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pawnsolo2
pawnsolo2
May 9, 2012
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pawnsolo2
pawnsolo2
May 9, 2012
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pawnsolo2
May 12, 2012
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#3

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pawnsolo2
pawnsolo2
May 15, 2012
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#4

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pawnsolo2
pawnsolo2
May 17, 2012
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#5

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Media Reform Information Center
Links and Resources on Media Reform

 

Media Reform Groups | Articles/Books | PR/Advertising/Commercialism | The Media Monopoly | Radio | TV/Cable | Internet | Alternative Media | Investigative Journalism | Progressive Media | Progressive Book Publishers | Mainstream Media | Other Media Links
Media Consolidation Chart
In 1983, 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the U.S. At the time, Ben Bagdikian was called "alarmist" for pointing this out in his book, The Media Monopoly. In his 4th edition, published in 1992, he wrote "in the U.S., fewer than two dozen of these extraordinary creatures own and operate 90% of the mass media" -- controlling almost all of America's newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations, books, records, movies, videos, wire services and photo agencies. He predicted then that eventually this number would fall to about half a dozen companies. This was greeted with skepticism at the time. When the 6th edition of The Media Monopoly was published in 2000, the number had fallen to six. Since then, there have been more mergers and the scope has expanded to include new media like the Internet market.

In 2004, Bagdikian's revised and expanded book, The New Media Monopoly, shows that only 5 huge corporations -- Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) -- now control most of the media industry in the U.S. General Electric's NBC is a close sixth.

 

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http://www.corporations.org/media/

pawnsolo2
pawnsolo2
May 18, 2012
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#6

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WASHINGTON - People living in America make up 5 percent of the planet's population but 25 percent of the world's prisoners.

Even if those prisoners are guilty, many are questioning whether they all should be behind bars. A surprising coalition is now saying definitely not.

Liberals and conservatives are banding together, agreeing that many people who shouldn't be behind bars are being imprisoned at a high cost to society.

They say it's time to rein in those costs.

Warped Priorities

Princeton professor and anti-poverty advocate Cornel West suggested that only about 30 percent of America's prisoners are considered dangerous enough to be a threat to society.

"Of 2.5 million people in prison, 62 percent of them are there for soft, non-offensive, drug convictions," West told CBN News.

That belief combined with a price tag close to $300 billion to capture, convict, and jail those prisoners has people from both the left and right questioning if there's a better, smarter way.

West and his long-time friend PBS talk show host Tavis Smiley want to reform a system they believe sweeps far too many poor people and people of color behind bars, while doing little to educate them.

African-Americans are now five times more likely to end up in prison than South African blacks were at the height of apartheid.

"It's warped priorities: prisons over education," West stated.

"We have to do something about these persons who need help as opposed to being locked up," Smiley said. "That's where it has to start."

Groups from across the political spectrum, like the conservativeAmericans for Tax Reform, Prison Fellowship, and the liberal NAACP and ACLU, are acting together to push for radically changing who America imprisons.

Wasted Tax Dollars

Conservatives fret about the assault on liberty as laws and regulations mushroom. At America's start, there were just three federal crimes: counterfeiting, treason, and piracy. Now there are more than 4,400 federal crimes and more than 10,000 federal regulations that include criminal penalties.

Today, a person no longer must have criminal intent to be sent to jail. They just need to have crossed one of many thousands of lines drawn up by federal regulators.

Conservatives also often talk about the money wasted.

"How much do we spend on incarceration?" Grover Norquist, with the Americans for Tax Reform, asked at a joint news conference of liberals and conservatives in the nation's capital.

"Are we getting our money's worth? What is the cost benefit analysis when someone gets sentenced to prison?" he asked.

Crime doesn't pay, but neither does punishing it. For instance, dollar for dollar, drug treatment is seven times more effective than prison.

Both sides agree prison time wastes tons of taxpayer dollars and human capital as it imprisons and warps people who could otherwise still contribute to society.

'A School for Crime'

"The skills they learn to survive inside our violent prisons make them more dangerous when they get out," Prison Fellowship Vice President Pat Nolan told CBN News.

"So we're undercutting public safety by sending low-risk offenders to prison," he said.

"I've called it a school for crime," Prison Fellowship founder Chuck Colson said. "That's exactly what goes on in prison: They teach each other."

"It's time to switch," NAACP President Ben Jealous, a leading prison reform advocate, agreed. "It's time to stop being tough and stupid. It's time to be smart and safe."

"We have prisons for people we're afraid of, but we've been filling them with folks we're just mad at," Nolan said.

Nolan and Colson have a visceral understanding of this issue since both served time themselves.

Wasted Talent

Colson played the role of ruthless operative in Richard Nixon's White House.

Becoming a convict for his role in the Watergate scandal humbled him. He surrendered his life to Christ but he found most of his time behind bars a tragic waste.  

"I was in prison in Maxwell, Ala.," Colson told CBN News. "I was running the washing machine next door to the former chairman of the board of directors of the American Medical Association. He was running the dryer."

Colson said they lost their freedom, but society lost a lot, too, as the duo did nothing but wash and dry clothes.

"It was ridiculous," he stated. "I could have been helping inmates who were poor and needed legal services or former inmates. He could have been delivering babies in the city. There are all kinds of alternatives."

Punishing Criminals, Taxpayers

Colson believes crime must be punished. 

"But the taxpayers don't have to be punished in the process," Prison Fellowship founder  told CBN News. 

"When you put a guy like me in prison, you're spending $40,000 a year to support that person. He's not producing a thing. He could be producing things and paying back his victims. Restitution!"

Prison Fellowship's Nolan once led the Republicans in the California Assembly before pleading guilty to a federal corruption charge and going to prison.

He firmly believes non-violent offenders like he was can still be useful if they're punished out in the community.

"They can support a family," Nolan stated. "They can keep a job and pay taxes."

Prison Reform Successes

Some states, with tough-on-crime Texas taking the lead, are working to turn things around. The goal: imprison only the truly dangerous while punishing and rehabilitating everyone else on the outside.

"Over a billion dollars they've saved already,"  Nolan said of Texas.

The NAACP's Jealous said, "Texas really is Ground Zero for cooperation between Tea Party activists and NAACP activists on these issues."

"They (Texas) were able to take three prisons off the table that they had in the budget and use that money for drug treatment programs and mental health facilities for people in the community -- a third of it went to that. Two-thirds went to help solve their budget problems," Nolan said.  

This unique coalition points out that these states on the forefront of prison reform are saving money.

They're also seeing their crime rates drop lower than the states which keep building more prisons.

The fact that these reforms have brought the left and right together still raises eyebrows, like those of a legislator who once cornered Colson. 

Colson recalled the conversation for CBN News:

"He said, 'I thought you were a conservative.' I said, 'I am.'  He said, 'But aren't you for lock 'em up?' I said, 'Yeah, but not when they aren't doing anything dangerous to me," Colson said. "I just want to lock up dangerous people.'"

 

pawnsolo2
pawnsolo2
May 19, 2012
0
#7

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What Did the Iraq War Cost? More Than You Think.

It's not just what the U.S. bought that's the problem; it's how the nation paid for it

By DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN

December 15, 2011

By its very definition, war spending—indeed, any government spending—improves GDP, as anyone who has ever taken an economics 101 course knows. Spending on World War II is credited with helping the U.S. decisively climb out of its depression slump. Likewise, the Iraq War helped the economy in some ways. But to many experts, the costs will far outweigh and outlast the benefits.

As U.S. operations in Iraq end, tallying up the costs and benefits of a nine-year ordeal is a daunting task. Estimates on Iraq War spending vary. The Congressional Research Service has put the Operation Iraqi Freedom pricetag at $806 billion. President Obama said that the Iraq War would cost over $1 trillion, all told. Either way, compared to past U.S. conflicts, spending on the Iraq war has been relatively small—at its height, spending on WWII helped drive government spending to 42 percent of GDP, according to the Congressional Budget Office. At its height, operations in Iraq cost around 1 percent of GDP.

But the long-term costs will well exceed this total, and the budgetary consequences are far-reaching.

On the positive side, the Iraq War did bolster the economy in some ways.

[Debate Club: Was the Iraq War Worth It?]

"It reduced unemployment compared to what it otherwise would have been" both with military and contractor jobs, says Stan Collender, a senior partner at Qorvis Communications who has also worked on both the House and Senate Budget Committees.

[Read analysis of the latest jobs report.]

According to figures from the Commerce Department, GDP has grown at an average quarterly rate of 4.1 percent since the start of 2003, when the Iraq War began. While the war's contribution to that growth was likely small, Collender believes it is significant.

"[Troops] were getting hazardous duty pay, which means they were sending more money home. We weren't really on a wartime economy, certainly not compared to Vietnam or WWII, but you can't say that it wasn't an insignificant part of economic or GDP, given where the economy has been."

