Bush Fulfills His Grandfather's Dream

It's remarkably common for a grandson to take up his grandfather's major project. This occurred to me when I read recently of Thor Heyerdahl's grandson taking up his mission to cross the Pacific on a raft. But what really struck me was the http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/document/document_20070723.shtml aired on July 23rd documenting President George W. Bush's grandfather's involvement in a 1933 plot to overthrow the U.S. government and install a fascist dictatorship. I knew the story, but had not considered the possibility that the grandson was trying to accomplish what his grandfather had failed to achieve.

Prescott Sheldon Bush (1895 to 1972) attended Yale University and joined the secret society known as Skull and Bones. Prescott is widely reported to have stolen the skull of Native American leader Geronimo. As far as I know, this has not actually been confirmed. In fact, Prescott seems to have had a habit of making things up. He sent letters home from World War I claiming he'd received medals for heroism. After the letters were printed in newspapers, he had to retract his claims.

If this does not yet sound like the life of a George W. Bush ancestor, try this on for size: Prescott Bush's early business efforts tended to fail. He married the daughter of a very rich man named George Herbert Walker (the guy with the compound at Kennebunkport, Maine, that now belongs to the Bush family, and the origin of Dubya's middle initial). Walker installed Prescott Bush as an executive in Thyssen and Flick. From then on, Prescott's business dealings went better, and he entered politics.

Now, the name Thyssen comes from a German named Fritz Thyssen, major financial backer of the rise of Adolph Hitler. Thyssen was referred to in the New York Herald-Tribune as "Hitler's Angel." During the 1930s and early 1940s, and even as late as 1951, Prescott Bush was involved in business dealings with Thyssen, and was inevitably aware of both Thyssen's political activities and the fact that the companies involved were financially benefiting the nation of Germany. In addition, the companies Prescott Bush profited from included one engaged in mining operations in Poland using slave labor from Auschwitz. Two former slave laborers have sued the U.S. government and the heirs of Prescott Bush for $40 billion.

Until the United States entered World War II it was legal for Americans to do business with Germany, but in late 1942 Prescott Bush's businesses interests were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Among those businesses involved was the Hamburg America Lines, for which Prescott Bush served as a manager. A Congressional committee, in a report called the McCormack-Dickstein Report, found that Hamburg America Lines had offered free passage to Germany for journalists willing to write favorably about the Nazis, and had brought Nazi sympathizers to America. (Is this starting to remind anyone of our current president's relationship to the freedom of the press?)

The McCormack-Dickstein Committee was established to investigate a homegrown American fascist plot hatched in 1933. Here's how the BBC promoted its recent story:
"Document uncovers details of a planned coup in the USA in 1933 by right-wing American businessmen. The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell Hse & George Bush’s Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression. Mike Thomson investigates why so little is known about this biggest ever peacetime threat to American democracy."
Actually, if you listen to the 30-minute BBC story, there is not one word of so much as speculation as to why this story is so little known. I think a clue to the answer can be found by looking into why this BBC report has not led to any U.S. media outlets picking up the story this week.

The BBC report provides a good account of the basic story. Some of the wealthiest men in America approached Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, beloved of many World War I veterans, many of them embittered by the government's treatment of them. Prescott Bush's group asked Butler to lead 500,000 veterans in a take-over of Washington and the White House. Butler refused and recounted the affair to the congressional committee. His account was corroborated in part by a number of witnesses, and the committee concluded that the plot was real. But the names of wealthy backers of the plot were blacked out in the committee's records, and nobody was prosecuted. According to the BBC, President Roosevelt cut a deal. He refrained from prosecuting some of the wealthiest men in America for treason. They agreed to end Wall Street's opposition to the New Deal.

Clearly the lack of accountability in Washington, D.C., did not begin with Nancy Pelosi taking Dubya's impeachment off the table, or with Congress' decision to avoid impeachment for President Ronald Reagan (a decision that arguably played a large role in installing Prescott Bush's son George H.W. Bush as president), or with the failure to investigate the apparent deal that George H.W. Bush and others made with Iran to not release American hostages until Reagan was made president, or with the failure to prosecute Richard Nixon after he resigned. Lack of accountability is a proud tradition in our nation's capital. Or maybe I should say our former nation's capital. I don't recognize the place anymore, and I credit that to George W. Bush's efforts to fulfill his grandfather's dream using far subtler and more effective means than a military coup.

Bush the grandson took office through a highly fraudulent election that he nonetheless lost. The Supreme Court blocked a recount of the vote and installed Dubya.

Prescott's grandson proceeded to weaken or eliminate most of the Bill of Rights in the name of protection from a dark foreign enemy. He even tossed out habeas corpus. The grandson of Prescott, that dreamer of the 1930s, established with very little resistance that the U.S. government can kidnap, detain indefinitely on no charge, torture, and murder. The United States under Prescott Bush's grandson adopted policies that heretofore had been considered only Nazi policies, most strikingly the willingness to openly plan and engage in aggressive wars on other nations.

At the same time, Dubya has accomplished a huge transfer of wealth within the United States from the rest of us to the extremely wealthy. He's also effected a major privatization of public operations, including the military. And he's kept tight control over the media.
Dubya has given himself the power to rewrite all laws with signing statements. He's established that intentionally misleading the Congress about the need for a war is not a crime that carries any penalty. He's given himself the right (just as Hitler did) to open anyone's mail. He's created illegal spying programs and then proposed to legalize them. Prescott would be so proud!

The current President Bush has accomplished much more smoothly than his grandfather could have imagined a feat that was one of the goals of Prescott's gang, namely the elimination of Congress.

