tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29974305579943630972024-03-06T12:02:04.387-08:00Michael Parenti BlogA comprehensive collection of links to Dr. Michael Parenti's materials that are online--all videos, interviews, recorded lectures and other things are all recorded on this blog. In addition, Dr. Parenti will himself be writing and adding to his blog frequently. Visitors and members of this site are requested to refrain from using his material without proper attribution to the author. Thank you for your consideration!
Please also see http://michaelparenti.org/ for more of his articles online.Han EunJa 한 은자http://www.blogger.com/profile/13755995421254443930noreply@blogger.comBlogger39125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2997430557994363097.post-22071701910701322942013-09-30T01:24:00.001-07:002013-09-30T01:24:34.002-07:00 Syria, Sarin, and Casus Belli by Michael Parenti<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="userContent" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}">Here is a new article I just finished writing. Feel free to post or share, giving due and proper attribution to the author.<br /> <br /> Syria, Sarin, and Casus Belli by Michael Parenti<br /> <br />
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced that on August 21 the
Assad government slaughtered 1,429 people, including 426 children, in a
sarin chemical attack in Ghouta, a Damascus suburb. (Doctors Without
Borders put the<span class="text_exposed_show"> total at about 300.)
Secretary Kerry insisted that now the United States had no choice but to
launch U.S. bombing attacks against President Bashar al-Assad,
devolving into another of America's "humanitarian wars." <br /> <br /> The Sarin Mysteries<br />
Following Kerry, President Obama announced that the situation in Syria
had changed irredeemably since August 21. The United States would have
to attack. But, on second thought, Obama decided to leave the decision
up to (a seemingly reluctant) Congress.<br /> A few weeks later, Turkish
prosecutors issued a lengthy court indictment charging the Syrian rebels
with seeking to use chemical weapons. The indictment suggested that
sarin gas and other "weapons for a terrorist organization" were utilized
by the opposition and not by the Assad government. <br /> The "Syrian
freedom fighters" include men who are not even Syrian, much like the
many mujahedeen who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan but who were not
Afghani. As reported in the Wall Street Journal (September 19, 2013),
the ISIS, an Iraqi al Qaeda outfit operating in Syria, "has become a
magnet for foreign jihadists" who view the war in Syria not primarily as
a means to overthrow Assad "but rather as a historic battleground for a
larger Sunni holy war. According to centuries-old Islamic prophecy
they espouse, they must establish an Islamic state in Syria as a step to
achieving a global one." <br /> <br /> Wrong Hands<br /> Meanwhile, a Mint
Press News story quoted residents in Ghouta who asserted that Saudi
Arabia gave chemical weapons to an al Qaeda-linked group. Residents
blamed this terrorist group for the deadly explosions of August 21. They
claimed that some of the rebels handled the weapons improperly and
thereby set off the explosions. Anti-government forces, interviewed in
the article, said they had not been informed about the nature of the
weapons nor how to use them. “When Saudi Prince Bandar gives such
weapons to people, he must give them to those who know how to handle
them,” complained one rebel militant.<br /> <br /> At the same time, the
Russian government submitted a 100-page report to the United Nations in
early September, regarding an attack upon the Syrian city of Aleppo in
March 2013. It concludes that the rebels---not the Syrian
government---used the nerve agent sarin. According to a member of the
U.N. independent commission of inquiry, Carla Del Ponte, there were
"strong, concrete suspicions . . . of the use of sarin gas." Del Ponte
added: "This was used on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not the
government authorities." Many of those killed by the gas attack were
Syrian soldiers, according to the report. <br /> <br /> If true, then we
might wonder why are chemical weapons and other weaponry and supplies
being supplied to various al Qaeda-type groups? Is not al Qaeda a secret
terrorist organization that delivers death and destruction upon people
everywhere? Are we Americans not locked in a global struggle with the
demonic jihadists who supposedly hate us because we are rich,
successful, and secular, while they are impoverished failures? That
certainly is the scenario the U.S. public has been fed for over a
decade. <br /> <br /> The United States claims it provides military
assistance only to "vetted" rebel groups, "free ones" that are friendly
toward America and are not Islamic fanatics. (Although, as Senator
Croker, Republican from Tennessee, admitted: we sometimes make
"mistakes" and give weapons to the wrong rebels.) On September 17,
President Obama waived a provision in the federal law that prohibits
supplying arms to terrorist groups. To many of us this was an unspoken
admission that Washington was giving aid to extremist Islamic groups, of
which al Qaeda was only the best advertised. <br /> <br /> Remember the Casus Belli<br />
It is difficult for me to accept the charge that on August 21 the
Syrian government waged a chemical onslaught in Ghouta against its own
people in a situation that was bound to backfire in the worst possible
way---by handing over to the U.S. war hawks a casus belli, a perfect
excuse to wreak retaliatory "humanitarian" death and destruction upon
Syria. This is the last thing the Assad government wants. <br /> <br />
Remember how the Spaniards asked the Americans not to send the USS Maine
to Havana Harbor in 1898. They feared that something might happen to
the ship and the U.S. would use that mishap as a casus belli, putting
the blame on Spain. Sure enough, the Maine blew up while sitting in the
harbor, sending U.S. public opinion into a jingoistic fury against the
Spaniards. But why would Spaniards perpetrate the very act that would
give the Americans an excuse and an inducement to wage a war that Spain
most certainly did not want and could not win? <br /> <br /> And let us not
forget the hundreds of imaginary Kuwaiti babies torn from incubators and
dashed upon hospital floors by snarling, maniacal Iraqi soldiers. And
remember the never-to-be-found weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that
Saddam supposedly was preparing to use but never got around to doing so.
And then there's that Serbian general---never identified or
located---who purportedly told his troops (also never identified) to "go
forth and rape." And Qaddafi who reportedly handed out Viagra to his
Libyan troops so they could go forth and rape with a drug-driven vigor, a
story so obviously fabricated that it was dropped after two days.<br /> <br /> Choice: Satellite or Enemy<br />
Why do (some) U.S. leaders seek war against Syria? Like Yugoslavia,
Iraq, Libya and dozens of other countries that have felt America's
terrible swift sword---Syria has been committing economic nationalism,
trying to chart its own course rather than putting itself in service to
the western plutocracy. Like Iran, China, Russia and some other nations,
Syria has currency controls and other restrictions on foreign
investments. Like those other nations, Syria lacks the proper
submissiveness. It is not a satellite to the U.S. imperium. And any
nation that is not under the politico-economic sway of the U.S. global
plutocracy is considered an enemy or a potential enemy. <br /> <br /> The
Assad government had social programs for its people, far from perfect
services but still better than what might be found in many U.S.
satellite countries. When Iraqi refugees fled to Syria to escape U.S.
military destruction, the Assad government gave them full benefits. So
with the Libyan refugees who crossed over a few years later. Generally
Damascus presided over a multi-ethnic society, relatively free of
sectarian intolerance and violence.<br /> <br /> Syria has been ruled by the
Ba'ath Party which has dominated the country's parliament and military
for half a century. The party's slogan is "Unity, Freedom, Socialism."
Socialism? Now that gets us closer to why the trigger-happy boys in
Washington will continue to pursue a "humanitarian war" of attrition and
a prolonged campaign of demonization against Assad and his "regime." <br /> <br /> Weapons of Mass Destruction Redux<br />
On September 10, the Syrian government welcomed a Russian proposal
calling for Syria to place all of its chemical weapons under
international control and for the weapons to be destroyed. Here was a
chance to avoid false charges of mass murder by sarin. If Assad no
longer had such an arsenal, no one could accuse him of using it. (In any
case, the Syrian government's campaign against the rebels was going
well enough using just conventional weapons.)<br /> <br /> Instead of
winning approval from the humanitarian warriors of the West, Syria's
eager agreement to surrender its chemical arsenal set off a newly framed
barrage of threats from U.S. and French leaders, with the irrepressible
Secretary Kerry leading the charge. Was this a ploy on Syria's part or a
genuine offer? Kerry asked in a scoffing tone. How can we be certain
that Assad would not sequester its enormous stock of chemical weapons?
Kerry issued a whole barrage of tough-guy threats. Syria will be treated
most harshly if it pursued a path of deception. French President
François Hollande called for a United Nations Security resolution that
would authorize the use of force if Syria failed to hand over its
chemical weapons. One would think that Syria had refused to do so.<br /> <br />
The August charge had been that Syria had used chemical weapons , a
claim that might be refuted. Now the new charge was that Syria possessed
such weapons---which was true. And possession itself was suddenly being
treated as a crime deserving of swift and severe retaliation. <br /> <br />
Now Assad would have to demonstrate the indemonstrable. He would have
to convince the western aggressors that he has handed over his entire
stockpile of chemical weapons. At the same time, he asserts that a
thorough inspection must not come at the expense of disclosing Syrian
military sites or causing a threat to its national security. <br /> <br />
Recall how the Saddam government in Iraq, hoping to avoid war,
cooperated fully with U.N. inspectors hunting for WMDs. Every facility
in the country was opened to investigation. Even after all of Iraq was
occupied, the hunt continued. We were told that the WMDs could be
anywhere, maybe out in some remote part of the desert. It was impossible
to be sure. <br /> <br /> I fear that the Syrian population is facing more
years of painful attrition. The one faintly positive development is that
the FSA and the ISIS and all the murderous, Allah-is-great grouplets
continue to attack not only the government forces but each other. Dozens
of rebels have been killed in clashes with each other within the last
few months.<br /> <br /> Meanwhile young Syrian children, now living in
refugee camps in Lebanon, go every morning to work long days in the
fields, earning the few dollars a day upon which their families depend
for survival. Some are as young as 5. When asked what they miss most
about Syria, the children say, "school." <br /> _________<br /> Michael
Parenti is the author of "The Face of Imperialism" and "Waiting for
Yesterday:Pages from a Street Kid's Life." See his website for more
information: <a href="http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.michaelparenti.org&h=0AQEDw7TR&enc=AZMrZPy-xUrUjeDIe6DQCfZsHzKX0j5HoPv_lNm74YLr-hBRan4u5pJwwA0n4DYfNpE-ZcfWKuESmDdWAlq4yU9fQeH5F7kU-VZgG6KkB0Jz1VFRGj4f2Sf_C4t2jULPR0wbpcM6BR9oFkOWyjs4SG2L&s=1" rel="nofollow nofollow" target="_blank">www.michaelparenti.org</a></span></span></div>
Han EunJa 한 은자http://www.blogger.com/profile/13755995421254443930noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2997430557994363097.post-16626715363380637972013-09-01T09:08:00.002-07:002013-09-01T09:08:42.412-07:00I Have a Dream, a Blurred Vision by Michael Parenti <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}">Here is an article I wrote recently about MLK. Feel free to share.<br /> <br />
The 50th anniversary of the March on Washington---in which Rev. Martin
Luther King Jr. made his famed "I Have a Dream" speech---has recently
won renewed attention from various print and electronic media in the
United States. But the more attention given to King's extraordina<span class="text_exposed_show">ry
speech, the less we seem to know about King himself, the less aware we
are about the serious challenges he was presenting, challenges that
remain urgent and ignored to this very day.<br /> <br /> The March on
Washington took place on 28 August 1963. Despite repeated fear mongering
by certain commentators and public officials who predicted there would
be violence in the streets---over 250,000 people descended upon
Washington D.C. in a massive show of unity and peaceful determination.
<br /> <br /> I was there. About two-thirds of the demonstrators were
African-American, and about one-third were white. After all these years I
still recall how gripped I was by the vast sweep of the crowd moving
like democracy's infantry across the nation's capital, determined to
awaken "our leaders" in Congress and the White House. <br /> <br /> The
high moment of the day was Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.
It was a call to freedom and enfranchisement for a people who had
endured centuries of slavery followed by segregation and lynch-mob rule.
In his speech King reminded us that "the Negro is still languishing in
the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own
land." <br /> <br /> He went on: "The marvelous new militancy which has
engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to distrust all white
people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence
here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our
destiny and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom." <br /> <br />
King continued to stoke the new militancy: "We can never be satisfied
as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York
believes he has nothing for which to vote. . . . Now is the time to
rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path
of racial justice."<br /> <br /> Then came his smashing conclusion: "When
we allow freedom to ring from every village and every hamlet, from every
state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of
God's children," all colors and creeds "will be able to join hands and
sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last! free at
last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'" <br /> <br /> At this, the
crowd exploded with thunderous applause and wild cheers. Many of us were
left overwhelmed and misty eyed. For all its clichés and overdone
metaphors, King's "I Have a Dream" speech remains a truly great oration.<br /> <br />
So impressive is the speech, however, that commentators and pundits to
this day have found it easy to focus safely upon it to the neglect of
other vital social issues that engaged King. <br /> <br /> The
opinion-makers prefer to treat Martin Luther King as an inspirational
icon rather than a radical leader. He has been domesticated and
sanitized. Today the real King probably would not be invited to the
White House because he is too far left, too much the agitator. <br /> <br />
In 1967, he was becoming an increasingly serious problem for the
defenders of privilege and profit. King came out against the Vietnam War
that year, a fact that is seldom mentioned today. His stance
discomforted many liberals (black and white) who felt they should
concentrate on civil rights and not alienate potential supporters with
anti-war issues. But for King, the U.S. government had become "the
greatest purveyor of violence in the world," spending far more on death
and destruction than on vital social programs. <br /> <br /> He differed
with those who believed we could resist violence and cruelty at home
while resorting to violence and cruelty abroad. He condemned "those who
make peaceful revolution impossible," those who "refuse to give up the
privileges and pleasures that come from the immense profits from
overseas investments . . . the individual capitalists who extract
wealth" at the expense of other peoples and places.<br /> <br /> By 1967
King was treading on dangerous ground. He was connecting the issues. He
condemned "the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and
militarism." The same interests that brought us slums also brought us
wars, he argued, and they were getting richer for the doing. <br /> By
1968, the year he was assassinated, King was also waging war against
poverty. Civil rights, he dared to say, were linked to economic rights.
He was planning a national occupation of Washington D.C., called the
Poor People's Campaign. Again he was treading on dangerous ground
bringing together working-class people of various ethnic groups. <br /> <br />
These class demands go unmentioned in the usual MLK commemorations. The
"I Have a Dream" oration now overshadows the other less known messages
that King was putting forth not long before he was killed, including the
search for economic justice for all working people. The great "dream
speech" of 1963 serves less as an inspiration and more as a cloak
covering his latter-day radical views regarding class struggle and
anti-imperialism.<br /> <br /> In 1968, at the age of 39, Martin Luther King
was killed by a sniper's bullet while standing on the balcony of his
motel room in Memphis, Tennessee. He was in Memphis to lend support to a
sanitation workers strike, the very kind of thing his opponents were
finding increasingly intolerable.<br /> <br /> A penniless fugitive from the
Missouri State Penitentiary, James Earl Ray, while being sought by the
police, supposedly took it upon himself singlehandedly to make his way
to Memphis where he somehow located King's motel balcony and shot him
from a room across the courtyard. <br /> Then entirely on his own,
supposedly with no visible financial support, the fugitive convict and
newly established assassin made his way to England. Arrested in London
at Heathrow Airport with substantial sums of cash in his pocket, Ray was
extradited to the United States and charged with the crime. He was
strongly advised by his lawyer to enter a guilty plea (to avoid the
death penalty) and was sentenced to 99 years. Three days later he
recanted his confession. Over the ensuing decades he made repeatedly
unsuccessful efforts to withdraw his guilty plea and be tried by a jury.
