Four myths government and media use to scare us about 'dictators'

Good article about the current manufactured "crisis" with Iran from the author of Wag the Dog.

Four Myths Government and Media Use to Scare Us About 'Dictators'
By Larry Beinhart
AlterNet
October 2, 2007

We have a basic mythology: Appeasement of dictators leads to war. The historical basis for this narrative is the "appeasement" of Hitler at Munich. It encouraged him to believe the democracies -- and the Soviets -- were weak and would not oppose him. That led him to attempt more conquests and engulfed us all in the Second World War.

If the other countries had stood up to him right away, the theory goes, he would have backed down. If he hadn't, they would have gone to war and nipped him in the bud, thereby preventing WWII, the Holocaust, the deaths of 60 million and all the rest of the horrors.

Now we are floating the story that Mahmoud Ahmenajad is a dictator (the new, new Hitler, after Saddam Hussein). If we "appease" him, it will only encourage him and that will engulf us in World War Three.

If we accept the myth as a gospel truth that should guide our political and military lives, and accept that description as true, it makes good sense -- it is even necessary -- to start another preventive war, like the one in Iraq, to stop him now! Let us examine the facts.

Fog Fact No. 1: The president of Iran is not a dictator.

He is not even the most powerful person in Iran.

The position of president used to be a figurehead, but recently it was combined with that of prime minister and now has much real power. However, he does not control the army and the intelligence and security services. He does not have the power to go to war.

The president is elected by direct popular vote. There have been five so far. None has served more than two terms. Ahmenajad is in his first term. His previous office was as mayor of Tehran. He is a loud mouth, jingoistic conservative, rather like -- dare we say it? -- the current incarnation of Rudolph Giuliani in his run for U.S. president.

The best way to grasp how Iran is governed is to take its name quite literally: The Islamic Republic of Iran. It is a theocracy, but within the bounds of that -- which are fairly strict bounds -- it is run by elected officials.

The man at the top is called the supreme leader. His constitutional title is "Leader of the Revolution."

The supreme leader is commander-in-chief, with control of the army and the intelligence and security services. He can make the decision to go to war. He has a great many additional powers, including control of the state radio and television networks.

The supreme leader is elected -- and can be dismissed -- by the Assembly of Experts. This is an 86-member congress. They, in turn, are directly elected by popular vote, but must be Mujtahids, Islamic scholars qualified to practice Islamic law.

The way all this is kept under proper Islamic Revolutionary control is that all candidates for everything have to be approved before they can get on the ballot by the Council of Guardians.

There are 12 members. Half are appointed by the supreme leader. The other half are elected by the Iranian parliament from a list supplied by the head of judiciary (who is named by the supreme leader). They are all clerics and scholars of Islamic law. In sum, it is a republic, with many checks and balances, and real elections within theocratic limits. Everybody in government has to be a respectably devout Muslim, with the exception that of the 290 members of parliament there are five representatives from the recognized minority religions (two Armenian Christian, one Chaldean/Assyrian Catholic, one Jewish, one Zoroastrian).

An Iranian, or some other opponent of the United States, might claim that the cost of running for office here creates a de facto council of the wealthy that vets all candidates, excluding anyone who would work against their interests. They might also note that the elected members of the U.S. federal government are 93 percent Christian (including Catholics and Mormons), 7 percent Jewish, with a single Muslim, no pantheists and no atheists, almost a religious mirror image, of the makeup of the Iranian political class.

Fog Fact No. 2: The "appeasement" in the myth is very specific and rather narrow.

It refers to one country taking over the territory -- or the whole -- of another country. Then the world allowing that to stand. In 1938, Germany under Hitler annexed Austria. Hitler had already remilitarized the Rhineland -- which was supposed to be a demilitarized zone protecting France -- and taken over the Saar, a small area rich with coal and iron. Then he took over the Sudetenland, a part of Czechoslovakia. Its population, which was over 80 percent ethnically German, desired the annexation. However, it contained most of Czechoslovakia's defenses against Germany, which meant that if Germany wanted to take the rest, it would be able to so at will.

England, France and the Soviet Union had treaties with Czechoslovakia that obligated them to come to its defense. But they all wanted to avoid, or at least delay, war. So they came to an agreement -- the Munich Agreement -- which allowed Hitler to keep the Sudetenland. In 1939 Hitler took the rest of Czechoslovakia.

It does not refer to "allowing" one country to posture, threaten, arm or rearm.

Generally, since WWII, when one country has invaded another country, they've either fought to a stalemate (Iraq -- Iran, China -- India, China -- Vietnam, India -- Pakistan), or the invaders put in a friendly regime and then left (Vietnam -- Cambodia, United States -- Panama, Grenada, Dominican Republic) or, with international approval, the invader was kicked out (Iraq -- Kuwait, North Korea -- South Korea.)

But there are some very significant exceptions:

Fog Fact No. 3: Sometimes "appeasement" works well; it was American policy for 50 years.

After the Second World War the Soviet Union annexed the Baltic states, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, part of East Prussia and part of Slovakia. Then, mostly through rigged elections, it turned Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria into puppet states and used military force, when necessary, to maintain that status.

Neither the United States -- nor anyone else -- seriously challenged any of that.

Basically, we accepted that anything that happened inside the Iron Curtain -- formed by the positions where the Red Army stopped at the end of the war -- was inside its sphere of influence.

What Truman did do was adopt an active policy of containment. It opposed any attempt of the Soviets to go beyond those lines.

The Soviets did more or less the same. They accepted American hegemony where the American armies had stopped. They vigorously contested any efforts to go beyond that, especially anything that encroached on their sphere of influence. Anything outside those lines -- the Third World and the colonies that the Europeans had reoccupied -- was up for grabs, and all sorts of proxy wars were fought. But the Big One, a Third World War, was averted.

Under Nixon this had the formal name of "détente." There is no doubt that Iran is a "revolutionary" state, as it declares itself to be, and has "revolutionary" dreams, as the Communists used to. It believes that the whole world should eagerly throw off its secular chains and embrace the higher, holier order of Islam.

It wants things that we would prefer not to see happen.

It is also aware of its own physical and military limitations and don't appear to be suicidal.

So while it is prepared to use influence, money and propaganda, and to support violent people who believe as it does, or close to what it does, a reasonable prediction is that there are limits. It proceeds with caution.

It also has multiple interests and are flexible. At one point it offered to trade Al Qaeda terrorists that it was holding to the United States in return for anti-Iranian terrorists that America was holding in Iraq. The Bush administration never got around to replying.

Fog Fact No. 4: Nobody is speaking of what happens after a war with Iran.

The ultimate goal of the strategy of war is the shape of the peace that follows.

This is especially true of a war of choice. If someone attacks you, you fight back, and the goal is to stop them and be safe. But if it's a preemptive or preventive war, then a great deal of thought must be given to what happens after the attack. Will it make us safer? Stronger? More prosperous? How? And for how long?

It is clear that this administration did not give enough thought to that before the invasion of Iraq. There were plenty of dreams about the best-case scenario, but no plans for the worst, and the worst is what happened.