The Killing Machine

Sunday is a good day to read something that would appear to be science fiction.
It was announced that the CIA would be declassifying hundreds of pages on illegal actions that included plans to eliminate the leaders of foreign governments. Suddenly the publication is halted and it is delayed one day. No coherent explanation was given. Perhaps someone in the White House looked over the material.
The first package of declassified documents goes by the name of “The Family Jewels”; it consists of 702 pages on illegal CIA actions between 1959 and 1973. About 100 pages of this part have been deleted. It deals with actions that were not authorized by any law, plots to assassinate other leaders, experiments with drugs on human beings to control their minds, spying on civil activists and journalists, among other similar activities that were expressly prohibited.
The documents began to be gathered together 14 years after the first of the events took place, when then CIA director, James Schlessinger became alarmed about what the press was writing, especially all the articles by Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein published in The Washington Post, already mentioned in the “Manifesto to the People of Cuba”. The agency was being accused of promoting spying in the Watergate Hotel with the participation of its former agents Howard Hunt and James McCord.
In May 1973, the Director of the CIA was demanding that "all the main operative officials of this agency must immediately inform me on any ongoing or past activity that might be outside of the constituting charter of this agency”. Schlessinger, later appointed Head of the Pentagon, had been replaced by William Colby. Colby was referring to the documents as “skeletons hiding in a closet". New press revelations forced Colby to admit the existence of the reports to interim President Gerald Ford in 1975. The New York Times was denouncing agency penetration of antiwar groups. The law that created the CIA prevented it from spying inside the United States.
That “was just the tip of the iceberg”, said then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
Kissinger himself warned that “blood would flow” if other actions were known, and he immediately added: “For example, that Robert Kennedy personally controlled the operation for the assassination of Fidel Castro”. The President’s brother was then Attorney General of the United States. He was later murdered as he was running for President in the 1968 elections, which facilitated Nixon's election for lack of a strong candidate. The most dramatic thing about the case is that apparently he had reached the conviction that Jack Kennedy had been victim of a conspiracy. Thorough investigators, after analyzing the wounds, the caliber of the shots and other circumstances surrounding the death of the President, reached the conclusion that there had been at least three shooters. Solitary Oswald, used as an instrument, could not have been the only shooter. I found that rather striking. Excuse me for saying this but fate turned me into a shooting instructor with a telescopic sight for all the Granma expeditionaries. I spent months practicing and teaching, every day; even though the target is a stationary one it disappears from view with each shot and so you need to look for it all over again in fractions of a second.
Oswald wanted to come through Cuba on his trip to the USSR. He had already been there before. Someone sent him to ask for a visa in our country’s embassy in Mexico but nobody knew him there so he wasn’t authorized. They wanted to get us implicated in the conspiracy. Later, Jack Ruby, --a man openly linked to the Mafia-- unable to deal with so much pain and sadness, as he said, assassinated him, of all places, in a precinct full police agents.
Subsequently, in international functions or on visits to Cuba, on more than one occasion I met with the aggrieved Kennedy relatives, who would greet me respectfully. The former president’s son, who was a very small child when his father was killed, visited Cuba 34 years later. We met and I invited him to dinner.
The young man, in the prime of his life, and well brought up, tragically died in an airplane accident on a stormy night as he was flying to Martha’s Vineyard with his wife. I never touched on the thorny issue with any of those relatives. In contrast, I pointed out that if the president-elect had then been Nixon instead of Kennedy, after the Bay of Pigs disaster we would have been attacked by the land and sea forces escorting the mercenary expedition, and both countries would have paid a high toll in human lives. Nixon would not have limited himself to saying that victory has many fathers and defeat is an orphan. For the record, Kennedy was never too enthusiastic about the Bay of Pigs adventure; he was led there by Eisenhower’s military reputation and the recklessness of his ambitious vice-president.
I remember that, exactly on the day and minute he was assassinated, I was speaking in a peaceful spot outside of the capital with French journalist Jean Daniel. He told me that he was bringing a message from President Kennedy. He said to me that in essence he had told him: “You are going to see Castro. I would like to know what he thinks about the terrible danger we just experienced of a thermonuclear war. I want to see you again as soon as you get back.” “Kennedy was very active; he seemed to be a political machine”, he added, and we were not able to continue talking as someone rushed in with the news of what had just happened. We turned on the radio. What Kennedy thought was now pointless.
Certainly I lived with that danger. Cuba was both the weakest part and the one that would take the first strike, but we did not agree with the concessions that were made to the United States. I have already spoken of this before.
Kennedy had emerged from the crisis with greater authority. He came to recognize the enormous sacrifices of human lives and material wealth made by the Soviet people in the struggle against fascism. The worst of the relations between the United States and Cuba had not yet occurred by April 1961. When he hadn’t resigned himself to the outcome of the Bay of Pigs, along came the Missile Crisis. The blockade, economic asphyxiation, pirate attacks and assassination plots multiplied. But the assassination plots and other bloody occurrences began under the administration of Eisenhower and Nixon.
After the Missile Crisis we would have not refused to talk with Kennedy, nor would we have ceased being revolutionaries and radical in our struggle for socialism. Cuba would have never severed relations with the USSR as it had been asked to do. Perhaps if the American leaders had been aware of what a war could be using weapons of mass destruction they would have ended the Cold War earlier and differently. At least that’s how we felt then, when there was still no talk of global warming, broken imbalances, the enormous consumption of hydrocarbons and the sophisticated weaponry created by technology, as I have already said to the youth of Cuba. We would have had much more time to reach, through science and conscience, what we are today forced to realize in haste.
President Ford decided to appoint a Commission to investigate the Central Intelligence Agency. “We do not want to destroy the CIA but to preserve it”, he said.
As a result of the Commission’s investigations that were led by Senator Frank Church, President Ford signed an executive order which expressly prohibited the participation of American officials in the assassinations of foreign leaders.
The documents published now disclose information about the CIA-Mafia links for my assassination.
Details are also revealed about Operation Chaos, carrying on from 1969 for at least seven years, for which the CIA created a special squadron with the mission to infiltrate pacifist groups and to investigate “the international activities of radicals and black militants”. The Agency compiled more than 300,000 names of American citizens and organizations and extensive files on 7,200 persons.
According to The New York Times, President Johnson was convinced that the American anti-War movement was controlled and funded by Communist governments and he ordered the CIA to produce evidence.
The documents recognize, furthermore, that the CIA spied on various journalists like Jack Anderson, performers such as Jane Fonda and John Lennon, and the student movements at Columbia University. It also searched homes and carried out tests on American citizens to determine the reactions of human beings to certain drugs.
In a memorandum sent to Colby in 1973, Walter Elder who had been executive assistant to John McCone, CIA Director in the early 1970s, gives information about discussions in the CIA headquarters that were taped and transcribed: “I know that whoever worked in the offices of the director were worried about the fact that these conversations in the office and on the phone were transcribed. During the McCone years there were microphones in his regular offices, the inner office, the dining room, the office in the East building, and in the study of his home on White Haven Street. I don’t know if anyone is ready to talk about this, but the information tends to be leaked, and certainly the Agency is vulnerable in this case”.
The secret transcripts of the CIA directors could contain a great number of “jewels”. The National Security Archive is already requesting these transcripts.
A memo clarifies that the CIA had a project called OFTEN which would collect “information about dangerous drugs in American companies”, until the program was terminated in the fall of 1972. In another memo there are reports that manufacturers of commercial drugs "had passed” drugs to the CIA which had been “refused due to adverse secondary effects”.
As part of the MKULTRA program, the CIA had given LSD and other psycho-active drugs to people without their knowledge. According to another document in the archive, Sydney Gottlieb, a psychiatrist and head of chemistry of the Agency Mind Control Program, is supposedly the person responsible for having made available the poison that was going to be used in the assassination attempt on Patrice Lumumba.
CIA employees assigned to MHCHAOS –the operation that carried out surveillance on American opposition to the war in Vietnam and other political dissidents –expressed “a high level of resentment” for having been ordered to carry out such missions.
Nonetheless, there is a series of interesting matters revealed in these documents, such as the high level at which the decisions for actions against our country were taken.
The technique used today by the CIA to avoid giving any details is not the unpleasant crossed out bits but the blank spaces, coming from the use of computers.
For The New York Times, large censored sections reveal that the CIA still cannot expose all the skeletons in its closets, and many activities developed in operations abroad, checked over years ago by journalists, congressional investigators and a presidential commission, are not in the documents.
Howard Osborn, then CIA Director of Security, makes a summary of the “jewels” compiled by his office. He lists eight cases –including the recruiting of the gangster Johnny Roselli for the coup against Fidel Castro –but they crossed out the document that is in the number 1 place on Osborn’s initial list: two and a half pages.
“The No. 1 Jewel of the CIA Security Offices must be very good, especially since the second one is the list for the program concerning the assassination of Castro by Roselli,” said Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive who requested the declassification of “The Family Jewels” 15 years ago under the Freedom of Information Act.
It is notable that the administration which has declassified the least information in the history of the United States, and which has even started a process of reclassifying information that was previously declassified, now makes the decision to make these revelations.
I believe that such an action could be an attempt to present an image of transparency when the government is at an all time low rate of acceptance and popularity, and to show that those methods belong to another era and are no longer in use. When he announced the decision, General Hayden, current CIA Director, said: “The documents offer a look at very different times and at a very different Agency.”
Needless to say that everything described here is still being done, only in a more brutal manner and all around the planet, including a growing number of illegal actions within the very United States.
The New York Times wrote that intelligence experts consulted expressed that the revelation of the documents is an attempt to distract attention from recent controversies and scandals plaguing the CIA and an Administration that is living through some of its worst moments of unpopularity.
The declassification could also be an attempt at showing, in the early stages of the electoral process that the Democratic administrations were as bad, or worse, than Mr. Bush’s.
In pages 11 to 15 of the Memo for the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, we can read:
“In August 1960, Mr. Richard M. Bissell approached Colonel Sheffield Edwards with the objective of determining whether the Security Office had agents who could help in a confidential mission that required gangster-style action. The target of the mission was Fidel Castro.
“Given the extreme confidentiality of the mission, the project was known only to a small group of people. The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency was informed and he gave it his approval. Colonel J. C. King, Head of the Western Hemisphere Division, was also informed, but all the details were deliberately concealed from officials of Operation JMWAVE. Even though some officials of Communications (Commo) and the Technical Services Division (TSD) took part in initial planning phases, they were not aware of the mission's purpose.
“Robert A. Maheu was contacted, he was informed in general terms about the project, and he was asked to evaluate whether he could get access to gangster-type elements as a first step for achieving the desired goal.
“Mr. Maheu informed that he had met with a certain Johnny Roselli on several occasions while he was visiting Las Vegas. He had only met him informally through clients, but he had been told that he was a member of the upper echelons of the 'syndicate' and that he was controlling all the ice machines on the Strip. In Maheu's opinion, if Roselli was in effect a member of the Clan, he undoubtedly had connections that would lead to the gambling racket in Cuba.
“Maheu was asked to get close to Roselli, who knew that Maheu was a public relations executive looking after national and foreign accounts, and tell him that recently he had been contracted by a client who represented several international business companies, which were suffering enormous financial losses in Cuba due to Castro. They were convinced that the elimination of Castro would be a solution to their problem and they were ready to pay $ 150,000 for a successful outcome. Roselli had to be made perfectly aware of the fact that the U.S. government knew nothing, nor could it know anything, about this operation.
“This was presented to Roselli on September 14, 1960 in the Hilton Plaza Hotel of New York City. His initial reaction was to avoid getting involved but after Maheu’s persuasive efforts he agreed to present the idea to a friend, Sam Gold, who knew “some Cubans”. Roselli made it clear that he didn’t want any money for his part in all this, and he believed that Sam would do likewise. Neither of these people was ever paid with Agency money.
“During the week of September 25, Maheu was introduced to Sam who was living at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. It was not until several weeks after meeting Sam and Joe –who was introduced as courier operating between Havana and Miami –that he saw photos of these two individuals in the Sunday section of Parade. They were identified as Momo Salvatore Giancana and Santos Trafficante, respectively. Both were on the Attorney General’s list of the ten most wanted. The former was described as the boss of the Cosa Nostra in Chicago and Al Capone's heir, and the latter was the boss of Cuban operations of the Cosa Nostra. Maheu immediately called this office upon learning this information.
“After analyzing the possible methods to carry out this mission, Sam suggested that they not resort to firearms but that, if they could get hold of some kind of deadly pill, something to be put into Castro’s food or drink, this would be a much more effective operation. Sam indicated that he had a possible candidate in the person of Juan Orta, a Cuban official who had been receiving bribery payments in the gambling racket, and who still had access to Castro and was in a financial bind.
“The TSD (Technical Services Division) was requested to produce 6 highly lethal pills.
“Joe delivered the pills to Orta. After several weeks of attempts, Orta appears to have chickened out and he asked to be taken off the mission. He suggested another candidate who made several unsuccessful.”
Everything that was said in the numerous paragraphs above is in quotes. Observe well, dear readers, the methods that were already being used by the United States to rule the world.
I remember that during the early years of the Revolution, in the offices of the National Institute for Agrarian Reform, there was a man working there with me whose name was Orta, who had been linked to the anti-Batista political forces. He was a respectful and serious man. But, it could only be him. The decades have gone by and I see his name once more in the CIA report. I can’t lay my hands on information to immediately prove what happened to him. Accept my apologies if I involuntarily have offended a relative or a descendent, whether the person I have mentioned is guilty or not.
The empire has created a veritable killing machine that is made up not only of the CIA and its methods. Bush has established powerful and expensive intelligence and security super-structures, and he has transformed all the air, sea and land forces into instruments of world power that take war, injustice, hunger and death to any part of the globe, in order to educate its inhabitants in the exercise of democracy and freedom. The American people are gradually waking up to this reality.