Ray died in prison in 1998, still proclaiming his innocence. <br /> <br />
In 1986 King's birthday was established as a national holiday. Hundreds
of streets in America have been renamed in his honor. There are annual
commemorations. His resonant voice, memorable words and gripping cadence
are played and replayed. But the politco-economic issues he highlighted
continue to be passed over by mainstream leaders and commentators. <br /> <br />
In addition, the opinion-makers who celebrate King's birthday every
year and hail him as a monumental figure have nothing to say about the
many unresolved questions related to his assassination. No one openly
entertains the question of whether there were powerful people
(certainly more powerful than James Earl Ray) who thought it necessary
to do away with this popular leader because he had moved too far beyond
"I Have a Dream."<br /> _______<br /> Michael Parenti is an award winning,
internationally known author. His two most recent books are The Face of
Imperialism (2011), and Waiting for Yesterday: Pages from a Street
Kid's Life (2013), a memoir of his early life.</span></span></div>
Han EunJa 한 은자http://www.blogger.com/profile/13755995421254443930noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2997430557994363097.post-68519539775299708032013-04-26T12:49:00.000-07:002013-09-30T01:27:08.078-07:00 Requiem for a Dominatrix by Michael Parenti<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">On April 8, 2013, the western world lost a grand dame, an
iconic figure, a woman admired by millions while dismissed by others as just
another lady in a bouffant hairdo. She came from a modest social background yet
she made her way to the top, a woman who could perform winningly in what is
arguably the most competitive arena of life. I am, of course, speaking of
Annette Funicello, singer and Hollywood actress. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Oh wait, some readers may have assumed I was pumping for Margaret
Thatcher, former prime minister of Great Britain, who also died on April 8,
2013. No, Thatcher and Funicello had nothing in common, save for the bouffant
hairdo and date of death. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Annette Funicello was a child star in the late 1950s, one of
the <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mouseketeers, complete with enormous
Mickey Mouse ears, appearing on Walt Disney's "Mickey Mouse Club." As
a teenager, she turned out hit tunes and captivated adolescent hearts in Beach
Blanket movies. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">How many hearts did Thatcher captivate in her teenage years?
Did she even have teenage years? Or did she not vault directly from early
childhood into late adulthood? In any case, she was no day at the beach.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The most memorable moment Thatcher ever provided for me was
her adulatory spiel to the blood-drenched Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet,
as the two of them sat in a cozy room in Britain. Pinochet was resisting
deportation to Spain to stand trial as a war criminal. He was rescued from
justice by Prime Minister Tony Blair who regularly sucked up to reactionary war
mongers especially those "friendly to the West." </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Without stint Thatcher poured out her gratitude and admiration
to a smiling Pinochet for "saving Chile from the communists," and
restoring peace, liberty, and stability. She made no mention of the many
thousands of Chileans whom Pinochet imprisoned, tortured, executed, or drove
into exile. On that visit to Pinochet, Thatcher was wearing her fascism right
under her makeup. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Would
Annette Funicello ever kiss a dictator's butt the way Thatcher did? I <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>think not. During her stardom, Annette
described herself as “the queen of teen,” and millions of fans close to her age
agreed. As one critic put it, "Young audiences appreciated her sweet,
forthright appeal, and parents saw her as the perfect daughter." <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here was the girl you might take home to meet
and marry your son. Would you say the same about Lady Thatcher? Only if you
really hated your kid.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Thatcher
served for eleven years as Prime Minister, waging war upon the Irish, the Argentines,
and the social democracy that existed in Britain. Be it health care, education,
mining, transportation, housing, utilities or other public industries---many were
privatized, deregulated, or cutback while customer rates and costs sharply
increased. Corporate salaries rose to obscene heights while wages remained flat
or declined. Labor unions were broken. Under Thatcher's reign, the free market was
king, producing ever greater profits and lower taxes for the superrich and ever
greater hardship for the populace. A poll tax was imposed upon the people, an
equal sum to be paid by both the dustman and the duke.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Someone once said that Margaret Thatcher satisfied the
average Englishman's longing for the perfect dominatrix. No doubt about it, she
could deliver pain. The Iron Lady should best be remembered as the Leather
Lady. Indeed, today Thatcherism leaves its dreary imprint not only on the
Conservative Party but---thanks also to Tony Blair---on a Labor Party that
accepts most of her regressive policies.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">During her reign, Thatcher also pursued her "school-girl
political crush for President Reagan" as one Labor MP pronounced during a
parliamentary debate. Indeed, she and Reagan adored each other, politically
speaking. With hands joined, as it were, they created in their respective
countries more wealth for the few and more poverty for the many. They served as
a free-market inspiration to one another as they advanced back into the dark
ages.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">President Barack Obama, who loves to grovel before rightwing
leaders (note his adoring depiction of Reagan as a "transformative"
president), issued a cloying statement following Thatcher's death:</span> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">"With the passing of Baroness Margaret
Thatcher, the world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty,
and America has lost a true friend. . . . Here in America, many of us will
never forget her standing shoulder to shoulder with President Reagan, reminding
the world that we are not simply carried along by the currents of history—we
can shape them with moral conviction, unyielding courage and iron will.</span> <span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">"</span> <span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> Obama
invites nausea. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">If
only for a brief moment, let us get back to our girl Annette Funicello, the
only laudable personage in this sorry parade. While Thatcher was cutting health
services, Annette was championing the campaign against multiple sclerosis, a
disease she herself grappled with for more than 25 years, until death took her at
age 70. </span><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Speaking of disease: long after they left office, both
Reagan and Thatcher were inundated with honors; their material lives groaned
with abundance. But their respective <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mental
</i>lives ended in dismal poverty, that is, in dementia. Their brains had turned
to porridge.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There must be many
reasons why people suffer dementia. But in regard to Reagan and Thatcher, I
suspect it was a self-generated condition. When one tirelessly confects so many
fictional representations and twisty untruths---all<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in the cause of callous plunder and greater social
inequality---it must put an inordinate strain on one's brain. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Meanwhile the anti-Thatcher theme song, "Ding Dong the
Witch is Dead" <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>now enjoys a massive
revival in Britain and retains a top slot on the charts. The people are dancing
in the streets.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">All I can say is "May she rest in peace." (I'm
talking about Annette.) </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">__________</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Michael Parenti's most recent book is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Face of Imperialism</i>. Soon to be published is his childhood
memoir <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Waiting for Yesterday: Pages from
a Street Kid's Life.</i> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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Michael Parentihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03669839134550199120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2997430557994363097.post-4080402721296045832013-02-28T14:31:00.002-08:002013-02-28T14:32:19.924-08:00Eating Horses in Paris by Michael Parenti<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Eating Horses In Paris</span></b><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">by<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Michael Parenti</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">In 1951, only five years after World War II ended, I managed
to make my way to Paris where I landed a job as a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">courier diplomatique</i> (messenger boy) for the United Nations Sixth
General Assembly. Despite the years of war and deprivation, Paris still was a
special place with its history, its cafes, galleries, bridges, ornate edifices,
and narrow winding cobblestone streets, some seemingly as old as the city
itself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Recent reports about how horsemeat has been smuggled into
certain meat products in England, Sweden, and elsewhere remind me of one of
Paris's unusual features of 1951: the numerous butcher shops that sold
horsemeat. Such a shop usually sported a mounted life-sized horse head (made of
metal or wood) above the store entrance to advertise unequivocally that the butcher
specialized in the sale of horse flesh.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I ate horsemeat at a small neighborhood Parisian restaurant
a number of times. It was smoothly textured and more gamy than beef. I wasn't
particularly fond of it but it did have the virtue of being affordable. In
those post-war days, low-income Parisians were more inclined to eat horses than
ride them. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">All the talk today about how undesirable it is to consume
horses carries the implication that our immense ingestion of other livestock is
perfectly acceptable. We are advised not to eat horses, nor dogs, rabbits, or
cats---no matter how close to starvation we might be. But devouring limitless numbers
of cattle, pigs, sheep, lambs, chickens, turkeys, and ducks is quite all right.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This causes us to overlook the real problem, which is not
horsemeat but meat consumption in general. The world cannot feed itself if it
continues to make meat a common staple. Millions upon millions of livestock require
vast amounts of grain and water, ultimately far more than the environment will
be able to provide.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Aside from the survival problems raised by the consumption
of immense quantities of land, water, and grain in producing meat, there is another
menacing aspect: all the poisons and torture that happen along the way from the
feedlot to the supermarket. For the health of the planet and for our own health
and for the sake of the livestock, we should stop eating animals. Rather than calling
for more regulation of meat production, we need to move entirely away from meat
meals.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Originating from the
top of the food chain, all animal products menace our health. Pesticides and
other toxic run-offs work their way into the food and water consumed by livestock.
So with wild and farmed fish, and seafood. Finally, perched at the highest rung
of the food chain, we humans feast on the accumulated toxins that concentrate
further in our bodies. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Many of us are unsettled about eating horses, dogs, cats, rabbits,
snakes, monkeys, rodents, or alligators---which other people around the world
do eat. Perhaps we should give more attention to the horrid mistreatment of
domesticated livestock,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the mass
produced cruelties of factory farms, the torturous stalls, the joyless
overcrowded feedlots, the loads of antibiotic and hormone additives, the frequent
sickness and fatal dismemberments, and the terrible toxic accumulations. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Save your health and your planet. May all animal consumption
go the way of the Paris horsemeat butcher shops. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">-----------------------------</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Michael Parenti's recent books include <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Face of Imperialism</i> and the forthcoming <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Waiting for Yesterday: Pages from a Street Kid's Life</i> (a memoir of
his early life).</span></div>
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<br /></div>
Michael Parentihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03669839134550199120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2997430557994363097.post-4346954305316568882013-01-30T16:58:00.000-08:002013-01-30T17:13:03.165-08:00A Terrible Normality by Michael Parenti<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">A Terrible Normality</span></i></b><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>by <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Michael
Parenti</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Through much of history the
abnormal has been the norm. This is a paradox to which we should attend.
Aberrations, so plentiful as to form a terrible normality of their own, descend
upon us with frightful consistency.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The number of massacres in
history, for instance, are almost more than we can record. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was the New World holocaust, consisting
of the extermination of indigenous Native American peoples throughout the
western hemisphere, extending over four centuries or more, continuing into recent
times in the Amazon region.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">There were the centuries of heartless
slavery in the Americas and elsewhere, followed by a full century of lynch mob
rule and Jim Crow segregation in the United States, and today the numerous
killings and incarcerations of Black youth by law enforcement agencies. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Let us not forget the
extermination of some 200,000 Filipinos by the U.S. military at the beginning
of the twentieth century, the genocidal massacre of 1.5 million Armenians by
the Turks in 1915, and the mass killings of African peoples by the western
colonists, including the 63,000 Herero victims in German Southwest Africa in 1904,
and the brutalization and enslavement of millions in the Belgian Congo from the
late 1880s until emancipation in 1960---followed by years of neocolonial
free-market exploitation and repression in what was Mobutu's Zaire. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">French colonizers killed some
150,000 Algerians. Later on, several million souls perished in Angola and
Mozambique along with an estimated five million in the merciless region now
known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The twentieth century gave us---among
other horrors---more than sixteen million lost and twenty million wounded or
mutilated in World War I, followed by the estimated 62 million to 78 million killed
in World War II, including some 24 million Soviet military personnel and
civilians, 5.8 million European Jews, and taken together: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>several million Serbs, Poles, Roma,
homosexuals, and a score of other nationalities. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">In the decades after World War II,
many, if not most, massacres and wars have been openly or covertly sponsored by
the U.S. national security state. This includes the two million or so left dead
or missing in Vietnam, along with 650,000 Cambodians, 100,000 Laotians, and 58,000
Americans.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Today in much of Africa,
Central Asia, and the Middle East there are "smaller" wars, replete
with atrocities of all sorts. Central America, Colombia, Rwanda and other
places too numerous to list, suffered the massacres and death-squad
exterminations of hundreds of thousands, a constancy of violent horrors. In
Mexico a "war on drugs" has taken 70,000 lives with 8,000 missing. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">There was the slaughter of more
than half a million socialistic or democratic nationalist Indonesians by the
U.S.-supported Indonesian military in 1965, eventually followed by the extermination
of 100,000 East Timorese by that same U.S.-backed military.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Consider the 78-days of NATO's aerial
destruction of Yugoslavia complete with depleted uranium, and the bombings and
invasion of Panama, Grenada, Somalia, Libya, Yemen, Western Pakistan,
Afghanistan, and now the devastating war of attrition brokered against Syria.
And as I write (early 2013), the U.S.-sponsored sanctions against Iran are seeding
severe hardship for the civilian population of that country.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">All the above amounts to a very
incomplete listing of the world's violent and ugly injustice. A comprehensive
inventory would fill volumes.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>How do
we record the<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>countless other life-searing
abuses: the many millions who survive wars and massacres but remain forever broken
in body and spirit, left to a lifetime of suffering and pitiless privation, refugees
without sufficient food or medical supplies or water and sanitation services in
countries like Syria, Haiti, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Mali. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Think of the millions of women
and children around the world and across the centuries who have been<span style="color: red;"> </span>trafficked in unspeakable ways, and the millions upon
millions trapped in exploitative toil, be they slaves, indentured servants, or underpaid
laborers. The number of impoverished is now growing at a faster rate than the
world's population.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Add to that, the
countless acts of repression, incarceration, torture, and other criminal abuses
that beat upon the human spirit throughout the world day by day.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Let us not overlook the ubiquitous
corporate corruption and massive financial swindles, the plundering of natural
resources and industrial poisoning of whole regions, the forceful dislocation
of entire populations, the continuing catastrophes of Chernobyl and Fukushima
and other impending disasters awaiting numerous aging nuclear reactors. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The world's dreadful aberrations
are so commonplace and unrelenting that they lose their edge and we become
inured to the horror of it all. "Who today remembers the Armenians?"
Hitler is quoted as having said while plotting his "final solution"
for the Jews. Who today remembers the Iraqis and the death and destruction done
to them on a grand scale by the U.S. invasion of their lands? William Blum
reminds us that more than half the Iraq population is either dead, wounded,
traumatized, imprisoned, displaced, or exiled, while their environment is
saturated with depleted uranium (from U.S. weaponry) inflicting horrific<span style="color: red;"> </span>birth defects.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">What is to be made of all this?
First, we must not ascribe these aberrations to happenstance, innocent
confusion, and unintended consequences. <span style="color: red;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span>Nor should we believe the usual
rationales about spreading democracy, fighting terrorism, providing humanitarian
rescue, protecting U.S. national interests and other such rallying cries
promulgated by ruling elites and their mouthpieces.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The repetitious patterns of
atrocity and violence are so persistent as to invite the suspicion that they usually
serve real interests; they are structural not incidental.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All this destruction and slaughter has
greatly profited those plutocrats who pursue economic expansion, resource
acquisition, territorial dominion, and financial accumulation. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Ruling interests<span style="color: red;"> </span>are well served by their superiority in firepower and
striking force. Violence is what we are talking about here, not just the wild
and wanton type but the persistent and well-organized kind. As a political
resource, violence is the instrument of ultimate authority. Violence allows for
the conquest of entire lands and the riches they contain, while keeping
displaced laborers and other slaves in harness.<span style="color: red;"></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The plutocratic rulers find it
necessary to misuse or exterminate restive multitudes, to let them starve while
the fruits of their land and the sweat of their labor enrich privileged
coteries. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="color: red;"></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Thus we had a profit-driven imperial
rule that helped precipitate the great famine in northern China, 1876-1879,
resulting in the death of some thirteen million. At about that same time the
Madras famine in India took the lives of as many as twelve million while the
colonial forces grew ever richer. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
thirty years earlier, the great potato famine in Ireland led to about one
million deaths, with another desperate million emigrating from their homeland. Nothing
accidental about this: while the Irish starved, their English landlords
exported shiploads of Irish grain and livestock to England and elsewhere at considerable
profit to themselves. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">These occurrences must be seen
as something more than just historic abnormalities floating aimlessly in time
and space, driven only by overweening impulse or happenstance. It is not enough
to condemn monstrous events and bad times, we also must try to understand them.
