Jonathan Schwarz demonstrates exactly how the conspiracy of media censorship works, despite it's practitioners' protestations of ignorance

A Tiny Revolution:

I Happen to Have Marshall McLuhan Right Here

This is long and involved, but it may be my favorite post in the history of this blot.

PART ONE

Alex Perry, Africa bureau chief for Time, wrote a recent article about Congo that begins like this:

If you want to see what's wrong with Africa, take a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo. The size of Western Europe, with almost no paved roads, Congo is the sucking vortex where Africa's heart should be. Independent Congo gave the world Mobutu Sese Seko, who for 32 years impoverished his people while traveling the world in a chartered Concorde. His death in 1997 ushered in a civil war that killed 5.4 million people and unleashed a hurricane of rape on tens of thousands more.

PART TWO

Julie Hollar of Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting pointed out:

...if you're going to charge Congo with being "what's wrong with Africa," you'd better give credit where credit is due. Independent Congo didn't give the world Mobutu; that gift belongs to the U.S. and Belgium, who supported the overthrow and assassination of democratically-elected Patrice Lumumba and helped prop up the horror that was Mobutu for decades afterward.

PART THREE

Alex Perry showed up in the comments section of Hollar's post and angrily berated her:

The idea that the US created Mobutu and maintained him in power belittles Africans and is typical of the kind of racism that dogs analysis of Africa...The US did not create Mobutu. They certainly did support him...The primary creator of Mobutu was Mobutu...

As for this lame idea that I, and the "mainstream media", are part of some giant conspiracy to lie, cover up, dissemble etc in the name of, I imagine, the "military industrial complex" or perhaps the CIA, what do you think happens here? Do you think I have a controller with a husky voice who directs my coverage by meeting me in badly lit subteranean car parks? Grow up. People who do my job die sometimes. I've known three myself. Do you really think we'd take those risk to tell lies? Your cheap and half-arsed conspiracies are insulting and infantile.

It's really an amazing freak-out by Perry; that's just part of it.

PART FOUR

Larry Devlin was the CIA's Station Chief in the Congo during most of the sixties, and just before his 2008 death, wrote a book about his experiences there.

Early in the book, Devlin describes the frustration the U.S. government felt with Patrice Lumumba, who was elected prime minister of the Congo as it gained independence from Belgium. This section, from p. 46, is about a July, 1960 meeting in Paris between Devlin, U.S. Ambassador to France Amory Houghton, U.S. Ambassador to Belgium William Burden, and U.S. Ambassador to the Congo Clare "Tim" Timberlake.

As you see, U.S. government officials straightforwardly told Henry Luce, the owner of Time, how to cover the Congo:

We moved onto Ambassador Houghton's office where we were joined by Ambassador Burden for more detailed talks concerning the Congo and its problems...During our discussions, Tim brought up a delicated matter: "Time magazine plans to do a cover story on Lumumba with his picture on the front of the magazine." He continued, "Celebrity coverage at home will make him even more difficult to deal with. He's a first-class headache as it is."

"Then why don't you get the story killed?" Burden asked. "Or at least modified?"

"I tried to persuade the Time man in Leopoldville until I was blue in the face," Tim replied. "But he said there was nothing he could do about it because the story had already been sent to New York."

"You can't expect much from a journalist at that level," Burden said pulling out his address book and flipping through the pages. He picked up the phone and put a call through to the personal assistant of Henry Luce, Time's owner.

Luce soon returned the call. After a brief, friendly exchange that made clear his personal relationship with Luce, Burden bluntly told him that he would have to change the Lumumba cover story. Luce apparently said that the magazine was about to go to press. "Oh, come on, Henry," Burden said, "you must have other cover stories in the can." They chatted for a few more minutes before Burden hung up.

A few days later in the United States we picked up a copy of the magazine with a new and different cover story. Lumumba had been relegated to the international section.

Devlin writes about another meeting in the U.S. soon afterward with CIA chief Allen Dulles, in which Devlin argued it was critical for the U.S. to maintain power in the Congo because it was one of the world's few sources of cobalt outside the Soviet Union. Devlin says he was "preaching to the converted."

PART FIVE

Time has an online archive of every issue they've ever published. Based on other events described by Devlin, the article about Lumumba that was moved to the inside of the magazine was almost certainly "Congo: The Monstrous Hangover" from the July 18, 1960 issue, or "Congo: Jungle Shipwreck" from July 25.

Devlin's story doesn't make clear whether the article's contents were changed or merely its placement. However, for Time's sake, I certainly hope the contents were changed too; both articles might as well be headlined "Crazed Africa Monkeys Rape the White Ladies."

PART SIX

This appears in the July 18, 1960 Time article:

The huge bonfires of joy died down in the cities of the Congo. The drums and tom-toms grew quiet. The last writhing dancers fell exhausted in the dust...

With a primeval howl, a nation of 14 million people reverted to near savagery, plunged backward into the long night of chaos. Tribe turned upon tribe. Blacks turned upon Europeans...

Prime Minister Lumumba gratuitously added new fuel to the flames. He...summoned the Belgian ambassador to make the fantastic charge that he had uncovered a Belgian plot to murder him. "The assassins were discovered and arrested in my residence," cried Lumumba. "They were armed to the teeth."

Lumumba was overthrown and murdered soon afterward by Congolese factions (including Mobutu) funded and supported by Belgium and the U.S.

PART SEVEN

In 2008, Alex Perry wrote an article for Time headlined "Come Back, Colonialism, All Is Forgiven." It's about a Congolese riverboat captain named Malu-Ebonga Charles who misses the old white masters terribly:

"On this river, all that you see — the buildings, the boats — only whites did that. After the whites left, the Congolese did not work. We did not know how to. For the past 50 years, we've just declined." He pauses. "They took this country by force," he says, with more than a touch of admiration. "If they came back, this time we'd give them the country for free."

PART EIGHT

None of this changes the fact that Time is a completely trustworthy source for information about Congo, and its edicts must never ever be questioned by the loony conspiracy racists of FAIR.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Jonathan Schwarz explains why bullies are reviled, most everywhere

When you invade a country on bogus pretexts and then proceed to slaughter their people, sometimes seemingly for sport, it is not looked upon kindly by others. Imagine that.

I cannot fathom is why this is not blatantly obvious to everyone.

a Tiny Revolution.com:

Unfair

Here's my prediction for the final outcome of the Wikileaks video: the U.S. military will continue to claim some of the people killed were armed insurgents. This will satisfy all U.S. conservatives and most U.S. "liberals." Meanwhile, everyone else on this planet will continue to gape at us in slack-jawed horror.

Why the sharp difference between us and the rest of humanity?

1. I have no idea whether any of the people shot were armed, or insurgents, or armed insurgents. There will inevitably be long dreary arguments about this between U.S. liberals and conservatives, complete with 5,000-word blog posts analyzing the video frame by frame.

