Bank of America versus America the Beautiful

A public hew and cry has arisen against the announced plan of major banks to charge depositors three to five dollars a month for the use of debit cards to make purchases. In an extremely rare instance of 'market justice' the value of Bank of America’s shares tumbled.

As significant as the fact of the planned charges is the logic that drives them. Facts on the ground are always merely manifestations of a paradigm in the air. As important as opposing the charges is opposing the twisted thinking behind them.

The shylockian mind-set behind the planned debit-card charges was best illustrated by JPMorgan-Chase's Jamie Dimon who stated, “If you’re a restaurant and you can’t charge for the soda, you’re going to charge more for the burger.”

Dimon was referring to the fact that, under the Durbin-Frank financial “overhaul” law, banks are prohibited from charging more than 24 cents in service fees per purchase transaction. Prior to the “overhaul,” banks were charging 44 cents per purchase transaction. The law halved the amount they could charge.

But like most garbage flowing down from Capitol Hill, the overhaul contained a loophaul. (We are shocked!) The debit fee was charged to the merchant not to the customer and the law only limited the amounts banks can charge their merchant customers. There was a silver streak in the legislative swill after all.

With this background in mind, Jamie Dimon’s twisted logic boils down to saying that what the banks can’t take from Paul’s hide, they will take from Peter’s. But one way or another the banks will get their pound -- a full English pound -- of flesh.

The rhetorical cheat behind the financial cheat is easy to see. The banks are not charging more for one service (a coke) to make up for price controls on another (the burger); they are rather like gangs of hoods prowling the street looking for pockets to plunder. “Hey! If we can’t roll the guy in the suit, let’s roll the little old lady in the walker.”

But, irrespective of Jamie Dimon’s spurious analogies, the driving force of the paradigm is the notion that banks are entitled by some divinely ordained law of nature to a certain maximum level of profit. The point of departure for Bank of America, JP Morgan-Chase and Wells Fargo is simply the presumption that they are entitled to 44 cents per purchase transaction.

The banks would have us believe that this amount reflects some sort of “natural market law” like water seeking its own level. If they can’t get the quantum of flow from one source it is “only natural” that they should extract it from another. Dimon’s analogy simply assumes and would have us believe that 44 cents is what banks are entitled to and cannot be faulted for demanding.

Wherefrom this 44 cents? Banks no longer bother with the pretence of justifying the charge on the basis of costs of operations. The amount is simply what they (on average) have decided to charge. The “natural market level” is nothing more than the ad hoc level of banker avarice.

A 2010 Nilson Report report showed that in 2006 debit card usage generated just over 10 billion dollars in profits. In 2010 those profits had soared to just over 20 billion. This roaring, soaring surge of money certainly did not reflect a doubling of the costs of maintaining installed telemetric swiping machines.

In fact, the Federal Reserve has calculated the average variable costs of a debit charge at $0.071 for transaction processing, $0.059 for network fees, $0.049 for fraud losses, and $0.018 for fraud prevention costs, for a total of .19 cents per purchase. There can be no claim that banks are simply passing along their operating costs to the customer be it in the price of a coke or of a burger.

In fact, the Federal Reserve limit of 24 cents has a built in profit of 4.8 percent per transaction. That’s over half the average State sales tax. But that is not enough to satisfy the rapacity of Jamie Dimon or Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan. They want more, more and more of your flesh.

The bankers’ lust for geld is epitomized by a famous motto from Spain’s Siglo de Oro which symbolized the conquistadors’ lust for gold.

Al espada y el compás, más y más y más y más.

By sword and compass, more and more and more and more!

The lust for more is the same sin as the ne plus ultra of rapacious Iberia. The only difference is that today’s river of gold is extracted from the diminishing pay checks of struggling workers rather than from the sweat of Indian press gangs.

Needless to say, if they don’t bother justifying the charges on the basis of costs, it would never occur to Dimon or Moynihan to justify them on the basis of social utility. The idea that privilege, position and property should subserve the social good simply does not exist in the world of so-called “financial services”.

Understandably, most people oppose the monthly charges because they financially hurt. But there is a more fundamental point that progressives in particular need to press.

Defining the Progressive platform a century ago, Teddy Roosevelt insisted that corporate profit should be allowed “only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community.” “The true conservative,” he said, “is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth.”

Progressives should not concede or overlook fundamentals while complaining about symptoms. They need to drive home the point that banks and all financial institutions should be treated and regulated as public utilities. They exist to lubricate the economy, not to suck it dry.

-oOo-

But the issue is broader than utility. The other half of the equation is sin which, in its most primary sense, refers to those concepts of conduct and being that arise from subjective knowledge, shared by all, concerning the objective phenomenon of the “all” -- of society, of creation and, ultimately, of the cosmos.

There is a reluctance in progressive circles to talk about sin, as if doing so entailed an abandonment of reason and a return to archaic and repressive mind-sets. I believe this is a mistake. Social utility and social morality are two sides of the same coin. They are complimentary perspectives which, when harmonized, broaden perception and strengthen the argument.

Utility represents what the French mathematician and philosopher, Pascal, called l’esprit de geometrie -- so called ‘linear thought’ which orders inferences and causes toward postulated conclusions or goals. The concept of ‘sin’ reflects what he called l’esprit de finesse -- best translated as ‘collective intuition’.

This intuition is more than just an historical consensus or agreement among individuals. Like the faculty of physical sight, it is a ‘brain wiring’ which we all share and which enables our awareness to be embraced by the whole of all parts and to be infused with a sense of the whole in each of the parts. When we see the whole we necessarily see our place in it; and seeing one’s place understand how we are supposed to be.

Philosophers have used various terms to denote this intuitive faculty. According to Pascal, l’esprit de finesse “is simply a question of seeing -- but of seeing well and completely.” Plato called this faculty ‘nous’ which, he said, was a passive state of knowing one step beyond the struggling effort or 'mathesis' of learned, logical knowledge. In Medieval usage, the act of intuitive knowing was referred to as an intellection or “in-taking” of the true nature of things.

Howsoever called, the myriad insights which comprise intuitive thought are “so fine and so numerous” (Pascal) that they can only be expressed in the form of a metaphor, an allegory, a parable, a poem or a song wherein the ‘argument’ consists in shades of meaning and resonances of feeling. It is from this esprit de finesse that we derive our concepts of sin.

Sin is typically thought of in terms of discrete personal failings. But before we can call something “wrong” we have to have a sense of what is “right” - what Eastern philosophy calls Tao. More essentially than any particular wrong, “sin” denotes an absence of harmony and this absence presupposes an ordered social relation which we intuit ought to be there.

Thus understood, our concepts of sin are fundamentally social in two ways. First, they arise from an intuition that we are part of the whole. Secondly, they are formed by an intuition which is itself collective.

Man’s earliest intuitions identified sin with harm to the pack. As a young man once told Socrates, “the just man is he who does good to his friends and harm to his enemies.” In a famous exchange, Socrates proved that the young man was wrong; that the just man, if he truly loved justice, had to do good to his enemies. Socrates did not deny that evil or injustice or sin consisted in doing harm to the pack, he simply enlarged the circle so as to include a greater whole.

Over the course of history the scope of our shared subjective awareness of sin has enlarged as we ourselves have evolved. What was at first viewed as transgression against a tribal god and “our” pack got reformulated into the unawareness of a “universal father” and alienation from humanity. But within the process of becoming, the constant has always been a consciousness of our shared predicament with others “of our own kind”. At whatever stage of our historical development, the idea of sin derives from a societal sense of social self -- from social self-recognition.

This collective mutuality is what the words 'society' and 'community' hearken to. The Latin 'socius' means companion or ally, and the word 'comunis' derives from sharing or commingling. From these roots, 'society' is defined as a collaborative fellowship for a common purpose. Thus, Aristotle wrote that all social interaction was comprised of varying levels of friendship.

This friendship is not just something that takes place “within” society (a geometrical perspective); society itself is a state or condition of friendliness. The concept of society is, at its core, coextensive with the Golden Rule which is the sum and whole of moral law.

Curiously, the limited “pack morality” of primitive societies was more closely connected to an intuition of the greater animated natural whole and it is only now that we are re-opening our minds to an intuition of the great natural society that is our ultimate home.

