JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

“But you can say one thing with confidence: a 14-month campaign that divides the country even more deeply, adds to uncertainty about long-term economic policy, fails to resolve anything but paralyses government in the meantime, all with the economy sliding back into recession, is not a good plan.”
Well put, Mr Crook.

You have precisely put your finger on the national political pulse and diagnosed why American politics are so inimical to good government.

It is actually bizarre in a nation with such a strongly defined sense of itself, that set patriotic feelings which have been very accurately described as the American Civic Religion, the people are so divided by what, in a longer term view, are trivia that they cannot pitch in to a national need and purpose so clear before them.

But it is nothing new. American killed people for ten years in Vietnam, squandered countless billions, and ended by dropping the convertibility of the dollar for what? A vicious domestic politics in which each side feared being “out-commied” by the other.
All that death and destruction dispensed to no point whatsoever since communism was always fated to wither through its internal inconsistencies.

Nations really do rise and fall in many instances owing to things which in hindsight seem immense stupidities, and America is certainly no exception.

The trouble is that the entire world must fear and be hurt by America’s crazy, meaningless politics because America has so thoroughly stuck its fingers into everyone else’s business.

There are many stories on the Internet, which if demonstrated true, may well end Perry’s campaign.

He is said to be a heavy user of prostitutes.

His wife was clearly not a happy camper in his last campaign for governor, going around with a rather frozen face and few words.

His religion is extreme and bizarre, a branch off the Pentecostals which the Pentecostals have called heresy.

And remember the American Pentecostals themselves are folks whose idea of religious inspiration is rolling around on the floor and yelling meaningless gibberish, a performance known as “speaking in tongues.”

Yes, America has a lot of Christian fundamentalists, but they are a minority, and the really bizarre ones are a still smaller minority.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES BY CLIVE CROOK

I’m not sure why these many people are rioting.

But I very much like the idea that Gaddafi apparently has recognized them as the legitimate government of Britain.

____________________

I think you are still too young, Clive Crook, to have an accurate perspective on this.

The truth is that we are just chimpanzees with big brains, the brains largely serving to expand our opportunities for mayhem.

Perhaps a tenth of humanity thinks and reacts as you do, as civilized and thoughtful and decent.

I wish it were a larger portion, but I know to a certainty it’s not.

If you think the London riots or people defecating in an alley are bad, try imagining what the people of Iraq have experienced in the last decade, their entire advanced Arab society set back for a generation and perhaps a million dead and no jobs or opportunity left.

Or what the people of Vietnam experienced in the 1960s and ’70s when the world’s most advanced nation spent countless billions bombing, napalming, and poisoning them, leaving their land a hideous mess for decades to come, and all for absolutely nothing but political superstition?

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

The Republican behavior has a long history.

Barry Goldwater, a decent though extreme politician, back in the early 1960s was fond of saying, “…extremism in defence of liberty is no vice…”

The “Tea Party,” really just a sub-caucus of the Republican Party, adhere to that kind of simplistic declaration of faith.

One senses in such adherence more than a tinge of another American social phenomenon, the notion of the endless possibilities of self-improvement held almost as a kind of intense faith in wish fulfillment.

If I want it to be so, and wish or pray for it hard enough, it will be so.

The outer limits of these attitudes are seen in the large groups of fundamentalists who periodically sell their homes and gather in some location, waiting for the Second Coming at a predicted date – something which has happened dozens of times.

Another reflection of the phenomenon was highly visible at the turn of the century. Huge numbers of otherwise seemingly reasonable Americans predicted social collapse and stocked freeze-dried food and ammunition.

We do have millions of American fundamentalists who support Israel out of some bizarre set of thoughts from the Book of Revelations that when certain events transpire in the Mideast, Christ will return. Thus they support Israel in a kind of nihilistic embrace of death.

I believe these extreme attitudes and views have a Puritan origin. They are in the genes, not learned.

That makes them pretty well unchangeable over any reasonable time horizon.

Whenever a bizarre subgroup has leverage over a political system, owing to that system’s inadequate institutions, we get paralysis.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Well said, Mr. Crook.

And I think this points to an underlying truth about the government of America.

If a man as intelligent, optimistic, and hard-working as Obama can get things so wrong, who possibly can get them right?

He is being torn apart in the world’s mightiest, most unforgiving force-field,a set of demands from scores of directions, many or most irrational and unforgiving.

America’s national politics have many similarities to being caught in the gravitational pull of a black hole.

The force cannot be resisted, and there is only one possible end to the event: the object caught will be reduced to its constituent atomic particles.
_________________
From another reader:

‘Another question: Is not “productivity” even more of an empty mantra than “competitiveness”?’

Empty mantra?

Productivity is a real and measurable quantity.

Unfortunately, in the popular mind, higher productivity means just something like just working harder, but that is not at all the case.

Take the example of two small farmers, one still using a hoe and spade and the other using a new small tractor.

No matter how hard the farmer with the hoe works, he can barely compete with the farmer who has a tractor. Indeed, the tractor makes such increases in productivity that its owner will be ready to buy more land since his tractor enables him to work more without a huge increase in time and other inputs. Or he may choose to do still other work with his tractor in his time freed up.

Productivity is the ratio of the amount of output (the product) to the amount of an input – often called a factor of production, as capital or labor, but most often measured in terms of labor. The ratio may be in terms of hours or dollars or still other measures.

It is possible to substitute up to a point more labor for capital goods like tractors if you have an economy with huge surpluses of underemployed labor, as has been the case of China or India, since hiring from this pool of labor does not raise costs.

Competitiveness is a nation’s (or a company’s, within a nation) ability to produce goods and services at lower cost, so long as that cost has adequate returns to the factors used in producing it.

The adequacy of the returns to factors of course varies from country to country and industry to industry: we know interest rates, the price of capital, and wages, the price of labor, vary.

The United States remains competitive in areas of high-technology and advanced services, but in all traditional industries it is pretty well uncompetitive.

Its car industry, for example, is just holding on through various artificial barriers and helps. Within a few years, China is going to come crashing into North America with quality products at lower cost.

We have already seen the results in recent decades: American real wages have dropped for decades.

