Union imposes another concession deal on West Coast dockworkers

Hector Cordon

A year after negotiations began, West Coast dockworkers voted to accept a new contract with the industry group representing 71 shippers, marine terminal operators and stevedores.

With the voting results announced last Friday, the five-year agreement between the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) will be retroactive to July 1 of last year. It will cover 20,000 dockworkers employed at 29 ports on the West Coast and Canada, including major container ports such as Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oakland, Portland, Seattle and Tacoma. All told, these ports handle one half of all maritime trade in the US.

The ratification of the deal—which the ILWU reported was approved by 82 percent—was not a vote of confidence in the union or the settlement it reached, which will only continue concessions. Instead dockworkers have no confidence that the ILWU would lead any fight against the PMA and the Obama administration, which is backing the employers.

The contract was tentatively approved by the ILWU in February after an intervention by the Obama White House. At that time, Labor Secretary Thomas Perez flew to the West Coast and threatened to move negotiations to Washington. Along with Penny Pritzker, Obama’s billionaire Commerce Secretary, a slew of politicians and corporate newspapers gave their marching orders to the union to reach an agreement. The ILWU obediently accommodated, announcing a new contract two days later.

The ILWU, which is allied to the Democratic Party and a fervent Obama supporter, feared that restive dockworkers might take matters into their own hands—a concern shared by the White House—to oppose the PMA’s “last, best and final offer” and its multiple lockouts that had cost workers thousands of dollars in weekend and holiday pay. Both the unions and the Obama administration were concerned that such a struggle could be an impetus for a broader mobilization of workers in the US who have suffered through the longest period of wage stagnation since the Great Depression even as corporate profits and the stock markets have soared.

In the Los Angeles area alone, strikes by port truckers, which Los Angeles longshoremen honored and joined, a strike by oil refinery workers and a possible Los Angeles teachers’ strike, signaled a new militancy among workers that threatened the efforts of the ILWU and the AFL-CIO to isolate and wear down the dockworkers.

The contract offers an insulting wage increase of less than three percent per year, which will be rapidly chewed up by inflation while, according to the PMA, health care changes “will foster greater efficiency, cost containment and fraud prevention for the long term.” Maximum pension benefits will increase by 11.1 percent. Conditions for 7,000 essentially permanent and low-paid casual workers will not improve.

The PMA agreed to pay about $150 million in taxes imposed by the Obamacare law on so-called “Cadillac” health care plans. The tax, designed to encourage employers to provide inferior health coverage, is due to take effect in 2018.

The contract contains changes to the arbitration system that have been lauded by the PMA. Instead of four so-called “neutral” arbitrators spanning the West Coast, which the union insists have not been impartial, each of the four areas will have a three-member arbitration panel consisting of a union and a employer representative and a so-called neutral member. The union, which had been negotiating for the right to fire an arbitrator at the end of the contract, stated that this will “provide an improved system for resolving job disputes.”

At the heart of many of these disputes are the swift technological changes—computerization, automation and mega-ships—that the industry has sought to implement in order to reduce labor costs while boosting productivity and profits. The blueprint followed by the ILWU over the last 13 years has been to acquiesce to these changes while paying lip service to the militant history of dockworkers’ struggles. The ILWU emerged out of the four-day San Francisco general strike and 83-day shutdown of West Coast ports in 1934—led for the most part by socialists—and the subsequent 1937 break with the conservative AFL-affiliated International Longshoremen’s Association.

In 2002, the ILWU gave the port and shipping operators the right to introduce computerization, slashing an estimated 30 percent of marine clerk jobs. At that time, Richard Mead, president of ILWU Local 10 in San Francisco, acknowledged, “We handle 10 times the amount of cargo that we did decades ago, but now we have one-twentieth the people.” That ratio only increased with the 2008 contract.

That agreement contract conceded the unrestricted use of automation: computer-controlled ship-to-shore cranes, unmanned horizontal ground transportation and automated stacking cranes operable 24 hours a day. These measures are leading to the destruction of an estimated 40 to 50 percent of general longshore jobs. Most egregiously, the union hiring hall could now be bypassed on a “case-by-case” basis as management decided what workers it needed for the latest cargo-handling technology. The union hiring hall represented the greatest gain of the 1934 strike, eliminating the despised “shape up system” where dock foremen picked which (favored) workers had a job for that day.

The concession on the union hiring hall took full flight in a contract negotiated by the ILWU with the owners of the newly built EGT grain terminal in Longview, Washington in 2012, after 18 months of bitter protests. That five-year contract, which recognized the ILWU as the “sole collective bargaining” representative and contained many serious givebacks, also gave EGT sole discretion in determining which union member would be on hiring lists, a list which EGT “creates and maintains.” EGT could also hire from outside the list non-union “necessary individuals.”

The 2013 lockouts of longshoremen by Mitsui-owned United Grain terminal in Vancouver, Washington and Marubeni-owned Columbia Grain terminal in Portland, Oregon in February and May of 2013 respectively, was ended after a year and a half with the ILWU agreeing to equalize the master contract on the basis of the EGT concessions. In an effort to conceal its betrayal of the locked-out workers the ILWU launched a nationalist campaign of denouncing “foreign owned” terminals versus American-owned Temco, which signed an agreement with the union.

Also conceded in 2008 were some of the agreements on guaranteed hours and work sharing achieved in the 1970s in response to the introduction of the labor-saving containerization process.

The threat by shippers, in response to alleged union slowdowns, to redirect traffic to Canada or Mexico, or East Coast ports via an enlarged Panama Canal struck at the core of the union’s institutional interests—its collection of dues to sustain a bloated bureaucracy. The new contract extends a carrot on this issue, allowing the ILWU jurisdiction over the maintenance and repair of truck chassis. According to the May 23 Journal of Commerce, the leading shipping industry publication, “The PMA and ILWU know they are treading on dangerous ground here because the contract specifically excludes trucker-owned chassis from ILWU inspection and M&R.”

The article, however, points at “trucker-leased” chassis as exempt from that exclusion. It is a foregone conclusion that the ILWU will seek to expand its dues base at the expense of the brutally exploited truck-leasing drivers who are categorized as “independent contractors,” i.e., without set hours, wages or benefits. The Teamsters union has organized several protests and pickets in the Los Angeles area in an effort, coordinated with sections of the Democratic Party, to gain the franchise over these drivers.

With a shrinking dues base, the ILWU has been involved in turf battles with other unions in order to increase membership and income. In Portland, Oregon the ILWU tried to spark a fratricidal fight between workers when it sought jurisdiction over two International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers positions plugging in refrigerated containers. The same battle arose at all West Coast ports where it fought the International Association of Machinists over chassis repair.

A host of pseudo-left groups in and around the ILWU, including the International Socialist Organization, Labor Notes, Transport Workers Solidarity Committee, etc., promote the lie that the ILWU—which is little more than labor contracting business—can be pressured to defend their interests.

The experiences of workers with the unions, not only in the United States but all over the world, however, have demonstrated the exact opposite. In the face of rank-and-file opposition, the unions, rather than being pressured into fighting, draw closer to the employers and the state to suppress opposition to their lucrative relations with the corporations. The decades-long transformation of these pro-capitalist organizations into direct instruments of corporate management was accelerated by the globalization of production, for which the nationally-based unions had no progressive answer.

Recent experience of US workers has further demonstrated that the unions cannot be revived. The oil workers’ walkout in February was sabotaged by the United Steelworkers, which called out only 7,000 out of 30,000 members in the industry, and then agreed to a sellout deal, which does nothing to address workers’ demands for improved safety, work conditions and living standards.

The United Auto Workers (UAW) has presided over the creation of a low-paid, overworked workforce and is currently discussing a third-tier wage, lower than the second-tier of $15 an hour imposed by the Obama administration during its 2009 restructuring of the auto industry. Meanwhile, the auto companies have reported record profits of $76 billion since 2009.