Coming to a hard figure on the costs versus benefits of the Iraq War may indeed be impossible—particularly because untangling those costs from those of the simultaneous war in Afghanistan is difficult. However, it is clear that the costs of the war will ultimately go far beyond those of the costs of combat and reconstruction.

One key way that the war's costs will outlast its operations is in veterans' health care. A recent paper from the Center for American Progress estimates that the projected total cost of veterans' healthcare and disability will run between $422 billion and $717 billion.

Columbia University Economics Professor Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, a lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, have also argued that fighting in Iraq diverted resources from Afghanistan, prolonging conflict in that country. All told, Stiglitz and Bilmes have put the cost at well over $3 trillion.

Whatever the cost, some experts say that it wasn't what was financed in the Iraq War but how it was financed that is problematic.

"The problem is not the impact on the GDP. It basically was financed through debt, which is a completely different issue," says Anthony Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"It's really the decision of how to pay for it that has had such a negative effect on the U.S. economy. Because unlike any previous war in U.S. history, this was paid for entirely by debt at the same time that we cut taxes," says Bilmes. While entitlements and other mandatory spending make up a majority of annual federal budgets and contribute heavily to deficits and debt, the Iraq War also contributed significantly. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities has estimated that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, together with the Bush tax cuts, will account for almost half of the projected $20 trillion debt in 2019.

Tags:
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Iraq, 
Iraq war (2003-2011


Afghanistan, Iraq Wars Killed 132,000 Civilians, Report Says


At least 132,000 civilians have died from 10 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a new study by Brown university. And that’s a conservative estimate.

No one can say with certainty how many civilians have died in these wars. But researchers at Brown’s Watson Institute for International Studies found that between 12,000 and 14,000 of them perished in Afghanistan — the most recent of which came from Tuesday’s audacious insurgent attack on Kabul’s most famous hotel. Another 120,000 died in Iraq. An estimated 35,000 more lost their lives in Pakistan, where the United States is fighting a shadow war against terror groups and militants. (Although the report says it can’t “disaggregate civilian from combatant death” there, which is kind of a big deal.)

But even by the Institute’s own admission, the death toll is far higher. The Institute only counts direct violence that killed civilians — bombings, gunshot wounds, missile strikes, whatever. It doesn’t include indirect deaths, as occur when war creates refugees that can’t find food, clean water or adequate medical care. Nor does it include the lost limbs and emotional suffering that are a part of every war. Nor does it attempt to count civilian deaths in clandestine conflicts like Yemen or Somalia.

And its data is reliant on existing tallies from the United States, the United Nations, nongovernmental organizations and media reports. Some of them lack precision and aren’t able to go where conditions are most dangerous. Many of them disagree about exactly who is a civilian noncombatant: The National Counterterrorism Center, for instance, categorizes Afghan police and security contractors as civilians killed by terrorism. (The United States doesn’t officially keep body counts — at least not for United States-caused civilian deaths.) Think of the Institute’s data as a tally of civilian-death tallies.

 

The Institute gives an undercount in order to avoid an emotional and highly politicized debate aboutresponsibility for civilian suffering. “To give exact figures, or to use a methodology which depends on more accurate and complete information about civilian death than is available,” writes researcher Neta C. Crawford, “would be to imply a level of precision that is not possible at this juncture.” A debate about precision in tallying would also “obscure the larger picture of enormous suffering on the part of the people of Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.”

And how. In 2004, the British medical journal Lancet published a survey claiming that about 100,000 Iraqi civilians had died as the result of the war. Its estimates relied on samples of indirect death, like poor access to medical care in certain areas; compared them with pre-war death tolls; and extrapolated. It was also roundly castigated. “This isn’t an estimate. It’s a dart board,” wrote Slate’s Fred Kaplan.

Except that the Brown report isn’t without its own agenda. One section of it refers to “Alternatives to a Military Response to 9/11,” which include “alternative policing and political approaches.”

Additionally, the report pegs the total cost of the wars to the United States, when veterans’ care and other expenses are included, at nearly $4 trillion.

What conflict researchers tend to call “excess deaths” aren’t the only things the Institute opts to avoid. It doesn’t make judgments about which combatants caused more civilian casualties. If the U.N. is correct, 82 percent of the 368 civilian deaths in March — a new high — were attributable to the Taliban. Nor does it attempt to categorize which direct deaths were caused by which methods of war, something a 2009 King’s College report tallied for Iraq.

Civilian deaths have wartime implications. Not only do they erode the perceived legitimacy of combatants, but economic research last year showed they directly inspire new enemies from the victims’ loved ones. The U.S. Army is working on a new manual for preventing civilian casualties. Even the Taliban has had topay lip service to avoiding civilian deaths (.pdf), although that hasn’t restricted its recent assassination campaign.

The Institute’s report might serve as a baseline for discussing civilian deaths in these long wars. But at least it’s up front in highlighting how little we actually know about that crucial statistic — something it doubts is likely to change with time: “[W]e may never know the full human toll of these wars with any certainty,” Crawford writes, “and even post-war surveys, which may be possible in a few years, will likely be incomplete.”

Photo: Watson Institute for International Studies/Rawa.org via Wikimedia


Tao999
Tao999
May 20, 2012
0
#8

For those looking for legitimate economic indicators (not manipulated to make politicians and central banks look good), I suggest http://www.shadowstats.com/.

Government-provided statistics vastly underreport inflation and unemployment - and have for some time now - at least as most people experience and understand those terms...

pawnsolo2
pawnsolo2
May 21, 2012
0
#9

 

Cool
 
 
More Than 2,000 False Convictions In the Last 23 Years. 
 
By Elizabeth Chuck, msnbc.com

In 1984, two North Carolina girls, age 4 and 6, were molested. They told police their abuser was Sylvester Smith, who was dating the mother of one of the girls, and he went to prison for the crime. 

Twenty years later, the victims recanted, saying their grandmother told them to blame Smith, and his conviction was overturned.

But the person they say who really molested them -- their cousin, who was nine at the time -- could not be prosecuted because he was under age at the time of the alleged crime. He is, however, serving a life sentence for another crime he committed in the meantime: murder.

 
Smith's case illustrates the fallout from false convictions: He lost roughly 20 years of his life to prison, while the alleged perpetrator was free to commit other crimes.

Smith's discarded conviction is one of nearly 900 such cases filed in the National Registry of Exonerations, a database of prisoners exonerated in the U.S. of serious crimes since 1989, that was made public on Monday. To qualify as an "exoneree," an individual must have been convicted and later relieved of all the legal consequences.

In compiling the database, researchers became aware of more than 1,100 other cases in which convictions were overturned due to 13 separate police corruption scandals, most of which involved the planting of drugs or guns on innocent defendants. Those exonerations are not included in the registry. 

ExonerationRegistry.org is the largest database of its kind ever assembled, according to its creators from the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law. Nonetheless, researchers are not able to say what percentage of convictions in the U.S. are false, in part because it can take so long for new evidence to come to light. There are currently about 2.5 million people in prison in the United States.

The earliest cases in the database date back to 1989, when DNA evidence freed its first two prisoners.

"We can figure that as sort of the modern period in exonerations because DNA was a big game-changer," said University of Michigan Law Professor Samuel Gross, one of the registry's creators. "It provided a scientific instrument for reviewing cases and providing a different type of evidence about those cases because the technology didn't exist."

But DNA doesn't actually account for the majority of the exonerations in the database, after an initial wave in the early 1990s, he said.

"DNA is a fairly narrow-gauged tool. It only fits particular type of crimes," Gross said, noting that only 37 percent of the people in the database were cleared with the help of DNA evidence. "In the public mind, exoneration became identified with DNA... Most of these cases -- DNA and non-DNA -- everybody agrees there was a mistake; frequently because the criminal was caught, often because we agree there was no crime at all."

Gross co-authored a report on the database that pulls together statistics on exonerations from January 1989 through February 2012. While the database is constantly updated and new exonerations are being added all the time, the report focuses on the 873 individuals whose cases had been filed before March. 

Gross and his report co-author, University of Michigan law school graduate Michael Shaffer, discovered correlations in the types of crimes and reasons for wrongful convictions.

  • Fabricated crimes. False convictions in child sex abuse cases were usually due to fabricated crimes; sometimes a divorced parent told a child to make up lies about an ex-spouse abusing them, or police or a therapist convinced a child to say something that wasn't true.
  • Eyewitness mistakes. In adult rape cases, for example, false convictions were typically based on eyewitness mistakes, "more often than not, mistakes by white victims falsely identifying black defendants," the report said.
  • Misconduct by authorities. For homicides, misconduct by authorities was the second-biggest cause of false convictions, just behind false eyewitness accounts.

Eyewitnesses are crucial to a trial, experts say, and their mistakes, whether intentional or not, can have a huge impact.

"The bulk of the evidence that is presented in trials in human testimony. Almost all of the time, energy, and effort is spent hearing people's statement in what occurred at a different place and a different time," Dan Simon, a professor of law and psychology at USC, said. "The bottom line is, people are often inaccurate."

