Happy Imperial New Year

 â€œNOTHING TO KILL OR DIE FOR”

 

As the last minutes of 2006 ticked away on the eastern coast of the United States, John Lennon’s song “Imagine” blared over loudspeakers in New York City’s Times Square.

 

One hour later, I sat in my living room in Iowa City and stared at my corporate telescreen. The clock said 11:59 PM.  My television was turned to NBC.  It showed the scene at Broadway and 42nd as the assembled masses prepared to welcome in the New Year.” 

 

Most of the people were wearing read hats with yellow logos.  The logos advertised Chevrolet trucks and automobiles, official sponsor of New Year’s Eve. In the upper left hand corner of the screen, NBC said “LIVE.” But it couldn’t have been “live” coverage because Iowa is on Central Time and one hour behind New York. 

 

Here are some of the lyrics from “Imagine:”

 

Imagine there's no countries

It isn't hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion too

 

Imagine all the people

Living life in peace...

Imagine no possessions

I wonder if you can

No need for greed or hunger

A brotherhood of man

 

Imagine all the people

Sharing all the world...

 

I hope someday you'll join us

And the world will live as one

 

 

“IF THAT’S WHAT THE MAJORITY OF [IRAQIS’] WANT”...

 

I am not naïve enough to think that most (United States of) Americans have signed on with Lennon’s egalitarian and anti-imperialist world view.  Still, those who confuse the nation’s narrow, militaristic and corporate-crafted election choices and “popular culture” with the citizenry’s real beliefs and values would be surprised to know just how left the populace leans when it is asked specific foreign policy questions. If majority opinion on national priorities and policies were institutionally empowered in the "world's greatest democracy," there'd be at lot less Empire abroad and a lot more Equality at home.  The centrist Chicago Foreign Relations Council's survey of American public opinion in the fall of 2004 (www.ccfr/globalviews2004/sub/usa.htm) suggested a populace that is well to the social-democratic and internationalist left of the nation’s policies. Behold:

 

American Population surveyed: 1,195 randomly selected non-institutional US citizens interviewed in mid-July 2004:

 

1. Percentage who think the following should be a very important goal of US foreign policy:

protecting jobs of American workers: 78%

preventing spread of nuclear weapons: 73

maintaining superior military power worldwide: 50

Help bring a democratic form of government to the others nations: 14

 

2. Ranking of popular support for expansion of government spending on following programs:

health care: 79%

aid to education: 69

Social Security: 65

Intelligence gathering on other nations: 43

defense spending: 29

 

3. Percentage of Americans who think US should have long-term military bases in the following nations:

South Korea: 62%

Cuba (Guantanamo): 58

Germany 57

Japan: 52

Saudi Arabia: 50

Afghanistan: 47

Turkey: 46

IRAQ: 42

 

4. Percentage of Americans who think the US should remove its military presence from the Middle East if that's what the majority of people there want: 59%

 

5. Percentage of Americans who think the US should remove its military presence from IRAQ if that's what the majority of people there want: 72%

 

6. Percentage of Americans who think has the responsibility to be the world's policeman: 20%

 

7. Percentage of Americans who think the US needs to work more closely with other countries to effectively combat terrorism: 73%

 

8. Percentage of Americans who favor the following means to combat terrorism:

- working through the UN to strengthen international law and make sure UN enforces int. law: 87%

- help poor countries develop their economies: 67

- make a major effort to be even-handed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: 64

- use torture to extract information from terrorists: 29

 

9. Americans' opinion on how the US is doing in the fight against terrorism:

- should put more emphasis on military: 23%

- should put more emphasis on diplomatic and economic methods, less on military methods: 45%

- current balance between the first and the second is about right: 26

 

10. Percentage of Americans who think the US has a UNILATERAL RIGHT TO GO TO WAR:

- if the US has strong evidence that another country is acquiring weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that could be used against the US a some point in the future (Bush's de facto preventive war doctrine): 17%

- only if the US has strong evidence that it is in imminent danger of being attacked by the other country (the actual meaning of pre-emptive war): 53%

- only if the other country attacks first: 24%

 

11. Percentage of Americans who think US has the right to overthrow a government supporting terrorists who might pose a threat to the US, even without UN approval:

- when the US thinks the terrorist group might be a threat in the future even though it isn't a threat now: 11%

- only with strong evidence of an imminent threat: 58%

- only with UN approval: 28%

 