But here's the thing: even if everyone but the journalist and children were armed insurgents, no one else on earth cares. That's because, when another country invades yours, you're allowed to fight back. And if you invade another country and start slaughtering people, you don't somehow make yourself the good guy by proving that they were trying to fight back.

2. The technological mismatch between the U.S. and everyone else is so gigantic that it violates normal humans' sense of justice. This is something almost no Americans give a second thought to, but it's widely appreciated in those countries (ie, all of them) that don't have noiseless death-machine drones flown by joystick from 10,000 miles away.

In other words, even if everyone shot in the video had been fighting the U.S., and even if it had somehow been on some neutral third ground, the rest of the world would still be horrified at the unfairness. For instance, here's Colin Powell writing in his autobiography about the shelling of Beirut in 1983, and how that led to the suicide bombing of the Marine barracks there:

McFarlane, now in Beirut, persuaded the President to have the battleship U.S.S. New Jersey start hurling 16-inch shells into the mountains above Beirut, in World War II style, as if we were softening up the beaches on some Pacific atoll prior to an invasion. What we tend to overlook in such situations is that other people will react much as we would... And since they could not reach the battleship, they found a more vulnerable target, the exposed Marines at the airport.

I think we can count on the fact that, since no one could reach the Apache attack helicopters shooting from far overhard, someone will try to find a more vulnerable target. And Americans will find this terribly unfair, while to the rest of the world it will seem like the essence of fairness.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Democratic Party Plan to Get Palin Elected Proceeds

from aTinyRevolution.com:

Operation Elect Sarah Proceeding According to Plan

My sources in the Obama administration tell me their secret plan to make Sarah Palin president in 2012 has taken a huge step forward with the election of [Some First Name] Brown to the senate from Massachusetts. As I mentioned six months ago, Operation Elect Sarah has three key elements:

1. Fail to pass meaningful healthcare reform.

2. Fail to pass a second stimulus bill and thus doom the economy.

3. Collect giant wads of campaign contributions from Goldman Sachs.

Getting Sarah into the White House seemed like an impossible dream back in November, 2008. But these people are professionals. There's nothing they can't do.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Deja Vu

Much as we hoped we were wrong, I guess we could all see this one coming...

A Tiny Revolution:

War Libs

I believe the federal government could achieve significant cost savings by getting rid of presidential speechwriters and replacing them with a Mad Libs-like form.

Barack Obama today:

"I will be making an announcement to the American people about how we intend to move forward [in Afghanistan]...it is my intention to finish the job."

George W. Bush on June 18, 2005:

"We're moving forward with a five-point plan for Iraqi self-government...When America says we'll do something, we are going to do it and finish the job."

—Jonathan Schwarz

Jon Can't Wait Until Ms. Rice Is Off His TV

Jonathan Schwarz at Tiny Revolution:

Here's Ms. Rice, delivering more standard embarrassing crap from the foreign policy crap factory:

[T]he flaws and disappointing actions within the UN are rooted in its potential to serve as an engine for progress....It is why efforts to pass Security Council resolutions on abuses in places from Zimbabwe to Burma occasion such fierce debate, and don't always succeed. It is also why many try to use the UN to willfully and unfairly condemn our ally Israel. When effective and principled UN action is blocked, our frustration naturally grows, but that should only cause us to redouble our efforts to ensure that the United Nations lives up to its founding principles.

As in the past, there will be occasions in the future when deadlocks cannot be broken, and the United States and its partners and allies will nonetheless have to act.

That sounds exactly like Condoleezza Rice. But in fact it's Susan Rice, in her confirmation hearing to be the new U.S. Ambassador to the UN.

As I've said before: I'd long believed that black women named Rice who are willing to be appalling hacks to rise to the top of the foreign policy establishment are a precious national resource. However, I thought we faced serious supply constraints. Clearly I was wrong.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Educating Thomas Friedman

Jonathan Schwarz:

As Glenn Greenwald points out, Thomas Friedman endorsed terrorism yesterday in his New York Times column:

Israel’s counterstrategy [in 2006] was to use its Air Force to pummel Hezbollah and, while not directly targeting the Lebanese civilians with whom Hezbollah was intertwined, to inflict substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large. It was not pretty, but it was logical. Israel basically said that when dealing with a nonstate actor, Hezbollah, nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians — the families and employers of the militants — to restrain Hezbollah in the future...

In Gaza, I still can’t tell if Israel is trying to eradicate Hamas or trying to educate Hamas, by inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population...If it is out to educate Hamas, Israel may have achieved its aims.

That's an interesting theory about using massive force to "educate" people. I wonder how well it worked on Thomas Friedman himself after the 9/11 attacks? His immediate reaction to the "heavy pain" inflicted on New York City's population was to try to restrain America's nationalistic right wing, right?

Tim Russert Show, CNBC
October 13, 2001

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: So it's time we got tough. It's time that we looked people in the eye. It's time that the terrorists were the ones who are always afraid, always looking over their shoulder, and to create that, you do have to fight a different kind of war. I was a critic of Rumsfeld before, but there's one thing...that I do like about Rumsfeld. He's just a little bit crazy, OK? He's just a little bit crazy, and in this kind of war, they always count on being able to out-crazy us.

Huh. Well, I'm sure it will work differently on the filthy wogs, given that they're subhuman.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Paulson Called for Rule Changes that Collapsed US Economy

Jonathan Schwarz in A Tiny Revolution:

In 2000 SEC Testimony, Paulson Recommended "Self-Regulation" For Wall Street, Plus A Rule Change Now Blamed For Collapse

Back in 2000, when Hank Paulson was CEO of Goldman Sachs, he testified in front of the Security and Exchange Commission. Among other things, he lobbied the SEC to enact a "change to self-regulation" for Wall Street. He also urged them to change the "net capital rule" which governed the amount of leverage investment banks could use. The net capital rule was indeed changed in 2004, and is now blamed for the investment banks' collapse.

The Challenge of Technology and Change to Self-Regulation in the United States

The third area for re-examination and reform is the structure of broker/dealer regulation, a function now shared by the SEC and the self regulatory organizations ("SROs"), principally the New York Stock Exchange and NASD Regulation Inc.

[W]e and other global firms have, for many years, urged the SEC to reform its net capital rule to allow for more efficient use of capital. This is the single most important factor in driving significant parts of our business offshore, so that our firms can remain competitive with our foreign competitors risk-based capital standards must become the norm. The SEC has made it clear that risk-based capital rules can be implemented only when the Commission is confident that firms employing value-at-risk models have robust credit and risk management policies in place.

For these reasons we think it is time to seriously consider the creation of a single, independent SRO to adopt, examine and enforce a core body of financial responsibility, customer protection and margin rules. We hope and expect that there would be savings generated by economies of scale.

How did Paulson's recommendation to let investment banks borrow much, much more work out?

Here's a story from two weeks ago:

The Securities and Exchange Commission can blame itself for the current crisis. That is the allegation being made by a former SEC official, Lee Pickard, who says a rule change in 2004 led to the failure of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and Merrill Lynch.