Asking an eyewitness to identify a suspect from a lineup demonstrates this.

"There's a nice study that shows slight variations in the way the lineup is conducted can result in swings of accuracy from as low as 14 percent to as high as 86 percent," Simon said.

Confessing to a crime you didn't commit
Another factor in false convictions is what happens in the interrogation room. The report tracks 135 people who falsely confessed to a crime, and went to prison as a resul

"Why would anyone ever admit doing a terrible crime they didn't do?" Gross said. "The first thing to note is the risk false confessions goes up rapidly when the suspects are either juveniles or mentally handicapped or both."

In other cases in the database, a comment made to authorities was misinterpreted as a confession, or police pressure led to the false confession.

How effective are police lineups? Take our test

"Some people are being interrogated at a time of extreme mental anguish and distress," Gross said. "There was a very depressing case from Lake County, Illinois. He confessed to raping and murdering his young daughter, 8 or 9 years old, and a friend of hers. But consider the circumstances. He was being interrogated by the police, probably for 10 or 20 hours, within a day or two of when his daughter was kidnapped, raped and murdered and then they turned on him."

Exonerees can be found in all parts of the country, but most were concentrated in Illinois, New York, Texas, and California. 

  • 93 percent are men, 7 percent women;
  • Nearly 50 percent are black, 38 percent white, 11 percent Hispanic and 2 percent Native American or Asian;
  • 48 percent had been falsely convicted of homicides, 35 percent of sexual assaults (23 percent adult, 12 percent child), five percent robberies, five percent other violent crimes, and seven percent drug, white-collar and other non-violent crimes.

As a group, they spent more than 10,000 years in prison, an average of more than 11 years each.

Free from bars, but not from stigma
Smith, the man from North Carolina who was accused of molestation, maintained his innocence all along. He was only freed after one of the victims spoke to the other and decided to come forward in 2004.

"They said they were more or less encouraged to accuse Mr. Smith, but it took a number of years and a great passage of time," Smith's lawyer, Roy Trest, said. "Obviously, he was extremely elated after all the years he had spent in prison."

Smith asked for a pardon from the governor, but was denied.

Now 61 and in poor health, he lives with his wife -- who he was married to but separated from before he went to prison -- in Brunswick County, N.C., and has established a friendship with one of the victims who accused him, his lawyer said.

Not all exonerees who leave prison are able to reintegrate back into society like Smith, despite a court proclaiming them innocent.

"Even if people honestly believe that this person was truly innocent, there is a certain stigma that comes with the mere fact that you were in prison," Simon said. "You were with bad people, you were antisocial, you had to live in the jungle-like societies you often find in prisons."

Sometimes, families break up when a defendant goes to prison. Finding a job after release can be hard too.

"Often times, the state is really unhelpful. There is no automatic method to get your criminal record expunged," Simon said. "And they have huge holes in their results, and often times they lack the skills that would help you get a job. Everyone else was studying while you were stuck in a cell."

Simon believes the registry will help reform the justice system because it helps experts analyze the causes of false convictions. The creators are still adding cases to ExonerationRegistry.org. Gross said he hopes exonerees will contact his team if they had their convictions overturned and don't see their story in the database. 

 

Tao999
Tao999
Jun 6, 2012
0
#10

If anyone wants to research an interesting topic, look into false confessions and mistaken identity (victim vs accuser, or perceived accuser). Plenty of people are induced into giving false confessions due to police pressure in interrogations, and plenty of people think one person assaulted them when indeed it was someone else.

Related: "Don't Talk to the Police" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc (A law school professor and former criminal defense attorney tells you why you should never agree to be interviewed by the police. 1.44 million views to date.)

pawnsolo2
pawnsolo2
Jun 27, 2012
0
#11

Cool

 

GLOBALIZATION AT WAR:
WAR ON TERRORISM

Jan Nederveen Pieterse

Globalization

At the turn of the millennium an emerging consensus on at least some features of globalization holds that globalization is being shaped by technological changes and major corporations, is uneven, involves the reconfiguration of states and goes together with regionalization. 

Information and communications technologies are part of the infrastructure of globalization in finance, capital mobility and transnational business. Major changes in the international economic landscape are intertwined and contemporary accelerated globalization is in effect a package deal that includes informatization (applications of information technology), flexibilization (changes in production and labour associated with post-Fordism), financialization (the growing importance of financial instruments and services) and deregulation or liberalization (unleashing market forces). This package effect contributes to the dramatic character of the changes associated with globalization, which serves as their shorthand description. Since "globalization" per se refers to a spatial process, i.e. world scale effects (precisely of what is not determined), the term itself is inadequate but serves as a flag word signaling wider changes. 

From the nineteenth century the form of globalization was the growing predominance of nation states (Robertson, 1992). While between 1840 and 1960, nation states were the leading format of political organization worldwide, since the 1960s regional integration has entered into the picture as an increasingly significant dynamic. From the mid-twentieth century state authority has been leaking upwards, in international and supranational forms of pooling sovereignty, and downwards. If the latter happens in a controlled fashion it is referred to as decentralization; if it occurs in an uncontrolled fashion it is termed ethnic or regional conflict, resulting in fragmentation and possibly state disintegration. 

A familiar account of the implications of globalization is the erosion of boundaries and the growth of crossborder activities, economic and otherwise. For instance, "A critical issue raised by globalization is the lack of meaning of geographically rooted jurisdiction when markets are constructed in electronic space" (Kobrin, 1998: 362). The "internationalization of the state," another common notion, refers to the blurring of boundaries between international and domestic politics (producing "intermestic" politics). 

While earlier analyses argued the retreat of states (Strange, 1996), the onset of a borderless world (Ohmae, 1992), the end of the nation state and formation of the region state (Ohmae, 1995), these arguments have been superseded by more nuanced views (e.g. Boyer and Drache, 1996; Mann, 1997), according to which states may now be leaner but also more active and in some areas assume greater responsibilities (Griffin and Khan, 1992). Perhaps what consensus exists may be formulated in the twin processes of a general trend towards the pooling of sovereignty at different levels (regional, international, supranational) in combination with an incomplete shift from government to multi-scalar governance, from local and municipal, national and regional, all the way to supranational levels. 

Presently the leading political form of globalization is regionalization, ranging from customs unions, free market zones and regional security alliances to the deep institutionalization of the European Union (EU). For example, a spatial-political perspective is to view regional formations as anchors around which peripheries align-with Japan and China as centres in East and Southeast Asia; North America and Latin America; and the EU and Eastern Europe, the Southern Mediterranean and Africa. A temporal perspective is to view regional integration as a stepping stone towards growing multilateralism and eventually global governance.

Contemporary globalization is largely concentrated in the Triad of North America, Europe and East Asia. Income and wealth are extremely and increasingly unequal in distribution: 14 percent of the world's population accounted for 80 percent of investment flows in the period 1980-91 and for 70 percent of world trade in 1992 (Hirst and Thompson, 1996). The ratio of income of the top 20 percent of the world population to the income of the bottom 20 percent has jumped from 30:1 in 1960 to 78:1 in 1994. The personal assets of 385 billionaires in the world now exceed the annual income of countries representing 45 percent of the world population (Castells, 1999). This is captured under headings such as "Triadization", "selective globalization" or "truncated globalization", confined to the "interlinked economies". 

While this prompts the idea that the "Third World" is being left out or excluded from globalization, this would overlook the many ways in which countries in the South are being affected by global dynamics. Rather than describing these relations as exclusion they are more accurately described as asymmetric inclusion or hierarchical integration (Nederveen Pieterse, 1997 and 2000). While during the past decades the development gap between advanced economies and newly industrialized countries has narrowed, the gap between these and the least developed countries has been widening. Paraphrasing the terminology of uneven development, the present situation may be referred to as combined and uneven globalization.

Another common understanding, that globalization means time-space compression, refers to more intensive interaction across wider space and in shorter time than before, in other words the experience of a shrinking world. 

There is plenty of controversy as to what some of these features mean, so it's not easy to draw a line between the consensus and the controversies over globalization. Overall, globalization invites more controversy than consensus and areas of consensus are narrow by comparison to the controversies. While it is widely assumed that globalization is fundamentally multidimensional (as in its cultural implications) economics is usually presented as the driving force. Another dispute concerns globalization and capitalism: does globalization coincide with neoliberalism or is neoliberalism merely the current form of globalization? How one answers this follows from one's assessment of the timing of globalization and whether it is a recent or long-term historical process. 

Globalization crosses boundaries of general, government, business, cultural and academic interest; it is politically and theoretically challenging. Politically it crosses the ideological spectrum and challenges social movements and local, national and international politics. Theoretically, it involves a paradigm shift from the era of nation states and international politics to global politics.