The growing militancy of workers cannot and will not find expression through these company unions but only through the building of new organizations of struggle, controlled by the rank-and-file and independent of the corporations and the big business parties. Above all, a new political perspective is needed, which is based on the international unity of the working class and the reorganization of production and trade to meet human need not private profit.

NATO begins anti-Russian air drill in Arctic

Patrick Martin

More than 4,000 troops from six NATO countries and three non-member states began a major air exercise over far northern Europe Monday in one of the largest military mobilizations of the year. Arctic Challenge is to last two weeks and involves more than 100 warplanes from the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Norway, and the Netherlands, all NATO members, plus Sweden, Finland and Switzerland.

The US Air Force will contribute 12 F-16 jet fighters as well as AWACS radar aircraft. The European countries are contributing their own F-16s as well as Eurofighter Typhoons and Tornado GR4 fighters. Norway’s Chief Brigadier General Jan Ove Rygg, in overall command of the exercise, said it would test “orchestration and conduct of complex air operations, in close relation to NATO partners.”

The exercise is clearly directed against Russia, which borders on Norway, the host country for the drills, as well as on Finland. Both Finland and Sweden have raised the alarm over alleged Russian submarine penetration of their coastal waters in recent months, and tensions have worsened throughout the region because of ongoing anti-Russian provocations over Ukraine and the Baltic states.

On May 20, only five days before the beginning of the drill, Swedish fighter jets intercepted two Russian Tu-22M “Backfire” bombers over the Baltic Sea. While Swedish officials said the bombers were heading toward the Swedish island of Land, south of Stockholm, they conceded that the planes had remained throughout in international airspace.

The military exercise, which lasts until June 5, will include operations over northern Norway, Sweden and Finland as well as the Arctic Ocean, all areas a short flying time from northern Russia and critical military bases such as Murmansk, headquarters of the Russian Northern Fleet.

The exercises could easily trigger a confrontation with Russian air force planes. According a report by journalist Ahmed Rashid in the New York Review of Books, a similar drill in Estonia in April brought Russian and American planes within 20 feet of each other over the Baltic Sea. The near-collision had a “high probability of causing casualties or a direct military confrontation between Russia and Western states,” Rashid wrote.

Arctic Challenge 2015 is the second such mobilization to include the two non-NATO Scandinavian countries and give NATO warplanes experience in operating in northern Swedish and Finnish airspace above the Arctic Circle.

It follows a series of operations testing the coordination of NATO forces against Russia on land, sea and air. There were NATO submarine detection drills off the Norwegian coast earlier this month, and two major ground exercises—Operation Hedgehog, in which 13,000 ground troops simulated a response to a Russian invasion of Estonia, and Operation Lightning Strike, involving 3,000 troops in Lithuania. Next month, the annual BaltOps exercise will bring a large number of NATO warships into the Baltic Sea.

The Washington Post wrote on May 16: “Training efforts have swept the region, and in the past week alone separate exercises took place in Poland, Lithuania, Georgia, Estonia and the Baltic Sea. Military planners said they were a practical attempt to drill new lessons about how Russia wages war… US military trainers are also in Ukraine trying to strengthen that nation’s fighting forces even as a war burns in the eastern part of the country.”

Next to eastern Ukraine, the Baltic states remain perhaps the most dangerous flashpoint between NATO and Russia, since the right-wing governments of the three countries have escalated tensions with Russia, claiming that they are the imminent targets of Russian military aggression although nothing of the kind is actually in evidence. Moscow has repeatedly denied it has any designs on their territory.

On May 14, the three Baltic countries formally requested that NATO institute a permanent deployment of some 3,000 troops on their soil to reinforce the guarantee made by President Obama last year that he would invoke Article Five of the Atlantic Charter and go to war with Russia in the event of a military attack on Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania. Some NATO member countries are opposed to such a deployment, since it would violate a 1997 NATO-Russia agreement limiting the size of NATO forces stationed in the Baltics.

On May 22, the European Commission met in Riga, the Latvian capital, for discussions with the leaders of six former Soviet republics—Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Belarus. It was the first such meeting of the European Union’s “Eastern Partnership” since November 2013, when the EU offered a deal for economic association to Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. It was Yanukovych’s decision to reject the association agreement that prompted the campaign, backed by the US and the EU, which led to the overthrow of his government by the ultra-right elements who now hold sway in Kiev.

On the eve of the Arctic Challenge exercise, NATO defense chiefs from all 28 member countries met in Washington to discuss “challenges from Russia and from non-state actors,” according to a Pentagon press release. Danish General Knud Bartels, who chaired the May 22 gathering, said the NATO powers “are implementing the biggest reinforcement of our collective defense since the end of the Cold War.”

In addition to tensions with Russia over Ukraine, Bartels pointed to NATO playing a larger role in southern Europe, where refugee flows across the Mediterranean are being treated as a military issue.

NATO Supreme Commander Philip Breedlove said, “To the south, we face a different set of challenges that involve multiple state and non-state actors. Our members are facing the consequences of instability in North Africa, Sahel and sub-Sahara as well as other regions, which is driving migration and proving fertile ground for extremism, violence and terrorism.”

In the fall, the Pentagon said, NATO will conduct one of its largest-ever exercises involving the southern European countries. Trident Juncture 15 will mobilize 35,000 troops from 33 countries, as well as personnel from international and non-governmental organizations.

China warns of war with US in South China Sea

Peter Symonds

In the face of mounting American pressure and provocations in the South China Sea, the Chinese government announced yesterday that it had lodged an official complaint over a highly publicised surveillance flight close to Chinese-claimed territory and urged the US to back off.

Washington’s extraordinarily reckless actions are threatening to plunge the Asia Pacific and the entire world into conflict. From a media campaign condemning Chinese land reclamation in the South China Sea, the US has moved to military challenges. While last week’s reconnaissance flight did not breach China’s 12-mile territorial limit, the Pentagon is preparing plans to do just that under the pretext of defending “freedom of navigation.”

At a press briefing yesterday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying condemned the flight as “utterly dangerous and irresponsible” and declared it was “highly likely to cause miscalculation and untoward incidents in the waters and airspace.”

An editorial in yesterday’s Global Times, a hawkish state-run tabloid, warned: “If the United States’ bottom line is that China has to halt its activities, then a US-China war is inevitable in the South China Sea.” The article went on to state that if the US wanted to teach China a lesson by “provoking and humiliating,” then “China will have no choice but to engage.”

The US has deliberately placed the entire region on a knife edge, posing a real and imminent danger of war. An accident or miscalculation by US or Chinese military aircraft or warships in the South China Sea could set in train a series of actions and reactions that would bring the two nuclear-armed powers to blows.

One has only to consider how the US would react to Chinese aircraft or ships engaged in “freedom of navigation” operations near Hawaii or off the coast of California to appreciate the sheer hypocrisy of American propaganda over the South China Sea. These waters are not only essential to Chinese trade but are immediately adjacent to key naval bases on Hainan Island in southern China.

The US has further heightened the risk of war by pushing other claimants in the South China Sea, such as the Philippines and Vietnam, to more assertively press their territorial demands against China. It has also encouraged Japan to conduct its own patrols in the region. All of these steps multiply the danger of an incident, not necessarily immediately involving the United States, precipitating a far broader conflict.

Philippine President Benigno Aquino declared yesterday that his country’s aircraft “will still fly the routes we fly based on international law.” Philippine Air Force spokesman Colonel Enrico Canaya told the media that its planes flew in contested areas, including the route taken last week by the US reconnaissance flight.