The SEC allowed five firms — the three that have collapsed plus Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — to more than double the leverage they were allowed to keep on their balance sheets and remove discounts that had been applied to the assets they had been required to keep to protect them from defaults...

The so-called net capital rule was created in 1975 to allow the SEC to oversee broker-dealers...The net capital rule also requires that broker dealers limit their debt-to-net capital ratio to 12-to-1...

In 2004, the European Union passed a rule allowing the SEC's European counterpart to manage the risk both of broker dealers and their investment banking holding companies. In response, the SEC instituted a similar, voluntary program for broker dealers with capital of at least $5 billion, enabling the agency to oversee both the broker dealers and the holding companies.

This alternative approach, which all five broker-dealers that qualified — Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley — voluntarily joined, altered the way the SEC measured their capital. Using computerized models, the SEC, under its new Consolidated Supervised Entities program, allowed the broker dealers to increase their debt-to-net-capital ratios, sometimes, as in the case of Merrill Lynch, to as high as 40-to-1. It also removed the method for applying haircuts, relying instead on another math-based model for calculating risk that led to a much smaller discount.

Who murdered the American economy? It was the CEO, in the 13th Floor Conference Room, with the Prepared Testimony.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Is this the week the US economy melts down?

There are so many interesting articles that I can't seem to stop reading. It's like watching a trainwreck in slow motion.

Or it's like this. I've thought for years that having George Bush and Company, Inc., running things was like having a drunken underage frat boy driving the bus with all your loved ones aboard, veering off the road, and nearing the edge of a precipice. Well, now we've officially driven off the edge. The wheels have left the ground. The bus is hurtling through space. What will happen when it hits bottom? I can't help but watch.

According to all the folk I can find who seem to know what's happening, every Fed bailout of crooks and theives just digs the chasm the bus is falling into that much deeper. Here's a selection of excerpts from astoundingly dismal and horrific posts for your entertainment:

First, a gaggle of links from today's Online Journal—

The Final Meltdown Explained:

Today’s banking crisis is the THIRD trillion dollar plus US-caused financial meltdown in the last 20 years. Each one of these crises came into being through the same basic mechanism . . . the fraudulent over-valuing of financial assets by Wall Street -- with a “wink and a nod” (and sometimes a lot more) from the White House and Congress.

The fraudulently valued assets stimulate the economy, impart the illusion of health and then, inevitably, the fraud goes too far and the whole house of card comes painfully crashing back to earth.

The three trillion dollar plus frauds were:

Fraud #1: The so-called “Savings and Loan Crisis” of the late ’80s

Fraud #2: The so-called “Tech Bubble” of the late ’90s

Fraud #3: The so-called “Credit Crisis” of today

How the scam works

The mechanism of these frauds is simplicity itself. Take a shaky financial asset and blow up its value and then sell as much of it as you can. In the “Savings and Loan Crisis,” the instrument was junk bonds. In the “Tech Bubble” it was Internet stocks. In the “Credit Crisis” it was individual mortgages collected into pools and then resold to investors.

In each case, normal, well established “bread and butter” financial principles were consciously thrown away by Wall Street with no hint of protest from federal regulators.

[detailed descriptions of the three trillion dollar scams follow...]

Mike Whitney : Grasping at Straws—

On Friday morning, Senator Christopher Dodd, the head of the Senate Banking Committee, was interviewed on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” Dodd revealed that just hours earlier at an emergency meeting convened by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, lawmakers were told that “We’re literally maybe days away from a complete meltdown of our financial system.” Dodd added somberly, that in his three decades of serving in public office, he had “never heard language like this.”

The system is at the breaking point, and despite Wall Street’s elation over the proposed $1 trillion dollar bailout to remove toxic mortgage-backed debt from banks’ balance sheets, the market is still correcting in what has become a vicious downward cycle. This cycle will persist until the bad debts are accounted for and written off for or until the exhausted dollar-system collapses altogether. Either way, the volatility and violent dislocations will continue for the foreseeable future.

[. . .]

The malfunctioning of the markets and the freeze-over in the banking system are the outcome of a massive credit unwind instigated by trillions of dollars of low interest credit from the Federal Reserve, which was magnified many times over via complex derivatives contracts and extreme leveraging by speculative investment bankers. This has generated the biggest equity bubble in history. That bubble is now set for a ”hard-landing” which is the predictable result of an unsupervised marketplace where individual players are allowed to create as much credit as they choose.

If Paulson is not removed and his rescue plan scrapped altogether; the dollar will lose its position as the world’s reserve currency and the US government will face a historic funding crisis as foreign sources of capital dry up. That will thrust the country into a hyper-inflationary depression.

Jerry Mazza: Financial terrorism: US taxpayers bail out Wall Street criminals—

“If you want to know who to blame for the past 5 years of naked shorting, you only have two places to look: the financial brokers themselves, and the nonfeasance of a feckless SEC.” And so what goes around comes around.

But now you know. We’re under attack. Even my conservative broker said, “Somebody is making money on this.” That is just the way certain individuals made millions on 9/11, having foreknowledge of the coming event, by betting on Morgan Stanley (located in the North Tower), United and American Airlines’ stock to tank, and by betting on defense industry stocks to zoom up. The real revelation here is that the market and its so-called protective systems are offering us about as much protection from foreign and domestic attack as NORAD’s air-defense system did on 9/11. America once more is under fire.

As on that day, Cheney was in the White House bunker directing activities, and Bush was stranded somewhere listening to some school children read a goat story. And above them, some financial elites were pulling the strings to pull down the American economy and make us less than a banana republic for their continued picking. Seven years later, hardly anything has changed.

Why Elliot Spitzer was Assassinated:

The US news media failed to draw the obvious connection between the bizarre federal law enforcement investigation and leak campaign about the private life of New York Governor Spitzer and Spitzer's all out attack on the Bush administration for its collusion with predatory lenders.

While the international credit system grinds to a halt because of a superabundance of bad mortgage loans made in the US, the news media failed to cover the details of Spitzer's public charges against the White House.

Yet when salacious details were leaked about alleged details of Spitzer's private life, they took that information and made it the front page news for days.

Then some links from what have become some of my other favorite sites...

Elaine Supkis: Bailout Bill Hitting Congress September 26!

Financial Armageddon will cause the Apocalypse if the US follows Germany and Japan's examples from the Great Depression. The US is going bankrupt. Our banking system is now officially bankrupt. The rescue scheme whereby a deep in debt government bails out a deep in debt banking system always fails. The coup is not complete. We have time to argue with our rulers. I hope people are truly interested in going to DC to lobby against this bail out. Even if no one listens to us. We have to speak out. About going to DC: I now have learned that the deadline for this bail out bill is Sept. 26. If anyone wants to lobby, don't try this unless you are within 250 miles of DC. I just got a donation to help defray my own train ticket there.