Now we are creating a new fog of mythologies -- about a "dictator" who isn't one, about "appeasement" that is completely inapplicable, about nuclear weapons that don't exist, about a country that is "evil" -- that make it seem like we must do something.

But what will the consequences of military action be? If we've learned but one single thing from the current war in Iraq it's that after we panic ourselves with descriptions of the worst that will happen if we don't act, we had better consider the worst that will happen if we do. And be ready for it.

That's a fact.

***

Larry Beinhart is the author of "Wag the Dog," "The Librarian," and "Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin." All available at nationbooks.org.

Catastrophist governance and the need for a tricameral legislature

Interesting essay.

Catastrophist Governance and the Need for a Tricameral Legislature
William Irwin Thompson
Printed in Annals of Earth, Spring, 2007 Issue.

As American school children, we were all raised to believe the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson's "That government is best that governs least." Americans of a Republican and Libertarian persuasion feel that interference of the state in the life of the individual is evil, and the excesses of fascism and communism in the nineteen-thirties and forties confirmed their Superman comic book sense of the superiority of "The American Way." Even to this day in a new century with new problems, the Republicans and Libertarians in their think-tanks like the Cato Institute continue to rant on about the evils of Big Government.

When government is seen as an intrusive menance, then cutting taxes as a way of starving it to death is the basic neocon philosophy of governance--a philosophy that Bush has eagerly sought to implement. In an updated version of Kipling's nineteenth-century imperialism of "the white man's burden," the neocons sought to bring suburban Right Wing party politics to tribal, medieval, and socialist societies in Afghanistan and Iraq in a policy of enforced modernization through unrestrained market economics and military invasion.

The liberalism of FDR's New Deal was a response to a man-made economic catastrophe, but the historical landscape we are now entering is one of natural catastrophes: of tsunamis that can devestate the coastlines of many countries at once, of earthquakes and hurricanes that can devastate entire cities, of volcanic eruptions that can darken the planet's skies and eliminate summers and the harvests that come at their finish, and pandemics spread by the jet travel of economic globalization. When one adds human contributions to the forces of nature in the form of global climate change, then one begins to see a new world in which the individual citizen is utterly powerless to address the rise of oceans or the shift of tectonic plates.

A philosophy of government based upon nothing more than tax cuts simply won't cut it any more. In a tranquil world, nature can be taken for granted as a stage upon which the human drama unfolds, and agriculture and industry can be used as the foundation for a business model of political governance. Farmers and merchants became the first wave of representatives elected to Congress; then, as the process of governance became larger and more complex, lawyers became the representatives of the businessmen who supported their campaigns for office.

But this tranquil world in which nature is a stage only for human ambition is a thing of the past. The rumblings of a new global storm have sounded on the horizon with the tsunami of Boxing Day, 2004, and Katrina in 2005. When hurricanes again devastate our coastal cities, and earthquakes strike the populous cities of the West, this global storm will strike us head-on and full force. At that time we will need something other than businessmen grousing about Big Government and proposing tax-cuts for the wealthy to serve as our philosophy of government.

What will the politics of catastrophe look like? In a crisis, our first instinct will be to revert to the archaic politics of the primate band and look to some alpha male to deliver us from evil. We will pray to some archaic paternal god in the sky to save us and we will surrender to the will of some dominant Big Brother to protect us through martial law and even stronger versions of the Patriot Act. But alpha male dominance and military power will be utterly incapable of addressing the problems we face. In this crisis, we will need scientists and not more soldiers and lawyers.

Certainly, when East Coast multiple hurricanes overlap with West Coast earthquakes at a time of massive neocon war deficits, we will enter a time when natural catastrophes, and not just terrorist attacks, create the punctuated equilibirium that drives evolution. At that time, the smug boomerism of capitalism that takes nature for granted in industrial development and distorts the ecological sciences to reinforce its own political ideology will be as historically irrelevant as peasant magic was to the industrial revolution. At this time, whatever culture is able to miniaturize science into a civilization—American, European, or Asian—and keep it intact during a period of catastrophes, whether from gobal warming or volcanic eruptions, or both, will determine the fate of humanity.

No doubt, human fear more than Western science will shape our response and probably create a mood of religious superstition and End of the World popular scenarios in which the face of Jesus is seen in the clouds and Elvis sightings are reported over Graceland. The Executive branch of government will probably once again seek to manipulate this fear to its own ends in the same manner that it used the fear of terrorists to secure its re-election, but in other biomes within our national ecology of mind, we might just begin to glimpse an opportunity for a new era of democratic revolution.

Our eighteenth century constitution was conceived by rural aristocratic land owners and slave holders who feared popular democracy as the rule of the urban mob, but it was also midwived by urban Federalists who wished to bring forth the economy of a modern nation-state. The machinery of the state with its checks and balances was an eighteenth-century steam engine fueled by the people but held on course by a governor. A bicameral legislature was that century's vision of balance between passion and reflection--between a lower house of pushy and uncouth merchants and farmers and an upper house of men of property and culture.

But in an age of global warming and suden catastrophes from pandemics, earthquakes, coastal innundation, tsunamis and volcanoes, a scientific academy will be needed for a tricameral legislature in which government is provided with sound and objective scientific information and informed guidance. The Bush Administration sought to constrain and edit science so that it would tell it what it wanted to hear for its own neocon ideological reasons; in other words, it sought to treat science in the same way it treated Intelligence and the CIA in particular. Since the CIA has only the single client of the Presidency, both the CIA and the Supreme Court have been corrupted by the growth of the "Imperial Presidency." A third chamber will be needed to be composed of truly intelligent and independent scientists, artists, scholars, and professors of constitutional law. These outstanding citizens will need to be men and women of "intellectual property," and not simply popular celebrities chosen through elections funded by the wealthy and the few owners of the media. They will need to be elected to this third chamber by an ad hoc electoral college composed of the faculties of the state universities and the outstanding private universities of the nation, from Harvard in the East to Stanford in the West. And at the same time that this twenty-first century ad hoc Electoral College is created, our present anti-democratic eighteenth-century Electoral College should be abolished. The President should be elected by a simple popular majority so that Florida, 2000 can never happen again. And it is this third chamber that should nominate members to the Supreme Court based upon their knowledge of constitutional law and not their party politics. In the election of 2000 we saw what happens when the Supreme Court intrudes and applies party politics to negate a plurality in the popular vote.

To avoid the imperial presidency and the neocons' doctrine of "the unitary executive" that have sucked power away from Congress, something needs to be done about the flawed institution of the American Presidency. The conventional wisdom of the Founding Fathers was that to avoid a takeover of the republic by a military dictator one should insure that the military was under the governance of a civilian President as Commander-in-Chief; but in choosing a military hero as our first president, the Founding Fathers also showed how difficult it was to avoid the shadow of Julius Caesar. The neocons' perversion of the Founding Fathers' wisdom has transformed our civilian presidency into nothing but the Commander-in-Chief of the world's largest military-industrial establishment. As the Presidency has evolved over centuries, we have seen--even before the horrors of Bush and Cheney--that purely civilian presidents like Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Harry Truman were capable of suspending habeas corpus and creating a National Security State without the need of a military putsch. Parliamentary democracies-- such as Ireland, Germany, and Israel--have settled for the wisdom of separating the Head of State from the Head of the Government with the two offices of President and Prime Minister, or Chancellor. Switzerland, a country refreshingly immune to charisma, chose the most radical solution of all by having an executive council in which the Presidency rotates among the members of its "Bundesrat." Having grown sick of our contemporary simulacrum of a Roman Emperor, as well as the dominance in American culture of sports celebrities, movie stars, and military heroes, I confess that I am attracted to this bland Swiss model, but our American culture has so labored over the centuries to construct a hagiographic image of the President that I doubt that Americans could ever deliver themselves from this idolatrous worship of POTUS. POTUS omnipotens est. So our popularly elected President would most probably be expected to chair an Executive Council for the four years of the term of office.

