and the Middle East? Do they provide transportation? What else?

JK – I don’t know. What I can tell you is that when I went to Afghanistan with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff in 2009, one Afghan poppy farmer complained to me, when I asked him why he was planting poppy instead of food crops, that he wished the US government would “make up its mind.” He said, “The CIA told me in 2002 that if I told them where al-Qaeda was I could grow poppy. Now you say I can’t grow poppy. I wish you would make up your mind.” We can all draw our own conclusions as to what has happened in Afghanistan with its poppy crop over the past 15 years.

DV – What chance does America have of achieving democracy, given everything we’ve discussed above about the CIA, including the complicity of our Congressional representatives and media?

JK – I don’t think we’ll ever be a true democracy. The vested interests are just too strong, and “democracy” doesn’t help them in any way.

DV – Given the extraordinary functions it serves, is it possible to abolish the CIA and divide its functions between the State Department and the military?

JK – Many Americans mocked Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan when he said in 1975 that the CIA should be abolished. And I believe that it should. (I don’t think it will, but believe that it should.) Certainly, the analysis can be done by the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research; the human intelligence collection can be done by the Defense Department’s “Defense HUMINT Services; military analysis can, and is, done by the DIA; and special forces operations can and should be done by the special forces. We simply don’t need the CIA anymore.

DV – Thank you John for the interview and for your courage in standing up to the CIA. I wish you great good luck with your prison reform endeavor.

Author’s note: We know from Dewey Clarridge’s infamous terror manual Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare that the CIA never observed the reforms imposed upon it in the mid-1970s.

Strange Convergence

Robert Meeropol 

If Billie Holiday and Ethel Rosenberg were alive, they’d both celebrate their 100th birthdays this year. At first glance they may seem an unlikely couple, but a closer look reveals surprising parallels.

They were each born into poverty six months and a hundred miles apart. Billie in April 1915 in Philadelphia, and Ethel in September in lower Manhattan. Both had extraordinary singing voices, although Billie’s vocal genius eclipsed Ethel’s. Still, Ethel’s teachers considered her voice so special that they called her out of class to sing the national anthem at assemblies.

Both girls were precocious. Ethel graduated high school at 15 and tried to pursue a singing and acting career. At the height of The Great Depression, she could only find work as a clerk-typist in New York’s garment district. There she helped organize and lead a strike at 19. Billie was singing in clubs in Harlem at 17, and made her mark as a recording artist before she was 20.

Both got in trouble with the law. Billie first ran afoul of powerful forces for singing “Strange Fruit,” the anti-lynching anthem. Her performances generated threats, even riots. Josh White also sang the song and was questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy period. He bowed to their demands that he stop. Billie defiantly refused and continued singing “Strange Fruit.” Many believe that her resistance led law enforcement to hound and arrest her in 1947 for drug possession. She served almost a year in prison, and her conviction disrupted her career for the rest of her life.

In 1950 Ethel was arrested with her husband Julius and charged with Conspiracy to Commit Espionage; they were convicted and sentenced to death. The government knew she had not committed espionage, but they held her as a hostage to coerce her husband into cooperating with the authorities. She refused to confess to something she did not do and backed her husband’s refusal to implicate others. The FBI files never claimed she was guilty, but consistently described her as “cognizant and recalcitrant.”

You might conclude that Billie and Ethel had similar talents and defied similar enemies.

Both died prematurely, victimized by law enforcement. Ethel was executed in 1953 at age 37, and Billie died in a hospital bed at age 44, while awaiting arraignment after another drug arrest.

Billie and Ethel followed different paths in life and probably never met, but they converged in death. High school English teacher, poet, and songwriter Abel Meeropol wrote “Strange Fruit” after seeing a photograph of a lynching. He played it for Billie Holiday in 1939, when she was performing at Cafe Society and she subsequently began performing it.

Fourteen years later, Abel helped carry Ethel Rosenberg’s coffin to her grave site. Within a year, Abel and his wife Anne had adopted Ethel and Julius’ sons. The man who abhorred lynching and wrote one of the most iconic songs in Billie Holiday’s repertoire, adopted Ethel’s orphans, my brother Michael and me.

In 2015, the centennial year of both of their births, we remember Billie Holiday for singing about lynching, and we remember Ethel Rosenberg for being legally lynched.