Philippine Defence Secretary Voltaire Gazmin said he would ask for a “stronger commitment” from the US for assistance to counter Chinese “bullying” when he meets his American counterpart Ashton Carter this week. What the Philippines is seeking is a public pledge that the US will support it in a war with China similar to the guarantee already provided to Japan in its dispute with China over rocky outcrops in the East China Sea.

The looming confrontation in the South China Sea has been long in preparation. The Obama administration’s aggressive stance towards China on every front—diplomatic, economic and military—began in 2009 and was formalised in the “pivot to Asia” in 2011. As part of the “pivot,” the US has engaged in a comprehensive build-up and restructuring of its armed forces in the Indo Pacific, focussed on fighting a war with China.

Throughout Asia, Washington has strengthened its already formidable network of military alliances and partnerships. It has concluded formal basing agreements with Australia, including “rotating” US Marines, warplanes and naval ships through its bases, and with the Philippines, providing virtually unlimited access to that country’s military facilities. The US is repositioning and boosting its forces in Japan and South Korea, has placed warships in Singapore, and is consolidating closer relations with every country on China’s periphery.

Washington has also encouraged closer cooperation between countries it regards as the cornerstones of “the pivot”—Japan, Australia and India. The Australian government has announced that Japanese troops will take part for the first time in the huge biennial Talisman Sabre war games held at locations around Australia and involving up to 30,000 US, Australian and New Zealand troops.

The US is not about to back off its confrontation with China in the South China Sea. To do so would result in a loss of confidence in its strategic commitments among US allies in Asia and around the world. More fundamentally, American imperialism is being driven to increasingly rash military actions as a means of shoring up its hegemony in Asia and internationally.

Washington bitterly resented the decision by Britain in March to ignore its advice and sign up to the China-backed Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). The move prompted a rush by other countries to follow suit, undermining the monopoly position of longstanding American-dominated institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. US actions in the South China Sea are, in part, a means of hitting back by underscoring the military vulnerability of China.

There is absolutely nothing progressive about the response of the Chinese regime, which rests on and defends the interests of a tiny layer of super-rich oligarchs. Deeply hostile to the working class, the Beijing bureaucracy is engaged in a frantic arms race that only heightens the danger of a catastrophic war.

The drive to war is being fuelled by the fundamental contradictions of capitalism expressed in the deepening breakdown of the world economy following the 2008 financial crisis. Whatever the immediate outcome of the present standoff in the South China, war is inevitable if the international working class does not disarm the imperialist war-mongers by means of socialist revolution.

A Nuclear Weapons Ban Emerging?

Robert F. Dodge

Every moment of every day, all of humanity is held hostage by the nuclear nine.  The nine nuclear nations are made up of the P5 permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and their illegitimate nuclear wannabes Israel, North Korea, India and Pakistan, spawned by the mythological theory of deterrence. This theory has fueled the nuclear arms race since its inception wherein if one nation has one nuclear weapon, its adversary needs two and so on to the point that the world now has 15,700 nuclear weapons wired for immediate use and planetary destruction with no end in sight. This inaction continues despite the 45-year legal commitment of the nuclear nations to work toward complete nuclear abolition. In fact just the opposite is happening with the U.S. proposing to spend $1 Trillion on nuclear weapons “modernization” over the next 30 years, fueling the “deterrent” response of every other nuclear state to do likewise.

This critical state of affairs comes as the 189 signatory nations to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) concluded the month long Review Conference at the U.N. in New York. The conference was officially a failure due to the refusal of the nuclear weapons states to present or even support real steps toward disarmament. The nuclear gang demonstrates an unwillingness to recognize the peril that the planet faces at the end of their nuclear gun; they continue to gamble on the future of humanity. Presenting a charade of concern, they blamed each other and bogged down in discussions over a glossary of terms while the hand of the nuclear Armageddon clock continues to move ever forward.

The nuclear weapons states have chosen to live in a vacuum, one void of leadership. They hoard suicidal nuclear weapons stockpiles and ignore recent scientific evidence of the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons that we now realize makes these weapons even more dangerous than we thought before. They fail to recognize that this evidence must be the basis for prohibiting and eliminating them.

Fortunately there is one powerful and positive response coming out of the NPT Review Conference. The Non-Nuclear Weapons States, representing a majority of people living on the planet, frustrated and threatened by the nuclear nations, have come together and demanded a legal ban on nuclear weapons like the ban on every other weapon of mass destruction from chemical to biologic and landmines. Their voices are rising up. Following a pledge by Austria in December 2014 to fill the legal gap necessary to ban these weapons, 107 nations have joined them at the U.N. this month.  That commitment means finding a legal instrument that would prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons. Such a ban will make these weapons illegal and will stigmatize any nation that continues to have these weapons as being outside of international law.

Costa Rica’s closing NPT remarks noted, ”Democracy has not come to the NPT but Democracy has come to nuclear weapons disarmament.” The nuclear weapons states have failed to demonstrate any leadership toward total disarmament and in fact have no intention of doing so.  They must now step aside and allow the majority of the nations to come together and work collectively for their future and the future of humanity. John Loretz of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons said, “The nuclear-armed states are on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of morality, and the wrong side of the future. The ban treaty is coming, and then they will be indisputably on the wrong side of the law. And they have no one to blame but themselves.”

“History honors only the brave,” declared Costa Rica. “Now is the time to work for what is to come, the world we want and deserve.”

Ray Acheson of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom says, “Those who reject nuclear weapons must have the courage of their convictions to move ahead without the nuclear-armed states, to take back ground from the violent few who purport to run the world, and build a new reality of human security and global justice.”

China Lobby Pre-WWII, Israel Lobby Pre-WWIII

David Swanson

The history of catastrophically murderous and stupid warfare that the United States can memorialize on Memorial Day dates back to Day 1 and earlier, begins with the genocide of the native inhabitants of the land, the invasions of Canada, etc., and from that day to this too many deadly escapades to list.

But one way in which the U.S. government gets itself into major crusades of mass killing is by hearing what it wants to hear. It even goes to the extent of allowing top U.S. government officials, sometimes briefly out the revolving door of public “service,” to work in the pay and service of foreign nations pushing war propaganda on the U.S. public.

James Bradley’s new book is called The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in China. It’s well worth a read. For years leading up to World War II, the China Lobby in the United States persuaded the U.S. public, and many top U.S. officials, that the Chinese people all wanted to become Christian, that Chaing Kai-shek was their beloved democratic leader rather than the faltering fascist he was, that Mao Zedong was an insignificant nobody headed nowhere, that the United States could fund Chaing Kai-shek and he would use the funding to fight the Japanese, as opposed to using it to fight Mao, and that the United States could impose a crippling embargo on Japan without any Japanese military response.

For years leading up to at least the brink of World War III, the Israel Lobby in the United States has persuaded the United States that Israel is a democracy rather than an Apartheid state with rights based on religious identity. The United States, which has just derailed plans at the United Nations for a weapons-of-mass-destruction-free Middle East, and done so at the behest of nuclear Israel, has been following Israel’s catastrophic lead in Iraq, Syria, Iran, and the rest of the region, chasing the mirage of a democratic law-abiding Israel that is no more real than that of the Christian-Americanized China that eventually had the U.S. identifying the little island of Taiwan as “the real China.”

The mirage that contributed to the “new Pearl Harbor” of 911, in other words, is not entirely unlike the mirage that contributed to Pearl Harbor itself. The U.S. thinking of China as an extension of the United States, while knowing nothing about China and actually forbidding anyone Chinese from entering the country, did more harm to the world than imagining Israel as the 51st state has yet accomplished. Give it time.

Bradley’s new book, in the early sections, covers more quickly some of the same ground as his remarkable The Imperial Cruise, still very much worth reading — including the U.S. militarization of Japan and Theodore Roosevelt’s encouragement of Japanese imperialism. The new book covers, better than I’ve seen anywhere else, the history of how many of the wealthiest individuals and institutions of the East Coast United States in the 19th century got their money — including Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s grandfather’s money — by illegally selling opium in China. The opium trade led to the opium wars and to the British and U.S. attacks on and occupation of pieces of China, making use of early versions of what the U.S. now calls in most nations on earth “Status of Forces Agreements.”