To avoid the excesses of the imperial presidency, I propose that in the catastrophic condidtions to come, we replace the Presidency with an Executive Council of four, consisting of the popularly-elected president, the popularly-elected Vice President as President of the Senate, and one representative elected by the new Academy of Arts and Sciences and another by the traditional House of Representatives. The popularly elected President should be defined as the Head of the Government, and the President of the Academy of Arts and Sciences should be defined as the Head of State. At the end of four years, the two chambers of the Academy and the House would elect new representatives to the Executive Council, so the Executive Council would change along with the popularly elected President and Vice President. The line of succession in which the Speaker of the House remains third in line after the popularly elected President and Vice President could remain as is in our present constitutional situation. Since the Speaker of the House has enough to do in overseeing the largest third house of the Congress, it might better serve the model of an executive council if the House elected another representative to the Council and that this position was separate from the position of Speaker of the House. It would be the work of this Executive Council to sign bills into law through a ¾'s majority. The President could remain as Commander-in-Chief, since it is hard to direct a war by committee, and the current Presidential Cabinet could continue its work of advising the Council and administering the various departments of government, such as Agriculture, Defense, and Foreign Affairs or "State."

Would conflict and abuse of power be avoided in such a situation of an executive Council of Four? Given human nature, naturally not. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice were a disaster, so there is no absolute protection from evil simply by sharing it, but there is hope that if all are not of the same party and ideology, there are more opportunities for balance and self-correction.

Of course, I realize that such an amending of the Constitution would open up the political process to crazies and not simply scientists--and to some crazy scientists as well. The possibility for such dramatic change would only be possible under unimaginable circumstances that I am here trying to imagine—such as the innundation of the East Coast and the earthquake devastation of the cities of the West Coast. Under such circumstances of unimaginable crisis, we would need to hold a new Constitutional Convention composed of the members of Congress and the Electoral College of the members of the faculties of our universities and colleges who would then elect their representatives for the creation of the new Third House, the Academy of Arts and Sciences. This new tricameral legislature would then address itself to the reconstruction of our devastated environment and polity. Since the Senate would probably be fearful of the lessening of its power, the third house should probably be limited to two members from each state and be required to submit legislation to the popularly-elected House and not directly to the Executive Council. I am not a constitutional lawyer, so it should be the work of any future Constitutional Convention to hammer out the details on the iron anvil of politics.

My modest proposal for a tricameral legislature and an amending of the Constitution is merely an amateur's sketch, but the sketch, like any political cartoon, does come from a pattern-recognition of the dangers inherent in our new mediocracy. The electronic media have created a new technopeasantry whose attacks on the imaginary castle of science's Dr. Frankenstein now threaten to eliminate scientific textbooks from our schools to replace them with the Bible. As popular ministers thrust themselves to the head of the empassioned multitude, waving their Bibles in the air, we will be brought back to the ugly Thirty Years War of religions that preceded the Age of Revolution from 1689 to 1789. If we slide into that abyss of a new dark age, then we will have indeed fallen off the edge of history.

Warriors and high priests have been the entwined poles of human culture since the origin of urban civilization in the fourth millennium B.C.E. Now that formation has expressed its sunset-effect in the evangelical fundamentalism of Karl Rove's redesign of the Republican party and Cheney's Halliburton hostile take-over of Iraq. This supernova of the dying star of militarism and religious fundamentalism is, of course, not confined to Christianity, but also expresses itself in the extremism of the Israeli West Bank settlers, right-wing Hindu nationalists, and Islamist terrorists. In ideological thinking, the content camouflages the structure, and that is why very often in conflict extremes are very much like one another.

But this too shall pass. Like the Dark Ages and Inquisition that preceded the Renaissance, or the period of global slavery that preceded the Enlightenment, humanity has still a chance to face the coming era of ecological devastation, pandemics, and natural catastrophes and respond in a way other than chaos and rule by war lords in collapsed states. Like the Dark Age monks who miniaturized classical civilization and made it a curricular content inside medieval civilization, whatever cultural group that can miniaturize scientific civilization and place it within a new formation of a post-religious spirituality of fellowship and not followership will carry us across the great rift into a new stage of cultural evolution. If we fail, then the dark age interval will be much longer.

Capitalism vs. democracy: Rights of money versus rights of living persons

This article from David Korten, the author of "When Corporations Rule the World", argues that our market-based system of government in America -- "one dollar, one vote" -- is not democracy -- "one person, one vote". I have come to the same conclusion myself, that capitalism and democracy are fundamentally opposed to each other. In one, each individual strives to maximize his or her inequality (richness in power in comparison to others); in the other, the system is defined by equality for all. As long as there is unequal property ownership, there will be unequal power, and the more unequal the distribution of power, the less democratic society is. I would say that capitalism -- completely market-driven, with policy auctioned off to the highest bidder -- is a better description of our system of government. Just look at how our candidates for government have to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to buy ads on TV, when the airwaves are actually owned by the public and could easily be used for public purposes. There could easily be a law against the private funding of political campaign ads and instead a certain amount of free advertising time given to each candidate.

Rights of money versus rights of living persons
David C. Korten
Feasta Review, number 1

Property rights should be limited by law to prevent those who have more than enough using them to deny others their right to the means of making a livelihood. Moreover, companies should be banned from political activities of any kind because political rights reside only in real people.

Proponents of market liberalism claim the free market is the essential foundation of political democracy -- a guarantor of the rights of people against the abuse of state power. They neglect, however, the important ways in which the unfettered market tends to function as a profoundly undemocratic institution.

Political democracy vests rights in the living person, one person, one vote. By contrast, the market recognises only money, not people -- one dollar, one vote. It gives no voice to the penniless, and when not balanced by constraining political forces can become an instrument of oppression by which the wealthy monopolise society's resources, leaving the less fortunate without land, jobs, technology or other means of livelihood. Only when wealth is equally distributed can the market be considered democratic in any meaningful sense.

Global markets are now dominated by global mega-corporations -- among the most undemocratic and unaccountable of human institutions. By its nature the corporation creates a legal concentration of power while shielding those who wield that power from accountability for the consequences of its use. Many mega-corporations command more economic power than do the majority of states and dominate the political processes of nearly all states. Their growing unaccountable power poses a serious threat to the basic economic and political rights of people everywhere.

The time has come to re-examine some of our most basic assumptions about the nature of democracy, human rights, and the institution of the corporation. The survival of our political freedoms depends on recognising that economic rights are an essential foundation of political democracy. Consider for example two of the most fundamental of all human rights -- the right to a means of living -- literally the right to live -- and the right to participate in making the decisions that affect our lives.