The Logic of Lesser Evilism

ANDREW LEVINE

From a logical point of view, the case is unassailable: when, for any reason, choosing between X and Y, anyone who, again for any reason, believes that X is better than Y, ought to choose X.

The argument is perfectly general: X and Y can stand for anything, and because “better than” means better all things considered, it always applies; contextual and other pertinent considerations are already taken into account. The availability of other alternatives, if any, does not alter the calculation.

The reasoning that supports lesser evil voting – and lesser evil politics generally – boils down to this argument.

From a rhetorical point of view, however, lesser evilism involves more than just the logical principle behind it. The reason is plain: except in a trivial sense, better choices are less bad only when the alternatives are bad or, more precisely, regarded as bad. Less bad choices are less evil only when the alternatives are or are thought to be bad indeed.

This is all that the “evil” in “lesser evilism” implies. Strictly speaking, evil is a religious, not a political, notion. But lesser evilism in politics is a secular phenomenon, and the force of the word is rhetorical only. Its religious origins and connotations are useful for giving the word a resonance that “bad” and even “very bad” lack; not for making any theological or otherwise portentous point.

Although the logic behind lesser evilism is impeccable, the principle seldom applies directly in real world circumstances. In political contexts especially, there are too many complicating factors, and there is too much indeterminacy.

This is why lesser evilism in politics – especially, electoral politics — can be, and often is, a bad idea.

* * *

An American example, still fresh in the mind, illustrates some of these points:

It is intuitively obvious to anyone to the left of, say, Rachel Maddow that, on the face of it, Barack Obama was a better choice for President than John McCain in 2008 or Mitt Romney in 2012. Anyone to the left of Cokie Roberts would probably agree as well.

Maddow, the star of the evening lineup at the cable news channel MSNBC, is a liberal idol and a Democratic Party – or “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” — cheerleader. Roberts is the doyenne of conventional wisdom, representing the dead center on network television and National Public Radio.

The 2008 and 2012 election results show that quite a few Americans, including some whose views are surely to the right even of Roberts’, also thought Obama the better choice. After all, he won handily both times – even in 2012, after a miserable first term.

In 2008, many of those voters saw candidate Obama as a Rorschach figure upon whom they projected their hopes. To them, he was not a lesser evil; just the better choice.

This view of Obama is now nearly extinct — except perhaps on weekday evenings at MSNBC.

By 2012, the blinders had already been off for a while. Hardly anyone still harbored illusions about Obama.

Therefore the people who voted for him, the vast majority of them, were opting for the lesser of two evils.

Were they right? Was Obama truly the lesser evil? Perhaps; but the answer is not as obvious as it seemed to Obama voters back then, or as many people still believe.

For one thing, lesser evil Obama voters may have been looking at their X versus Y choice near-sightedly.

Myopia is a chronic problem in electoral contests because voters tend to focus on candidates’ personalities or on what they believe they are likely to do if elected, neglecting other pertinent considerations.

Suppose, for instance, that Obama truly was less disposed than McCain in 2008 or Romney in 2012 to expand the wars he inherited from George Bush and Dick Cheney or to extend the range and intensity of the Bush-Cheney “Global War on Terror.”

Of course, war making is not the only thing Presidents do, but even if we focus only on that, we can still wonder whether voters favoring peace who voted for Obama served their cause well.

With Obama in the White House, Congressional Democrats have felt obliged to back continuations of the Bush-Cheney wars, and the additional under-the-radar wars that America is now waging throughout the Muslim world. Were a President McCain or a President Romney in charge of the empire, they would likely now be more oppositional.

Democratic acquiescence in the Age of Obama was predictable; Democrats may not be good for much, but when one of their own is in the White House, they, like Hillary Clinton, stand by their man.

How many lesser evil voters for Obama factored this likely consequence of an Obama victory into their calculations? There is no way to know for sure, but a good bet would be – not many at all.

By 2012 especially, the evidence was plain: between 2006 and 2008, Congressional Democrats offered at least milquetoast resistance to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars; they would have offered yet more had not the Pelosiite leadership of the Party reined them in. When Obama took office, they became meeker than lambs.