12. Percentage of Americans who support use of nuclear weapons:

- never: 22%

- only in response to a nuclear attack: 57%*

- in certain circumstances even if we have not suffered nuclear attack : 19%

 

13. Percentage of Americans who think the US should be more willing to make international relations decisions within the UN even if this means the US will sometimes have to go along with a policy that is not it first choice: 66%*

 

14. Percentage of Americans who favor dropping the veto power granted to the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, including of course the US: 59%

 

15. Percentage of Americans who favor general compliance with the decisions of the World Court, not just case-by-case (as under current US policy) compliance: 57%

 

16. Percentage of Americans who favor giving the UN a standing peacekeeping force selected, trained, and commanded by the UN: 74%

 

17. Americans' comparative feelings of warmth towards the following international institutions on a scale of 1 to 100, with 50 signifying "neutral:"

World Health Organization: 60

UN: 57

International Human Rights Groups: 57

World Court: 50

World Trade Organization: 48

World Bank: 46

International Monetary Fund: 44

Multinational Corporations: 41

 

18. Percentage of Americans who think the US should participate in the following international agreements/treaties:

- nuclear weapons explosion test ban: 87%

- land mines ban: 80%

- International Criminal Court, with powers to try individual American military and other officials for war crimes even if their own country will not prosecute them of such crimes: 76%

- Kyoto Accord on global warming: 71%

 

 

More than two years ago, then, nearly 60 percent of Americans rejected permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq.  Nearly three fourths said the U.S. should leave Iraq if – imagine – that’s what the majority of Iraqis wanted. The opinion numbers would certainly be further left today, thanks to the deepening of the Cheney-Bush-Rumsfeld travesty in Iraq. 

 

 

...AND IT’S WHAT THEY WANT

 

For what it’s worth, surveys of Iraqis undertaken by the British Ministry of Defense and the University of Maryland and other polling agencies in 2005 and 2006 show that the majority of Iraqis want U.S. troops to leave.   Most Iraqis support attacks on American occupiers.  Two-thirds of Baghdad’s residents want U.S. forces out immediately. Support for attacks on American forces is especially high among the 80 percent of Iraqis who think that the U.S. is building permanent military bases in Iraq. 

 

Contrary to dominant political and media rhetoric claiming that the U.S. must stay in Iraq to guarantee stability and prevent civil war (already well underway), 80 percent of Iraqis think that the U.S. presence increases violence. 

 

The heavily disseminated U.S. claim – ritually repeated by elite “liberals” and “conservatives” alike – that we invaded Iraq in order to "spread democracy" is believed by probably no more than 1 percent of the Iraqi people. Iraqis have the strange idea that Uncle Sam invaded to take control of their petroleum reserves.    

 

 

“YOU” CITIZEN “CONSUMERS” AND YOUR “DIGITAL DEMOCRACY”

 

The minute the Times Square ball hit the ground, signaling the passing of the last year, the communal, pacifist, anti-authoritarian and now obsolete (so “last year”) musings of Lennon’s “Imagine” were  replaced by the acquisitive boasts  of Frank Sinatra in “New York, New York.”  “If YOU can make it there,” old Blue Eyes reminded us, “YOU’LL make it anywhere.”

 

Chevy’s parent company General Motors prefers, I reflected, to make its cars in other, poorer countries because so many of the people wearing the red hats feel entitled to archaic things like a livable wage.

 

Just before Midnight, NBC talk-show host Carson Palmer reminded us that Time Magazine had proclaimed “YOU” the “person of the year” for 2006.  This was the year in which “you the consumer” seized power in America with YOUR heroic mastery of on-line shopping and through such noble exercises in radical democracy as blogging and posting videos on You Tube. Last year witnessed the arrival, Palmer told us, of a “digital democracy” in which the citizen-consumer held ultimate authority.

 

The ironic smile on Palmer’s face suggested that he knew this was an idiotic thing to say. The free speech relevance of the radical-leftist Internet newsletter you are currently reading is only slightly more impressive than your freedom to whisper to the person next to you in the front row of a giant movie theater. Corporate state media is the giant screen that makes you nearly inaudible to all but those sitting nearby. 