But even in areas of high-technology and advanced services, countries like China and India are catching up. They invest in education and technology, and they appear to have natural intellectual gifts making them very comfortable with computers and engineering.

China today produces the world’s fastest super-computer and is entering areas like high-speed trains or advanced aeronautical products. India, with its language gift from the British Empire, is busy in areas like finance and banking and on-line computer services.

The world does not sit still. The rate of change in technology, which over the long term, drives economic growth, is on a steep rising curve, which means the rates of change we see will only continue to come faster and with greater impacts. America in no way possesses a unique grasp of technology or of the ability to adapt to its changes.

Indeed, it could well be argued that the ancient adaptations Asian people have made to group cooperation and civility are superior qualities for a rapidly changing world. Just so, their clear superior average endowment in mathematical ability – measured on many international tests – gives them a powerful underlying advantage.

America’s postwar period of easy superiority, a time when all serious competitors were prostrate, is now over – that is, the so-called American Dream, that glib, largely meaningless political slogan, is dead.

On top of those realities, America has so over-extended itself with debt and waste on war in every direction, there is a huge price to be paid before an equilibrium can be reached to even start new competitive efforts. Obama and other American leaders are not willing to say any of this.

It’s just more of the same-old, same-old blubbering and slogans, whether from Obama or the Tea Party.

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

“President Obama’s great promise has been utterly wasted in policy-setting.”

Absolutely, and I have to believe he represented the last great hope of changing America’s course, Mr. Murray.

The entire planet breathed a sigh when Bush left office and this bright, charming young man entered.

But I cannot think of one area now where Obama has not disappointed, often greatly disappointed.

It does really seem that elections do not matter in the United States.

The pointless Afghan War goes on and on.

America is killing hundreds of civilians in Pakistan.

Iraq remains the mess America has made of it, millions reduced to hopeless lives for a generation.

America’s client, Israel, continues its brutal, bloody policies, never once making a genuine effort at peace, never once even acknowledging the inhumanity of its actions.

Internally, American politics are the same dog-fight they ever were. The Culture of Complaint prevails in everything, the Tea Party being just the latest change of costume for the same old play. No sense is heard anywhere on the national scene, at least from anyone of influence or even potential influence.

Sinking into old age as I am, it is exceedingly melancholy to consider the way virtually nothing in America has changed for the better since I was an angry young man over the horrors of Vietnam. American political rhetoric remains as utterly meaningless as 45 years ago.

The slaughter of innocents continues all over the globe, indeed, now is becoming computerized so that buzz-cut young men in secret rooms can play games at computer consoles, pumping their fists after sending a Hellfire missile into a home full of people.

I think it likely the only force now which will precipitate real change in America is its relative decline in the world, an unavoidable reality, which will cause many changes in attitudes and beliefs as it truly takes hold.

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY KONRAD YAKABUSKI IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Competitiveness and innovation are never affected by government exhortations, nor indeed are they affected by any other exhortations, including those of business schools or “inspirational” speakers.

They come from the underlying real economic and financial conditions of a country and of the world in which it functions.

One can only look at the United States’ position in the world and offer a bitter smile at Obama’s empty words.

Debts of monumental proportions in every accounting from international balances to personal finance, idiotic pointless wars, and mindless military and security expenditures – all at the same time new competitors like China, India, Brazil, and even Russia grow to new strengths.

The United States is simply not competitive in so many areas of its economy. Nor is there any reason to believe that it can become so before undergoing a great deal of painful adjustment, the kind of adjustment its government works tirelessly to avoid.

Their government ignores reality because Americans are on average surely the world’s greatest whiny babies when it comes to painful adjustments.

It is their sense of boundless entitlement, fostered by countless dumb politicians blubbering in Fourth of July speeches about the American Dream and passing laws and budgets, year after year, which are completely irresponsible.

That is simply a one-way trip to nowhere, no matter how big your economy and how great some of its past performance.

But Americans are suckers for tent preachers, in everything from new product advertising to politics and self-help gurus helping themselves to people’s pocket books, and Obama is really starting to sound like one more of a tiresome breed.

The answer, of course, is for America to shut-up and roll its sleeves up – even then there are no guarantees of the same kind of future as it has enjoyed in the past – but you never fire America’s imagination by truth and reality.

Miracles, sermons, sugar plums, and fairy stories are always in demand.

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

“Mr Chuckman, why are Canadians are so obsessed with America and Americans, studying American history to glean anything and everything that can be used to bolster long formed opinions of ‘America the Evil’ then spewing it ad naseum. If only Canadians spent 1/10 as much time worrying about what’s wrong with Canada.”

Constance P, that is a truly fatuous comment, and I note that is in the very spirit of American politics being discussed.

Did your words possess any validity, there would be no reason to analyze or criticize anything.

I do not claim to be an expert on America, but it is a subject I know rather well, having been born and having spent close to half my life in the place.

In my effort to understand the world in which I live, America is a subject about which I have read a great many books, and I have written one and am in the process of writing a second.

I do think myself qualified to make comments on the subject, quite likely somewhat more than yourself.

At any rate, ad hominem argument – yours – has been recognized for centuries as invalid logic, indeed as no argument at all.

America’s people constitute about five percent of the world’s population, and its active voters a far smaller fraction, perhaps on the order of one percent.

So when America swings its economic and military weight around in world affairs, which it does certainly day and night, it is in effect acting as an aristocracy. After all, the Communist Party of China represents about the same fraction of the Chinese population, and it is in for constant carping and criticism, especially from America.

When a small group of people so affects the lives of others, I take it to be your view that those affected aren’t supposed to say anything.

A limited view, to say the least.

That last of yours is embarrassingly revealing. What do you know about Canada and Canadians to qualify you to make such a specific comment as you do?

Your saying that only reveals the same thinking pattern of which you accuse me.

I would roughly assay the quality of your comment as coming pretty close to twenty-four karat Sarah Palin.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

I’m not sure what else anyone could expect, Mr. Crook.

The cast of characters on the national political scene, especially those on the right, makes mighty poor material out of which to shape a civil political life.

Winning is everything, sophomoric arguments are common, and insults are basic building blocks of American politics, not to mention election fraud.

This political phenomenon is not new to America.

Perhaps many abroad have no real feeling for the history of America’s national politics.

