Wendy Kristianasen

Palestine: Hamas besieged

The current crisis in the West Bank and Gaza shows that Israel, the United States, and elements within Fatah mean to provoke the collapse of the Hamas-led government. As the violence reaches new levels, what will happen to the call made by Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas for a July referendum on the 'prisoners' document', accepting a two-state solution along the 1967 lines?

US and Israeli determination to undermine the Hamas-led government (voted into power in January in a transparent election that the US had promoted) has caused tensions between, on one side, Fatah and the Palestinian Authority (PA) president, Mahmoud Abbas, and Hamas on the other.

The new government looks to the Arab/Muslim world for support. Egypt and Jordan have kept their distance, fearful of the impact of an Islamist-led government at home. Other countries have promised help.

The problem is getting it in. The banks are under pressure, especially in the US, not to transfer funds."

International donors require the new government to observe three conditions: to denounce violence, recognise the state of Israel, and agree to previous agreements signed between the Palestinians and Israelis. But no demands have been made of the Israelis. "It's a wakeup call," said a secular women's rights activist in Ramallah, Soraida Hussein. "We have to reject Western interference. That means supporting Hamas. People voted for them and we have to respect their wishes."

The Palestinians voted for Hamas because it offered clean hands, not tarnished with corruption, and had a strong social base and good record in local government. Also because Fatah's strategy had failed.

JOSE RAMOS HORTA AND RAJ PUROHIT

A UN role in Timor Leste

Peace-building processes that pay attention to a nation's need to feed, employ, govern, and heal itself are essential in any nation-building process. But the world failed to offer sufficient assistance to Timor Leste. The world community, including the United States, moved on to the next failing state before Timor Leste had sufficient strength to stand on its own.

The first order of business is to address the violence caused by the dismissal of 600 striking soldiers.

ZNet | Vision & Strategy

Learn from the South?

by Tony Christini; July 01, 2006

We hear a steady stream of progressives say that progressives need to "learn from the South" where they are having more success at social change -- Venezuela, in particular

Unless the military and the church grow out of many of their status quo enforcing and repressive ways - and for that matter unless the schools and universities and the labor force generally do so as well (not to mention the rest of the "liberal" and "conservative" establishment, who, I suppose, along with the police, will be among the last to change, by force) -- it's not clear that any amount of learning by progressives about the South will have widespread decisive effect. The greater poverty of the South gives it more motivation to change, and probably more economic and political consciousness -- to an extent.

Citizens versus Extreme Poverty

Jeffrey D. Sachs

Rather than wait for politicians to take up the fight against polio, Rotarians led the way. A few years later, the World Health Organization, and then other international agencies and donor countries, joined the cause, creating a coalition of official and private organizations that now support Rotary’s vision. By 2006, the number of polio cases had been cut dramatically, to well under 3,000 cases per year.

Consider hunger in Africa. Most of Africa’s farmers, working tiny plots, do not produce enough food to feed their families, much less to earn an income. The root of the problem is that Africa’s farmers are too poor to obtain the basic modern inputs that could enable them to double or triple their output of food and cash crops.

The time has arrived for a massive effort by voluntary organizations to take up the MDG’s through private action. We need not wait for the politicians. The key is practicality, boldness, and, most importantly, a commitment by those who are better off to volunteer their time and money to bring practical help–in the form of high-yield seeds, fertilizers, medicines, bed nets, drinking wells, and materials to build school rooms and clinics—to the world’s poorest people.

Globalization’s Hidden Benefits

Globalization encourages policies that improve the lives of many

Richard W. Fisher

This is the natural process of capitalism, constrained by the cost of transport and information and accelerated by technologies that make it cheaper to move goods, services and ideas. Globalization will proceed apace unless or until the governmental authorities intervene to stop it. Policymakers in both the political and monetary realms must come to grips with this if we are to fulfill our mandates.

• In the past two decades, the stock of foreign direct investment assets has nearly quadrupled as a percentage of gross world product.

More people than ever are crossing national borders – for business and pleasure. On average around the globe, countries received just one foreign visitor for every 100 people in 1950. By the mid-1980s there were six, and since then that number has doubled to 12.

With the important exceptions of fiscal and labor policies, the Dallas Fed study concludes that globalization is associated with better policies. Of course, there is a chicken-and-egg problem of whether globalization improves public policy or whether nations that improve their policies succeed in becoming more globalized. It is probably both. We should celebrate, not denigrate, globalization. It is associated with better government policies, ones that lead to higher living standards and greater economic freedom.

Richard W. Fisher is president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

What 'Energy Security' Really Means

By Sebastian Mallaby

For many American leaders, energy security means producing energy at home and relying less on foreigners. But the United States imports three-fifths of its oil, and the share is heading up. For the foreseeable future, alternative fuel is unlikely to change that.