The Right of Access to a Means of Living.

The earth's life-sustaining resources are a common heritage of all life. All people are born with an inalienable right to a sufficient share of these resources to create a secure and fulfilling life for themselves and their families. They have a corresponding responsibility to share and steward these resources to the benefit of all persons and other living things.

Since the most basic requirements of living depend on the products of the earth, there is a fundamental -- though often neglected -- connection between livelihood rights and property rights. English philosopher John Locke set forth a moral justification for property rights in The Second Treatise of Government published in 1689. Locke argued that where unused land is abundant, a man has a right to appropriate for his private and exclusive use the land which he tills to produce for his basic subsistence needs. It is through the application of his labour to make the land produce that he acquires this private right. Locke stressed that given the condition of abundance, such appropriation in no way deprived others of similar opportunity. Locke was also clear that the rightful claim to a property right followed only from the application of one's personal labour. Furthermore, he said, this claim legitimately extended only to such property as required to meet one's own material needs -- suggesting that a property right is virtually synonymous with a livelihood right,

Locke, however, went beyond this relatively unassailable moral argument to seek justification for actions of those who accumulate property rights far beyond their personal needs. Presuming that property rights are most likely to be accumulated by clever and industrious persons who seek to realise their full productive potential, Locke argued that the result of this accumulation would be to maximise the wealth of society and thereby the well-being of all. It is essentially the same argument that economists make to this day in defence of inequality based on the assumption that the surpluses created through investments of the wealthy in a growing economy will be widely distributed through society in the form of high-paying jobs and well-funded public services.

It is noteworthy that the moral defence of inequality imbedded in Locke's thesis and the work of most modern economists rests on two inadequately examined assumptions: 1) natural wealth is abundant relative to need; and 2) the benefits of an overall increase in economic activity are widely shared even when wealth is distributed unequally. Unfortunately, for several billion people who find their livelihoods increasingly at risk, neither premise is valid in our present world. To the contrary, the poor are being excluded from access to land, technology is eliminating jobs faster than it is creating new ones, and public services are being systematically dismantled -- all to increase the riches of those whose wealth already exceeds any conceivable need. In short, property rights are being used routinely to justify the exclusion of those without property from access to a decent means of living.

As suggested by Locke's argument, the rightful purpose of a property right is to protect a person's right of access to a means of livelihood or to secure for the individual a just reward for entrepreneurial initiatives that create a better life for all. A property right loses its legitimacy when its exercise by those who have more than they need denies others of their rightful means of livelihood or otherwise diminishes their opportunities for a full and meaningful life. The livelihood rights of the many come before the property rights of the few. Recognition in our laws and public culture of this limitation of property rights is fundamental to the market's socially efficient function.

The Right to Participate in Decisions That Affect One's Life and Community.

Born with reason, conscience, and the capacity for intelligent choice, all people have the inalienable right -- indeed the obligation -- to use these gifts to participate actively in the decisions that affect their lives and communities. The rights of speech and assembly derive from this basic right to participate. The right to participate resides in the person and does not rightfully extend to any corporation.

In the economic realm the exercise of the right of participation extends far beyond choosing among those products the market finds it profitable to offer us. It includes the right to participate in setting standards and priorities for the economic affairs of our communities, the uses to which our local resources will be put, and the conditions under which we will engage in external trade and invite the participation of others in our domestic economies.
There is nothing democratic about an unregulated market that responds exclusively to the needs of the wealthy and subordinates human rights and interests to corporate rights and interests.

This right is under attack by the world's mega-corporations that seek to establish their own right to move across the face of the planet without restriction to extract resources, exploit unorganised and unprotected labour, evade taxes and environmental regulations, and monopolise indigenous knowledge and genetic materials without regard to the human and environmental consequences. Their weapons of choice are international agreements on trade and investment that take precedence over the rules and regulations established by people and their governments to govern local commerce. Negotiated in secret and implemented without full public discussion and democratic assent, these agreements are systematically eroding the democratic rights of people to regulate their own local and national economies, and to set rules for commerce consistent with their own values and judgements regarding their personal and community needs. The interests of money and the fictitious legal persona of the corporation are thus placed ahead of the interests of living persons and their communities -- all in the name of market freedom.

It is useful to recall that Adam Smith, the patron saint of free marketeers, favoured a market comprised exclusively of small buyers and sellers. Smith considered the corporation to be an instrument for monopolising markets and saw no place for such institutions in a properly functioning competitive market economy. By his reckoning the corporation is an anti-market institution.

A corporation comes into being only through the public act of the government that issues the corporate charter. The creation of a corporation is thus a public, not a private, act and its only justification is to serve a public purpose. Whatever privileges or authority the corporation may enjoy are derived from the authority of government, which is itself derived from the will of the people. It therefore follows that the corporation is rightfully subject to the will of the people and to whatever laws people freely chose to establish governing its function.

Nor does a corporation rightfully enjoy any privilege beyond the jurisdiction of the government that issued its charter unless and until the people of another jurisdiction explicitly chose to grant it such privilege. It is the proper function of the corporation to implement the laws that people establish through their governments, not to participate in their creation. Indeed, it is essential to the integrity of democratic governance that corporations be barred from political participation of any kind on the theory that political rights reside only in real people.

The idea that corporations should enjoy the rights of flesh and blood persons -- including the right of free speech -- grew out of a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1886 that designated corporations as legal persons entitled to all the rights and protections afforded by the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. Significantly, the U.S. Constitution makes no reference to corporations. It was a decision without legal or moral foundation made by a corrupted court system.

As citizens it is our right to revise existing legal codes to make clear that human rights belong only to flesh and blood persons. Similarly, it is our right to replace trade and investment agreements that abrogate the most basic political and economic rights of people with international agreements that protect the rights to economic and political choice of all people against infringement by democratically unaccountable institutions -- either state or corporation.

Markets are important institutions and they have an essential place in any democratic society -- functioning within a framework of democratically determined rules and public safeguards. There is nothing democratic, however, about an unregulated market that responds exclusively to the needs of the wealthy and subordinates human rights and interests to corporate rights and interests. In the end only an active and politically engaged citizenry can assure the protection of our human rights from the arbitrary use of power by either states or corporations. Institutional power and legitimacy flow from the will of people, and when any institution usurps our natural rights, it is right of the people to restructure, replace, or eliminate, that institution.

This aticle was first circulated by the People-Centered Development Forum in May 1997.

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Biographical Sketch

David C. Korten holds MBA and PhD degrees from Stanford Business School and taught for five years at Harvard Business School before joining the Harvard Institute for International development to head a Ford Foundation project to strengthen national family planning programmes. He moved to Southeast Asia in the late 1970s, working first for the Ford Foundation and then as a regional advisor on development management to USAID. Eventually, disillusioned with the official aid system, he spend the last five years of his fifteen in Asia working with NGOs identifying why development was failing.