Abraham Lincoln, now the nation’s most beloved president, was commonly called an “obscene ape” during his campaigning. Grotesque cartoons and vicious commentary played regularly on the theme.

There was an undercurrent in all that hatred of Lincoln’s having been believed to be an abolitionist. He most decidedly was not, but that mere fact didn’t stop the hate and excess of opponents just as facts do not stop the hate and excess of today.

Hatred was so intense, Lincoln went to Washington for his inauguration hiding his identity.

Andrew Jackson, as near a mad president as ever there was, fought duels, horse-whipped one politician, and threatened anyone who said anything he regarded as an insult.

Thomas Jefferson had a full-time paid hack to dig up dirt on his opponents, including the man he worked for as Secretary of State, George Washington. When the hack didn’t feel fairly treated by Jefferson, he sold his services to others, disseminating such dark facts he had discovered as Jefferson’s liaison with a teen-age slave girl, Sally Hemmings.

Look at the way the opposition treated Senator McGovern’s running mate, Senator Eggleton, a thoroughly decent man who had experienced some depression. Look at the way nasty graffiti artists treated Senator Muskie during his campaign, reducing him to public tears. Look at the words of Tom Delay – now a convicted felon – about Bill Clinton’s big trip to Africa, words dripping with hate and racism.

There are countless examples of this political insanity in America just during my lifetime. There was the idiot Republican Senator who accused the Clinton administration of running a concentration camp after the poor Cuban boy, Elian, was taken from his kidnappers and sent to a quiet place of refuge following months of being held to ransom and hearing his loving father regularly insulted by shouting voices.

And this stuff is not without real consequences, sometimes far greater than the recent shooting in Arizona. Richard Nixon made a career early on of defaming his opponents – his early election to Congress featured insults and lies toward the woman against whom he ran. Nixon accused her of being “pink down to her underwear.” His reputation as a gutter fighter was so established that President Johnson, in sending the beginnings of an army to Vietnam, was known to be motivated by political fear of being castigated for “losing Vietnam” the way “China was lost.”

The late Governor George Wallace and serious presidential candidate had a famous quote justifying his extreme actions towards desegregation: he famously said he would never be “outniggered” again after losing in an early political fight owing to his then moderation.

America is simply too young a society to have developed genuinely civilized political customs, and there is a raw quality to it that almost encourages the kind of behavior of a Sarah Palin having a cross-hair sight over a politician’s face on her web site.

The effects of this rawness are reinforced by America’s wealth because wealth enables people to publish and disseminate filth and stupidity in vast quantities. They are also reinforced by the totally dominant ethos of, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”

I see little hope for any change, except after the passage of a century or so.

America’s now-certain relative decline in the world should help a bit along the way: nothing is unhealthier for manic behavior than quasi-religious faith in being number one.

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

You have put many of the relevant points very well, Clive Crook, and I think this an inevitable development.

America’s sweeping power and matchless affluence after WWII were temporary phenomena, the result all the world’s major competitors being flattened by war and America’s industries having just reached remarkable levels of output as the armory of democracy.

But all those competitors – Germany, Britain, Italy, and Japan – are today back and thriving.

Not only are they thriving but new remarkable competitors have emerged, especially China. And now we even have countries like Brazil and Russia starting to emerge.

Trade and economics are of course not zero-sum games, but competition always means there are relative winners and losers.

Americans, even the most humble of them, over the last half century have formed an iron-clad sense of entitlement. Their leaders have only force-fed them in this with jingo nonsense like “the American dream,” and the new (new in the postwar period) phenomena of mass marketing and advertising with new penetrating media have only further fed this fantasy belief.

Americans’ naïve religious propensity, the inheritance of Puritan genes, makes many of them extremely gullible to such nonsense as being special.

This entire set of beliefs and expectations works strongly against American competitiveness, and America simply is not competitive in many areas. It is living off its accumulated fat, as it were, in many respects.

Real wages for the middle class have done nothing but fall for decades. Americans have adjusted by such efforts as two spouses working and moving out to elephantine houses thrown-up on the deserts and in the cornfields. Both these strategies have pretty well been exhausted.

I would add, too, the important factor that American education has, on average, become inflated and lost a good deal of value. High graduation is practically guaranteed even for someone who barely reads.

Undergraduate degrees have suffered exactly the same decay in value. You can get an English degree in America without ever reading Shakespeare. You can get a degree in television studies or circus. You can get a degree just by playing basketball.

What these educational trends represent is the consumer portion of education taking over to a considerable extent from the human investment portion of education, a reflection surely of the postwar feelings of American entitlement, as in “my kids goin’ to college” even if the kid involved has no academic talent. Such education makes you competitive with precisely no one and only wastes resources in a form of consumption.

Another absolutely crucial area contributing to America’s decline is its long series of pointless, costly wars. Nothing is more wasteful than the military, but America’s sense of entitlement has fooled it into believing it can manipulate the world to its narrow interests and quite frankly uninformed prejudices.

America’s titanic investments in the pointless slaughters in Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and in many lesser efforts has been as unproductive as its decayed system of education.

You can’t keep doing stupid things – all the while pressuring everyone else to pretend that they are not stupid – forever, and I genuinely believe America has reached the limits. Our greatest future danger is America’s not recognizing these truths and adjusting appropriately, instead taking the John Wayne approach to the new world emerging, especially towards China.

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

“With time, society changes, and the gap between justices who believe in fidelity to the original document and those who believe in a “living constitution”–equally defensible positions, regardless of one’s politics–gets wider.”

 That is absolutely true, with the exception that “fidelity to the original” can be called an equally defensible position.

Not in rational terms. It cannot be.

The Judge Bork view of things is exactly comparable to the Fundamentalist Christians who believe the earth and all it contains was created at one stroke about 6000 years ago.

The world now changes rapidly, and the rate of change only grows more rapid with changing technology. All forms and practices of government must change in response, not necessarily promptly but regularly.

Also, the simple fact is that the American Constitution was a document of compromise, and some of the compromises were with forces we now find utterly unacceptable, as for example, with the very real political power of slaveholders.

Even further still, the Constitution has many flaws. The Fathers were not all-seeing and, indeed, were downright wrong in some important matters. Some of the things they thought they were doing ended up with the opposite effect to what they intended.