Obama was seemingly the lesser evil in matters of war and peace but, even confining attention only to that, he may not have been the lesser evil all things considered.   This, of course, is what matters in the end.

The kind of problem lesser evil voters in the United States faced in 2008 and 2012 is hardly unique, to the United States. But it is especially salient in American elections where there are effectively only two candidates with any chance of winning.

Unofficially, but most assuredly, America has a duopoly party system – in consequence of deeply entrenched practices and traditions, and thanks to laws that make ballot access difficult for candidates who are neither Democrats nor Republicans.

Therefore, in Presidential elections and most others as well, Americans face straightforward X versus Y choices. Independent or third party candidates have no chance of winning. They seldom even have a chance of affecting the outcomes in more than negligible ways.

However the logic behind lesser evilism applies even in the more democratic (less undemocratic) electoral systems of other so-called democracies, where easy ballot access is assured and where not all electoral contests are decided on a first-past-the post, winner-take-all basis.

Strategic voting is usually a more front-and-center issue in those circumstances, but the principle – if X is better than Y, choose X – is compelling everywhere.

* * *

Even so, its applications are often problematic – thanks to the level of abstraction from real world voting situations at which it is pitched. Voter myopia is not the only complication.

Myopic voters focus narrowly on personalities and policies, and therefore fail to take all pertinent considerations into account. Another danger is not looking far enough ahead.

Some of the problems this raises have nothing to do with the comparative merits and shortcomings of the candidates themselves; they are problems with lesser evil voting itself.

This is because elections in the present affect elections in the future; among other things, they can and often do initiate or continue trends.

As a general rule, but especially when the choices voters face remain above the threshold beneath which talk of lesser evil voting becomes rhetorically appropriate, choosing the better candidate is no guarantee that the choices will be better still the next time around or the time after that.

But once the lesser evil threshold is crossed, it does seem that the choices keep getting worse. There is no inherent reason why this must be so, but there is ample anecdotal evidence that bears out the suggestion that, in our time and place, lesser evil voting encourages a downward spiral, “a race to the bottom.”

To be sure, America’s deteriorating political culture cannot be blamed entirely, or even mainly, on the pervasiveness of this practice. The corruptions of money undoubtedly play a larger role.

Still, lesser evil voting does seem to feed upon itself – hastening a downward trend.

The consequences are especially damaging in a duopoly party system like ours, where choosing the lesser evil means choosing a Democrat or (in very rare instances) a Republican, further diminishing the already meager prospects of breaking free from the duopoly’s stranglehold.

* * *

Is lesser evil voting itself an evil?

To say Yes would be to overstate the point – not just because the principle behind the practice is sound but, more importantly, because sometimes worse really is worse.

The problem, though, is that there is often no way to tell. There is too much indeterminacy.

Let’s concede, for the sake of argument, that, all things considered, there has been less peace under the rule of Nobel laureate Obama than there would have been had the war-mongering McCain or the War Party pandering Romney defeated him in 2008 and 2012, respectively.   Lets suppose, in other words, that the increased pusillanimity of Democrats in Congress swamped the advantages of electing a less bellicose leader.

It might still be the case that Obama’s nominations for the Supreme Court and for other seats on the federal judiciary have been better, less retrograde, than McCain’s or Romney’s would have been. We can never know, of course, but there are no plausible grounds for doubting that this is the case.

Then how are we to apply the lesser evil principle, taking both considerations into account?   How can voters make considered judgments that involve comparing apparently incomparable considerations?

And if the problem seems disabling with only two factors taken into account, what can we do when all the many respects in which X can be better or worse than Y must also be factored in?

Yet voters take the lesser evil route apparently without anguish or effort. How is this possible? How can they ignore so many complexities?

For those who voted for Obama, the answer is plain: it reduces to one word – Republicans.

As the 2016 election takes shape, it is looking like this will happen again, notwithstanding the effects of the race to the bottom. Once again, Republicans will be the reason why liberals will turn out in droves to vote for – God forbid! – Hillary Clinton.

However awful Democrats become, however Clinton-like, and however plain it may be that, where Democrats and Republicans are involved, worse can be and often is better, Republicans are there to make voting for the Democrat seem the clear lesser evil choice.