But it was never entirely lost. The Tenth Century abbot, Aelred of Rievaulx, describes our universal friendship thus:

“What forest bears but a single tree? Even in inanimate nature a certain love of companionship, so to speak, is apparent and thrives in society with its own kind. And surely in animate life who cannot easily see how clearly the picture of friendship is, and the image of society and love? For, although in other respects animals are rated irrational, yet they imitate man in this regard to such an extent that we believe they act with reason. How they run after one another, play with one another and betray their love by sound and movement. So eagerly do they enjoy their mutual company, that they seem to prize nothing else so much as they do whatever pertains to friendship.”

What Aelred intellected “rings true” just as the tones of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony convince us that an elixir of joy permeates all creation from the lowly worm to the cherub by god’s throne. Ultimately, sin is simply un happiness.

Pharisees and moral philosophers have brought discredit on the concept of sin by trying to rationalize it with l’esprit de geometrie thereby reducing it to a species of accounting which in turn leads to a “privatization” of morality and a divorcing of sin from its primary social context.

On the other hand, to say that the concept of sin is intuitive does not signify an individualistic “feels right” relativism. The intuition is social and shared universally. It requires us to submit ourselves to the broader social conscience. The less shared, the more the acuity of the vision is suspect as astigmatic or partial.

It is certainly true that throughout time witchdoctors and priests have misused the concept of sin to agitate and mislead people. But the same might be said of science which can just as readily be abused in order to wreak harm. Collective intuition is not less reliable than scientific objectivity; it simply represents an alternative basis of knowing. We should trust our subjectivity and not be frightened away from a proper awareness of sin.

In allowing itself to be frightened away and in seeking refuge in a supposedly more certain “objective rationality,” progressives concede the field of “public morality” to fundamentalists who would trivialize sin into questions of sex, alcohol and nudity. The concession looses half the argument and fails to give tenor to what we all intuitively know.

-oOo-

Bringing l’esprit de finesse to bear on Jamie Dimon’s paradigm of behavior allows us to see the fundamentally sinful and socially destructive nature of the bankster soul.

The geometry of avarice is simple. It consists in grabbing more than one needs and, given the finitude of resources, thereby taking what is needed by others. The finesse of the matter is not simply charging more than what is needed to cover the costs of operations, but a repudiation of our communality. It is a mindset from which fellow feeling is absent.

This absence is expressed in art by paintings of the hunched and inwardly turned miser counting his coin. The miser’s turn inward is a turn away from society. He represents the paradox that a bloated ego is a shrivelled one.

In the Old Testament, indifference to the needs of the poor is the Sin of Sodom. (Ezekiel 16:46-50) The New Testament calls avarice "the root of all evil." (1 Timothy 6:10) Medieval thought viewed avarice as the sin most offensive to the spirit of love which, as we have noted, was understood to be the animating and unifying force of society.

It is a mistake to ignore this tradition of moral understanding or to be embarrassed by it. William Jenning Bryan’s Cross of Gold speech is powerful to this day not because it is good rhetoric but because the image is true.

And crucifying man is what Dimon and Moynihan have done and continue to do. We should not forget that Bank of America, Wells Fargo and banks throughout the land were, directly or through fraudulent alter egos, responsible for the mortgage meltdown and global financial collapse that ensued.

We do well to remember that the corporate cretins who want to charge “more for the burger” are the same criminals who fraudulently colluded in chopping, packaging and off loading knowingly worthless mortgages. These same crooks are now trying to foreclose on properties they don’t have title to precisely because they “diced and dished” the securities. Next to such scum, Shylock was a saint.

But in the twisted world of perfect bankster equity, the same parties who caused the financial meltdown, get bailed out with tax-payer money. When flooded with treasury dollars at effectively negative interest, these same banks still refuse to lend or to renegotiate mortgages. When the common economic interest depends on restimulating consumer spending, these same banks still insist on charging 15% to 24% credit card interest and now insist on the right to suck out of the economy 20 billion a year in debit card fees.

The planned debit charges are not some isolated incident of over-reaching. They are yet another maw of a man eating plant that needs to be raked up, eradicated and purged from the garden.

America the Beautiful sings to us about more than amber fields of grain. Katherine Lee Bates, gave voice to an American exceptionalism grounded in a higher consciousness purified of sin,

Till selfish gain no longer stain
The banner of the free!

And nobler men keep once again
Thy whiter jubilee!

That happier song should be our anthem.

©Woodchip Gazette, 2011
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In the Shadow of the Shibboleth

Once again, 9/11 has rolled around and the media is overflowing with stories of horror and heroism. They publish analyses of the event, analyses of the aftermath, analyses of the war on terrorism and spectacular reruns of buildings collapsing in gargantuan clouds of smoke. Already in the run-up to the anniversary the New York Times ran a front page picture captioned “APOCALYPSE”. Nine Eleven has become a shibboleth.

A shibboleth is an arbitrary, and often insignificant, quality, fact or circumstance which is used to draw a distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The fact -- in this case an event -- is endowed with a sacrosanct status and soon becomes a taboo because its divisive force can only be maintained through unquestioning horror buttressed by emotions of fear and pity. Once so endowed, the shibboleth becomes its own self-sustaining psychologic -- a sort of perpetual emotion machine; a monstrous idol before whom all mutely bow.

The Tar Baby was (and in many ways remains) America’s fundamental shibboleth. The taboo quality was, of course, blackness, against which Bre’r Rabbit became hopelessly and helplessly stuck the more he tried to analyze and deal with the situation.

Let us hazard to put an end to the nonsense.

The lesson to be analyzed out of 9/11 was as plain as day for anyone to see, even on Apocalypse + Two. All that was needed was to listen to what the Administration was actually saying.

As soon as he was released from whatever bunker he had fled to, President Bush announced a War on Terrorism. Wherever they were, whoever they were, them terrorists would be hunted down and brought to justice. But the Administration went further, also promising to "go after terrorism and get it by its branch and root."

In so saying, the Administration blurred the distinction between the specific and the general, between reaction and preemption, between punishing culprits and crusading against an abstraction. Bush's declaration of war against an invisible danger at once created its own necessity and gave birth to a vicious paradox that just as necessarily confused 'them' and 'us'.

“Whoever they are.” The entire difficulty with the phenomenon of terrorism is that it is not conducted by official or state agents but is carried out by anonymous actors at random. The proposed action -- in this case a 'war' -- immediately embroils us in three levels of 'known unknowns': a non-present, unspecified harm by an uncertain actor. The object which we declare to be our enemy is simply a “potential” -- something that could, but has not actualized.

Fighting an unknown enemy is not the same thing as chasing after an unknown suspect. From the outset, the Administration confused the two, so that the chase after bin Laden illustrated the fundamental fault involved in creating the hybrid of a 'suspect enemy'.

Within hours of the Twin Tower collapse and even before the identities of the hijackers were known, U.S. officials began fingering Osama bin Laden as a possible or potential suspect based on a so-called “list of candidates.” Within a day, he became a “likely” suspect and a day later got elevated to "a" [sic] “prime” suspect -- none of which said more than that he was a probable, possible culprit.

The Administration's redundant blabber betrayed that the Government had nothing more than the usual scuttlebutt of links, leads, associations and activities "consistent" with an hypothesis of guilt. In the criminal context, such so-called 'soft evidence' will eventually coalesce around the hard facts of a crime that has happened. But everyone and anyone is a 'possible suspect'. How is it possible to 'root out' unknown suspects of terrorism that might happen? As we noted at the time,

“What the Government will have to presume is that everyone is at least a potential terrorist. In the most fundamental sense that is a presumption which is entirely antithetical to the concept of civil friendship, i.e., societas." (Woodchip Gazette, 010915)

The spectacular shibboleth of 9/11 gave rise to a massive self perpetuating contradiction. The enemy against whom we distinguished ourselves was in ourselves.

In 2008 then CIA chief, Mike McConnell, told Congress that “the enemy” had developed the capacity to “blend in” such that anyone one of us could be one of them. If it took McConnell seven years to figure out that terrorists tend to “blend in” he is the stupidest man on the planet.

In fact, the Administration understood perfectly well from the start that 'prime suspects' tend to 'hide out' within the general population. McConnell was just spooking a terrorized Congress into another round of liberty concessions.

But the spooking works because a cry of danger always creates its own apparent necessity. A danger is simply the possibility of a harmful event. Because a potential can always potentially be present, the declaration that the potential exists cannot be refuted. It is impossible to prove that what could exist in actuality doesn't exist in potentiality. As a result, we become trapped by what is, at bottom, an imaginary evil.