“You cannot fool all of the people all of the time”, said Lincoln.


By Fidel Castro Ruz

Around the Globe, Farmers Losing Ground

WASHINGTON - In 1938, Walter Lowdermilk, a senior official in the Soil Conservation Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, traveled abroad to look at lands that had been cultivated for thousands of years, seeking to learn how these older civilisations had coped with soil erosion.
He found that some had managed their land well, maintaining its fertility over long stretches of history, and were thriving. Others had failed to do so and left only remnants of their illustrious pasts.
In a section of his report entitled “The Hundred Dead Cities,” he described a site in northern Syria, near Aleppo, where ancient buildings were still standing in stark isolated relief, but they were on bare rock. During the seventh century, the thriving region had been invaded, initially by a Persian army and later by nomads out of the Arabian Desert. In the process, soil and water conservation practices used for centuries were abandoned.
Lowdermilk noted, “Here erosion had done its worst… if the soils had remained, even though the cities were destroyed and the populations dispersed, the area might be re-peopled again and the cities rebuilt, but now that the soils are gone, all is gone.”
Now fast forward to a trip in 2002 by a United Nations team to assess the food situation in Lesotho, a small country of 2 million people imbedded within South Africa. Their finding was straightforward: “Agriculture in Lesotho faces a catastrophic future; crop production is declining and could cease altogether over large tracts of the country if steps are not taken to reverse soil erosion, degradation, and the decline in soil fertility.”
Michael Grunwald reports in the Washington Post that nearly half of the children under five in Lesotho are stunted physically. “Many,” he says, “are too weak to walk to school.”
Whether the land is in northern Syria, Lesotho, or elsewhere, the health of the people living on it cannot be separated from the health of the land itself. A large share of the world’s 852 million hungry people live on land with soils worn thin by erosion.
The thin layer of topsoil that covers the planet’s land surface is the foundation of civilisation. This soil, measured in inches over much of the earth, was formed over long stretches of geological time as new soil formation exceeded the natural rate of erosion. As soil accumulated over the eons, it provided a medium in which plants could grow. In turn, plants protect the soil from erosion. Human activity is disrupting this relationship.
Sometime within the last century, soil erosion began to exceed new soil formation in large areas. Perhaps a third or more of all cropland is losing topsoil faster than new soil is forming, thereby reducing the land’s inherent productivity. Today the foundation of civilisation is crumbling. The seeds of collapse of some early civilisations, such as the Mayans, may have originated in soil erosion that undermined the food supply.
The accelerating soil erosion over the last century can be seen in the dust bowls that form as vegetation is destroyed and wind erosion soars out of control. Among those that stand out are the Dust Bowl in the U.S. Great Plains during the 1930s, the dust bowls in the Soviet Virgin Lands in the 1960s, the huge one that is forming today in northwest China, and the one taking shape in the Sahelian region of Africa.
Each of these is associated with a familiar pattern of overgrazing, deforestation, and agricultural expansion onto marginal land, followed by retrenchment as the soil begins to disappear.
Twentieth-century population growth pushed agriculture onto highly vulnerable land in many countries. The overplowing of the U.S. Great Plains during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, led to the 1930s Dust Bowl. This was a tragic era in U.S. history, one that forced hundreds of thousands of farm families to leave the Great Plains. Many migrated to California in search of a new life, a move immortalised in John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath”.
Three decades later, history repeated itself in the Soviet Union. The Virgin Lands Project between 1954 and 1960 centred on plowing an area of grassland for wheat that was larger than the wheatland in Canada and Australia combined. Initially this resulted in an impressive expansion in Soviet grain production, but the success was short-lived as a dust bowl developed there as well.
Kazakhstan, at the centre of this Virgin Lands Project, saw its grainland area peak at just over 25 million hectares (44 millions acres) around 1980, then shrink to 14 million hectares today. Even on the remaining land, however, the average wheat yield is scarcely one tonne per hectare, a far cry from the nearly eight tonnes per hectare that farmers get in France, Western Europe’s leading wheat producer.
A similar situation exists in Mongolia, where over the last 20 years half the wheatland has been abandoned and wheat yields have also fallen by half, shrinking the harvest by three fourths. Mongolia — a country almost three times the size of France with a population of 2.6 million — is now forced to import nearly 60 percent of its wheat.
Dust storms originating in the new dust bowls are now faithfully recorded in satellite images. In early January 2005, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) released images of a vast dust storm moving westward out of central Africa. This vast cloud of tan-coloured dust stretched over some 5,300 kilometres. NASA noted that if the storm were relocated to the United States, it would cover the country and extend into the oceans on both coasts.
Andrew Goudie, professor of geography at Oxford University, reports that Saharan dust storms — once rare — are now commonplace. He estimates they have increased 10-fold during the last half-century. Among the countries in the region most affected by topsoil loss from wind erosion are Niger, Chad, Mauritania, northern Nigeria, and Burkino Faso. In Mauritania, in Africa’s far west, the number of dust storms jumped from two a year in the early 1960s to 80 a year today.
The Bodélé Depression in Chad is the source of an estimated 1.3 billion tons of wind-borne soil a year, up 10-fold from 1947 when measurements began. The 2 to 3 billion tons of fine soil particles that leave Africa each year in dust storms are slowly draining the continent of its fertility and, hence, its biological productivity. In addition, dust storms leaving Africa travel westward across the Atlantic, depositing so much dust in the Caribbean that they cloud the water and damage coral reefs there.
In China, plowing excesses became common in several provinces as agriculture pushed northward and westward into the pastoral zone between 1987 and 1996. In Inner Mongolia (Nei Monggol), for example, the cultivated area increased by 1.1 million hectares, or 22 percent, during this period. Other provinces that expanded their cultivated area by 3 percent or more during this nine-year span include Heilongjiang, Hunan, Tibet (Xizang), Qinghai, and Xinjiang.
Severe wind erosion of soil on this newly plowed land made it clear that its only sustainable use was controlled grazing. As a result, Chinese agriculture is now engaged in a strategic withdrawal in these provinces, pulling back to land that can sustain crop production.
Water erosion also takes a toll on soils. This can be seen in the silting of reservoirs and in muddy, silt-laden rivers flowing into the sea. Pakistan’s two large reservoirs, Mangla and Tarbela, which store Indus River water for the country’s vast irrigation network, are losing roughly 1 percent of their storage capacity each year as they fill with silt from deforested watersheds.
Ethiopia, a mountainous country with highly erodible soils on steeply sloping land, is losing an estimated 1 billion tons of topsoil a year, washed away by rain. This is one reason Ethiopia always seems to be on the verge of famine, never able to accumulate enough grain reserves to provide a meaningful measure of food security.
Fortunately there are ways to conserve and rebuild soils. These will be discussed in the next Earth Policy Institute Book Byte.

By Lester Brown
(Lester Brown is founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute. This article originally appeared on earthpolicy.org).

Bush Administration Seeks Big $$$ For New Nuclear Weapons Complex

In the nearly two decades since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has not produced new H-bombs or felt the need to significantly modernize its nuclear arsenal. Now, the Bush administration is seeking funding for a major, costly ?upgrade? that would allow the U.S. to produce new nuclear weapons.
The administration argues the ?upgrade? is needed to make the U.S. more secure. But members of Congress from both major political parties have expressed skepticism about the need to enhance the U.S. nuclear arsenal and have questioned the $150 billion price tag. Stopping this proposal, called ?Complex 2030? for the date the upgrade would be completed, is a priority for FCNL?s legislative program in the 110th Congress.

The U.S. nuclear weapons complex is a network of facilities across the country that develop and maintain the United States? arsenal of nuclear weapons. The complex is administered by a semi-autonomous agency inside the Energy Department called the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Just maintaining the existing nuclear weapons complex currently costs taxpayers more than $6 billion a year.

The plan released by the NNSA this past fall calls for a complete overhaul of existing U.S. nuclear weapons facilities. Included in the proposal is the construction of a new nuclear bomb-making plant, which would give the U.S. a weapons production capability it has not had since the Rocky Flats plant in Colorado closed in 1989. If completed, the new bomb plant would annually produce 125 to 200 plutonium pits, the primary component of thermonuclear weapons.

For years since the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. arsenal of nearly 10,000 nuclear warheads has been viewed by the executive branch as ?reliable,? and large enough to protect the United States. (Indeed this arsenal is sufficient to kill everyone on the plant many times over.) Yet, Complex 2030 and the proposed bomb plant, for the first time in more than a decade, would result in a sharp increase in U.S. nuclear weapon production capacity. As NNSA administrator Thomas D?Agostino told a congressional committee in April 2006, Complex 2030 would return the U.S. to a ?level of capability comparable to what we had during the Cold War.?

A Program Without a Mission

Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. nuclear weapons program has struggled to justify its existence. As former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger recently noted, ?the doctrine of mutual Soviet-American deterrence [has become] obsolete [and] reliance on nuclear weapons for this purpose is becoming increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective.? In an op-ed published January 4 in the Wall Street Journal, Kissinger joined former Secretary of State George Schultz, former Defense Secretary William Perry, and former Senator Sam Nunn in calling for universal nuclear disarmament.

But if nuclear weapons are not needed, funding for the nuclear weapons complex would be in jeopardy. This funding represents the paychecks of weapons scientists and bomb plant production employees working at eight primary facilities located in congressional districts across the country. Members of Congress from districts where these facilities are located recognize the economic impact to local communities, and they frequently advocate for increased funding for new nuclear weapons projects.

