Oh No! Thoughts From Socialists

From Barack Obama as a Ruling Class Candidate by Paul Street:

But, as The New York Times‘ editors certainly know, “they” still “put in who they want to put in” to no small extent. The predominantly white U.S. business and political establishment still makes sure that nobody who questions dominant domestic and imperial hierarchies and doctrines can make a serious (“viable”) run for higher office – the presidency, above all. It does this by denying adequate campaign funding (absolutely essential to success in an age of super-expensive, media-driven campaigns) and favorable media treatment (without which a successful campaign is unimaginable at the current stage of corporate media consolidation and power) to candidates who step beyond the narrow boundaries of elite opinion. Thanks to these critical electoral filters and to the legally mandated U.S. winner-take-all “two party” system, a candidate who even remotely questions corporate and imperial power is not permitted to make a strong bid for the presidency.

Barack Obama is no exception to the rule. Anyone who thinks he could have risen to power without prior and ongoing ruling class approval is living in a dream world.

Read more here.

From The U.S. Imperial Triangle and Military Spending by John Bellamy Foster, Hannah Holleman, and Robert W. McChesney:

The United States is unique today among major states in the degree of its reliance on military spending, and its determination to stand astride the world, militarily as well as economically. No other country in the post–Second World War world has been so globally destructive or inflicted so many war fatalities. Since 2001, acknowledged U.S. national defense spending has increased by almost 60 percent in real dollar terms to a level in 2007 of $553 billion. This is higher than at any point since the Second World War (though lower than previous decades as a percentage of GDP). Based on such official figures, the United States is reported by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) as accounting for 45 percent of world military expenditures. Yet, so gargantuan and labyrinthine are U.S. military expenditures that the above grossly understates their true magnitude, which, as we shall see below, reached $1 trillion in 2007.

Externally, these are necessary expenditures of world empire. Internally, they represent, as Michal Kalecki was the first to suggest, an imperial triangle of state-financed military production, media propaganda, and real/imagined economic-employment effects that has become a deeply entrenched, and self-perpetuating feature of the U.S. social order.

Today the enormous weight of Washington’s war machine has not prevented it from being stretched to its limits while becoming bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although still capable of great destruction, the United States is significantly limited in its ability to deploy massive force to achieve its ends whenever and wherever it wishes. The dream of Pax Americana, first presented by John F. Kennedy at the height of the Cold War, has turned into the nightmare of Pox Americana in the years of waning U.S. dominance. The role the media monopoly has assumed in recent years in the promotion of war propaganda has contributed to the rapid growth of a media reform movement, which is now challenging the concentration of communications in the United States.

There is no doubt that a society that supports its global position and social order through $1 trillion a year in military spending, most likely far exceeding that of all the other countries in the world put together, unleashing untold destruction on the world, while faced with intractable problems of inequality, economic stagnation, financial crisis, poverty, waste, and environmental decline at home, is a society that is ripe for change. It is our task to change it.

From Notes from the Editors:

In the Notes from the Editors for the September issue of Monthly Review (written in late July) we asked why, with the United States bailing out the financial sector of the economy to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, there was no public outrage. As we observed at that time, “In the end there seems to be no satisfactory explanation for lack of popular protest over a series of ad hoc grants showering hundreds of billions of dollars of public money on the masters of finance, collectively the richest group of capitalists on the planet. And that raises the question: Is this outrage present nonetheless, growing underground, unheard and unseen? Will it suddenly burst forth, like some old mole, unforeseen and in ways unimagined?” The collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15, the resulting freezing up of credit markets, U.S. Secretary of Treasury Henry Paulson’s emergency plan for a $700 billion bailout of financial firms, offering “cash for trash,” i.e., proposing to buy up the toxic waste of virtually worthless mortgage-backed securities at taxpayer expense—quickly answered our question. When the U.S. Treasury got into the act with its bailout proposal, requiring Congressional authorization (previously the Federal Reserve had led the way in bailouts, to the point that treasury securities had sunk to just over half of the Fed’s assets, as we explained in September), all hell finally broke loose. Suddenly, the public outrage that had been growing beneath the surface burst forth. The U.S. capitalist class was abruptly confronted with a major political as well as economic crisis.

Read the rest here.

Why All The Hate?

From Blasts in Indian city kill at least 29:

At least 29 people were killed and 88 wounded in 17 blasts within a little more than an hour Saturday night in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad, police and government officials said.

All metropolitan areas in India have been put on high alert.

Several media outlets and the country's Intelligence Bureau received an e-mail, purportedly from the Muslim militant group Indian Mujahedeen, warning about a possible attack. The group has claimed responsibility for two similar attacks in the past nine months in northern India.

Indian Mujahedeen claimed responsibility in May for near-simultaneous bomb attacks that killed 63 people in the northwest Indian city of Jaipur. In that claim, the group declared "open war" against India in retaliation for what it said were 60 years of Muslim persecution and the country's support of U.S. policies.

Why do they hate the United States so much?

I suggest you read Why Muslims hate the US? by Zafarul-Islam Khan if you don’t know the answer to that question, or if you think they hate us for our “freedoms.”

We Do It Because We Can

This makes me think of George Carlin and “the Bigger Dick Theory of Foreign Policy.” If we only had a brain.

From Whither Homo Sap by Rob Payne:

Homo saps consider themselves to be soffistuhkated. After all, some of us eat caviar on Ritz crackers, can take pictures with cell phones, and drive BMWs the ultimate driving machines, yet almost everything that is going on today in our sophisticated foreign policy is about marking territory like a dog pissing on bushes. If anyone threatens our territorial rights like Iran is doing the first primal reaction is to beat our chests. I believe a lot of what drives our foreign policy is to keep other nations like China and Russia from grabbing the territory we don’t want them to have as much as anything else. This is why I have trouble believing that Homo saps are the apex of evolution as all we have aspired to do is what wild animals do, mark out and claim territory then defend it if threatened. But unlike our much more honest cousins in the wild we lie about why we do it. Christ, we’re so noble. We want everyone to have democracy, we want to free them so they can be like us or if that doesn’t work then the enemy becomes a most evil and vile thing and therefore the greatest threat to the universe that has ever existed in the entire history of Homo saps like Iran is supposed to be today.

Read the rest here.

Imperial Hubris

From Rev. Wright and Reinhold Niebuhr by Omar Hossino:

Over 60 years ago, following the emergence of an American superpower after the Second World War, Reinhold Niebuhr, perhaps the greatest American Christian theologian of modern times, warned the United States of its potential for immense injustice. Niebuhr wrote in an essay entitled "The Anglo-Saxon Destiny and Responsibility" that America's virtues may deceive it into believing that it is favored by God and on a divine mission. A self-righteous and arrogant America may attempt to run the world and thus be led to great evil. Niebuhr argued instead that America must acknowledge its faults and sins. If America did not do this, he warned, "woe be unto us."