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Hard Times Without Studs
By Tom Engelhardt
On Sunday, I went to a memorial for Studs Terkel, that human dynamo, our nation's greatest listener and talker, the one person I just couldn't imagine dying. After all, the man wrote his classic oral history of death, Will the Circle Be Unbroken? at 89, and only then did he do his oral history of hope, Hope Dies Last. The celebration of his life went on for almost two and a half hours. Everyone on stage had a classic story about the guy, one better than the next, and Studs would have been thrilled that so many people talked at such length about him. But he wouldn't have stayed. Half an hour into the event, he would have been out the door, across the street, and into the nearest bar, asking people about their lives. And the amazing thing is this: they would have been spilling their guts. He could make a stone talk -- and not only that, but tell a story of stone-ness that no one had ever heard before or even imagined a stone might tell. His death is like an archive of what was best in America closing; his legacy lies in oral histories that will inform the generations.
Unfortunately, his remarkable oral history of the Great Depression, Hard Times, may prove all too hauntingly relevant to our moment. In fact, in the midst of the ceremonies, the radio host Laura Flanders pointed out that, in Studs's beloved Chicago, a group of more than 200 workers from United Electrical union local 1110 were sitting in at their factory. After the Bank of America had cut the company off from operating credit, the execs of Republic Windows and Doors shut the plant for good on just three days notice without offering severance pay. The workers responded by demanding some justice and "blocking the removal of any assets from the plant" until they got their "rightful benefits." Shades of the 1930s! As John Nichols of the Nation writes, "[They] are conducting the contemporary equivalent of the 1930s sit-down strikes that led to the rapid expansion of union recognition nationwide and empowered the Roosevelt administration to enact more equitable labor laws. And, just as in the thirties, they are objecting to policies that put banks ahead of workers; stickers worn by the UE sit-down strikers read: ‘You got bailed out, we got sold out.'"
If this isn't a message from and about a changing nation, I don't know what is. And, by the way, the fact that the President-elect supported their demands at a news conference on Sunday indicates not just that change has indeed occurred, but that messages sent from the bottom en masse don't go unnoticed by canny politicians at the top.
(8) CommentsDecember 12, 2008
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FDR Mania
By Tom Engelhardt
If you want to catch something of the fears and hopes of Americans right now, go to News.Google.com and try searching for a few words. For instance, put in "FDR" -- the well-known initials of the man who was president four times and took America through the Great Depression and all but the last months of World War II -- and endless screens of references pop up.
The Nation and the National Review have both devoted space to him. Paul Krugman and George Will both thought this was the moment to focus on him. Checking out the headlines you might think that the intervening sixty-four years since his death had simply vanished: ("Will FDR Inspire Obama?" "Obama's jobs plan could echo FDR's," "Clinton's potential pitfalls seen in FDR's secretary of State," Channeling FDR," "FDR saved capitalism -- now it's Obama's turn," and so on); headlines galore, not to speak of that Time Magazine "Obama as FDR?" cover.
Or, if you have another moment, try "the New Deal," or even the 2008 Barack Obama version of the same, "the new New Deal"; or, if you really want to get a sense of the moment, try "since the Great Depression," which now seems to be embedded in any article about the present economic situation -- as in the "worst crisis since the Great Depression," or "the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression," or even "the most severe credit crunch since the Great Depression." It's a phrase that hovers between horror and euphemism, between the urge to invoke the word "depression" for our moment and an almost superstitious fear of doing so.
(11) CommentsDecember 1, 2008
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Custodians of Empire
By Tom Engelhardt
The Obama national security "team" -- part of that much-hailed "team of rivals" -- does not yet exist, but it does seem to be heaving into view. And so far, its views seem anything but rivalrous. Mainstream reporters and pundits lovingly refer to them as "centrist," but, in a Democratic context, they are distinctly right of center. The next secretary of state looks to be Hillary Clinton, a hawk on the Middle East. During the campaign, she spoke of our ability to "totally obliterate" Iran, should that country carry out a nuclear strike against Israel. She will evidently be allowed to bring her own (hawkish) subordinates into the State Department with her. Her prospective appointment is now being praised by the likes of Newt Gingrich and Henry Kissinger.
The leading candidate for National Security Advisor is General James L. Jones, former Marine Corps commandant and NATO commander, who remained "publicly neutral" during the presidential campaign and is known to be personally close to John McCain and, evidently, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as well. Not surprisingly, he favors yet more spending for the Pentagon. The reputed leading candidate for Director of the CIA, John Brennan, now head of the National Counterterrorism Center, was George Tenet's chief of staff and deputy executive director during the worst years of the CIA's intelligence, imprisonment, and torturing excesses.
