Is It Deja Vu All Over Again?

Friends, old enough to know, are of the opinion that Obama's Afghan speech is Vietnam all over again. The people in that country, in the whole region really, don't want us there. The whole post-WW II era has been one of colonies, what Western writers like to call the Third World, struggling to oust foreigners and their armies. To counter the USSR the United States spent lavishly to fund Islamist extremism (see Robert Dreyfus's Devil's Game) and after the Soviet Afghan withdrawal, the Islamists took off for Chechnya in southern Russia. Grozny, the Chechen capital, was leveled. (Interesting to compare photos of the rebuilt Grozny to the not really rebuilt New Orleans. Maybe Louisiana needed bombing, not a hurricane, to earn a better refurbishment.) An interview with Osama Bin Laden has him saying that he got the idea of attacking the US from watching video of the US Navy bombing Beirut in 1982 during Israel's Lebanese invasion. Read the released declassified portion of the President's 2006 National Intelligence Estimate to find our own government's realization that the Iraqi and Afghan invasions would lead to more terrorists and more terrorism. But then these wars were never about terrorism or protecting Americans but were undertaken to seize greater control of Middle Eastern and Central Asian energy resources. What's good for Enron is good for America, or so one must conclude from Dubya's meeting with Ken Lay and Hamid Karzai more than 10 years ago when Bush was still a governor.

Obama said in his speech that 911 was planned in Afghanistan though the official 911 commission report said the planning was done in Abu Dhabi and Hamburg. The scriptwriters didn't do their homework, or maybe they just figured noone would notice. Speaking to Jim McDermott (D-MA), who opposes the extra troops after 8 years of failure and Karzai's continued corruption and vote rigging, NPR's Rene Montaigne said, mirabile dictu, "maybe we weren't really trying." !!! The head of the British Army said that "we" will be in Afghanistan for another 40 years. The half-century war. Obviously, US media don't mention these things; they're still trying to connect the dots in pre-schoolers' puzzle books.

I've been reading lots about the US Civil War era (to me tracking down stuff from the past is one of the Internet's most useful features, and the writings are even in the public domain!). For example, there seems to be no (as in zero) first-hand, eyewitness accounts of Ulysses Grant's supposed drunkenness, much unlike Andrew Johnson's embarrassing inebriation whereof there is much testimony. Perhaps that is one reason Johnson was impeached. As best I can figure most people with power just didn't like Grant which I infer goes back to his service in but heated opposition to the Mexican War, from which Zachary Taylor launched a successful presidential run. Grant wasn't a team player and he wasn't an imperialist. As President he successfully resisted the push to seize Cuba, an expansion that was always dear to the hearts of Southern plantation owners. But this is mere aside. What's really fun is reading what Americans of 150 years ago actually said and wrote. For the most part my opinion is that journalists and editors wrote what they really thought; in other words they were honest. One of my favorites is an 1860 editorial in the Augusta (GA) Chronicle and Sentinel about the Republican Party that "...stands forth today, hideous, revolting, loathsome, a menace not only to the Union of these States, but to Society, to Liberty and to Law. It has drawn to it the corrupt, the vile, the licentious, the profligate, the lawless, and is the embodiment not only of anti-slavery, but of communism, of agrarianism, of free-loveism, and all the abominations springing from a false reality." What reaction is proper? Thatthe Republicans used to be decent folks, or that Georgians should tell us what they really think?

Meanwhile, back on the home front, impoverishment continues unabated. In the US poverty is an industry. Think of all the social workers and sociologists and psychologists and organizations and the government workers who might be forced to find real jobs if poor people disappeared. When the Salvation Army got $2 billion from Joan Kroc they didn't give it to poor people; I hear they became money managers. 'The poor will always be with you' was a capitalists' wet dream. Journalists, not being bright nor energetic - not liking to do homework - mention unemployment as though it were ancillary to the economy rather than its heart. Irving Fisher, the Yale economist who predicted enduring prosperity in 1929 before the crash and in 1933 wrote the Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions, an analysis dear to our Fed chief's heart, wrote "Idle men and idle machines spell lessened production and lessened real-income, the central factor in all economic science." Jobs create value and provide wages to buy products. Work is at the core of wealth, not an addendum. The ignoramuses who spout empty platitudes in news reports don't seem to get this but appear to believe that wealth is created by the mathematical equations of Wall Street financiers. The best bet may be that things will get even worse, that the poor will be blamed for their poverty to partner with cuts in welfare spending, social unrest and crime will increase, repression will grow and we'll end up with our own fascists waging war from the Mediterranean to India. And that may be the good news. If they use nukes and figure they can take out Russia that would be even worse news. For the large ranks of the unemployed and poor the message will become clear: Move to Sherwood Forest and join up with Robin Hood.