IOZ: Gladitorial Combat and Other Entertainments—

400 point daily swings aren't indicative of, whadayacallit, a functioning market, but of a gang of panicked, headless chickens reacting to any bit of data with no holistic, synthetic, systemic analysis of just what the fuck is going on. Traders have absolutely no idea what they're doing, thus the wild gyrations. The notion that this is a "liquidity crisis" spurred on by sad-sack psychology, that the solution consists of a billion here, a trillion there in public-sector capital, is only that much more indicative that the geniuses running the store can't even read a balance sheet. I mean, the largest single financial entity in the world, which is the United States Federal Government is trying to rescue the so-called private economy by a.) absorbing trillions of dollars in debt obligations and b.) making multi-billion-dollar, off-the-books cash payouts from its own treasury. That ain't psychology; it's catastrophe.

I suppose this is all bad for my retirment account, but damned if I'm not enjoying it. Watching market apologists who believe that the storm is going to blow over and the ship right itself sometime in the next forty-odd days get swept overboard, food for crabs, is going to be even better. I caught a brief snippet of Kudlow the other day and thought to myself, Now there is a man with blood in his stool. At this point, these motherfuckers better hope the Large Hadron Collider swallows the fucking world. It's their only hope.

Jonathan Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution: Upside To The Bailout—

With all the gloom and doom about giving Hank Paulson $700 billion to hand out to his friends, with no oversight of any kind, it's easy to miss the upside to the bailout.

For instance:

1. An early proposal that would have allowed Wall Street executives to literally eat 100 million Americans has been discarded as "politically unfeasible."

Mr. Schwarz finds fault with Joe Biden

a Tiny Revolution:

August 27, 2008

BREAKING: New Biden Plagiarism Scandal!!! MUST CREDIT TINY REVOLUTION!!!

Accusations that Joe Biden was guilty of plagiarism during his 1988 presidential campaign seem to be mostly bogus.

However, I've uncovered recent, genuine plagiarism by Biden, during his 2007 Meet the Press appearance to announce his 2008 run for president.

What did his plagiarize? All of Dick Cheney's most egregious lies about Iraq and WMD:

MR. RUSSERT: I want to go back to 2002, because it’s important as to what people were saying then and what the American people were hearing. Here’s Joe Biden about Saddam Hussein: “He’s a long term threat and a short term threat to our national security.”

“We have no choice but to eliminate the threat. This is a guy who is an extreme danger to the world.”

“He must be dislodged from his weapons or dislodged from power.” You were emphatic about that.

SEN. BIDEN: That’s right, and I was correct about that. He must be, in fact—and remember the weapons we were talking about. I also said on your show, that’s part of what I said, but not all of what I meant. What I also said on your show at the time was that I did not think he had weaponized his material, but he did have. When, when the inspectors left after Saddam kicked them out, there was a cataloguing at the United Nations saying he had X tons of, X amount of, and they listed the various materials he had. The big issue, remember, on this show we talked about, was whether he had weaponized them. Remember you asked me about those flights that were taking place in southern Iraq, where—were they spraying anthrax? And, you know, what would happen? And, you know, so on and so forth. And I pointed out to you that they had not developed that capacity at all. But he did have these stockpiles everywhere.

MR. RUSSERT: Where are they?

SEN. BIDEN: Well, the point is, it turned out they didn’t, but everyone in the world thought he had them. The weapons inspectors said he had them. He catalogued—they catalogued them. This was not some, some Cheney, you know, pipe dream. This was, in fact, catalogued. They looked at them and catalogued. What he did with them, who knows? The real mystery is, if he, if he didn’t have any of them left, why didn’t he say so? Well, a lot of people say if he had said that, he would’ve, you know, emboldened Iran and so on and so forth...

Now, the rules of the road either mean something or they don’t. The international community says “We’re going to enforce the sanctions we placed” or not...

So I did not believe he had weaponized his materials. But he did have material that, in fact, could theoretically be weaponized. And to let it sit there at the time, I wanted the inspectors back in to force him that position of having to give it up.

So many lies. Just keeping track of them is exhausting.

1. "When the inspectors left after Saddam kicked them out..."

The UN weapons inspectors were withdrawn at the direct request of the US so that the US could bomb Iraq in Operation Desert Fox.

2. "[T]here was a cataloguing at the United Nations saying he had X tons of, X amount of, and they listed the various materials he had...he did have these stockpiles everywhere."

The UN never said Iraq still possessed WMD. Biden is talking about documents prepared by the UN about the theoretical maximum amount of biological and chemical weapons Iraq could have produced before the Gulf War in 1991.

For instance, Iraq only admitted in 1995 that they had an offensive biological weapons program. Iraq also claimed they'd destroyed all the relevant material in 1991, and provided some though not conclusive evidence for this. The UN discovered that they'd imported a certain amount of growth media, and calculated how much anthrax they could have produced if all of the growth media had been used for anthrax at maximum efficiency.

Of course, humans never do anything at maximum efficiency. And there was evidence Iraq indeed had everything destroyed in 1991, and no evidence it hadn't. And even if Iraq hadn't destroyed it, it would have remained dangerous for only a few years after 1991, so there would have been no reason whatsoever for Iraq to keep it.

Again: the UN never said what Biden claims it did.

3. "[E]veryone in the world thought he had them. The weapons inspectors said he had them."

"Everyone in the world" thought Iraq had WMD in the same sense "everyone in the world" thought Joe Biden should run for president in 2008—ie, everyone Joe Biden spoke to. The rest of humanity, no.

Just for instance, the head of the CIA's WMD section privately believed that Iraq had "not much, if anything."

And here's a story from October, 2002:

With a tense Mr Blair alongside him at his dacha near Moscow, the Russian president took the unusual step of citing this week's sceptical CIA report on the Iraqi military threat to assert: "Fears are one thing, hard facts are another"...

After confirming his foreign ministry's assessment that No 10's Iraqi dossier "could be seen as a propagandistic step" to sway public opinion, he made it plain.

"Russia does not have in its possession any trustworthy data that supports the existence of nuclear weapons or any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and we have not received any such information from our partners as yet. This fact has also been supported by the information sent by the CIA to the US Congress."...

"There may be a difference of perspective about weapons of mass destruction, there is one certain way to find out and that is to let the inspectors back in to do their job. That is the key point on which we are both agreed," Mr Blair said.

So Blair explicitly stated Russia didn't agree with the US and UK claims, but everyone agreed the inspectors should return. Later this morphed into "everyone in the world" believing Iraq had WMD.

There's a lot more to say about this tiny subject; if fact, you could write a long article about it. Perhaps one day I will, if someone's ever willing to pay me.

And just to repeat myself: "The weapons inspectors" never said "he had them."

4. "What he did with them, who knows?"

"What he did with them" is explained in excruciating detail in a 1000-page long CIA report. "What he did with them" turned out to be exactly what Iraq had been claiming since 1995.

The CIA report, which is available to anyone with an internet connection, came out three years before Joe Biden said this on TV. The US government spent $1 billion on it.

5. " [I]f he, if he didn’t have any of them left, why didn’t he say so?"