The evil is imaginary not because an instance of it may not have happened but because a danger is no more than a potential evil which might and, thus, can be imagined to happen. The awful spectacle of towers collapsing in flame and smoke was a true picture of an evil that had taken place. It was also the image of an evil that could again take place. The smoldering ruins became the conjunction between "hunt down" culprits and "root out" terrorism.

Transfixed by the spectacle, our consciousness was suspended between horrified pity for the desperate victims jumping to their deaths and equally horrified fear that such a thing might happen again, perhaps even to us, ourselves. In this way the shibboleth of 9/11 fed off our own natural sentiments of sympathy and selfishness, so that the smouldering ruins became the visible symbol of Bush's bi-polar crusade to "smoke em out."

It is in this way as well that shibboleths induce collective madness. For the fight against an imagined, potential or hypothetical harm - in turn creates a reaction without an actual object. The fight becomes the exercise of a means without any actual and present purpose.

This is not to say that terrorism, like disease or like crime, does not exist. But it is to point out that the term “terrorism” is a general abstraction which covers all possible variants and instances. While it may be reasonable to take some precautions against a foreseeable harm, the wisdom of doing so depends on the specificity of the adverse potential, the probability of its occurrence and the impact of the precautionary measures on the people to be protected. Fighting potential terrorism wherever it may hide and however it may strike destroys the very thing one intends to save.

Doctors do not prescribe drugs for conditions which might exist undetected; and, despite destructive rhetoric from stupid and insipid politicians, we do not, in fact, “wage war on crime.” Society prosecutes specific instances of crimes that have taken place. The Bill of Rights places limits on searches and seizures and confessions precisely because not to do so results in society terrorizing itself under color of law.

And yet it was upon such a Crusade of Self-Destruction that Chief Beelzebub beckoned us when, from the pulpit at National Cathedral, he exhorted the Country “to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil."

To retaliate against the actual perpetrators of specific attacks is one thing but to seek to rid the world of “evil” is in fact a sin. Christianity rejects the Manichean division of the world into forces of good and forces of evil precisely because to create the distinction necessarily endows an absence of good with a force mere emptiness would not otherwise have. We can respond to specific wants or injuries as conscience leads us, but to crusade against “evil” anywhere “righting the world’s wrongs” becomes its own catastrophe.

No doubt the Administration was impaling the country on an ambiguity which could be understood as equating the fighting of evil with the hunting down of culprits. But listening carefully to the way officials were talking over the course of three days, it was evident that the Government had in mind -- and confused -- two distinct objectives.

Politically speaking, Bush embarked us on an active war against variable and interchangeable suspect enemies anywhere coupled with an ongoing surveillance everywhere which assumes everyone's potential guilt unless and until actual innocence is proved. And it is worth noting that every time a person is asked to show identification or to pass through a scanner he is being required to prove his innocence. A nation that sees potential enemies everywhere is a psychotic danger to the world. A country that suspects itself has succumbed to political cancer.

This, then, is the sum and substance of the War on Terrorism and of everything that has ensued from the “apocalyptic” Twin Tower collapse.

There was, in fact, nothing “apocalyptic” about it. In the historical scheme of things the events of 9/11 do not hold a candle to the firestorms of Dresden, Hamburg and Hiroshima or to many other natural or man-made catastrophes. In all such grim and murderous events, victims meet horrible deaths and survivors bear devastating griefs. But while such misfortunes merit a decent respect, they do not become, by the mere fact of their existence, social or historical turning points.

What the events of 9/11 provided was a rivetting pyrotechnic spectacle which held us in a state of horrified suspended judgement neutralized by the twin prongs of pity and fear.

“That! is what They! do” came the shout and with all the histrionic hysterics it could muster the Country ran into the chasm. Ten years on and we are still there; sagaciously, sentimentally, lacrimosely, obsessively tracing our steps and picking our wounds, “reliving the horror” and “taking stock of what it means for us”.

But the remembrances and analyses are merely shadows of the shibboleth, and do not seriously question its validity. The official and respectable opinion never questions whether we should be “at war” at all. Not at all. Evil did it; Evil must be punished! Again and again and again...

The comic moral of the Tar Baby fiasco is: Just let go! The tragic moral of the story is that Br’er Rabbit can’t.

We have met the enemy and we is stuck.

©Woodchip Gazette, 2011

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Obama’s Trojan Horse

In Thursday night’s Address to Congress and the Nation [1], President Obama seized the podium and, in echoes of Reagan to Gorbachev, repeatedly defied Congress to “pass this bill.” Congress is more likely to tear it down.

Obama used the occasion, first off, to appear aggressively in command. Congress is in disrepute and what better time to kick it when it is down? But Obama’s “in your faceness” betrayed his political weakness. From a truly powerful man, a wink or a nod is more than sufficient. Chanting demands is for the streets.

On the merits, Obama used the occasion to reclaim his tattered “progressive” mantle. One’s initial reaction could only be, Why didn’t he speak this way on behalf of a public option for medical care? The question contains the answer; but in order for it to reveal itself one has to first ask, What is progressivism ?

The essential idea of progressivism, by whatever of many names it might be called, is that the parts of the whole each and all operate for the sake of the whole. This may seem like a no-brainer, but it states a very different premise from saying that the parts of the whole each operate for their own benefit, or from saying that the parts of the whole should cooperate among themselves.

Americans have confused the three formulations and as a result the “progressive” or “liberal” or “union” movement in the country is itself in tatters. Contrast Teddy Roosevelt with Obama.

Defining the principles of the American Progressive Movement in Osawatomie Kansas, in August 1910, Roosevelt announced that “the New Nationalism puts the national need before sectional or personal advantage.” “Equality of opportunity means that the commonwealth will get from every citizen the highest service of which he is capable... the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth.” [2]

This formulation went beyond “levelling the playing field” or insuring that the competitive game was clean and fair. While progressivism included laws against “unfair” competition and “unsafe” profit-making as well as provisions for some redistribution of wealth, it went beyond the mere softening of hard-knock capitalism. Its fundamental tenet was that all components of society were answerable to the good of the common wealth.

In his address to Congress, there were moments when Obama sounded almost Rooseveltian. “Yes, we are rugged individualists” whose self-reliant drive built the world’s greatest economy, he said; “but there’s always been another thread running throughout our history -- a belief that we’re all connected... that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation. ... No single individual built America on their own. We built it together.”

But Obama’s fine print told a more nuanced story. The immediate goal of the Jobs Act, he said, was “to provide a jolt to an economy that has stalled” by putting money into consumers’ pockets. The long term goal was to “mak[e] America more competitive.” The difficulty with this goal is that, from a progressive point of view, it is incomplete. It omitted the at least co-equal goal of making America more fair and socially secure for its citizens. Obama's goal-formulation subtly equated “America” with “business” -- an equation worthy of Calvin Coolidge.

The equivalency occurred more than once throughout his delivery. At the beginning of his speech Obama alluded to an America “where if you stepped up, did your job, and were loyal to your company, that loyalty would be rewarded with a decent salary and good benefits; maybe a raise once in a while.” And further, “On all of our efforts to strengthen competitiveness, we need to look for ways to work side by side with America’s businesses.”

Such statements were a clear retreat from the concept of business as a “servant” of the commonwealth. They returned instead to the idea that parts of the whole should cooperate among themselves. The goal was simply to get the existing machinery moving again. The paradigm Obama announced was that of government helping business while business kept labor peace with decent salaries and benefits. This was little different than, “For God’s sake! Keep the peasants placid!”

Perhaps we are quibbling over semantics? After all, “why roam the world looking for better bread than is made from wheat?” Obama is certainly not a socialist. Whatever he does, it is clear he aims to do it with and through business. And, at a strictly functional level, progressivism has always engineered things with and through business, regardless of how it formulated its overall political concept or purpose.

However, the deceit of a Trojan Horse is that it looks like a horse and may function as a horse while it contains a secret, different and destructive purpose inside.

Obama tipped his hand midway through the speech when he stated that his proposed Jobs Act would be fully “paid for” through “a more ambitious deficit plan ... that will not only cover the cost of this jobs bill, but stabilize our debt in the long run. This approach is basically the one I’ve been advocating for months.”

The use of the word “more” was like a Greek toe sticking out from the hoof of the Trojan Horse. Was the Jobs Act really a “deficit plan” ? If the Jobs Act is paid for through an overall deficit plan, it becomes a component of that plan as much a closing loopholes, revising tax rates or anything else.