He came to realise that the deepening poverty, growing inequality, environmental devastation, and social disintegration he was observing in Asia were also being experienced in nearly every country in the world. Moreover, the United States was actively promoting policies that made matters worse. For the world to survive, the United States must change, and he returned to the US in 1992 to help bring that change about. He has since written two highly influential books, When Corporations Rule the World (1995) and The Post Corporate World: Life After Capitalism (1999).

CIA to air decades of its dirty laundry

I really disagree fundamentally with the idea of keeping entire branches of government secret from the public. How can we claim to be a democracy when we don't even know what our government is doing? Clearly, hiding the CIA and NSA's operations from public scrutiny has led to the many abuses that are about to be admitted by the CIA, as the Washington Post reports. Keeping the CIA and NSA hidden allows us to wallow in the myth of American benevolence and support for democracy. We can deny all these abuses by the CIA because they are never admitted by our leaders, whom we trust. But now they are admitted. But since they happened 30 years ago, we can pretend they were "abuses" that were long ago stopped, and that the secret CIA is not engaging in them anymore. It's like a religion. We have faith in our country not to do such things, and we deny all evidence to the contrary.

CIA to Air Decades of Its Dirty Laundry
By Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus
Washington Post
June 22, 2007

The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency's worst illegal abuses -- the so-called "family jewels" documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday.

The documents, to be publicly released next week, also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency's opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of "unwitting" tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs.

"Most of it is unflattering, but it is CIA's history," Hayden said in a speech to a conference of foreign policy historians. The documents have been sought for decades by historians, journalists and conspiracy theorists and have been the subject of many fruitless Freedom of Information Act requests.

In anticipation of the CIA's release, the National Security Archive at George Washington University yesterday published a separate set of documents from January 1975 detailing internal government discussions of the abuses. Those documents portray a rising sense of panic within the administration of President Gerald R. Ford that what then-CIA Director William E. Colby called "skeletons" in the CIA's closet had begun to be revealed in news accounts.

A New York Times article by reporter Seymour Hersh about the CIA's infiltration of antiwar groups, published in December 1974, was "just the tip of the iceberg," then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger warned Ford, according to a Jan. 3 memorandum of their conversation.

Kissinger warned that if other operations were divulged, "blood will flow," saying, "For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of [Cuban President Fidel] Castro." Kennedy was the attorney general from 1961 to 1964.

Worried that the disclosures could lead to criminal prosecutions, Kissinger added that "when the FBI has a hunting license into the CIA, this could end up worse for the country than Watergate," the scandal that led to the fall of the Nixon administration the previous year.

In a meeting at which Colby detailed the worst abuses -- after telling the president "we have a 25-year old institution which has done some things it shouldn't have" -- Ford said he would appoint a presidential commission to look into the matter. "We don't want to destroy but to preserve the CIA. But we want to make sure that illegal operations and those outside the [CIA] charter don't happen," Ford said.

Most of the major incidents and operations in the reports to be released next week were revealed in varying detail during congressional investigations that led to widespread intelligence reforms and increased oversight. But the treasure-trove of CIA documents, generated as the Vietnam War wound down and agency involvement in Nixon's "dirty tricks" political campaign began to be revealed, is expected to provide far more comprehensive accounts, written by the agency itself.

The reports, known collectively by historians and CIA officials as the "family jewels," were initially produced in response to a 1973 request by then-CIA Director James R. Schlesinger. Alarmed by press accounts of CIA involvement in Watergate under his predecessor, Schlesinger asked the agency's employees to inform him of all operations that were "outside" the agency's legal charter.

This process was unprecedented at the agency, where only a few officials had previously been privy to the scope of its illegal activities. Schlesinger collected the reports, some of which dated to the 1950s, in a folder that was inherited by his successor, Colby, in September of that year.

But it was not until Hersh's article that Colby took the file to the White House. The National Security Archive release included a six-page summary of a conversation on Jan. 3, 1975, in which Colby briefed the Justice Department for the first time on the extent of the "skeletons."

Operations listed in the report began in 1953, when the CIA's counterintelligence staff started a 20-year program to screen and in some cases open mail between the United States and the Soviet Union passing through a New York airport. A similar program in San Francisco intercepted mail to and from China from 1969 to 1972. Under its charter, the CIA is prohibited from domestic operations.

Colby told Ford that the program had collected four letters to actress and antiwar activist Jane Fonda and said the entire effort was "illegal, and we stopped it in 1973."

Among several new details, the summary document reveals a 1969 program about CIA efforts against "the international activities of radicals and black militants." Undercover CIA agents were placed inside U.S. peace groups and sent abroad as credentialed members to identify any foreign contacts. This came at a time when the Soviet Union was suspected of financing and influencing U.S. domestic organizations.

The program included "information on the domestic activities" of the organizations and led to the accumulation of 10,000 American names, which Colby told Silberman were retained "as a result of the tendency of bureaucrats to retain paper whether they needed it or acted on it or not," according to the summary memo.

CIA surveillance of Michael Getler, then The Washington Post's national security reporter, was conducted between October 1971 and April 1972 under direct authorization by then-Director Richard Helms, the memo said. Getler had written a story published on Oct. 18, 1971, sparked by what Colby called "an obvious intelligence leak," headlined "Soviet Subs Are Reported Cuba-Bound."

Getler, who is now the ombudsman for the Public Broadcasting Service, said yesterday that he learned of the surveillance in 1975, when The Post published an article based on a secret report by congressional investigators. The story said that the CIA used physical surveillance against "five Americans" and listed Getler, the late columnist Jack Anderson and Victor Marchetti, a former CIA employee who had just written a book critical of the agency.

"I never knew about it at the time, although it was a full 24 hours a day with teams of people following me, looking for my sources," Getler said. He said he went to see Colby afterward, with Washington lawyer Joseph Califano. Getler recalled, "Colby said it happened under Helms and apologized and said it wouldn't happen again."

Personal surveillance was conducted on Anderson and three of his staff members, including Brit Hume, now with Fox News, for two months in 1972 after Anderson wrote of the administration's "tilt toward Pakistan." The 1972 surveillance of Marchetti was carried out "to determine contacts with CIA employees," the summary said.

CIA monitoring and infiltration of antiwar dissident groups took place between 1967 and 1971 at a time when the public was turning against the Vietnam War. Agency officials "covertly monitored" groups in the Washington area "who were considered to pose a threat to CIA installations." Some of the information "might have been distributed to the FBI," the summary said. Other "skeletons" listed in the summary included:

· The confinement by the CIA of a Russian defector, suspected by the CIA as a possible "fake," in Maryland and Virginia safe houses for two years, beginning in 1964. Colby speculated that this might be "a violation of the kidnapping laws."

· The "very productive" 1963 wiretapping of two columnists -- Robert Allen and Paul Scott -- whose conversations included talks with 12 senators and six congressmen.

· Break-ins by the CIA's office of security at the homes of one current and one former CIA official suspected of retaining classified documents.

· CIA-funded testing of American citizens, "including reactions to certain drugs."

The CIA documents scheduled for release next week, Hayden said yesterday, "provide a glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency."

Barred by secrecy restrictions from correcting "misinformation," he said, the CIA is at the mercy of the press. "Unfortunately, there seems to be an instinct among some in the media today to take a few pieces of information, which may or may not be accurate, and run with them to the darkest corner of the room," Hayden said.