For China, which isn't part of the G-8 but participates in some of its meetings, energy security means buying stakes in foreign oil fields -- in Sudan, Nigeria, Angola and so on.

So there's no sense in these nationalistic conceptions of energy security. As Daniel Yergin has written recently in Foreign Affairs, real energy security requires setting aside the pipe dream of energy independence and embracing interdependence.

For different reasons, the oil market also shows why leaders should embrace interdependence. Because oil is traded globally, a supply disruption anywhere will affect gas prices in the United States; there's no use thinking nationalistically.

If the United States releases oil from its reserve, the benefit is dissipated around the world since the global oil price is affected.

Ensuring Energy Security
Daniel Yergin
From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006

But the switch also meant that the Royal Navy would rely not on coal from Wales but on insecure oil supplies from what was then Persia. Energy security thus became a question of national strategy. Churchill's answer? "Safety and certainty in oil," he said, "lie in variety and variety alone."

The renewed focus on energy security is driven in part by an exceedingly tight oil market and by high oil prices, which have doubled over the past three years. But it is also fueled by the threat of terrorism, instability in some exporting nations, a nationalist backlash, fears of a scramble for supplies, geopolitical rivalries, and countries' fundamental need for energy to power their economic growth. In the background -- but not too far back -- is renewed anxiety over whether there will be sufficient resources to meet the world's energy requirements in the decades ahead.

Qaeda has threatened to attack what Osama bin Laden calls the "hinges" of the world's economy, that is, its critical infrastructure -- of which energy is among the most crucial elements.

Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

The Key to History: Discover a Principle

For today: What's the great principle? We need two things, most of all, in terms of science: We must have an immediate explosion—not of nuclear bombs, but of nuclear power plants. Without that, we're not going to be able to deal with the water problems of the planet. We're not going to deal with the pollution of the planet, none of these things.

Roosevelt was committed to overturning the policies of the United States from the assassination of one President [McKinley]; the inauguration of Teddy Roosevelt; the inauguration of another fascist, Woodrow Wilson; the inauguration of fools—Coolidge was an evil fool; Hoover who was not a fool, but who was corrupt. So, the United States from 1901-1902 until 1933 was run by a policy entirely contrary to the Constitutional prescription of the United States.

There was a union in Europe in the 16th century. It collapsed

On July 4, 1569, the Union of Lublin was created. It’s unlikely you have heard of it. Yet this predecessor of the European Union created the most progressive state in Europe

Once upon a time there was a union in Europe. In the Eastern part of our continent a country more politically advanced than any yet seen in Europe was created. The Republic of Two Nations (Poles and Lithuanians), created by the Union of Lublin in 1569, was a unique societal and political experiment.

In an age of continuous religious warfare, the Republic was an oasis of tolerance. Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, Jews and Muslims lived together and their rights and duties were only partially dependent on their religion.

What eventually killed the Republic’s political experiment was ignorance. As long as the Republic stayed open and inclusive for others, as long as it was based on the principle of equality and tolerance, it was the most admired state in 16th and early 17th century Europe.

But as the Republic turned away from the principle of openness, problems started to arise. The Republic’s Parliament operated through consensus – if one member opposed a policy, then the entire session would be lost. Increasing internal fractures hamstrung attempts at political reform. Then, when the Cossacks (today’s Ukrainians) asked to be members of the szlachta, they were refused. This resulted in increased domestic tensions and civil wars.

WWFFD?

America's founders had strong views on illegal immigration, preemptive war and executive power.

By Richard Brookhiser, RICHARD BROOKHISER is the author of "What Would the Founders Do: Our Questions, Their Answers."

In 1798, Congress passed and President John Adams signed the Alien Act, a law allowing the president to deport dangerous aliens on his own say-so, without trial. The stimulus was an influx of refugees from Ireland and France — countries undergoing political turmoil that many founders feared would be brought to the U.S. by the new immigrants. Rep. Harrison Gray Otis of Massachusetts, for example, warned in Congress of "hordes of wild Irishmen" coming here "to disturb our tranquillity."

Thomas Jefferson, who intended to replace Adams as president, opposed the Alien Act on the grounds that it gave the executive too much power. But Jefferson's position also appealed to ethnic and immigrant voters in America, including, in addition to wild Irishmen, the German Americans in Pennsylvania and New York City. Jefferson's success with these voters was one reason he won the election of 1800.

In other words, key elements of our debate were already in place: fear that immigration would be a political and cultural problem versus confidence that it was no problem at all, especially if immigrants voted the right way. The founders were split on the question, as politicians are today.

In 1803, President Jefferson bought the Louisiana Territory from France for $15 million. His old enemy, Alexander Hamilton, congratulated him on the acquisition but added that Jefferson should have simply taken it. "Sound policy unquestionably demanded of us … to seize the object at once" — then we could have dickered over the price.