The globalizer globalized

Major historical events, like existential and political prisms and mirrors, reveal our preoccupations. Like in a mirror everyone views 9/11 through one's own lenses. As a "politique du spectacle" of almost apocalyptic proportions 9/11 reverberates on many levels-as an emotional shock that raises levels of anxiety and alertness, a signal that arouses deep thought and reflection about the world we live in and that is translated into action along various lines. In the United States 911 is the national alarm number. In the Islamic world a key date is 10/7, when the bombing of Afghanistan began. All is in the eye of the beholder. A terrorism expert thinks of methods of terrorism. Others ponder misdeeds of the United States. 

In the United States, 9/11 has been experienced as a major crisis. Considered by planetary standards it may be reasonable to ask what crisis? Attacks that take many innocent lives, that have economic, political and cultural spillover effects is what many peoples have been experiencing for decades. For countries such as Sudan and Afghanistan crisis has been chronic and a permanent condition. Now the United States which has so often inflicted crisis, experiences crisis. The globalizer globalized. 

9/11 shattered the illusion of the United States as a separate reality of peace and prosperity. Third World diseases such as TB are now found in New York and the West Nile virus has been signaled across the country (Sassen, 2001). Goods and resources from all parts of the world reach the United States and so do illegal immigrants and human trafficking. Strategic or selective globalization, which is so troublesome to achieve for many countries, turns out to be a difficult undertaking for the United States as well. The idea that the United States can have globalization the American way, tapping energy sources and cheap labour the world over without sharing the burden is no more. 

Global reach used to refer to multinational corporations. However, "If economics could be globalized, why not political violence? The two are in fact connected" (Ferguson, 2001: 78). Global reach turns out to be a two-way street. Congo never attacked Belgium, but now for the first time, notes Chomsky (2002), the guns point the other way. Is this so novel? During the Algerian war, Algerians undertook attacks in France; the IRA hit targets in England; the PKK attacked Turkish targets in Germany. Many European countries have experienced attacks of various kinds; yet this is the first time that the United States has been successfully attacked on its own soil, so in a perverse way the world is one as never before. "September 11 shrunk the distance between the world that benefits from globalisation and the world that has been left behind" (Ignatieff, 2001).

The globalization divide-between rich folks and poor folks-used to match a conflict divide. The US defense system conventionally distinguishes between C level security threats or minor conflicts, B level threats to the "national interest" and A level threats to national survival. Asymmetric conflict between unequal parties and across technology gaps used to mean Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda (Nederveen Pieterse, 2002a); 9/11 has suddenly stretched the spectrum of asymmetric conflict all the way to A level. 

Some counsel that 9/11 calls for a security response and for global democratization, including economic democracy between North and South-a forward-looking reaction that looks past the paranoia of the moment. The dark scenario is that this episode yields a cycle of deepening violence and militarization, a sliding slope of risk and retaliation, and inaugurating a new imperial episode. A light scenario is that this highlights the need for a global conversation and serious engagement with world problems. 

However, the media through which, in part, this conversation should be conducted have long been underperforming. Mainstream media in the US have under-reported the globalization divide, the nature of American policies overseas and reactions to American policies, as well as dissent within the US. In the wake of 9/11, a monotony of patriotic correctness suddenly swept through the media and academia. In the US, "You will find more opinion pieces on airport x-ray machines and new check-in procedures than about global injustice" (Freedland 2001). By legitimating policies while recycling stereotypes the media intoned a collective Stepford effect. 

We are all part of the theatre of war considering that contemporary warfare includes the use of media. Much information that reaches the public may be understood as part of a knowledge-intensive military strategy, which is technically termed Integrated Information Operations. In Operation Desert Storm and the Allied Force Operation in Kosovo media manipulation was a crucial component of strategy, and warfare was conducted as a multilevel spin doctoring operation. According to a strategy analyst, "The essence of Information Warfare and Information Operations is that the aim of conflict should be to manage the perceptions of an enemy leadership. … An integrated IO strategy would therefore incorporate covert action, public affairs and propaganda, diplomacy and economic warfare" (Rathmell, 1998: 290). This approach applies to international and domestic arenas. For the US to win the war at the narrative level ("hearts and minds"), one plea, phrased in double-speak, is now for "an 'information strategy' complete with truth-seeking teams of 'special media forces'" (Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 2001a: 18).

9/11 and media

The usual sequence is first the facts, then judgment. In relation to 9/11 two sets of data are available: mainstream media, which have suffered from patriotic correctness, and alternative sources such as internet, which are uncorroborated and speculative but raise key questions. 

There are many anomalies in the standard accounts. Many intelligence warnings were ignored. Anomalous dealings in stocks of United Airlines and American Airlines days before 9/11 are odd as well. So is the circumstance that according to a French analysis of US armed forces photographs after the explosion there is no plane to be seen at the Pentagon (see http://www.asile.org/citoyens/numero13/pentagone/erreurs_en.htm). These oddities could point in various directions. Most odd is that no intercept of the civilian aircraft that strayed off course by military aircraft took place, although that is a standard procedure that normally takes place within minutes. That this routine procedure would not have worked in one or two instances can happen, but it did not occur either in relation to two further aircraft that swerved off course almost an hour later (a detailed discussion is in Ahmed, 2002). Stranger still is that no pressing questions have been raised about this in the mainstream media.

In the fog of war all is twilight. How can we assess 9/11 without full disclosure? Adequate evidence of Bin Laden's involvement in 9/11 has not been provided; the US government's promised white paper was never published. Neither is there certainty whether Al Qaeda is of real significance (when I was visiting Peshawar and the Afghan border in spring 2002 it was jokingly referred to as `phantom Al Qaeda'). Where evidence does appear to exist, it is not, or only belatedly, being disclosed. For instance, while it is argued that the anthrax scare of fall 2001 originated from an American military laboratory, allegedly known with precision in the security community (Monbiot, 2002), we lack full disclosure on this issue as well.

In November 2001 a confidential memo leaked from the chair of CNN, Samuel Isaacson, directed to CNN correspondents to the effect that given the death toll of 9/11 it would be perverse to highlight civilian casualties in Afghanistan; if reported they should be mentioned along with reiterating the casualties of 9/11 (www.fair.org). In effect the world's most influential news medium served as a war trumpet. We don't really know what is going on in war theatres since most information comes from or via the Pentagon. 

Information Coordination Centers were set up in New York, London and Islamabad to neutralize and deflect news of civilian casualties and other unfavourable reporting on a 24-hour basis. In October 2001 the Pentagon sought advice from Hollywood and hired "A well-known Washington public relations firm [the Rendon Group] to help it explain US military strikes in Afghanistan to global audiences" (Strobel and Landay 2001). While the Pentagon Office of Strategic Influence did not have a long career, who knows what share of US foreign policy reporting now consists of black ops (disinformation intelligence operations) or marketing exercises.

Beyond blowback 

A standard account of 9/11 refers to blowback. In a nutshell, this reiterates how during the Afghanistan war the United States and allies supported conservative religious organizations as a counterweight in the fight against communism. The US supported the Mujahideen in Afghanistan the way Israel sponsored Hamas in the Occupied Territories, as a counterweight to leftwing Palestinian groups. The Bin Laden phenomenon, then, is an outgrowth of previous anti-Soviet policies (Bodansky, 2001; Orbach, 2001). Since it is also an extension of Saudi oil wealth, part of the wider backdrop is US Middle East policy. For decades the US and other countries relied on oil supplies from the Middle East while sustaining oligarchies. The US poured oil revenues into the region while alienating it politically, particularly through its virtually unconditional support of Israel: a policy of politically alienating while economically strengthening a strategic region. During the cold war this imbalance was compensated for by the struggle against communism; the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia and other countries conducted joint operations from Afghanistan to Zaire. Saudi Arabia as part of its own balancing act supported both anti-communism and conservative Islamic movements. When the cold war unraveled so did the alliance. The Mujahideen in Afghanistan funded, armed and trained by the US and Pakistan, turned to other targets. Returnees from the Afghan front became armed Islamic militants in Egypt, Algeria, the Philippines, Bosnia and Kashmir. Meanwhile the Gulf War brought US military bases into Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Gulf Emirates. 

The close ties between American and Saudi elites are well on record (including relations between the Bush and Bin Laden families; a brother of Osama Bin Laden invested in Arbusta, a small oil company set up by George W Bush, and later in the Carlyle Group, the eleventh largest defense contractor in the US, on whose board is George Bush Sr.; Ahmed, 2002).
The implication of blowback, originally a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) term, is unwanted consequences of past security operations (for a broad account see Johnson, 2000). While this implies admission of past involvement, on the other hand, it disavows responsibility and takes politics out of ongoing events by treating them as merely unanticipated consequences of past actions. Is this an accurate account of ongoing dynamics?

The same organizations that the United States promoted in the eighties were declared to be the new enemy in the nineties, renamed fundamentalist, with the "clash of civilizations" serving as a new enemy doctrine. Yesterday's freedom fighter became today's terrorist. The "clash of civilizations" formula is not merely primordialism warmed over but diverts attention from the role of politics in the equation: yesterday's allies were created and then recast as today's enemies. 