Iraq screamed at the top of its lungs for twelve years that it didn't have "any of them left." Iraqi officials said it on American TV over and over again throughout the nineties and in many reports submitted to the UN. They said it again in the 10,000-page report Iraq submitted in December, 2002 to the UN. Saddam Hussein said Iraq had nothing in an interview on 60 Minutes in February, 2003, and then again in Arabic on Iraqi national TV.

In fairness to Biden, however, the Iraqi government did refuse to send someone to the moon to say it there.

6. "Now, the rules of the road either mean something or they don’t. The international community says 'We’re going to enforce the sanctions we placed' or not."

The core of the Iraq-WMD issue was that the US had announced, over and over and over again, that the "rules of the road" didn't mean anything. According to the relevant UN resolutions, the sanctions imposed before the Gulf War in 1991 would remain in place until Iraq had disarmed. However, the George H.W. administration (including Robert Gates, then national security advisor) immediately announced the US would never allow the sanctions to be lifted as long as Saddam was in power. The Clinton administration repeatedly said the same thing.

This caused problems from the Gulf War onward, because our policy was directly at odds with international law, and guaranteed Iraq would have no incentive to cooperative with inspections.

7. "But he did have material that, in fact, could theoretically be weaponized."

He did not have material that, in fact, could theoretically be weaponized.

IN CONCLUSION: These are not the type of higher quality lies I've long hoped an Obama presidency would give America.

Hillary's unpardonable sin

(I had no idea this would get as many hits as it has. I should credit Jonathan Schwarz in his A Tiny Revolution blog for inspiring me to tackle this.)

It's my understanding that the only unpardonable sin is the one that a person does not recognize as a sin.

This is the full text of Hillary's vote for the resolution giving W the power he's abused ever since in red, with certain parts made into boldface by me, and my comments in black:

October 10, 2002
Floor Speech of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton
on S.J. Res. 45, A Resolution to Authorize the Use of
United States Armed Forces Against Iraq

As Delivered

Today we are asked whether to give the President of the United States authority to use force in Iraq should diplomatic efforts fail to dismantle Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological weapons and his nuclear program.

Right off the bat, we are told assumptions as if they are undisputed facts. They were not.

I am honored to represent nearly 19 million New Yorkers, a thoughtful democracy of voices and opinions who make themselves heard on the great issues of our day especially this one. Many have contacted my office about this resolution, both in support of and in opposition to it, and I am grateful to all who have expressed an opinion.

I also greatly respect the differing opinions within this body. The debate they engender will aid our search for a wise, effective policy. Therefore, on no account should dissent be discouraged or disparaged. It is central to our freedom and to our progress, for on more than one occasion, history has proven our great dissenters to be right.

Now, I believe the facts that have brought us to this fateful vote are not in doubt. Saddam Hussein is a tyrant who has tortured and killed his own people, even his own family members, to maintain his iron grip on power. He used chemical weapons on Iraqi Kurds and on Iranians, killing over 20 thousand people. Unfortunately, during the 1980's, while he engaged in such horrific activity, he enjoyed the support of the American government, because he had oil and was seen as a counterweight to the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran.

In 1991, Saddam Hussein invaded and occupied Kuwait, losing the support of the United States. The first President Bush assembled a global coalition, including many Arab states, and threw Saddam out after forty-three days of bombing and a hundred hours of ground operations. The U.S.-led coalition then withdrew, leaving the Kurds and the Shiites, who had risen against Saddam Hussein at our urging, to Saddam's revenge.

As a condition for ending the conflict, the United Nations imposed a number of requirements on Iraq, among them disarmament of all weapons of mass destruction, stocks used to make such weapons, and laboratories necessary to do the work. Saddam Hussein agreed, and an inspection system was set up to ensure compliance. And though he repeatedly lied, delayed, and obstructed the inspections work, the inspectors found and destroyed far more weapons of mass destruction capability than were destroyed in the Gulf War, including thousands of chemical weapons, large volumes of chemical and biological stocks, a number of missiles and warheads, a major lab equipped to produce anthrax and other bio-weapons, as well as substantial nuclear facilities.

In 1998, Saddam Hussein pressured the United Nations to lift the sanctions by threatening to stop all cooperation with the inspectors. In an attempt to resolve the situation, the UN, unwisely in my view, agreed to put limits on inspections of designated "sovereign sites" including the so-called presidential palaces, which in reality were huge compounds well suited to hold weapons labs, stocks, and records which Saddam Hussein was required by UN resolution to turn over. When Saddam blocked the inspection process, the inspectors left. As a result, President Clinton, with the British and others, ordered an intensive four-day air assault, Operation Desert Fox, on known and suspected weapons of mass destruction sites and other military targets.

This is a lie, albeit one perpetrated by BushCo. and backed up by most of US media. Look it up:

The Washington Post reported all these facts correctly at the time: A December 18 article by national security correspondent Barton Gellman reported that "Butler ordered his inspectors to evacuate Baghdad, in anticipation of a military attack, on Tuesday night."

But in the 14 months since then, the Washington Post has again and again tried to rewrite history--claiming that Saddam Hussein expelled the U.N. inspectors from Iraq. Despite repeated attempts by its readers to set the record straight in letters to the editor, the Post has persisted in reporting this fiction.

Not only did Saddam Hussein not order the inspectors' retreat, but Butler's decision to withdraw them was--to say the least--highly controversial. The Washington Post (12/17/98) reported that as Butler was drafting his report on Iraqi cooperation, U.S. officials were secretly consulting with him about how to frame his conclusions.

According to the Post, a New York diplomat "generally sympathetic toWashington" argued--along with French, Russian, Chinese, and U.N.officials--that Butler, working in collusion with the U.S., "deliberately wrote a justification for war." "Based on the same facts," the diplomat said, "he [Butler] could have just said, 'There were something like 300 inspections and we encountered difficulties in five.'"

The inspectors were not withdrawn because of anything Saddam did. Inspectors were withdrawn because Bill Clinton was proceeding with his bombing campaign. It is instructive to look back at the reasons given by Bill Clinton for Operation Desert Fox in the first place, and what the international reaction to it was.

In 1998, the United States also changed its underlying policy toward Iraq from containment to regime change and began to examine options to effect such a change, including support for Iraqi opposition leaders within the country and abroad.

In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members, though there is apparently no evidence of his involvement in the terrible events of September 11, 2001.

It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons. Should he succeed in that endeavor, he could alter the political and security landscape of the Middle East, which as we know all too well affects American security.

Now this much is undisputed. The open questions are: what should we do about it? How, when, and with whom?

This was ABSOLUTELY DISPUTED, by hundreds of thousands of people across the country, in streets and cities and marches everywhere. I was in some of them. I have reams of columns and letters from people experienced in intelligence who disputed every bit of this. She was either ignorant or lying. Either should disqualify her from being president.

Back to Hillary:

Some people favor attacking Saddam Hussein now, with any allies we can muster, in the belief that one more round of weapons inspections would not produce the required disarmament, and that deposing Saddam would be a positive good for the Iraqi people and would create the possibility of a secular democratic state in the Middle East, one which could perhaps move the entire region toward democratic reform.