They must be contextualized in the larger framework of historical social relations.
<span style="color: red;"></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The dominant socio-economic system
today is free-market capitalism (in all its variations). Along with its unrelenting
imperial terrorism, free-market capitalism provides "normal abnormalities"
from within its own dynamic, creating scarcity and maldistributed excess, filled
with duplication, waste, overproduction, frightening environmental destruction,
and varieties of financial crises, bringing swollen rewards to a select few and
continual hardship to multitudes. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Economic crises are not
exceptional; they are the standing operational mode of the capitalist system. Once
again, the irrational is the norm. Consider U.S. free-market history: after the
American Revolution, there were the debtor rebellions of the late 1780s, the
panic of 1792, the recession of 1809 (lasting several years), the panics of
1819 and 1837, and recessions and crashes through much of the rest of that
century. The serious recession of 1893 continued for more than a decade. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">After the industrial underemployment
of 1900 to 1915 came the agrarian depression of the 1920s---hidden behind what became
known to us as "the Jazz Age," followed by a horrendous crash and the
Great Depression of 1929-1942. All through the twentieth century we had wars,
recessions, inflation, labor struggles, high unemployment---hardly a year that
would be considered "normal" in any pleasant sense. An extended
normal period would itself have been an abnormality. The free market is by
design inherently unstable in every aspect other than wealth accumulation for
the select few.<span style="color: red;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">What we are witnessing is not
an irrational output from a basically rational society but the converse: the "rational"
(to be expected) output of a fundamentally irrational system. Does this mean
these horrors are<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> inescapable</span>?<span style="color: red;"> </span>No, they are not made of supernatural forces. They
are produced by plutocratic greed and deception. <span style="color: red;"></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">So, if the aberrant is the norm
and the horrific is chronic, then we in our fightback should give less
attention to the idiosyncratic and more to the systemic. Wars, massacres and recessions
help to increase capital concentration, monopolize markets and natural
resources, and destroy labor organizations and popular transformative resistance.
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The brutish vagaries of plutocracy
are not the product of particular personalities but of systemic interests. President
George W. Bush was ridiculed for misusing words, but his empire-building and
stripping of government services and regulations revealed a keen devotion to ruling-class
interests. Likewise, President Barack Obama
is not spineless. He is hypocritical but not confused. He is (by his own
description) an erstwhile "liberal Republican," or as I would put it,
a faithful servant of corporate America.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Our various leaders are well
informed, not deluded. They come from different regions and different families,
and have different personalities, yet they pursue pretty much the same policies
on behalf of the same plutocracy. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">So it is not enough to denounce
atrocities and wars, we also must understand who propagates them and who benefits.
We have to ask why violence and deception are constant ingredients. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="color: red;"></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Unintended consequences and
other oddities do arise in worldly affairs but we also must take account of interest-driven
rational intentions. More often than not, the aberrations---be they wars, market
crashes, famines, individual assassinations or mass killings---take shape because
those at the top are pursuing gainful expropriation. Many may suffer and perish
but somebody<span style="color: red;"> </span>somewhere<span style="color: red;"> </span>is
benefiting boundlessly. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Knowing your enemies and what
they are capable of doing is the first step toward effective opposition. The
world becomes less of a horrific puzzlement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We can only resist these global (and local) perpetrators when we see who
they are and what they are doing to us and our sacred environment.<span style="color: red;"></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Democratic victories, however
small and partial they be, must be embraced. But the people must not be
satisfied with tinseled favors offered by smooth leaders. We need to strive in every<span style="color: red;"> </span>way possible for the revolutionary unraveling, a
revolution of organized consciousness striking at the empire's heart with the
full force of democracy, the kind of irresistible upsurge that seems to come
from nowhere while carrying everything before it. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>____________________</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Michael Parenti is the author
of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Face of Imperialism</i> and
numerous other books<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">.</i> For further
information, visit www.michaelparenti.org.</span></div>
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Michael Parentihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03669839134550199120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2997430557994363097.post-26152732344967314762012-10-23T07:26:00.001-07:002012-10-23T07:26:37.855-07:00The Nobel Peace Prize for War by Michael Parenti<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Those who own the wealth of nations take care to downplay the
immensity of their holdings while emphasizing the supposedly benign
features of the socio-economic order over which they preside. With its
regiments of lawmakers and opinion-makers, the ruling hierarchs produce a
never-ending cavalcade of symbols, images, and narratives to disguise
and legitimate the system of exploitative social relations existing
between the 1% and the 99%.<br />
<br />
The
Nobel Peace Prize would seem to play an incidental role in all this.
Given the avalanche of system-sustaining class propaganda and
ideological scenarios dished out to us, the Nobel Peace Prize remains
just a prize. But a most prestigious one it is, enjoying a celebrated
status in its anointment of already notable personages.<br />
<br />
In October 2012, in all apparent seriousness, the Norwegian Nobel
Committee (appointed by the Norwegian Parliament) bestowed the Nobel
Peace Prize upon the European Union (EU). Let me say that again: the
European Union with its 28 member states and 500 million inhabitants was
awarded for having "contributed to the advancement of peace and
reconciliation, democracy, and human rights in Europe." (Norway itself
is not a member of the EU. The Norwegians had the good sense to vote
against joining.)<br />
<br />
Alfred Nobel's will (1895) explicitly states that the peace prize should go "to the <strong><em>person</em></strong>
who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between
nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the
holding and promotion of peace congresses." The EU is not a person and
has not worked for the abolition or reduction of standing armies or
promotion of any kind of peace agenda. If the EU award looked a bit
awkward, the BBC and other mainstream news media came to the rescue,
referring to the "six decades of peace" and "sixty years without war"
that the EU supposedly has achieved. The following day, somebody at the
BBC did the numbers and started proclaiming that the EU had brought "<em>seventy</em>
years of peace on the European continent." What could these wise
pundits possibly be thinking? Originally called the European Economic
Community and formed in 1958, the European Union was established under
its current name in 1993, about twenty years ago.<br />
<br />
The Nobel Committee, the EU recipients, and the western media all
overlooked the 1999 full-scale air war launched on the European
continent against Yugoslavia, a socialist democracy that for the most
part had offered a good life to people of various Slavic
nationalities—as many of them still testify today.<br />
<br />
The EU did not oppose that aggression. In fact, a number of EU
member states, including Germany and France, joined in the 1999 war on
European soil led largely by the United States. For 78 days, U.S. and
other NATO forces bombed Yugoslavian factories, utilities, power
stations, rail systems, bridges, hotels, apartment buildings, schools
and hospitals, killing thousands of civilians, all in the name of a
humanitarian rescue operation, all fueled by unsubstantiated stories of
Serbian "genocide." All this warfare took place on European soil.<br />
<br />
Yugoslavia was shattered, along with its uniquely designed
participatory democracy with its self-management and social ownership
system. In its place emerged a cluster of right-wing mini-republics
wherein everything has been privatized and deregulated, and poverty has
replaced amplitude. Meanwhile rich western corporations are doing quite
well in what was once Yugoslavia.<br />
<br />
Europe aside, EU member states have sent troops to Afghanistan, Iraq,
Libya, and additional locales in Africa, the Middle East, and Central
Asia, usually under the tutorship of the U.S. war machine.<br />
<br />
But what was I to expect? For years I ironically asserted that the
best way to win a Nobel Peace Prize was to wage war or support those who
wage war instead of peace. An overstatement perhaps, but take a look.<br />
<br />
Let's start back in 1931 with an improbable Nobel winner: Nicholas
Murray Butler, president of Columbia University. During World War I,
Butler explicitly forbade all faculty from criticizing the Allied war
against the Central Powers. He equated anti-war sentiments with sedition
and treason. He also claimed that "an educated proletariat is a
constant source of disturbance and danger to any nation." In the 1920s
Butler became an outspoken supporter of Italy's fascist dictator Benito
Mussolini. Some years later he became an admirer of a heavily
militarized Nazi Germany. In 1933, two years after receiving the Nobel
prize, Butler invited the German ambassador to the U.S. to speak at
Columbia in defense of Hitler. He rejected student appeals to cancel the
invitation, claiming it would violate academic freedom.<br />
<br />
Jump ahead to 1973, the year one of the most notorious of war
criminals, Henry Kissinger, received the Nobel Peace Prize. For the
better part of a decade, Kissinger served as Assistant to the President
for National Security Affairs and as U.S. Secretary of State, presiding
over the seemingly endless blood-letting in Indochina and ruthless U.S.
interventions in Central America and elsewhere. From carpet bombing to
death squads, Kissinger was there beating down on those who dared resist
U.S. power. In his writings and pronouncements Kissinger continually
talked about maintaining U.S. military and political influence
throughout the world. If anyone fails to fit Alfred Nobel's description
of a prize winner, it would be Henry Kissinger.<br />
<br />
In 1975 we come to Nobel winner Andrei Sakharov, a darling of the
U.S. press, a Soviet dissident who regularly sang praises to corporate
capitalism. Sakharov lambasted the U.S. peace movement for its
opposition to the Vietnam War. He accused the Soviets of being the sole
culprits behind the arms race and he supported every U.S. armed
intervention abroad as a defense of democracy. Hailed in the west as a
"human rights advocate," Sakharov never had an unkind word for the
horrific human rights violations perpetrated by the fascist regimes of
faithful U.S. client states, including Pinochet's Chile and Suharto's
Indonesia, and he aimed snide remarks at the "peaceniks" who did. He
regularly attacked those in the West who opposed U.S. repressive
military interventions abroad.<br />
<br />
Let us not overlook Mother Teresa. All the western world's media
hailed that crabby lady as a self-sacrificing saint. In fact she was a
mean spirited reactionary who gladly welcomed the destruction of
liberation theology and other progressive developments in the world.
Her "hospitals" and "clinics" were little more than warehouses for the
dying and for those who suffered from curable diseases that went
untreated---eventually leading to death. She waged campaigns against
birth control, divorce, and abortion. She readily hobnobbed with the
rich and reactionary but she was so heavily hyped as a heavenly heroine
that the folks in Oslo just had to give her the big medal in 1979.<br />
<br />
Then there was the Dalai Lama who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
in 1989. For years the Dalai Lama was on the payroll of the CIA, an
agency that has perpetrated killings against rebellious workers,
peasants, students, and others in countries around the world. His eldest
brother played an active role in a CIA-front group. Another brother
established an intelligence operation with the CIA, which included a
CIA-trained guerrilla unit whose recruits parachuted back into Tibet to
foment insurgency. The Dalai Lama was no pacifist. He supported the
U.S./NATO military intervention into Afghanistan, also the 78 days'
bombing of Yugoslavia and the destruction of that country. As for the
years of carnage and destruction wrought by U.S. forces in Iraq, the
Dalai Lama was undecided: "it's too early to say, right or wrong," said
he in 2005. Regarding the violence that members of his sect perpetrated
against a rival sect, he concluded that "if the goal is good then the
method, even if apparently of the violent kind, is permissible." Spoken
like a true Nobel recipient.<br />
<br />
In 2009, in a fit of self parody, the folks in Oslo gave the Nobel
Peace Prize to President Barack Obama while he produced record military
budgets and presided over three or four wars and a number of other
attack operations, followed a couple of years later by additional wars
in Yemen, West Pakistan, Libya, and Syria (with Iran pending). Nobel
winner Obama also proudly hunted down and murdered Osama Bin Laden,
having accused him—without a shred of evidence—of masterminding the 9/11
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.<br />
<br />
You could see that Obama was somewhat surprised—and maybe even
embarrassed—by the award. Here was this young drone commander trying to
show what a tough-guy warrior he was, saluting the flag-draped coffins
one day and attacking other places and peoples the next—acts of violence
in support of the New World Order, certainly every bit worthy of a
Nobel peace medal.<br />
<br />
There are probably other Nobel war hawks and reactionaries to
inspect. I don't pretend to be informed about every prize winner. And
there are a few worthy recipients who come to mind, such as Martin
Luther King, Jr., Linus Pauling, Nelson Mandela, and Dag Hammarskjöld.<br />
<br />
Let us return to the opening point: does the European Union actually
qualify for the prize? Vancouver artist Jennifer Brouse gave me the last
(and best) word: "A Nobel Prize for the EU? That seems like a rather
convenient and resounding endorsement for current cutthroat austerity
measures. First, corporations are people, then money is free speech, now
an organization of nation states designed to thwart national
sovereignty on behalf of ruling class interests receives a prize for
peace. On the other hand, if the EU is a person then it should be
prosecuted for imposing policies leading directly to the violent
repression of peaceful protests, and to the misery and death of its
suffering citizens."<br />
<br />
In sum, the Nobel Peace Prize often has nothing to do with peace and
too much to do with war. It frequently sees "peace" through the eyes of
the western plutocracy. For that reason alone, we should not join in the
applause. <b>- Michael Parenti</b><br />
<br /><a href="http://www.commondreams.org/michael-parenti"></a></div>
Han EunJa 한 은자http://www.blogger.com/profile/13755995421254443930noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2997430557994363097.post-81541839692976121602012-08-05T16:47:00.000-07:002012-08-05T16:47:53.512-07:00Iran and Everything Else by Michael Parenti<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>Iran and Everything Else </b></span> by Michael Parenti <br /><br />Occasionally individuals complain that I fail to address one subject or another. One Berkeley denizen got in my face and announced: “You leftists ought to become aware of the ecological crisis.” In fact, I had written a number of things about the ecological crisis, including one called “Eco-Apocalypse.” His lack of familiarity with my work did not get in the way of his presumption.<br /> Years ago when I spoke before the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in New York , the moderator announced that she could not understand why I had “remained silent” about the attempt to defund UNESCO. Whatever else I might have been struggling with, she was convinced I should have joined with her in trying to save UNESCO (which itself really was a worthy cause). <br /> People give me marching orders all the time. Among the most furiously insistent are those fixed on 9/11. Why haven’t I said anything about 9/11? Why am I “a 9/11 denier.” In fact, I have written about 9/11 and even spoke at two 9/11 conferences (Santa Cruz and New York), raising questions of my own. <br /> Other people have been “disappointed” or “astonished” or “puzzled” that I have failed to pronounce on whatever is the issue du jour. No attention is given by such complainers to my many books, articles, talks, and interviews that treat hundreds of subjects pertaining to political economy, culture, ideology, fascism, communism, capitalism, imperialism, ecology, political protest, history, religion, race, gender, homophobia, and other topics far too numerous to list. (For starters, visit my website: www.michaelparenti.org) <br /> But one’s own energy, no matter how substantial, is always finite. One must allow for a division of labor and cannot hope to fight every fight. <br /> Recently someone asked when was I going to “pay some attention” to Iran. Actually I have spoken about Iran in a number of interviews and talks---not to satisfy demands made by others but because I myself was moved to do so. In the last decade, over a five year period, I was repeatedly interviewed by English Radio Tehran. My concern about Iran goes back many years. Just the other day, while clearing out some old files, I came across a letter I had published over 33 years ago in the <i>New York Times</i> (10 May 1979), reproduced here exactly as it appeared in the <i>Times</i>:<br /><br />To the Editor of the New York Times:<br /><br /><i>For 25 years the Shah of Iran tortured and murdered many thousands of dissident workers, students, peasants and intellectuals. For the most part, the U.S. press ignored these dreadful happenings and portrayed the Shah as a citadel of stability and an enlightened modernizer.<br /> Thousands more were killed by the Shah’s police and military during the popular uprisings of this past year. Yet these casualties received only passing mention even though Iran was front-page news for several months. And from 1953 to 1978 millions of other Iranians suffered the silent oppression of poverty and malnutrition while the Shah, his family, and his generals grew ever richer.