Perhaps the greatest single example of that was the division of war-making authorities, the President as Commander-in-Chief and only the Congress as able to declare war.

Of course, in the modern era, none of America’s many wars are declared, so Congress’s power is vestigial.

And when the Founders made the President Commander-in Chief, Americans largely believed in no standing armies, so his power was only potential for a situation Congress first decided military response as appropriate.

But today, his power is immense and dangerous because of America’s Frankenstein military. He is Commander-in-Chief of a thing greater than all the world’s armies combined.

In a very real sense, this immense contemporary power violates the fundamental ideas of the Founders because the President’s office was deliberately designed to be weak, which indeed it still is in domestic affairs. 

But the Bork view very much fits the military-industrial complex America has become. Empires and militarism are quite comfortable with sticking with ways which facilitated their rise.

The great irony is that the sentimental sense of America which is so often cited by Bork-types in fact no longer exists, and, to a considerable extent, never did.  

America is barely a democracy at home and literally behaves the part of a tyranny abroad often.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Wendell Murray is right: there is a huge capacity in America for increasing taxes.

It has been a race to the bottom for years in cutting taxes. From old man Reagan to lunatic Bush, there has been no limit to cutting the sources of nourishment for society’s bones and sinews, the infrastructure of government.

On top of that insanity, there has been the imposition of wars and increased military budgets – to the point, by the way, where the U.S. now spends more than the entire rest of the planet on the means of destruction – with no responsible method of accounting for their payment.

I believe Americans will not accept the kind of taxation required. Their sense of entitlement and the “I want it now, and I want it all,” syndrome are still throbbing away, much resembling teenagers with crushes, despite the economic crisis.

Obama has backed off one issue after another in response to less-than-rational pressure, and I cannot see him being tough in this matter. The truth is Americans do not want a tough president, unless by “tough” you are talking about bombing foeigners somewhere.

He sounded good on the Middle East in the beginning, looking for a genuine peace, and now I’m not sure I can tell him from George Bush, but then the mid-term Congressional elections would be sorely affected by a loss of contributions from the apologists for Israel.

He sounded good about war in the beginning, although his main stress was only the suggestive fact that he did not vote for the atrocity in Iraq, but still he runs two wars, and he has lowered himself into the ethical hell with his horrible drone attacks on Pakistan, killing many civilians and de-stabilizing that society.

He has responded in an almost ridiculous fashion to the whining complaints about the BP blow-out. I say “whining” because it is Americans themselves who insist on consuming as much gasoline as they possibly can, driving lumbering pick-up trucks and buying homes with three-car garages.

The attacks on BP are, so far as I can tell, unwarranted. Was BP indeed doing anything different to the many other operators in the Gulf? If not, then the blow-out is just bad luck, one of those one-in-a-thousand possibilities inherent in any risky business, which is certainly the nature of drilling for oil more than a mile beneath the sea.

And the attacks on Obama are unwarranted. This was not a case of a cabinet-level official totally failing to do his job, and a president just blithely going about things as usual while a city sinks and a thousand people die.

But Obama, again with mid-term elections ahead, has responded as though these attacks were warranted. His heavy-handed treatment of BP has been inappropriate and hostile to a major company from a friendly nation.

No, I don’t expect much from Obama, and that is part of the reason I expect America is headed for a dark chapter, a serious decline, dragging the rest of us with it. This is a people who appear from countless examples in their history to learn only by banging their heads into walls.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Clive Crook has some astute observations here.

The trouble, however, with all reasonable suggestions for the future improvement of America’s position, such as value-added tax, is that American voters are in large part simply not reasonable.

I believe it truly is the heart of the matter that Americans have an ongoing sense of entitlement like nothing found anywhere else. It is captured in that warped political expression “the American Dream,” a slogan still mouthed by the pathetic workers losing their jobs, and their homes, likely permanently.

America can’t pay for what it imports and expects others to forever hold its debt. It can’t pay for its extreme actions abroad but expects others to help bear the load. And the average American makes no effort to alter the most lunatic expectations, the kind of attitude that created the financial crash.

America is wasting immense amounts on two wars and countless interventions, yet it remains insanely stubborn over the taxes needed to support such excess and ignorant concerning the lack of any economic benefit for the average citizen in these colossal expenditures.

Few people comment on another trend underway, and that is the rise of China (and a couple of other potentially great competitors). The competition China offers is necessarily killing American jobs: you might call it “creative destruction” on an international scale.

Instead of focusing on measures needed to compete in an ever more competitive world, American administrations just repeat economic illiteracies and berate the Chinese for being successful. And they continue to spend like drunken sailors on military waste. And they continue to believe that somehow it is entitled always to end up in first place.

It is not, of course.

I think the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, as others have said, may be seen as something of an allegory for America’s problems. BP, unbelievably, was permitted to drill by American regulatory agencies without having taken basic, needed preparations. Blind stupidity based on the slogan that America needs oil – and it does, so long as the endless march of new three-car garages, beached-whale-sized new houses, meaningless urban sprawl, lumbering vehicles continues – threw sensible regulation overboard. Ironically, this disaster, its magnitude still not widely appreciated, has pretty well destroyed the political possibilities of further offshore drilling as supported by Bush and Obama.

America’s mythology about itself has rendered it literally incapable of governing itself rationally, and I believe, sadly, nothing we can say will turn that stumbling, blind colossus towards enlightenment. We will all pay a price for its stumbling and falling.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Many of the criticisms here are true, especially those about costs.

But since when in America is it possible to legislate a neat, rational, economical, sensible bill about anything?

That’s not just a sarcasm.

American legislation is often so convoluted, so fraught with nonsense, that it in practice it achieves the opposite of its title.

That’s just a reality of government in America.

The one real merit of this legislation is that the door is finally thrown open to some extent on healthcare.

And that’s no small thing.

With time, the legislation will be refined, improved, and perhaps changed significantly.

The real truth is that America – with its opinionated extremes, its ideologies, and its sheer volume of noise – learns often only by banging its head against walls.

We have seen that time and time again.

Turning America in anything is like turning a super-oil tanker in a tight channel, and too often there is a drunk at the helm.