Hayden's speech and some questions that followed evoked more recent criticism of the intelligence community, which has been accused of illegal wiretapping, infiltration of antiwar groups, and kidnapping and torturing of terrorism suspects.

"It's surely part of [Hayden's] program now to draw a bright line with the past," said National Security Archive Director Thomas S. Blanton. "But it's uncanny how the government keeps dipping into the black bag." Newly revealed details of ancient CIA operations, Blanton said, "are pretty resonant today."

The unitary executive theory of American monarchy

According to Alternet, Bush just signed a "presidential directive" giving him "all governmental power" in the case of a "catastrophic emergency" such as a terrorist attack or natural disaster.

Don't We Have a Constitution, Not a King?
By Marjorie Cohn
AlterNet
June 1, 2007

As the nation focused on whether Congress would exercise its constitutional duty to cut funding for the war, Bush quietly issued an unconstitutional bombshell that went virtually unnoticed by the corporate media.

The National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive, signed on May 9, 2007, would place all governmental power in the hands of the President and effectively abolish the checks and balances in the Constitution.

If a "catastrophic emergency" -- which could include a terrorist attack or a natural disaster -- occurs, Bush's new directive says: "The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government."

What about the other two co-equal branches of government? The directive throws them a bone by speaking of a "cooperative effort" among the three branches, "coordinated by the President, as a matter of comity with respect to the legislative and judicial branches and with proper respect for the constitutional separation of powers." The Vice-President would help to implement the plans.

"Comity," however, means courtesy, and the President would decide what kind of respect for the other two branches of government would be "proper." This Presidential Directive is a blatant power grab by Bush to institutionalize "the unitary executive."

A seemingly innocuous phrase, the unitary executive theory actually represents a radical, ultra rightwing interpretation of the powers of the presidency. Championed by the conservative Federalist Society, the unitary executive doctrine gathers all power in the hands of the President and insulates him from any oversight by the congressional or judicial branches.

In a November 2000 speech to the Federalist Society, then Judge Samuel Alito said the Constitution "makes the president the head of the executive branch, but it does more than that. The president has not just some executive powers, but the executive power -- the whole thing."

These "unitarians" claim that all federal agencies, even those constitutionally created by Congress, are beholden to the Chief Executive, that is, the President. This means that Bush could disband agencies like the Federal Communications Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Reserve Board, etc., if they weren't to his liking.

Indeed, Bush signed an executive order stating that each federal agency must have a regulatory policy office run by a political appointee. Consumer advocates were concerned that this directive was aimed at weakening the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The unitary executive dogma represents audacious presidential overreaching into the constitutional province of the other two branches of government.

This doctrine took shape within the Bush administration shortly after 9/11. On September 25, 2001, former deputy assistant attorney general John Yoo used the words "unitary executive" in a memo he wrote for the White House: "The centralization of authority in the president alone is particularly crucial in matters of national defense, war, and foreign policy, where a unitary executive can evaluate threats, consider policy choices, and mobilize national resources with a speed and energy that is far superior to any other branch." Six weeks later, Bush began using that phrase in his signing statements.

As of December 22, 2006, Bush had used the words "unitary executive" 145 times in his signing statements and executive orders. Yoo, one of the chief architects of Bush's doctrine of unfettered executive power, wrote memoranda advising Bush that because he was commander in chief, he could make war any time he thought there was a threat, and he didn't have to comply with the Geneva Conventions.

In a 2005 debate with Notre Dame professor Doug Cassel, Yoo argued there is no law that could prevent the President from ordering that a young child of a suspect in custody be tortured, even by crushing the child's testicles.

The unitary executive theory has already cropped up in Supreme Court opinions. In his lone dissent in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, Justice Clarence Thomas cited "the structural advantages of a unitary Executive." He disagreed with the Court that due process demands an American citizen held in the United States as an enemy combatant be given a meaningful opportunity to contest the factual basis for that detention before a neutral decision maker. Thomas wrote, "Congress, to be sure, has a substantial and essential role in both foreign affairs and national security. But it is crucial to recognize that judicial interference in these domains destroys the purpose of vesting primary responsibility in a unitary Executive."

Justice Thomas's theory fails to recognize why our Constitution provides for three co-equal branches of government.

In 1926, Justice Louis Brandeis explained the constitutional role of the separation of powers. He wrote, "The doctrine of the separation of powers was adopted by the convention of 1787 not to promote efficiency but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power. The purpose was not to avoid friction, but, by means of the inevitable friction incident to the distribution of the governmental powers among three departments, to save the people from autocracy."

Eighty years later, noted conservative Grover Norquist, describing the unitary executive theory, echoed Brandeis's sentiment. Norquist said, "you don't have a constitution; you have a king."

One wonders what Bush & Co. are setting up with the new Presidential Directive. What if, heaven forbid, some sort of catastrophic event were to occur just before the 2008 election? Bush could use this directive to suspend the election. This administration has gone to great lengths to remain in Iraq. It has built huge permanent military bases and pushed to privatize Iraq's oil. Bush and Cheney may be unwilling to relinquish power to a successor administration.

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, president of the National Lawyers Guild, and the US representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists. Her new book, Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law, will be published in July. Her articles are archived at http://www.marjoriecohn.com/.

Deputy Attorney General James Comey's testimony: George W. Bush "engage[d] in conduct that the Department of Justice had said had no legal basis"

SCHUMER: And why did you decide to resign?

COMEY: I believed that I couldn’t — I couldn’t stay, if the administration was going to engage in conduct that the Department of Justice had said had no legal basis. I just simply couldn’t stay.

Via Truthdig, this video from YouTube shows former Deputy Attorney General James Comey's testimony to the U.S. Congress this week about this story (summarized on Wikipedia):

In early January 2006, the New York Times, as part of their investigation into alleged domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency, reported that Comey, who was Acting Attorney General during the March 2004 surgical hospitalization of John Ashcroft, refused to "certify" central aspects of the NSA program at that time. The certification was required under existing White House procedures to continue the program. After Comey's refusal, the newspaper reported, Andrew H. Card Jr., White House Chief of Staff, and Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House counsel and now Attorney General, made an emergency visit to the George Washington University Hospital, to attempt to win approval directly from Ashcroft for the program. Comey confirmed these events took place (but declined to confirm the specific program) in testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on 16 May 2007.

Comey also confirmed that Attorney General Ashcroft forcefully refused to certify the program and that the White House proceeded to go ahead with the program anyway, thus giving rise to what Comey described as "engag[ing] in conduct that the Department of Justice had said had no legal basis". He also testified that he, his chief of staff, Ashcroft, Ashcroft's chief of staff, and FBI director Robert Mueller all threatened to resign over President Bush's defiance of the law.

The transcript of Comey's testimony is at Think Progress.