Hamilton was so bellicose because France was ruled by Napoleon, a known aggressor; indeed, the French had already made trouble for Americans trying to ship produce down the Mississippi and out of New Orleans. In Hamilton's view, there were hostile actions short of war that justified hostile responses. An Army veteran who came from a broken home, he expected the world to be dangerous.

In the Federalist Papers, Hamilton had asked: "Is it not time to awake from the deceitful dream of a golden age" and realize that we do not live in "the happy empire of perfect wisdom and perfect virtue?" He would have been willing to strike first to defend the United States.

Aristocracy, he wrote Jefferson when they were old men, rested on "five pillars": birth, wealth, beauty, genius and virtue.

America is a vastly different country from the one the founders knew. It has cars, computers and good teeth; it has no slaves. In defense of their own relevance, the founders would tell us that human passions — for power, fame, money, sex — remain the same. The founders were obsessed with designing systems that would put those passions to good use, or at least moderate their bad effects. We might no longer agree with all of their solutions, but we can never escape their problems.

A Dissident's Holiday

By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Tuesday, July 4, 2006; Page A15

Have you ever noticed a certain hesitant quality to the expressions of patriotism by progressives or left-wingers?

But the progressive and the reformer have a problem with what passes for unadulterated patriotism. By nature, the reformer is bound to insist that the country, however glorious, is not a perfect place, that it is capable of doing wrong as well as right. The nation that declared "all men are created equal" was, at the time those words were written, the home of an extensive system of slavery.

"To say now that America was right, and England wrong, is exceedingly easy," Douglass declared. "Everybody can say it. . . . But there was a time when, to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried men's souls. They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men. To side with the right, against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, with the oppressed against the oppressor! here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems unfashionable in our day."

This telling of the Fourth of July story identifies the day as part of a long, progressive history and turns "agitators" and "plotters of mischief" into the holiday's true heroes. The Fourth is transformed from an affirmation of continuity into a celebration of change. The republic's founders are praised not because they inaugurated a system designed to stand forever, unaltered, but because they blazed a path toward what Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has called "active liberty." They set the nation on a course that would, as Breyer put it, expand "the scope of democratic self-government."

As long as people are people, democracy, in the full sense of the word, will always be no more than an ideal," Havel said. "One may approach it as one would the horizon in ways that may be better or worse, but it can never be fully attained. In this sense, you, too, are merely approaching democracy."

That we're still trying, 230 years after we declared independence, is our national glory.

There is nothing more frustrating for critics of neoclassical economics than the argument that neoclassical economics is a figment of their imagination; that, simply, there is scientific economics and there is speculative hand-waiving (by those who have never really grasped the finer points of mainstream economic theory). In

In this chapter, we offer a definition of neoclassical economics which turns on three crucial axioms and which, in conjunction with one another, as we shall claim, underpin all (and only) neoclassical theory.¹  Later, we argue that these very axioms are simultaneously responsible for: (a) the difficulty mainstream economics faces when it comes to illuminating economic and social reality, and (b) the discursive success of neoclassical economics which gives it an effective (politically driven) stranglehold over alternative modes of economic reasoning.

 

2. The first axiom of neoclassical economics: methodological individualism

Indeed, the last thirty years of neoclassical economics have been marked by an explosion of models in which economic actors are imperfectly informed, some times other-regarding, frequently irrational (or boundedly rational, as the current jargon would have it) etc. In short, Homo Economicus has evolved to resemble us more.

First, this was not the method of classical economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Or, indeed, of Keynes. Or Hayek. Secondly, this proclivity is fully in tune with the mid-19^th Century angloceltic liberal individualism

3. The second axiom of neoclassical economics: methodological instrumentalism

We label the second feature of neoclassical economics methodological instrumentalism: all behaviour is preference-driven or, more precisely, it is to be understood as a means for maximising preference-satisfaction.² Preference is given, current, fully determining, and strictly separate from both belief (which simply helps the agent predict uncertain future outcomes) and from the means employed. Everything we do and say is instrumental to preference-satisfaction so much so that there is no longer any philosophical room for questioning whether the agent will act on her preferences. In effect, neoclassical theory is a narrow version of consequentialism in which the only consequence that matters is the extent to which an homogeneous index of preference-satisfaction is maximised.³

Methodological instrumentalism’s roots are traceable in David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739/40) in which the Scottish philosopher famously divided the human decision making process in three distinct modules: Passions, Belief and Reason.

However, it is a mistake to think that Hume would have approved. For his Passions are too unruly to fit neatly in some ordinal or expected utility function. It took the combined efforts of Jeremy Bentham and the late 19^th Century neoclassicists to tame the Passions sufficiently before they could initially be reduced to a unidimensional index of pleasure before turning into smooth, double differentiable utility functions.