The U.S. flooded China with drug dealers, traders of other commodities, and Christian missionaries, the latter far less successful than the others, converting very few people. A leading missionary admitted that in 10 years he had converted 10 Chinese people to Christianity. With an eye on Chinese and Southeast Asian trade, the United States built the Panama Canal and took over the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.  With an eye on keeping Russia away from profitable Pacific trade, President Theodore Roosevelt supported Japanese expansion into Korea and China, and negotiated “peace” between Japan and Russia while secretly consulting with Japan every step of the way. (Another echo of the Palestinian “peace process” in which the U.S. is on Israel’s side and “neutral.”) T.R. was given a Nobel Peace Prize for the deed, about which award presumably not a single Korean or Chinese person was consulted. When Woodrow Wilson refused to meet with non-white Hoh Chi Minh in Paris, he also took part in handing over to Japan the colonies previously claimed by Germany in China, enraging the Chinese, including Mao. The seeds of future wars are small but perfectly discernable.

The U.S. government slant would soon shift from Japan to China. The image of the noble and Christian Chinese peasant was driven by people like the Trinity (later Duke) and Vanderbilt educated Charlie Soong, his daughters Ailing, Chingling, and Mayling, and son Tse-ven (T.V.), as well as Mayling’s husband Chaing Kai-shek, Henry Luce who started Time magazine after being born in a missionary colony in China, and Pearl Buck who wrote The Good Earth after the same type of childhood. TV Soong hired retired U.S. Army Air Corps colonel John Jouett and by 1932 had access to all the expertise of the U.S. Army Air Corps and had nine instructors, a flight surgeon, four mechanics, and a secretary, all U.S. Air Corps trained but now working for Soong in China. It was just the start of U.S. military assistance to China that made less news in the United States than it did in Japan.

In 1938, with Japan attacking Chinese cities, and Chaing barely fighting back, Chaing instructed his chief propagandist Hollington Tong, a former Columbia University journalism student, to send agents to the United States to recruit U.S. missionaries and give them evidence of Japanese atrocities, to hire Frank Price (Mayling’s favorite missionary), and to recruit U.S. reporters and authors to write favorable articles and books. Frank Price and his brother Harry Price had been born in China, without ever encountering the China of the Chinese. The Price brothers set up shop in New York City, where few had any idea they were working for the Soong-Chaing gang. Mayling and Tong assigned them to persuade Americans that the key to peace in China was an embargo on Japan. They created the American Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression. “The public never knew,” writes Bradley, “that the Manhattan missionaries diligently working on East Fortieth Street to save the Noble Peasants were paid China Lobby agents engaged in what were possibly illegal and treasonous acts.”

I take Bradley’s point to be not that Chinese peasants are not necessarily noble, and not that Japan wasn’t guilty of aggression, but that the propaganda campaign convinced most Americans that Japan would not attack the United States if the United States cut off oil and metal to Japan — which was false in the view of informed observers and would be proved false in the course of events.

Former Secretary of State and future Secretary of War Henry Stimson became chair of the committee, which quickly added former heads of Harvard, Union Theological Seminary, the Church Peace Union, the World Alliance for International Friendship, the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, the Associate Boards of Christian Colleges in China, etc. Stimson and gang were paid by China to claim Japan would never attack the United States if embargoed — a claim dismissed by those in the know in the State Department and White House, but a claim made at a time when the United States had virtually no real communication with Japan.

The public’s desire to stop arming Japan’s assaults on China seems admirable to me and resonates with my desire that the U.S. stop arming Saudi Arabia’s assault on Yemen, to take one example of dozens. But talking could have preceded an embargo. Setting aside the racist and religious filters in order to see the reality on the ground in China would have helped. Refraining from the threatening moves of the U.S. Navy, moving ships to Hawaii and building airstrips on Pacific Islands could have helped. The anti-war choices were far wider than economic antagonization of Japan and non-communicative insults to Japanese honor.

But by February 1940, Bradley writes, 75% of Americans supported embargoing Japan. And most Americans, of course, did not want war. They had bought the China Lobby’s propaganda.

FDR and his Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau set up front companies and loans to Chaing, going behind the back of Secretary of State Cordell Hull. FDR, it seems, was not just catering to the China Lobby but truly believed its story — at least up to a point. His own mother, who had lived in a U.S. bit of China as a child with her opium-pushing father, was honorary chairwoman of both the China Aid Council and the American Committee for Chinese War Orphans. FDR’s wife was honorary chairwoman of Pearl Buck’s China Emergency Relief Committee. Two thousand U.S. labor unions backed an embargo on Japan. The first economic advisor to a U.S. president, Lauchlin Currie, worked for both FDR and the Bank of China simultaneously. Syndicated columnist and Roosevelt relative Joe Alsop cashed checks from TV Soong as an “advisor” even while performing his service as “objective journalist.” “No British, Russian, French, or Japanese diplomat,” writes Bradley, “would have believed that Chaing could become a New Deal liberal.” But FDR seems to have believed it. He communicated with Chaing and Mayling secretly, going around his own State Department.

Yet FDR believed that if embargoed, Japan would attack the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) with the possible result of a wider world war. Morgenthau, in Bradley’s telling, repeatedly tried to slip through a total embargo on petroleum to Japan, while FDR resisted. FDR did move the fleet to Pearl Harbor, impose a partial embargo on aviation-fuel and scrap, and loan money to Chaing. The Soong-Chaing syndicate also worked with the FDR White House to create a U.S.-funded, U.S.-trained, and U.S.-staffed air force for China to use in attacking Japanese cities. When FDR asked his advisor Tommy Corcoran to check out the leader of this new air force, former U.S. Air Corps captain Claire Chennault, he may have been unaware that he was asking someone in the pay of TV Soong to advise him on someone else in the pay of TV Soong.

Bradley says that FDR kept his Asian air war scheme secret from the U.S. public. Yet, on May 24, 1941, the New York Times reported on U.S. training of the Chinese air force, and the provision of “numerous fighting and bombing planes” to China by the United States. “Bombing of Japanese Cities is Expected,” read the subheadline. This may have been “kept secret” in the sense in which Obama’s kill list is secret despite appearing in the New York Times. It’s not endlessly discussed because it doesn’t fit well into happy little narratives. The “first draft of history” is always very selectively entered into history books that survive into future decades.

But Bradley is right that this was no secret from Japan. And he includes something I don’t remember knowing before, namely that Chennault admitted that when a ship carrying his pilots left San Francisco for Asia in July 1941, his men heard a Japanese radio broadcast boast, “That ship will never reach China. It will be sunk.” Also in July, FDR approved a Lend-Lease program for China: 269 more fighters and 66 bombers, and froze Japanese assets. All of this was part of longer and wider trends that Bradley could have developed more fully. But he offers some interesting details and a curious interpretation of them, concluding that Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson catapulted the United States into World War II by maneuvering to deny any U.S. oil to Japan for a month, beginning while FDR was off conspiring with Winston Churchill on a boat and creating what would be called the Atlantic Charter.

In Bradley’s account Hull learns of the embargo, a month in, on September 4, 1941, and informs FDR that day. But they elect to leave it unchanged as somehow undoing it would somehow be seen as allowing Japan to get “more” oil than before. The embargo had by this point been public news in Japan for a month. FDR had access to reports on Japanese news, as well as to decoded secret Japanese government communications, not to mention that he met with the Japanese ambassador in the interim. Were communications really not advanced in 1941 beyond what they were when Texas took so long to learn that slavery had ended?

