Rant of the week: December 13, 2004

Selling the Disaster (or how I stopped worrying and learned to love the war)

The Pentagon released a report just before the Thanksgiving holiday that admitted a truth all rational and informed people already knew. It would seem that despite the ravings of our demented commander in chief, the terrorists don’t ‘hate us for our freedom’ after all. According to this report, they actually hate us for our policies.

Well, DUH!

The United States is hated throughout the third world because we support regimes that make their citizens’ lives a living hell. People resent that they live under dictatorships that are financed, protected, and in some cases created by the United States. They hate that despite the rhetoric of American presidents, both Republican and Democrat, we do not support democracy or even have a mild interest in its creation in these unfortunate nations. What we DO support is the complete and unquestioned right of American corporations to stomp all over humanity in the pursuit of profit.

This might come as heresy to knuckle-dragging hyper-patriots and the free market goons of Wall Street, but when you take away all restrictions and regulations from capitalism, you are left only with unquenchable greed. You’re left with modern corporatism.

America is still a regulated society. Though the laws that protect American citizens from corporate abuse have been steadily eroding since the 1960s, corporatism is somewhat stymied from acting on its worst impulses on the home soil. Unions still exist, albeit in a weakened and sometimes compromised form. Despite the Republican assault on the environment, there are still (for now at least) laws to prevent the blatant wholesale dumping of toxic waste into our waterways and air. For the most part, Americans still have the right to strike, to protest, to speak out when corporate abuse grows too great. We still believe we’re free, and belief is a powerful thing.

In the third world however, there are no countervailing forces to protect the powerless from the powerful. There, corporatism takes on the lethality of cancer.

Most third world governments protect transnational corporate power and earning potential at the expense of their own citizens. Workers are paid a pittance to work and live in unsafe and unsanitary conditions. Natural resources are extracted for a fraction of their value and local economies are destroyed by the influx of cheap foreign products. In return for a cut of the profits, third world governments act as a corporate security force by crushing any workers movement that springs up. To assist in this cozy arrangement, the U.S. provides millions of dollars in aid, arms and military training (often packaged as ‘developmental assistance’) to the military apparatus of these despicable governments. Power feeds power, and the citizens grow desperate in the shadows.

It doesn’t matter if the host government is a monarchy, a military dictatorship or a theocracy. We excuse these anti-democratic governments as ‘governments in transistion’. The State Department portrays the leaders as ‘strong men’ and our corporate media compare them to our founding fathers. Democracy will be there someday, but only when the people are ready for the ‘responsibilities of self-government’.

Makes you proud to be an American, doesn’t it?

The Pentagon surprised me in diagnosing the illness correctly. The terrorists, insurgents, whatever you want to call them DO hate us as a direct result of U.S. policy. But the Pentagon, in its infinite and eternal stupidity, prescribed the following cure: propaganda. As response, the report calls for the “establishment of a national security adviser for strategic communications, and a massive boost in funding for the ‘information war’ to boost US government TV and radio stations broadcasting in the Middle East.”

So it’s just an image problem, is it? Did the report not just conclude that our policies are the problem? Shouldn’t we maybe re-think some of those policies that lead to so many people hating us so rabidly? Substituting an advertising blitz for policy reform makes as much sense as trying to save a burning house by giving it a new coat of paint.

There are many things we could do to alleviate some of the hatred and anti-American passions that exist in the world today. Getting the hell out of Iraq would be a good place to start. Holding American based corporations accountable for their crimes at home and abroad would be a good follow up. Working with other nations to develop corporate controls, labor and environmental policy to lift the living standards for all humanity would be a good long- range project. Of course, removing the Bush Administration from power would have been an excellent good faith gesture to the world, but that ship has sailed.

As result, I fear we will now have hell to pay.

The Pentagon’s dim-witted response to this study should surprise no one. Corporate influence in the United States has supplanted whatever once passed for democracy, and grows more arrogant and powerful each day. Until America wakes up to this reality, we will continue on our path to apocalypse. 

We know what the problem is.

We just don’t have the guts to accept the cure.

Mal!

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