In Afghanistan, the US, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia supported the Taliban, helped them come to power, and kept them in power by demobilizing their rivals such as the Northern Alliance as late as 1998 (Ahmed, 2002). Central Asia emerged as another strategic backdrop and geopolitical pivot, amply discussed (Brzezinksi, 1997). In 1998 Dick Cheney told the oil industry, "I cannot think of a time when we had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian" (Pilger, 2001). Taliban leaders were flown to Washington and Texas by then president Bush Sr. and Unocal. At the time a US official stated that "with the Caspian's oil flowing, Afghanistan would become "like Saudi Arabia", an oil colony with no democracy and legal persecution of women… and we can live with that" (ibid.). 

From 1995 on the US and Unocal talked to the Taliban government about oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia through Afghanistan, as reported in Congressional hearings of 1998 and 2001 (Ahmed, 2002). According to the Unocal negotiator based in Islamabad, by mid-August 2001 talks were advanced to the point that a draft contract was ready to be signed. US officials offered the Taliban the choice between "a carpet of gold or a carpet of bombs" (Crogan, 2002). Sometime in August the Taliban changed course and opted to work with Petronas of Malaysia and an Argentinean oil company instead. The breakdown of talks in August brought into effect the military option. That US military operations in Afghanistan were planned to take place in mid-October was well known in policy circles in Pakistan and India in summer 2001. 

Needed then, between August and October, was a trigger to provide justification for an attack on Afghanistan. This raises the question whether sections of the US government had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attack; this is an open question that in the absence of a full inquiry cannot be addressed. It may take years for the truth to come out, like with the Gulf of Tonkin.

War on terrorism

That the war on terrorism is an unlikely kind of war has been widely observed. The post-cold war weaknesses of US national security and intelligence are well on record (Eisendrath, 2000). Launching unmanned missiles at distant targets vaguely defined as "the infrastructure of terrorism", as was done since 1998, is neither an effective military strategy nor a credible deterrent against further criminal acts. Unlike the cold war, the war on terrorism is open-ended. While the war on terrorism is widely scorned as simplistic, it is worth considering what purposes this multi-pronged and open-ended project serves-political, geopolitical, military and military-industrial. 

The war on terrorism fulfills certain purposes better than the war on drugs. Perceptions of threat, security buildup, expansion of the military budget, and projection of American military presence overseas were all in place already, consider for instance the $1.3 billion Plan Colombia. The reactions to 9/11, then, reinforce an existing pattern; 9/11 has been a godsend to the hawks. A new component is the narrowing of the spectrum of American debate and the curtailment of domestic dissent. 

The American leadership responded to 9/11 with remarkable dispatch, launching a brand new war on terrorism and obtaining broad Congressional support within weeks. The basic parameters of the "new kind of war" were set in a matter of days; in the words of defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld (2001): "Forget about 'exit strategies'; we're looking at a sustained engagement that carries no deadlines". This marks a clear break with the post-Vietnam principle of avoiding long-term military engagements overseas. 

The widely ridiculed "axis of evil" in fact refers to three regions of major geostrategic concern to the United States. Brzezinksi (1997: xiv) notes that "he who controls Eurasia controls the world" and offers a virtual blueprint of American geopolitical objectives. He identifies pivotal areas that include Iran, to secure access to Central Asia; Iraq, to secure a presence in the Middle East and the Gulf; and North Korea, to keep Japan within the circle of military influence. (An alternative interpretation, held in China, is that the objective is to contain China; Harris, 2002).

The war on terrorism comes with a vast, unprecedented increase in the US military budget. The increase of $48 billion for the fiscal year 2003 equals the entire military budget of Japan. It brings military spending for 2003 to a total of three hundred eighty billion US dollars, which exceeds the combined military spending of the next 15-20 largest military spenders. "The US intelligence community's roughly $30 billion budget is already greater than the national defense budgets of all but six countries in the world" (Hoffman, 2001: 20). This budget exceeds cold war US military spending by more than 15%. These gargantuan magnitudes must be juxtaposed to cutbacks in already low federal spending on infrastructure, education and social services.

Already Afghanistan is being enthusiastically advertised as a laboratory for testing weaponry, like the Gulf was previously. New equipment-"smarter bombs, more sensitive surveillance systems and more sophisticated communication networks"-is to "supply the troops with better information, precision and speed" (Feder, 2001). The war on terrorism coincides with a programme of "force transformation" centred on rebuilding the American military around information technology and phasing out big weapon systems; this is variously described as modernization towards a capabilities-based, entrepreneurial approach (Rumsfeld, 2002) and "a revolution in warfare" (Dao and Revkin, 2002). 

Previously a tension existed between the Clinton/Gore "globalists" favouring broad aims of nation building overseas and "positive ends", and the "hegemonists" of the Bush campaign focusing on narrowly defined vital interests and Powell's "preventive defense" (Harris, 2002). The war on terrorism bridges these objectives and thus creates a bipartisan framework of consensus. 

The Bush administration has adopted an aggressive unilateralism ("if you are not with us you are against us"), largely bypassing international institutions such as the United Nations (UN) and UN Security Council. In November 2001 Dick Cheney warned that the United States could take action against 40 to 50 countries, with Somalia and Iraq then top of the list. The Nuclear Posture Review of Congress released in early 2002 adds preemptive nuclear strikes to the arsenal of deterrence. In late spring 2002 the Bush administration has formally taken the war to an offensive stage by announcing preemptive strikes; by summer the target was narrowed down to Iraq.

Forks in the road 

The war on terrorism raises short term and long term problems and problems that are internal and external to the United States. 

A short-term problem is that Israel's invasion of the West Bank stole the thunder from the American war on terrorism. Israel's war on terrorism took the form of a reoccupation and devastation of a defenseless people who had been occupied for 35 years already, in contravention of UN Security Council resolutions and international law during most of this time. The overt rationale of Israel's invasion of Palestine is clearly absurd: destroy the "terrorist infrastructure" while "suicide bombs" are a low-tech weapon of despair; destroy the Palestinian security forces while urging them to contain terrorism; and devastate the civilian infrastructure under the pretext of defence against terror. The implications are absurd: Palestinian infrastructures have been largely funded by the EU, US and international agencies and have been destroyed with American weapons and blessings. While the whole world has been watching, the political and emotional nexus between 9/11 and war on terrorism has been replaced by another nexus: the war on terrorism and Jenin. "War on terrorism" now means wanton destruction and war crimes. The bravery of Palestinians may add up to this: that after Jenin the US war on terrorism has been derailed for the time being and its legitimacy has evaporated. 

The attempts to bring Iraq back into the picture (funding families of suicide bombers in Palestine and supplying the "terrorist infrastructure") and thus linking the US and Israeli war on terrorism backfired by placing them on the same moral footing, in a frame of international war crimes. Attempts to bring Iraq's weapons of mass destruction back into the picture appear thin, also considering that they had been supplied by the United States in the first place during Iraq's war against Iran. 

The resemblance between US and Israeli policies is not occasional. American conduct in the wake of 9/11 resembles on a world scale the way Israel has been behaving on a regional scale, along with a siege mentality, an obsession with security and a garrison state that curtails civil liberties and is short on dissent. Both share a Goliath complex in relying almost exclusively on force as a solution to their perceived problems; this leads to the suspicion that some problems may be manufactured to justify a war policy and machinery that has become an end in itself. 

That different factions in American military circles endorse divergent strategic principles in reaction to the threat of terrorism presents another kind of problem. "Overwhelming Force", the strategic doctrine followed by General Colin Powell as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Operation Desert Storm, has been applied again in Afghanistan as the doctrine informing the use of US military capabilities. This approach matches the Nazi Blitzkrieg, the swift application of full military means to achieve rapid victory. Proportionate violence is one of the principles underlying just war; Overwhelming Force or unrestrained force is far removed from proportionate. Current American military doctrine frequently refers to the Blitzkrieg as a shining example for the modernization of the US military (Rumsfeld, 2002). This type of approach privileges hierarchical centralized command.

RAND analysts advocate a strategy of "netwar", or "fight networks with networks". This analysis argues that Al Qaeda "holds advantages at the organizational, doctrinal and social levels" (Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 2001a: 18-19). In this view, at the organizational level, the confrontation with networked/ nonstate actors is a challenge to achieve deep, selective, all-channel networking among the military, law enforcement, and intelligence elements on the American side. On the level of doctrine, the method of "swarming" attributed to the opponent ("a campaign of episodic, pulsing attacks by various nodes of the network at locations sprawled across global space and time") requires a "whole new doctrine based on small-unit swarming… emphasizing special forces and limited air power" (Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 2001a: 18-19; Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 2001b). This approach follows the American tradition of low intensity conflict and privileges decentralized command. 