In any case, when Japan saw the embargo lasting, it did not move toward moderate democracy as the China Lobby had always said would happen. Instead it became a military dictatorship. Meanwhile Time magazine was publicly hoping that a U.S. and British war on the side of China would persuade the Chinese to convert to Christianity. The parallel in the Israel Lobby is of course the Christian fanatics who believe that Israel is leading the way toward some magically prophesied future of desirable catastrophe.

Mayling Soong’s speech to the U.S. Congress in February 1943 rivaled Bibi Netanyahu’s of 2015 for mass adoration, delusion, and devotion to a fraudulent foreign power. The delusion would continue for generations. The Catholic Vietnam Lobby would get in on the game. The U.S. wouldn’t recognize Mao’s China until it had been reduced to making Richard Nixon its president. For the full account, I recommend Bradley’s book.

Yet I think the book has some gaps. It doesn’t seek to touch on FDR’s desire for war on Germany, nor on the value to him and his administration of a Japanese attack as the key to entering both the Atlantic and the Pacific wars. What follows I have written about before.

What Was FDR’s Game?

On December 7, 1941, FDR drew up a declaration of war on both Japan and Germany, but decided it wouldn’t work and went with Japan alone. Germany, as expected, quickly declared war on the United States.

FDR had tried lying to the American people about U.S. ships including the Greer and the Kerny, which had been helping British planes track German submarines, but which Roosevelt pretended had been innocently attacked.

Roosevelt had also lied that he had in his possession a secret Nazi map planning the conquest of South America, as well as a secret Nazi plan for replacing all religions with Nazism.

As of December 6, 1941, eighty percent of the U.S. public opposed entering a war. But Roosevelt had already instituted the draft, activated the National Guard, created a huge Navy in two oceans, traded old destroyers to England in exchange for the lease of its bases in the Caribbean and Bermuda, and secretly ordered the creation of a list of every Japanese and Japanese-American person in the United States.

On April 28, 1941, Churchill wrote a secret directive to his war cabinet: “It may be taken as almost certain that the entry of Japan into the war would be followed by the immediate entry of the United States on our side.”

On August 18, 1941, Churchill met with his cabinet at 10 Downing Street. The meeting had some similarity to the July 23, 2002, meeting at the same address, the minutes of which became known as the Downing Street Minutes. Both meetings revealed secret U.S. intentions to go to war. In the 1941 meeting, Churchill told his cabinet, according to the minutes: “The President had said he would wage war but not declare it.” In addition, “Everything was to be done to force an incident.”

From the mid-1930s U.S. peace activists — those people so annoyingly right about recent U.S. wars — were marching against U.S. antagonization of Japan and U.S. Navy plans for war on Japan — the March 8, 1939, version of which described “an offensive war of long duration” that would destroy the military and disrupt the economic life of Japan.

In January 1941, the Japan Advertiser expressed its outrage over Pearl Harbor in an editorial, and the U.S. ambassador to Japan wrote in his diary: “There is a lot of talk around town to the effect that the Japanese, in case of a break with the United States, are planning to go all out in a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor. Of course I informed my government.”

On February 5, 1941, Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner wrote to Secretary of War Henry Stimson to warn of the possibility of a surprise attack at Pearl Harbor.

As noted, as early as 1932 the United States had been talking with China about providing airplanes, pilots, and training for its war with Japan. In November 1940, Roosevelt loaned China one hundred million dollars for war with Japan, and after consulting with the British, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau made plans to send the Chinese bombers with U.S. crews to use in bombing Tokyo and other Japanese cities.

On December 21, 1940, China’s Minister of Finance T.V. Soong and Colonel Claire Chennault, the retired U.S. Army flier who was working for the Chinese and had been urging them to use American pilots to bomb Tokyo since at least 1937, met in Henry Morgenthau’s dining room to plan the firebombing of Japan. Morgenthau said he could get men released from duty in the U.S. Army Air Corps if the Chinese could pay them $1,000 per month. Soong agreed.

By July, the Joint Army-Navy Board had approved a plan called JB 355 to firebomb Japan. A front corporation would buy American planes to be flown by American volunteers trained by Chennault and paid by another front group. Roosevelt approved, and his China expert Lauchlin Currie, in the words of Nicholson Baker, “wired Madame Chaing Kai-Shek and Claire Chennault a letter that fairly begged for interception by Japanese spies.” Whether or not that was the entire point, this was the letter: “I am very happy to be able to report today the President directed that sixty-six bombers be made available to China this year with twenty-four to be delivered immediately. He also approved a Chinese pilot training program here. Details through normal channels. Warm regards.”

The 1st American Volunteer Group (AVG) of the Chinese Air Force, also known as the Flying Tigers (logo later designed by Walt Disney, as Bradley notes), moved ahead with recruitment and training immediately and were provided to China prior to Pearl Harbor.

On May 31, 1941, at the Keep America Out of War Congress, William Henry Chamberlin gave a dire warning: “A total economic boycott of Japan, the stoppage of oil shipments for instance, would push Japan into the arms of the Axis. Economic war would be a prelude to naval and military war.”

On July 24, 1941, President Roosevelt remarked, “If we cut the oil off , [the Japanese] probably would have gone down to the Dutch East Indies a year ago, and you would have had a war. It was very essential from our own selfish point of view of defense to prevent a war from starting in the South Pacific. So our foreign policy was trying to stop a war from breaking out there.” Reporters noticed that Roosevelt said “was” rather than “is.” The next day, Roosevelt issued an executive order freezing Japanese assets. The United States and Britain cut off oil and scrap metal to Japan, whether Acheson actually sneaked this past Roosevelt or not. Radhabinod Pal, an Indian jurist who served on the war crimes tribunal after the war, called the embargoes a “clear and potent threat to Japan’s very existence,” and concluded the United States had provoked Japan.

On August 7, 1941, the Japan Times Advertiser wrote: “First there was the creation of a superbase at Singapore, heavily reinforced by British and Empire troops. From this hub a great wheel was built up and linked with American bases to form a great ring sweeping in a great area southwards and westwards from the Philippines through Malaya and Burma, with the link broken only in the Thailand peninsula. Now it is proposed to include the narrows in the encirclement, which proceeds to Rangoon.”

By September the Japanese press was outraged that the United States had begun shipping oil right past Japan to reach Russia. Japan, its newspapers said, was dying a slow death from “economic war.”

In late October, U.S. spy Edgar Mower was doing work for Colonel William Donovan who spied for Roosevelt. Mower spoke with a man in Manila named Ernest Johnson, a member of the Maritime Commission, who said he expected “The Japs will take Manila before I can get out.” When Mower expressed surprise, Johnson replied “Didn’t you know the Jap fleet has moved eastward, presumably to attack our fleet at Pearl Harbor?”

On November 3, 1941, the U.S. ambassador sent a lengthy telegram to the State Department warning that the economic sanctions might force Japan to commit “national hara-kiri.” He wrote: “An armed conflict with the United States may come with dangerous and dramatic suddenness.”

On November 15th, U.S. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall briefed the media on something we do not remember as “the Marshall Plan.” In fact we don’t remember it at all. “We are preparing an offensive war against Japan,” Marshall said, asking the journalists to keep it a secret, which as far as I know they dutifully did.

Ten days later Secretary of War Stimson wrote in his diary that he’d met in the Oval Office with Marshall, President Roosevelt, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, Admiral Harold Stark, and Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Roosevelt had told them the Japanese were likely to attack soon, possibly next Monday.

It has been well documented that the United States had broken the Japanese’ codes and that Roosevelt had access to them. It was through intercept of a so-called Purple code message that Roosevelt had discovered Germany’s plans to invade Russia. It was Hull who leaked a Japanese intercept to the press, resulting in the November 30, 1941, headline “Japanese May Strike Over Weekend.”