America is a chaotic society, yet pretends to be well organized, and it is overflowing with posing and melodrama.

It is, as Robert Hughes said, a culture of complaint.

________________

“…it is opposed by most of the country; and it is now law. I would never have believed this possible in the United States.”

Clive Crook, that statement by someone as well-informed as you astounds me.

A great many major votes in Congress do not reflect general public opinion in America. Check out public opinion on subjects like gun control, abortion, and some of America’s wars.

The truth is that a great many Americans do not vote, so while their views are reflected in a valid poll, they have no political influence.

Also, Congress blurs many issues with immensely complex omnibus bills, making it difficult to sort out votes.

And since representation is what economists call “bundled,” voters will forget or forgive an unwelcome vote on some issues so long as they get what they want on others.

In a political duopoly, no voter gets the policies he or wants without lots of extra baggage from either party.

Finally, there has been an immense amount of misinformation, genuinely stupid stuff like the rubbish about death panels put forward by genuine airheads like Sarah Palin.

Once voters see that such misinformation is what it is, views will alter. There will undoubtedly be a big educational drive too.

I would have much preferred another approach – this one has many shortcomings – but it is step forward, and it will make it easier to make refinements in future.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

“Barack Obama is a puzzle.”

Yes, indeed, and I think you’ve described it well.

“His ambitions are genuinely progressive; his temperament is genuinely open-minded. It is a rare and confusing combination, and it explains a great deal.”

Yes, again, but I think there’s more to the mystery than that.

Pragmatism is of course a philosophy claimed by many Americans, even before it was explicated by William James.

But ideology has also always been a feature of American society, often extreme ideology and often colored with religious or quasi-religious beliefs.

That too shouldn’t sit well with pragmatism, but apparently it does.

I put it down to two things in the end.

One is what the fine American historian Page Smith called – misusing a word by standards of our modern understanding – America’s “schizophrenia.”

There are countless examples of this dating back to the Founding Fathers blubbering about freedom while trading in slaves, what the great Dr Johnson called “drivers of negroes” talking about freedom.

Jefferson, that greatest of blubberers on freedom, supported the tyrant Napoleon trying to recapture Haiti, as well acting in a great many other anti-freedom loving ways.

Lincoln started a great bloody war rather than tolerate the South’s right to self-determination. Lincoln may be viewed actually as the founder of the military-industrial complex with his mighty armies and ironclads. Yet Americans think of him as Father Abraham, an epithet having almost nothing to do with Lincoln’s actual character and behavior.

Look at the America of the last half century. It has started numerous bloody wars, killing millions for almost nothing, and coups, yet it insists on using the language of peace and liberty and principles. It just does not compute.

The one national drive that dominates American history is the drive to empire, to expand and to run the lives of others. Naturally, this drive is not contained in the anthems and speeches, but it is always there, subordinating everything else.

So a kind of “schizophrenic” thinking just comes second-nature. Being part of the fabric of the society, it influences thinking in all matters, domestic as well as foreign.

You cannot spend the best part of a trillion dollars a year on the Pentagon and at least fourteen intelligence agencies and pretend there is some unique freedom in America. That is absurd, yet most Americans desperately believe the absurdity.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

One of the key facts in understanding American health care and the lack of support for serious reform is not widely understood outside of the United States.

That fact is that under the existing regime, the comfortable middle class almost universally receives very good health care.

Those who work at good corporate or government jobs receive good to superb insurance as a benefit.

This fact effectively removes society’s most vocal and politically influential group of people from the debate. In fact, it actually puts them on the side against any change: “I’ve got mine, and I don’t want it mucked up,” is genuine if unspoken thinking.

The people who suffer most are the underemployed or those consigned to lives with low-level jobs – the great majority of clerks and retail employees and people who work at service work of many descriptions. They receive either no insurance or, often, insurance which is so poor in its coverage and rules that it can be close to useless. In effect, they are hard-working people who cannot afford to buy costly private insurance and have little prospect for a change in their circumstances over their lifetimes.

Of course, there are also the tens of millions who go entirely uninsured, but many of these are young and in a sense their plight isn’t as serious as the underinsured.

So the total American population is highly segmented, as it were, into groups whose political importance also varies greatly. The politically important ones are pretty satisfied with their health care. The politically less important are generally not but tend to be inert.

When politicians are doing their electioneering (even outside of health care), middle class people are pretty consistently their target of first importance. They have the money, they have the voices, and they are statistically the most likely to vote. It’s fundamental part of “the calculus of consent.”

General ethical appeals have limited claim on many of them. America is not run as a society in which ethics, apart from self-interest, play a great role in politics. This is easily observed in many phenomena, but the words used by politicians and political commentators are especially revealing in this regard. People aren’t addressed as citizens or fellows but typically as consumers in America. There is a palpable theme of Social Darwinism that surges through most public affairs.

And, of course, as de Tocqueville observed a long time ago, “I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.” That characterizes every national election still, and Obama’s was no exception.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

I too have read a number of Galbraith’s books, and there is no doubt that he is an interesting writer, and while I disagree with a good deal of his thought, I welcome the thoughtful views of those who go against the academic establishment.

I have also met Galbraith, briefly, and heard him lecture, and there is equally no doubt that he was one of the most arrogant people I have ever met. He literally dripped arrogance. Not a pleasant experience.

Further thought.

It is not widely appreciated that Galbraith came from rural Ontario. His first academic work was at what was then called the Ontario Agricultural College (since changed into the University of Guelph).

I’ve always thought, in view of Harvard and the top Washington establishment, that he hid his embarrassment at that humble beginning with practiced arrogance.

Perhaps.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMESYes, exactly.

Whether in war or foreign affairs or economics or trade, the basic problem is the American attitude of “I want it all, and I want it now.”

Another word for this is entitlement.

I think there really is no cure for this sickness, just as it is virtually impossible to undo the damage to a person raised by parents who behaved as though they were his servants.

The only time we saw some deviation from this obsession was in the Great Depression, a learning experience comparable to repeatedly hitting one’s head into a wall.

But, as we’ve seen, even depressions have been banned in America now. You can buy your way out, and go back to just what you were doing.