Underlying the tension between centralized and decentralized command is an overall contradiction between structures of hierarchy and dynamics of modernization. One response to 9/11 is to bring back Big Government by expanding the Pentagon budget and establishing a new Department of Homeland Security, a vast new bureaucracy with expanded powers of domestic policing and surveillance (which aggravates rather than alleviates the existing problem of bureaucracy in the security community); while another response relies on information technology to manage security risk, which requires flexibility and all-channel connectivity and networking to be effective. Here technology functions as a "silver bullet" approach to security risk. The hierarchical command structure, however, is out of synch with knowledge-intensive force transformation, a problem that also beset earlier attempts to modernize the US armed forces. 

US policies and their ramifications for allies and foes raise further problems from the point of view legality and security. The new policy of preemptive strikes "could amount to ultimate unilateralism, because it reserves the right to determine what constitutes a threat to American security and to act even if that threat is judged imminent" (Sanger, 2002). Based, essentially, on the threat of weapons of mass destruction, which is in turn based on classified information, the rationale for war is unaccountable; it is the preserve of closed-door committees releasing allegations. Any unruly country or government can be targeted. The allegation of harbouring or assisting terrorism, possessing or manufacturing weapons of mass destruction is of a type that only intelligence agencies can monitor and assess. Meanwhile, the investigator, rapporteur, prosecutor, judge and executioner are a single entity. While the talk is of a "common security policy", in matters like this there are no independent sources of information. 

The key question is whether the reactions to 9/11 should follow a war paradigm or a law enforcement paradigm. International terrorism is a crime and a matter of law enforcement, not military operations (a pointed argument is Boyle, 2002). A country seeking extradition of a criminal must produce evidence. As to sponsorship of terrorism, in reaction to IRA bombs in London, as Chomsky (2002) asks, did Britain bomb Belfast and Boston? The definition of terrorism is contentious. Where would South Africa and the ANC be now if terrorism had been defined then the way it is now? Terrorism bills in the US and United Kingdom, the curtailment of civil liberties, suppression of dissent, illegal detention of suspects of Middle Eastern descent in the US and secret military tribunals for terrorism suspects, compound the situation. 

International law is a major avenue toward stabilizing international affairs. In brief, without legality, there is no legitimacy; and without legitimacy, there is no security. Hence weakening international legality means weakening security. The war on terrorism gives governments a green light to use violent means to suppress crossborder and domestic challenges. The attractions of this paradigm do not go unnoticed by other governments. Israel, Russia (Chechnya), India (Kashmir), China (Xingjian), the Philippines (Basilan), Yemen, Nepal (Maoist rebellion), Indonesia (Aceh, Malucu) are joining the bandwagon, and others may yet follow such as Turkey, Sri Lanka (Tamil Elam) or Senegal. The policy of preemptive strikes may raise the stakes further: "Israel could use it to justify harder strikes into Palestinian territory; India could use it to preempt any Pakistani nuclear capability; China could use it justify an attack on Taiwan" (Sanger, 2002). It may also prompt preemptive strikes by opponents.

This may open the door to widening international anarchism. While actual US policy is one of temporary plug-in plug-out alliances (Nederveen Pieterse, 2002a), the official US response is to formulate a common security policy for the great powers-Europe, Russia, China, Japan (Sanger, 2002). But each of these envisions different threats and opportunities, and the policy of "ultimate unilateralism" undermines the very political and legal basis that the United States seeks to fashion. 

If the war against terrorism extends to Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, and other countries a coalition may not hold. Already the Beirut proposal of Saudi and other Arab countries for peace in the region has drawn a line against US intervention in Iraq. Legality is a sensitive point in coalition politics too. European countries may not extradite terrorist suspects to the United States because of the US death penalty. 

Other central concerns are US Middle East policy and macroeconomic policy. According to an American view, "The United States has a severe image problem in the Muslim world" (Thomson, 2001: 13). This displaces the problem of American policies to a question of perceptions. Note the question of a young Pakistani: "How come Americans are so good at selling Coke and McDonald's to people all over the world, but can't sell their policies? 'Because their policies are poisonous and their Coke is sweet', said Moulana Samiul Haq" (Friedman, 2001). Nothing short of a change in policies, then, will change this situation; yet US support for Israel is deeply anchored in American domestic politics.

Neoliberalism 

"The terrorist attacks on America were the Chernobyl of globalization', according to the German sociologist Ulrich Beck (2001). "Suddenly, the seemingly irrefutable tenets of neoliberalism-that economics will supersede politics, that the role of the state will diminish-lose their force in a world of global risks. … America's vulnerability is indeed much related to its political philosophy. … Neoliberalism has always been a fair-weather philosophy, one that works only when there are no serious conflicts and crises". 

The Canadian journalist Naomi Klein (2001) makes a similar point: "In this `new kind of war', it becomes clear that terrorists are finding their weapons in our tattered public infrastructures. This is true not only in rich countries such as the US, but also in poor countries… The extreme Islamic seminaries in Pakistan that indoctrinated so many Taliban leaders thrive precisely because they fill a huge social welfare gap…" 

Interpreting Islamist influence as a stopgap for privatization may apply to Egypt but not to Sudan or the madrasas in Pakistan where Islamic influence reflects wider dynamics. While neoliberal globalization means a weak public sector and `cheap government', in some respects states have been strong all along: in implementing IMF conditionalities and structural adjustment programmes, imposing spending cutbacks and suppressing popular resistance, and in security and defence; but weak in domestic economic policy and in contending with multinational corporations. With the turn to war, states again take the front seat; Big Government is back also in the US. 

9/11 has shaken the "animal spirits" of late capitalism. Once consumer confidence fades an economy driven by replacement demand and consumer spending on status goods, kept going by marketing mood-making, comes tumbling down like a house of cards. "Hundreds of thousands of jobs disappear in a month. Confidence-and stock market gains-evaporate in a blink. Companies whose strategies appeared brilliant are exposed as overreaching, or even fraudulent, the moment times get tough" (Stevenson, 2001). Aviation, tourism, retail, stocks, banks, energy, accounting, telecommunications, insurance, advertising, Hollywood, fashion, media, even masculinity and theology-all sectors have been trembling and repositioning under the impact of 9/11 which is what American media have been continuously reporting on. Global capitalism turns out to be as interconnected as network analysis has suggested and as vulnerable. In this war, Americans have been urged to go shopping. On the whole, the economic impact of 9/11 has been only temporary, with the exception of insurance rates; the economic impact of the Enron episode and the cascade of corporate scandals turns out to be much more significant. 

Still there is glaring inconsistency between federal government support for sectors hit by the 9/11 crisis-especially airlines and insurance (which incurred a $50 billion loss)-and the Washington consensus which has been urging all governments, crisis or not, to liberalize economies and cutback spending. If the insurance industry would not receive government support rates will increase, delaying economic recovery. Countries that have been lectured by Washington and the International Monetary Fund on economic sanity are surprised to learn that the US does not follow its own counsel. This may have lasting ripple effects, showing up the shallowness of neoliberal policy. That neoliberalism is crisis-prone rather than crisis-proof is no news in most of the world (Asia, Latin America, Africa and Russia) but a novel experience for the US.

During the Vietnam War, the US budget squeeze between Johnson's Great Society and the war effort led to a major slump; now a deficit economy faces a budget squeeze between huge tax cuts and a vast expansion of military spending. In a globally-wired economy with a large service sector and a failing "new economy", a transition to a war economy is not as easily achieved nor as rewarding as during the cold war era. 

The opportunism of the present US administration in macroeconomic policy does not help in bringing about a new international coalition. Proclaiming free trade while imposing steel tariffs and adopting a farm bill with huge subsidies to American farms demonstrates that the United States favours free trade only if it does not damage its interests. This is nothing new, but the signal is louder than before and it clashes with Washington's agenda in the World Trade Organization (WTO).

9/11 and globalization from below

In media coverage "anti-globalization" now takes a backseat behind security concerns. Control of the public agenda is one of the effects of war and also the war on terrorism. The impact on globalization-from-below movements is minor for their agenda remains essentially unchanged, but it does affect the representation of globalization from below. This holds implications for tactics, strategy and methods of action.

Increasing security concerns in summit meetings rule out another "battle of Seattle". Secure and remote locations for new WTO, Group of Eight (G8) and other meetings represent a novel pattern, which is symbolic for a new phase of globalization. Meetings such as the World Economic Forum and the World Social Forum now take place in locations wide apart (such as New York or Davos and Porto Alegre in Brazil, respectively). Violent methods of direct action are now no go. Within globalization-from-below movements this means a marginalization or retreat of the anarchist black bloc. Within the movements this helps the shift from protest to proposition that had been in motion already. The French initiative ATTAC, for instance, campaigns for the implementation of the Tobin tax.

There is no significant change in the issues facing globalization-from-below movements. Their major agendas remain unchanged-such as the critique of the IMF, World Bank and WTO, the aims of social development, democratization and anti-racism. The war on terrorism makes no difference in relation to these agendas, but some additional agendas emerge: with human rights now comes the question of civil liberties. The nexus between development and security acquires a new salience. Regional flash points such as the Middle East, Kashmir and Central Asia come to the foreground. These concerns bring back earlier connections between humanitarian intervention and development (or relief and development), between the peace movement and solidarity with the South (deadly connections), and between justice and peace (long proclaimed in liberation theology).