It is as if the Republican motto were: we will not be out-eviled. Bring on your Clintons and Bidens and, yes, your Obamas – and we will raise the ante a hundred, a thousand, fold.

This may have more to do with appearance than reality. But where Republicans are concerned, appearances tend to overwhelm. Even voters who expect the worst cannot help but be amazed at how awful Republicans sometimes are.

In just the past week, for example, there was the unmitigated, oh so Christian, nonsense pouring forth out of the mouth of Texas Senator and declared candidate for the GOP nomination, Ted Cruz.

His audience of evangelicals at Liberty University reportedly loved it; so, it seems, did a gaggle of viciously Zionist donors in New York. One would think that nothing could make Hillary Clinton look good – but they do.

And then there is Scott Walker, and others even more risible. As Al Jolson, used to say: “you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.”

Tea Party Republicans – are there any other kind? – probably think about Democrats in much the way that sane people think about the Tea Party.

Some of their reasons are even worth listening to because, as the Germans say, der Hass sieht scharf (hatred sees sharply).

But, in the end, when dealing with whack jobs or worse (like those Zionist donors falling in behind Cruz), the wisest course is to ignore them, as best one can. It is either that or stack up on blood pressure meds.

Unfortunately, ignoring them isn’t always possible – because of the power they wield.

This is where Democratic Party cheerleaders like Rachel Maddow have a use. They are good for spreading the word when Republicans embarrass themselves – in other words, when they do anything at all.

What a dreary prospect the impending lesser evil election will be, what, as Chester A. Riley would say, a revolting development!

But we can always hope for a silver lining: we can hope that, with Hillary Clinton for the lesser evil, the American electorate may finally wake up from its acquiescent slumber.

The downward spiral is bound to bottom out eventually. If not with Clinton, who? And if not now, when?

* * *

Incomparability is not the only source of indeterminacy; sometimes it is hard to get a purchase on just how bad or good an alternative is.

Obama voters in 2008 and 2012 could be reasonably confident that McCain’s or Romney’s judicial appointments would be worse than their candidate’s, but by how much?   Who knows!

Yet the lesser evil voters who fell in behind Obama must have had some idea. Otherwise, how could they factor this consideration in with all the others?

Of course, they weren’t exactly weighing plusses and minuses; they were making choices based on informed intuitions, as voters characteristically do.

Therefore, at least to some extent, their vote for Obama reflected a considered judgment. But with all the indeterminacies involved, it was a judgment made in conditions of uncertainty – and it may well have been wrong.

Indeterminacy is an even more disabling problem the more remote one is from the scene.

What, for instance, are Americans (or anyone living far away from the quotidian politics of the Promised Land), who care about peace and justice, to make of the recent election in Israel?

Was it best, all things considered, that Benjamin Netanyahu won? His victory does make the true face of Israeli intransigence harder to deny; and this, in turn, makes it harder for the leaders of the countries that make Israel’s colonial project possible – the United States, especially — to justify enabling Israel’s continuing predations.

Many Palestinians and a few Israelis on the scene, along with informed observers from abroad, have argued – seemingly cogently – that, Netanyahu’s sheer awfulness notwithstanding, his victory was a good thing.

Some have even argued that the daily lives of Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories would be no better under Isaac Herzog than under Netanyahu. If they are right about that, then, at least from a Palestinian perspective, there is no doubt that it is better that Netanyahu won.

Of course, there are also cogent arguments on the other side.

And if we take other relevant perspectives into account – among others, those of Israeli Arabs and Jews — the situation becomes murkier still.

What then is the lesser evil conclusion?

Especially from the outside looking in, it is difficult to say. It is difficult from within as well. There is just too much indeterminacy involved.

* * *

One final point: we should be careful not to confuse lesser evil thinking with the kind of strategic maneuvering that is the heart and soul of politics, or with a political line based on what Lenin called “the concrete analysis of concrete situations.”

Greek voters in last January’s election, the ones whose highest priority was to end, or at least mitigate, the effects of, the brutal austerity regime that the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund had imposed on Greece, had two choices.

They could vote, as many did, for Syriza, the party now in power; or they could vote for Antarsya, a party to its left. Both parties seek an end to austerity politics. But Syriza is pledged to try to keep Greece in the Eurozone – at least until it becomes clear that the situation is hopeless. Antarsya favors immediate withdrawal.