____________________

Yes, Wendell Murray, the American military expenditure is actually cancer-like in its growth, and only recently we were assured by the good Mr. Gates that there would be still more coming.

American politicians today sometimes harangue about China’s military expenditure, which at somewhere between 10 and 15% that of America’s (with four times the population), seems almost miniscule.

There is no rational explanation for this.

Consider the countless billions squandered in Vietnam – inflate it to present dollars and the sum is immense – and to what end?

Trillions were spent on the Cold War, almost all of it wasted. The Soviet Union finally collapsed based on the flaws in economics and logic embedded in its very foundation and structure, not owing to America’s military might.

I think the practice reflects a combination of the American entitlement syndrome (we are entitled to make all others fear our might) and the Moby Dick obsession with chasing the white whale.

There always seems to be a white whale for America.

Spain’s remaining North American Empire of the 1890s, Communism for decades going back to the 1920s (when Hoover first showed his obsession with getting rid of anyone who could be regarded as a Communist), to Islam in recent times.

Does that reflect a basic paranoid trait in a good portion of the population, the legacy of the horrible Puritans? I’ve long thought so. I think Australia was lucky to get the convicts rather than the Pilgrims.

I do believe the world needs seriously to start re-thinking the role of the American dollar as reserve currency in light of the county’s proved record of irresponsibility. That role for the currency leaves Americans with an option no one else has in paying for its lack of control. Look what it did after Vietnam.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

“Republicans, who see themselves as his mortal enemies, with their only goal as that of destroying his presidency and putting what President Eisenhower presciently called the “military-industrial complex” fifty years ago back in total control of this country, as was the case under Bush.”

A perfect example of delusional American thinking.

Under Obama, the evidence couldn’t be clearer that the military-industrial complex is still running things as it has for the last half century. Power that great and concentrated does not ever fade away, and the vast contracts being spewed out in America since 9/11 have fed the voracious beast.

Troops are still in Iraq.

A great many more troops are going to Afghanistan.

American missiles regularly kill villagers in Pakistan.

Far, far more civilians than “bad guys.”

And the same is true in Afghanistan, families are regularly killed by American air attacks.

And now Yemen is threatened, and it has been bombed.

And just today we have the news from General Petraeus that America has contingency plans to bomb Iran.

Guantanamo is still not closed.

Even worse, dark holes like Bagram Air Base in Iraq and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean have who-knows-what going on, certainly involving large numbers of extra-legal prisoners.

Israel ignores Obama’s reasonable words. It continues with its relentless seige of a million and half refugees, and it continues to use cheap tricks daily to steal homes in Jerusalem.

All the silly “Detroit bomb” incident did was renew fears of people who do not think clearly and effectively instantly produce vast world-wide set of orders for an American company’s expensive body scanners, a business bonanza.

By the way, carefully conducted tests of the scanners in Canada shows them failing 70% of the time, but we will all be forced to buy them.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

I don’t know why you would quote anyone from Cato Institute.

Cato is a propaganda mill much like the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, or the Hoover Institution.

While designed to superficially resemble an academic institution, only one kind of viewpoint ever comes from Cato, as well as the other places.

They are financed by some of the most right-wing corporations and individuals in America.

And they serve to provide sinecures to retired professors or government officials who can contribute significantly to what are essentially boiler room operations.

Opinion on demand is provided on almost any issue of concern to America’s Right Wing.

Finally, the Constitution is used by every group wishing to stop progress in America.

It is itself a largely outdated document, full of concepts which have proved mistaken over time.

Any student of American history knows full well it has been ignored countless times when that was convenient for the establishment.

Indeed, for years, the very concept of the Bill of Rights was unenforceable because it was felt by people like Jefferson that a federal court could not pass judgment on state activities.

Still, the Court is a weak institution on the whole, generally not daring to go beyond the most timid interpretations.

Nations are, like all of nature, ever-evolving things. To remain rigidly married to words set down by a few rather provincial men two and a quarter centuries ago much resembles Catholic Church doctors arguing over nonsense.

Indeed, words themselves are constantly evolving in their meaning, something we experience keenly over the last half century and something which will only speed up in future.

Sticking to certain meanings of certain words in a certain document is a perfect formula for little social progress.

Indeed, the establishment uses the Constitution for exactly that purpose.

Genuine freedoms and important institutions only survive over the long term because of general good will and consent in any society, not because of a piece of parchment.

________________________

algasema,

“Left wing rants” is a genuinely pejorative phrase. It is also inaccurate.

I am a classically-trained economist, rather traditional in his views, in my retirement also a teacher of micro-economics of which Milton Friedman would approve.

However, when it comes to the defense of human freedom and decency or attacking arrogance and pomposity, I like to think of people like Samuel Johnson or Graham Greene or George Orwell or Jonathon Swift (‘A Modest Proposal’). To my mind, there is no room for compromise in such matters: they are not simplistic matters of left- or right-wing, except to simplistic people or ideologues at places like the American Enterprise Institute.

What I write is well-written (I am a published author, former corporate chief economist and speechwriter, and once had a weekly metropolitan newspaper column), well-informed, but it is highly critical in defense of human rights, democratic values, and decency.

Calling my comments “rants” is the typical response of someone who does not have the same commitment to these values. It is a noun used a few times towards me by apologists for America’s murderous post-WWII rampage in the world or Israel’s ghastly record of abuse and brutality.

I suspect my views on both of these contemporary barbarisms click a switch somewhere back in your consciousness.

Of course, such descriptions as yours are used in an effort to reduce the person with whom you disagree, an old and genuinely puerile (since you love Latinisms) technique, one shared I am sorry to point out by those of a quietly tyrannical temperament everywhere and always.

I do take credit or blame for everything I write, hardly a shabby quality.

I do not rant, but you, my anonymous name-caller, do expose what I can only call a rather afraid-of-your-own-shadow quality.

That’s surely what you are doing by prefacing comments, somewhat in agreement, with name-calling.

It also is obvious in those countless typo-corrections of yours: they remind me of the nervous schoolboy looking down at his new wing-tip shoes to see if they are adequately shined, a young, desperate-to-please Richard Nixon with a sad smile and beads of sweat on his brow.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Sorry, this article is delusional.

Remodeling America is an imaginary concept.