<br /> Now the furies of revolution have lashed back, thus far executing about 200 of the Shah’s henchmen—less than what the Savak would arrest and torture on a slow weekend. And now the U.S. press has suddenly become acutely concerned, keeping a careful account of the “victims,” printing photos of firing squads and making repeated references to the “repulsion” and “outrage” felt by anonymous “middle-class” Iranians who apparently are endowed with finer sensibilities than the mass of ordinary people will bore the brunt of the Shah’s repression. At the same time, American commentators are quick to observe that the new regime is merely replacing one repression with another. <br /> So it has always been with the recording of revolutions: the mass of nameless innocents victimized by the </i>ancien régime<i> go uncounted and unnoticed, but when the not-so-innocent murderers are brought to revolutionary justice, the business-owned press is suddenly filled with references to “brutality” and “cruelty.” That anyone could equate the horrors of the Shah’s regime with the ferment, change and struggle that is going on in Iran today is a tribute to the biases of the U.S. press, a press that has learned to treat the atrocities of the U.S.-supported right-wing regimes with benign neglect while casting a stern self-righteous eye on the popular revolutions that challenge such regimes.</i><br /> Michael Parenti<br /> Washington, D.C.<br /> <br /><br />There is one glaring omission in this missive: I focused only on the press without mentioning how the White House and leading members of Congress repeatedly had hailed the Shah as America’s sturdy ally---while U.S. oil companies merrily plundered Iran’s oil (with a good slice of the spoils going to the Shah and his henchmen).<br /> A few years before the 1979 upheaval, I was teaching a graduate course at Cornell University. There I met several Iranian graduate students who spoke with utter rage about the Shah and his U.S.-supported Savak secret police. They told of friends being tortured and disappeared. They could not find enough damning words to vent their fury. These students came from the kind of well-off Persian families one would have expected to support the Shah. (You don’t make it from Tehran to Cornell graduate school without some money in the family.) All I knew about the Shah at that time came from the U.S. mainstream media. But after listening to these students I began to think that this Shah fellow was not the admirably benign leader and modernizer everyone was portraying in the news.<br /> The Shah’s subsequent overthrow in the 1979 revolution was something to celebrate. Unfortunately the revolution soon was betrayed by the theocratic militants who took hold of events and created their Islamic Republic of Iran. These religious reactionaries set about to torture and eradicate thousands of young Iranian radicals. They made war upon secular leftists and “decadent” Western lifestyles, as they set about establishing a grim and corrupt theocracy.<br /> U.S. leaders and media had no critical words about the slaughter of leftist revolutionaries in Iran. If anything, they were quietly pleased. However, they remained hostile toward the Islamic regime. Why so? Regimes that kill revolutionaries and egalitarian reformists do not usually incite displeasure from the White House. If anything, the CIA and the Pentagon and the other imperial operatives who make the world safe for the Fortune 500 look most approvingly upon those who torture and murder Marxists and other leftists. Indeed, such counterrevolutionaries swiftly become the recipients of generous amounts of U.S. aid.<br /> Why then did U.S. leaders denounce and threaten Iran and continue to do so to this day? The answer is: Iran’s Islamic Republic has other features that did not sit well with the western imperialists. Iran was-—and still is---a “dangerously” independent nation, unwilling to become a satellite to the U.S. global empire, unlike more compliant countries. Like Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Iran, with boundless audacity, gave every impression of wanting to use its land, labor, markets, and capital as it saw fit. Like Iraq---and Libya and Syria---Iran was committing the sin of economic nationalism. And like Iraq, Iran remained unwilling to establish cozy relations with Israel. <br /> But this isn’t what we ordinary Americans are told. When talking to us, a different tact is taken by U.S. opinion-makers and policymakers. To strike enough fear into the public, our leaders tell us that, like Iraq, Iran “might” develop weapons of mass destruction. And like Iraq, Iran is lead by people who hate America and want to destroy us and Israel. And like Iraq, Iran “might” develop into a regional power leading other nations in the Middle East down the “Hate America” path. So our leaders conclude for us: it might be necessary to destroy Iran in an all-out aerial war. <br /> It was President George W. Bush who in January 2002 cited Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as an “axis of evil.” Iran exports terrorism and “pursues” weapons of mass destruction. Sooner or later this axis would have to be dealt with in the severest way, Bush insisted.<br /> These official threats and jeremiads are intended to leave us with the impression that Iran is not ruled by “good Muslims.” The “good Muslims”---as defined by the White House and the State Department---are the reactionary extremists and feudal tyrants who ride high in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirate, Bahrain, and other countries that provide the United States with military bases, buy large shipments of U.S. arms, vote as Washington wants in the United Nations, enter free trade agreements with the Western capitalist nations, and propagate a wide-open deregulated free-market economy. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> The “good Muslims” invite the IMF and the western corporations to come in and help themselves to the country’s land, labor, markets, industry, natural resources and anything else the international plutocracy might desire. <br /> Unlike the “good Muslims,” the “bad Muslims” of Iran take an anti-imperialist stance. They try to get out from under the clutches of the U.S. global imperium. For this, Iran may yet pay a heavy price. Think of what has been happening to Iraq, Libya, and now Syria. For its unwillingness to throw itself open to Western corporate pillage, Iran is already being subjected to heavy sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies. Sanctions hurt the ordinary population most of all. Unemployment and poverty increase. The government is unable to maintain human services. The public infrastructure begins to deteriorate and evaporate: privatization by attrition.<br /> Iran has pursued an enriched uranium program, same as any nation has the right to do. The enrichment has been low-level for peaceful use, not the kind necessary for nuclear bombs. Iranian leaders, both secular and theocratic have been explicit about the useless horrors of nuclear weaponry and nuclear war. <br /> Appearing on the Charlie Rose show when he was visiting the USA, Iranian president Ahmadinejad pointed out that nuclear weapons have never saved anyone. The Soviet Union had nuclear weapons; was it saved? he asked. India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons; have they found peace and security? Israel has nuclear weapons: has it found peace and security? And the United States itself has nuclear weapons and nuclear fleets patrolling the world and it seems obsessively preoccupied with being targeted by real or imagined enemies. Ahmadinejad, the wicked one, sounded so much more rational and humane than Hillary Clinton snarling her tough-guy threats at this or that noncompliant nation. <br /> (Parenthetically, we should note that the Iranians possibly might try to develop a nuclear strike force---not to engage in a nuclear war that would destroy Iran but to develop a deterrent against aerial destruction from the west. The Iranians, like the North Koreans, know that the western nuclear powers have never attacked any country that is armed with nuclear weapons.) <br /> I once heard some Russian commentators say that Iran is twice as large as Iraq, both in geography and in population; it would take hundreds of thousands of NATO troops and great cost in casualties and enormous sums of money to invade and try to subdue such a large country, an impossible task and certain disaster for the United States.<br /> But the plan is not to invade, just to destroy the country and its infrastructure through aerial warfare. The U.S. Air Force eagerly announced that it has 10,000 targets in Iran pinpointed for attack and destruction. Yugoslavia is cited as an example of a nation that was destroyed by unanswerable aerial attacks, without the loss of a single U.S. soldier. I saw the destruction in Serbia shortly after the NATO bombings stopped: bridges, utilities, rail depots, factories, schools, television and radio stations, government-built hotels, hospitals, and housing projects---a destruction carried out with utter impunity, all this against a social democracy that refused to submit to a free-market capitalist takeover.<br /> The message is clear. It has already been delivered to Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria, and many other countries around the world: overthrow your reform-minded, independent, communitarian government; become a satellite to the global corporate free-market system, or we will pound you to death and reduce you to a severe level of privatization and poverty.<br /> Not all the U.S. military is of one mind regarding war with Iran. While the Air Force can hardly contain itself, the Army and Navy seem lukewarm. Former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, actually denounced the idea of waging destruction upon “80 million Iranians, all different individuals.” <br /> The future does not look good for Iran. That country is slated for an attack of serious dimensions, supposedly in the name of democracy, “humanitarian war,” the struggle against terrorism, and the need to protect America and Israel from some future nuclear threat.<br /> Sometimes it seems as if U.S. ruling interests perpetrate crimes and deceptions of all sorts with a frequency greater than we can document and expose. So if I don’t write or speak about one or another issue, keep in mind, it may be because I am occupied with other things, or I simply have neither the energy nor the resources. Sometimes too, I think, it is because I get too heavy of heart. <br /></span>Michael Parentihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03669839134550199120noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2997430557994363097.post-22555014349112852242012-06-20T22:18:00.000-07:002012-07-01T02:57:16.284-07:00An Interview with Michael Parenti (Part I & II)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>An Interview with Michael Parenti </b>(Part I)<br /><br /><br />Noted political scientist Michael Parenti was recently interviewed by another noted political scientist, Carl Boggs. The interview originally appeared in the academic journal <b><i>New Political Science,</i></b> June 2012. Here is the first of its two parts.<br /><br /><br />Carl Boggs (CB): <i>Your scholarly work has won extraordinary acclaim, both nationally and internationally, over a period of several decades. All this, despite having been driven out of the political science discipline in the early seventies and, for the most part, having been denied the institutional supports, rewards, and income that most academics – including those on the left – take for granted. Now well into your seventies, you remain as productive as ever. What has been the key to your success?</i><br /><br />Michael Parenti (MP): I want to say “clean living” but no one would believe me. Seriously, the only things I knew how to do in life were write and speak, so I continued doing them. What impelled me onward was the urge to seek truth amidst the lies and obfuscation of ruling interests. My efforts repeatedly drew me into forbidden terrain of a kind that does not lead to tenure. Deprived of a regular university position because of my activism and iconoclastic writings, I dedicated myself to trying to become a public intellectual. At the same time I still maintained links with academia: some of my books are used in courses; I do guest lectures at various schools and have had a few guest teaching invitations over the decades. And believe it or not, I still on rare occasions cobble together an article for books of collected scholarly essays or for academic journals. Financially it has been difficult at times but I have survived so far.<br /><br /><br /><b>CB</b>: <i>Speaking for myself and most other progressives and leftists I have known, the radicalizing process we underwent usually came in our adult years. What was the source of your departure from established norms and conventional politics? And when in your life did it happen?</i><br /><br /><b>MP</b>: No instant red diaper blooming for me. As a schoolboy I occasionally read about political events in the New York Daily News and other such rags. For a brief spell as a teenager in high school, I considered myself a Republican (don’t ask). By college I was an activist for the Liberal Party in New York City. At that time the civil rights struggle really gripped me. The injustice of Jim Crow racism was so compellingly clear. I think I moved leftward because I love justice more than anything else, more than beauty or love or happiness itself. Still there were lapses. The most apolitical period of my adult life was the three years or so at Yale University getting my Ph.D. in political science, or as it might be better called “apolitical science.” Finally it was the Vietnam War that took me from a pale liberalism to a real radicalism. I began questioning the war, then I questioned the leaders who produced the war, and then the system that produced the leaders. At first I thought the war was an irrational venture, a tragic mistake. Eventually I concluded that the war was quite rational, a tragic success (or at least partial success) serving global corporate interests. At that point I started moving from a liberal complaint about how bad things are to a radical analysis about why they are the way they are. <br /><br /><b>CB</b>: </span><i><span style="font-size: large;">You were one of the founders of the Caucus for a New
Political Science during the late 1960s. At the height of New-Left
radicalism, the Caucus was motivated by the hope that the discipline
could be strongly influenced by a building wave of progressive
scholarship and activism – and pushed significantly leftward. Viewing
the trajectory of the discipline, what is your present reflection on
those original Caucus goals</span></i><span style="font-size: large;"><i>?</i><br /><br /><b>MP</b>: The Caucus goals are still as worthy as ever, and still not completely fulfilled: venturing into forbidden areas, research that is critical, comprehensible, and relevant to political struggle and history. It was unimaginable back in 1967 that almost a half-century later things in the profession would be pretty much the same. Today we have the same suffocating centrist ideology making false claim to objectivity. Today mainstream political scientists still debate the same tired questions about methodological rigor and paradigmatic shifts. How come? Well, the centrists and conservatives still control the boards of trustees; they still control the administrations, research funds, think tanks and scholarly journals, along with recruitment, promotion and tenure; in short, all the means to reproduce the conditions of their own hegemony---in the continued pursuit of apolitical science. <br />Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s I recall case after case of radical scholars and teachers being let go. Generally speaking, politically safe mainstream academics had---and still have---smoother and more prestigious career paths than those who work from a critical perspective, although it’s good to know that numbers of radicals have survived the cut. <br /><br /><br /><b>CB</b>: <i>When we were graduate students a good many years ago debates raged between the “pluralist” school convinced of an exemplary American democracy and “power <br />structure” advocates influenced by the Marxist tradition and the work of such radicals as C. Wright Mills. In a strange paradox, while oligarchic tendencies within American society have intensified across the decades, mainstream political science has embraced pluralism as a nearly sacred, taken-for-granted ideology while critical perspectives remain essentially marginalized. How do we explain this remarkable contradiction?</i><br /><br /><b>MP</b>: The same has happened in economics. In economics departments around the country, Marxism has disappeared---not that it ever had much of a foothold---but so has Keynesianism! Almost all academic economists are now free-marketeers. The ideological right has been seriously active this past half-century, recruiting conservatives for journalism and radio, law school and judgeships, public policy and public office, scholarship and college teaching. The reactionaries understand that people are moved and controlled by words and ideas. Meanwhile the liberals have done little in the way of ideological education except to suppress those to the left of themselves. To this day, liberals and even many “leftist progressives” continue to make war against imaginary hordes of Marxist ideologues while themselves getting regularly whipped by the reactionary right. The Republicans beat the hell out of them and they just keep reaching out, dreaming of bi-partisanship. The liberals and the Democratic Party in general (with some exceptions) resemble the battered spouse in an abusive relationship. <br /><br /><br /><b><i>CB</i></b>: <i> Speaking of oligarchy, the recent Occupy movement has been erected on the premise that corporate and banking elites (the 1%) now rule the country with increasing power and ruthlessness and have scandalously undermined whatever remained of democratic institutions and practices. Looking at this “new populism,” to what extent do you see it as an important political breakthrough – a potentially sustained, radical challenge to the power structure?</i><br /><br /><b>MP</b>: The Occupy movement emerged as a massive and spontaneous political force in hundreds of locales, very heartening for the many who thought they were alone and powerless. The movement propagated a clever shorthand for the class war going on in the United States and elsewhere: the 1% vs. the 99% For decades some of us have been trying to get people to recognize the great (financial) class divide in this society and for that effort we were treated as “extremists” and “Marxist ideologues” by those who wanted no part of class analysis and class conflict (as if they can escape it by declaring it passé). And now suddenly hundreds of thousands of protestors have recognized the great class divide, vividly and succinctly. Even some news commentators now make gingerly references to the 1%. As we speak, however, the Occupy movement is being systematically suppressed by militarized police forces. When popular sentiment rises up, it is maligned, misrepresented, and treated to police violence. <br /><br /><b>CB</b>: <i>Many political observers – including some on the left – see parallels between the Occupy movement and the “populism” of the Tea Party movement. What is your assessment?