In some cases, support for the weapons complex becomes more a matter of turning on the Treasury spigot in members? districts rather than a serious congressional evaluation of the ?merits? of nuclear weapons. As Robert Civak, a former White House budget official in the first Bush and Clinton administrations, stated, ?The weapons labs are more interested in job security than national security.?

Stop Funding Before It Gains Momentum

Frequently, when a large new federal program such as Complex 2030 is proposed, the president?s initial request is only a small portion of the program?s overall cost. Subsequent budgets call for ever larger allocations. In the case of Complex 2030, the projected cost is expected to balloon from the president?s fiscal year 2008 request of $25 million for the design phase of the new bomb plant, to an eventual final cost of $150 billion when the program is complete.

Each subsequent annual funding allocation would take the United States one step further along on the path to completion and each step makes it harder to reject the whole project. We at FCNL believe this dangerous and ill-founded program should be stopped at the starting gate. Congress has the "power of the purse? and can defund this ambitious plan before it gains momentum.

During congressional hearings on the Complex 2030 plan this past March, members expressed doubt about the viability of and need for the new complex. Many members noted the lack of a coherent national nuclear weapons policy that would be a prerequisite for such a large expansion.

As Rep. Pete Visclosky (IN), the chair of the House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee stated, ?We are not going to begin building more nuclear bombs without a serious and open national debate on that policy question.?

other members question NNSA?s track record of project management and frequent budget overruns. Rep. David Hobson(OH), the ranking Republican on the same subcommittee noted, ?I discussed [with the Energy Department] the department?s bad habit of making very expensive commitments and then expecting Congress to fork over billions of dollars to pay the costs of these commitments, especially when they weren?t budgeted.?

Rep. Visclosky questioned how the U.S. could ask North Korea and India to stop developing nuclear weapons programs while the U.S. rebuilds its own arsenal. ?Given the United States? nuclear nonproliferation commitments around the world, our desire to stop proliferation of nuclear weapons in other countries, and the pressing need to reduce the size of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex within a believable period of time, I am disappointed that the Department of Energy and this administration has chosen to make [new nuclear weapons] its top priority,? Rep. Visclosky said.

For FCNL, these expressions of congressional caution are good news. But members of Congress still need to hear from their constituents and to be reminded by them of the unacceptable financial and moral costs of nuclear weapons.

FCNL Washington Newsletter

Congress Gives Iraq War Profiteers Another Hundred Billion

Congress has demonstrated its unconditional love for the Bush administration by handing the war profiteers another $100 billion worth of good reasons to keep the war in Iraq rolling along at full-throttle.
And today there was the President, whose only military experience consists of draft-dodging, going AWOL from a cushy stint in the National Guard set up by daddy, and finishing his term of duty as grounded fighter pilot, calling a press conference to inform Americans for the umpteenth time that the only way to the keep the terrorist at bay is by allowing the slaughtering in Iraq to continue; forever apparently.
Over the past month, the majority of political discussions on cable news talk shows related to Iraq funding bill were focused on how members of Congress and especially those who are presidential candidates are consumed with worry over how their votes on funding will affect the results of the next elections.
Once elected, it would be interesting to find out exactly how long it takes for politicians to lose the ability to feel and vote with their hearts when they know that a policy such as the Iraq war is terribly wrong, without thinking about how the decision will effect the vote tally in the next election.
As citizens, we have no control over our own government. Never in my 57 years on this earth have I been so ashamed to be an American knowing that every day that the war continues we are knowingly allowing our soldiers and innocent Iraqis to be killed or injured with absolutely no justification, other than because politicians believe it will be beneficial to their careers to allow Bush's failed war policies to continue.
While political commentators discuss voter odds, myself and probably most Americans are sitting at home unable to watch the news without breaking down crying as the latest pictures flash on the screen showing the happy faces of the young soldiers who are now dead, knowing full well that the next night there will be more pictures of dead soldiers because the politicians have made it clear that the citizens paying their salaries have no right to demand that their elected officials put an end to the killing in Iraq.
It would be interesting to take a poll to see how often each politician even looks at the smiling faces of the dead soldiers and the second question in the poll should be, for those who claim that they do look at these faces every day and still vote to give Bush more funding, how many had to use drugs or alcohol to get to sleep during the 7 days following the vote. For this poll, a high number of drugs and alcohol users would be viewed as positive because the reason for the question is to determine how many politicians still have the capacity to feel guilt.
Congress needs to get one thing straight, the war funding is not about politics, it is about more deaths and injuries every single day that ticks off the calendar all because Bush took this country into a senseless war based on lies. Every single day matters to the soldiers and their families, and to those of us who feel extremely guilty about not being able to find a away to get them out of Bush's war.
Why is there no in-depth discussion by any members of Congress on political talk shows about where these tax dollars are actually ending up, aside from an occasional flare-up of indignation about Halliburton?
There is nothing positive in Iraq to hold up to show Americans how Iraqis have benefited from all the tax dollars already poured into a bottomless pit.
The issue of war profiteering is like the elephant in the middle of the living room, every member of Congress knows where the funding is going but Americans don't hear them on talk shows letting people know that these kids are being killed in the name of war profits.
And the statements in speeches made by members of Congress while debating the bills don't mean anything because 95% of Americans never hear those speeches. Honest politicians should be out screaming to any reporter who will listen to educate Americans about where the hundreds of billions of tax dollars have ended up.
This war is 100 times worse than Viet Nam. A least with Viet Nam, the war profits were not being funneled over the backs of our dead soldiers in plain sight directly into the bank accounts of current and former members of the administrations in power at the time.
Nor were they being funneled to the family bank accounts of the Presidents who were in office during the Viet Nam war.Former Nixon administration official, John Dean, has said that the Bush administration is worse than the Nixon's. He’s right; the Bush gang makes the Nixon administration look saintly and gives a whole new meaning to Nixon's famous line of "I am not a crook." In comparison to the actions of the current regime, it could indeed be said that Mr Nixon was not a crook.
Its easy to understand why most Republicans are not about to tell the world that the leader of their party is a war profiteering crook but the question remains, when are Democrats going to start addressing the issue of who is benefiting from all this war funding and start publicly naming names along with the companies they are connected with.
They have the ability to draw press coverage and give the specific names of current and former administration officials and Bush family members who have set up companies to profit off the war or steered contracts to companies they now work.
Last year, most clearly in the fall elections, Americans told Bush and Congress to get our troops out of Iraq. Democrats took control of Congress at the new year, and there was Bush in a televised address on January 10, 2007, announcing that he had ordered the deployment of five more combat brigades to serve as sitting ducks in Iraq, in addition to the 15 brigades that were already there. Since then, he has extended combat tours from 12 months to 15 months and announced the deployment of still more troops.
According to an analysis by Hearst Newspapers, when support troops are added in, the total number of soldiers in Iraq is about 162,000, and could be 200,000 by Christmas.
In the years to come, the history books will describe the Bush Presidency and the details of a grand war profiteering scheme nicknamed the "war on terror," and with that in mind, members of Congress would be wise to start speaking out against the war profiteers to make damn sure that the historians will be able to report that that they were out there calling a spade a spade and trying to put an end to the death for profit disaster in Iraq.
One commentator on a recent cable talk show made the statement that when voting on the Iraq funding; politicians are not in lock step with how strongly Americans feel about ending this war. That comment was an understatement, because Americans are as fed up with politicians debating over the money as much as they are with the war itself.
Members of Congress and the Presidential candidates should quit trying to second guess how American will vote in the next election and think about how much longer they are going to be willing to sit at home in front of their television sets depressed and driven to tears by looking at flashes of the happy faces of soldiers who were killed that day.
As for presidential candidates, the name John Murtha should be added to the ballot, as he seems to be about the only member of Congress willing to go public and speak from the heart when trying to get the rest of Congress to recognize the need for an immediate plan to rescue our young men and women stranded in Iraq.
The candidates that are working hard to try to end the war get little credit or media coverage. Dennis Kucinich is rarely mentioned and he is working tirelessly to come up with ways to get our soldiers out of Iraq.
By the time the 2008 election rolls around, who knows, after weighing the few options available maybe Americans will decide that no candidate who is a current member of Congress and refused to listen to the people on such an important issue as the Iraq war can be trusted to serve as President.


By Evelyn Pringle

mailto:evelyn-pringle@sbcglobal.net(Evelyn Pringle is a columnist for OpEd News and an investigative journalist focused on corruption in government and corporate America)

Is Imperial Liquidation Possible For America?

In politics, as in medicine, a cure based on a false diagnosis is almost always worthless, often worsening the condition that is supposed to be healed. The United States, today, suffers from a plethora of public ills. Most of them can be traced to the militarism and imperialism that have led to the near-collapse of our Constitutional system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, none of the remedies proposed so far by American politicians or analysts addresses the root causes of the problem.

According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, released on April 26, 2007, some 78% of Americans believe their country to be headed in the wrong direction. Only 22% think the Bush administration's policies make sense, the lowest number on this question since October 1992, when George H. W. Bush was running for a second term -- and lost. What people don't agree on are the reasons for their doubts and, above all, what the remedy -- or remedies -- ought to be.

The range of opinions on this is immense. Even though large numbers of voters vaguely suspect that the failings of the political system itself led the country into its current crisis, most evidently expect the system to perform a course correction more or less automatically. As Adam Nagourney of the New York Times reported, by the end of March 2007, at least 280,000 American citizens had already contributed some $113.6 million to the presidential campaigns of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, Rudolph Giuliani, or John McCain.