Despite changes over the last two centuries such as universal franchise, America manages a great deal to be what it was two centuries ago.

An aristocracy of wealth and influence, where only a small number of people’s views genuinely count and one bent on imperial expansion.

The entire political system is stacked against serious change.

Congress is the best money can buy, and that goes for both parties.

The two parties are an opportunistic duopoly representing almost no principles at all.

The Washington establishment of the Pentagon/CIA/NIA/FBI actually form an unelected continuing government behind the elected government.

The last president who tried challenging that unelected government died in Dallas November 22, 1963.

Obama is personally an enlightened man of considerable depths, but he is ambitious to be and remain president. That wish is virtually incompatible with “remolding America.”

American exceptionalism is now everywhere and always the rule, whether it is making a war crime/ invasion into legitimate foreign policy or the Secretary of State putting pressure on Italy over a woman, one from a well-off family, fairly convicted of murder.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Nothing is at stake in Afghanistan.

That is, except for American pride in once more having invaded a country, killed a great many people and achieved nothing.

America didn’t know what it was doing from the beginning, and it still does not know.

But it sure knows how to kill people, and the American establishment is always ready to do more killing and bombing rather than be embarrassed at its own foolishness.

It chewed up human beings in Vietnam for ten years to no purpose whatsoever beyond regard for its own violent and stupid pride.

No one else regards Afghanistan as a serious threat, else why are NATO countries constantly browbeaten by American officials into making larger commitments?

The facts of Afghanistan are rather simple if you open your mind to them.

It is not a democracy – never was and still is not – and you can never create a democracy at the barrel of a gun. Moreover, America’s own problematic claim to genuine democratic government makes it among the least suitable of instructors.

Afghanistan is one of the poorest regions on earth, affording only a hard-scrabble existence to most of its people – it always has been poor and it remains so. America has done almost nothing to turn around its economy for a brighter future, but it sure has killed a lot of people and created a lot of damage.

Like all poor, backward countries, Afghanistan remains prisoner of ancient customs not understood by modern societies, and nothing, except long-term serious economic growth, America can do will change that.

Consider even a healthily growing third-world country like India. It still has bride burning, forced marriage, and horrid treatment of widows, plus many other ghastly ancient customs it will not shake until after generations of growth.

Imagine going to 17th century Spain and telling the people they must give up the Holy Inquisition, Jews and Arabs must be tolerated as full members of society, and nuns must stop wearing hideous gigantic habits? To pose the question is to know the answer.

How much more so Afghanistan?

The warlords that now are deemed the government of Afghanistan are, most of them, no better than the Taleban in terms of modern values. Horrible acts continue all over the country, and the burka is still worn in most of the country. Some, like General Dostum, are nothing but mass murders.

Rape of boys is common everywhere, often done by translators and other helpers of Americans right in front of the eyes of troops. The Americans and others tolerate these hideous acts, for the sake of keeping allies and helpers, acts which would earn their perpetrators long prison sentences and public hatred anywhere in the West.

Alliance with those warlords is the only thing that allowed America its cheap “victory.” Cheap in American blood, that is, not Afghan blood.

The Taleban never was America’s enemy, the perpetrators of 9/11 were mostly Saudis, and they were mostly in America on legitimate visas, being part of a secret CIA training scheme that backfired badly.

Most of the terrorist incidents since the invasions – like the London underground bombing – are just the work of homegrown men angry and frustrated at the injustice of what has happened, at the tens of thousands of their fellow Muslims killed with no thought or care.

The CIA never took any responsibility for 9/11. America never took any responsibility. But Afghanistan was invaded – according to experts, just the deaths in Kabul from bombing were at least 50,000 – and the Taleban was dispersed. Some achievement.

Now America bombs and kills regularly in Pakistan, claiming, just as it claimed about Cambodia during its bloodbath in Vietnam. People under no charges are regularly assassinated along with any family members and bystanders, a la Israel’s regular extra-judicial killings, activity indistinguishable from that of former South America juntas who regularly made people “disappear.”

America is only making enemies and de-stabilizing still another land.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMESI stopped watching Frontline years ago.

There were too many tame programs with no real analysis, the documentary content-equivalent of PBS’s nature specials, as that on apes narrated by Charlie Sheen.

And, several times, more hard-hitting items were removed from their schedule. Shameful.

Since the rise of Newt Gingrich, PBS executives started wetting their pants and reducing the network to fluff. Their anchor news show, the News Hour, was reduced to arguments between political party chairmen saying nothing and tame news coverage.

However the scene you describe, Clive, is strong stuff, and should tell Americans something, but there are none so blind….

Of course, there is the reason why there can be no victory in Afghanistan.

I’m not even sure what the Military-Industrial bureaucrats mean by “victory.” Afghanistan reduced to an Illinois suburb with shopping centers and SUVs in the driveways of homes?

The U.S. went there for vengeance, and that is what it got. It killed tens of thousands, including an estimated 50,000 just in Kabul.

It did this with horrible weapons and carpet bombing, and to minimize American casualties on the ground, it let the nasty people in the Northern Alliance do most of the legwork. It also participated in horrible war crimes against Taleban prisoners, as the 3,000 who disappeared, buried in the desert after having been suffocated in vans, a la early Nazi experiments with mass killings.

Once the U.S. had a technical victory – actually nothing but dispersing the Taleban to the hills – it did not know what to do, and it still does not.

Its troops have used brutal techniques – never likely to be shown on Frontline or any other American television. Years of special forces thugs going from village to village, knocking down doors, holding guns on families, and taking away men from households.

And every time it calls an air strike, civilians die.

Now it is spreading its horror into Pakistan, having quietly intimidated the Pakistan government into cooperating in matters that are not really their interests.

I, of course, recall that wonderful achievement of America’s during its pointless holocaust in Vietnam of de-stabilizing the neutral government of Cambodia and helping pave the way for the “killing fields” which it did absolutely nothing to stop.

Indeed, when the brave Vietnamese went in and stopped the horror, American bureaucrats stood, arms folded, saying I told you so, it’s the domino theory at work.

Colonial wars are not legitimate “policy” in the 21st century, and, as good students of history know, wars generally solve nothing.

