All of this happened before....(Redux)

... Does It Have To Happen Again?

A few months ago, I highlighted Bill Moyers' look at The Secret Government and wondered if we can avoid the future our history would seem to project.

Well, as is my wont, I recently ran across a wonderful quote. Try to guess when it was said.

"Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street and for Wall Street ... Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags ... the politicians said we suffered from overproduction. Overproduction when 10,000 little children ... starve to death every year in the U.S. and over 100,000 shop girls in New York are forced to sell their virtue for bread...
There are thirty men in the United States whose aggregate wealth is over one and one-half billion dollars. There are half a million looking for work ... We want money, land and transportation. We want abolition of the National Banks, and we want the power to make loans direct from the government. We want the accursed foreclosure system wiped out ... We will not pay our debts to the loan-shark companies until the Government pays its debts to us.
The people are at bay, let the bloodhounds of money who have dogged us thus far beware."

Did you guess 1890? A Kansan Populist named Mary Ellen Lease spoke these words at a time, admittedly worse than our own times, when the anger at wealth and backlash against elite privilege was rapidly rising.

And although the Populist Party was unable to "crack" the lock on elections held by the GOP and Democrats, much of the their strength, organization and platform was coopted and adopted int he following decades.

Hopefully we will not have to wait decades.



(Quote found in Zinn's A People's History of the United States, a book that every citizen should read and digest.)

"Diplomacy and Empire"

Earlier today, I was privileged to stumble upon a recent speech given by the former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas Freeman to the group Diplomats and Consular Officers, Retired (DACOR). Titled "Diplomacy and Empire," Freeman delivers more, with eloquence and style, on what has happened to the United States since 1989 than I have ever read before. What a speech it must have been in person!


Some may have heard of Freeman's recent appointment by President Obama to the National Intelligence Council (NIC). The NIC is part of the U.S. Intelligence Community and serves to provide the best guess as to current and future issues to senior policy makers in our government. Often, the NIC only ends up in the news when they deliver National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) - and only then when those NIEs turn out to be quite controversial. As it turns out, Freeman's history of even-handedness - based on U.S. national security interests first - in a region dominated by Israel has raised the hackles of the pro-Israel community. Despite the concerned howls and ludicrous protests, the choice of Freeman is inspired - and inspiring - and you can get a sense of why from his own words.

I highlight this speech because what Freeman says matches so closely to what I think about the innate strength and inner wealth the U.S. has had, possesses today and must use to guide our shared future. In case you have not already clicked through to Freeman's speech, here are some highlights:

On our current "unhappiness"

Since 9/11 Americans have chosen to stake our domestic tranquility and the preservation of our liberties on our ability – under our commander-in-chief – to rule the world by force of arms rather than to lead, as we had in the past, by the force of our example or our arguments. And we appear to have decided that it is necessary to destroy our constitutional practices and civil liberties in order to save them. This is a trade-off we had resolutely refused to make during our far more perilous half-century confrontation with Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union.

On the failure of Grand Strategy (or any strategy) since 2001 (or even 1989):

With the numbers of our enemies mounting, it is fortunate that our military power remains without match. The United States' armed forces are the most competent and lethal in history. And so they are likely to remain for decades to come. Our humbling on the battlegrounds of the Middle East does not reflect military inadequacy; it is rather the result of the absence of strategy and its political handmaiden – diplomacy. We are learning the hard way that old allies will not aid us and new allies will not stick with us if we ignore their interests, deride their advice, impugn their motives, and denigrate their capabilities. Friends will not walk with us into either danger or opportunity if we injure their interests and brush aside their objections to our doing so. Those with whom we have professed friendship in the past cannot sustain their receptivity to our counsel if we demand that they adopt secular norms of the European Enlightenment that we no longer exemplify, while loudly disparaging their religious beliefs and traditions. Diplomacy-free foreign policy does not work any better than strategy-free warfare.

And the futility of our current war:

When war is not the extension of policy but the entrenchment of policy failure by other means, it easily degenerates into mindless belligerence and death without meaning.

On what has been the result:

As distaste has succeeded esteem for us in the international community, we have become ever more isolated. Our ability to rally others behind our causes has withered. We have responded by abandoning the effort to lead. We are now known internationally more for our recalcitrance than our vision. We have sought to exempt ourselves from the jurisdiction of international law. We have suspended our efforts to lead the world to further liberalization of trade and investment through the Doha Round. We no longer participate in the UN body charged with the global promotion of human rights. We decline to discuss global climate change, nuclear disarmament, or the avoidance of arms races in outer space. If we have proposals for a world more congenial to the values we espouse, we no longer articulate them. The world is a much less promising place for our silence and absence.

The increasing restriction of American intercourse with foreigners encourages the outsourcing not just of jobs but of innovation in science and technology, research and development, engineering and design services, and industrial production. Xenophobic policies and practices have begun to erode the long-standing American scientific and technological superiority they were intended to protect. Like economic protectionism, intellectual protectionism, it turns out, weakens, not strengthens one, and makes one less rather than more competitive in the global marketplace.

And who has "won":

The contrast with the situation here underscores the extent to which al-Qaïda has achieved its central objectives. It has unhinged America and alienated us from the world. We are apparently willing to sacrifice everything, including the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity, to achieve absolute security from risks that others rightly consider nasty but manageable. Quite aside from the fact that absolute security is absolutely impossible, this is not who we were. It is not who most of us want to be.