This article from Slate has the story and its implications for the "unitary executive theory" -- in other words, the dictatorship our country has become in the endless war Bush claims we are engaged in:

Nixon Rides Again
It's only illegal when the president agrees it's illegal.
By Dahlia Lithwick
May 17, 2007

It took a day, but the newspapers finally caught up to the bloggers this morning in recognizing the real shocker in former Deputy Attorney General James Comey's dramatic congressional testimony Tuesday. It's not just the Grim Reaper tale of Alberto Gonzales and Andy Card double-teaming a critically ill John Ashcroft in his hospital bed. The real issue, as Orin Kerr, Glenn Greenwald, Marty Lederman, The Anonymous Liberal, and Paul Kiel started explaining Wednesday, is much bigger: The story isn't who picked on a sick guy or even who did or didn't break laws. The story is who gets to decide what's legal. And the president's now-familiar claim, a la Richard Nixon, is that it's never illegal when he does it.

We now know that in 2004 Gonzales and Andy Card raced to the hospital to try to get a very sick John Ashcroft to certify the legality of the president's secret NSA surveillance program—going over the head of Comey, the acting attorney general while Ashcroft was ill. When Ashcroft refused to override Comey, the White House reauthorized the program without DoJ certification. The question now is whether in so doing, the White House did something illegal, improper, neither, or both.

The Wall Street Journal today dismisses this story as a "full length docudrama." Quoting selectively from Arlen Specter's long colloquy with Comey, in which Comey conceded that "the Justice Department's certification ... was not [required] as far as I know," the Journal concludes that "nothing illegal was done, [Comey] was never threatened by White House officials, and the President told him to do what he felt was right." No laws broken. Nothing to see here, America. Move along.

But those of you who actually read the transcript know that Comey never conceded that DoJ certification of the classified program was legally unnecessary. He seems merely to have said that the administration may not have believed it was legally necessary. Indeed, when Specter asked whether "the certification by the Department of Justice as to legality was indispensable as a matter of law," Comey said he believed that it was. He said, twice, and most carefully, that while he was not a presidential scholar, there were those who argued "that because the head of the executive branch determined that it was appropriate to do, that that meant for purposes of those in the executive branch it was legal." Comey added that he disagreed with that conclusion.

There is a normative legal argument about whether the president should need any permission to do anything in wartime. The bloggers above agree that this bare assertion—that the president's Article II powers allow him to do what needs doing—appears to be the basis for the work of John Yoo, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyer who laid much of the legal groundwork for torture and other forms of unchecked executive power before 2004. That may, in turn, have been the basis for the apparently rigorous re-evaluation of Yoo's legal work by the new head of OLC, Jack Goldsmith. (Disclosure: Goldsmith and I have co-authored here in Slate.)

But regardless of what the Journal claims, Comey was not this week endorsing the assertion that whatever the president says goes. He conceded that the attorney general's certification was not required by statute or by regulation, but it was "the practice in this particular [surveillance] program ... there was a signature line for that." And he added that the AG's certification had never yet been disregarded.

Specter hardly wrung from Comey the concession that the White House decision to reauthorize its NSA program over DoJ objections was "legal." What Comey did grant was the proposition that it could have been legal if you accepted that what the White House does is legal by definition. The administration's decision to push forward with the program anyway meant that Comey (and DoJ) had no role to play at all, and he found that untenable, if not expressly illegal.

It's impossible to draw neat lines around which elements of the mushrooming U.S. attorneys scandal violate the law and which are encompassed in Bush's larger worldview that life happens at the pleasure of the president. But these discussions raise the bigger question: How can the president ever break a law, so long as he insists he is the law? And how can the rest of us know if he's broken a law, if we've absolutely no idea what he's been doing?

The psychodrama in Ashcroft's hospital room boils down to a rift between the people at Justice (Ashcroft, Comey, and Goldsmith) who believed even the president can cross a line into lawless behavior and those who simply don't. Glenn Greenwald contends that "the President consciously and deliberately violated the law and committed multiple felonies by eavesdropping on Americans." The Wall Street Journal insists that no law was broken because the surveillance program put the president above the law. Greenwald believes in an immutable legal architecture that binds even the president. The White House contends the president answers to nobody. There is no midpoint between these two arguments. The president is either above the law or he isn't.

As it turns out, almost everyone who espoused the latter view has fled DoJ. The most underreported moment at Comey's hearing this week was not, as the Journal claims, the Comey-Specter colloquy, but Sen. Chuck Schumer's Freudian effort to swear Comey back into office when he was supposed to be administering an oath. As Ben Wittes puts it today, "the bad guys won."

But that's not quite right. The bad guys were winning for a while because they picked the teams, set the rules, sidelined the referees, and turned off all the lights in the stadium. Congress has some work to do. It needs to drill down on what this mystery eavesdropping program was (and which worse mystery eavesdropping program it replaced) and to get to the bottom of the Yoo memos and what else they've authorized. Let's call the Comey testimony the halftime show. With the refs in and the lights finally on, this might just prove to be an interesting game after all.

Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

Majority of Iraqi parliament calls for US withdrawal from Iraq

Alternet reports that a majority of the Iraqi parliament has "signed onto a legislative petition calling on the United States to set a timetable for withdrawal". The article is also very instructive in its delineation of "nationalists" and "separatists" in Iraq. It seems that the parliament is dominated by "nationalists", who want to keep Iraq together as a single country, and who oppose the wholesale giveaway of Iraqi oil contracts to American and British oil corporations and the construction of permanent American military bases in Iraq. America and Britain, apparently following the classic strategy of "divide and conquer", support "separatists", who want to break up the country into three separate countries along ethnic lines, and who also are eager, coincidentally, to hand control of Iraqi oil fields over to American and British oil corporations, and to allow the construction of permanent American military bases in Iraq. It's interesting how the rationale for this war has undergone so many changes: from WMD, to democracy, to security, to what now? America found no WMD, it's ignoring the elected Iraqi parliament, and it seems to be mainly focused on oil and control over the country for its own purposes through whatever means are most convenient. This is what 655,000+ Iraqis have died for.

Majority of Iraqi Lawmakers Now Reject Occupation
By Raed Jarrar and Joshua Holland
AlterNet
May 9, 2007


On Tuesday, without note in the U.S. media, more than half of the members of Iraq's parliament rejected the continuing occupation of their country. 144 lawmakers signed onto a legislative petition calling on the United States to set a timetable for withdrawal, according to Nassar Al-Rubaie, a spokesman for the Al Sadr movement, the nationalist Shia group that sponsored the petition.

...

The major schism in Iraqi politics is not between Sunni and Shia or supporters of the Iraqi government and "anti-government forces," nor is it a clash of "moderates" against "radicals"; the defining battle for Iraq at the political level today is between nationalists trying to hold the Iraqi state together and separatists backed, so far, by the United States and Britain.

The continuing occupation of Iraq and the allocation of Iraq's resources -- especially its massive oil and natural gas deposits -- are the defining issues that now separate an increasingly restless bloc of nationalists in the Iraqi parliament from the administration of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose government is dominated by Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish separatists.

By "separatists," we mean groups who oppose a unified Iraq with a strong central government; key figures like Maliki of the Dawa party, Shia leader Abdul Aziz Al-Hakeem of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq ("SCIRI"), Vice President Tariq Al-Hashimi of the Sunni Islamic Party, President Jalal Talabani -- a Kurd -- and Masoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish Autonomous Region, favor partitioning Iraq into three autonomous regions with strong local governments and a weak central administration in Baghdad. (The partition plan is also favored by several congressional Democrats, notably Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware.)