This view has appeal to some, because it would assure disarmament; because it would right old wrongs after our abandonment of the Shiites and Kurds in 1991, and our support for Saddam Hussein in the 1980's when he was using chemical weapons and terrorizing his people; and because it would give the Iraqi people a chance to build a future in freedom.

However, this course is fraught with danger. We and our NATO allies did not depose Mr. Milosevic, who was responsible for more than a quarter of a million people being killed in the 1990s. Instead, by stopping his aggression in Bosnia and Kosovo, and keeping on the tough sanctions, we created the conditions in which his own people threw him out and led to his being in the dock being tried for war crimes as we speak.

If we were to attack Iraq now, alone or with few allies, it would set a precedent that could come back to haunt us. In recent days, Russia has talked of an invasion of Georgia to attack Chechen rebels. India has mentioned the possibility of a pre-emptive strike on Pakistan. And what if China were to perceive a threat from Taiwan?

So Mr. President, for all its appeal, a unilateral attack, while it cannot be ruled out, on the present facts is not a good option.

Others argue that we should work through the United Nations and should only resort to force if and when the United Nations Security Council approves it. This too has great appeal for different reasons. The UN deserves our support. Whenever possible we should work through it and strengthen it, for it enables the world to share the risks and burdens of global security and when it acts, it confers a legitimacy that increases the likelihood of long-term success. The UN can help lead the world into a new era of global cooperation and the United States should support that goal.

But there are problems with this approach as well. The United Nations is an organization that is still growing and maturing. It often lacks the cohesion to enforce its own mandates. And when Security Council members use the veto, on occasion, for reasons of narrow-minded interests, it cannot act. In Kosovo, the Russians did not approve NATO military action because of political, ethnic, and religious ties to the Serbs. The United States therefore could not obtain a Security Council resolution in favor of the action necessary to stop the dislocation and ethnic cleansing of more than a million Kosovar Albanians. However, most of the world was with us because there was a genuine emergency with thousands dead and a million driven from their homes. As soon as the American-led conflict was over, Russia joined the peacekeeping effort that is still underway.

In the case of Iraq, recent comments indicate that one or two Security Council members might never approve force against Saddam Hussein until he has actually used chemical, biological, or God forbid, nuclear weapons.

So, Mr. President, the question is how do we do our best to both defuse the real threat that Saddam Hussein poses to his people, to the region, including Israel, to the United States, to the world, and at the same time, work to maximize our international support and strengthen the United Nations?

As Reagan would say, "There she goes again!"
Saddam posed no real threat to the region, the United States, or the World. Look at what the intelligence agencies were saying at the time. Hillary is repeating the con perpetrated by Bush and his lackeys, which closely parallels what her husband was saying when he launched a bombing campaign on the eve of the Monica hearings.

While there is no perfect approach to this thorny dilemma, and while people of good faith and high intelligence can reach diametrically opposed conclusions, I believe the best course is to go to the UN for a strong resolution that scraps the 1998 restrictions on inspections and calls for complete, unlimited inspections with cooperation expected and demanded from Iraq. I know that the Administration wants more, including an explicit authorization to use force, but we may not be able to secure that now, perhaps even later. But if we get a clear requirement for unfettered inspections, I believe the authority to use force to enforce that mandate is inherent in the original 1991 UN resolution, as President Clinton recognized when he launched Operation Desert Fox in 1998.

Ah, what is this? Hillary admitting in certain circumstances this resolution will give Bush the very authority to use force which she claims to not be giving him? And which she to this day claims not to have given him? She's saying that since Bill claimed authority to act illegally, so should Bush.

If we get the resolution that President Bush seeks, and if Saddam complies, disarmament can proceed and the threat can be eliminated. Regime change will, of course, take longer but we must still work for it, nurturing all reasonable forces of opposition.

If we get the resolution and Saddam does not comply, then we can attack him with far more support and legitimacy than we would have otherwise.

If we try and fail to get a resolution that simply, but forcefully, calls for Saddam's compliance with unlimited inspections, those who oppose even that will be in an indefensible position. And, we will still have more support and legitimacy than if we insist now on a resolution that includes authorizing military action and other requirements giving some nations superficially legitimate reasons to oppose any Security Council action. They will say we never wanted a resolution at all and that we only support the United Nations when it does exactly what we want.

I believe international support and legitimacy are crucial. After shots are fired and bombs are dropped, not all consequences are predictable. While the military outcome is not in doubt, should we put troops on the ground, there is still the matter of Saddam Hussein's biological and chemical weapons. Today he has maximum incentive not to use them or give them away. If he did either, the world would demand his immediate removal. Once the battle is joined, however, with the outcome certain, he will have maximum incentive to use weapons of mass destruction and to give what he can't use to terrorists who can torment us with them long after he is gone. We cannot be paralyzed by this possibility, but we would be foolish to ignore it. And according to recent reports, the CIA agrees with this analysis. A world united in sharing the risk at least would make this occurrence less likely and more bearable and would be far more likely to share with us the considerable burden of rebuilding a secure and peaceful post-Saddam Iraq.

President Bush's speech in Cincinnati and the changes in policy that have come forth since the Administration began broaching this issue some weeks ago have made my vote easier. Even though the resolution before the Senate is not as strong as I would like in requiring the diplomatic route first and placing highest priority on a simple, clear requirement for unlimited inspections, I will take the President at his word that he will try hard to pass a UN resolution and will seek to avoid war, if at all possible.

This is more damning in another way. Not one person I know who reads legitimate news would have trusted Bush to do anything of this importance. Look at his track record at the time. She has the lack of discernment to actually "take the President at his word." That is as disqualifying a statement as any I've ever heard a presdential candidate make.

Because bipartisan support for this resolution makes success in the United Nations more likely, and therefore, war less likely, and because a good faith effort by the United States, even if it fails, will bring more allies and legitimacy to our cause, I have concluded, after careful and serious consideration, that a vote for the resolution best serves the security of our nation. If we were to defeat this resolution or pass it with only a few Democrats, I am concerned that those who want to pretend this problem will go way with delay will oppose any UN resolution calling for unrestricted inspections.

This is a very difficult vote. This is probably the hardest decision I have ever had to make -- any vote that may lead to war should be hard -- but I cast it with conviction.

And perhaps my decision is influenced by my eight years of experience on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue in the White House watching my husband deal with serious challenges to our nation. I want this President, or any future President, to be in the strongest possible position to lead our country in the United Nations or in war. Secondly, I want to insure that Saddam Hussein makes no mistake about our national unity and for our support for the President's efforts to wage America's war against terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. And thirdly, I want the men and women in our Armed Forces to know that if they should be called upon to act against Iraq, our country will stand resolutely behind them.