During the tumultuous 20^th Century, neoclassicists invested greatly in bleaching all psychology out of the rational agent’s decision making process. All hints of a philosophical discussion regarding the rationality of homo economicus were thus removed. People could, and ‘should’, be modelled as if they possessed consistent preferences which guide their behaviour automatically. The question of whether all rational women and men are condemned to maximise some utility function all the time became…nonsensical. Thus, instrumentalism lost its connection to the philosophies of Hume, Bentham or Mill and became a technical move that economists made instinctively with the same nonchalance as that of an accomplished artist preparing his oils and canvass before getting down to business.

. The third axiom of neoclassical economics: methodological equilibration

The reason for the axiomatic imposition of equilibrium is simple: it could not be otherwise! By this we mean that neoclassicism cannot demonstrate that equilibrium would emerge as a natural consequence of agents’ instrumentally rational choices. Thus, the second best methodological alternative for the neoclassical theorist is to presume that behaviour hovers around some analytically-discovered equilibrium and then ask questions on the likelihood that, once at that equilibrium, the ‘system’ has a propensity to stick around or drift away (what is known as ‘stability analysis’).

 

It is hard to imagine how any standardly trained economist could deny that her theoretical practices digress from the three methodological moves mentioned above: Methodological individualism, methodological instrumentalism and methodological equilibration.

The Prophet and the Evangelist
The public "conversation" of Reinhold Niebuhr and Billy Graham

As the two most recognizable faces of postwar Protestantism (Paul Tillich and Norman Vincent Peale were the others), Niebuhr and Graham's thought was often juxtaposed in popular periodicals

He wondered whether "this generation is not expressing its desire to believe in something," though perhaps unwilling "to be committed to a God who can be known only through repentance."4

And though he agreed with Graham that New York City was a modern-day "'Babylon,'" whose "'sins'" invited condemnation, he doubted whether Graham could "discern the real sins of such a Babylon." Niebuhr worried that the pietistic moralism of Graham would "accentuate every prejudice which the modern 'enlightened,' but morally sensitive, man may have against religion."

In particular, Niebuhr objected to Graham's belief that if enough "'bad'" people could convert and become "'good'" people, delicate problems such as potential atomic warfare might be solved. Niebuhr reminded Graham that "all men sin, even good men. The latter may be involved in sin, particularly when they try to do good, as for instance when they try to save their civilization."

Graham's "simple answers to complex questions" endangered any relevance the gospel had gained with the "modern generation."10

To his credit, Graham tackled the race problem in Life magazine seven weeks after Niebuhr's "Proposal." The article, one of the more substantive pieces Graham ever produced for popular consumption, ran for six pages, brooking no compromise with racism and segregation. A companion article—no doubt encouraged by Graham—featured a dialogue regarding the problem of integration among some leading evangelical Protestants, including Graham's father-in-law, L. Nelson Bell. Both articles denounced racism as unbiblical, though the latter article advocated a gradualist approach to desegregation

Early in Richard Nixon's first term, the president inaugurated weekly worship services in the East Room of the White House. "Naturally," Niebuhr wrote in Christianity and Crisis, Graham "was the first preacher in this modern version of the king's chapel and the king's court."

Socialist Worker 2008, 8 July 2006 (www.socialistworker.co.uk)

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php?article_id=9150

Features

Walter Benjamin and commodity capitalism

With the victory of Nazism in Germany and the fall of France, the spaces of safe Europe were shrinking. The east held little promise. At the end of 1926 Benjamin had visited Moscow for eight weeks in order to decide whether to join the Communist Party.

He decided against. The Soviet system appeared as a dynamic and energetic society - but already there were frightening tendencies towards leadership cults and corruption. By the time Benjamin sought to flee the Nazis, the situation in Russia had worsened.

The topics that attracted Benjamin were exceptionally diverse. They included the social dynamics of technology, the philosophy of history, the politics of literature, theories of memory and experience, and even the cultural significance of astrology.

Given his own precarious freelance existence, one of Benjamin’s key concerns was with the changing status of intellectuals, writers and artists over the period of industrialisation. The intelligentsia had to struggle to find financial backers where once patronage by nobility or the church had sufficed.

He devised strategies to avoid the pressures on artists to be individualistic, competitive, or proponents of art as a new religion. Benjamin assessed what the new mass cultural forms - radio, film, photography, photomontage, worker-correspondent newspapers - meant socially and politically. He was hopeful that new technologies could bring culture closer to larger numbers of people, demystify it and make its formats relevant for a modern epoch.

Benjamin studied the past in an effort to understand how capitalism had created the conditions for the victory of fascism. It was Paris that Benjamin chose to focus on. From the late 18th to the late 19th century Paris had been an animated place of burgeoning consumer capitalism and repeated revolutionary waves.

For Benjamin the arcades of Paris were a microcosm of capitalism. They ­represented both historical potential and disappointment - a promise of abundance and betrayal of that promise.

An international architectural form, they were crammed with colonial plunder, the raided booty of wealthy nations. The empire aided commodity production, providing sources of raw materials which could be worked over and sold off in newly established markets.