Most anti-austerity voters chose Syriza. For some, this may have been a strategic choice; they may have thought that the more “moderate” of the two anti-austerity parties had a better chance of scoring enough votes to form the next government; or they may have thought that, were it to come to power, Syriza’s chances were better than Antarsya’s for winning over necessary public support in Greece and throughout Europe.

Others may have agreed with Syriza’s analysis of the situation: that because fascism is a live threat in Greece today, and in other parts of Europe as well, that now is not a good time to risk causing increased financial instability in Greece and throughout Europe or otherwise to put the fragile economies of the continent in jeopardy.

Some of those Syriza voters might, under different circumstances, have preferred Antarsya’s program. But in the circumstances they faced, they opted for Syriza instead.

These voters were not choosing the lesser evil or even the less good choice among acceptable alternatives. It might look like they were, but the similarities are superficial.

They were engaging in real politics.

This is what is supposed to happen in democracies, where, in theory, thedemos, the people (in contrast to social and economic elites) rule. Elections are one way democratic politics gets done.

In actually existing democracies – our own and, until recently, Greece’s – the opposite is the case. Social and economic elites do the politics, and then, when election time comes, they sell the voting public on the results they want – calling on the people to legitimize the outcomes with their votes.

Elites do not always get the candidates or parties they favor – indeed, they disagree among themselves — but they always win.

This is what our elections are about; and this is not about to change between now and November 2016.

At this point, it seems clear – let’s say 85% likely — that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic candidate. If she is, then it is maybe 90% likely that she will be the lesser evil candidate with the most votes. What is 100% likely is that the demos will lose again.

If we do indeed have another President Clinton in our future, then it is also extremely likely that, this time, the true lesser evil will be the one who has the honor of doing the demos in.

In retrospect, Obama may not have been the lesser evil all things considered. But Clinton, if she runs, surely will be — not because voters now are less myopic than they used to be or because she is a better choice than Obama was. In fact, she is a worse choice – by far.

But she will be the real lesser evil because the Republican candidate, whether Jeb Bush or somebody even more ludicrous, is sure to seem utterly vile – even from the most far-sighted vantage point available.

And she will win because that Republican will scare even right-wing voters away – either because he will be so retrograde that even voters far to the right of Cokie Roberts’ dead center will not be able to abide him, or because, like Mitt Romney in 2012, he will be so phony that Tea Partiers will refuse to jump on board.

Plutocrats will fuss – and spend – to keep that from happening, but their efforts will be in vain.

And so, one likely election result will be that there will be less evil than there might otherwise have been. But the downward trend of our politics will not change; quite the contrary, it will continue unabated.

And, needless to say, the election will have nothing to do with changing the world for the better.

For that, what is needed is the kind of politics that is now taking shape in the land where the idea of democracy first emerged – and in other countries on Europe’s periphery, where finance capitalism’s predations have been more than usually intense.

If it can happen in those places, under those conditions, it can happen anywhere.

It can certainly happen here. The indignation that gave rise to the Occupy movement cannot remain repressed forever. And it is surely not beyond our capacity to find ways to seize that energy, and use it to transform the economic and political conditions that make it both possible and necessary.

The Greeks are on to something, the Spaniards too – and the Portuguese, the Irish, the Italians and more. Even in Germany and other redoubts of finance capitalism, the idea is dawning that the same old, same old cannot go on much longer.

There must be a way for us too to ride the wave– even with a more than usually dreary electoral distraction looming in the months ahead.

Cancer and Infant Mortality at Three Mile Island

John LaForge

The partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, March 28, 1979, involved the loss-of-coolant, the melting of half its fuel, a hydrogen explosion in the “containment” building,  the uncontrolled, frightening buildup of explosive hydrogen in the reactor vessel, the venting of radioactive gases, and the dumping of contaminated water into a major source public drinking water. The accident caused such a scare that it ended the expansion of nuclear power in the US. Today, reactor builds can’t keep up with closures.