</i><br /><br /><b>MP</b>: The Tea Party consists of people who take their otherwise legitimate grievances about taxes and services and misdirect them against irrelevant foes. The tea baggers have internalized much of the reactionary Republican ideological scenario---relentlessly fed to them by Fox News and radio talk show propagandists. Their “sacred values” include: boundless support for the military, superpatriotism, an untrammeled corporate capitalism, the right to bomb other countries at will, no separation of church and state, patriarchal family, compulsory pregnancy, drastic cuts in government services, and a lustily applied death penalty. They believe that these “precious values” are under attack by the “cultural elites,” the “hate-America” crowd, the snobby liberals, socialists, egg-head intellectuals, trade unionists, atheists, gays, feminists, minorities, immigrants, and other shadowy demons. The Tea Party is a purveyor of reactionary populism and rightist libertarianism. <br /> In sum, the Tea Party bears little resemblance to the Occupy movement other than that they are both protest movements (even then, only one of them gets beaten up by the cops). Maybe someday we will be able to reach the tea baggers and show them how indeed they really are being victimized. But meanwhile we must not reduce essence to form nor succumb to wishful thinking.<br /><br /><b>CB</b>: <i>You have written quite extensively on questions of American global power and the dynamics of U.S. imperialism going back to World War II and earlier. It has been fashionable, even on the left, to dismiss classical theories of imperialism (such as those, for example, derived from Lenin, Luxemburg, and Hobson or later from Williams and Baran/Sweezy) as outmoded, as dwelling too much on economic factors. How do you view the main sources of U.S. military interventions?</i><br /><br /><b>MP</b>: To say that U.S. global intervention is motivated by economic factors does not mean that resource acquisition is the prime or only factor in the empire’s aggrandizement. The goal of imperialism remains what it has always been, the striving for dominance over others in order to expropriate their land, labor, natural resources, markets, and capital. The complimentary goal is to uproot and destroy any leader, government, or movement that seeks an alternate route (usually a more communitarian or collectivist one) outside the global imperial system. Such people have to learn that their country does not belong to them; it belongs to the imperium and its transnational corporations. <br /> The U.S. empire sees only two kinds of nations beyond its shores: (1) satellites (also called “client states”) that are politically obedient and completely open to foreign expropriation, including our allies who are economically wedded to the western corporate world and who cooperate with Washington on most things; and (2) enemies or potential enemies, countries that pursue independent self-development outside the global free market system, “troublesome” countries like Yugoslavia, Iraq, Cuba, Panama (under Noriega), Haiti (under Aristide), Nicaragua (under the Sandinistas), Libya (under Gaddafi), Venezuela (under Chavez); one could on. <br /> Instead of educating themselves about the economic imperatives of empire, most present-day writers, such as Chalmers Johnson, claim imperialism is all about aggrandizement, power for power’s sake, military bases, and messianic hegemony---as if these things were mutually exclusive of economic imperialism. One central goal of these writers is to avoid any informed discussion of the underlying imperatives of class power in service to class interests. Relatively little is offered on how power (in the hands of the few) is used to accumulate wealth, and how wealth is used to secure power. In one of my books I call them the “ABC theorists,” (Anything But Class). <br /><br /><b>CB</b>: <i>Many contemporary critics of U.S. foreign policy – the work of Chris Hedges and Andrew Bacevich comes quickly to mind – have written that U.S. global power is now in serious decline, that the capacity of Washington to intervene around the globe has been compromised by growing economic weaknesses and a too-ambitious international reach. We have the specter of an increasingly debilitated imperial giant no longer able to pursue its superpower ambitions. What is your response to these critics?</i><br /><br /><b>MP</b>: I would like to think they are correct but there really isn’t all that much evidence that the U.S. empire is tottering. The empire has more numerous and more elaborate bases around the globe than ever before. It has more deliverable destructive power and more reserves of “soft imperialism” than ever before. It has penetrated more markets and resource areas than ever before. It has successfully destroyed leaders and organized movements in scores of countries that have tried to chart a more egalitarian and independent course. The empire has extended its reach around the globe, going from one success to another---along with one or two stalemates as in Afghanistan. Even when the empire suffers defeats, it still might then continue to wax more powerful. Consider the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. Since then the U.S. empire has only grown in power. And every year it is granted a still more gargantuan military budget, now courtesy of President Obama who stands at attention saluting the Pentagon, always ready to serve. <br /> Of course, it’s also true that the empire feeds off the republic. All its expenses are paid by the republic. It feasts from the public trough at great cost to the civilian sector. It’s the republic that is in drastic decline not the empire. But like any parasite, if the empire is too successful and unrestrained in its parasitic feed, it will eventually kill its host and itself. Right now it enjoys a military Keynesianism, a public spending that bolsters (in a warped way) the republic’s economy and Corporate America’s profits. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"> <i><b>An Interview with Michael Parenti </b></i><b>(Part 2)</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"> Michael Parenti interviewed by fellow political scientist Carl Boggs for the academic journal <i><b>New Political Science</b></i>. Part 2 of a two-part posting. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Carl Boggs (CB</b>): <i>In your book </i>To Kill a Nation<i>,
your focus on a multitude of crimes carried out by U.S. and NATO forces
during nearly three months aerial bombardments – preceded by roughly a
decade of economic, political, and military efforts to destroy
Yugoslavia as a unified nation -- .brought widespread outrage from
leftists as well as liberals who uncritically accepted the Western
demonization of Serbs as the party singularly guilty of atrocities
during the long and bloody civil war. My own generally positive review
of your book elicited similar harsh responses. How, in your opinion,
could American progressives normally critical of U.S. interventions
abroad suddenly become so myopic in the case of Yugoslavia?</i><br /><br /><b>Michael Parenti (MP</b>):
Most U.S. leftists want to open toward those to the right of them and
eschew those to their left. Their prime passion seems to be making war
against communism or what they call “Stalinism,” a largely undefined and
rather dated demon. I’m talking about people on the intellectual and
sectarian left, not the Tea Party reactionaries. Many of the
liberal-left saw Milosevic as the last Stalinist in Europe who had to be
done in. So they readily swallowed the mass media’s fabricated stories
about genocidal atrocities allegedly committed by the Serbs. They stood
shoulder to shoulder with NATO, the CIA, the Pentagon, the White House
and mainstream media, the same usual suspects whom they say we should
never trust. They believed every demonizing story fed to them about the
Serbs. To give just one example: they believed that 100,000 people in
Kosovo were slaughtered by the Serbs and that the Trepca mines were
filled with corpses. No such mass graves were found and in the Trepca
shafts not even a shoe or belt buckle was found. Actually the Serbs
were the ones who had the largest multi-ethnic populations in their
republic, including Croats, Albanians, and Slovenians; the Serbs were
not indulging in ethnic cleansing and certainly not genocide. The
Kosovars fleeing south during the war openly exclaimed that they were
running from the NATO bombings not from a Serbian Juggernaut. I have all
the sources and citations in To Kill a Nation, almost all of them
western sources including ones from the United Nations and even NATO.<br />
But it is a familiar scenario: U.S. leaders demonize the targeted
leader, in this case the democratically elected Milosevic, and this
gives them license to bomb his people---with depleted uranium no less.
In my book The Face of Imperialism I call it “Privatization by Bombing.”
I was in Serbia a few weeks after the 78 days of bombing and noted
that only government-owned and worker-owned factories, utilities, hotels
and the like were bombed. The privately owned Hilton Hotel and other
private companies had not a scratch.<br /> What is unusual is that
so many lefties got suckered into this “humanitarian war” scenario. As I
say, I think some of them are fighting the ghost of Stalin, possessed
as they are by their knee-jerk anti-communism. The Serbs were targeted
by the U.S. imperialists because they were the biggest ethnic group,
the one most against secession, and with a working class that was more
socialist than in any other of the Yugoslav republics.<br /><br /><b>CB</b>: <i>The
process of globalization is usually presented in mainstream (and
standard political-science) discourse as something of a natural
phenomenon – an inevitable tendency of the world economy toward
heightened integration, transnational communication, prosperity, and (in
some readings) democracy. You have written, in contrast, that
globalization is no inexorable process but rather a conscious, planned
design by multinational corporate interests to expand the realm of
capitalist markets and profits, making it anything but a development
favoring economic prosperity and political democracy. Can you elaborate
on this argument?</i><br /><br /><b>MP</b>: In The Face of Imperialism I
have a chapter dealing with globalization; I take a couple of pages to
criticize those Marxists who seemed unable to grasp what globalization
is. As with the conservatives, many Marxists (but not all) missed the
whole nature of the struggle. They saw globalization only as a process
of expanding investment—which Marx and Engels described long ago, so why
the fuss. But those of us who actually knew something about the free
trade agenda---including farmers, workers, students, and intellectuals
all over the world---understood that under globilization’s free trade
agreements public services can be ruled out of existence because they
cause “lost market opportunities.” Laws that try to protect the
environment or labor and health standards already have been overturned
in many countries for “creating barriers to free trade.” Globalization
monopolizes production by removing protections for small producers and
farmers who are then undersold and driven out by heavily subsidized
corporations. <br />What is also overthrown is democracy itself, the right
to have laws that are protective of the social wage, human services,
and local economies. Globalization elevates investment rights above all
other rights. Globalization also attempts to monopolize nature itself,
allowing corporations to lay exclusive claim to basic resources of life,
including farm seeds, rice, corn, and even rainwater. It is not free
trade; it is monopoly investment. The results are disastrous for Third
World nations and not good for any of us except the 1%. <br /><br /><b>CB</b>: <i>The
severe economic crisis we have experienced in the U.S. – and the world –
during the past few years is often understood as either a temporary
downturn or a cyclical adjustment within an otherwise healthy, dynamic
growth-oriented “market” system. After all, previous crises have
typically been followed by sustained phases of development. Is there
something qualitatively novel, more deeply structural and long-term,
about the present crisis? </i><br /><br /><b>MP</b>: Recessions are
difficult and painful for us but not such a bad thing for Corporate
America. Recession allows giant firms to more easily swallow up smaller
ones (or other giants) thereby increasing oligopolistic concentration
and diminishing competition. Profits keep flowing in while corporate tax
rates remain lighter than ever (as even the Wall St. Journal recently
reported). Recession also tames or totally defeats labor unions. And
the general public learns humility too. The 1% does not want a public
that is well educated and well informed, free of debt, able to organize
and make demands, directed by a strong sense of entitlement and high
expectations, advocating not-for-profit social programs and services.
Recessions often teach the working public to stay in its lowly place and
work harder and harder for less and less. Crisis, panic, recession, and
poverty are the common conditions of free-market capitalism not the
rare exception. Take a look around the world at (to name just a few)
capitalist Nigeria, capitalist Indonesia, capitalist Hungary, capitalist
Bosnia, capitalist Haiti, capitalist Honduras, and soon-to-be
capitalist Libya. <br />But capitalism is also a self-devouring beast. One
function of the capitalist state seldom mentioned, even by Marxists, is
to protect capitalism from the capitalists. If the 1% become too
successful in their frenzied pursuit of profits and their furious
determination to roll back all regulations and restraints, they may well
destroy their own system. The plutocrats will plunder everything and
everyone in sight, including other capitalists. Toss the global
ecological crisis into this witch’s brew and we may well be headed
toward monumental disaster. In the middle of it all we have a president
who keeps jacking up the military budget and is now spending billions to
build the first new (and utterly dangerous) nuclear plant in decades,
announcing proudly “I believe in nuclear power.” <br /><br /><b>CB</b>: <i>You
have written, in your book Contrary Notions, that “the important
legitimating symbols of our culture are mediated through a social
structure that is largely controlled by centralized, moneyed
organizations. This is especially true of our information universe
whose mass market is pretty much monopolized by corporate-owned media.”
This offers a rather monolithic view of media culture in the U.S. Do
you see any signs, or sources, of fissures in this system – of a break
from the hegemonic order?</i><br /><br /><b>MP</b>: The corporate owned mass
media are not as perfectly reactionary as media owners might want. All
sorts of information can be found buried in the back pages of the New
York Times, Wall St. Journal, and other mainstream publications---or
even stuck right in the headlines. Some of it can be quite revelatory,
if you know how to connect the dots. Troublesome events peek through the
haze: recession, poverty, enormous public debt, horrific military
interventions, corrupt lawmakers, thieving financiers, renditions and
torture, unprecedented natural disasters---but these are not things we
lefties inventively pull out of our radical hats. They really exist.
Reality is radical. Often the media have to report something about
these unpleasant realities, and when they do, this convinces the moneyed
reactionaries that there exists a “biased liberal media” that tries to
make capitalist society look bad. <br /> As for “fissures” in the
communication universe, well, there do exist a few hundred non-profit
community and campus radio stations that occasionally allow a dissident
voice on the air. I do about 35 radio interviews a year on small
stations all around the country that broadcast to very small listening
audiences. There also are a few under-financed tiny circulation
magazines that offer some leftist perspectives. And then there is the
Internet which has the defects of its own virtues, with websites and
blogs that extend across the entire political spectrum, and hundreds of
self-appointed columnists and commentators of all political hues. <br />
Still the moneyed class and its acolytes control almost the entire
communication universe. Getting heard by larger publics is an uphill
battle if you have no access to major media. I speak from direct
experience. I usually get over 100,000 hits a month on my website, while
Glenn Beck gets millions of hits and has many millions of viewers and
listeners (and makes millions of dollars). Can he really be that much
more intelligent and informed than the rest of us? Or is he just more
ideologically correct and therefore better marketed by superrich
interests? So the Internet has provided an outlet but---given the way
moneyed resources are distributed---it is difficult to create a level
playing field.<br /><br /><br /><b>CB</b>: I<i>n your book </i>God and His Demons<i>
you write: “God’s wonders never work more mysteriously – and
deleteriously – than in the propagation of religion itself. Religion is
widely credited with being the great progenitor of moral virtues, but
looking at the actualities of history we cannot help noticing how
frequently religions have served as instruments for promoting
intolerance, autocracy, and atrocity.” To what extent has this kind
of religious dogmatism influenced the contemporary rightward shift in
American politics, in which Christian fundamentalists (among others)
seem fully possessed of a combination of righteous moralism, nationalist
xenophobia, and political authoritarianism?</i><br /><br /><b>MP</b>: As I note in <b><i>God and His Demons</i></b>,
many fundamentalist groups are completely hostile toward “godless”
secular democracy; they are uncompromising totalitarian theocrats and
openly say as much. They are dedicated to infiltrating the various
institutions of this country. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
About 25 years ago I was invited to speak at the U.S. Air Force
Academy. The Academy’s political science department was using my
textbook, <b><i>Democracy for the Few</i></b>. No kidding. I had an
interesting time and made some nice friends. But today I would not be
allowed through the gate. The Academy has been taken over by Protestant
fundamentalists as has other military centers and bases throughout the
armed forces. More generally, the fundamentalist worshippers have
played an active role injecting theocratic values into political
discourse, especially with such receptive reactionary presidents as
Reagan and George W.<br /> The clearest case of theocratic intrusion
into secular politics was Pope John Paul II’s destruction of liberation
theology throughout Latin America, a CIA sponsored suppression that
needs more revelation than the few pages I gave it in my book. And of
course there is a circular effect. The secular reactionaries fund the
fundamentalists in whatever ways they can and even appoint some of them
to public office. So church impacts upon state and state bolsters the
church, all in a mutually reactionary direction, a marriage made in
heaven---or more likely somewhere else. <br /><br /><b> CB</b>: <i>Returning
to the Occupy movement and its many offshoots, can we find cause for
optimism here at a time when our experience with other contemporary
social movements has been somewhat less than positive. Popular
insurgencies rooted in global justice, antiwar politics (Iraq), and
immigration rights, for example, have generally stalled and failed to
achieve much political articulation or durability. Might one identify
something entirely different about this new insurgency – different
enough to justify renewed optimism for the future?</i><br /><br /><b>MP</b>:
That’s a crystal ball question. Who can say? I would qualify what I
said earlier about the imperium. It is horribly powerful but neither
invincible nor omnipotent. There have been victories and changes. In my
lifetime I have seen Jim Crow driven off its pedestal. I have seen a
peace movement that eventually almost paralyzed the U.S. war effort in
Indochina and raised a ferment on the domestic front that shook up our
institutions and our very lives. There have been dramatic gains by
feminists and gays, and now a sudden explosion of class fightback by the
Occupy movement. Uprisings are unpredictable things. Nobody expected
the overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt, not even the Egyptologists and Middle
East specialists. If they did, they certainly kept it to themselves.
