Anniversary weekend reads

[Political Waves]

I thought to get a jump on the 9/11 anniversary, to mention in passing before the din began, in last weekends blog piece. Silly me. Media pounced on it like a duck on a bug, blowing past news that should have found some purchase earlier in the week to take advantage of the tenth anniversary of mayhem. Well -- I guess we have to give them their due: if anybody DIDN'T change over the last decade, it's media. The majority STILL hacks and manipulates for corporate profit.

As we supposed would happen, then, media is having a 9/11 love-fest with this disaster anniversary. Pounding out the pathos -- in what Tom Engelhardt (piece found below) calls our "worst urges" and "public spectacle" -- we are now wallowing in print over the events of that fateful day and what has happened since ... reminding us that we've changed forever, and not for the better ... while advertising full-blown media extravaganza's for the weekend.

When the weekend arrives, print will fall back to the graphics -- this was a disaster caught in slow-motion and burned into the retina's of a global community. Playing on that emotion, then, we will continue to dredge up images best left behind, review old hatreds and revenge, but seldom call attention to the scam it actually was ... whether from actual plots and plans, as I believe, or from the opportunism it provided a government looking for just such an event to reposition strategically and go on jihad against slumbering oil fields and open enemies.

This 9/11 remembrance echoes everywhere and reminds me that there HAS been change, not just the incessant fear of terrorist attack or paranoid dangers -- but sea change in the way we think about civic matters, including government. We don't trust it ... for good reason.

 

Bush went to war on the American public's credit card, gutted the agencies set to protect it and enabling his cronies to empty the public coffers. Four trillion US bucks later, Obama is catching hell for not being able to pull the trounced economy out of the mud and Republican's are looking on like Bart "I didn't do it" Simpson, hanging back just enough to let the black guy catch all the hell.

The difference between 2001 and now?

We know. We know who sank us deeply into the mire, who used every pathetic emotional goad to pull us down into war and debt, paranoia and the resulting economic pit and class struggle. We know ... but setting things a' right will take a lot more attention and hard work than pulling it apart did.

And that, perhaps, is the real lesson of this whole tragedy -- a conscious rebuilding of what had long before begun to wobble would require not only our attention but our emotions, our intelligence and our will. Ten years later, we're just awakening to the outline of that blueprint. Ten years from now, we will have the shape of a new nation to discuss.

Some good reads for the weekend, mostly links that tell a story -- pick and choose at will. The one by Jesuit peace advocate John Dear isn't so religious as spiritual; don't be put off by the Jesus reference.

Oh, and if you missed this last week over on the PlanetWaves blog, you definitely need to read it this weekend. It's always more potent when it's their own rising above the crowd and yelling fire:

Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult
Mike Lofgren, Truthout
Saturday 3 September 2011
http://www.truth-out.org/goodbye-all-reflections-gop-operative-who-left-cult/1314907779

Jude


Jesus and the Falling Towers
John Dear, SJ, NCR
http://ncronline.org/blogs/road-peace/jesus-and-falling-towers

Jesus is like the awakened Buddha, perfectly centered, mindful, alive and at peace, gently telling us:

Do not continue on your present course! Your global destructive violence ensures your own destruction! Renounce your greed and war making. Stop your wars, dismantle your nuclear weapons, stop funding terrorist regimes, cut all funding for Israel's occupation of Palestine, spend billions to feed the world's starving, build new schools and hospitals in Iraq and Afghanistan, overcome evil with good, love everyone on the planet, reverse your violence and become people of global nonviolence. If you do not do this, you as a people will be destroyed. It will not be God's doing. Your own violence will come down upon you. [...]


Let's Put 9/11 Behind Us and End the Blank Check it Has Become for America's Endless Wars
We could stop using it to make ourselves feel like a far better country than we are. We could leave the dead in peace and take a hard look at ourselves in the nearest mirror.
September 8, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152345/let%27s_put_9_11_behind_us_and_end_the_blank_check_it_has_become_for_america%27s_endless_wars_?page=entire

Was There an Alternative?
Noam Chomsky, HuffPo
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/noam-chomsky/was-there-an-alternative-_b_950216.html

"... the debt is being cynically exploited by the far right, with the collusion of the Democrat establishment, to undermine what remains of social programs, public education, unions, and, in general, remaining barriers to corporate tyranny." [...]


Bush and Cheney remind us how we got into this mess
Eugene Robinson, WaPo
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/bush-and-cheney-remind-us-how-we-got-into-this-mess/2011/09/01/gIQAboXFvJ_story.html

So far, the wars and the tax cuts have cost the Treasury between $4 trillion and $5 trillion. If Bush had just left income tax rates alone, nobody except Ron Paul would be talking about the debt. [...]


Atlas Mugged: The Ayn Rand Six Step
John Atcheson, CommonDreams
Friday, September 2, 2011

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/09/02-0

Yet that is precisely the game the Republicans have been playing for years. Call it the Ayan Rand six step. Step one: discredit government. Step two, starve it. Step three, when the underfunded government can’t perform, stand back and say “I told you so.” Step four, create the myth of the individual uber-alles – the Marlboro man on steroids; Step five, if anyone gets wise, find a scapegoat and blame it on them – gays, immigrants, government workers; government working gay immigrants. Step six, when things get bad, divide and conquer – “if it wasn’t’ for them… [...]