That next Monday would have been December 1st, six days before the attack actually came. “The question,” Stimson wrote, “was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves. It was a difficult proposition.”

The day after the attack, Congress voted for war. Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin (R., Mont.) stood alone in voting no. One year after the vote, on December 8, 1942, Rankin put extended remarks into the Congressional Record explaining her opposition. She cited the work of a British propagandist who had argued in 1938 for using Japan to bring the United States into the war. She cited Henry Luce’s reference in Life magazine on July 20, 1942, to “the Chinese for whom the U.S. had delivered the ultimatum that brought on Pearl Harbor.” She introduced evidence that at the Atlantic Conference on August 12, 1941, Roosevelt had assured Churchill that the United States would bring economic pressure to bear on Japan. “I cited,” Rankin later wrote, ” the State Department Bulletin of December 20, 1941, which revealed that on September 3 a communication had been sent to Japan demanding that it accept the principle of ‘nondisturbance of the status quo in the Pacific,’ which amounted to demanding guarantees of the inviolateness of the white empires in the Orient.”

Rankin found that the Economic Defense Board had gotten economic sanctions under way less than a week after the Atlantic Conference. On December 2, 1941, the New York Times had reported, in fact, that Japan had been “cut off from about 75 percent of her normal trade by the Allied blockade.” Rankin also cited the statement of Lieutenant Clarence E. Dickinson, U.S.N., in the Saturday Evening Post of October 10, 1942, that on November 28, 1941, nine days before the attack, Vice Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr., (he of the catchy slogan “Kill Japs! Kill Japs!” ) had given instructions to him and others to “shoot down anything we saw in the sky and to bomb anything we saw on the sea.”

General George Marshall admitted as much to Congress in 1945: that the codes had been broken, that the United States had initiated Anglo-Dutch-American agreements for unified action against Japan and put them into effect before Pearl Harbor, and that the United States had provided officers of its military to China for combat duty before Pearl Harbor.

An October 1940 memorandum by Lieutenant Commander Arthur H. McCollum was acted on by President Roosevelt and his chief subordinates. It called for eight actions that McCollum predicted would lead the Japanese to attack, including arranging for the use of British bases in Singapore and for the use of Dutch bases in what is now Indonesia, aiding the Chinese government, sending a division of long-range heavy cruisers to the Philippines or Singapore, sending two divisions of submarines to “the Orient,” keeping the main strength of the fleet in Hawaii, insisting that the Dutch deny the Japanese oil, and embargoing all trade with Japan in collaboration with the British Empire.

The day after McCollum’s memo, the State Department told Americans to evacuate far eastern nations, and Roosevelt ordered the fleet kept in Hawaii over the strenuous objection of Admiral James O. Richardson who quoted the President as saying “Sooner or later the Japanese would commit an overt act against the United States and the nation would be willing to enter the war.”

The message that Admiral Harold Stark sent to Admiral Husband Kimmel on November 28, 1941, read, “IF HOSTILITIES CANNOT REPEAT CANNOT BE AVOIDED THE UNITED STATES DESIRES THAT JAPAN COMMIT THE FIRST OVERT ACT.”

Joseph Rochefort, cofounder of the Navy’s communication intelligence section, who was instrumental in failing to communicate to Pearl Harbor what was coming, would later comment: “It was a pretty cheap price to pay for unifying the country.”

The night after the attack, President Roosevelt had CBS News’s Edward R. Murrow and Roosevelt’s Coordinator of Information William Donovan over for dinner at the White House, and all the President wanted to know was whether the American people would now accept war. Donovan and Murrow assured him the people would indeed accept war now. Donovan later told his assistant that Roosevelt’s surprise was not that of others around him, and that he, Roosevelt, welcomed the attack. Murrow was unable to sleep that night and was plagued for the rest of his life by what he called “the biggest story of my life” which he never told.

Ireland Says Yes to an Equal Society

Lily Murphy

On May 23, 2015 Ireland finally threw off the shackles of a conservative catholic past and voted in favour for social equality.

The Irish electorate were asked to vote in a referendum to include gay marriage in our constitution and we agreed in great numbers to this proposal.

Many young people who had to leave Ireland in recent years due to austerity, managed to make the journey back home to vote yes. They sailed home and flew home under the hash tag ‘home to vote’ which lit up twitter and many had aspirations of returning for good once the land of their birth shakes off it’s recessionary hangover, but for the meantime they can proudly boast they took part in creating a Irish society everyone can live in.

While the youth turnout at polling stations generated a buzz, there were many older voters who also voted yes. These people are of a generation who grew up in a catholic conservative state, a generation suffocated by stringent church laws that prohibited an equal society. This was their chance to reject something that had blighted most of their lives, a chance to turn the tables on the catholic church.

The margin of victory for the yes side in the gay marriage referendum showed modern Irish people’s rejection of church morals. 62.1% of the electorate compared to 37.9% voted in favour of marriage equality.

All political parties in the country supported the introduction of gay marriage which left the no side backed up by conservative Christian groups and the catholic church who ran a campaign on fear. Posters from the no side were adorned with children which played up to the ‘normal’ family nucleus. One poster from the no side depicted a baby with a man and woman, it’s slogan was: Children deserve a mother and a father.

The referendum had nothing to do with children, it was a marriage referendum, yet the no side ran their campaign on the fear of what may happen to children. They cried fowl of the prospect of two men or two women raising children which is rather ironic when you look at the history the catholic church has with children in Ireland. Where were these same people to speak out for the many children who had to spend miserable childhoods in church run industrial schools across the land? Where were they when unmarried pregnant women were sent to the dreadful Magdalene laundries and then had their babies taken form them and sold to the highest bidders in America and else where. Where were these people when so many children were abused by the likes of the Christian brothers in schools and churches across the country.

Those times thankfully and hopefully are gone. With the overwhelming acceptance of gay marriage, the people of Ireland sent a message to those who want to keep us in a backwater.

On that fine day in May, as count centres across the country began the process of counting the votes, a surge of anticipation was bubbling up across social media and on the ground. By early evening the country was heaving in celebrations.

At the main count centre in Dublin castle, thousands thronged in its courtyard to listen to results coming in. The place was awash with rainbow flags, singing, dancing, happy people young and old, mothers, fathers, children, all there to be part of history.

While the streets burst with jubilation, a number of people made their way to a quite park outside the city centre at Fairview where they lay their ‘yes to equality’ badges and rainbow flags on a bench in solemn dignity.

In 1982 a gay airport worker in his early 30s called Declan Flynn sat on that very bench when he was set upon by a gang of thugs and beaten to death. It was a time when gay people were hunted down by such bigoted bastards and little was done to prevent it. Church and state turned a blind eye to such activity and while the men who carried out the murder of Declan Flynn were arrested, they later received suspended sentences.

This was an Ireland where gay people were treated as second class citizens while the catholic hierarchy lorded over its flock with menace but, now Ireland has changed utterly. Ireland has voted in favour of equality. Ireland has rejected hate. Ireland has emerged as a leading light in what can be a very dark world.

China’s Unaddressed Mental Health Problems

Cesar Chelala

China has a complex history in the treatment of the mentally ill. In 1849, the first mental institutions in the country were founded by Western missionaries. One of them, Dr. John G. Kerr, instituted some principles which are even valid today. Among those principles were the following: mentally ill patients shouldn’t be blamed for their actions; those that were hospitalized were not in a prison but in a hospital and should be treated as human beings, not as animals.

During the Cultural Revolution there were changes that lead to strong political control, over-diagnosis and treatment, a change that overshadowed patients’ real needs. Many mentally-ill patients were sent to labor camps because of their ‘counterrevolutionary behavior’. Western models of treatment were gradually introduced only after the reforms advocated by Den Xiaoping. Today, however, serious problems remain such as the high number of untreated mentally ill patients, inadequate services, and lack of trained personnel.