Yet the human health consequences of TMI aren’t well known, and official cover-ups, propaganda and ignorance of radiation-induced illnesses have led to trivialization of the disaster. As Gar Smith notes in his 2012 book Nuclear Roulette, public officials issued one false statement after another for days, like: there were no radiation releases; radiation releases were “controlled”; radiation releases were “insignificant”; there was no melting of the reactor fuel; there was never any danger of an explosion; there was no need to evacuate close communities. In fact, TMI’s failed containment released a plume of radiation “about 100 times more significant than the initial estimates offered” by the industry and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission — which still doesn’t know how much radiation was released or where it went.

David Lochbaum of the Union of Concern Scientists estimates between 40 million curies and 100 million curies escaped during the accident. President Carter’s Kemeny Commission estimated about 15 million curies of radioactive gas was vented from the containment building, including 43,000 curies of krypton-85  — which stays in the environment for 100 years — and 15-to-24 curies of radioactive iodine-131.  (A curie is a huge amount of radiation — 37 billion disintegrations per second.) The NRC later admitted to several “deliberate but uncontrolled releases” of the cancer-causing gases. Estimates of these airborne releases are mere guesses, because half of the outside radiation monitors were not working, and of those that worked, a large number of them went off-scale. 

Approximately 400,000 gallons of highly radioactive cooling water leaked from the reactor into “containment” areas. This water was secretly dumped into the Susquehanna River, a source of drinking water for nearby communities. Later, about 2.3 million gallons of radioactively contaminated cooling water were allowed to be “evaporated” into the atmosphere.

On the third day of the venting and dumping, half the population within 15 miles — 144,000 people — fled the area. By this time the bulk of the airborne radiation gusher had already been spewed and was drifting on the wind. Yet the Kemeny Commission ignored all data on the effects of wind-borne radiation, even though the wind blew 6-to-9 mph toward upstate New York and western Pennsylvania. 

“Nobody died at Three Mile Island” — unless you count babies

In 1980, Pennsylvania State Health Department authorities reported a sharp rise in hypothyroidism in newborn infants in the three counties downwind from the reactor. Late in 1979, four times as many infants as normal were born with the disease. The NRC said the increase was unrelated to radiation released by TMI.  Upwind incidence of the disease had dropped to below the national average.

Eric Epstein, Chair of Three Mile Island Alert had noted that in March 1982, the American Journal of Public Health reported, “During the first two quarters of 1978, the [newborn] mortality rate within a 10 mile radius of Three Mile Island was 8.6 and 7.6 per 1,000 live births, respectively. During the first quarter of 1979, following the startup of accident-prone Unit 2, the rate jumped to 17.2; it increased to 19.3 in the quarter following the accident at TMI, and returned to 7.8 and 9.3, respectively, in the last two quarters of 1979.” (Dr. Gordon MacLeod, Secretary, Pennsylvania Department of Health.)

A June 1991, Columbia University Health Study’s findings (Susser-Hatch) were published in the American Journal of Public Health. The data actually shows more than a doubling of observed cancers in areas near the partial meltdown, including lymphoma, leukemia, colon and the hormonal category of breast, endometrium, ovary, prostate, and testis. For leukemia and lung cancers in the six-to-12 kilometer distance from TMI, the number observed cases was almost four times greater. In the zero-to-six kilometer range, colon cancer was 4 times greater. The study found “a statistically significant relationship between incidence rates after the accident and residential proximity to the plant.”

In the county where TMI is located, infant mortality (deaths of kids under one) soared 53.7% in the first month after the accident; the rate rose 27% in the first year after the accident. As originally published, the federal government’s own Monthly Vital Statistics Report shows a statistically significant rise in infant and over-all mortality rates shortly after the accident.

Studying 10 counties closest to TMI, Jay Gould and Benjamin Goldman, in their 1990 book Deadly Deceit, found that childhood cancers, other infant diseases, and deaths from birth defects were 15% to 35% higher than before the accident, and those from breast cancer 7% higher. These increases far exceeded those elsewhere in Pennsylvania.  Gould suggests that between 50,000 and 100,000 excess deaths occurred after the TMI accident.

Joseph Mangano studied the three counties closest to TMI — Daupin, Lancaster, and York. He found that between 1980 and 1984, “death rates in these three counties were considerably higher than 1970-74 (before the reactor opened) for leukemia, female breast cancer, thyroid and bone and joint cancers.” Cancer deaths among kids fewer than 10 years of age (between 1980 and 1984) nearly doubled compared to the national rate.