Everything may seem hopeless and then suddenly the people find something
in themselves and each other and the democracy is out on the streets. <br />
I guess the best approach is the one offered by Antonio Gramsci who
said we must have “a pessimism of the mind and an optimism of the will.”
That is, we must be able to look at how grim things can get and have no
sunshine illusions about what we face, but we must also keep fighting
as if it made a difference and had an impact---because sometimes it
does. </span></div>Michael Parentihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03669839134550199120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2997430557994363097.post-7819159035434709572012-03-01T12:17:00.004-08:002012-03-01T23:00:31.377-08:00<span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=" font-weight: bold;font-family:georgia;" >Free Market Health Care: True Stories</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > </span><span style="font-family:georgia;">by Michael Parenti</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-family:georgia;">I recently wrote an article about my personal experiences in dealing with the medical system while undergoing surgery (“Free Market Medicine: A Personal Account”). In response, a number of readers sent me accounts of their own experiences trying to get well in America. </span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-family:georgia;">Health care in this country is hailed by conservative boosters as “the best medical system in the world.” It certainly is the most expensive, most profitable, and most complicated system in the world, leaving millions of Americans in shock. None of the people who wrote to me had anything positive to say about the U.S. health system. Below are some of the responses to my article. (Several of the senders requested that their real names not be used). </span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">~ </span>This first email, in a few words, contains one of the more familiar stories:</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > “In the mid-90s I had an attack of sciatica while visiting my wife's daughter in the Bay Area. I went to Alta Bates Emergency. After I waited three hours, a doctor stopped by, saw me for two minutes, gave me a pain prescription & sent me home.</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > “ Total bill was over $1,000.”</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > ---John Steinbach</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">~ </span>Price gouging is the name of the game:</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > “I had a kidney stone which was causing me great pain. I drove myself to the emergency ward where I was told the kidney stone was so large that it had to be ‘shattered.’ I spent one night in the hospital. The operation was performed early the next morning. My family had to come pick me up which they did by noon that same day. I wasn’t even in the hospital for 24 hours. Imagine my shock when the bill came. It was $57,000, not including the doctor’s bill! I actually thought it was a typo. I thought they had put the comma in the wrong place.</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > “Blue Cross paid it, except for $2,500 which I had to pay. Then Blue Cross promptly dumped me.” </span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > ---Angel Ewing </span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-family:georgia;">~ In my original article, I did not have much to say about pharmaceutical costs, but this next reader does:</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > “Medicare cannot negotiate drug prices, which means that the one Rx I take costs over $700 every three months, of which I pay $90 until I reach the ‘doughnut hole,’ which happens with just this one drug. When I first started on this medication, the cost was about $350, so it has doubled in just three years. No improvements, it's the same exact drug and there are no generics. The only change is the higher price!</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > “ Speaking of higher prices, I just renewed my prescription and the three month cost has increased again, from $718 to $781. My doctor at Kaiser said that should I get into the ‘doughnut hole’ she would give me a prescription I can use at a Canadian pharmacy. It's crazy that even with a drug coverage plan, I'll eventually have to buy from a Canadian pharmacy!”</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > ---Joan Leslie Taylor</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><br style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">~</span> Another subject deserving of more attention, iatrogenic disaster</span><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" >:</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > “The U.S. medical/hospital/industrial system as it has developed is horrifying to me. I went through the hospital and nursing home process with my late parents in the 90s up through 2000 when my mother died from an infection from an antibiotic resistant strain of bacteria, Mercer, caught in the hospital.</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > “At least you were not subject to staying overnight and having to endure a hospital food system which is criminally poor in nutritional value. . . . Plus the added risk of infection.”</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > ---Dennis Goldstein</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><br style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">~ </span>Here is another reported tragic mishap</span><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" >:</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > “When the nurses went on strike at Alta Bates, a friend of mine was being treated for her uterine cancer, which was finally in remission. The replacement nurse misdiagnosed the treatment and connected a tube in an erroneous way. My friend tragically died from the mishap. Such a sweet, wonderful person taken by medical error.</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > “So, my friend, you were basically lucky that you got out with your life. [My wife] recently had a small procedure and she is still getting bills from the treatment - six months later. In other words, you are right, be prepared for the other shoe to drop.”</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > ---Roberto Ronaldi</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">~</span> Medical care in America for the longest time has been all about owing, billing, and paying. This letter deals with events from fifteen years ago. (The writer is herself an M.D. who is on disability):</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > “I have had my own disastrous hospitalization. In 1997, I had private insurance that left a lot unpaid. The hospital ate some of the uncovered costs as a one time only concession, but the "extras" (anesthesiologist, radiologists, etc.) insisted on full payment. I went over the supplies billing and was shocked at the repetitions and also waste. . . .</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > “ At that time almost all my income from Workman’s Comp went to pay my insurance coverage. Within a couple of years I was unable to continue to afford being insured due to pre-existing conditions. </span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > “The whole thing was so traumatic, I couldn't even write about it, though I wanted to! And I signed myself out a day early because I felt unsafe due to the many errors of omission or neglect made in my 3 days there. </span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > “A problem which I could not prove was surgical or due to post-op neglect left me with one-and-a-half years of rehab, a limp, and continued hip pain which, by the way, was not the area that was to be addressed by the surgery-- it was my neck! But they took some bone from my hip to fix the neck... and apparently, the hip ended up being less well connected to the rest of me afterwards. And that was Free Market Medicine and Worker's protection health benefits 15 years ago.” </span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > ---Deb Rosen</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">~</span> Among the hardest hit are the homeless. Here is a report from the field, from someone who works for Task Force for the Homeless:</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > “Every day we ‘house’ 500-700 homeless Atlantans [Georgia], who are men, mostly. We distribute mail daily as well, and the bulk of the mail is hospital bills from our former ‘charity’ hospital which is now a private hospital. Homeless men who owe that hospital for treatment are often denied jobs and housing because of their credit problems. We are in the process of fighting those bills. All too often, our friends don't even seek treatment because they know they cannot pay. The prescriptions at that same hospital cost $10 each, and so people who take more than one medication often go without, as in the case of one man who has heart failure [and needed] life-saving medication.”</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > ---Anita Beaty</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">~</span> A reader offers a look at the Swiss system:</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > “Last year I had four eye surgeries and breast cancer and the maximum I paid was 7000 CHF for it all. I had to fight to get out of the hospital after five days because they wanted to make absolutely sure I had no problem with drainage. I was able to walk out (no wheelchairs). A portion of my insurance payment does go to cover people who can't afford insurance. I'm fine with that.</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > “I had a team that still keeps tabs on me and a lead nurse who is there 24/7 (she does have off time with a substitute who is there for whatever I need.).</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > “No way would I ever live in the US again. It's too cruel. I do carry insurance that if I were in the US and I get sick, I get air ‘freighted’ back to a civilized society.”</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > ---Dora Philips</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" ><span style="font-weight: bold;">~</span> </span><span style="font-family:georgia;">From a friend in Canada</span><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" >:</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > “I am just appalled reading your account---although our Conservative government is trying very hard to destroy our cherished health care system these days. But to give you a personal example, my husband just had a total hip replacement and is due for another one this summer. Five years ago he had a serious bowel operation which required a nine day stay at the hospital.</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > “ NO bills were sent to us for either of these operations. It is all included in our health care system OHIP for Ontario. Ontario Health Insurance Plan.</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > “The only cost this time is for buying a commode chair, a bath bench and a walker ( which we could have rented). And we will be able to deduct these expenses on our income taxes. We also have a $100.oo deductible yearly for our medications so it cost us about $6 to $8 for each prescription.</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > ---Madeleine Gilchrist</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">~</span> From another friend in Canada; after giving a detailed account of the excellent free treatment accorded her mother, she added:</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"></span><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;font-size:130%;" > “Far too many Americans accept an utterly depraved and bizarre system of health-care-for-profit. The health system in the USA is an aberration. Many Americans have been led to think that we Canadians pay a fortune for our health care in taxes. But Americans already pay more per capita in taxes for health care (that most of you don't receive) than do Canadians. We get full, FREE coverage, no questions asked.<br /> “Our system is under attack by the Conservatives. But so far, only free prescription drugs have been taken away from my Mum's coverage. She now pays about 20% of the cost of her heart medications. Until about a decade ago they were totally free of charge.<br /> “Meanwhile, my fellow Canadians are being lied to, and many are being hoodwinked. They look at the TV commercials for American for-profit health care, and listen to Fox television and its Canadian counterpart, Sun television, and the ranting of Prime Minister Steven Harper, and conclude that we have an inferior system.”</span><span style="font-size:130%;"><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > ---Amanda Bellerby</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">~</span> These observations from a friend in England</span><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" >:</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > "I just read your article - a lot of it left me speechless. Some I am not surprised by; my friends in California have told me about their own horror stories when it comes to accessing health care. The National Health Service [in the U.K.] is far from perfect but we had peace of mind when a family friend had surgery recently and was taken to and from the hospital by mini-bus—so different from your experience. . . . </span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > I noticed when interviewing some of my refugee/asylum seeking clients that a huge percentage of them are given anti-depressants. Doctors readily hand out prescription drugs rather than referring to other services (which are more costly). I can now easily spot when someone is taking them as their memory is often bad and they have delayed responses to my questions. One man I was talking to the other day from Zimbabwe has been taking anti-depressants for seven years and was prescribed them after just one meeting with his doctor. We used to have an NHS service in Nottingham where I live called Health In Mind who were great with supporting refugees suffering post-traumatic stress, but it's been scrapped now. Companies who supply anti-depressants must be making a fortune here.</span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" > ---Sharon Walia </span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-family:georgia;">In sum, readers found the conditions I described in my earlier article to be quite unsettling. But the above comments indicate that many people in the USA have a story of their own to tell about the heartless medical industry. And people abroad make clear to us that their “socialized” medical systems are more humane and less cruel than ours---even if they too sometimes suffer from faulty practices. </span><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-family:georgia;">T</span><span style="font-family:georgia;">he corporate goal in the United States and elsewhere is to treat medical care not as a human right but as a market-determined profit-driven service. We should unequivocally demand socialized medicine, that is, a publicly funded and publicly administered system whose purpose is human care rather than profit accumulation. It will cost so much less and serve us so much better.</span><br face="georgia" style=" font-style: italic;"><br />------------------------<br style=" font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-family:georgia;">Michael Parenti’s most recent book is </span><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family:georgia;" >The Face of Imperialism</span><span style="font-family:georgia;"> (2011). For more information about his work, see his website: www.michaelparenti.org, and the Michael Parenti Blog.</span><br style="font-family: georgia; font-style: italic;"><br style="font-family: georgia; font-style: italic;"></span>Michael Parentihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03669839134550199120noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2997430557994363097.post-43156987273196315362012-01-23T18:25:00.000-08:002012-01-27T11:04:37.075-08:00Free-Market Medicine--A Personal Account by Michael Parenti<span style="font-size: 130%;"><span style="font-size: 180%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Free-Market Medicine—A Personal Account</span> </span><br />
by Michael Parenti <span style="font-weight: bold;"></span><br />
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When I recently went to Alta Bates hospital for surgery, I discovered that legal procedures take precedence over medical ones. I had to sign intimidating statements about financial counseling, indemnity, patient responsibilities, consent to treatment, use of electronic technologies, and the like.<br />
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One of these documents committed me to the following: “The hospital pathologist is hereby authorized to use his/her discretion in disposing of any member, organ, or other tissue removed from my person during the procedure.” <span style="font-style: italic;">Any member</span>? <span style="font-style: italic;">Any organ</span>?<br />
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The next day I returned for the actual operation. While playing Frank Sinatra recordings, the surgeon went to work cutting open several layers of my abdomen in order to secure my intestines with a permanent mesh implant. Afterward I spent two hours in the recovery room. “I feel like I’ve been in a knife fight,” I told one nurse. “It’s called surgery,” she explained.<br />
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Then, while still pumped up with anesthetics and medications, I was rolled out into the street. The street? Yes, some few hours after surgery they send you home. In countries that have socialized medicine (there I said it), a van might be waiting with trained personnel to help you to your abode.<br />
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Not so in free-market America. Your presurgery agreement specifies in boldface that you must have “a responsible adult acquaintance” (as opposed to an irresponsible teenage stranger) take you home in a private vehicle. I kept thinking, what happens to those unfortunates who have no one to bundle them away? Do they languish endlessly in the hospital driveway until the nasty weather finishes them off?<br />
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You are not allowed to call a taxi. Were a taxi driver to cause you any harm, you could hold the hospital legally responsible. Again it’s a matter of liability and lawyers, not health and doctors.<br />
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One of the two friends who helped me up the steps to my house then went off to Walgreen’s to buy the powerful antibiotics I had to take every four hours for two days. I dislike how antibiotics destroy the “good bacteria” that our bodies produce, and how they help create dangerous strains of super-resistant bacteria. I kept thinking of a recent finding: excessive reliance on medical drugs kills more Americans than all illegal narcotics combined.<br />
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So why did I have to take antibiotics? Because, as everyone kept telling me, hospitals are seriously unsafe places overrun with Staph infections and other super bugs. It’s a matter of self-protection.<br />
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Two days after surgery I noticed a dark red discoloration on my lower abdomen indicating internal bleeding. I was supposed to get a follow-up call from a nurse who would check on how I was doing. But the call might never come because the staff was planning a walkout. “We have no contract,” one of them had told me when I was in the recovery room. So now the nurses are on strike---and I’m left on my own to divine what my internal bleeding is all about. What fun.<br />
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Fortunately, it didn’t turn out that way. A nurse did call me despite the walkout. Yes, she said, it was internal bleeding, but it was to be expected. My surgeon called later in the day to confirm this opinion. Death was not yet knocking.<br />