If these people actually believe a presidential election a year-and-a-half from now will significantly alter how the country is run, they have almost surely wasted their money. As Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism, puts it: "None of the Democrats vying to replace President Bush is doing so with the promise of reviving the system of check and balances.... The aim of the party out of power is not to cut the presidency down to size but to seize it, not to reduce the prerogatives of the executive branch but to regain them."

George W. Bush has, of course, flagrantly violated his oath of office, which requires him "to protect and defend the constitution," and the opposition party has been remarkably reluctant to hold him to account. Among the "high crimes and misdemeanors" that, under other political circumstances, would surely constitute the Constitutional grounds for impeachment are these: the President and his top officials pressured the Central Intelligence Agency to put together a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's nuclear weapons that both the administration and the Agency knew to be patently dishonest. They then used this false NIE to justify an American war of aggression. After launching an invasion of Iraq, the administration unilaterally reinterpreted international and domestic law to permit the torture of prisoners held at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and at other secret locations around the world.

Nothing in the Constitution, least of all the commander-in-chief clause, allows the president to commit felonies. Nonetheless, within days after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush had signed a secret executive order authorizing a new policy of "extraordinary rendition," in which the CIA is allowed to kidnap terrorist suspects anywhere on Earth and transfer them to prisons in countries like Egypt, Syria, or Uzbekistan, where torture is a normal practice, or to secret CIA prisons outside the United States where Agency operatives themselves do the torturing.

On the home front, despite the post-9/11 congressional authorization of new surveillance powers to the administration, its officials chose to ignore these and, on its own initiative, undertook extensive spying on American citizens without obtaining the necessary judicial warrants and without reporting to Congress on this program. These actions are prima-facie violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (and subsequent revisions) and of Amendment IV of the Constitution.

These alone constitute more than adequate grounds for impeachment, while hardly scratching the surface. And yet, on the eve of the national elections of November 2006, then House Minority Leader, now Speaker, Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), pledged on the CBS News program "60 Minutes" that "impeachment is off the table." She called it "a waste of time." And six months after the Democratic Party took control of both houses of Congress, the prison at Guantánamo Bay was still open and conducting drumhead courts martial of the prisoners held there; the CIA was still using "enhanced interrogation techniques" on prisoners in foreign jails; illegal intrusions into the privacy of American citizens continued unabated; and, more than fifty years after the CIA was founded, it continues to operate under, at best, the most perfunctory congressional oversight.

Promoting Lies, Demoting Democracy

Without question, the administration's catastrophic war in Iraq is the single overarching issue that has convinced a large majority of Americans that the country is "heading in the wrong direction." But the war itself is the outcome of an imperial presidency and the abject failure of Congress to perform its Constitutional duty of oversight. Had the government been working as the authors of the Constitution intended, the war could not have occurred. Even now, the Democratic majority remains reluctant to use its power of the purse to cut off funding for the war, thereby ending the American occupation of Iraq and starting to curtail the ever-growing power of the military-industrial complex.

One major problem of the American social and political system is the failure of the press, especially television news, to inform the public about the true breadth of the unconstitutional activities of the executive branch. As Frederick A. O. Schwarz and Aziz Z. Huq, the authors of Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror, observe, "For the public to play its proper checking role at the ballot box, citizens must know what is done by the government in their names."

Instead of uncovering administration lies and manipulations, the media actively promoted them. Yet the first amendment to the Constitution protects the press precisely so it can penetrate the secrecy that is the bureaucrat's most powerful, self-protective weapon. As a result of this failure, democratic oversight of the government by an actively engaged citizenry did not -- and could not -- occur. The people of the United States became mere spectators as an array of ideological extremists, vested interests, and foreign operatives -- including domestic neoconservatives, Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi exiles, the Israeli Lobby, the petroleum and automobile industries, warmongers and profiteers allied with the military-industrial complex, and the entrenched interests of the professional military establishment -- essentially hijacked the government.

Some respected professional journalists do not see these failings as the mere result of personal turpitude but rather as deep structural and cultural problems within the American system as it exists today. In an interview with Matt Taibbi, Seymour Hersh, for forty years one of America's leading investigative reporters, put the matter this way:


"All of the institutions we thought would protect us -- particularly the press, but also the military, the bureaucracy, the Congress -- they have failed… So all the things that we expect would normally carry us through didn't. The biggest failure, I would argue, is the press, because that's the most glaring…. What can be done to fix the situation? [long pause] You'd have to fire or execute ninety percent of the editors and executives."


Veteran analyst of the press (and former presidential press secretary), Bill Moyers, considering a classic moment of media failure, concluded: "The disgraceful press reaction to Colin Powell's presentation at the United Nations [on February 5, 2003] seems like something out of Monty Python, with one key British report cited by Powell being nothing more than a student's thesis, downloaded from the Web -- with the student later threatening to charge U.S. officials with 'plagiarism.'"

As a result of such multiple failures (still ongoing), the executive branch easily misled the American public.

A Made-in-America Human Catastrophe

Of the failings mentioned by Hersh, that of the military is particularly striking, resembling as it does the failures of the Vietnam era, thirty-plus years earlier. One would have thought the high command had learned some lessons from the defeat of 1975. Instead, it once again went to war pumped up on our own propaganda -- especially the conjoined beliefs that the United States was the "indispensable nation," the "lone superpower," and the "victor" in the Cold War; and that it was a new Rome the likes of which the world had never seen, possessing as it did -- from the heavens to the remotest spot on the planet -- "full spectrum dominance." The idea that the U.S. was an unquestioned military colossus athwart the world, which no power or people could effectively oppose, was hubristic nonsense certain to get the country into deep trouble -- as it did -- and bring the U.S. Army to the point of collapse, as happened in Vietnam and may well happen again in Iraq (and Afghanistan).

Instead of behaving in a professional manner, our military invaded Iraq with far too small a force; failed to respond adequately when parts of the Iraqi Army (and Baathist Party) went underground; tolerated an orgy of looting and lawlessness throughout the country; disobeyed orders and ignored international obligations (including the obligation of an occupying power to protect the facilities and treasures of the occupied country -- especially, in this case, Baghdad's National Museum and other archaeological sites of untold historic value); and incompetently fanned the flames of an insurgency against our occupation, committing numerous atrocities against unarmed Iraqi civilians.

According to Andrew Bacevich, "Next to nothing can be done to salvage Iraq. It no longer lies within the capacity of the United States to determine the outcome of events there." Our former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas W. Freeman, says of President Bush's recent "surge" strategy in Baghdad and al-Anbar Province: "The reinforcement of failure is a poor substitute for its correction."

Symbolically, a certain sign of the disaster to come in Iraq arrived via an April 26th posting from the courageous but anonymous Sunni woman who has, since August 2003, published the indispensable blog Baghdad Burning. Her family, she reported, was finally giving up and going into exile -- joining up to two million of her compatriots who have left the country. In her final dispatch, she wrote:


"There are moments when the injustice of having to leave your country simply because an imbecile got it into his head to invade it, is overwhelming. It is unfair that in order to survive and live normally, we have to leave our home and what remains of family and friends.... And to what?"


Retired General Barry McCaffrey, commander of the 24th Infantry Division in the first Iraq war and a consistent cheerleader for Bush strategies in the second, recently radically changed his tune. He now says, "No Iraqi government official, coalition soldier, diplomat, reporter, foreign NGO, nor contractor can walk the streets of Baghdad, nor Mosul, nor Kirkuk, nor Basra, nor Tikrit, nor Najaf, nor Ramadi, without heavily armed protection." In a different context, Gen. McCaffrey has concluded: "The U.S. Army is rapidly unraveling."

Even military failure in Iraq is still being spun into an endless web of lies and distortions by the White House, the Pentagon, military pundits, and the now-routine reporting of propagandists disguised as journalists. For example, in the first months of 2007, rising car-bomb attacks in Baghdad were making a mockery of Bush administration and Pentagon claims that the U.S. troop escalation in the capital had brought about "a dramatic drop in sectarian violence." The official response to this problem: the Pentagon simply quit including deaths from car bombings in its count of sectarian casualties. (It has never attempted to report civilian casualties publicly or accurately.) Since August 2003, there have been over 1,050 car bombings in Iraq. One study estimates that through June 2006 the death toll from these alone has been a staggering 78,000 Iraqis.

The war and occupation George W. Bush unleashed in Iraq has proved unimaginably lethal for unarmed civilians, but reporting the true levels of lethality in Iraq, or the nature of the direct American role in it was, for a long time, virtually taboo in the U.S. media. As late as October 2006, the journal of the British Medical Association, The Lancet, published a study conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad estimating that, since March 2003, there were some 601,027 more Iraqi deaths from violence than would have been expected without a war. The British and American governments at first dismissed the findings, claiming the research was based on faulty statistical methods -- and the American media ignored the study, played down its importance, or dismissed its figures.

On March 27, 2007, however, it was revealed that the chief scientific adviser to the British Ministry of Defense, Roy Anderson, had offered a more honest response. The methods used in the study were, he wrote, "close to best practice." Another British official described them as "a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones." Over 600,000 violent deaths in a population estimated in 2006 at 26.8 million -- that is, one in every 45 individuals -- amounts to a made-in-America human catastrophe.