Imperialism unified the world through trade, but equally it divided peoples, setting them against one another as workers and as soldiers. The world exhibitions, another 19th century architectural form devoted to commodity display, were similarly contradictory.

“In 1855 the second world exhibition took place, this time in Paris. Workers’ delegations from the capital as well as from the provinces were now totally barred. It was feared that they gave workers an opportunity for organising.”

In focusing on the spaces of consumerism, Benjamin uncovered how the brokers of a new social order determined that bonds emerge only between consumers, not between workers. Nevertheless the workers’ bond of class solidarity threatened to endure - and so it had to be thwarted.

To this end, a new form of consumer experience proved useful. Benjamin tracked how Paris was restructured in the 1850s and 1860s in an effort to counter revolutionary actions. This modernisation project, inaugurated by Emperor Napoleon III, involved constructing vast boulevards designed to confound barricade building by rebellious workers, and to enable the swift passage of state vehicles from one part of the city to another to quell rioters.

Tourist location

Baron Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris aimed to move the working classes out of the city centre to the east, remodelling the west for the bourgeoisie. The arcades, which had been places of chance encounter, fell victim to this city tidy-up. Paris was to be turned into a location for tourists to contemplate rather than a locus of revolution.

Benjamin, influenced by Surrealism, unearthed impulses, objects, dreams and wishes in matter that had decayed.

The arcades and the consumer culture they ushered in was identified as a prerequisite of fascism, which cannot be understood without reference to capitalism. This was both in terms of its economic basis and in the way people are encouraged to conceive themselves as consumers and national masses, rather than as workers and internationalists.

At the same time, the arcades and similar 19th century forms - railway stations, museums, exhibition halls - all fizz with the utopian promise of luxuries, mobility and knowledge.

Benjamin was always alert to how the “hell” of commodity production and capitalist society could be probed to reveal traces of hope. So, at the same time as the worker’s consciousness is colonised by the commodity in spaces of consumption, the consumer reacts to the utopian side of commodity production.

From 1934, Benjamin’s dreams became ever more politicised and the dreams of the past, sought out in his historical archaeology of human desires, were obliterated by the pressing nightmares of the present. The collective appeared to have succumbed to the spectacle. The mass found an uncomfortable home in totalitarian states, where “class” was an outlawed category.

This is when Benjamin wrote his final piece, “On the Concept of History”. In the darkest days Benjamin pointed out the impotency of conventional modes of thinking and action. He diagnosed the root of the problem to be the “servile subordination into an uncontrollable apparatus” on the part of even those politicians, such as reformist social democrats, who were anti-fascist.

Benjamin’s challenging perspectives signal to us that revolutionary action in hand with revolutionary theory is the only rightful challenger to the system that oppresses us - and the only possibility for true happiness.

Esther Leslie is researcher at Birkbeck College and author of Walter Benjamin - Overpowering Conformism (Pluto Press).

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Philip Rieff, Sociologist and Author on Freud, Dies at 83

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By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

Dr. Rieff's first book, paradoxically titled "Freud: The Mind of the Moralist" (Viking Press, 1959), established him as an important sociologist. It argued that Freudian ideas, which gave rise to the idea of the "psychological man" as the dominant moral type in the 20th century, had had a corrosive effect on Western morality and culture because such an individual tended to relate all public questions not to received traditions of communal morality, but "to himself and his own emotions."

"The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud" (Harper & Row, 1966), which said that Freudian therapies had gone awry in modern society, aiming not at a healthier life but at "better living," with rationales to replace virtue with value and sidestep consequences.

In "Fellow Teachers" (Harper & Row, 1973), Dr. Rieff explored the role of teachers in higher education and argued for a "feeling intellect" that avoids preaching or espousing doctrines to students.

Hot, Cold & Imperial

By Robert Skidelsky

1945: The War That Never Ended

by Gregor Dallas

Yale University Press, 739 pp., $40.00

Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors

by Charles S. Maier

Harvard University Press, 373 pp., $27.95

The question of how the world should be run, and America's part in its running, is the subject of much academic and political discussion in Washington these days. The factual questions are: Is the United States on the road to becoming an empire like the Roman and British Empires before it? What are the prospects for such an enterprise in today's world? More speculatively, does globalization require an imperial underpinning? There are also questions of value: Is imperialism a good or bad thing? Should the United States sacrifice its republican institutions in order to fulfil an imperial vocation?^[1]

World War II, according to Gregor Dallas, never ended: it just stopped where the armies of East and West met, and almost immediately morphed into the cold war. This was because although the Soviet Union had achieved its war aim—an empire stretching from the Baltic to the Balkans—America had not achieved its aim, which, it will come as no surprise, was to convert the whole of Europe to democracy and free enterprise.

The cold war started when Truman realized that "democracy" did not mean quite the same to Stalin as it did to the Americans.