The spectrum of mental illness is broad, and includes minor conditions such as anxiety to depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and other problems that may lead to drug addiction and serious crimes. In 2009, the World Health Organization (WHO) stated that mental illness –which affected seven percent of the population- had overtaken heart disease and cancer as the biggest burden on China’s health care system.

According to a study by The Lancet, roughly 173 million Chinese suffer from a mental health disorder. 158 million of those have never received professional help for their disease. Despite this high number, China averages only one psychiatrist for every 83,000 people –approximately one twelfth the ratio in the United States and other industrialized countries. This led one professional psychiatrist to remark, “We are like pandas. There are only a few thousand of us.”

The need for psychiatrists, however, is growing. According The Lancet, the incidence of mental disorders had increased more than 50 percent between 2003 and 2008. Although some of these cases can be due to improved diagnosis, most cases can result from more stressful life conditions. These conditions may be one of the causes for the increasing number of individual who commit violent crimes.

Depression is China’s second most commonly diagnosed disease, and has a huge economic cost in terms of lost work days and medical expenses. In recent years, depression has replaced schizophrenia as the most common mental disease at China’s top mental health facility, Beijing’s Anding Hospital.

According to some estimates, more than 260 million people were struggling with at least mild depression in 2011, and depression-related deaths such as suicides even exceed traffic fatalities. In 2007, China’s Medical Association estimated that two-thirds of depression sufferers had harbored suicidal thoughts at least once, and 15 to 25 percent ended their lives on their own.

As the number of mentally ill people increase in China, efforts to expand insurance coverage haven’t kept pace. According to some statistics, in recent years only 45,000 people have been covered for free outpatient treatment and 7,000 for free inpatient care. This is a vastly inadequate response to a most serious problem. In Beijing, almost 90 percent of mental patients do no receive inpatient treatment, either because it is too expensive or because hospitals do not have enough room for them.

Huge needs in the treatment of the mentally ill have led to an increase of unregistered and inadequately trained psychologists who are unable to provide proper diagnosis and treatment to the patients. As a result, many patients end up with a worsening of their symptoms.

The lack of professionals in medicine and psychology should be urgently addressed. The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security is now expanding the country’s professional ranks by modifying criteria to certify mental health counselors. These counselors can treat patients suffering from minor depression symptoms and thus alleviate the work of psychologists and medical doctors who could address more severe cases.

Additional steps should be taken, however. They include bringing foreign doctors to help train local students on mental health’s most pressing issues and sending more Chinese students for specialization overseas. At the same time, the government should build more mental health facilities and improve insurance policies to help those patients in greater need. The Chinese government should treat mental health needs as the emergency it truly is.

The Global Elite’s Crimes Against Humanity

Colin Todhunter

For thousands of years, people have been writing about happiness. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristippus concluded that happiness lies in the pursuit of external pleasure. Others, from Antisthenes to Buddha, have stressed that looking inwards and leading an ascetic life based on virtue, simplicity and inner peace is the route to happiness. And then there are those like Schopenhauer who seem to think that we can only be occasionally happy in what is essentially a miserable world: life only oscillates like a pendulum, back and forth between pain and boredom.

Happiness is, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, “a state of well-being and contentment: a pleasurable or satisfying experience.”

For some, happiness runs much deeper than merely being content. Aristotle held that being virtuous was only one aspect of happiness. In the absence of say wealth and intelligence, virtue could only bring about a form of contentment.

But sometimes that’s not enough. Certain people strive to achieve an ongoing state of bliss, of feeling at one with the universe and everything in it. Through years of meditation, self-reflective practice or consciousness development, they can learn to transcend the illusion of existence and live life on a higher reality. A case of ignoring reality while striving to live out an illusion?

However, let’s not get too caught up in cynicism here. Illusion is all around us – both on a personal level and on a wider political level. The type of society we live in has a huge bearing on happiness or well-being.

From Bernays to Albright: ‘their’ happiness, our misery

Virtually every government in the world creates an illusion for its people. Take economic policy. Government policies might hurt us in the short term, but we are all on a one way route to the ‘promised land’ of happiness, or so we are told by the politicians, the corporate media and spokespersons for the ones who make us suffer to ensure they never have to – the privileged elite, the ruling class.

Western governments set out to con ordinary working folk by bringing us war in the name of peace, austerity in order to achieve prosperity and suffering to eventually make us happy. Is there any room for truth? Politicians never like to tell the public the truth. The feel-bad factor is never a vote winner. Best to keep the public in the dark and rely on positive spin. If people knew the truth, they just wouldn’t be happy.

And selling the feel-good factor is all pervasive. In this age of irretrievable materialism, the route to happiness is more goods, better goods, newer goods. A never-ending smorgasbord of commodities to be craved for. In league with private corporations, governments have learnt to play on our desires to create a one-dimensional type of happiness based on consumerism.

In part, Edward Bernays is responsible for this. The father of modern public relations and propaganda, he was expert in manipulating human perceptions of pain and pleasure, misery and happiness. Tap into or shape people’s desires in a certain way, and you can sell virtually any notion of happiness (or reality), regardless of how bogus it may be.

Whether it was whipping up mass fear in the US about the bogeyman of communism or selling the ‘American Dream’ of happiness through consuming goods, Bernays and the advertising industry, which took its cue from him, were able to marry misery and happiness together – if you do not buy into consumer capitalism, the alternative will be misery; if you do not buy this or that product, life will be terrible; if you do not join in the celebration of capitalism, those awful Soviets will take over and impose a fundamentally unhappy system of equality on each and every one of us.

Under US capitalism, the lie was that everyone would all live happily ever after because of, not in spite of, gross inequality, massive privileges and disadvantages and exploitation of labour, which all went under the notion of meritocracy and a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay.

Bernays’ propaganda techniques set the stage for con-trick of ‘liberal democracy’.

The US government quickly learned that angels and demons could be manufactured out of thin air and, from Guatemala, Congo and Vietnam to Iraq wars and destabilisations could be built on packs of lies – lies about evil-doers about to kick down the door, lies about the impending misery they would inflict on the US and on far away countries and lies about the government delivering us from impending doom.

Of course, it is best to arm ourselves to the teeth with nuclear weapons to ensure no one imposes their miserable regimes or awful ways of life on us. And to prevent us all shuddering with the fear of the threat of nuclear Armageddon on a daily basis, it’s a case of don’t worry, be happy, forget about it and watch TV. Even the very real danger of near-instant annihilation of the species is shoved to one side for the sake of a feel-good culture.

And the best way to instill that feeling is to have us endlessly treading around a wheel in a cage. Millions are locked into the pursuit of the Bernay’s model of happiness. They are locked into addiction. Addicted to the pursuit of acquisition, of hedonism, of chasing the dream. Addicted to the belief that there is a point to it all, where happiness is achieved by acquisitive materialism.

But, to paraphrase a sentiment from Buddhism: someone, somewhere, may well be suffering on our behalf for this happiness, this hedonism. There is no ‘may be’ about it.

So much blood has been spilled by those unfortunate enough to have been born in certain parts of the world on behalf of people in other parts of the world who deem the need to possess resources to be more worthy than the lives destroyed in order to grab them. Recall Madelaine Albright saying the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children was a price worth paying for furthering the geo-political interests of US corporations. And yes, a drone attack here, some ‘collateral damage’ there, and those boys in the US control centres are happy with a hard days killing.

In the US Declaration of Independence, there is the phrase “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Freedom and happiness (or the pursuit of it) is central, albeit built on the misery of others.