The death and disease associated with TMI’s radiation releases were foretold by Roger Mattson, a Director of the Systems Safety Division at the NRC at the time. Mattson told the NRC’s members during the accident: “I’m not sure why you are not moving people. I don’t know what we are protecting at this point.”

The World May Break Your Heart

Michael Welton

Watching the first Gulf War on TV

I remember waking up in the morning during the first Gulf War in 1991, trembling, sensing something funereal at work in the world. It seemed utterly incredible to sit in front of the television and watch the eerie flickering tracers dance through the sky as the USA bombed Iraq. I wrote poems to get me through the night about the incongruity of little children with their lunch buckets emblazoned with Mickey Mouse icons carrying their gas masks to school. Many of us were numb as went about our daily lives, in my case, teaching seminars in graduate adult education about critical approaches to human learning.

We were numb even if we did not know that Iraq was a client of the USA when Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons on the Kurds in Halabja in 1988. Two decades ago, the “vicious monster” was an ally. Right through the worst atrocities, the USA and the UK provided Iraq with lavish aid and the means to develop weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and nuclear weapons. He—the “Butcher of Baghdad”—was more dangerous then than he was throughout his later despicable regime. In the second Iraq war his statues were toppled (with the CNN cameras rolling) and he died a miserable death in some god-forsaken hole.

Shortly after the first Gulf War ended, with the oil fields spewing thick, dark smoke into the desert, the mass media in North American stopped reporting on Iraq and Kuwait. We knew that the Iraqi army had been devastated; images of bombed out, mangled tanks littering desert highways occasionally filtered into our living rooms. The media turned to other matters in the 1990s. We got on with our ordinary lives, but life was far from ordinary for the Iraqi people. The bombing continued throughout the 1990s. The United Nations applied sanctions against the Iraqis. Dr. Peter Pellet—a professor in the Department of Nutrition at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, New Hampshire—served on four United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization missions to Iraq. He reports that the Gulf War actually destroyed much of the infrastructure for electricity and water sanitation in south-central Iraq.

This effected the ability of the government to provide safe drinking water to people in the region. In January 1999, a larger power station in Baghdad was blown up, affecting the ability of the Iraqi government to rehabilitate the water sanitation system. The oil-for-food program failed to meet the needs of Iraqis in the south. Sanctions induced nation-wide poverty. Iraqis were malnourished; thousands (perhaps as
many as 500,000) children died as a consequence. On September 3, 2002, Pellet found that the people lacked adequate amounts of meat, milk and vegetables. A significant proportion of the population required special care (particularly the young and women). Propagandists for the US intervention in Iraq blamed Hussein for the death of thousands of children, but this smear tactic cannot be sustained. Even a liberal journal like Harper’sexposed US anti-humanitarian strategies.

Joy Gordon (“Cool war,” Harper’s, November, 2002) argued that the US “consistently thwarted Iraq from satisfying basic humanitarian needs, using sanctions [UN Security Council 661 is responsible for administering the sanctions] as nothing less than a deadly weapon, and, despite recent reforms, continuing to do so. Almost every aspect of Iraq’s exports and imports are controlled.” She shows that the “United States fought aggressively throughout the last decade to purposefully minimize the humanitarian goods that enter the country. And it has done so in the face of enormous human suffering, including massive increases in child mortality and widespread epidemics” (pp. 43-44).

Watching a plane smash into the World Trade Center

Almost as soon as the hijacked plane sliced into the World Trade Center on September 9, 2001, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak declared that the “world will not be the same from this time on” and that there had to be a “globally concerted effort” to fight terrorism (which he perceived as an “attack on the whole of civilization”). This statement sent a chill up my spine: the “war on terror” had begun; and as our television screens repeated apocalyptic images endlessly, some of us wondered what the hell was going on and how Israel figured into all of this. I scrambled through libraries, gathering Edward Said’s works and the writings of the likes of Israeli historians Benny Morris and Ilan Pappe. In fact, I read too much and almost drove myself and my wife crazy. I couldn’t get it out of my mind that when the US or Israel (or anyone else) says that we must go to “war” against “terrorism”, the horror of children crushed by falling buildings, parts of the human body splattering everywhere, sacred places and monuments smashed to bits never enters the consciousness. Even if these images break through into the supper hour, those of living in consumer paradises soon forget what we saw three days ago.