Dallas justifies his method by quoting the Polish poet Czesl/aw Mil/osz: "You can only express things properly by details. When you've observed a detail, you must discover the detail of the detail."

that the war against Germany (Japan is scarcely mentioned) was simultaneously a struggle to control the post-Nazi future.

But even in defeat, Hitler, too, influenced the shape of post-Nazi Europe, by his choice of where to fight, how hard to fight, whom to surrender to—and whom to kill. By the end, he preferred to have Germany conquered by Slavic communism than by the decadent democracies.

Stalin looked on the pact as a long-term arrangement because, to put it brutally, Hitler could give him what the Western democracies could not: reconstitution of the tsarist empire and further gains for the future.

The seeds of the cold war, in Dallas's view, were laid when Stalin insisted at Tehran in November 1943 that the terms of the Nazi–Soviet Pact still applied to Poland.

The cold war may have started with the Soviet takeover of Poland, but it got going seriously only in 1948 with the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, which had nothing to do with the pact. (It was Czechoslovakia rather than Poland that was regarded as the litmus test of Soviet intentions in 1948, as it had been of German intentions ten years earlier.)

Roosevelt was never concerned about who should liberate whom, because he dreamed of a post-territorial condominium with "Uncle Joe," exercised through multilateral institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, and the UN. This can be counted as the most spectacular misjudgment in American history

aided and abetted by a network of Soviet spies in the Treasury and State Departments.

that Roosevelt's persistent war aim was "the ejection of the British Empire as a Great Power." Churchill in his geopolitics and Keynes in his economic policy fought as hard as they could to maintain independence from the Americans, but the shrunken assets Britain controlled by the end of the war were inadequate for the job.

De Gaulle's other problem was that Roosevelt detested him. FDR was "at heart an ally of Vichy, thinking always that at any moment Vichy would switch sides and become a convenient client state of the Americans." For two years it was Churchill and Macmillan alone who upheld the claims of the prickly French general against American hostility. De Gaulle won the battle of legitimacy when his supporters gained control of the insurrection in Paris in August 1944 shortly before the Americans arrived, aided by the German military commander Dietrich von Choltitz, who ignored Hitler's order to "raze" the French capital.

The reasoning was the same in both cases: their ethnic characteristics made the victims actual or potential enemies of the regime. In 1941, Hitler wavered between deporting and exterminating the Jews. He had been considering evacuating all Jews first to Madagascar and then east of the Urals. It was "the loss of any chance for control of these lands...[which] pushed the Nazis towards...the 'Final Solution.'"

It was the Soviet Union, not Hitler's Germany, that was "in strictest terms the totalitarian state."

NATO, said Solzhenitsyn in a recent interview with Moskovskiye Novosti, "is methodically developing its military deployment in Eastern Europe and on Russia's southern flank."^[8] The United States is embarked on a revised version of FDR's mission to spread democracy and free markets around the world. It would take a rash person to say that frontiers in all these places are finally fixed, though it is far from clear where they will be fixed, or whether fixing them will make that much difference.

America aspired to be a post-territorial "empire of liberty," not a territorial dominion imposed by force.

Maier's book has much to say about how this construction took place after 1945. In this sense it follows from where Dallas left off. The US compromise between traditional empire and a Kantian comity of democratic republics was to establish American "hegemony" over the "free world," backed by military commitments and military bases, and underpinned by nuclear weapons and Ford assembly-line technology. Maier distinguishes between the "empire of production" and the "empire of consumption." In the first phase, the American productive system was transferred to its allies through Marshall Aid and other aid packages; Phase II's "empire of consumption" was based on the dominance of the dollar, and culminated in the "twin deficits" of today—the budget deficit and the balance of payments deficit.

and how this failed attempt to "adjourn...the cold war" was followed by a new "forward movement" by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and by the Carter doctrine of human rights. Of the Nixon-Kissinger design for imperial multipolarity—in which the American superpower would share the world with China and the USSR—he writes: "Not since Hitler had offered Molotov the domination of South and Central Asia in November 1940 was such a fundamental world political order presented as a grand bargain to international rivals."

The historian Niall Ferguson has called America an "empire in denial"^[9] ; Maier suggests it might be an empire in the making.

Rome remains the most convincing model for discussing the United States because foreign conquest changed it from a republic to an empire. It retained eviscerated republican institutions like the Senate, but power shifted to the emperor, and voting became plebiscitary. According to this view, the US is not yet an empire because its domestic politics haven't yet become Bonapartist. But perhaps it is on the way. There has been a slippage of power from the legislature to the executive, from open discussion to expert control, and from the politics of political parties to the politics of religious and other groups.

However, the official and popular ideology of the United States is anti-imperial, and for that reason alone America is unlikely to complete the classical transition from republic to empire.