One subject that the government, the military, and the news media try to avoid like the plague is the racist and murderous culture of rank-and-file American troops when operating abroad. Partly as a result of the background racism that is embedded in many Americans' mental make-up and the propaganda of American imperialism that is drummed into recruits during military training, they do not see assaults on unarmed "rag heads" or "hajis" as murder. The cult of silence on this subject began to slip only slightly in May 2007 when a report prepared by the Army's Mental Health Advisory Team was leaked to the San Diego Union-Tribune. Based on anonymous surveys and focus groups involving 1,320 soldiers and 447 Marines, the study revealed that only 56% of soldiers would report a unit member for injuring or killing an innocent noncombatant, while a mere 40% of Marines would do so. Some militarists will reply that such inhumanity to the defenseless is always inculcated into the properly trained soldier. If so, then the answer to this problem is to ensure that, in the future, there are many fewer imperialist wars of choice sponsored by the United States.

The Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex

Many other aspects of imperialism and militarism are undermining America's Constitutional system. By now, for example, the privatization of military and intelligence functions is totally out of control, beyond the law, and beyond any form of Congressional oversight. It is also incredibly lucrative for the owners and operators of so-called private military companies -- and the money to pay for their activities ultimately comes from taxpayers through government contracts. Any accounting of these funds, largely distributed to crony companies with insider connections, is chaotic at best. Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, estimates that there are 126,000 private military contractors in Iraq, more than enough to keep the war going, even if most official U.S. troops were withdrawn. "From the beginning," Scahill writes, "these contractors have been a major hidden story of the war, almost uncovered in the mainstream media and absolutely central to maintaining the U.S. occupation of Iraq."

America's massive "military" budgets, still on the rise, are beginning to threaten the U.S. with bankruptcy, given that its trade and fiscal deficits already easily make it the world's largest net debtor nation. Spending on the military establishment -- sometimes mislabeled "defense spending" -- has soared to the highest levels since World War II, exceeding the budgets of the Korean and Vietnam War eras as well as President Ronald Reagan's weapons-buying binge in the 1980s. According to calculations by the National Priorities Project, a non-profit research organization that examines the local impact of federal spending policies, military spending today consumes 40% of every tax dollar.

Equally alarming, it is virtually impossible for a member of Congress or an ordinary citizen to obtain even a modest handle on the actual size of military spending or its impact on the structure and functioning of our economic system. Some $30 billion of the official Defense Department (DoD) appropriation in the current fiscal year is "black," meaning that it is allegedly going for highly classified projects. Even the open DoD budget receives only perfunctory scrutiny because members of Congress, seeking lucrative defense contracts for their districts, have mutually beneficial relationships with defense contractors and the Pentagon. President Dwight D. Eisenhower identified this phenomenon, in the draft version of his 1961 farewell address, as the "military-industrial-congressional complex." Forty-six years later, in a way even Eisenhower probably couldn't have imagined, the defense budget is beyond serious congressional oversight or control.

The DoD always tries to minimize the size of its budget by representing it as a declining percentage of the gross national product. What it never reveals is that total military spending is actually many times larger than the official appropriation for the Defense Department. For fiscal year 2006, Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute calculated national security outlays at almost a trillion dollars -- $934.9 billion to be exact -- broken down as follows (in billions of dollars):

Department of Defense: $499.4
Department of Energy (atomic weapons): $16.6
Department of State (foreign military aid): $25.3
Department of Veterans Affairs (treatment of wounded soldiers): $69.8
Department of Homeland Security (actual defense): $69.1
Department of Justice (1/3rd for the FBI): $1.9
Department of the Treasury (military retirements): $38.5
NASA (satellite launches): $7.6
Interest on war debts, 1916-present: $206.7


Totaled, the sum is larger than the combined sum spent by all other nations on military security.

This spending helps sustain the national economy and represents, essentially, a major jobs program. However, it is beginning to crowd out the civilian economy, causing stagnation in income levels. It also contributes to the hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs to other countries. On May 1, 2007, the Center for Economic and Policy Research released a series of estimates on "the economic impact of the Iraq war and higher military spending." Its figures show, among other things, that, after an initial demand stimulus, the effect of a significant rise in military spending (as we've experienced in recent years) turns negative around the sixth year.

Sooner or later, higher military spending forces inflation and interest rates up, reducing demand in interest-sensitive sectors of the economy, notably in annual car and truck sales. Job losses follow. The non-military construction and manufacturing sectors experience the largest share of these losses. The report concludes, "Most economic models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment."

Imperial Liquidation?

Imperialism and militarism have thus begun to imperil both the financial and social well-being of our republic. What the country desperately needs is a popular movement to rebuild the Constitutional system and subject the government once again to the discipline of checks and balances. Neither the replacement of one political party by the other, nor protectionist economic policies aimed at rescuing what's left of our manufacturing economy will correct what has gone wrong. Both of these solutions fail to address the root cause of our national decline.

I believe that there is only one solution to the crisis we face. The American people must make the decision to dismantle both the empire that has been created in their name and the huge (still growing) military establishment that undergirds it. It is a task at least comparable to that undertaken by the British government when, after World War II, it liquidated the British Empire. By doing so, Britain avoided the fate of the Roman Republic -- becoming a domestic tyranny and losing its democracy, as would have been required if it had continued to try to dominate much of the world by force.

For the U.S., the decision to mount such a campaign of imperial liquidation may already come too late, given the vast and deeply entrenched interests of the military-industrial complex. To succeed, such an endeavor might virtually require a revolutionary mobilization of the American citizenry, one at least comparable to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Even to contemplate a drawing back from empire -- something so inconceivable to our pundits and newspaper editorial writers that it is simply never considered -- we must specify as clearly as possible precisely what the elected leaders and citizens of the United States would have to do. Two cardinal decisions would have to be made. First, in Iraq, we would have to initiate a firm timetable for withdrawing all our military forces and turning over the permanent military bases we have built to the Iraqis. Second, domestically, we would have to reverse federal budget priorities.

In the words of Noam Chomsky, a venerable critic of American imperialism: "Where spending is rising, as in military supplemental bills to conduct the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it would sharply decline. Where spending is steady or declining (health, education, job training, the promotion of energy conservation and renewable energy sources, veterans benefits, funding for the UN and UN peacekeeping operations, and so on), it would sharply increase. Bush's tax cuts for people with incomes over $200,000 a year would be immediately rescinded."

Such reforms would begin at once to reduce the malevolent influence of the military-industrial complex, but many other areas would require attention as well. As part of the process of de-garrisoning the planet and liquidating our empire, we would have to launch an orderly closing-up process for at least 700 of the 737 military bases we maintain (by official Pentagon count) in over 130 foreign countries on every continent except Antarctica. We should ultimately aim at closing all our imperialist enclaves, but in order to avoid isolationism and maintain a capacity to assist the United Nations in global peacekeeping operations, we should, for the time being, probably retain some 37 of them, mostly naval and air bases.

Equally important, we should rewrite all our Status of Forces Agreements -- those American-dictated "agreements" that exempt our troops based in foreign countries from local criminal laws, taxes, immigration controls, anti-pollution legislation, and anything else the American military can think of. It must be established as a matter of principle and law that American forces stationed outside the U.S. will deal with their host nations on a basis of equality, not of extraterritorial privilege.

The American approach to diplomatic relations with the rest of the world would also require a major overhaul. We would have to end our belligerent unilateralism toward other countries as well as our scofflaw behavior regarding international law. Our objective should be to strengthen the United Nations, including our respect for its majority, by working to end the Security Council veto system (and by stopping using our present right to veto). The United States needs to cease being the world's largest supplier of arms and munitions -- a lethal trade whose management should be placed under UN supervision. We should encourage the UN to begin outlawing weapons like land mines, cluster bombs, and depleted-uranium ammunition that play particularly long-term havoc with civilian populations. As part of an attempt to right the diplomatic balance, we should take some obvious steps like recognizing Cuba and ending our blockade of that island and, in the Middle East, working to equalize aid to Israel and Palestine, while attempting to broker a real solution to that disastrous situation. Our goal should be a return to leading by example -- and by sound arguments -- rather than by continual resort to unilateral armed force and repeated foreign military interventions.

In terms of the organization of the executive branch, we need to rewrite the National Security Act of 1947, taking away from the CIA all functions that involve sabotage, torture, subversion, overseas election rigging, rendition, and other forms of clandestine activity. The president should be deprived of his power to order these types of operations except with the explicit advice and consent of the Senate. The CIA should basically devote itself to the collection and analysis of foreign intelligence. We should eliminate as much secrecy as possible so that neither the CIA, nor any other comparable organization ever again becomes the president's private army.

In order to halt our economic decline and lessen our dependence on our trading partners, the U.S. must cap its trade deficits through the perfectly legal use of tariffs in accordance with World Trade Organization rules, and it must begin to guide its domestic market in accordance with a national industrial policy, just as the leading economies of the world (particularly the Japanese and Chinese ones) do as a matter of routine. Even though it may involve trampling on the vested interests of American university economics departments, there is simply no excuse for a continued reliance on an outdated doctrine of "free trade."

Normally, a proposed list of reforms like this would simply be rejected as utopian. I understand this reaction. I do want to stress, however, that failure to undertake such reforms would mean condemning the United States to the fate that befell the Roman Republic and all other empires since then. That is why I gave my book Nemesis the subtitle "The Last Days of the American Republic."

When Ronald Reagan coined the phrase "evil empire," he was referring to the Soviet Union, and I basically agreed with him that the USSR needed to be contained and checkmated. But today it is the U.S. that is widely perceived as an evil empire and world forces are gathering to stop us. The Bush administration insists that if we leave Iraq our enemies will "win" or -- even more improbably -- "follow us home." I believe that, if we leave Iraq and our other imperial enclaves, we can regain the moral high ground and disavow the need for a foreign policy based on preventive war. I also believe that unless we follow this path, we will lose our democracy and then it will not matter much what else we lose. In the immortal words of Pogo, "We have met the enemy and he is us."