My wife and I were wandering through the streets of our suburban neighbourhood in Bedford, Nova Scotia in the aftermath of 9/11. We stopped and imagined the Apache helicopters whirling over the horizon, smoke billowing from freshly bombed homes, people screaming in the streets, chaos, blood and terror everywhere. We thought too of driving down the street towards the university and being stopped at checkpoints, interrogated by boy soldiers, humiliated by their contempt. War rips the fabric of life, woven by many imbricated threads, to shreds. Through the bombsights of a smart missile or on a general’s map, Iraq and Afghanistan are little different from war-game scenarios in the popular culture.

Once the word “terrorism” is tossed like a wet blanket over peoples and cultures, history and politics disappears. One cannot speak about “Palestinian suffering or Arab frustration because Israel’s presence in the US prevents it” (Edward Said, “Israel, Iraq and the United States,”Al-Ahram Online Weekly, 10-16, October, 2002, p. 7)). Even Paul Wolfowitz was booed at a pro-Israel rally in the USA when he mentioned Palestinian suffering in passing. In Canada, Concordia University—a public university mandated to teach critical thinking—banned meetings on the Middle East because of conflicts between Arabs and Jewish Zionists over Israel’s actions in the world. This act of censorship came to the Canadian public’s attention when Binyamin Netanyahu—a man who totally refuses the idea of a Palestinian state—was invited to speak to the university. Disruptions followed.

The “war on terrorism” (an ignominious phrase if there ever was one) has allowed Israel and its supporters to commit war crimes against the entire Palestinian peoples of the West Bank and Gaza with impunity. Memory struggles against forgetting, so it is good to remember that during the first two weeks of October 2002, “Israel killed 75 Palestinians, many of them children, it has demolished houses, deported people, razed valuable agricultural land, kept everyone indoors under 80-hour curfews at a stretch, not permitted civilians through roadblocks or allowed ambulances and medical aid through, and as usual cut off water and electricity. Schools and universities simply cannot function.” Only occasionally is any of this mentioned in the US media. “Suspected of terrorism,” such a tiny phrase, is “both the justification and epitaph for whomever Sharon chooses to have killed” (Said, 2002, p. 8) Remember Sharon?

The USA reacts only in the softest of terms to Israel’s endless cruelty and massacres of Palestinians. Israel is chided a little when Palestinian children are murdered; former president Bush even declared Sharon a “man of peace”: the tanks grind on; the suicide bombers explode on the beaches and in the buses. It is all ghastly, but the rock bottom reality is that Palestine is occupied territory, and one must resist pronouncing a facile pox on both houses. History twists and turns: the victims of the Holocaust have become victimizers and oppressors. Since 1948, the Israeli objective has been to destroy Palestinian society. Is this too harsh and unsubtle and unscholarly? Does it not seem to you that the Israeli state through its armed forces wants to drive the Palestinians back into a pre-modern existence? Israeli attacks on Palestine in the early 21-st century destroyed computers and files and hard drives were carried off from the central Bureau of Statistics; the Ministry of Education, of Finance, of Health, cultural centres, libraries and offices vandalized (Said, 2002, p. 2).

In the melancholic days and weeks after 9/11, the US government faked evidence and went after Iraq in March, 2003. They claimed that they would bring “democracy” to Iraq (and, perhaps, in due time, everywhere else). Aside from the wicked thought that “democracy” has either not arrived yet to America or has taken a long vacation, why would the Bush administration even dream of attempting to bring democracy to Iraq? If democracy means, minimally, that sovereign people choose their own form of governance, then this is not what the US wants. The Empire requires submission and disabled countries; it does not want any country to hold its head high and speak its own truths.

The Taliban weren’t rooted out and ISIS thrives this very moment; one decade later, the words of Phyliss Bennis (“Going global: building a movement against empire,” Znet Online, April, 2003) are still appropriate. US policymakers look out upon an Iraq “not only devastated and dishonoured,” but a “humiliated and enraged Arab world; a shattered system of alliances; and a constellation of an international opposition” (p. 2).