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A few days later, there were massive nurses strikes on both coasts. Among other things, the nurses were complaining about “being disrespected by a corporate hospital culture that demands sacrifices from patients and those who provide their care, but pays executives millions of dollars.” (<span style="font-style: italic;">New York Times</span>, 16 December 2011). One cold-blooded management negotiator was quoted as saying, “We have the money. We just don’t have the will to give it to you” (ibid.).<br />
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As for the doctors, both my surgeon and my general practitioner (GP) are among the victims, not the perpetrators, of today’s corporate medical system. My GP explained that it is an endless fight to get insurance companies to pay for services they supposedly cover. Feeling less like a doctor and more like a bill collector, my GP found he could no longer engage in endless telephone struggles with insurance companies.<br />
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There are 1,500 medical insurance companies in America, all madly dedicated to maximizing profits by increasing premiums and withholding payments. The medical industry in toto is the nation’s largest and most profitable business, with an annual health bill of about $1 trillion.<br />
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Along with the giant insurance and giant pharmaceutical companies, the greatest profiteers are the Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs), notorious for charging steep monthly payments while underpaying their staffs and requiring their doctors to spend less time with each patient, sometimes even withholding necessary treatment.<br />
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I am without private insurance. And my Medicare goes just so far. Like many other doctors, my GP no longer accepts Medicare. For a number of years now, Medicare payments to physicians have remained relatively unchanged while costs of running a practice (staff, office space, insurance) have steadily increased. So now my GP’s patients have to pay in full upon every visit—which is not always easy to do.<br />
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Our health system mirrors our class system. At the base of the pyramid are the very poor. Many of them suffer through long hours in emergency rooms only to be turned away with a useless or harmful prescription. No wonder “the United States has the worst record among industrialized nations in treating preventable deaths” (Healthcare-NOW! 1 December 2011).<br />
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Too often the very poor get no care at all. They simply die of whatever illness assails them because they cannot afford treatment. An acquaintance of mine told me how her mother died of AIDS because she could not afford the medications that might have kept her alive.<br />
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In Houston I once got talking with a limousine driver, a young African-American man, who remarked that both his parents had died of cancer without ever receiving any treatment. “They just died,” he said with a pain in his voice that I can still hear.<br />
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Living just above the poor in the class pyramid are the embattled middle class. They watch medical coverage disappear while paying out costly amounts to the profit-driven insurance companies. I was able to get surgery at Alta Bates only because I am old enough to have Medicare and have enough disposable income to meet the co-payment.<br />
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For my out-patient operation, the hospital charged Medicare $19,466. Of this, Medicare paid $2,527. And I was billed $644. The hospital then writes off the unpaid balance thus saving considerable sums in taxes (amounting to an indirect subsidy from the rest of us taxpayers). Had I no Medicare coverage, I would have had to pay the entire $19,466.<br />
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I was informed by the hospital that the $19,466 charge covers only hospital costs for equipment, technicians, supplies, and room. So besides the $644, I will have to pay for any pathologists, surgical assistants, and anesthesiologists who performed additional services. I am waiting for the other shoe to drop.<br />
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How much does my surgeon earn? Not much at all. He gets about $400 to $500 for everything, including my pre-op and post-op visits and the surgery itself, an exacting undertaking that requires skills of the highest sort. He also has to maintain insurance, an office, an assistant, and an increasing load of paperwork.<br />
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My surgeon pointed out to me, “If you ask people how much I make on an operation like yours, they will say $4000 to $5000, and be wrong by a factor of ten.” He noted that in a recent speech President Obama criticized a surgeon for charging $30,000 to replace a knee cap. “The surgeon gets a minute fraction of that amount,” my doctor pointed out. <br />
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To make matters worse, there is talk about cutting Medicare payments to physicians by 27 percent. If this happens, it is going to be increasingly difficult to find a surgeon who will take Medicare. Still worse, the private insurance companies will join in squeezing the physicians for still more profits.<br />
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I was able to meet my payment ($644) not only because my operation was heavily subsidized by Medicare but because it was a one-day “ambulatory surgery.” I don’t know how I would fare if I had to undergo prolonged and extremely costly treatment.<br />
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So much for life in the middle class. At the very top of the class pyramid are the 1%, those who don’t have to worry about any of this, the superrich who have money enough for all kinds of state-of-the-art treatments at the very finest therapeutic centers around the world, complete with luxury suites with gourmet menus.<br />
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Among the medically privileged are members of Congress and the U.S. president. They pay nothing. They are treated at top-grade facilities. They enjoy, how shall we put it, <span style="font-style: italic;">socialized medicine</span>. No conservative lawmakers have held fast to their free-market principles by refusing to accept this publicly funded, medical treatment.<br />
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John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, cheerfully announced that medical care is not a human right; it should be “market determined just like food and shelter.” Nobody has a higher opinion of John Mackey than I, and I think he is a greed-driven, union-busting bloodsucker. Nevertheless I will give him credit for candidly admitting his dedication to a dehumanized profit pathology.<br />
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The U.S. medical system costs many times more than what is spent in socialized systems, but it delivers much less in the way of quality care and cure. That’s the way it is intended to be. The goal of any free-market service---be it utilities, housing, transportation, education, or health care---is not to maximize performance but to maximize profits often at the expense of performance.<br />
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If profits are high, then the system is working just fine---for the 1%. But for us 99%, the profit lust is itself the heart of the problem.<br />
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© Michael Parenti, 2011<br />
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Michael Parenti’s recent books include: The Face of Imperialism (2011); God and His Demons ( 2010); Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader (2007); The Assassination of Julius Caesar (2004). For further information, visit: www.MichaelParenti.org.<br />
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</span>Michael Parentihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03669839134550199120noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2997430557994363097.post-22214595930703763332012-01-02T21:20:00.000-08:002012-01-02T21:24:13.272-08:00An Opinon About the Opinion-Makers by Michael Parenti<span style="font-size:130%;">Jill Pletcher and Mary Magnuson (two of my favorite FB people) were speculating as to what might be my opinion of Chris Hedges. I think Hedges makes a valuable contribution. He goes over issues and topics that some of us have dealt with for many years. It is familiar terrain but also nice to have a fresh verve injected into it, the enthusiasm of the recent convert. Plus he brings his own idiom and experience to it.<br /><br />I differ from him in regard to his view (resembling Michael Moore's view) that capitalism "has lost its way." As that argument goes, earlier capitalism was okay but this corporate monster has become something that cannot be countenanced, etc. I agree of course that it is a corporate monster but I also think that earlier capitalism was pretty rotten in its own way: y'know, 8-year-old kids working 14-hour-days, widespread typhoid epidemics, massive underemployment, starvation wages, etc.<br /><br />Perhaps Hedges and Moore are thinking about capitalism after WW II, with the postwar prosperity and "historical compromise" with labor. In that case, their argument is a little more understandable but it still does not hold, since even then the 1% was at war with the 99%, albeit with less of the systematic confidence and brutal persistence displayed today.<br /><br />Also, Jill wrote, "Dr. Michael Parenti would wholeheartedly support Hedges comments on Yugoslavia." That surprised me. In Hedges' early book about war correspondence, as I recall, he supported the destructive war against Yugoslavia which broke that country into a cluster of shattered, right-wing, mini republics where everything is privatized and deregulated and (almost) everyone is poor. Hedges just couldn't stop demonizing the Serbs and Milosevic in that most ill-informed but de rigueur way that does shore up one's legitimacy with the liberal centrists.<br /><br />Maybe Jill is referring to a more recent opinion of Hedges. I hear that some people on the left ,who stood shoulder to shoulder with NATO, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House (Clinton) in delivering death and destruction on Yugoslavia, now are having second thoughts. Maybe Hedges is one of them. I wonder how he stands on Libya.<br /><br />In any case more important than what I think about this or that other left commentator is what do YOU think about what is being said. Fashioning a reasoned argument is always a superior path to political liberation (both mental and collective) than embracing the latest name as the authoritative source. I am happy to say that people like Jill and Mary keep all of us on our toes as they forge ahead, determined to make sense out of the madness.</span>Michael Parentihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03669839134550199120noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2997430557994363097.post-43705244936661110582011-12-18T19:30:00.000-08:002011-12-18T19:34:59.963-08:00Must We Adore Vaclav Havel? by Michael ParentiVaclav Havel died recently and the mainstream media has been filled with adulatory obits. Here is something I wrote about him many years ago. It gives the reader a more substantive view of what Havel really stood for.<br /><br />From Michael Parenti's <span style="font-weight: bold;">Blackshirts and Reds</span> (1997) pp. 97-99:<br /><br /> <span style="font-weight: bold;"> Must We Adore Vaclav Havel?</span> by Michael Parenti<br /><br /> <span style="font-size:130%;"> No figure among the capitalist restorationists in the East has won more adulation from U.S. officials, media pundits, and academics than Vaclav Havel, a playwright who became the first president of post-communist Czechoslovakia and later president of the Czech Republic. The many left-leaning people who also admire Havel seem to have overlooked some things about him: his reactionary religious obscurantism, his undemocratic suppression of leftist opponents, and his profound dedication to economic inequality and unrestrained free-market capitalism.<br /><br /> Raised by governesses and chauffeurs in a wealthy and fervently anticommunist family, Havel denounced democracy's "cult of objectivity and statistical average" and the idea that rational, collective social efforts should be applied to solving the environmental crisis. He called for a new breed of political leader who would rely less on "rational, cognitive thinking," show "humility in the face of the mysterious order of the Being," and "trust in his own subjectivity as his principal link with the subjectivity of the world." Apparently, this new breed of leader would be a superior elitist cogitator, not unlike Plato's philosopher, endowed with a "sense of transcendental responsibility" and "archetypal wisdom." Havel never explained how this transcendent archetypal wisdom would translate into actual policy decisions, and for whose benefit at whose expense.<br /><br /> Havel called for efforts to preserve the Christian family in the Christian nation. Presenting himself as a man of peace and stating that he would never sell arms to oppressive regimes, he sold weapons to the Philippines and the fascist regime in Thailand. In June 1994, General Pinochet, the man who butchered Chilean democracy, was reported to be arms shopping in Czechoslovakia - with no audible objections from Havel.<br /><br /> Havel joined wholeheartedly in George Bush's Gulf War, an enterprise that killed over 100,000 Iraqi civilians. In 1991, along with other [e]astern European pro-capitalist leaders, Havel voted with the United States to condemn human rights violations in Cuba. But he has never uttered a word of condemnation of rights violations in El Salvador, Columbia, Indonesia, or any other U.S. client state.<br /><br /> In 1992, while president of Czechoslovakia, Havel, the great democrat, demanded that parliament be suspended and he be allowed to rule by edict, the better to ram through free-market "reforms." That same year, he signed a law that made the advocacy of communism a felony with a penalty of up to eight years imprisonment. He claimed the Czech constitution required him to sign it. In fact, as he knew, the law violated the Charter of Human Rights which is incorporated into the Czech constitution. In any case, it did not require his signature to become law. in 1995, he supported and signed another undemocratic law barring communists and former communists from employment in public agencies.<br /><br /> The propagation of anticommunism has remained a top priority for Havel. He led "a frantic international campaign" to keep in operation two U.S.-financed, cold war radio stations, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, so they could continue saturating Eastern Europe with their anticommunist propaganda.<br /><br /> Under Havel's government, a law was passed making it a crime to propagate national, religious, and CLASS hatred. In effect, criticisms of big moneyed interests were now illegal, being unjustifiably lumped with ethnic and religious bigotry. Havel's government warned labor unions not to involve themselves in politics. Some militant unions had their property taken from them and handed over to compliant company unions.<br /><br /> In 1995, Havel announced that the 'revolution' against communism would not be complete until everything was privatized. Havel's government liquidated the properties of the Socialist Union of Youth - which included camp sites, recreation halls, and cultural and scientific facilities for children - putting the properties under the management of five joint stock companies, at the expense of the youth who were left to roam the streets.<br /><br /> Under Czech privatization and "restitution" programs, factories, shops, estates, homes, and much of the public land was sold at bargain prices to foreign and domestic capitalists. In the Czech and Slovak republics, former aristocrats or their heirs were being given back all lands their families had held before 1918 under the Austro-Hungarian empire, dispossessing the previous occupants and sending many of them into destitution. Havel himself took personal ownership of public properties that had belonged to his family forty years before.<br /><br /> While presenting himself as a man dedicated to doing good for others, he did well for himself. For all these reasons some of us do not have warm fuzzy feelings toward Vaclav Havel.<br /><br />-- Michael Parenti<br /><br /><br /></span>Michael Parentihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03669839134550199120noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2997430557994363097.post-56377064148870164492011-11-08T23:06:00.000-08:002011-11-13T14:23:40.450-08:00Occupy America by Michael Parenti<span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Occupy America</span> by </span><span style="font-size:130%;">Michael Parenti<br /><br /><br />Beginning with Occupy Wall Street in September 2011, a protest movement spread across the United States to 70 major cities and hundreds of other communities. Similar actions emerged in scores of other nations.<br /><br />For the first two weeks, the corporate-owned mainstream media along with NPR did what they usually do with progressive protests: they ignored them. These were the same media that had given the Tea Party supporters saturation coverage for weeks on end, ordaining them “a major political force.”<br /><br />The most common and effective mode of news repression is <span style="font-style: italic;">omission</span>. By saying nothing or next to nothing about dissenting events, movements, candidates, or incidents, the media consign them to oblivion. When the Occupy movement spread across the country and could no longer be ignored, the media moved to the second manipulative method: <span style="font-style: italic;">trivialization</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">marginalization</span>.<br /><br />So we heard that the protestors were unclear about what they were protesting and they were “far removed from the mainstream.” Media cameras focused on the clown who danced on Wall Street in full-blown circus costume and the youths who pounded bongo drums: “a carnival atmosphere” “youngsters out on a spree,” with “no connection to the millions of middle Americans” who supposedly watched with puzzlement and alarm.<br /><br />Such coverage, again, was in sharp contrast to the respectful reportage accorded the Tea Party. House Majority Leader, the reactionary Republican Eric Cantor, described the Occupy movement as “growing mobs.” This is the same Cantor who hailed the Tea Party as an unexcelled affirmation of democracy.<br /><br />The big November 2 demonstration in Oakland that succeeded in closing the port was reported by many media outlets, almost all of whom focused on the violence against property committed by a few small groups. Many of those perpetrators were appearing for the first time at the Oakland site. Some were suspected of being undercover police provocateurs. Their actions seemed timed to overshadow the successful shutdown of the nation’s fifth largest port.<br /><br />Time and again, the media made the protestors the issue rather than the things they were protesting. The occupiers were falsely described as hippie holdovers and mindless youthful activists. In fact, there was a wide range of ages, socio-ethnic backgrounds, and lifestyles, from homeless to well-paid professionals, along with substantial numbers of labor union members. Far from being a jumble of confused loudmouths prone to violence, they held general assemblies, organized themselves into committees, and systematically took care of encampment questions, food, security, and sanitation.