 

“THE WAITING [AND KILLING] GAME”: THE “WAR WILL LIKELY CONTINUE”

 

Maybe Palmer was thinking about one of the cruder videos that went up on “You Tube” near the end of the year. Or maybe (though this is not likely) he was thinking about how officially irrelevant the citizenry’s real values are as far as the nation’s corporate-imperial ruling-class is concerned.  As Noam Chomsky noted in a recent ZNet interview with Michael Albert, “Iraqi opinion is almost entirely disregarded” by U.S. policymakers.”  In a similar vein, Chomsky added, “U.S. opinion is [also] of little interest. ...Elite [U.S.] opinion is profoundly undemocratic, though overflowing with lofty rhetoric about love of democracy and messianic missions to promote democracy” (Chomsky, “Iraq: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” ZNet Magazine, December 27, 2006).

 

As numerous polls show, most of the U.S. population is opposed to the war in Iraq and would like to see a rapid U.S. withdrawal. Americans’ profound distaste for Bush and his policies â€“ including especially his criminal oil invasion – was widely registered in the mid-term Congressional elections last November. While it’s been hard to get pollsters to tackle the question comprehensively, it seems likely that the majority of American voters would now support impeachment proceedings against Dick Cheney and The Worst President Ever.

 

None of this seems to matter all that much to the political class, even on the newly emboldened (one would think) “left” wing of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Party. We have the new Madam Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi taking impeachment off the table in advance of her ascendancy to the third highest office in the land.

 

We have the deeply conservative, Harvard-pedigreed Barack Obama masquerading as a “progressive” alternative and claiming that Democrats will be “punished in ‘08” if they seem “ideological” by "not“working with the president.”  Obama’s recent book “The Audacity of Hope” lectures Americans on their need to feel “empathy” for “the oppressors,” not just "the oppressed."  It curries reactionary Caucasian favor by announcing that the “reservoirs of white guilt” are now thoroughly “exhausted” and by claiming that blacks have moved into the American “socioeconomic mainstream” – a curious argument in a time when blacks are less than a tenth as wealthy as whites.

 

Speaking of being “ideological,” Obama’s book declares that America owes its unmatched greatness to its gloriously “efficient” and “innovative” capitalist “system of social organization” and “business culture.”  Just more than two years out of the Illinois state legislature and a constitutional law professorship at the  University of Chicago, the overnight national sensation – recently identified along with the Jesus Christ (in an MSNBC poll) as one of the American public’s two favorite personalities in 2006 – is doing his best to impress the foreign policy establishment with his belief that American Empire has always been and remains a wonderfully benevolent thing ...even if it occasionally makes “strategic blunders” like the crucifixion of Southeast Asia and the mass-murderous invasion of Iraq. 

 

In “Audacity” and in a recent speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Obama eagerly casts down his bucket to take up the imperial White Man's Burden.  He argues that  Uncle Sam should resist the American citizenry’s foolish desire to step back from maintaining an assertive posture of global supremacy.

 

We have Donald Rumsfeld, the disgraced (one would think) architect of the Iraq “fiasco,” being hailed as a noble visionary in a grand send-off at the White House. Darth Cheney referred there to Rummy as “the best secretary of defense the nation ever had” (Maureen Dowd, “Farewell Dense Prince,” New York Times, 16 December 2006). The Rumbofest was all on “YOU” the taxpayer’s dime.  So is the shocking cost of the continuing illegal invasion of Iraq - $355 billion as of this writing (see National Priorities Project, “Cost of War” at http://costofwar.com/index.html). 

 

We have the Bush administration planning to increase the U.S. force level in Baghdad, where the majority wants the Americans to leave now. The forthcoming “Surge” is consistent with the recent report of the Iraq Study Group (ISG).  That report will be cited by a large number of Congressional Democrats as justification for supporting an escalation of what liberal New York Times columnist Bob Herbert today called “the mad, mindless, meaningless and apparently endless slaughter” in Iraq (Herbert, “Another thousand Lives,” New York Times, 4 January 2007, A23).