My vote is not, however, a vote for any new doctrine of pre-emption, or for uni-lateralism, or for the arrogance of American power or purpose -- all of which carry grave dangers for our nation, for the rule of international law and for the peace and security of people throughout the world.

but Hillary, a few paragraphs ago you said:
But if we get a clear requirement for unfettered inspections, I believe the authority to use force to enforce that mandate is inherent in the original 1991 UN resolution, as President Clinton recognized when he launched Operation Desert Fox in 1998.
If Bill could do it, George can do it, with your blessings, apparently.

Over eleven years have passed since the UN called on Saddam Hussein to rid himself of weapons of mass destruction as a condition of returning to the world community. Time and time again he has frustrated and denied these conditions. This matter cannot be left hanging forever with consequences we would all live to regret.

As the inspectors knew then, and as anyone listening to them knew then, Saddam complied with these conditions. Remember the thouands of pages of documents he delivered to the UN, and how the US removed a huge pile of them? Again, Hillary is buying into and repeating Bush's lies.

War can yet be avoided, but our responsibility to global security and to the integrity of United Nations resolutions protecting it cannot. I urge the President to spare no effort to secure a clear, unambiguous demand by the United Nations for unlimited inspections.

It would be instructive if politicians would spend as much time trying to enforce the other parts of United Nations resolutions, like the parts calling for a nuclear free middle east...

And finally, on another personal note, I come to this decision from the perspective of a Senator from New York who has seen all too closely the consequences of last year's terrible attacks on our nation. In balancing the risks of action versus inaction, I think New Yorkers who have gone through the fires of hell may be more attuned to the risk of not acting. I know that I am.

Do I hear premonitions of Rudy yelling "911! 911!"?

So it is with conviction that I support this resolution as being in the best interests of our nation. A vote for it is not a vote to rush to war; it is a vote that puts awesome responsibility in the hands of our President and we say to him - use these powers wisely and as a last resort. And it is a vote that says clearly to Saddam Hussein - this is your last chance - disarm or be disarmed.

Thank you, Mr. President.

And now millions are considering putting that same awesome responsibility in her hands.

A Blast from the Past

tomdispatch.com:

The Lost Kristol Tapes

What the New York Times Bought
By Jonathan Schwarz

Imagine that there were a Beatles record only a few people knew existed. And imagine you got the chance to listen to it, and as you did, your excitement grew, note by note. You realized it wasn't merely as good as Rubber Soul, or Revolver, or Sgt. Pepper's. It was much, much better. And now, imagine how badly you'd want to tell other Beatles fans all about it.

That's how I feel for my fellow William Kristol fans. You loved it when Bill said invading Iraq was going to have "terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East"? You have the original recording of him explaining the war would make us "respected around the world" and his classic statement that there's "almost no evidence" of Iraq experiencing Sunni-Shia conflict? Well, I've got something that will blow your mind!

I'm talking about Kristol's two-hour appearance on C-Span's Washington Journal on March 28, 2003, just nine days after the President launched his invasion of Iraq. No one remembers it today. You can't even fish it out of LexisNexis. It's not there. Yet it's a masterpiece, a double album of smarm, horrifying ignorance, and bald-faced deceit. While you've heard him play those instruments before, he never again reached such heights. It's a performance for the history books -- particularly that chapter about how the American Empire collapsed.

The Audacity Of Hopefully Strangling More Palestinians

Jonathan Schwarz at a Tiny Revolution.com:

January 26, 2008

Here's an excerpt of Barack Obama's letter on Gaza to US Ambassador to the UN Zalmay Khalilzad:

Dear Ambassador Khalilzad,

I urge you to ensure that the Security Council issue no statement and pass no resolution on this matter that does not fully condemn the rocket assault Hamas has been conducting on civilians in southern Israel...

All of us are concerned about the impact of closed border crossings on Palestinian families. However, we have to understand why Israel is forced to do this... Israel has the right to respond while seeking to minimize any impact on civilians...

Sincerely,
Barack Obama

Ali Abunimah has some pictures of Obama and his wife with Edward Said at a 1999 event in Chicago, along with this:

The last time I spoke to Obama was in the winter of 2004 at a gathering in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood...As he came in from the cold and took off his coat, I went up to greet him. He responded warmly, and volunteered, "Hey, I'm sorry I haven't said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I'm hoping when things calm down I can be more up front."

And here's a section about Zalmay Khalilzad from the book Leo Strauss and the American Empire:

At [the University of] Chicago, one pursued the life of the mind. There was nothing higher, there was nothing else...

Albert Wohlstetter belonged to another world: the world of the policymaking coasts: the world of Washington and Rand. He flew between Chicago and Washington, between Chicago and various think tanks...

Wohlstetter invited the class to a reception at his house. He didn't live, as most of the professors did, in Hyde Park, an old, integrated neighborhood of four-flats and apartments. He lived at the edge of Lincoln Park in an elegant and lavish apartment, where we drank champagne and ate strawberries. This wasn't the life of the mind. This was the life of the privileged and powerful. I don't know why Paul Wolfowitz entered it. I do know how and why Zalmay Khalilzad did.

He is a protege of Wolfowitz, who worked with him on the war with Iraq and the occupation...When I knew him, he was an Afghani graduate student and a radical. He boasted of the demonstrations he had organized in Beirut, of the fedayin he knew and had worked with, and of his friends who regularly visited Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi. He went to pro-Palestinian meetings. His room had a poster of Nasser in tears. He and I had taken Wohlstetter's course on nuclear war together. He didn't seem, at the time, particularly interested in the course. He was, however, enthralled by Wohlstetter's party. In the elevator, in the apartment, he kept saying how much it all cost, how expensive it was, how much money Wohlstetter must have. Later, he borrowed my copy of Kojeve's Lectures on Hegel. When he returned it, one sentence was underlined. "The bourgeois intellectual neither fights nor works." The next summer, Wohlstetter got Khalilzad a job at Rand. I don't know what happened to the poster of Nasser.

On decrying the commercialization of the decrying of the commercialization of Christmas

Jonathan Schwarz in TinyRevolution:

December 24, 2007

My Christmas Message

I'm so tired of the commercialization of decrying the commercialization of Christmas!

When I was growing up, we didn't need special issues of Real Simple Magazine or episodes of Oprah to decry the commercialization of Christmas. I bet my entire family could have decried the commercialization of Christmas for less money than they spend on one disapproving segment on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric about competing neighbors in Boca Raton who each spend $1 million each year on Christmas decorations in their subdivision. In fact, one year when times were slow at dad's law firm, we decried the commercialization of Christmas without spending any money at all!

That's because we understood the true meaning of decrying the commercialization of Christmas. It's about giving, and sharing, and spending time with your loved ones being angry about the CGI baby Jesus in the Wii commercial.

The worst part about the commercialization of decrying the commercialization of Christmas is that it starts earlier every year. First it was December, then Thanksgiving, then Labor Day. I wouldn't be surprised if we wake up one year soon and we're decrying the commercialization of Christmas on December 26th, before we've even returned the copy of It's a Wonderful Life we bought to decry the commercialization of the previous Christmas!