And the “anything else” which Obama has been “advocating for months” since he released his budget Fact Sheet in April 2011 includes cutbacks to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. April's budget fact sheet acknowledged,

“The President does not believe that Social Security is in crisis nor is a driver of our near-term deficit problems.” [3]

Nevertheless, the deficit reduction plan called for reduced pay-outs to medical service providers and for "adjustments" to Social Security cost-of-living increases.

In in his July 16th Weekly Address, Obama again elaborated on his concept of "shared sacrifice" stating,

“If we’re going to ask seniors, or students, or middle-class Americans to sacrifice, then we have to ask corporations and the wealthiest Americans to share in that sacrifice.” [4]

In other words, Obama's budget and deficit plans have always demanded that the poorest weakest elements of society "share" in the burden of reducing a deficit they in no way caused.

Last night, Obama all but stuck out a full foot when he acknowledged later on in his speech that the Jobs Act cum Deficit Plan would be paid for “by making modest adjustments to health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid...” Why “like”? Are there other health programs that are significant? What other programs are “like” Medicare?

Anyone can compare Obama’s address last night with his April 2011 Deficit Plan. The bottom line is that the address was chock full of quotes and cribs from the Deficit Plan; and the core essence of that plan is to stimulate business while reducing the long term deficit.

However since the deficit was indisputably caused [5] by war spending and lower tax rates for the “corporate class” and since Obama proposes merely fringe adjustments to either, the difference has to be taken out of the hide of the old, the poor and infirm. That is nothing a true progressive would propose. Once again, Teddy Roosevelt,

“I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective - a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion.”

In contrast, President Obama has never proposed a genuinely progressive tax reform. Allowing tax give-aways to expire and closing "evasion" routes here and there does not reduce the grotesque income disparity which exists in the country. A key element of progressive thought has always been the belief that there can be no equal justice and no equal opportunity without equality of condition.

But that is not Obama's framework. In his view, America is a business dynamo and everything else is geared into making that dynamo spin. The reason he did not sound like a progressive in the Spring of 2009, is that he had no intention of substituting even an optional national health service in place of channelling funds into the "health dynamo" of for-profit drug and insurance, companies.

Polls show that the American people demand higher tax rates on those that own and control the economy. They demand an end to foreign wars and no cutbacks to Social Security or Medicare.

Those who enthusiastically voted for Obama hoping for a change did not sufficiently scrutinize his “puff talk”. Obama’s mephistofelian rhetoric is very good at insinuating an impression of what it is not. Last night’s was a stellar performance.

©Woodchip Gazette, 2011


Linked References

[1] http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press office/2011/09/08/address-president-joint-session-congress

[2] http://www.presidentialrhetoric.com/historicspeeches/roosevelt_theodore/newnationalism.html

[3] http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press office/2011/04/13/fact-sheet-presidents-framework-shared prosperity-and-shared-fiscal-resp

[4] http://www.whitehouse.gov/the press%20office/2011/07/16/weekly-address-unique opportunity%20secure-our-fiscal-future

[5] http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9OHLRBG0.htm

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Flighting for Freedom

Yvonne is a cow. On May 24th she escaped en route to slaughter. Since then she has eluded the full force of the German Waldmacht and has remained on the lamb (oooooooh) despite the latest and bestest in cow-capturing technology: helicopters, heat-seeking cameras infra-red sensors and human bush-beaters wired into their cell phones. On August 30th, Yvonne was captured.




But not without an heroic fight, struggling ferociously to the last despite being stunned by two tranquilizer shots and being beset by a small swarm of humans with the Dread Opposable Thumb.

To give credit where credit is due, the Germans long ago abandonned the idea of shooting Yvonne and dragging her carcass to the chop shop (oooooooooh). Hunters were warned off while her would be-captors tried instead to coax her out of hiding with a handsome bull. No dice. The authorities were more or less resigned to letting Yvonne romp in the wild while they tried to figure something out. Now that Yvonne has been captured, she will be taken to a bovine rescue farm in Bavaria where her sister, Waltraud, and son, Friesi, await her. Although it appears that Bull Stud was a one time offer, it all ended well enough.

But as we contemplated the picture of Yvonne's heroic resistance, we thought back to Greek and Rennaisance sculptures of captured slaves and of Africans running through the forest of the South the sound of baying coon-hounds in the distance. Why, we wondered, should it be thought unusual that any sentient creature will flight for his freedom; what debasement of soul allows us to think that beating the spirit out of living things is natural and pastoral?

©Woodchipgazette, 2011
photo courtesy Der Spiegel ©

Mining, Harvesting and Civic Carcinogens in the National Security State

Two seemingly disconnected news articles recently caught our attention.

On May 30th, the New York Times News Service published a report on how the “FBI’s Counter-terrorism Operations” were “Scrutinizing Political Activists.” The article described the great lengths to which the Bureau went to spy on a self-described anarchist and organizer of anti corporate protests whose criminal record consisted entirely of being arrested at those demonstrations. In addition to combing through garbage, emails, and bank accounts, the FBI infiltrated meetings and deployed agents to strike up fake friendships with the investigated suspect. A former FBI agent turned civil libertarian considered the program to be a colossal farce. “You have a bunch of guys and women all over the country sent out to find terrorism,” he said, “fortunately, there isn’t a lot of terrorism in many communities, so they end up pursuing people who are critical of the government” and mislabelling non violent civil disobedience as ‘terrorism’.

A few days before, on May 25th, the U.K. Guardian carried a story which reported on criticism of General David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, by Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the former British ambassador to the war-torn country. Earlier this year, Petraeus told Congress that “precision operations by US special mission units” were killing or capturing “some 360 targeted insurgent leaders” every 90 days. [1] According to the Guardian, Petraeus’s staff argued that the tactic was demoralizing the Taliban and would ultimately make the movement more likely to agree to a peace deal on the terms agreeable to the West. [2] Cowper Coles criticised the strategy, stating that “boasting” about “body counts” was “profoundly wrong” and not “conducive to a political settlement.” Cowper-Coles added, “it produces tactical success in cleansing insurgents out of particular areas, but it's essentially moving water around a puddle, and I think any general who boasts of the number of Pashtun insurgents he's killed should be ashamed of himself."

-oOo-

At first blush, the stories fell into the Keystone Kops category -- gub’mint unglued, doing outrageous but otherwise ineffectually stupid things. However, the apparent ineffectiveness hides a more sinister and socially cancerous mechanism at work. The stories illustrate how the National Security State creates its own non-existent necessities.

The denouement was the poisonous fruit of the Government’s vow to protect the country from terrorism. Ten years ago, when President Bush first announced the “war on terrorism,” our blog observed

“What the Government will have to presume is that everyone is at least a potential terrorist. In the most fundamental sense that is a presumption which is entirely antithetical to the concept of civil friendship, i.e., societas." (Woodchip Gazette, 010915)

The fight against an imagined harm -- that is, a harm which could exist in general but which is not specifically present -- creates a reaction without an actual object; the exercise of a means without an actual purpose.

It always helps to begin with Latin. To pro-tect means to raise a barrier before something. By extension, it means to take preventative measures against a contemplated harm. How then does government protect us from terrorism? To erect a wall against a present and identifiable external enemy is one thing; but what happens when the harm is an enemy who might e anyone, anywhere? How do we fight a war against potential enemies?

The entire difficulty with the phenomenon of terrorism is that it is not conducted by an official or state agent but is carried out by anonymous actors at random. We are immediately embroiled in three levels of “known unknowns” -- a non-present, unspecified harm by an uncertain actor.

In 2008 then CIA chief, Mike McConnell, told Congress that “the enemy” had developed the capacity to “blend in” -- in other words, that anyone one of us could be one of them. If it took McConnell seven years to figure out that terrorists tend to “blend in” he is the stupidest man on the planet. [3]

President Bush’s vow to detect and defend against terrorism ipso facto placed all ‘blendables’ under suspicion. By definition, su[b]-spicion (from the Latin 'to look under') replaces the face-value of things with an imagined harm or hypothesized guilt assumed to be lurking behind appearances. Since everyone is at least a ‘a potential enemy suspect’, civic trust is replaced by suspicion and a necessity for general surveillance has been created ex nihilo.

This is not a play on words. The general theory of data mining is that random bits of innocent facts can and eventually will disclose guilty patterns not detectable with primitive linear thinking such as concepts of probable cause. Innocence Hides Guilt and In Garbage There is Truth.

Nor are these simply Orwellian slogans, they are slogans which reflect an Orwellian corruption of civil society at a very root level.