Freeman offers his thoughts on what next steps the United States must take to climb out of the hole in which we find ourselves.

First, an America driven by dread and delusion into the construction of a garrison state, ruled by a presidency claiming inherent powers rather than by our constitution and our laws, is an America that can be counted upon to respect neither the freedoms of its own people nor those of others. The key to the defense of both the United States and the freedom that defines us as a great nation is to retain our rights and cultivate our liberties, not to yield them to our government, and to honor and defend, not to invade, the sovereignty of other nations and individuals. Second, it is time to recognize that freedom spreads by example and a helping hand to those who seek it. It cannot be imposed on others by coercive means, no matter how much shock and awe these elicit. Neither can it be installed by diatribe and denunciation nor proclaimed from the false security of fortified buildings. We must come home to our traditions, restore the openness of our society, and resume our role as "the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all ... [but] the champion and vindicator only of our own." Third, credibility is not enhanced by persistence in counterproductive policies, no matter how much one has already invested in them. The reinforcement of failure is a poor substitute for its correction. Doing more of the same does not make bad strategy sound or snatch successful outcomes from wars of attrition. All it does is convince onlookers that one is so stubbornly foolish that one is not afraid to die. Admitting that mistakes have been made and taking remedial action generally does more for credibility than soldiering blindly on. The United States needs big course corrections on quite a range of foreign and domestic policies at present. Fourth, we must recover the habit of listening and curb our propensity to harangue. We might, in fact, consider a war on arrogance to complement our war on terror.

There's no doubt that many will think Freeman insufficiently supportinve of pre-Israel policies and way to sympathetic to the thoughts, feelings and interests of the other several hundred million Arab and Persian peoples who live in the Middle East. I, however, believe that our nation is well served by this appointment and applaud the Obama Administration for its courage in making it.

(Original h/t to Moon Over Alabama's host, b)

(Image from Nieman Watch website)

This Land Was Made...

... For You and Me

Today is it. The last full day.

Eight long years of incompetence, arrogance, greedy and dangerous leadership is finally ending.

Unlike some Americans out there who will shed a tear when that final helo flight takes Bush and his family for that last flight to Texas, I am certain that many, many more tears will be shed by those celebrating the fact that the flight is even taking place.

These guys say it best. And they said it yesterday in celebratory joy:



Like so many others, I hope, I wish, that tomorrow begins anew what is best about our nation. A collective striving towards our better angels. A belief that we can and will improve ourselves, our children and our neighbors. A common dream of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And a return to a foreign policy that our last crisis President called for in his first inaugural address:

"the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others—the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors."

Most of all, I want my government to invert what Scott Horton describes as his epitaph for the Bush Years - Augustine's question - "Remota itaque iustitia quid sunt regna nisi magna latrocinia? (If it does not do justice, what is the government but a great criminal enterprise?)" I want our government to return to what government's do - deliver justice.

Then we can truly sing again, "this land was made for you and me."

Guess Who's Not Going to CIA

So it's breaking today that John Brennan says he's not the guy for the CIA. One "former senior intelligence official" told Washington Post's Joby Warrick that Mr. Brennan's withdrawal was "a tragedy." Seems that this unnamed source would not agree with many fellow citizens who felt that the 25-year intelligence veteran's advocacy of rendering alleged terrorists to foreign nations ("an absolutely vital tool") and the use of illegal and morally repugnant "enhanced interrogation techniques" more than disqualified him from leading the CIA.

Mr. Brennan noted in his publicly released note to the President-elect that he had "been a strong opponent of many of the policies of the Bush administration such as the pre-emptive war in Iraq and coercive interrogation tactics, to include waterboarding...the fact that I was not involved in the decision-making process for any of these controversial policies and actions has been ignored." Well, he might have opposed the Iraqi War, but his own statements, amply documented, contradict his plea that he opposed coercive interrogation techniques. At No Comment, Scott Horton gives a good analysis of Mr. Brennan's credibility problem:

As a company man, Brennan was quick to justify and support what was done. As an “independent” analyst for broadcast journalists, he also provided support and cover for practices from waterboarding to the use of psychotropic drugs. As an adviser to the Obama campaign, Brennan experienced an unconvincing epiphany and came to reject President Bush’s “program” along the same lines as his boss. The timing and circumstances of Brennan’s conversion suggest that it was dictated by political expedience and not ethics.

Perhaps Mr. Brennan is trying to salvage a portion of his legacy and credibility in the era of "teh Google." Maybe he decided that staying in business securing (or not) the passport records of U.S. citizens is much more lucrative than running the CIA. Whether Mr. Brennan pulled the plug on himself, or whether the plug was pulled for him as a result of the advocacy of psychologists, bloggers and activated, concerned citizens, his withdrawal from consideration is but a small step towards righting the horrifying wrong of detention policies in the so-called War on Terror. Either way, this is far, far from a tragedy. If you don't believe me, take some time to watch Torturing Democracy and tell me why any advocate of current policies should get a paycheck from the taxpayers.

Glen Greenwald discusses this development much more eloquently than I can -- It's a good thing that "the C.I.A.’s secret detention program remains a particularly incendiary issue" and that anyone associated with it -- let alone someone who defended it -- will have a difficult time being appointed to a position of high authority. Now let's hope that no other retreads (John McLaughlin) or morally compromised politicians (Jane Harman) get the nod to lead any portion of our intelligence community.

And that, my friends, is some change I can believe in.

(This - Gates Staying on as Defense Chief - not so much.)