By Chalmers Johnson
Chalmers Johnson is the author of Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007). It is the final volume of his Blowback Trilogy.

The American Empire is Failing

Terry Paupp is the author of Exodus from Empire: The Fall of America's Empire and the Rise of the Global Community. The book examines the downfall of the American Empire, its impact on the world community and what world order will take its place. Paupp has been a professor of philosophy and international law at Southwestern College, National University, San Diego City College. He served as the National Chancellor of the U.S. for the International Association of Educators for World Peace from 2001-2005. His previous books include “Achieving Inclusionary Governance: Advancing Peace and Development in First and Third World Nations (2000). He is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs.

Kevin Zeese: Exodus from Empire is an exhaustive book, 423 pages long, covering a wide array of empire-related issues. It must have taken you a geat deal of time and effort to write it. Why did you write this book?

Terry Paupp: Yes, you're right. A 423-page long book on empire related issues is quite an undertaking. I can honestly say that I have worked on, thought about, and read about these issues for the last 37 years of my life. So, starting as a freshman in college and continuing on through my years in higher education and teaching, I have wrestled with the reality of a mutating and violent American Empire. In high school I mourned the death of my hero, Robert F. Kennedy. In college, I was involved in the anti-war movement and an active participant in Vietnam War teach-ins and protests. After college I obtained a Master of Theological Studies in Chicago – doing my thesis on liberation theology in Latin America. It was at that time that I started viewing religion, politics, economics, and social life from the perspective of those on the bottom of society – the poor, oppressed – most of who live in the Global South (Third World). After teaching philosophy and comparative religion courses for 6 years, I went to law school and obtained a Juris-Doctor in Law. Soon thereafter, I returned to academics and writing books and articles about what I have termed "Inclusionary Governance" – juxtaposing that ideal for human rights and social justice to all forms of "Exclusionary Governance" and "Exclusionary States."
In my professional determination, the United States itself was hardly a democratic polity because of exclusionary policies based on race and after the 1870s policies increasingly based on the priorities of capital---the most privileged and wealthy classes of the elite. Further, after the Reagan era it has become clear to me that the US was increasingly becoming more like the oligarchies of Latin American dictators and its large landowners.
Certainly since George W. Bush stole the elections of 2000 and 2004 it is clear that voter suppression, the US Patriot Act, the corruption of the US Justice Department for partisan political gain, the death of a Constitutional framework of effective checks and balances, illegal wiretapping and spying on Americans in violation of the Bill of Rights of the US Constitution, has all contributed to the defense of corporate wealth and a corporate agenda that is inherently ant-democratic. These are features which are similar to a Latin American oligarchy---a so-called banana republic. Of course the main difference in the case of the US was its huge military budget and the military-industrial complex that drove it. This reality is what inspired me to write the book – especially after the Bush-2 regime invaded Iraq in 2003 and began and illegal occupation of that nation. For me, it was clear from the start that it would be another Vietnam – justified by the American Establishment with a phony pretext for war (9/11) just as the Gulf of Tonkin incident gave the Johnson administration a green light for introducing combat troops into Vietnam. On this matter, please refer to Chapter 5 of Exodus from Empire.
I have devoted Chapter 5 of Exodus from Empire to a discussion of this "hidden politics of empire." In short, this book came about out of a sense of rage and a sense of injustice against an empire that could sanction tremendous degrees of hunger, poverty, and inequality around the world while creating a global network of military bases for the defense of corporate interests only interested in their own profits to the exclusion of every other human and humane consideration.

KZ: Your book faces up to a key question that is rarely discussed in the U.S. media -- American Empire. I expect many in the media and the public do not think of the U.S. as an empire. Please explain why you call the U.S. an empire?

TP: You are quite correct in noting that the U.S. media fails to even acknowledge that Americans live in an empire. I call the U.S. an empire because it is clear to any serious student of history that it became one in the aftermath of World War II when England surrendered its colonies and accepted the protection of the U.S. nuclear umbrella from the beginnings of the Cold War.
The entire period of the late 1940s through the early 1960s was an age of de-colonization from the empires of Britain, France, and Germany. Yet, during this period the Cold War provided the context for the U.S. to embark upon neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism in order to protect the so-called "Free World." The reality is that the Free World is not really "free" in terms of civil liberties and human rights. It is free to open access by U.S.-based corporations and multinational/transnational business interests.
To assist in this structuring of the world economy in line with the American Establishment, the IMF, World Bank, and WTO have been established to govern the world economy and as many countries as possible within its orbit. To that end, both Wall Street and the U.S. Treasury Department – as the centers of U.S. finance and capital – give the rest of the world within its "sphere of influence" their marching orders. We see this as Third World nations have structural adjustment programs shoved down their throats by the IMF. These structural adjustment programs--- SAPs---that are imposed by the IMF function so as to order the governments who are the recipients of these loans to break up labor unions, suspend wage structures that benefit workers, and condone the rape of the environment.
All of this is undertaken by the U.S. Global Empire in the furtherance of its corporate allies and in its strategic search for obtaining natural resources – such as oil, tungsten, ore – to shore up its domination of the planet. In fact, the Pentagon has said as much in its planning documents since 2001 when it writes of "full spectrum dominance." What is that? It is the control of not only land, air, and sea by the American Empire, but outer space as well.
The weaponization of space is a high priority for the Bush-2 regime – as exemplified by its unilateral withdrawal from the 1972 ABM Treaty and its spending billions of dollars every year for "National Missile Defense" (NMD). It is a program born in the Reagan years under the name of the "Strategic Defense Initiative" (SDI) which its critics later referred to as "Star Wars." So, the military and economic components of the American empire are all in place or being developed to be put in place so as to turn the 21st Century into the "Next American Century."
Just as the 20th Century has been referred to by historians as the "American Century," it is the hope and wet-dream of the Neo-Conservatives and their allies to make the 21st Century into their own. Hence, the invasions of the Middle East for oil, the building of U.S. military bases throughout Eurasia and the soft underbelly of Russia, and the ever sought after control of the Persian Gulf are all designed as a geopolitical strategy to reinforce the American Empire against all possible contenders for its dominant or "hegemonic" position. Therefore, both Russia and China are seen as new potential enemies insofar as they might develop the capacity to become competing hegemons---threatening American and British access to oil supplies and energy resources.
The entire geopolitical strategy of the Pentagon and the Bush-2 regime is dedicated to maintaining American hegemony at all costs. The only significant difference between the Bush-2 regime and the Pentagon is that the Pentagon admits that Global Warming and Climate Change could be an even greater threat than terrorism, while the members of the Bush-2 regime are still arguing that there is "no real science" to support the data and findings of those who have studied the phenomena we call Global Warming.

KZ: You also claim that the American empire is falling. What evidence do you have of that?

TP: I do claim that the American Empire is falling. To begin with, the U.S. Governments borrows $2-billion dollars a day from China just to keep the American economy going. China is basically borrowing worthless U.S. Treasury Bonds that are backed up by nothing more than the promise of the "full faith and credit" of the U.S. Government. Ever since the U.S. went off the gold standard during the Nixon presidency, the dollar is not backed by anything---except the military strength of the nation and its worldwide domination over most foreign currencies. However, those days might well be ending as the Euro takes its place as the dominant currency of the European Union and Europe begins to follow different policy choices and paths from the architects of the American Empire.
Additionally, the breakdown of the so-called "Washington Consensus" in the late 1990s means that the economic model of Neo-liberalism is no longer a viable model for the developing nations of the Third World and those nations – such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Ecuador that want to walk an independent path from that proclaimed by the architects of the empire and expressed through the policies of the IMF, World Bank WTO, and Free Trade Agreements (such as NAFTA and CAFTA).
The reality of globalization under the sway of the U.S. Global Empire and international capitalism has used the Neo-liberal economic model to subordinate Third World nations into debt traps and then leave their peoples vulnerable to market fluctuations and the fleeting fortunes of economic practices premised upon the promise of greater wealth through strategies of privatization and deregulation.
In 1999, the East Asian Miracle becamea nightmare with an economic meltdown followed by the witches brew made up by the IMF. The World Bank's former head economist and Nobel Prize Winner, Joseph Stiglitz, wound up fired from his position at the World Bank by Bill Clinton and Larry Summers (his Treasury Secretary) when he dared to criticize the failed policies of the IMF, the failures of the Neo-liberal model and its orthodoxy, and the absurd dogmas that surrounded the "Washington Consensus."
In Chapter 6 of Exodus from Empire, I differentiate between Neo-liberal globalization on the one hand, and the path of "inclusive human rights based development on the other (pp. 287-297). I claim that the American Empire is falling because it has engendered global resistance movements throughout the entire Global Community. Further, I argue that this emerging and rising Global Community has the capacity to develop national, regional, and international alliances across the Global South – thereby beginning to undermine the sway and threat of the American Empire. I call this a "counter-hegemonic alliance."
Also, there are struggles within the Global North as well in the form of social movements that are dedicated to eliminating the Neo-liberal model and those Bush-sanctioned policies of resurgent militarism that seek to enforce it. After 2001, the entire economy of Argentina collapsed under the IMF formulas for economic "growth" – just as the East Asian economies went into meltdown and then were decimated by the IMF's structural adjustment programs in the period of 1999-2001.
In Exodus from Empire, I examine the arguments for relief from "odious debt" and examine how nations from Africa to Latin America are seeking their year of Jubilee---debt forgiveness and reparations for the injustices imposed on them by the American Empire and its cronies. The principles of this "counter-hegemonic alliance" are of a new historical magnitude – coming at a time when the American Empire is over-extended by what Paul Kennedy has termed "imperial overstretch."
The roots of these principles may be traced back to 1955 when the Bandung Conference produced its 10-basic principles---the product of the work of 29 Third World Nations that were intended to govern the relations between Third World States (p. 310). At the present time, Latin American states are beginning to effectively move toward making their region an independent regional power – increasingly immune from the dictates of the American Empire and its institutional appendages.
Further, within the U.S. itself the lawlessness of the Bush-2 regime is catching up with the realities of Constitutional law as a new Democratic Congress seeks to re-establish oversight of the federal government, bring an end to illegal wiretaps and violations the FISA law, curtail the excesses of the Patriot Act, the illegal use of torture in violation of the Geneva Conventions and U.S. law, and to restore habeas corpus. Yet, it remains to be seen if the fascist drift of the Bush-2 regime can truly be stopped and the American Republic repaired after almost eight years of lawless rule. These are the questions I address in Chapter 3 of Exodus from Empire. The challenge is what to do “when the law of the land becomes lawless.” The real problem, of course, is that the empire has developed its own law – "Empire's Law" – that is accountable only to the dictates of Empire and to the furtherance of the imperial project.
In short, all laws are not equal because the new reality declares that all activities and laws shall be subject to harmonization to fit the smooth progress of the empire's activities. Noting is supposed to stand in the way of the unrestrained movement of capital and the dictates of the architects of the American Empire. Yet, there cannot be nor has there ever been a "Superpower Democracy" and there is no "Constitution of the American Empire." It is an unbounded reality and force that – like fascism itself – is a system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme Right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership together with belligerent nationalism (See: pages 83-84, 234 of Exodus from Empire).