Globalization before and after 

Contemporary globalization is still being shaped by technological changes, involves corporations as major players, is uneven, involves the reconfiguration of states and goes together with regionalization. But globalization before and after 9/11 and the war on terrorism is marked by two major differences from which other differences follow. First, the United States now displays an aggressive unilateralism that marks a shift from a mixed international system of uni-multipolarity to unipolarity (Brooks and Wohlforth, 2002; Nederveen Pieterse, 2002b). Second, if before 9/11 matters of security were background issues in globalization, involving conflict management in the global margins ("humanitarian intervention"), or geopolitics that rarely figured on the front pages, now American homeland defence and an offensive war mode define the overall terrain. From globalization centred primarily on economic dynamics (international trade, finance, development) globalization now centres on security and geopolitics, and the whole world has become a potential battleground. If globalization before was primarily economic in character, now it is primarily state-driven. If previously lean government was the keynote, now big government is back. 

9/11 and its aftermath shows how the faces of contemporary globalization are completely out of synch. What are at issue, among other things, are corporate entanglements (oil and gas), geopolitical aspirations (Central Asia and the Gulf), blowback, political zigzags and opportunism (US-Taliban), military ambitions, partial information or disinformation (media) as well as a host of factional, national and regional interests. Any adequate representation of contemporary globalization would take, for starters, the skills of post-cubist painting. 

Besides international law, another major concern in stabilizing the international situation is greater economic equity and global democratization. Contemporary globalization is fundamentally hierarchical and unequal. As many comments point out, "The essential problem is that the victors of the cold war now run a global world order that has no perceived legitimacy among billions of human beings, especially those in the Islamic world" (Ignatieff, 2001); or, "the campaign against terrorism has reminded Americans that our security depends on ensuring that other countries have a stake in the international system-which is possible only if the wealthy nations lower their trade barriers" (Brainard, 2001). This calls for equitable international trade, democratization of international institutions, and so forth. 

US policy circles view doing away with extreme poverty and oppression that feed the political cultures of terrorism as a pragmatic option, which is casually referred to as "draining the swamp". This is not a matter of compassion but of global risk management through social engineering, that is, a matter of drainage. A moderate undercurrent in US foreign policy looks to poverty alleviation and economic development as part of a preemptive security policy. But the $5 billion over three years allocated by the Bush administration in Monterrey for this purpose pale next to the $48 billion extra for the military for the 2003 budget. American unilateralism and bypassing international institutions in the war on terrorism do not point in this direction either. Besides, mere gestures at poverty reduction do not alter the perception of plain injustice: US policies particularly in the Middle East are widely perceived as biased and unjust. 

The open-ended war on terrorism is a formula both for imperial projection and imperial overstretch. Many accounts refer to the risks of overextension (for instance, "Too broad a war could just create new foes"; Cannistraro, 2002). The American leadership has seized the moment of 9/11 to vastly expand its military spending and overseas military presence; such policies would otherwise have met considerable resistance, domestic and international. The US leadership uses the occasion of the war on terrorism to implement an essentially imperial project. It is bent on using the occasion to seize strategic geopolitical positions and bridgeheads, in the process serving corporate interests (particularly of the energy sector) as well as political and military objectives. Considering that the major Congressional committees are bipartisan, this must be viewed as an essentially bipartisan project. The United States capitalizes on its present status as sole superpower to try to secure its continued primacy over the next 50 years. That it does so is not surprising; the way it does destabilizes international conditions.

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pawnsolo2
pawnsolo2
Sep 11, 2012
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pawnsolo2
pawnsolo2
Nov 30, 2012
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#13

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pawnsolo2
pawnsolo2
Jan 4, 2013
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or Immediate Release
December 31, 2011
 

Statement by the President on H.R. 1540

 

Today I have signed into law H.R. 1540, the "National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012." I have signed the Act chiefly because it authorizes funding for the defense of the United States and its interests abroad, crucial services for service members and their families, and vital national security programs that must be renewed. In hundreds of separate sections totaling over 500 pages, the Act also contains critical Administration initiatives to control the spiraling health care costs of the Department of Defense (DoD), to develop counterterrorism initiatives abroad, to build the security capacity of key partners, to modernize the force, and to boost the efficiency and effectiveness of military operations worldwide.

The fact that I support this bill as a whole does not mean I agree with everything in it. In particular, I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of suspected terrorists. Over the last several years, my Administration has developed an effective, sustainable framework for the detention, interrogation and trial of suspected terrorists that allows us to maximize both our ability to collect intelligence and to incapacitate dangerous individuals in rapidly developing situations, and the results we have achieved are undeniable. Our success against al-Qa'ida and its affiliates and adherents has derived in significant measure from providing our counterterrorism professionals with the clarity and flexibility they need to adapt to changing circumstances and to utilize whichever authorities best protect the American people, and our accomplishments have respected the values that make our country an example for the world.

Against that record of success, some in Congress continue to insist upon restricting the options available to our counterterrorism professionals and interfering with the very operations that have kept us safe. My Administration has consistently opposed such measures. Ultimately, I decided to sign this bill not only because of the critically important services it provides for our forces and their families and the national security programs it authorizes, but also because the Congress revised provisions that otherwise would have jeopardized the safety, security, and liberty of the American people. Moving forward, my Administration will interpret and implement the provisions described below in a manner that best preserves the flexibility on which our safety depends and upholds the values on which this country was founded.

Section 1021 affirms the executive branch's authority to detain persons covered by the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) (Public Law 107-40; 50 U.S.C. 1541 note). This section breaks no new ground and is unnecessary. The authority it describes was included in the 2001 AUMF, as recognized by the Supreme Court and confirmed through lower court decisions since then. Two critical limitations in section 1021 confirm that it solely codifies established authorities. First, under section 1021(d), the bill does not "limit or expand the authority of the President or the scope of the Authorization for Use of Military Force." Second, under section 1021(e), the bill may not be construed to affect any "existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States." My Administration strongly supported the inclusion of these limitations in order to make clear beyond doubt that the legislation does nothing more than confirm authorities that the Federal courts have recognized as lawful under the 2001 AUMF. Moreover, I want to clarify that my Administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens. Indeed, I believe that doing so would break with our most important traditions and values as a Nation. My Administration will interpret section 1021 in a manner that ensures that any detention it authorizes complies with the Constitution, the laws of war, and all other applicable law.

Section 1022 seeks to require military custody for a narrow category of non-citizen detainees who are "captured in the course of hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force." This section is ill-conceived and will do nothing to improve the security of the United States. The executive branch already has the authority to detain in military custody those members of al-Qa'ida who are captured in the course of hostilities authorized by the AUMF, and as Commander in Chief I have directed the military to do so where appropriate. I reject any approach that would mandate military custody where law enforcement provides the best method of incapacitating a terrorist threat. While section 1022 is unnecessary and has the potential to create uncertainty, I have signed the bill because I believe that this section can be interpreted and applied in a manner that avoids undue harm to our current operations.

I have concluded that section 1022 provides the minimally acceptable amount of flexibility to protect national security. Specifically, I have signed this bill on the understanding that section 1022 provides the executive branch with broad authority to determine how best to implement it, and with the full and unencumbered ability to waive any military custody requirement, including the option of waiving appropriate categories of cases when doing so is in the national security interests of the United States. As my Administration has made clear, the only responsible way to combat the threat al-Qa'ida poses is to remain relentlessly practical, guided by the factual and legal complexities of each case and the relative strengths and weaknesses of each system. Otherwise, investigations could be compromised, our authorities to hold dangerous individuals could be jeopardized, and intelligence could be lost. I will not tolerate that result, and under no circumstances will my Administration accept or adhere to a rigid across-the-board requirement for military detention. I will therefore interpret and implement section 1022 in the manner that best preserves the same flexible approach that has served us so well for the past 3 years and that protects the ability of law enforcement professionals to obtain the evidence and cooperation they need to protect the Nation.

My Administration will design the implementation procedures authorized by section 1022(c) to provide the maximum measure of flexibility and clarity to our counterterrorism professionals permissible under law. And I will exercise all of my constitutional authorities as Chief Executive and Commander in Chief if those procedures fall short, including but not limited to seeking the revision or repeal of provisions should they prove to be unworkable.

Sections 1023-1025 needlessly interfere with the executive branch's processes for reviewing the status of detainees. Going forward, consistent with congressional intent as detailed in the Conference Report, my Administration will interpret section 1024 as granting the Secretary of Defense broad discretion to determine what detainee status determinations in Afghanistan are subject to the requirements of this section.

