John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY BOB WOODWARD IN RINF

 

Bob Woodward is not speaking for the larger interests.

He never has. He demonstrated that during the horrible Bush administration when he slithered around on his belly, flattering and giving favorable publicity to George Bush, the most incompetent and destructive president in memory.

America’s recent Supreme Court has been a disaster.

Money is free speech? That’s what it ruled, and the results are disastrous.

That view does not earn you freedom, it earns you slavery.

Slavery to a plutocracy.

That is what America has become.

Woodward also always subtly represented the interests of the Israel Lobby. They like things the way they are with America being aggressive across the globe keeping Israel afloat.

And that view shares many aspects with the views of America’s super-rich crowd.

It is ordinary Americans and others who suffer from the current set-up.

Scalia was a basic building block in creating the mess we have. His views were narrow and often uninformed, and over time he said some just plain dumb things.

His views and words on gays and gay marriage were intolerant and disgraceful, just serving to highlight his backwardness and lack of leadership.

The trouble with a lot of what is carelessly labeled as conservatism in America is that it actually supports fascism and the plutocratic crowd. I think many do not appreciate this, but it is painfully true. There is a natural border between these two, but it is easily violated and in today’s America virtually does not exist.

A number of Americans are convinced that Scalia’s views on guns were vital, but the net effect of his views is part of the explanation for the hopeless situation in America today.

Just think of America’s horrible, aggressive, poorly-trained, and murderous police who cause many Americans literally to live in fear. They killed more than a thousand of their own people last year, as they do every year, a performance putting any so-called terrorists to shame.

Scalia supporters may not see a connection, but there very much is one. The police always have the excuse that they thought the person was armed, and it is an excuse which continues to work perfectly because a huge number of Americans are armed.

The plutocrats love things the way they are: murderous police keep the mob in order. Most of these people or corporations live in what are effectively gated communities, and they have very little interaction with the mess “out there.” They just want to see it quiet where they live.

And here it is no accident that large numbers of American police now receive training in Israel, Israel being a place in which a privileged group also wants to live in quiet and security and a place where almost half the population are terrorized by police and army. Israel itself is becoming one giant gated community, and ordinary Israelis themselves do not have a great life. Israel’s equivalent of America’s plutocracy – some being Americans with dual citizenship – is the group making the rules. Thus there is a natural fit with present-day America in many aspects of life.

Scalia was not about freedom. He was about its opposite, slavery.

He reminded me of Thomas Jefferson in his thinking.

No, Jefferson was a thousand times more eloquent, but his seemingly freedom-loving words were not about freedom. Most people who quote them have no idea about the kind of man they are quoting. He actually used words as a kind of self-written legacy, a vast advertising campaign which was about sympathetic-sounding things the real Jefferson was not about.

Jefferson was quite backward in many things. While superficially interested in science, he had some remarkably unscientific views, like the healing properties of soaking his feet in cold water each morning or his interpretation of some fossils found in Virginia which was quite silly.

He was a strong, life-long supporter of slavery. Even when he was President he opposed the rebellion of slaves in Haiti and supported Napoleon’s efforts to crush them. After the French failed, he made sure to have nothing to do with Haiti. His dreamy thoughts about freedom died instantly anytime black slaves were involved.

Jefferson absolutely believed in black inferiority, and we have his own embarrassing words on the subject. This despite his long sexual relationship with a mulatto slave, Sally Hemmings, said to have been fathered by Jefferson’s dead wife’s father. That relationship started when Sally was thirteen. Today we would say Jefferson was a pedophile, and that’s hardly about freedom. He fathered children by Sally – we have the sworn testimony of her adult son on this, no matter what some of Jefferson’s Caucasian descendants claim in order to protect his legacy – and Jefferson did little to improve their lot.

Jefferson rather bizarrely hated industry and wanted only a nation of stout yeomen farmers, something, which if you analyze it, greatly resembles the views of someone like Pol Pot. His vision of stout yeoman farmers of course is completely oblivious to the industrial revolution and the new prosperity coming to some societies.

Jefferson, despite his wealth and over 200 slaves, was never able to support himself. He died a bankrupt. His love of things like fashions and luxury imports was such he was regularly borrowing from friends, some of whom he cheated, never paying them back. He was not a man of his word.

When Jefferson, as President, decided that America must boycott Britain, he was ruthless against American businesses suffering from the policy. His program put many of them under, and he used substantial force to go after any who were not complying. None of this corresponds to today’s fantasy ideas, or Jefferson’s own words, about freedom.

Jefferson as Governor, at the drop of a hat, was ready to have Virginia secede from the Union. He anticipated the entire Confederacy, and that is not an idea of freedom in keeping with a wholesome, democratic society. It’s a version of – what some American plutocrats do today – taking your marbles and running.

Jefferson opposed the Supreme Court even having the very powers which men like Scalia later exercised. He wanted no interpretation of the Constitution. He wanted it to have no force at all in the individual states. His vision much resembled anarchy. He was extremely provincial and ruthless about states’ interests when a Governor, views which were bent completely around when he had other needs as President. Consistency was not a Jefferson strong point.

Jefferson’s words about free expression were extremely hypocritical. When he was Secretary of State under Washington, he secretly hired some nasty scribblers to attack the President and his policies, always pretending he knew nothing about the source of the libels.

Despite Jefferson’s many pretentious words about bloodshed and regular revolutions, he proved in the Revolutionary War a complete coward. He rode so hard away, never stopping for a long time, from some approaching British – a quite small force under the dashing Banastre Tarleton – that there were jokes and laughter about it long afterward by colonists as well as by the British.

When Jefferson was first considered as the colonies’ ambassador in Europe, he wouldn’t go. He was afraid to sail and perhaps be captured by British ships. That didn’t stop old Ben Franklin, who went instead and served well.