Perry Tales: Rick Is Not Who He Says He Is
Jim Hightower, Truthout
Wednesday 7 September 2011
http://www.truth-out.org/perry-tales-rick-not-who-he-says-he/1315400975

Here's a particularly revealing stat that the Perry pixies don't want us to see: On his watch as governor, Texas added more minimum wage jobs than all the other 49 states combined. More than half a million Texans now work for $7.25 an hour or less. He can brag that he's brought Texans down into a tie with Mississippi for the highest percentage of workers reduced to poverty pay. [...]


The Price of 9/11
Joseph E. Stiglitz, TruthOut
Wednesday 7 September 2011
http://www.truth-out.org/price-911/1315403131

George W. Bush addresses the media on Israel and Lebanon in August 2006. (Photo: Eric Draper / Wikimedia)New York – The September 11, 2001, terror attacks by Al Qaeda were meant to harm the United States, and they did, but in ways that Osama bin Laden probably never imagined. President George W. Bush’s response to the attacks compromised America’s basic principles, undermined its economy, and weakened its security.

The attack on Afghanistan that followed the 9/11 attacks was understandable, but the subsequent invasion of Iraq was entirely unconnected to Al Qaeda – as much as Bush tried to establish a link. That war of choice quickly became very expensive – orders of magnitude beyond the $60 billion claimed at the beginning – as colossal incompetence met dishonest misrepresentation.

Indeed, when Linda Bilmes and I calculated America’s war costs three years ago, the conservative tally was $3-5 trillion. Since then, the costs have mounted further. With almost 50% of returning troops eligible to receive some level of disability payment, and more than 600,000 treated so far in veterans’ medical facilities, we now estimate that future disability payments and health-care costs will total $600-900 billion. But the social costs, reflected in veteran suicides (which have topped 18 per day in recent years) and family breakups, are incalculable.

Even if Bush could be forgiven for taking America, and much of the rest of the world, to war on false pretenses, and for misrepresenting the cost of the venture, there is no excuse for how he chose to finance it. His was the first war in history paid for entirely on credit. As America went into battle, with deficits already soaring from his 2001 tax cut, Bush decided to plunge ahead with yet another round of tax “relief” for the wealthy.

Today, America is focused on unemployment and the deficit. Both threats to America’s future can, in no small measure, be traced to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Increased defense spending, together with the Bush tax cuts, is a key reason why America went from a fiscal surplus of 2% of GDP when Bush was elected to its parlous deficit and debt position today.

Direct government spending on those wars so far amounts to roughly $2 trillion – $17,000 for every US household – with bills yet to be received increasing this amount by more than 50%.

Moreover, as Bilmes and I argued in our book The Three Trillion Dollar War, the wars
contributed to America’s macroeconomic weaknesses, which exacerbated its deficits and debt burden. Then, as now, disruption in the Middle East led to higher oil prices, forcing Americans to spend money on oil imports that they otherwise could have spent buying goods produced in the US.

But then the US Federal Reserve hid these weaknesses by engineering a housing bubble that led to a consumption boom. It will take years to overcome the excessive indebtedness and real-estate overhang that resulted.

Ironically, the wars have undermined America’s (and the world’s) security, again in ways that Bin Laden could not have imagined. An unpopular war would have made military recruitment difficult in any circumstances. But, as Bush tried to deceive America about the wars’ costs, he underfunded the troops, refusing even basic expenditures – say, for armored and mine-resistant vehicles needed to protect American lives, or for adequate health care for returning veterans. A US court recently ruled that veterans’ rights have been violated. (Remarkably, the Obama administration claims that veterans’ right to appeal to the courts should be restricted!)

Military overreach has predictably led to nervousness about using military power, and others’ knowledge of this threatens to weaken America’s security as well. But America’s real strength, more than its military and economic power, is its “soft power,” its moral authority. And this, too, was weakened: as the US violated basic human rights like habeas corpus and the right not to be tortured, its longstanding commitment to international law was called into question.

In Afghanistan and Iraq, the US and its allies knew that long-term victory required winning hearts and minds. But mistakes in the early years of those wars complicated that already-difficult battle. The wars’ collateral damage has been massive: by some accounts, more than a million Iraqis have died, directly or indirectly, because of the war. According to some studies, at least 137,000 civilians have died violently in Afghanistan and Iraq in the last ten years; among Iraqis alone, there are 1.8 million refugees and 1.7 million internally displaced people.

Not all of the consequences were disastrous. The deficits to which America’s debt-funded wars contributed so mightily are now forcing the US to face the reality of budget constraints. America’s military spending still nearly equals that of the rest of the world combined, two decades after the end of the Cold War. Some of the increased expenditures went to the costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the broader Global War on Terrorism, but much of it was wasted on weapons that don’t work against enemies that don’t exist. Now, at last, those resources are likely to be redeployed, and the US will likely get more security by paying less.

Al Qaeda, while not conquered, no longer appears to be the threat that loomed so large in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. But the price paid in getting to this point, in the US and elsewhere, has been enormous – and mostly avoidable. The legacy will be with us for a long time. It pays to think before acting. ++

Copyright 2011, Project Syndicate.

Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor at Columbia University, a Nobel laureate in Economics, and the author of Freefall: Free Markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy.

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