Apologists for the national security state have argued that “rooting out” terrorism was no different than “waging war” against crime. Without doubt, terrorism is a species of crime; i.e. random, unauthorized, anti-social behavior committed by anyone so inclined. The defect was not in the analogy but in the assumed premise that we “wage war” against criminals. We do not and the Constitution with good reason places strict limits on the official reaction to criminality.

Aristotle pointed out centuries ago that what we call society is simply a network and hierarchy of friendships. We assume that everyone of us, at some basic level, is at least not an enemy. If our root assumption is precisely the opposite -- that anyone is a potential terrorist -- our self-protection has metastasized into self-destruction.

The same cancerous paradigm applies to the New World Order’s ongoing “zonal wars” in Iraq, Af-Pakistan and -- soon -- Mexico. The difference is that what is guarded against in this case is not potential terrorism but potential potential. This necessitates more drastic measures such that surveillance is replaced by killing.

Colonialism is nothing new and has existed at least since the days when Greeks and Romans established outpost settlements (coloni) in hostile territories. What distinguishes present day zonal wars from their historical antecedents is the method and nature of their emplacement.

The post Cold War methodology was first drafted as of 1992 in Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney’s proposed Defense Planning Guide. [ 5 ], [ 6 ] This draft was then polished up in a white paper entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses [ 7 ] published by the defense-industry funded Project for a New American Century (PNAC). This paper in turn got massaged into the official National Security Strategy of the United States of America, promulgated in September 2002. Although not an official government document, the PNAC paper serves as a fundamental text which accurately reflects official policy.

The premise of zonal wars is that “potentially powerful states” might challenge America’s geo-political preeminence or “expand their own influence.” (Rebuilding etc., p. i; ch. 1, p. 2.) This requires a “refocus on precluding the emergence of any potential global competitor." (Planning Guide Memorandum, 18 Feb. 1992, I 91/28291, p. 4.) Accordingly, the United States needs to “preserve and extend its position of global leadership by maintaining the preeminence of U.S. military forces” and by developing “the full range of missions needed to exercise U.S. global leadership.” (Rebuilding, p. iv.)

The key word, here as in other contexts, is ‘potential’ which, it bears repeating, refers to a happenstance which can be imagined to occur. Here, as with suspicion, an actual policy is built upon an imagined circumstance. Of course, ‘contingency planning’ is nothing new but critical to the reasonableness of the plan is the probability and specificity of the allegedly foreseeable condition. To plan for ‘a possibility’ without specification is nonsense.

Once again Latin. The word ‘potential’ derives from potens or “power” -- and refers to a latent or possible power to do something. To speak of “potentially powerful states” is to say nothing more than that another country could become powerful.

Thus deconstructed, the avowed purpose of U.S. geo-political policy is meaningless as a true purpose. A purpose consists in the doing of X in order to cause or achieve a specific Y. In contrast, the goal of the so called ‘missions’ is to prevent a potential -- to stop something that might occur but has not occurred. How does one stop something that has not occurred?

Since the object-condition is in fact imaginary, the only real factor left is the means itself; that is, the meeting of an imaginary power with the exercise of real power.

As implemented, the full range of zonal missions includes, “deployment o[f] forward operating bases” as a “force multiplier” in “power projection operations.” (Rebuilding, p. 20.) These power projection operations include “constabulary” duties for "shaping the security environment in critical regions.” ( Ibid, pp. iv and 6.)

Once again, ‘purpose-based language’ is merely a cover for the ongoing exercise of so-called ‘leadership’ and what the leadership boils down to is ‘power projection’ and the purpose of power projection is to prevent any other state or group from becoming a ‘potential rival’.

Americans are notoriously careless of language, as if meaning could be conveyed apart from the words used. But it is critical to grasp the meaning of policy junk-speak that employs terms like “potential rival” or “potential threat.” A potential rival is an entity which is not but could become a rival. A potential threat is the possibility of a potential harm.

In either case a policy is conjured up against potential but imaginary objects so that the means is the only reality left. Stripped of bureaucratic burble, U.S. policy is simply Bad Bad Leroy Brown Comes to Town to throw His Weight Around. (See Rebuilding, p. 11.)

And what is brought to town are zonal occupations in which everyone is placed under suspicion and treated accordingly. The word ‘constabulary’ used in the PNAC paper never found much acceptance among military bureaucrats who prefer words like ‘stabilizing’ or the more traditional ‘peace-keeping’. No matter; the underlying concepts are the same. The 'shaping' takes the form of degrading civil society and making the zone itself less viable and less secure on the theory that a weakened zone presents less of a so-called ‘potential threat’.

Needless to say, the usual pogey-bait is proffered up with yap about enhancing democracy, protecting human rights and building economies where individual entrepreneurship can thrive. Without deconstructing each of the tweets, it will suffice to say that each of these subsidiary goals must ultimately align and conform to the primary goal of ‘power projection’. Whatever might be served up as window-dressing, ‘shaping the security environment’ means promoting chaos in order to retain control.



The PNAC mavens were brazenly candid about this, going so far as to state that "constabulary missions" were "likely" to "generate" violence. (Rebuilding, p. 11.)

How does maintaining security manage to generate violence? It does so because the reality under the label consists in degrading infrastructures while engineering a low level state of ongoing urban, ethnic and social warfare. So called ‘full spectrum’ military-police-intelligence operations include infiltration, random searches, arbitrary arrests, and generally brutalizing the civilian population by both provoking incidents and responding to the provocation.

It is within this full-spectrum, strategic context that Petraeus’s reference to “precision operations by US special mission units” must be understood. These American einsatzgruppen are simply the ongoing preemptive response to potential provocation.

Such a policy of ‘power projection’ against potentials is simply an abuser’s wet dream. “I’m going to beat you until you love me” is not a true foundation for civil society; unless, that is, civil society is to be degraded in to a vast sado-masochist spectacle.

The difference between the FBI’s “ongoing surveillance of potential terrorists” and U.S./NATO “power projection missions” is simply a question of spectral intensity; but the inherent purposelessness is the same.

In the concluding chapters of 1984, Orwell explains that, under IngSoc, the Inner Party realized it was no longer necessary to conjure up reasons for the exercise of power; rather, the projection of power was its own self sufficient good.

“The image of society in 1984 is that of a boot in the face.”

Effectively speaking, Orwell’s image forms the operative nexus between the two seemingly disconnected reports. It makes no difference that the FBI surveillance is teleologically absurd; it is the nature of NatSec to maintain surveillance, period.

Similarly, it makes no difference to Petraeus that the best way to negotiate with a party is to set up a table and chairs; “disposing” the Taliban to negotiate is its own power-projecting goal.

-oOo-

The mistake of progressives and the so-called Left has been to assume that what was at issue is a policy -- a Bush doctrine, a NeoCon strategy an Obama Formula. What evolved was not a “policy” but a political cancer.

The metastasizing event was like a tromp d’oeil in which positive potentials got replaced with negative ones. As with individuals, it is the nature of the social organism to give vent to inchoate, latent potentials -- what is usually called the 'creative energy of a people.' These are unknown but knowable. In contrast, defense against knowable unknowns produces a contractive effect. The fight against potential terrorism and potential power ends up suspecting everything, disorienting everything, subverting everything and, ultimately, destroying everything. As a society, the United States is being consumed by its self-defense.

That said, it is important not to confuse the image of the state with underlying causes. While it is possible that a state could become endemically and institutionally sadistic per se, it behooves us to attempt a diagnosis as to what forces or factors are driving the Orwellian denouement.

Likewise, while it is true that the United States has turned its own citizens into “potential enemies” and has become the abuser in ongoing abusive relationships around the world, it overstates the case to say that there is no ulterior purpose beyond sadistic indulgence in a power-projection paradigm.

The difficulty in detecting a qui bono results from the contextual shift entailed in global capitalism.

Wars for bananas are nothing new. However, they have hitherto followed a discrete national pattern whereby country X saw resource Y in region Z and thereupon intruded and grabbed. If profit followed the flag it was because capitalism itself subsisted in a national context or phase. In contrast, the globalization of capitalism necessarily resulted in a corresponding globalization of gunboat diplomacy.

At that point, a threshold was passed. What is the target when all is one? When two parts operating within a larger sphere are at war, the picture is one of con-flict, meaning literally the butting of two rams heads. But what is the picture when the inter-national whole is itself at war with itself? The picture there is simply one of ongoing convulsions and contractions, globally.

The “war” in Afghanistan corroborates this analysis. Since the 1980’s the existence of natural gas reserves in Central Asia (Turkmenistan) implicated the foreseeable need for a pipeline either through Turkey to the Mediterranean or through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean.