The new Secretary of Defense is odds on to be… the old secretary of defense, Robert Gates, a confidant of the first President Bush. Still surrounded at the Pentagon by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's holdovers, he has had a long career in Washington as a clever apparatchik. He was the adult brought in -- the story of how and by whom has yet to be told -- to clean up the Bush foreign policy mess (and probably prevent an attack on Iran). He did this. He now favors no fixed timelines for an Iraq withdrawal, but a significant American troop "surge" in Afghanistan, "well north of 20,000," in the next 12-18 months. He has overseen the further growth of the bloated Pentagon budget and has recently come out for the building of a new generation of nuclear weapons. (Other candidates for Defense include former Clinton Navy Secretary and key Obama advisor Richard Danzig, who may end up -- for the time being -- as an undersecretary of defense, Clinton former Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre, and Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, who might instead land the job as the Director of National Intelligence.)
(84) CommentsNovember 25, 2008
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A Fallen Legion in Washington
By Tom Engelhardt
By October 2005, when American casualties in Iraq had not yet reached 2,000 dead or 15,000 wounded, and our casualties in Afghanistan were still modest indeed, informal "walls" had already begun springing up online to honor the fallen. At that time, I suggested that "the particular dishonor this administration has brought down on our country calls out for other 'walls' as well." I imagined, then, walls of shame for Bush administration figures and their cronies -- and even produced one (in words) that November. By now, of course, any such wall would be full to bursting with names that will live in infamy.
That October, at the website I run, TomDispatch.com, we launched quite a different project, another kind of "wall," this time in tribute to the striking number of "governmental casualties of Bush administration follies, those men and women who were honorable or steadfast enough in their government duties," and so often found themselves smeared and with little alternative but to resign in protest, quit, or simply be pushed off the cliff by cronies of the administration.
Nick Turse led off what we came to call our "fallen legion" project with a list of 42 such names, ranging from the well-known Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki (who retired after suggesting to Congress that it would take "several hundred thousand troops" to occupy Iraq) and Richard Clarke (who quit, appalled by how the administration was dealing with terror and terrorism) to the moderately well known Ann Wright, John Brown, and John Brady Kiesling (three diplomats who resigned to protest the coming invasion of Iraq) to the little known Archivist of the United States John W. Carlin (who resigned under pressure, possibly so that various Bush papers could be kept under wraps). By the time Turse had written his second fallen legion piece that November, and then the third and last in February 2006, that list of names had topped 200 with no end in sight.
(11) CommentsNovember 24, 2008
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A Clinton Administration?
By Tom Engelhardt
No one should be shocked to discover that, in his transition to the presidency, the "inexperienced" former senator from Chicago has turned to the last Democratic administration that had experience in Washington. It seems, however, that the Obama team is doing so big time. Looking at lists of early appointees for the transition period and the administration to come, from Rahm Emanuel on down, you might be forgiven for concluding that Hillary had been elected president in 2008. Clintonistas are just piling up in the prospective corridors of power.
You might also be forgiven for concluding that just about no one else in America had ever had any "experience." Late last week, the website Politico.com did some counting and came up with the following: "Thirty-one of the 47 people so far named to transition or staff posts have ties to the Clinton administration, including all but one of the members of his 12-person Transition Advisory Board and both of his White House staff choices." More have been appointed since then, including, as White House Counsel, Gregory Craig, the lawyer who defended Bill Clinton in impeachment hearings, and evidently as Attorney General, Eric Holder, who worked in the Clinton Justice Department. And, of course, everyone in America now knows that Hillary herself is being considered for a cabinet post.
What do Washington political and policy types do when their party is kicked out of office? If they want to stay in the Big Town, they tend to go to work for lobbyists, consultancy firms, or think tanks. They raise money. They do what's needed and make good livings until the tide turns. Now, that tide is again rushing in -- and the lobbying money is, of course, rushing in with it. As the Washington Post has described it, there is already a "mini-boom" for Democrats along that lobbying alley, K Street.
(87) CommentsNovember 19, 2008
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Will Afghanistan Become Obama's War?