The great irony is that the Taleban never attacked anyone, had nothing to do with 9/11, yet the U.S. has made them into an enemy.

They are, of course, a major part of the population of Afghanistan, an absurdly poor and backward place, while the U.S. military with all their shiny G.I Joe equipment are occupiers. No one likes occupiers ever, except those who profit by trading with them, as the prostitutes of Paris in 1941.

Afghanistan is a hopeless disaster of America’s own making, and the soldier you describe, Clive, is a perfect symbol of the hopelessness of the entire crusade.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Yes, sadly, it is Obama’s war now.

But Obama chose to be President of a country that his keen intelligence had to know is addicted to war.

The Puritan genes – with their bizarre gift of making recipients always seeking for the evil one and ready to damn what are considered the enemies of God and tons of smug self-satisfaction – absolutely dominate modern America’s identity.

The trouble with the modern version of God’s New Model Army is that it is a world-straddling monster with the power to destroy the earth or, alternately, to assassinate someone on the other side of the planet by a bureacrat playing at a joystick.

And it is backed up by an intelligence house of horrors – at least a dozen agencies, some secret, and all receiving more money than they know what to do with.

There are few statements ever made that belong in my personal secular bible, but one is Lord Acton’s dictum.

Who is able to resist the lures of such hellish power? Who is able to stand against it?

Obama is a fine human being with virtually all the talents of a great leader.

But he is surrounded, even at the mercy of, individuals who subscribe to the thoughts of Milton’s Satan, it is better to be a prince in hell than serve in heaven.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Obama’s speech was an extraordinarily sensitive one. Americans and others are used to hearing only clap-trap on this topic.

He actually said something, and what he said is correct.

But I have to say where is any evidence that sensitivity or truth carry any weight in American politics? And that is especially true in all matters touching on the Middle East.

America’s Right Wing has already attacked Obama’s words, as has the mob of professional apologists for Israel’s bloody excesses.

But even the great mass of Americans who take little interest in world affairs and know only the mantra lines the mainline press repeats endlessly.

Doing anything that at all conflicts with those lines earns you some hard looks.

Israel’s supporters in America will use this to their benefit to prevent a genuine settlement in the Middle East, something we have every reason to believe Israel does not want.

After all, the constant, go-nowhere “peace process” serves simply to gain the decades of time for much of the rest of Palestine to be absorbed without its unwanted residents, for D-9 bulldozers to continue flattening homes and olive groves centuries old on the most specious of excuses.

Israel just ignores all agreements and documentation going into its modern re-creation from the Sykes-Picot Agreement to the Balfour Declaration and the UN maps for partition. All of them saw two states, somewhat equal in extent.

Ignored too are the UN Resolutions concerning the aftermath of the Six Day War.

Indeed, there is every reason to believe Israel engineered the Six Day War knowing full well it could handily win and make a great new land grab. We have the testimony of important historical figures on this matter, including President de Gaulle.

It was the same kind of dark-ops project as so many others, including the vicious attack on the USS Liberty in an effort to drag the U.S. into that war. The U.S. kept a massive silence over the attack on one of its ships, allowing the feeble excuse of a mistake to stand, a ridiculous claim in view of the facts the ship was extremely well marked and the attack lasted two hours.

Just as Israel’s illicit nuclear arsenal is ignored regularly in all the noise about North Korea or Iran. Ignored too was Israel’s help in proliferation by helping apartheid South Africa to briefly become a nuclear power.

The most damaging spy in American history, Jonathon Pollard, remains in prison, but there is a constant flow of intense pressure to release him.

Israeli spies were on to the perpetrators of 9/11, but the several spy groups – a phony moving company and a bunch of “art students” – were arrested afterward and sent home with no public statements about what it was that they had been doing.

If all these many events have not altered American public opinion and Israel’s place of unwarranted privilege in Washington, how will Obama ever succeeed?

I find it difficult to believe that Obama can turn around the momentum that has continued decade after decade, a momentum of slow-motion ethnic-cleansing in Palestine and America’s subsidizing the state doing it.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

“First of all, we need to know a lot more about each individual still being held in Guantanamo…”

That’s rather cowardly, to say the least.

We know more than enough.

These men were arrested and sent to Guantanamo against all international law.

They have been abused and tortured for years, again against all international law.

For years, they were allowed no lawyers, no visitors, and even the Red Cross was not allowed to visit.

The US has not only ignored international law and obligations, it ignores its own principles.

You cannot have a Bill of Rights worth spit if its provisions are completely ignored as soon as you put a toe over the border.

The very existence of this concentration camp – for that is precisely what it is – is an affront to people who love freedom and decency.

It is also the final proof of George Bush’s complete incompetence: he foresaw none of the consequences of creating this horror.

______________________

The case of Omar Khadr is the one I am thoroughly familiar with.

He has suffered, at the hands of American soldiers, beyond the understanding of most.

He was a mere boy, pushed by ideological parents, when he went to Afghanistan.

At the age of 15, he was shot twice, in the back, by cowardly American soldiers.

Then he was arrested and imprisoned in violation of all international conventions about child soldiers.

He was charged with a crime over something that is not even a crime in war, that is shooting one of your opponents.

But as we know now, he didn’t even do that. It has all been trumped up.

Khadr was tortured for years, again against international conventions. This included a particularly vicious American interrogator, well known for his brutality, having the boy with two horrible wounds trying to heal sit up regularly in uncomfortable positions, pulling at his wounds.

Khadr was held with no access or help for years.

I recall in many, many wars abroad having nothing to do with the US – civil wars and revolutions and colonial wars from Spain to the Congo – American soldiers of fortune and motivated idealists going off by the thousands to fight for one side or the other.

They weren’t subjected to this Nazi-like treatment afterward. This is a total disgrace on the part of the United States.

And our Prime Minister’s cowardly refusal to stand up for a citizen and an abused boy is also disgraceful, but he unfortunately reflects American sensibilities. To have asked for this boy, in view of a family history which includes a dead father who knew Osama bin Laden, would have been viewed as an unfriendly act by an insanely mad American government.

And we have the horrible irony that some of the images from that other ghastly place, Abu Ghraib, now being held back include images of American guards Sodomizing young prisoner boys. Our great investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh, has told us this over and over, but America pays little attention.