However, the building of such a pipeline represented a major investment requiring multiple investors, the consent of multiple countries and multiple agreements concerning purchasing rights, transit licenses, transport agreements and so on. One does not sink billions into a project only to see what fair winds might bring at the end of the day.

Thus, as of 1997 UNOCAL, on behalf of an international consortium of oil companies entered into negotiations with the Taliban [sic] over pipeline rights through Afghanistan. In 1998, UNOCAL (USA), Gazprom (Russia), Delta Oil. Co. (Saudi Arabia) and TurkmenRusgaz, as investors, finalized a sheaf of agreements with Turkmenistan, Pakistan and Afghanistan, as represented by the Taliban.

Speaking on behalf of UNOCAL, V.P., John Maresca, tooted the benefits of these agreements but told Congress that “without [a] peaceful settlement of conflicts within the region, cross-border oil and gas pipelines are not likely to be built.” Noting that the proposed pipeline traversed Taliban controlled territory, he stated that UNOCAL could not begin construction “until an internationally recognized Afghanistan government [was]in place.” [8 ]

Some have interpreted this statement as a call for the Taliban to be overthrown. It was not. UNOCAL had just reached an agreement with the Taliban. It was politically neutral statement which belabored the obvious fact that solid agreements can exist only between solid parties.

Instead, President Clinton bombed Afghanistan and UNOCAL halted its activities (Aug. 1998). A month later, the U.S. Trade and Development Agency financed an Enron study for a pipeline through Turkey. In April 1999 Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and Pakistan re-activated the pipeline project without UNOCAL participation. Two months later, Clinton froze Taliban assets in the U.S. Thereafter, the U.S. government and the Taliban held intermittent negotiations through August 2001.

Historically speaking, business has always been conducted in tandem with ongoing collateral power-projections. But where business deals themselves involve a full spectrum of interests and issues, it inevitably follows that the ancillary gunboat “diplomacy” should also involve the deployment of “full-spectrum” activities.

This brief recapitulation illustrates the multi-party, multi-region, multi-issue complexity of resource wars within a globalized economy. It is very difficult to see whose flag is flying over what where.

What we are witnessing is the turning of a grand historical cycle whereby capitalism reverts to the feudalism from which it emerged.

Economically speaking, what is conveniently called “feudalism” was a system in which government and economy were localized and privatized. Although the chaos of the Middle Ages has been exaggerated by bourgeois apologists, as a whole, the feudal system was both fragmented and fluid. The emergent nation state, solved the fragmentation problem on the domestic level and translated the fluidity problem to the newly defined ‘inter-national’ sphere.

From this perspective it can be seen that national capitalism and nationalised control of production served at least to delineate, and to some extent, restrain conflict. However, as far back as 1994, Le Monde Diplomatique [ See Note 9, infra ] warned that nation states had lost control over their economies and had been reduced to mere agencies which could do little more than react to international corporate behemoths. The state no longer included corporate personalities acting under its umbrella but rather global corporations used subsidiary states as agents and user-interfaces. Dick Cheney seized the day and turned this circumstance into his “Kill the Beast” policy which explicitly aimed to destroy government as an autonomous actor.

If a corporate creature like Cheney can regard the United States Government as a beast, what must he think of insects like Bolivia or Iraq?

As a result, ‘global capitalism’ is at once a progression forward and a reversion backwards. The system of capitalist production and exchange has reached an end state apotheosis. A mode of analysis that is stuck in an archaic and linear concept of causality does not take into account that, under global capitalism, chaos serves profit. The last thing corporate privateers want is a strong nation state (e.g., “Saddam”) in potential control of its own resources.

Within this globalized commerce, the qui bono both exists and does not exist at the same time. Ongoing full spectrum power projections do not really benefit “American” interests or “French” or “Brazilian.” Nor can they be said to benefit this or that international corporation because, as the Afghanistan situation illustrates, even with respect to a single commodity, no single corporation has its hand on the full banana.

After six years and billions of U.S. dollars, no American company controls Iraqi oil. In 2009, the government in Baghdad held two rounds of oil auctions. In the first round, of U.S. companies, only Exxon-Mobil won any contracts. The rest went to approximately 35 oil companies from China, India, Algeria, Angola, Pakistan, Thailand, Turkey and Vietnam. [10] [6] Winners in the second round included Russia’s Lukoil, UK’s Shell, Malaysia’s Petronas without there being any American takers. [11] [13]

"No one, even the United States, can steal the oil, whatever people think," an Iraqi oil ministry spokesman crowed. [ 12 ] But there is no “Iraqi” oil. Thirty six years after Saddam Hussein had nationalized the oil, the current auctions were held on a field-by-field basis with various provinces and ethnic groups imposing their conditions and demanding their cuts. The “oil ministry” is simply a flow through valve for petro-feudalism.

As the denouement in Iraq illustrates, ‘power-projections’ end up benefitting a systemic variable; that is, any entity which may be a ‘significant player’ at any given time. There is simply no ‘qui’ rather the system as such serves as its own ‘bono’. Where the evil to be feared and the benefit to be gained are both merely ‘possible potentials’ the means generates its own good.

Thus distilled, the civic cancer and the global qui bono are one and the same. Putting aside the irrelevance of what individual borg-units might feel, the full boot of the national security state is not an exercise in sado masochism for its own sake but is engaged in for the “good of the system” -- a good which serves any potential beneficiary in any instance but no one and nothing permanent at any time.

In a word, capitalism’s ultimate commodity has become civil society itself.


©WoodchipGazette, 2011.

Notes & References

[1] Petraeus Testimony, 3/11/2011
http://www.longwarjournal.org/threat matrix/archives/2011/03/full_text_of_general_petraeus.php#ixzz1OyeyY4fj

[2] Cowper-Coles Criticism
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/25/afghanistan tactics-profoundly-wrong-ambassador?intcmp=239

[3] Blendables
http://wcg darktimediary.blogspot.com/2008/02/blendables_2802.html

[5]Defense Planning Guide
http://www.scribd.com/doc/2260566/US-Defense-Planning-Guidance-19921999-Leaked-NY-Times

[6]Defense Planning Guide
http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1992_Draft_Defense_Planning_Guidance

[7]PNAC: Rebuilding America’s Defenses
http://www.newamericancentury.org/publicationsreports.htm

[8] UNOCAL Corp. to House Committee on International Relations, SubComittee on Asia and the Pacific (February 12, 1998)
http://www.ringnebula.com/Oil/Timeline.htm

[9] Une Capitalisme Hors de Control -Les Chantiers de la Démolition Sociale par Serge Halimi Le Monde Diplomatique (July 1994)

[10]Iraqi Oil Contract Auctions
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/06/200963093615637434.html

[11] Iraqi Oil Contract Auctions
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080622113024.5rfe5v9s&show_article

[12] Iraqi Oil Contract Auctions
http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/12/12/us-iraq usa-oil-idUSTRE5BB18Q20091212

[13]Iraqi Oil Contract Auction
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8407274.stm

[14] Woodchip Articles on National Security & Zonal Policies
http://wcg-footsandfotos.blogspot.com/2011/06/110615-index-articles-on-full-spectrum.html

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The Queen's Speech

The Queen’s visit to Ireland was certainly not a celebration. Her arrival at Baldonell Airport was as close to furtive as a State arrival can be and her motorcade down Dublin’s O’Connell Street was, like so much in Ireland’s sad history, desolate.

Desolée -- to be saddened, dismayed, sorry; the French phrases came to mind as, with equal perplexity I pondered the raison d’etre for this visit. It was certainly evident that Anglo-Irish relations were yet a work in progress and, being in progress, still harbored an outcome that was dubious.

Why would the Queen go to a place where a cordon sanitaire had to be drawn between her and its people? It was hardly the image or even the role of a modern monarch, which is to commemorate deeds done and seal done deals. The Queen’s speech, given at Dublin Castle, provided the answer: the visit was an exercise in remembrance for the sake of the future.

At once lean and rich, the speech began by hearkening to the “many layers and traditions” of a shared past while acknowledging that the “weight of history” was marked by the “sad and regrettable reality” produced by a relationship that had not always been “straightforward” or “benign.” In so saying, the Queen bowed to the fact that, on balance and despite the many complexities of the narrative, Britain had been the oppressor.

She then spoke what many commentators have already said was as close to an apology as a monarch could proffer:

“These events have touched us all, many of us personally, and are a painful legacy. We can never forget those who have died or been injured and their families. To all who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts and deep sympathy. With the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all.”