It is based on the belief that the West is best, and will only be secure if the Western way becomes the universal norm. Those who resist the embrace of the West are thought to be savages and must be persuaded, or forced, to recognize the error of their ways. This is classic European imperial-speak, and it is heard in Washington today. However, the doctrine of Western superiority has not yet crystalized into an overt imperial ideology

Maier discusses whether empires by definition exploit their subjects, concluding sensibly that all theories of exploitation make "unresolvable normative claims." Leaving these aside, Maier raises some factual questions which can in principle be resolved: Do the costs of empire outweigh the bene-fits to the imperial power? Can these costs be reclaimed from imperial subjects through taxation? Which groups gain and lose through the imperial connection? Maier tends to support the liberal view that empires, with all their military and other costs, are a

net drain on the imperial power, but that political and business elites, and special interests, both in the imperial center and at the peripheries, may gain at the expense of those with lower incomes.

This seems to fit recent US experience (for example, in relation to Latin America), but is unlikely to sustain an imperial project in the absence of popular support. Maier perceptively notes the reluctance of liberals to admit the connection between markets and empire. In economics as well as in psychology, they tend to view the satisfactions and rewards of empire as residues of past conditions rather than as part of the workings of markets. Thus, Maier writes, today's market model of globalization hides the role of US multinationals in spreading "imperial employment patterns" through offshore production. To the extent that empires were always a contest for control of resources, the current American adventure in the oil-rich Middle East fits the traditional imperial logic.

Thus the fundamental contradiction at the heart of empires is that they promise peace but beget war.

The main conclusion which emerges from Maier's study, though it does not seem to me that he spells it out explicitly, is that between the two poles of "empire" and "independence" there are a large number of intermediate positions which exhibit different mixtures of independence and subordination. It is the fiction that there are only two alternatives—a fiction which is the joint product of Wilsonian idealism and anti-colonialism—which causes most of the current confusion. Any exertion of power by the strong is called "imperialist" by its opponents, while the imperialist has to pretend that his actions are fully consistent with national independence.

The United States is not in transition from hegemony to empire. The world is in transition to new forms of political organization, whose outlines can be dimly perceived, but whose frontiers cannot yet be fixed.

For 2006, is this more likely to race through voters' minds in a way that makes this a national security election (favoring the hawkish party of the commander in chief) or a competence/change election (favoring the party of the Lioness from San Francisco)? (Our guess: Daddy trumps Mommy.)

Gov. Jon Corzine (D-NJ) was scheduled to address the New Jersey legislature at 9:00 am ET as casinos, parks, and beaches across the state close due to the ongoing government shutdown. The governor's proposed 1% sales tax hike is at the heart of his budget battle with the legislature. More from the AP: LINK

"Another Democratic Governor who's embraced tax cutting and benefited politically is New Mexico's Bill Richardson. Since winning the state house in 2002, he has cut the state's top income tax rate to 4.9% from 8.2% and cut the capital gains tax in half. 'This was our way of declaring to the world that New Mexico is open for business,' Mr. Richardson tells us. 'After all, businesses move to states where taxes are falling, not rising.'"

"But don't tax cuts produce budget deficits? Not in New Mexico, which now has a half-billion-dollar surplus and has seen tax revenues soar by 27% this year, faster than in any other state over the past year, according to the Rockefeller Institute state revenue report."

"We asked Mr. Richardson how he thought his party could regain its competitiveness with the GOP on the national level. His answer is good advice for Democrats everywhere: 'We have to be the party of growth and the American dream, not the party of redistribution.'"

Al-Zaman in English reports that 190 physicians employed by the Iraqi Ministry of Health have been killed since April, 2003, and 400 kidnapped. An Arabic report said that in toto, 590 physicians have been kidnapped, and 1,000 have fled the country in fear (see below)

David Remnick writes in the New Yorker: "More than any other White House in history, Bush's has tried to starve, mock, weaken, bypass, devalue, intimidate, and deceive the press. . . .

"In the wake of the Administration's record of dishonesty and incompetence in Iraq and the consequent decline in the President's domestic polling numbers, it is not hard to discern why the White House might find a convenient enemy in the editors of the Times: this is an election year. The assault on the Times is a no-lose situation for the White House. The banking story itself showed the Administration to be doing what it had declared it was doing from the start: concertedly monitoring the financial transactions of potential terrorists. At the same time, by smearing the Times for the delectation of the Republican 'base,' the Administration could direct attention away from its failures, including, last week, the Supreme Court's decision to block its plans to try Guant?namo detainees before military commissions."

In February 2000, Mother Jones has learned, the Lays paid about $4 million -- an amount greater than Lay's entire salary from Enron that year -- to buy variable annuities . . . While stocks and most other ordinary investments are open to attack by creditors, life insurance policies and annuities are protected in many states . . . Once the annuities reach maturity in February 2007, Kenneth and Linda Lay will be guaranteed monthly payments of $43,023 and $32,643, respectively, for life.