Iraq's separatists also oppose setting a timetable for ending the U.S. occupation, preferring the addition of more American troops to secure their regime. They favor privatizing Iraq's oil and gas and decentralizing petroleum operations and revenue distribution.

But public opinion is squarely with Iraq's nationalists. According to a poll by the University of Maryland's Project on International Public Policy Attitudes, majorities of all three of Iraq's major ethno-sectarian groups support a unified Iraq with a strong central government.

...

While sectarian fighting at the neighborhood and community level has made life unlivable for millions of Iraqis, Iraqi nationalism -- portrayed as a fiction by supporters of the invasion -- supercedes sectarian loyalties at the political level. A group of secular, Sunni and Shia nationalists have long voted together on key issues, but so far have failed to join forces under a single banner.

That may be changing. Reached by phone last week, nationalist leader Saleh Al-Mutlaq, of the National Dialogue Front, said, "We're doing our best to form this united front and announce it within the next few weeks." The faction would have sufficient votes to block any measure proposed by the Maliki government. Asked about the Americans' reaction to the growing power of the nationalists, Mutlaq said, "We're trying our best to reach out to the U.S. side, but to no avail."

That appears to be a trend. Iraqi nationalists have attempted again and again to forge relationships with members of Congress, the State Department, the Pentagon and the White House but have found little interest in dialogue and no support. Instead, key nationalists like al-Sadr have been branded as "extremists," "thugs" and "criminals."

That's a tragic missed opportunity; the nationalists are likely Iraq's best hope for real and lasting reconciliation among the country's warring factions. They are the only significant political force focused on rebuilding a sovereign, united and independent Iraq without sectarian and ethnic tensions or foreign meddling -- from either the West or Iran. Hassan Al-Shammari, the head of Al-Fadhila bloc in the Iraqi parliament, said this week, "We have a peace plan, and we're trying to work with other nationalist Iraqis to end the U.S. and Iranian interventions, but we're under daily attacks and there's huge pressure to destroy our peace mission."

A sovereign and unified Iraq, free of sectarian violence, is what George Bush and Tony Blair claim they want most. The most likely reason that the United States and Britain have rebuffed those Iraqi nationalists who share those goals is that the nationalists oppose permanent basing rights and the privatization of Iraq's oil sector. The administration, along with their allies in Big Oil, has pressed the Iraqi government to adopt an oil law that would give foreign multinationals a much higher rate of return than they enjoy in other major oil producing countries and would lock in their control over what George Bush called Iraq's "patrimony" for decades.

Al-Shammari said this week: "We're afraid the U.S. will make us pass this new oil law through intimidation and threatening. We don't want it to pass, and we know it'll make things worse, but we're afraid to rise up and block it, because we don't want to be bombed and arrested the next day." In the Basrah province, where his Al-Fadhila party dominates the local government, Al-Shammari's fellow nationalists have been attacked repeatedly by separatists for weeks, while British troops in the area remained in their barracks.

...

The United States, in pushing for more aggressive moves against Iraqi nationalists and the passage of a final oil law, is playing a dangerous game. Iraqi nationalists reached in Baghdad this week say they are beginning to lose hope of achieving anything through the political process because both the Iraqi government and the occupation authorities are systematically bypassing the Iraqi parliament where they're in the majority. If they end up quitting the political process entirely, that will leave little choice but to oppose the occupation by violent means.

Raed Jarrar is Iraq Consultant to the American Friends Service Committee. He blogs at Raed in the Middle.

Boy King Bush

This article from Znet goes over well-worn ground, but I think it makes the case that our country's system of government has become almost indistinguishable from a monarchy under Bush.

Boy King Bush
by Paul Street
ZNet
May 09, 2007

George W. Bush sure looked uncomfortable spending a day with the Queen of England. I find this ironic. It is richly appropriate that he be intimately linked in the public eye for at least one day to the English monarchy.

The core founding United States document The Declaration of Independence (DOI) was written in fierce defiance of the English crown, the British Empire, and the institution of absolute monarchy.

But the U.S. President Bush has been defying key DOI postulates in ways that the original “royal brute” (as Thomas Jefferson described the King George of 1776) would approve. He has invoked a modern version of the Divine Right of Kings by claiming to be above the law in enacting such policies as the wiretapping of U.S. citizens, extraordinary rendition, the denial of habeas corpus to “enemy combatants” and the torture of alleged terrorists and occupation resisters.

Boy-king George has only half-jokingly referred to the nation’s billionaires as his real “base” and to thinking it would be easier to rule through dictatorship than via “democracy,” which he falsely claims to promote within and beyond Iraq. He is a longstanding close friend of the monarchical rulers of the totalitarian and arch-reactionary state of Saudi Arabia. His administration sponsored and supported a military coup against the democratically elected president of Venezuela in April of 2002.

And while he just cringed through a royal day culminating in a nauseating and hyper-classist white-tie dinner that cost U.S. taxpayers untold tens if not hundreds of thousands (millions?) of dollars, more United States troops died in an illegal war that Bush strategized with top British officials while hiding his plans from the American people. People trying to deal with the aftermath of a devastating Kansas tornado were denied assistance from state National Guard units still diverted to Bush’s arch-criminal oil occupation of Mesopotamia.

In the leaked Downing Street Memo of 23 July 2002, it was revealed by top British military intelligence officials that English authorities learned something remarkable from Bush and his team. “Military action was now seen as inevitable,” the British discovered. “Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action,” the Memo reads, “justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

The cooked intelligence claims used to trick the American people into supporting the pre-ordained invasion of Iraq were being manufactured in advance by U.S. authorities. British rulers were let in on this terrible reality.

Things got positively weird between Team Bush and the rulers of England five months later. In a two-hour meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair that took place in the White House office on January 31, 2003, Bush discussed several ways to provoke a confrontation. One of the methods he proposed was to paint a U.S. surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of anti-aircraft fire that could be used to justify an invasion.

Formed in opposition to British rule and institutions, the DOI made history by saying that the consent of the governed was the only legitimate basis for a government and that the people had the right to replace an authoritarian government with more popular forms of rule. This is the well known right of revolution.

Just less than two hundred and twenty one years later, the rulers of the British state knew more about Bush’s foreign policy plans than “the Decider’s” own U.S. subjects as he prepared to undertake the thoroughly immoral and illegal invasion of petroleum-rich Iraq. Nearly two hundred and thirty one years later, after at least one stolen Bush election, the majority of those subjects oppose their authoritarian president’s recently escalated criminal war but lack confidence in their ability to do anything to stop it. After committing numerous offenses worthy of impeachment, removal, incarceration and worse, the messianic- militarist Bush continues to tell reporters and the public that his decisions on Iraq will be informed by his generals and “commanders on the ground” – unelected military authorities – and not by merely elected “politicians in Washington.” He exhibits special reverence for the title “Commander-in-Chief,” also suggesting a belief that military rule has supplanted civilian rule in his authoritarian mind.

Paul Street is a frequent ZNet contributor and the author of many articles, studies, speeches, chapters and books. He can be reached at paulstreet99@yahoo.com.