‘Life’, ‘liberty’ and ‘happiness’ have become debased. Fed to the masses, happiness has been confused with excessive individualism and the never-ending pursuit of material goods. It became hijacked by the likes of Bernays. With his knowledge of psycho-analysis (Sigmund Freud was his uncle), he knew it was relatively easy to manipulate desires and get people hooked on indulging in certain behaviour, even if ultimately they don’t really want or need those consumer products, those ‘false needs’, they strive to acquire. Getting them hooked is what really counts.

You have no time to think about the disillusionment because you are all too busy buying the next quick-fix for happiness product. It’s called retail ‘therapy’ for good reason. A therapy that has no long-term benefit. It’s a feel-bad, feel-good then feel bad again spiral.

But who needs this form of ‘happiness’, this type of ‘liberty’, ultimately underpinned by an Albright-esque view of life and death? No one. Yet the masses are encouraged to swallow the lies. The propaganda is pervasive.

Look no further than all those feel-good Hollywood trash films, passed off as ‘blockbusters’, that gloss over or usually ignore all the mundane, miserable aspects of life in working class ‘America’. Little wonder half the world seems to want to live in the US. The need to portray a bogus notion of happiness has served to kick reality into touch. The Hollywood propaganda machine has seen to that.

The ‘wealth creators’ and their crimes against humanity

The great ‘American Dream’ was built on craving and propaganda. It was built on stripping the environment bare, on the unsustainable raping of nature to fuel profits, perpetual war and misery and suffering. The sociologist C.Wright Mills noted the existence of a post-war power elite in the US back in 1956. An integrated power elite of big corporations, the military and the political establishment. Fast forward 57 years and it is responsible for a body count of ten million dead and counting, a statistic, a dirty secret that Hollywood will never tell. Ten million slaughtered in US-backed wars and by death squads, covert ops and destabilisations (see this). Drug-running and the exporting of terror and murder, glorified by countless Hollywood icons, commentators and politicians under the banner of championing freedom and democracy.

The system in place exists to benefit not the majority, but small a minority of just 6,000 to 7,000 people, according to David Rothkopf. These are the extremely wealthy of the world who have cemented their position on the back of their ancestors and hundreds of years of capitalism. These are the people setting the globalisation and war agendas at the G8, G20, NATO, the World Bank, and the WTO. They are from the highest levels of finance capital and transnational corporations. These billionaires, this transnational capitalist class, dictate global economic policies and decide on who lives and who dies and which wars are fought and inflicted on which people. Although they are having a bit of difficulty in kick-starting it right now, with their see-through lies and hypocrisy, Syria is a case in point.

Their crimes against humanity are never mentioned as such. Instead, these people are called ‘wealth creators’. They are the self-anointed role models and captains of industry. The high flyers who have stolen ordinary people’s wealth, who have stashed it away in tax havens, who have bankrupted economies because of their reckless gambling and greed and who have imposed a form of globalisation that results in devastating destruction and war for those who attempt to remain independent from them, or structurally adjusted violence via privatisation and economic neo-liberalism for millions in countries that have acquiesced.

Little wonder then that attempts to redress the balance, to snatch control away from this criminal class, have been brutally suppressed over the decades. From democratic leftist organisations to any government pursuing a socialist alternative, this class has used intelligence agencies or military might to attempt to subvert or annihilate any opposition.

From El Salvador and Chile to Egypt and India’s tribal belt, ordinary folk across the world have been subjected to policies that have resulted in oppression, poverty and conflict. But this is all passed off by politicians and the corrupt mainstream media as the way things must be. And anyone who stands up to this lie is ridiculed at best or spied upon, tortured and killed at worst in order to prevent the truth from emerging. And that truth is that many of us know what ‘happiness’ really is, the type of society necessary to establish it – based on communality and economic equality – and that the immensely wealthy people who stand in its way do all things necessary to prevent us from having it. Socialism is not a dirty word.

Various well-being surveys indicate that happier societies invest heavily in health, welfare and education, are more equal and live within the limits imposed by the environment. Many less wealthy countries (and wealthy) do well in such surveys because cultural priority is placed on family and friends, on social capital rather than financial capital, on social equity rather than corporate power. It’s no coincidence that people in places like Britain and the US appear to be less happy than they were 40 years ago.

Karl Marx knew that self-actualisation was to be truly achieved in a society that makes it possible for someone to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as he has a mind. Being ‘happy’ is state of being, a state of worthwhile endeavour freely chosen and not imposed. It is not achieved through the pursuit of an ultimate unattainable elusive goal on a never ending treadmill of drudgery, a never ending treadmill of control. Not a fixed end point to be achieved by possessing a hundred latest, cutting edge consumer gadgets and indulging in the individualised competition of conspicuous consumption that proclaims ‘look at me, I’m better than you, I’m elevated from the crowd’. And by elevating oneself in such a way, the gregarious human animal is cut off from the wider group and may ultimately become rather unhappy.

And yet it is ordinary working class men (and women) who sign up to join the military and support this system on behalf of these immensely wealthy people. Such people have however always been adept in manipulating the masses to rally around flag and nation, evoking an emotive misplaced sense of patriotism to pursue their militarism or justify their exploitation.

In his book ‘A People’s History of England’, The Marxist academic AL Morton documented how ordinary people, over many hundreds of years, set out to challenge these rulers and often paid with their lives. Nothing ever came for free and ordinary working people fought tooth and nail for any rights that they managed to obtain

Such a travesty then, that today, ordinary people are denied economic opportunities because this class has sold their jobs to the lowest bidder in India, China or elsewhere. This class and its ‘think tanks’ were determined to shatter the post-war Keynesian consensus based on a robust welfare state and government intervention in the economy to help secure full employment. Any notions of ‘fairness’ and the benefits to be derived from the welfare state were to be substituted for positive notions about the free market and individual responsibility in order to justify the real intention of shifting the balance of power towards elite interests.

With workers’ wages having been depressed over a period of decades, demand having thus been propped up by debt and bankers demanding to be bailed out, how convenient that the lie of ‘austerity’ is being used as a battering ram to finish off what the likes of Reagan and Thatcher did in the 80s with their pro-big business, pro-privatisation, anti-union, anti-welfare policies.

And we are supposed to thank ‘them’ for this? To vote for ‘their’ politicians, to join in a media circus to celebrate the birth of another royal parasite, to support their killing in Syria, in Libya, in Afghanistan, in Iraq and elsewhere?

Yes, we are supposed to back them and take in the poisonous lie that ‘we are all in it together’. And ordinary young men (and women) are supposed to sign up to fight their wars.

The working classes, the great, great grandchildren of the cannon-fodder ‘heroes’ sacrificed en masse on the blood-soaked battlefields of countless other wars that have gone before can now join up to fight again. For what? Austerity, powerlessness, imperialism, propping up the US dollar. For whom? Monsanto, Occidental Petroleum, BP, JP Morgan, Black Rock, Boeing and the rest.

The US economy has been hollowed out. Much of manufacturing has been shipped abroad. For those who benefitted, the US can go to hell in a handbasket, and it has. Meanwhile, for them, record profits ensue. It’s the ability to maximise profit by shifting capital around the world that matters to them, whether on the back of distorted free trade agreements which open the gates for plunder, or through coercion and militarism which merely tear them down.

In places like India, it cuts both ways. ‘Free’ trade and a state enforced militarism that both result in countless deaths and the forced removals of hundreds of thousands of the nation’s poorest folk from their lands and villages for the benefit of powerful corporations and a bogus notion of development. “I love my India” well-off ordinary urban dwellers often say. Patriotism has always been a distraction, a tool to be ignited by the oppressors at will among the masses.

As societies become hollowed out, with empty echoes of patriotism ringing out, they increasingly resemble boxes. The only thing inside however is a giant, brutal mechanical hand. There is nothing else apart from it. And it’s only function is to pull the lid shut if anyone ever dares to tear it open and shed light into the box. If successful, they will see the immorality, the lies, the hypocrisies. The social control based on the subversion of life, liberty and happiness.