By Tom Engelhardt
One of the eerier reports on the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan appeared recently in the New York Times. Journalist John Burns visited the Russian ambassador in Kabul, Zamir N. Kabulov, who, back in the 1980s, when the Russians were the Americans in Afghanistan, and the Americans were launching the jihad that would eventually wend its way to the 9/11 attacks… well, you get the idea…
In any case, Kabulov was, in the years of the Soviet occupation, a KGB agent in the same city and, in the 1990s, an adviser to a UN peacekeeping envoy during the Afghan civil war that followed. "They've already repeated all of our mistakes," he told Burns, speaking of the American/NATO effort in the country. "Now," he added, "they're making mistakes of their own, ones for which we do not own the copyright." His list of Soviet-style American mistakes included: underestimating "the resistance," an over-reliance on air power, a failure to understand the Afghan "irritative allergy" to foreign occupation, "and thinking that because they swept into Kabul easily, the occupation would be untroubled." Of present occupiers who have stopped by to catch his sorry tale, Kabulov concludes world-wearily, "They listen, but they do not hear."
The question is: Does this experience really have to be repeated to the bitter end -- in the case of the Soviets, a calamitous defeat and retreat from Afghanistan, followed by years of civil war in that wrecked country, and finally the rise of the Pakistani-backed Taliban? The answer is: perhaps. There is no question that the advisers President Obama will be listening to are already exploring more complex strategies in Afghanistan, including possible negotiations with "reconcilable elements" of the Taliban. But these all remain military-plus strategies at whose heart lies the kind of troop surge that candidate Obama called for so vehemently -- and, given the fate of the previous 2007 U.S./NATO "surge" in Afghanistan, this, too, has failure written all over it.
(15) CommentsNovember 17, 2008
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Seismic Shifts in the Political Landscape
By Tom Engelhardt
There's clearly a new political landscape forming in the U.S. That's what the polls are telling us. It's not just that the first major-party black candidate for President is leading by significant margins in the national polls; it's not just that North Dakota, a state George W. Bush won in 2004 by 64%, is believed to be "in play"; it's not just that Virginia which, like North Dakota, was last carried by a Democrat in the sweep year of 1964, is, according to the most recent Washington Post poll and others, in the Obama camp by at least 8 points, or that, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC/MySpace poll, 69% of "new and returning voters" favor Obama (up from 61% a month ago), or that he's leading in a remarkable number of states Bush took in 2004, or even that Democratic Senate and House candidates are making a run of it in previously ridiculous places.
Consider, instead, three recent polls in the context of the Bush years. Obama and McCain are now in a "statistical dead heat" among born-again evangelicals, those Rovian foot soldiers of two successful Bush elections, according to a recent survey; and the same seems to be true in Sarah Palin's "real America," those rural and small town areas she's praised to the skies. According to a poll commissioned by the Center for Rural Strategies, in those areas which Bush won in 2004 by 53%-41%, Obama now holds a statistically insignificant one point lead. To complete this little trifecta, Gallup has just released a poll showing that Jews are now likely to vote for Obama by a more than 3 to 1 majority (74% to 22%).
If present projections come close to holding, this could prove to be a rare reconfiguring or turning-point election -- as Wall Street expert Steve Fraser first suggested might be possible at TomDispatch.com way back in February 2007. If so, the Republican Party, only recently besotted by dreams of a generational Pax Republicana, might find itself driven back into the deep South and deep West for who knows how long, "an extremist rump, reduced to a few stronghold states and obsessed with causes that seem not to matter to the general public."
(42) CommentsOctober 29, 2008
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The $700 Billion Kiss-off?
By Tom Engelhardt
The Roman historian Tacitus famously put the following lines in the mouth of a British chieftain opposed to imperial Rome: "They have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger… they are driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor… They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by false pretenses, and all of this they hail as the construction of empire. And when in their wake nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace."
Or, in the case of the Bush administration, post-surge "success." Today, however, success in Iraq seems as elusive as ever for the President. The Iraqi cabinet is now refusing, without further amendment, to pass on to Parliament the status of forces agreement for stationing U.S. troops in the country that it's taken so many months for American and Iraqi negotiators to sort out. Key objections, as Juan Cole points out at his Informed Comment blog, have come from the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, which is [Prime Minister Nouri] al-Maliki's chief political partner, the support of which he would need to get the draft through parliament." That party, Cole adds tellingly, "is close to Tehran, which objects to the agreement." The Iranian veto? Hmmm…
Among Iraqis, according to the Dreyfuss Report, only the Kurds, whose territories house no significant U.S. forces, remain unequivocally in favor of the agreement as written. Frustrated American officials, including Ambassador Ryan Crocker ("Without legal authority to operate, we do not operate… That means no security operations, no logistics, no training, no support for Iraqis on the borders, no nothing…"), Secretary of Defense Robert Gates ("Without a new legal agreement,'we basically stop doing anything' in the country…"), and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen ("We are clearly running out of time…") are huffing and puffing, and threatening -- if the agreement is not passed as is -- to blow the house down.