 

We have the following judgment from David Corn, a careful follower of Beltway politics, in the liberal-left weekly The Nation:

“anyone anticipating quick and decisive action from the Dems will have to keep on waiting.  In the new Congress there will be much Iraq-related activity, but the Democrats will present no master plan to remove America from the debacle...Legislators can pass resolutions demanding that Bush remake his Iraq policy, but the Decider in Chief is free to ignore them...This spring the Bush White House is expected to ask for $100 billion or so for the war.  But Democratic Senate and House leaders have said they have no interest in compelling a withdrawal by choking off funds. Representative Jim McGovern...has been pushing legislation for the past year that would defund the war. The House leadership, he says, ‘does not have a lot of sympathy for this.  Some Democrats do not want to be blamed for losing Iraq.’ McGovern, whose bill has drawn only nineteen supporters, notes that many Democrats still hope Bush will disengage to they don’t have to do the heavy lifting of forcing a pullout. ‘But,’ he adds, ‘the Bush strategy is to push the war on the next Administration.  There will be action [by the Democratic-controlled Congress], but not enough to extricate ourselves.’” What Corn calls “the waiting game” is a killing and dying game for untold thousands of American troops and Iraqis (Corn, “The Waiting Game,” The Nation January 1,2007).     

 

We have local television news reporters still robotically chanting the doctrinal claim that local GIs killed in Iraq died on a great  mission to “defend their country” and advance “freedom.”

 

And we have the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (ISG) Report, which provides welcome political cover for imperialists of both business parties by pushing the big Iraq decisions on to the next White House. The authors of the ISG’s 79 recommendations are content to let untold thousands of American soldiers and Iraqis die for Bush’s lies and “mistakes” (well, crimes). They leave the door open to permanent U.S. military bases (if the captive Iraqi government â€œrequests” them from its colonial masters). 

 

They also recommend the passage of an Iraqi Petroleum Law that will hand the invaded nation’s vast petroleum assets (what the ISG pointedly identifies as “the world’s second largest known oil reserves”) over to predominantly American multinational corporations (see Antonia Juhasz, “Spoils of War: Oil, the U.S.-Middle East Free Trade Area and the Bush Agenda,” In These Times, January 2007). As Mark Lannery, oil analyst at Credit Suisse First Boston told MSNBC in November of 2002: “[If] it’s your tanks that dislodged the regime and you have 50,000 troops in the country…then you’re going to get the best deals.  That’s the way it works.  The French will have [a few] men and a 1950s tank” (MSNBC 11/11/02, quoted in Norman Solomon and Reese Erlich, Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You [New York, NY: Context Books, 2003], p. 111).

 

 

BLOOD FOR (THE CONTROL OF) OIL

 

The ISG Report’s release was a good time to review the “real reason for the invasion.” As Chomsky notes:

 

“Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world, very cheap to exploit, and lies right at the heart of the world’s major hydrocarbon resources, what the State Department 60 years ago described as ‘a stupendous source of strategic power.’ The issue is not access but rather control (and for the energy corporations, profit).  Control over these resources gives the U.S. ‘critical leverage’ over industrial rivals, to borrow Zbigniew Brezinski’s phrase, echoing George Kennan when he was a leading planner and recognized that such control would give the U.S. ‘veto power’ over others. Dick Cheney observer that control over energy resources provides ‘tools of intimidation or blackmail’ – when in the hands of others that is.  We are too pure and noble for those consideration to apply to us, so true believers declare – or more accurately, just presuppose, taking the point to be too obvious to articulate” (Chomsky, “Iraq”).

 

After 1991, it is worth recalling, U.S. oil firms were “prohibited from investing in or buying Iraqi oil, except as approved under the United Nations oil-for-food program.” As Reese Erlich noted in early 2003, “this frustrated U.S. oil executives, who saw lucrative contracts going to companies based in countries where the government had no political conflict in Iraq” (Solomon and Erlich, p. 110).

 

As Antonia Juhasz noted in the most recent issue of In These Times, “planning to secure Iraq’s oil for U.S. companies began on the tenth day of the Bush presidency, when the Vice President Dick Cheney established the National Energy policy Development Group...It produced two lists, titled ‘Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts as of 5 March 2001,’ which named more than 60 companies from some 30 countries with contracts for oil and gas projects across Iraq – none of which were with American firms.  If the sanctions were removed – which was becoming increasingly likely as public opinion turned against the sanctions and Hussein remained in power – the contracts would go to all of those foreign oil companies and the U.s. oil industry would be shut out...Two months after the invasion of Iraq, in May 2003, the U.S.-appointed senior advisor to the Iraqi Oil ministry, Thamer al-Ghadban, announced that the Iraqi government would honor few, if any, of the dozens of contracts signed with foreign companies under the Hussein regime” (Juhasz, “Spoils of War”). 