Jefferson’s overall impact on the shape of today’s America is extremely negative, despite all the fine words. Ironically, for American conservatives, what I’ll call the Jefferson Myth, was revived by Franklin Roosevelt’s government when they built the memorial in Washington. They were laying false claim to aspects of his legacy for political purposes.

And just so, the acts of many American so-called conservatives like Scalia which ultimately are destructive and divisive and anti-freedom in nature, just as Jefferson was once ready to divide the young country or violently suppress those who disagreed with his presidential policies.

It is all an extremely confused and confusing legacy, and a dangerous one.

America’s armed forces and secret security apparatus today are killing people in at least half a dozen places. America supports torture and illegal imprisonment and suppression in many parts of the world, from Israel to Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. America’s police, in many parts of the country, literally terrorize their own citizens. America’s secret security forces spy on everyone in the false name of protection from terror. And, all the while, we hear slogans – completely empty slogans about freedom and democracy. And the great plutocrats that Scalia represented think nothing of moving an entire company abroad, destroying jobs and communities, while enhancing their own wealth.

People who truly love and understand the meaning of a good and decent society cannot shed any tears for the passing of Judge Scalia. His legacy, like Jefferson’s, is simply poisonous.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY JEFFERY SIMPSON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Oh, yes, true words indeed.

But I fear they are good seed cast on barren ground.

The United States has demonstrated, time and again, that it is only capable of adjusting its governance after smashing its head into a wall, often after several times.

Its political system is a creaking wreck, a kind of man-made monster lumbering along, force-feed by special interest campaign contributions and marching to the drumbeat of outdated assumptions and truly ignorant superstitions.

Despite decades of declining real income, the American middle class remains moved by silly slogans like “the American Dream” and “America First,” much resembling the flock of some religious cult who even after being fleeced by its leaders insists the religion is true.

The United States is a plutocracy, perhaps as corrupt as France in 1788, and it is an overstretched world imperial power serving the narrow interests of its plutocrats, but always it is mouthing slogans about democracy and freedom and justice, largely dead and empty language, to its ordinary inhabitants.

People insulated from the effects of wars and bad times – the plutocrats and ruling establishment in Washington – just do not feel the impact of such terrible turns of event.

Elections only matter in the most nominal way in the United States, they are part of keeping the myths going, as we’ve seen so clearly in the case of Obama.

This bright, optimistic, and charming man took the world’s attention by storm after eight years of the rancid and hated George Bush.

But in two years what has he achieved? Almost nothing of consequence.

The wars go on. Indeed, they are now killing civilians weekly in Pakistan.

The Pentagon and the American intelligence apparatus have swollen into great wallowing beasts, consuming vast resources to no good purpose.

After a terrible financial catastrophe, what has been changed? Nothing, just countless billions given away to stimulate a temporary respite, paying for which threatens the very security and international position of the American dollar.

We see no meaningful legislation to regulate future financial excesses.

We hear not one voice speak about the painful sacrifices required to pay for all the ghastly excess of war and financial anarchy.

Do we see even one meaningful political change in the way elections are conducted and financed, something that might promise future reform? We do not.

Has anything changed, despite Obama’s early suggestion of a new policy direction, with America’s client state Israel and its terrible seemingly-endless abuse of millions?

Obama’s one big act, his health-care legislation, is an abomination, disliked by liberals and conservatives alike, an ugly ineffective costly compromise.

Has anything happened with the paranoid, democratically destructive legislation around American security, virtual police-state stuff which is unbelievably costly by every possible measure?

Nothing has changed. The election of 2008 might just as well not have taken place.

No individual, however bright and enthusiastic, can move the American establishment from its firm position of ignorance and selfishness and power.

And we all know what Lord Acton said about power.

His words apply to all power, no matter how established, even democratically-camouflaged power.
_______________________

If you want some interesting insight into the assumptions and attitudes of the American middle class, watch a few American real-estate, cable-channel television shows.

People often want three-car garages. They want granite counter tops. The want four bedrooms. They want three bathrooms. They want central air-conditioning.

They have saved no money. They are looking to finance on the basis of 100% mortgages.

And, perhaps worst of all, they are looking at subdivisions in the middle of nowhere, in Colorado or Texas or Arizona. Places which require cars for everyone and every single errand. Places which require twenty-four-hour-a-day air conditioning for major parts of the year. Places often with no long-term, dependable water resources, often genuine deserts.

Some of these shows actually deal with the results of the earlier excesses, people whose home prices have cratered, who owe huge amounts on their mortgages, people who are trying to sell ugly behemoths they can’t afford, and people who feel entitled.

Americans are entitled to walk away from homes and the loans which financed them when the value of the mortgage exceeds the value of the property, a fact not often appreciated in Canada where we honor contracts. They just hand the keys to the bank and go.

In buying homes, Americans often walk away from contracts too. That’s why in most places the signs in front of homes say they are “under contract” rather than “sold” during the interim between signing and closing. Realtors often keep showing homes “under contract” just in case. In America, for sure you do not know you have a valid sale until the little closing ceremony when money and keys are exchanged.

Another fact not always appreciated in Canada is that American home owners have long had the privilege of deducting the interest on their mortgages from their federal income tax. Yet even with this financial boost, still they cannot make a go of it, and for the simple reason that the deductibility has only encouraged still larger purchases and likely inflated prices.

Such shows tell us a great deal, exhibiting like educational films the results of America’s inability to govern itself sensibly. We see the grassroots reality of loose and chaotic government.

But when I say loose and chaotic government, I always exclude the intelligence monstrosity, the Pentagon, and America’s many and brutal police forces. Nothing loose there – just a quasi-police state taken for granted.