But the words went beyond "apology." They embodied a transformational call for compassionate atonement and forgiveness which was all the stronger because it came from within the circle of all those who had suffered. Those listening could not but themselves acknowledge that Elizabeth’s uncle, Lord Mountbatten, had been blown up by an IRA bomb.

In speaking thus, the Queen’s remarks called to mind that most ancient and stunning scene in which Priam comes to Achilles' tent to beg for the body of the son who had killed the other’s lover. “But come now, sit” says the warrior, “though we each feel our pain, let our grief lie quiet on hearts....” And when they had had their fill of lament, Achilles slew a sheep, skillfully spitted it and when it was ready “they set it in fine baskets, took bread, poured wine and filled their need for food and drink.” (Iliad, Bk. 24.)

“But it is also true,” the Queen continued, “that no-one who looked to the future over the past centuries could have imagined the strength of the bonds that are now in place between the governments and the people of our two nations....”

Throughout the speech, the words “us,” “us all,” and “our people” recurred. The Queen repeatedly returned to the remembrance of the “families” which “share the two islands” and to the “ties of family, friendship and affection” which bound “the people of our two nations.”

What the Queen would have her audience recall was that in the end, the Irish and the English, as the Welsh and the Scots and as, indeed, the Saxons, Danes and Normans, were all one people sharing, as every family must, a difficult but ultimately enduring bond.

Far more than just platitudes, the speech was an exercise in remembrance. Most people think of “memory” as the replaying or retrieving of a recorded hard fact. There is, they think, a “factual truth” which can be laid hold of and put back on the table before our eyes. But that is not the way memory works.

The word re-member means precisely that: to re-assemble, to re-collect, to put something back together again. There are, to be sure, pieces of the past which are worked with but the memory is the result of a present act of recreation. We put the past back together as we see it, and as we wish to see it, today.

Lawyers and psychologists have long understood the mechanics of memory which are now being confirmed by neuroscience. Eye-witnesses are the worst evidence because they see what they want to see and convince themselves that they did see it -- like the alleged murder in the “clear light of the silvery moon” which Lincoln famously proved didn’t shine that night. Likewise, people stuck in psychological ruts from which they can’t break loose simply “replay” today a record of their own fashioning that represents not the past but their reaction to it.

The two poles under the tent of remembrance are exaction and forgiveness. Do we demand our own satisfaction or do we forego and move on?

If we were to aggregate the sum total of all the injuries perpetuated by the “English” on the “Irish” satisfaction would be well nigh impossible. English oppression was all at once ethnic, economic, religious, linguistic and cultural. Such a heap of sins requires a diabolical first cause. But if we break down the past into more manageable bites, we are left simply with fallible and failing humans.

It is true that the English oppressed the Irish but who were the “English”? The celtic Britains conquered by the Angles, Danes and Saxons? The Saxons conquered by the Normans? The flexible majesty of the English language itself reflects the waves of invasion and oppression that swept over the isle.

It is true that Ireland was economically despoiled, its inhabitants left to poverty and famine. But the most classic study of economic oppression by one class against another was Frederick Engles’ The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844) -- a true horror tale if ever there was one. What the English did to the English under capitalism and by means of the “enclosure laws” which deprived the peasantry of its common lands was just as bad.

It is true that Irish Catholics were barred from office and civil advancement by the Act of Settlement of 1701, but so too were English Catholics and Protestant Dissenters. Moreover, had James II, with his Irish-Catholic and Continental backers succeeded in their endeavors the shoe would simply have been on the other foot. The sorry fact is that for three centuries all of Europe fell into the pit of sectarian animosity and exclusion.

Such an analysis allows us to see that both Ireland and England were rife with divisions of various sorts operating at different levels. We can then choose to remember only the fact of divisions, which is to remain dismembered; or, we can choose to gather in all the divisions, which is to be made whole.

Are we to say that George Bernard Shaw was not Irish but James Joyce was? That Daniel O’Connell was an Irish statesman but Edmund Burke was not? Such exclusionary resentments are pointless. It is a far, far better thing to recall more generally that throughout the English speaking world, the rose, thistle and shamrock are entwined.

Some people choose “never to forget” a past wrong. In so saying, they resolve to gnash their teeth over an ever more deepened and elaborately remembered injury. The Queen pointed to another path: Better to remember with “forbearance and conciliation” that the “ties of family, friendship and affection" are the “golden thread that runs through all our joint successes so far, and all we will go on to achieve.”


©Woodchip Gazette, 2011

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Cinco de Mayo -- A Poor Excuse for a Party

Throughout the Southwest and in more and more communities even in the North and East, this weekend will see a host of festive raucous Cinco de Mayo parties with the usual fare of tacos, moles, carnitas, and chicharron, the usual blare of banda, salsa and mariachi music and of course lots of tequila, margaritas and cerveza. There will also be the usual press clippings explaining how the victory of “Mexican” forces against the French “invader” symbolizes Mexican freedom and self-determination.

One is loathe to begrudge a party, but the Cinco de Mayo was not a great victory for Mexico. It was rather the symbolic beginning of her complete subservience to the United States.

Secular and anti-clerical biases in Mexico and the United States lend support to what has become the Myth of Benito Juarez who is lauded as the "liberator" of Indians and the "defender" of his country against foreign domination. As a politically correct bonus, he himself was actually a full blooded indigenous person. A few facts might help.


The French did not invade Mexico. They were invited in by the Conservatives in what had become a civil war over the nature and direction of the country.

Juarez was a leader in the Liberal faction which wanted free markets, free trade and an economic alliance with the United States. (Another leading Liberal was Governor Mariano Vallejo whose fairly gushing admiration for the United States led him to connive at American illegal immigration into California.)

Juarez was also an adamant secularist who blamed religion for all of Mexico's woes and who was determined to "liberate" the masses from their superstitions and lead them into the sunshine of Positivism.

In pursuit of these economic and secular goals Juarez was willing to sell the country to the United States. In 1861, upon assuming the presidency after a three year civil war, Juarez sent a personal emissary to Springfield Illinois to inform the newly elected Lincoln of his desire “to maintain the most intimate and friendly relations with the United States ... and to concede every form of facilities towards developing the commercial and other interests of both republics.” [1]

The type of concessions Juarez had in mind were evidenced in the McLane-Ocampo Treaty (1859) in which, in exchange for four million dollars, he granted the U.S. transit rights over the Isthmus of Tehuantepec which was being eyed as a possible inter-ocean canal. Juarez also proposed to grant additional corridors from Tampico to Mazatlan and from Arizona to Guaymas, thereby cutting the country into four sections. Further bittering the deal, Juarez agreed that Mexican troops would protect and enforce American transit rights. Lastly, the treaty abolished tariffs between the two countries and prohibited the granting of similar arrangements to any other "party". It was simply NAFTA with a vengeance. Fortunately for Mexico, the U.S. Senate never ratified the treaty.

Less fortunately for the Indian, Juarez's inane attempt to turn the peasant into a Jeffersonian yeoman benefitted only one class: the American investor. "Liberated" from his century old ejido system of communal land holding, (which had existed even prior to the Spanish Conquest), Indian peasants "freely" alienated their lands to American buyers and were left utterly destitute.

Juarez was an ultra-liberal free-trader who was entirely willing to place Mexico under the tutelage and economic domination of the U.S. If Mexico was saved from utter humiliation by the U.S. Senate, it was not for want of trying by Juarez.

In 1859, the same year that Juarez was buying support from the United States, the Conservatives initiated discussions with France with a view to having Archduke Maximilian of Austria assume the Mexican throne, vacant since 1824.

In 1862, at the request of the Conservative “Regency,” French troops landed in Veracruz. In Puebla, on the ascending plains outside the Central Valley, they were met and temporarily defeated by Liberal forces. It is this victory that is celebrated on the Cinco de Mayo.



In the ensuing weeks, the French retook the initiative and seized the capital. In 1864, Maximilian arrived and was installed as Emperor. By then, however, the American Civil War was over and the United States resumed its funding of the Liberal forces, leading to the ultimate defeat and execution of Maximilian (1867), whose rotting corpse Juarez refused to return to the widowed, erstwhile empress Carlota for over a year.

After defeat of "the French," Juarez was elected president by an overwhelming electoral onslaught of 7,422 votes out of 10,380 cast. (Yes, Mexico was that kind of democracy.) With the French out and the Confederacy defeated, the United States and Mexico could finally consummate their integration.