 

Dominant U.S. media has consistently joined the Cheney-Bush administration in denying the critical oil motivations behind Operation Iraqi Liberation (O.I.L.) while dutifully transmitting the preposterous Weapons of Mass Destruction claims and the related, equally ludicrous claims of a Saddam-al Qaeda link, and the frankly childish claims of America’s interest in democracy promotion (see Paul Street, “Bedtime Stories for the Bewildered Herd: Iraq War Fairy Tales in the Age of Never mind Media,” Z Magazine, January 2006).

 

Curiously enough, that same media has long claimed that petroleum concerns determine the policies of other countries regarding Iraq.  As Erlich noted on the eve of the launching of O.I.L., “oil considerations certainly can determine political decisions by other governments, but according to the mainstream media, Bush administration ties to the oil industry are irrelevant. This is all the more curious when we bear in mind that George W. Bush ran an oil company, Vice President Dick Cheney was the CEO of the oil equipment corporation Haliburton, and National Security Adviser Condaleeza Rice served as a member of Chevron’s board of directors.” (Solomon and Erlich, p. 109). 

 

Prior to joining the Republican presidential ticket in 2000, Cheney was so concerned over the “oil for food” restrictions on U.S. corporate petro-profits that he actually called for an end to sanctions against Iraq.   

 

It is by no means an accidental coincidence that the ISG report recommends the long-term presence of significant U.S. military forces in and around Iraq.  Once leading U.S. oil companies attain their prized post-invasion Production Sharing Agreements (PSAs), they will obviously require armed imperial protection from that great global petroleum security service called the US Armed Force. The fact that Iraq is a war-ravaged Hell will buttress the self-fulfilling imperialist case for giving them the petro-colonial shield that only the Pentagon can provide (see Juhasz, “Spoils”).

 

The "Beacon to the World of the Way Life Should Be" (as U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson once described the United States) appears to need more than the mere impeachment and removal of Cheney-Bush.  It requires a great democratic political and social rebellion, maybe even (imagine) a revolution against the deeply rooted, richly authoritarian and thoroughly bipartisan regime of Empire, Oil, Ecocide and Inequality, Inc. 

 

 

 

THE ORWELLIAN MANAGEMENT OF TWO PUBLIC DEATHS

 

The New Year came draped in the shadow of two great deaths: that of Gerald R. Ford and that of Saddam Hussein.  The corporate-Orwellian media handled both fatalities in striking accord with the totalitarian axiom in Nineteen Eighty Four: “those who control the present control the past; those who control the past control the future.”

 

The fact that Saddam “committed most of his crimes when he was an ally of those who now occupy his country” was “conveniently forgotten,” as Tariq Ali notes. Meanwhile, ruling-class communications respectfully relayed Bush’s laughable claim that the blatantly rigged and U.S.-ordered execution of Saddam was “a milestone on the road to Iraqi democracy” –a judgment that finds little support among ordinary Iraqis (Tarig Ali, “Conveniently Forgotten,” The Guardian, 1 January  2007). 

 

Meanwhile, the dominant theme in “mainstream" media’s handling of Ford’s short White House reign (1974-76)was that the dead president deserved to be remembered (a) for helping the nation “heal” after the "long national nightmare" of Watergate and (b) for (as the New York Times put it in a power-worshipping editorial on December 29th) "more than just the pardon."

 

One thing our “digital democracy’s” news “consumers” didn’t hear or see much of in â€œmainstream” retrospectives was that Ford pardoned Nixon not just for the limited Watergate crimes that led to Nixon’s resignation (and thereby to Ford’s unelected promotion to the oval office) but for any and all offenses committed as president. Ford also gave Nixon a Stay Out of Court (and Jail) Pass for the murderous and illegal invasion and bombing of Cambodia, for receiving illegal corporate campaign contributions and for ordering the illegal wiretapping, infiltration and many-sided harassment of various left and antiwar organizations.         

Ford justified his absolute pardon with the lovely theory that the U.S. would become "ungovernable" if the people had been allowed to try to make a criminal president accountable for his transgressions against democracy and law.  Yes, the virtuous American Way of Life would have unraveled and the nation would have been further "destabilized" (after the terrifying shocks of Vietnam, the antiwar movement, the riots, LSD/Altamont/Woodstock/Chicago’68/Black Power and Watergate) if "we the people" had been permitted to hold a leading tyrant's feet to the fire of popular governance.  If Nixon had been subjected to the law of the land (not to mention international law), the whole nation would have spun into a downward spiral like Betty Ford before she got her clinic on. It was a fitting argument in a time when leading business and academic authorities were decrying what Harvard’s Samuel P. Huntington called the “excess of democracy” and calling for explicitly authoritarian solutions to the deepening crises of American life at the dawn of the corporate-neoliberal era. 