<br /><br />One unnoticed community protest was Occupy Walnut Creek. For those who don’t know, Walnut Creek is a comfortable conservative suburb in northern California (with no known record of revolutionary insurrections). Only one local TV station gave Occupy Walnut Creek brief attention, noting that about 400 people were participating, average age between 40 and 50, no clowns, no bongos. Participants admitted that they lived fairly prosperous lives but still felt a kinship with the millions of Americans who were enduring an economic battering. Here was a contingent of affluent but rebellious “middle Americans” yet Walnut Creek never got mentioned in the national media, as far as I know. <br /><br />The Occupy movement has promulgated a variety of messages. With a daring plunge into class realities, the occupiers talk of the 1% who are exploiting the 99%, a brilliant propaganda formula, simple to use, yet saying so much, now widely embraced even by some media commentators. The protestors carried signs condemning the republic’s terrible underemployment and the empire’s endless wars, the environmental abuses perpetrated by giant corporations, the tax loopholes enjoyed by oil companies, the growing inequality of incomes, and the banksters and other gangsters who feed so lavishly from the public trough.<br /><br />Some occupiers even denounced capitalism as a system and hailed socialism as a humane alternative. In all, the Occupy movement revealed an awareness of systemic politico-economic injustices not usually seen in U.S. protests. Remember, the initial and prime target was Wall Street, finance capital’s home base.<br /><br />The mainstream news outlets not only control opinions but even more so opinion visibility, which in turn allows them to limit the parameters of public discourse. This makes it all the more imperative for ordinary people to join together in demonstrations, hoping thereby to maximize the visibility and impact of their opinions. The goal is to break through the near monopoly of conservative orthodoxy maintained by the “liberal” media.<br /><br />So demonstrations are important. They have an energizing effect on would-be protestors, bringing together many who previously had thought themselves alone and voiceless. Demonstrations bring democracy into the streets. They highlight issues that have too long been buried. They mobilize numbers, giving a show of strength, reminding the plutocracy perched at the apex that the pyramid is rumbling.<br /><br />But demonstrations should evolve into other forms of action. This has already been happening with the Occupy movement. It is more than a demonstration because its protestors did not go home at the end of the day. In substantial numbers they remained downtown, putting their bodies on the line, imposing a discomfort on officialdom just by their numbers and presence.<br /><br />At a number of Occupy sites there have been civil disobedience actions, followed by arrests. In various cities the police have been unleashed with violent results that sometimes have backfired. In Oakland ex-Marine Scott Olsen was hit by a police teargas canister that busted his skull and left him hospitalized and unable to speak for a week. At best, he faces a long slow recovery. The day after Olsen was hit, hundreds of indignant new protestors joined the Occupy Oakland site. Police brutality incites a public reaction, often bringing more people out, just the opposite of what officials want.<br /><br />Where does this movement go? What is to be done? The answers are already arising from the actions of the 99%:<br /><br />--Discourage military recruitment and support conscientious objectors. Starve the empire of its legions. Organize massive tax resistance in protest of corrupt, wasteful, unlawful, and destructive Pentagon spending.<br /><br />--Transfer funds from corporate banks to credit unions and community banks. Support programs that assist the unemployed and the dispossessed. It was Giulio Tremonti, Italy’s embattled finance minister who declared: “Salvate il popolo, non le banche” (“Save the people, not the banks”). It would be nice to hear such sentiments emanating from the U.S. Treasury Department or the White House.<br /><br />--Coordinate actions with organized labor. Unions still are the 99%’s largest and best financed groups. Consider what was done in Oakland: occupiers joined with longshoremen, truckers, and other workers to close the port. Already there are plans for a general strike in various communities. Such actions improve greatly if organized labor is playing a role.<br /><br />--We need new electoral strategies, a viable third party, proportional representation, and even a new Constitution, one that establishes firm rules for an egalitarian democracy and is not a rigmarole designed to protect the moneyed class. The call for a constitutional convention (a perfectly legitimate procedure under the present U.S. Constitution) seems long overdue.<br /><br />--Perhaps most of all, we need ideological education regarding the relationship between wealth and power, the nature of capitalism, and the crimes of an unbridled profit-driven financial system. And again the occupiers seem to be moving in that direction: in early November 2011, people nationwide began gathering to join teach-ins on “How the 1% Crashed the Economy.”<br /><br />We need to explicitly invite the African-American, Latino, Native-American, Arab/Persian-American, and Asian-American communities into the fight, reminding everyone that the Great Recession victimizes everyone but comes down especially hard on the ethnic poor.<br /><br />We need to educate ourselves regarding the beneficial realities of publicly owned nonprofit utilities, publicly directed environmental protections, public nonprofit medical services and hospitals, public libraries, schools, colleges, housing, and transportation--all those things that work so well, better known in some quarters as socialism.<br /><br />There is much to do. Still it is rather impressive how the battle is already being waged on so many fronts. Meanwhile the corporate media ignore the content of our protest while continuing to fulminate about the occupiers’ violent ways and lack of a precise agenda.<br /><br />Do not for one moment think that the top policymakers and plutocrats don’t care what you think. That is the only thing about you that wins their concern. They don’t care about the quality of the air you breathe or the water you drink, or how happy or unhappy or stressed and unhealthy or poor you might be. But they do want to know your thoughts about public affairs, if only to get a handle on your mind. Every day they launch waves of disinformation to bloat your brains, from the Pentagon to Fox News without stint.<br /><br />When the people liberate their own minds and take a hard clear look at what the 1% is doing and what the 99% should be doing, then serious stuff begins to happen. It is already happening. It may eventually fade away or it may create a new chapter in our history. Even if it does not achieve its major goals, the Occupy movement has already registered upon our rulers the anger and unhappiness of a populace betrayed.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></span>Michael Parentihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03669839134550199120noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2997430557994363097.post-4962940353765003712011-11-08T01:13:00.000-08:002011-11-08T01:13:36.948-08:00Michael Parenti Debunks the New Wrold Order in Lecture Series on The Attack on Yugoslavia<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/qedrKTGo1nA?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>Angel Wingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06046125924328596168noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2997430557994363097.post-35084366570451490612011-10-02T06:35:00.000-07:002011-10-02T06:35:46.723-07:00Dr. Parenti to Speak on Occupy Wall Street on the radioSunday Oct. 3rd on the radio. Details available here:<br />
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<a href="http://www.kdvs.org/show-info/1838?date=2011-10-02">http://www.kdvs.org/show-info/1838?date=2011-10-02</a>Angel Wingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06046125924328596168noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2997430557994363097.post-7501099430908984342011-10-01T12:19:00.000-07:002011-10-01T12:19:37.611-07:00Lies, War and Empire Part 1<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/CZTrY3TQpzw?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>Angel Wingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06046125924328596168noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2997430557994363097.post-4269512389206647622011-10-01T10:14:00.000-07:002011-10-01T11:54:30.857-07:00Michael Parenti's talk on Profit Pathology and its alternatives<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/KySMSyGyq8U?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>Angel Wingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06046125924328596168noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2997430557994363097.post-78667013589576150532011-10-01T10:08:00.000-07:002011-10-01T12:05:15.815-07:00Combining thoughts on Imperialist Intervention and Class: Interview<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/RWVorQIat70?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>Angel Wingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06046125924328596168noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2997430557994363097.post-81327442337213108632011-09-30T09:17:00.000-07:002011-10-01T12:06:22.653-07:00Michael Parenti's Amazon.com pagePlease visit Michael Parenti's Amazon.com page where many of his books (at least those still in print) are available!<br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Michael-Parenti/e/B000APNF70">http://www.amazon.com/Michael-Parenti/e/B000APNF70</a>Angel Wingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06046125924328596168noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2997430557994363097.post-80707409307900397832011-09-29T13:07:00.000-07:002012-01-22T23:46:02.667-08:00Class Warfare Indeed! by Michael Parenti<span style=" ;font-family:georgia;font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-size:130%;">Over the last two decades or more, Republicans have been denouncing as “class warfare” any attempt at criticizing and restraining their mean one-sided system of capitalist financial expropriation.<br /><br />The moneyed class in this country has been doing class warfare on our heads and on those who came before us for more than two centuries. But when</span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:130%;" > we</span><span style="font-size:130%;"> point that out, when </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:130%;" >we</span><span style="font-size:130%;"> use terms like class warfare, class conflict, and class struggle to describe the system of exploitation we live under—our indictments are dismissed out of hand and denounced as Marxist ideological ranting, foul and divisive.<br /><br />Amanda Gilson put it perfectly in a posting on my Facebook page: “[T]he concept of ‘class warfare’ has been hi-jacked by the wrong class (the ruling class). The wealthy have been waging war silently and inconspicuously against the middle and the poor classes for decades! Now that the middle and poor classes have begun to fight back, it is like, the rich want to try to call foul---the game was fine when they were the only ones playing it.”<br /><br />The reactionary rich always denied that they themselves were involved in class warfare. Indeed, they insisted no such thing existed in our harmonious prosperous society. Those of us who kept talking about the realities of class inequality and class exploitation were readily denounced. Such concepts were not tolerated and were dismissed as ideologically inspired.<br /><br />In fact, class itself is something of a verboten word. In the mainstream media, in political life, and in academia, the use of the term “class” has long been frowned upon. You make your listeners uneasy (“Is the speaker a</span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:130%;" > Marxist</span><span style="font-size:130%;">?”). If you talk about class exploitation and class inequity, you will likely not get far in your journalism career or in political life or in academia (especially in fields like political science and economics).<br /><br />So instead of working class, we hear of “working families” or “blue collar” and “white collar employees”. Instead of lower class we hear of “inner city poor” and “low-income elderly.” Instead of the capitalist owning class, we hear of the “more affluent” or the “upper quintile.” Don’t take my word for it, just listen to any Obama speech. (Often Obama settles for an even more cozy and muted term: folks, as in “Folks are strugglin’ along.”)<br /><br />“Class” is used with impunity and approval only when it has that magic neutralizing adjective “middle” attached to it. The </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:130%;" >middle class</span><span style="font-size:130%;"> is an acceptable mainstream concept because it usually does not sharpen our sense of class struggle; it dilutes and muffles critical consciousness. If everyone in America is middle class (except for a few superrich and a minor stratum of very poor), there is little room for any awareness of class conflict.<br /><br />That may be changing with the Great Recession and the sharp decline of the middle class (and decline of the more solvent elements of the working class). The concept of middle class no longer serves as a neutralizer when it itself becomes an undeniable victim.<br /><br />“Class” is also allowed to be used with limited application when it is part of the holy trinity of race, gender, and class. Used in that way, it is reduced to a demographic trait related to life style, education level, and income level. In forty years of what was called “identity politics” and “culture wars,” class as a concept was reduced to something of secondary importance. All sorts of "leftists" told us how we needed to think anew, how we had to realize that class was not as important as race or gender or culture.<br /><br />I was one of those who thought these various concepts should not be treated as being mutually exclusive of each other. In fact, they are interactive. Thus racism and sexism have always proved functional for class oppression. Furthermore, I pointed out (and continue to point out), that in the social sciences and among those who see class as just another component of “identity politics,” the concept of class is treated as nothing more than a set of demographic traits. But there is another definition of class that has been overlooked.<br /><br />Class should also be seen as a social relationship relating to wealth and social power, involving a conflict of material interests between those who own and those who work for those who own. Without benefit of reason or research, this latter usage of class is often dismissed out of hand as “Marxist.” The narrow reductionist mainstream view of class keeps us from seeing the extent of economic inequality and the severity of class exploitation in society, allowing many researchers and political commentators to mistakenly assume that U.S. society has no deep class divisions or class conflicts of interest.<br /><br />We should think of class not primarily as a demographic trait but as a relationship to the means of production, as </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:130%;" >a relationship to power and wealth</span><span style="font-size:130%;">. Class as in slaveholder and slave, lord and serf, capitalist and worker. Class as in class conflict and class warfare.<br /><br />And who knows, once we learn to talk about the realities of class power, we are on our way to talking critically about </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:130%;" >capitalism</span><span style="font-size:130%;">, another verboten word in the public realm. And once we start a critical discourse about capitalism, we will be vastly better prepared to act against it and defend our own democratic and communal interests.</span><br /><br /></span>Michael Parentihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03669839134550199120noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2997430557994363097.post-73917779106859712992011-09-21T16:41:00.000-07:002011-10-01T12:07:14.092-07:00Connection to many of Dr. Parenti's articles on another site<a href="http://en.wordpress.com/tag/michael-parenti-on-dandelion-salad/">http://en.wordpress.com/tag/michael-parenti-on-dandelion-salad/</a>Angel Wingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06046125924328596168noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2997430557994363097.post-70744438968647854942011-09-21T13:11:00.000-07:002011-10-01T12:07:48.232-07:00The Iraq War Is a Smashing Success by Michael Parenti<span class="commentBody" jsid="text"><div class="text_exposed_root text_exposed" id="id_4e7a4498aafbb0987008288">A reader recently reported on my Facebook wall that President George Bush had admitted to <span class="commentBody" jsid="text">singer Tony Bennett</span> that the Iraq war had been a "mistake." I beg to differ.<br />
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The Iraq war has not been a mistake. There was a miscalculation, it being assumed that the US invasion would be quick, easy and dearly welcomed by appreciative Iraqis. Instead the US has faced a bitter, destructive, protracted and costly conflict. There was a "mistake" in terms of operational expectations but Bush achieved what he intended and Obama is faithfully carrying on with the mission. The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld think tank, Project for a New American Century, had called for an invasion of Iraq over <span style="font-style: italic;">a year</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">before</span> 9/11. Iraq had to be taken out either with a quick easy war or a long <span class="commentBody" jsid="text">tough </span>one. In any case, the invasion and destruction of Iraq was not a "mistake."<br />
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The US destroyed a country that had the audacity to retain control of its own oil supply, kept its entire economy under state control (rather than private corporate ownership), and did not invite the IMF or the giant transnational corporations in. Iraq charted an independent <span class="text_exposed_show">course under a dictator who originally had served the CIA, and had destroyed the left progressive democracy that existed in Iraq since the 1958 revolution. But Saddam then retained control of the country's resources instead of throwing everything wide open to western investors.<br />
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Saddam also got out of line on oil quotas (wanting an equitable share of the international market). And he decided to drop the US dollar as the reserve currency and use the Euro instead. So he and his country have been correctly destroyed in keeping with the interests of the US-led global empire. Everything is now privatized, deregulated, devastated and poor--as with Yugoslavia and soon with Libya. Mission accomplished. <span style="font-style: italic;">Pace</span> Tony. Read my book THE FACE OF IMPERIALISM if you ever find time.<br />
</span></div></span>Michael Parentihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03669839134550199120noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2997430557994363097.post-4202286966480684422011-09-16T23:54:00.000-07:002011-10-01T12:08:17.896-07:00Michael Parenti's own website online!<a href="http://michaelparenti.org/">http://michaelparenti.org/</a>Angel Wingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06046125924328596168noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2997430557994363097.post-17730705276885455622011-09-16T23:42:00.000-07:002011-10-01T12:09:50.363-07:00Michael Parenti :: De moord op Julius Caesar - goddeau.com :: magazine over muziek en andere<a href="http://www.goddeau.com/content/view/1160">Michael Parenti :: De moord op Julius Caesar - goddeau.com :: magazine over muziek en andere</a>Han EunJa 한 은자http://www.blogger.com/profile/13755995421254443930noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2997430557994363097.post-1881470907227533662011-09-16T16:15:00.000-07:002011-10-01T12:10:20.263-07:00Michael Parenti has his own channel on Youtube!Please click the link below to find a great collection of Dr. Parenti's videos available in a single location on Youtube<a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/MichaelParentiOrg">http://www.youtube.com/user/MichaelParentiOrg</a>!Angel Wingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06046125924328596168noreply@blogger.com