(56) CommentsOctober 23, 2008
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Burning Cars and Suicides
By Tom Engelhardt
Back in the Great Depression years of the 1930s, unemployed writers, like unemployed steelworkers, were in need of jobs, and so the New Deal's Works Progress Administration, which put all sorts of Americans back to work, did so for writers as well--6,500 of them in the Federal Writers' Project at approximately $20 a week. Among other things, the FWP's writers produced a series of classic guide books to American cities and states, still enjoyable to read today. (Richard Wright and John Cheever were among the crew who, for example, did The WPA Guide to New York City.) FWP workers also gathered more than 10,000 first-person oral histories of ordinary -- yet extraordinary -- Americans, relatively few of which were ever published.
Almost 30 years ago, the writer Ann Banks collected 80 of these into a deeply moving memory piece of a book entitled First-Person America. When you read through it, one thing likely to strike you about its narratives from our last spectacular economic meltdown was how many of the speakers didn't distinguish between the 1920s and the 1930s, between, that is, "the roaring twenties" of the "Jazz Age" and the Great Depression era. For lots of them, it was all tough times. As Banks wrote in her introduction: "For most of the people in this book, the Depression was not the singular event it appears in retrospect. It was one more hardship in lives made difficult by immigration, world war, and work in low-paying industries before the regulation of wages and hours. Though they spoke of living through bad times, those interviewed by the Federal Writers seldom mentioned the Depression itself."
This came to my mind recently as I read in the Washington Post about a category of crime I hadn't known existed: desperate people in a money crunch, often behind on loan payments to car dealerships, who torch their cars and then try to collect insurance on them (usually by claiming they were stolen). Washington police estimate hundreds of such cases in their region just in the past two years. Though the numbers of such attempted frauds may now be on the rise, it's a phenomenon that hardly began with the collapse of Bear Stearns, or the tanking of the stock market, or the global credit crunch that followed. I was left wondering how many people this time around won't make much of a distinction between the blow-out 1990s, the Bush years in which the President, in response to the 9/11 attacks, asked Americans to head for Disney World and shop till they drop, and the disaster that is now almost certain to follow and haunt us all.
(54) CommentsOctober 20, 2008
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The Once and Future Secretary of Defense?
By Tom Engelhardt
Don't trust me as a gambler. You'd probably make more by putting your money into credit-default swaps. Nonetheless, I'd like to make a small wager on the single significant holdover from the Bush administration should an Obama presidency actually happen. Keep a close eye on Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. He was clearly sent into the Rumsfeld breach back at the end of 2006 to begin the clean-up of the Bush administration's foreign policy mess and--my guess--to prevent Dick Cheney and pals from attacking Iran. And this, with a little help from onrushing reality, he seems to have accomplished. He remains the singular adult in the Bush foreign policy playpen, a skilled bureaucratic maneuverer from his CIA days, who claims he plans to leave Washington in January but would never say "never" to an offer ahead of time.
Like Obama, he's plunked for an intensified Afghan War and, just last week, a key national security advisor to the candidate, former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, praised Gates, suggesting he had been a splendid secretary of defense and adding that "he'd be an even better one in an Obama administration."
So, when Gates gives a speech aimed at the Pentagon's future, it's worth listening carefully. On September 29th, he went to the National Defense University and offered a peek into that future as he imagines it. Now remember, the U.S. financial meltdown was already underway and, after seven unbelievably fat years, Pentagon weapons contractors were starting to express worries about possible future cutbacks. Nonetheless, Gates offered a vision of a U.S. military-plus. There was the usual support for a range of conventional weapons systems for wars that will never be fought and their futuristic equivalents, as well as for a larger Army, a larger Marine Corps, and a larger Navy. (The Air Force, except for unmanned aerial vehicles, looks to be in trouble in Gatesworld.) But above all, the once and (possibly) future secretary of defense wants to invest in "institutionalizing counterinsurgency skills, and our ability to conduct stability and support operations." Backed by a growing lobby eager to put ever more warm bodies in the military, he's opting for a major build-up to deal with future insurgencies out there in the global badlands. Think… gulp… "nation building." Think, as well, future Afghanistans and Iraqs.
(17) CommentsOctober 16, 2008
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