Sunday, January 13, 2008

Stan Goff: MLK & politics. With the dust-up between the Barack and Hillary camps over Clinton's intensely stupid gaffe comparing war-monger Lyndon Baines Johnson with peacemaker Dr. Martin Luther King, it seems a good time to bring up several embarrassing facts about MLK, his life, and his actual legacy. I'll start by pointing out what no-one who hangs her/his last hope of change on elections and elected officials wants to hear during an election year. Powers and principalities resist changing oppressive patterns until failure to do so threatens their first concern.... stability. Neither John Kennedy nor Lyndon Johnson welcomed any "opportunity" to make history. They were both dragged kicking and screaming through the morass of political risk into signing legislation that was put before them by a mass and disobedient movement that threatened the social order (and not by violence, but by unmasking the mimetic of racism and war by offering their bodies). That is why Clinton's claim that King's dream was only "realized" by the stroke of Genocidal Johnson's pen actually is offensive as hell. Pointing out that the enormously creepy Johnson -- also a Democratic Party political operator like both Obama and Clinton -- drove the nation deeper and deeper into the murderous quagmire of the American military occupation of Vietnam... is, shall we say, inconvenient. Johnson campaigned against Goldwater in 1964 as the comparative "peace" candidate, portraying the Bad Republicans as the war mongers; whereupon he was elected by the credulous public in a landslide, and escalated the occupation into the deaths of almost 3 million Southeast Asians, 58,000 US troops, and the still under-reported ecocide resulting from a horrifying chemical war directed against the whole peoples of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. All politicians, and even hamburger empires, like to quote MLK's "I have a Dream" speech, selecting two or three useful, out-of-context quotes designed to be inoffensive to consumers and white people who believe they live in a meritocracy. So does the press... and now it's their turn. When Dr. King spoke out against the war in 1968, and when he called out the US as a malignant and imperial power, and when he connected the racism that underwrote Jim Crow and its de facto correlatives in the oh-so-innocent North to the racism that allowed America to sleep soundly while Vietnamese men, women, and children were being slaughtered wholesale... then he was beyond the pale. The mainstream press -- far from embracing King -- fell all over themselves to denounce and marginalize him. The includes all the so-called "liberal" sheets that still tell the rest of the media what is and is not "news." Dr. King had the courage to tell us then that every bomb dropped in Vietnam exploded over Harlem. When I hear that kind of truth-telling from either of the pre-anointed Democrats, instead of their relentless phrase-mongering and dressed-up equivocations, then we can take them seriously. Right now all we see are smooth-talking politicians. With Martin Luther King Day right around the corner, expect plenty more of this disgusting mis-attribution to promote political careers. Here is King's speech on Vietnam. [The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com] 4:35:08 PM    comment []

U.S. Corporate Elite Fear Candidate Edwards. WASHINGTON - Ask corporate lobbyists which presidential contender is most feared by their clients and the answer is almost always the same — Democrat John Edwards. The former North Carolina senator’s chosen profession alone raises the hackles of business people. Before entering politics, he made a fortune as a trial lawyer. In litigious America, trial lawyers [...] [CommonDreams.org » Headlines07] 4:32:29 PM    comment []

Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles. In a feature series in The New York Times about Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who have committed, or been charged with, murder after returning home, Deborah Sontag and Lizette Alvarez write: "Late one night in the summer of 2005, Matthew Sepi, a 20-year-old Iraq combat veteran, headed out to a 7-Eleven in the seedy Las Vegas neighborhood where he had settled after leaving the Army." [t r u t h o u t] 4:30:34 PM    comment []

Bush Disowns U.S. Intel, Tells Israelis Iran NIE ‘Doesn’t Reflect My Own Views’. After the recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran was released, Israel publicly challenged the U.S. intelligence consensus that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program. “In our opinion,” Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said, Iran “has apparently continued that program.” Just days after the NIE was released, Bush quickly announced he would make the first visit to Israel of his presidency to mend differences over Iran. In private meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert this week, Newsweek reports that President Bush disowned the U.S. intelligence community’s judgments: But in private conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last week, the president all but disowned the document, said a senior administration official who accompanied Bush on his six-nation trip to the Mideast. “He told the Israelis that he can’t control what the intelligence community says, but that [the NIE’s] conclusions don’t reflect his own views” about Iran’s nuclear-weapons program, said the official, who would discuss intelligence matters only on the condition of anonymity. Bush had reportedly briefed Olmert about the Iran NIE days before it was publicly released in late November. The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh said, “The Israelis were very upset about the report. They think we’re naive, they don’t think we get it right. And so they have a different point of view.” But after his private meetings with Bush this week, Olmert — asked whether he felt reassured — replied, “I am very happy.” [Think Progress] 10:20:54 AM    comment []

Global ‘enthusiasm’ for Bush’s departure.. The 2008 U.S. elections are attracting an “eager” audience worldwide. This past week, for example, major British newspapers “devoted more than 87 pages to news of the U.S. primaries, including 22 front-page stories.” Much of the enthusiasm, according to the Washington Post, is for the end of the Bush presidency: But much of the enthusiasm comes from anticipation of President Bush’s departure, according to several analysts. U.S. prestige and popularity in much of the world have sunk to historic lows since Bush took office, over such issues as the Iraq war and climate change. Many analysts said the election has created high expectations that the new president will be more in tune with the rest of the world. “In many capitals people have been waiting for this change for some time,” said Rosa Balfour, a senior analyst at the European Policy Center, a Brussels-based research group. [Think Progress] 8:53:59 AM    comment []

Blackwater tainted shooting evidence.. Shortly after Blackwater guards shot and killed 17 Iraqi civilians on Sept. 16, the firm “repaired and repainted its trucks immediately,” essentially “destroy[ing] evidence that Justice Department investigators hoped to examine.” Blackwater responded that any repairs “would have been done at the government’s direction.” The State Department refused to comment. [Think Progress] 8:48:33 AM    comment []

DNI McConnell suggests waterboarding is torture.. In an interview with the New Yorker, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell said that waterboarding “would be torture” if used against him, but still declined to say whether the technique should be legally classified as torture: “If I had water draining into my nose, oh God, I just can’t imagine how painful! Whether it’s torture by anybody else’s definition, for me it would be torture,” McConnell told the magazine. […] McConnell said the legal test for torture should be “pretty simple”: “Is it excruciatingly painful to the point of forcing someone to say something because of the pain?” McConnell warned that if waterboarding is “ever is determined to be torture, there will be a huge penalty to be paid for anyone engaging in it.” [Think Progress] 8:46:12 AM    comment []