Mother Jones
Ken Lay's Nest Egg
February 21, 2002

No Respect for the Struggling Artist

John C. Yoo a principal architect of the Bush administration's legal response to the terrorist threat, sounded perplexed and a little bitter on Thursday afternoon. A few hours earlier, the Supreme Court had methodically dismantled the legal framework that he and a few other administration lawyers had built after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"What the court is doing is attempting to suppress creative thinking," said Professor Yoo, who now teaches law at the University of California, Berkeley. "The court has just declared that it's going to be very intrusive in the war on terror. They're saying, 'We're going to treat this more like the way we supervise the criminal justice system.' "

New York Times
The Court Enters the War, Loudly
July 2, 2006

_____________________

Johann C. Yoodelmeyer, a senior official in the Reich Ministry of Justice and one of the chief engineers of the previous regime's "police justice" program, sounded depressed and slightly resentful yesterday morning. A few hours earlier, the Nuremberg Tribunal had systematically condemned the framework of emergency powers that he and a few other Ministry lawyers created following the Feb. 27, 1933, Reichstag fire.

"What the Tribunal is doing is trying to stifle legal creativity," complained Professor Yoodelmeyer, who now teaches legal courses to his fellow inmates at the Spandau Prison. "The Tribunal has just declared it is going to be extremely intrusive in the war against Godless Bolshevism and international Freemasonry. "They're saying, 'we're going to judge this in much the fashion as we would judge other genocidal war crimes.' It's almost enough to make me give up the law entirely."

One of the strongest tensions at the core of the current conservative alliance (free market fat cats + religious reactionaries = electoral victory!) is the fact that smart conservatives, anyway, are well aware that capitalism is by a long way the most powerful force ever invented for social change. After all, successful capitalism requires lots of educated workers, provides those workers with lots of money, and thrives on the notion that corporations should be allowed to produce anything they want to satisfy the needs of consumers.

SO HOW ARE WE DOING IN THE WAR ON TERROR?....Foreign Policy magazine has a survey of 116 foreign policy heavyweights in this month's issue and the results are pretty easy to summarize: they think America's efforts in the war on terror are failing on practically every measure.

....James Fallows, reporting from the Aspen Institute's "Ideas Festival," reports that Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of Britain's MI6, said today that he thought "just about everything in the American approach to the war on Islamic terrorism had been ill-conceived." Fallows wants to hear more:

“Terrorism is an extreme form of political communication,” he said. “You want to be sure that, in your response, you don’t end up amplifying the messages that terrorists are trying to convey.” This understanding, he said, explained why his country approaches counter-terrorism in so different a way from America’s.

That’s what I wanted to hear more about — in what ways, exactly, he thinks the United States might have “amplified” the Al Qaeda message, and what a different approach would look like.

Some front-line units continue to operate out of spartan outposts where a hot meal is a luxury and flush toilets unknown. But growing numbers of troops live on giant installations complete with Wal-Mart-style post exchanges, movie theaters, swimming pools, gyms, fast-food eateries (Subway, Burger King, Cinnabon) and vast chow halls offering fresh-baked pies and multiple flavors of ice cream. Troops increasingly live in dorm-style quarters (called "chews," for "containerized housing units") complete with TVs, mini-refrigerators, air conditioning/heating units and other luxuries unimaginable to previous generations of GIs.

On one level, I thought Baucus's approach was not very senatorial and a bit amateurish. But since then, I've seen him get a lot done -- particularly in the trade and tax arena, and usually good for Dems.

In any case, I don't want to argue much with TNR about Max -- but it seems to me that they could apply the same logic they are applying to Baucus to Joe Lieberman (D-for a few more months-CT) and Ben Nelson (D-NE).

Weak on cybersecurity: Nearly a year after Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff announced the creation of a Cabinet-level cybersecurity czar, the position remains vacant.

– The Pentagon’s Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system “hasn’t successfully intercepted a missile since October of 2002. … And the last two times it tried to hit an oncoming missile, the interceptor didn’t even leave the ground. Things have gotten so bad that the Missile Defense Agency’s independent review team concluded last year that more tests may only undermine the GMD’s value as a deterrent.”

– A recent Pentagon Inspector General report found that security vulnerabilities are so serious “that the agency and its contractor, Boeing, may not be able to prevent misuse of the system.”

In today’s paper, Washington Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson asserts that there is little we can do about global warming:

The real truth is that we don’t know enough to relieve global warming, and — barring major technological breakthroughs — we can’t do much about it.

Samuelson draws his conclusions from “a new report from the International Energy Agency.” Actually, the study – Energy Technology Perspectives, Strategies and Scenarios for 2050 (purchase required) — concluded the exact opposite:

[B]y employing technologies that already exist or are under development, the world could be brought onto a much more sustainable energy path. The scenarios show how energy-related C02 emissions can be returned to their current levels by 2050.