 

There is a perverse contemporary logic behind dominant media's repeated references to Ford's supposedly noble role in "saving the nation" and "marking the end of a national nightmare" by letting Nixon off the hook. That media has been letting the equally if not more impeachment- (and removal-) worthy Cheney and Bush II administration off the hook for six years (from its failure to fully cover the blatant Republican theft of the 2000 presidential election through and beyond its enablement of Team Bush's oil occupation).  It is discouraging reasonable calls for the removal of Cheney and Bush on the grounds that another "impeachment drama" would "destabilize a nation that is already in shaky health" (to quote the Times' approving editors on the rationale behind Ford's Nixon pardon).

 

It's too much, of course, to ask "our" power-worshipping media to honestly reflect back on Ford's terrible roles in attacking Cambodia (during the Mayaguez incident), supporting military fascism in Chile and giving a big imperial green light to Indonesia's nearly genocidal invasion of East Timor.  

 

The media masters have repeatedly broadcast statements from some of our more Uncle-Tom-like citizens, who tell reporters they signed a Gerald Ford Condolence Book or traveled to Washington to “show respect for the office.” Ford didn’t earn the respect of the people when he held the nation’s highest office through appointment by one of the most corrupt and abusive office-holders of all time. He pardoned a disgraced power abuser and then went on to commit his own significant crimes.

 

And now we’re supposed to get all teary-eyed and bow our heads because of ”respect for the office” Because of our deep and heartfelt respect for authority as such...because of cringing deference to power. Yes, we are expected to cry one of our our ruling-class’s dead white males a deferential river of tears while the current blood-soaked war criminals in power produce an ever-expanding new crop of unjustly slaughtered victims within and beyond Iraq.

 

Gerald Ford was rewarded with 92 years on this wonderful earth. On the Public Broadcasting System's Nightly News Hour, you can regularly see the quickly forgotten names and faces of a large number of mostly working-class Americans who didn't get to live past age 22.  Their lives are cut short by an illegal, racist, and imperialist oil war ordered from above, by super-privileged chicken hawk members of the same dominant class that wants us to reflect on the humble greatness of the President who okayed the crucifixion of East Timor and let Tricky Dick run free.

 

Meanwhile, every spare billion dollars “we” spend on the pursuit of “our”  masters’ imperial ambitions for controlling global oil is not spent meeting social and economic needs in disadvantaged communities that provide a disproportionate share of soldiers in the highly class-stratified U.S.

 

The most offensive thing of all is the differential value we are expected to place on people’s lives in accord with their position in the nation’s rigid structures of inequality.

 

 

CLASS INEQUALITY AND THE COSTS OF EMPIRE

 

It is always useful to remember the dark logic of class injustice that lay at the domestic heart of Empire.  As Chomsky observed more than 36 years ago, “the costs of empire to the imperial society as a whole may be considerable.  These costs, however, are social costs, whereas, say, the profits from overseas investment guaranteed by military success are highly concentrated in certain special segments of the society.  The costs of empire are in general distributed over the society as a whole, while its profits revert to a few within.  In this respect, the empire serves as a device for internal consolidation of power and privilege and it is quite irrelevant to observe that its social costs are often great or that as costs rise, differences may also arise among those who are in positions of power and influence” (Chomsky, For Reasons of State [New York: New Press, 2003/1970], p. 47). 

 

Future issues of this newsletter will reflect in some detail on the class-selective "homeland" costs and benefits of Empire.  The next issue will make the (frankly slam-dunk) case for the impeachment and removal of Cheney and Bush.  It will also address the corporate-imperial perversion of political language, paying special attention to the degraded public discourse surrounding the ongoing madness and mayhem in Iraq.

 

 

 

“The Empire and Inequality Report” is a bi-weekly news and commentary letter produced by veteran radical historian, journalist, and activist Paul Street (paulstreet99@yahoo.com), a noted anti-centrist political commentator located in the Midwestern center of the U.S. Street is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004), Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005), and Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, and Policy in Chicago (Chicago, 2005) Street’s next book is Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (New York, 2007).