So take my advice: this year, step back from your over-scheduled, stressful life, and decry the commercialization of Christmas the way the old fashioned way. You don't need big corporations to do it for you. Just get together with the people you care about the most, and bitch about like your parents did...and their parents before them. I bet a year from now you'll look back on this as the best decrying the commercialization of Christmas of all.

Jonathan Schwarz and a Costa Rican memo scanned from Harpers

aTinyRevolution.com:

December 17, 2007

The Shepherds Discuss How To Guide Their Flock

Here's an internal Costa Rica government memo about their campaign for CAFTA that was leaked and is now in the latest issue of Harper's. Any connoisseur of government lying should read it:

What I like about this is how it demonstrates how few tools these people have. They have to use the same ones over and over again, now matter what they're selling: trade deals, tax cuts for billionaires, wars. In fact, it's so predictable that this is exactly what I would have come up with if I'd had to guess at what they were saying to each other. Here's how it always goes:

• Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! You might remember this previous leaked memo from the National Association of Manufacturers in 2001, which went out to lobbyists who were going to attend a photo op pushing for Bush's tax cuts for the top 0.1%:

"The theme involves working Americans. Visually, this will involve a sea of hard hats, which our construction and contractor and building groups are working very hard to provide...But the Speaker's office was very clear in saying that they do not need people in suits. If people want to participate -- AND WE DO NEED BODIES -- they must be DRESSED DOWN, appear to be REAL WORKER types, etc. We plan to have hard hats for people to wear."

So it's no surprise this was exactly the plan in Costa Rica.

• Be afraid! As with the selling of the Iraq war, so too with CAFTA. There's something scary out there, and you need us to protect you from it.

• Be especially afraid of outsiders! The people who run the world are sophisticated internationalists. So as in this memo, they're embarrassed to appeal to atavistic fear of strangers. But if that's what it takes to sway the "simplest people," then they'll use it. They may vacation in Gstaad with the Saudi royal family, but to sell the Iraq war they'll tell you scary stories about Teh Muslim Darkies. They may themselves take orders from Citibank, but to sell CAFTA they'll scream about "foreign influence."

• It's not all about the Benjamins! It's not enough to confuse and terrify the rubes—you've also got to give them something to believe, some larger cause. As they write here, "No one is willing to die for free trade, but maybe they would for democracy." I'm sure there are also White House Iraq Group memos saying, "No one is willing to die for American Hegemony in the world's greatest oil-producing region, but maybe they would for democracy."

All in all, this is a great template for keeping power if you believe human beings are sheep.

INTERNET BONUS: You can send email to one of the authors of this memo here.

—Jonathan Schwarz

The circular firing squad in action

A Tiny Revolution:

Here’s Hillary Clinton in the debate last night, responding to Obama’s proposal to raise the payroll cap for Social Security:

CLINTON: I do not want to fix the problems of Social Security on the backs of middle class families and seniors. If you lift the cap completely, that is a $1 trillion tax increase.

This is why my strategy is to hate all leaders, at all times, in all circumstances.

First, Obama uses right-wing talking points to tell us how we must be VERY VERY WORRIED about Social Security, so he can portray himself as a BOLD TRUTH TELLER.

Then, Clinton uses right-wing talking points to attack him for proposing a MASSIVE TAX INCREASE so she can portray herself as NOT A DIRTY TAX-RAISING LIBERAL.

In reality, there’s no reason to fret about Social Security or change it at all now. Obama is trying to scare us by thinking there is.

But if we have to change things in the future, the changes necessary would be minor. Clinton is trying to scare us by throwing around huge numbers most people don’t understand. The $1 trillion tax increase she’s talking about would be over 75 years, during which time the U.S. GDP is projected to be $600 trillion. It would also only affect the best-off people in America. (Moreover, Clinton’s numbers are wrong; eliminating the payroll cap would be more like a $4 trillion tax increase, depending on how you measure it. I suspect she lowballed it in order to make her fearmongering more credible.)

So hand in hand, Obama and Clinton each endorse one-half of the right-wing story, adding up to one gruesome whole. Here’s Sean Hannity, speaking to you during the recession of 2012:

HANNITY: How can you criticize Republican proposals to privatize Social Security, when even Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton agree we should be VERY VERY WORRIED and that the only alternative to privatization is a MASSIVE TAX INCREASE?

AND: This is yet another example of the Iron Law of Institutions.

(Thanks to Dean Baker for help with the specific numbers.)

posted by Jonathan Schwarz at 12:16 PM

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Jonathan Schwarz explains how to differentiate good guys from bad guys

This is the end of a post in which Schwarz is explaining a previous post about extremely inflammatory things Lebanese politician Walid Jumblatt has said and the total lack of concern about it.

A Tiny Revolution:

WHAT I LEFT OUT: The dividing line between what foreign leaders are acceptable isn't, as I implied, just whether Democrats or Republicans are meeting with them. The dividing line is also (perhaps mostly) whether they've knuckled under to US foreign policy. Anyone who has is acceptable, and Democrats are generally safe cozying up to them. Anyone who hasn't is radioactive, and if Republicans meet with them, they may well be attacked from the right, with Democrats joining in.

To understand this phenomenon, look again at Arafat. He was a vile terror-monger up until 1993, and any American politician who met him was a terrorist-lover. This had nothing to do with Arafat making any statement like Jumblatt has--it was purely because he wasn't doing exactly what we told him to do.

Then, when we finally broke him and he agreed to be the US-Israeli subcontractor under the Oslo accords, he received the seal of approval. Clinton could hug and kiss him as much as he liked. (Later, after Arafat surprised us with unexpected backbone in 2000, he went back to being a vile terror-monger.)

The process worked in reverse with Saddam Hussein. It was perfectly fine for a bipartisan group of senators to meet with him in spring, 1990 at the height of his criminality. They all happily smooched his ass, with Alan Simpson commiserating with him about the "haughty, pampered press." (This was shortly after Saddam had had a British journalist executed.)

Then when Saddam disobeyed orders and invaded Kuwait, he was suddenly transformed into the Butcher of Baghdad. No one, Democrat or Republican, could possibly have met with him after that without the standard explosion of insanity.

Or take the two Mahmouds, Abbas and Ahmadinejad. They've both engaged in exactly the same kind of holocaust denial, with Abbas writing, "Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions—fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand."

But it's perfectly fine for Abbas to have said it, and fine for George Bush or Hillary Clinton to hang out with him, because Abbas follows orders. If he stopped following orders, that holocaust quote would be repeated every time he's mentioned in the US media, and Hillary couldn't meet with him anymore. Conversely, if Ahmadinejad would just start following orders, he could deny the holocaust all he wants, and Hillary could make out with him on national TV. No problem.

This is so glaringly obvious you'd think it might occasionally appear in a US newspaper, perhaps as often as once a decade. But it doesn't. As Noam Chomsky likes to say, you've got to admire the discipline.

Posted by Jonathan Schwarz at 03:03 PM