KZ: Should the U.S. empire end? From the perspective of Americans, is it bad for us? Don't we get cheap products, a variety of produce, and access to critical resources? What do we lose by being an empire? Do we have to choose between empire and democracy -- are they, in the end, mutually exclusive?

TP: Should the U.S. Empire end? Yes, it should end because it is not sustainable for either the average American or for the rest of the world. It is equally bad for Americans as it is for billions of people trapped in poverty throughout the Global South.
The tragedy is that the average American does not know how bad it is or that he/she is an expendable subject within the empire. Certainly the middle-class is starting to see the effects of this empire when jobs are "outsourced" to cheap Third World labor markets and are not replaced, when the tax structure favors the richest two percent while gaps in national inequality continue to grow, when the education system continues to collapse, when political action becomes irrelevant within a two-party system that is owned and paid for by the same corporate elite.
The question becomes: "What do we lose by becoming an empire?" The short answer is that we lose our democracy. That is because empire and democracy are mutually exclusive. A choice has to be made between the two – either consciously or by default. I wrote Exodus from Empire in the hope that enough Americans would read it in order to prevent the choice being made by default.
For example, in Chapter 5 (pp. 200-201) I address the Congressional surrender of the war power – under the U.S. Constitution – to Bush on the eve of the Iraq War. From that surrender of its war power, the congress allowed Bush to revitalize the "imperial presidency" – a reality we see in Bush's claim that he can function as a "Unitary Executive" without guidance by either the courts or the Congress. As a result of this situation, the vast majority of the American people are left un-represented. Even when Bush's poll numbers fall it no longer matters – because he does not care and there are no effective checks-and-balances in place to stop him. Hence, illegal spying and wiretapping by the NSA is sanctioned by Bush in the name of "fighting the war on terror." As a result, the FISA courts become meaningless appendages of "an earlier era" – just as the Geneva Conventions prohibiting torture are, according to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, "quaint" artifacts of the past.
Americans are directly harmed by the fact that their civil liberties under the Bill of Rights have been shredded. Further, America's place in the world is diminished by the fact that as U.S. Corporations – operating under the protection of the American Empire – repress wages and workers throughout the Global South – so too, wages are depressed in the United States itself. Higher levels of inequality throughout the entire period of the Bush years are a testament to that reality – as is the absence of affordable health care for most Americans. As a result, Medicare is going bankrupt because the insurance companies and AMA lobby and the pharmaceutical industry-lobby remain protected enclaves of capitalist profit and exploitation. Congress is either powerless to rectify the situation or simply too corrupted by pay-offs to correct the situation.
In Exodus from Empire, I make three central points on this matter: (1) First, the fate of the Global North is linked to the fate of the Global South; (2) Second, trade and investment policies must benefit the citizenry of both the Global North and the Global South and, (3) Third, Neo-liberal globalization increases global inequality (pp. 230-233). Therefore, I argue that we must build what I call a "Post-Imperial America" (pp. 228-230, Exodus from Empire). In short, we need to realize that empire is antithetical to democracy and to our national and global civil society. The good news is that we are starting to witness the rise and newly emerging power of global civil society---as well as social movements across the Global South---which represent a direct challenge to the U.S. Global Empire (SEE: pp. 344-345, Exodus from Empire).

KZ: And, from the perspective of the world, isn't the American empire a good thing? Don't we bring stability and democracy to the world? Wouldn't the world be a more violent place without us? Wouldn't there be more poverty, disease and income disparity?

TP: From the perspective of the rest of the world, the American Empire is not a good thing – it is a curse. It deserves resistance, opposition, and overthrow. Why? Because it is a thing – a creation divorced from law and the moral codes of the teachings of all of the world's great religious traditions.
In Chapter 4 of Exodus from Empire, I address this directly by critiquing Professor Samuel Huntington's thesis that there is a "Clash of Civilizations" going on and that clash and conflict are inevitable. The problems with his position are many – and I address them all in this chapter. But what I want to emphasize is that at the heart of his thesis resides a strong "American Empire First" concern. He wants to see the protection of the current global power arrangements no matter who gets hurt and regardless of the fact that over 2-billion people on this planet attempt to live on less than a dollar a day and espite the fact that his clash-thesis serves to justify a “war without end” in the name of fighting “terrorism.” For Huntington, like the military planners in the Pentagon and the economic elite on Wall Street, in the IMF, World Bank, WTO, and the U.S. Treasury Department – these 2-billion people are nothing more than "collateral damage." Yet, what is at stake is a moral issue – a human rights issue – an issue of democracy rising in the world or fading into the sunset under the auspices of a Neo-liberal economic model combined with a fascist polity of control called the American Empire.
In contrast, I argue that there is an emerging unity of religions and civilizations. I call it a “convergence.” Further, from an international law perspective, I maintain that the evolution of customary international law reveals a normative standard that is shared globally – between and among nations – that is capable of moving humanity toward a "convergence" and "healing" of peoples and of nations and of civilizations. Hence, my counter-thesis to Huntington’s “clash thesis” is that war is not inevitable and that peace and harmony can be our collective destination if we re-order our mental-maps, our conceptual categories, and learn to recognize the propaganda of the American Empire for what it is---propaganda.
In short, the "clash thesis" is nothing more than an ideological construction for proceeding with business as usual. The clash-thesis is a cruel hoax that is employed to justify huge expenditures on a so-called "war on terror" while continuing to wage war on the weak and vulnerable. What I am calling "the rise of Global Community" means that we are actually witnessing global integration, nonviolent resistance, and the rise of global civil society in an era where terror and terrorism (as a strategy of resistance) is really representative of less than one-percent of the world's population. The real sources of terror are found in the projects of the American Empire along with its tragic consequences. The consequences of empire include higher levels of poverty, disease, inequality, and war itself. Hence, the pursuit of empire and "Empire's Law" (p. 111) produces a situation where the potential for "clash" and violence and terror is really the product and result of imperial rule---the actions of empire.
In opposition to the practices of the American Empire and the "clash thesis," I argue that: (1) Despite attempts to claim the opposite, there exists no inherent right, on the part of the powerful,. to govern, rule or order the weak; (2) Regardless of the ideological claims being advanced, there exists no unified or unifying civilizational consensus on the naturalness of a corporate-dominated, militaristic imperialism as comprising the common values, truth’s, visions of human futures that prescribe a universal course for humanity's social evolution; (3) Notwithstanding attempts to convince otherwise, there exists no preordained rationale for eternal truth of inevitability regarding forms of socially constructed orders that form the institutions of governance, including the form of "law."
In fact, the very existence of nuclear weapons is a violation of the moral code of all of the major world religions and a violation of international law since the findings and final judgment of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the 1990s (See: p. 111, Exodus from Empire). In short, in a world without the American Empire, the world would be less violent, less prone to suffer poverty, disease or income disparity. Chapters 1 through 3 make this point quite clear. The American Empire is dangerous not only for the world, but dangerous for American democracy itself. If we wish to see DEMOCRACY RISING, we must see the setting sun on the American Empire and its projects.

KZ: What kind of country would the U.S. be if it were not an empire? What would take the place of the U.S. empire in the world?

TP: If the U.S. were not an empire what kind of country would it be? I have suggested in Chapter 5 that a "post-Imperial America" would reject the policies, practices, and rationales that have characterized the hidden politics of empire.
A post-Imperial America would learn to embrace the dynamics of a rising Global Community in which America no longer engages in the fantasies of global domination that have characterized the thought and policies of the architects of the American Empire.
In its place, a post-Imperial American needs to find a path toward social, political, economic and spiritual liberation for both its own people and the peoples and governments of the rest of the world. The path of a post-Imperial America is a revolutionary proposition and a revolutionary goal. Taking such a path is the only way to re-democratize America and, at the same time, supply the necessary means to achieve an interdependent human rights oriented world under the rule of law (See: pp;228-229, Exodus from Empire). That is when we shall truly see DEMOCRACY RISING.


Kevin Zeese is Director of Democracy Rising (http://www.democracyrising.us/) and co-founder of Voters for Peace (http://www.votersforpeace.us/).

Courtsey from countercurrents.org