The sticking point all along had been the U.S. Democrats who conceived of domination in terms of territorial annexation and the extension of slavery. This was unacceptable to even the most craven Mexican. As Juarez's Springfield emissary had put it, “We are willing to grant the United States every commercial facility that will not be derogatory to our independence and sovereignty. This will give the United States all possible advantages of annexation without any of its inconveniences.” [1]

Free soil Republicans got the message; and, as Secretary of State William Seward later put it,“value[d] dollars more, and dominion less." Mexico's debts to the United States were paid off with licenses, land-grants and economic concessions.

In 1871, Juarez was re-elected by 5,837 votes against 3,555 for Porfirio Diaz and 2,874 for Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, all of whom were Liberals. Juarez died the following year and was succeeded by Tejada who began to feel that dependence on the United States had gone far enough. "Better a desert between strength and weakness," he said.

But between strength and weakness lay a mountain of debt. Tejada's proposed policy of balancing sell-outs with appeals to French (!) investors displeased the First National City Bank of New York, which overnight called-in its many loans and with the stroke of a pen bankrupted the Mexican Government.

Meanwhile, with funds provided by his investor friends in New York, Gen. Porfirio Diaz assembled troops on the northern border (that would be Texas) from whence he launched his liberating invasion of Mexico.

Once installed as president, Diaz became a stickler for legalities and had himself duly and very properly re-elected president for the next 35 years during which time he quite literally sold the country out to American interests. Of course a few upper crust Mexicans participated in the bonanza or served as strawmen but, by and large, virtually all of Mexico's resources, infrastructure, banking and commerce were under foreign and mostly American control.

By the numbers, Mexico boomed. It was ranked a first world country. It took three dollars to buy a single peso. From Taft to Tolstoy, Diaz was hailed as the prodigy of his age. But by those other numbers, Mexico was steeped in misery. The wealth did not trickle down. Only two percent of the population held title to land; and that two percent excluded 90 percent of the Indian population. In 1895 life expectancy was 30 years and 16 percent of the population was homeless.

In 1910, Diaz was overthrown in what is known as the Mexican Revolution. Covering its own sins of continuity, Mexico’s post-revolutionary governments have turned Diaz into the bugbear of the story. He is excoriated, denounced and blamed for following precisely the same policies that the "benemerito" Juarez had charted. The cherry on the whole historical sundae is that the general who led the decisive and winning charge on the Cinco de Mayo was none other than Porfirio Diaz himself.


This is not to deny that Mexico was faced with unpalatable choices, the essence of which had been brilliantly foreseen by the Count of Aranda. In a prophetic memorandum written in 1788 to King Charles III, Aranda lamented American independence. These “pygmy” colonies, he said, would soon become a “colossus” which would feed upon Spanish lands. [2]

Fully grasping the demographic, economic and cultural issues involved, Aranda proposed turning the hemisphere into a Spanish Commonwealth, ruled by affiliated monarchies taken from the Spanish House of Borbón, and perpetually excluding economic relations with the United States or Great Britain.

It was not to be. Napoleon’s invasion of Spain made sure of that, as did the restoration of the ultra-imbecillic Ferdinand VII. But in no small measure, the collapse of Aranda’s plan was also due to the opposition of those New World Spaniards (criollos) who, for a variety of economic and ideological reasons, wanted free trade with the English and the Americans.

Nevertheless, Aranda’s prospectus explains why the flags of Argentina, Guatemala and Nicaragua are dressed in the pale blue of Borbon colors and why Mexican conservatives had sought both in 1821 and 1859 to re-establish a monarchy oriented toward Europe.

It can be said, in gross, that throughout the 19th century the great divide in the Spanish Americas was between liberals who espoused free-trade with the United States coupled with the empirical secularism of the so-called French Enlightenment and more physiocratic conservatives who preferred commercial relations with continental Europe coupled to the cultural and religious traditions of the Indo-Iberian world.

From an economic perspective, the game was lost about the time of the world recession of 1808. The failure of the Spanish Empire to adequately foment the development of local capital meant that Spanish America would always have to look to the outside for its own development. With countries as with individuals economic catch-up is almost impossible.

The issue was not “what” but “how” -- or, more brutally, who would be the better, gentler master: Europeans with their understanding and at least partial respect for common cultural traditions or the Americans with their incomprehension, disdain and plunder-based economy.

People of a progressive or leftist persuasion tend to be anti-clerical, if not anti-religious. They also are pleased to see native people of color advance into positions of leadership. But Juarez is not their man.

Juarez was one of those people who turn their backs on themselves out of a mimetic envy and admiration of an alien who appears to them to be all that they are not and ought to be. Although he is extolled as Mexico’s first Indian president, he in fact turned his back on everything the Indian was and himself wanted to be.

It was Maximilian who, with the eyes of the enchanted foreigner, saw and appreciated the uniqueness of the Indians and sought to be their protector. Maximilian’s decrees were published in Nahuatl and indigenous people were granted the right to imperial audience and petition. Maximilian re-established recognition of communal ejidal lands and prohibited their alienation. Lastly, he promulgated laws regulating and improving the working conditions of agricultural laborers. This was no small matter in a country which, at the time, was one-third pure Indian.

The tragedy of Maximilian was that he was, in fact, a progressive and did more to modernize Mexico in three years than had been done in the preceding thirty. He alienated his own conservative base by refusing to abrogate the laws separating church and state. The difference between him and Juarez was that Maximilian saw and valued those deep rooted traditions and norms that give a people their uniqueness and define the character of a country. Juarez wanted Mexico to be not-Mexico.

As classic economic liberals, enamored with the Cartesian/Voltairian ideals of the French Revolution, it was was hardly surprising that Juarez & Co. should think of countries as fungible “economic units” in “trading blocs.” It was this mind-set that led liberals throughout Hispanic America to look to and attempt to carbon copy Democracy in America, irrespective of their own demographics and cultural traditions. It was a deceitful fantasy and the results were devastating.

Marx has pointed out that the bourgeois revolutions of the late 18th century resulted in a certain “equalization” of the individual who was freed to enter into ad hoc economic relations. “Free soil, Free Labor” as the U.S. Republicans put it. But the downside of this liberation was that it freed the individual to be simply a unit of production and consumption without that complex of personal affiliations and cultural customs that was woven around feudal economic relations.

This is not to repeat the somewhat trite and tired refrain that America has no culture. It was rather that the United States, erected on a virtual tabula raza, opted from the start to be home to all. The Count of Aranda saw clearly the advantages this gave to the Northern Pygmy,

“The liberty of religion and the ease of establishing settlements under the new form of government will call forth laborers and artisans from all nations....”

By “ease of establishing settlements” he meant that the new form of government dispensed with the limitations that had been placed on westward expansion by the British Crown, one of the main actual grievances of the disloyal colonists.

But Mexico had its own history -- one formed by the complex and paradoxical synchretism between the indigenous and the iberian under the aegis of a very multi-faceted Catholicism which both restricted and preserved pre-Cortesian beliefs and economies. To mold and modernize this clay required a very finessed hand.

In Mexico, where everything is equivocal, so-called "feudal" relations included exploitative hacienda peonage but also encompassed those communal ejidal proprietorships, rooted in soil and religion, which the "revolutionary" Emiliano Zapata fought to maintain.

Neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals were quite the bete noir they made each other out to be. Both faced a difficult task with less than delightful choices. Conservative intransigence over religious toleration (in Mexico a rather academic issue) caused them to desert their own best hope of a constitutional monarchy allied (as was the Dominion of Canada) with a European power.

Subordinating the country to the pygmy turned voracious colossus was the worst possible solution. Even assuming that American capitalism provided something more than extractive exploitation, it had nothing to offer Mexico but a cycle of production and consumption; and it is this that has filled Mexico with the appalling spectacle of consumer junk, mounds of garbage and telenovelas all smarmed over by an official propaganda of indigenous kitsch.

Global capitalism proved itself to be an irresistible historical phenomenon. But a political economy which followed the less utilitarian and more socially conscious French and German models would have served Mexico better.

[1] Lincoln’s Mexican Visitor, by William Moss William (1/17/2011) N.Y.Times, and citations therein. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/lincolns-mexican-visitor.html

[2] Dictamen del Conde de Aranda al Rey Carlos III...etc. http://www.bibliojuridica.org/libros/6/2713/48.pdf

[3] Empire & Revolution, John Hart, Univ. Press Group, (2006) ISBN 9780520246713


©Woodchip Gazette, 2011
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