Sections 1026-1028 continue unwise funding restrictions that curtail options available to the executive branch. Section 1027 renews the bar against using appropriated funds for fiscal year 2012 to transfer Guantanamo detainees into the United States for any purpose. I continue to oppose this provision, which intrudes upon critical executive branch authority to determine when and where to prosecute Guantanamo detainees, based on the facts and the circumstances of each case and our national security interests. For decades, Republican and Democratic administrations have successfully prosecuted hundreds of terrorists in Federal court. Those prosecutions are a legitimate, effective, and powerful tool in our efforts to protect the Nation. Removing that tool from the executive branch does not serve our national security. Moreover, this intrusion would, under certain circumstances, violate constitutional separation of powers principles.

Section 1028 modifies but fundamentally maintains unwarranted restrictions on the executive branch's authority to transfer detainees to a foreign country. This hinders the executive's ability to carry out its military, national security, and foreign relations activities and like section 1027, would, under certain circumstances, violate constitutional separation of powers principles. The executive branch must have the flexibility to act swiftly in conducting negotiations with foreign countries regarding the circumstances of detainee transfers. In the event that the statutory restrictions in sections 1027 and 1028 operate in a manner that violates constitutional separation of powers principles, my Administration will interpret them to avoid the constitutional conflict.

Section 1029 requires that the Attorney General consult with the Director of National Intelligence and Secretary of Defense prior to filing criminal charges against or seeking an indictment of certain individuals. I sign this based on the understanding that apart from detainees held by the military outside of the United States under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, the provision applies only to those individuals who have been determined to be covered persons under section 1022 before the Justice Department files charges or seeks an indictment. Notwithstanding that limitation, this provision represents an intrusion into the functions and prerogatives of the Department of Justice and offends the longstanding legal tradition that decisions regarding criminal prosecutions should be vested with the Attorney General free from outside interference. Moreover, section 1029 could impede flexibility and hinder exigent operational judgments in a manner that damages our security. My Administration will interpret and implement section 1029 in a manner that preserves the operational flexibility of our counterterrorism and law enforcement professionals, limits delays in the investigative process, ensures that critical executive branch functions are not inhibited, and preserves the integrity and independence of the Department of Justice.

Other provisions in this bill above could interfere with my constitutional foreign affairs powers. Section 1244 requires the President to submit a report to the Congress 60 days prior to sharing any U.S. classified ballistic missile defense information with Russia. Section 1244 further specifies that this report include a detailed description of the classified information to be provided. While my Administration intends to keep the Congress fully informed of the status of U.S. efforts to cooperate with the Russian Federation on ballistic missile defense, my Administration will also interpret and implement section 1244 in a manner that does not interfere with the President's constitutional authority to conduct foreign affairs and avoids the undue disclosure of sensitive diplomatic communications. Other sections pose similar problems. Sections 1231, 1240, 1241, and 1242 could be read to require the disclosure of sensitive diplomatic communications and national security secrets; and sections 1235, 1242, and 1245 would interfere with my constitutional authority to conduct foreign relations by directing the Executive to take certain positions in negotiations or discussions with foreign governments. Like section 1244, should any application of these provisions conflict with my constitutional authorities, I will treat the provisions as non-binding.

My Administration has worked tirelessly to reform or remove the provisions described above in order to facilitate the enactment of this vital legislation, but certain provisions remain concerning. My Administration will aggressively seek to mitigate those concerns through the design of implementation procedures and other authorities available to me as Chief Executive and Commander in Chief, will oppose any attempt to extend or expand them in the future, and will seek the repeal of any provisions that undermine the policies and values that have guided my Administration throughout my time in office.

BARACK OBAMA


THE WHITE HOUSE,
December 31, 2011.

pawnsolo2
pawnsolo2
Jan 21, 2013
0
#15

Cool

"Letter from a Birmingham Jail [King, Jr.]"

16 April 1963
My Dear Fellow Clergymen:
While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities "unwise and untimely." Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against "outsiders coming in." I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty five affiliated organizations across the South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Frequently we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here. I am here because I have organizational ties here.

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their "thus saith the Lord" far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city's white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action. We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good faith negotiation.

Then, last September, came the opportunity to talk with leaders of Birmingham's economic community. In the course of the negotiations, certain promises were made by the merchants--for example, to remove the stores' humiliating racial signs. On the basis of these promises, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights agreed to a moratorium on all demonstrations. As the weeks and months went by, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. A few signs, briefly removed, returned; the others remained. As in so many past experiences, our hopes had been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community. Mindful of the difficulties involved, we decided to undertake a process of self purification. We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves: "Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?" "Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?" We decided to schedule our direct action program for the Easter season, realizing that except for Christmas, this is the main shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic-withdrawal program would be the by product of direct action, we felt that this would be the best time to bring pressure to bear on the merchants for the needed change.

Then it occurred to us that Birmingham's mayoral election was coming up in March, and we speedily decided to postpone action until after election day. When we discovered that the Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene "Bull" Connor, had piled up enough votes to be in the run off, we decided again to postpone action until the day after the run off so that the demonstrations could not be used to cloud the issues. Like many others, we waited to see Mr. Connor defeated, and to this end we endured postponement after postponement. Having aided in this community need, we felt that our direct action program could be delayed no longer.

You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. Some have asked: "Why didn't you give the new city administration time to act?" The only answer that I can give to this query is that the new Birmingham administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one, before it will act. We are sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Albert Boutwell as mayor will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is a much more gentle person than Mr. Connor, they are both segregationists, dedicated to maintenance of the status quo. I have hope that Mr. Boutwell will be reasonable enough to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from devotees of civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I it" relationship for an "I thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal. Let me give another explanation. A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up that state's segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout Alabama all sorts of devious methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties in which, even though Negroes constitute a majority of the population, not a single Negro is registered. Can any law enacted under such circumstances be considered democratically structured?

Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First-Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.

I hope you are able to see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was evidenced sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience.

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country's antireligious laws.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn't this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn't this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn't this like condemning Jesus because his unique God consciousness and never ceasing devotion to God's will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber. I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I began thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency, made up in part of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so drained of self respect and a sense of "somebodiness" that they have adjusted to segregation; and in part of a few middle-class Negroes who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because in some ways they profit by segregation, have become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad's Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro's frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible "devil."

I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the "do nothingism" of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. For there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle. If this philosophy had not emerged, by now many streets of the South would, I am convinced, be flowing with blood. And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as "rabble rousers" and "outside agitators" those of us who employ nonviolent direct action, and if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies--a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place. The Negro has many pent up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides -and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: "Get rid of your discontent." Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremist. But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Was not Martin Luther an extremist: "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God." And John Bunyan: "I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience." And Abraham Lincoln: "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free." And Thomas Jefferson: "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal . . ." So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary's hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime--the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

I had hoped that the white moderate would see this need. Perhaps I was too optimistic; perhaps I expected too much. I suppose I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action. I am thankful, however, that some of our white brothers in the South have grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it. They are still all too few in quantity, but they are big in quality. Some -such as Ralph McGill, Lillian Smith, Harry Golden, James McBride Dabbs, Ann Braden and Sarah Patton Boyle--have written about our struggle in eloquent and prophetic terms. Others have marched with us down nameless streets of the South. They have languished in filthy, roach infested jails, suffering the abuse and brutality of policemen who view them as "dirty nigger-lovers." Unlike so many of their moderate brothers and sisters, they have recognized the urgency of the moment and sensed the need for powerful "action" antidotes to combat the disease of segregation. Let me take note of my other major disappointment. I have been so greatly disappointed with the white church and its leadership. Of course, there are some notable exceptions. I am not unmindful of the fact that each of you has taken some significant stands on this issue. I commend you, Reverend Stallings, for your Christian stand on this past Sunday, in welcoming Negroes to your worship service on a nonsegregated basis. I commend the Catholic leaders of this state for integrating Spring Hill College several years ago.

But despite these notable exceptions, I must honestly reiterate that I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say this as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say this as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen.

When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a few years ago, I felt we would be supported by the white church. I felt that the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.

In spite of my shattered dreams, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.

I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: "Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother." In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: "Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern." And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South's beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: "What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they when Governor Wallace gave a clarion call for defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?"

Yes, these questions are still in my mind. In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? I am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

There was a time when the church was very powerful--in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being "disturbers of the peace" and "outside agitators."' But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were "a colony of heaven," called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be "astronomically intimidated." By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests. Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent--and often even vocal--sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic. Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? Perhaps I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true ekklesia and the hope of the world. But again I am thankful to God that some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in the struggle for freedom. They have left their secure congregations and walked the streets of Albany, Georgia, with us. They have gone down the highways of the South on tortuous rides for freedom. Yes, they have gone to jail with us. Some have been dismissed from their churches, have lost the support of their bishops and fellow ministers. But they have acted in the faith that right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. Their witness has been the spiritual salt that has preserved the true meaning of the gospel in these troubled times. They have carved a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment. I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America's destiny. Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation -and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands. Before closing I feel impelled to mention one other point in your statement that has troubled me profoundly. You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping "order" and "preventing violence." I doubt that you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its dogs sinking their teeth into unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I doubt that you would so quickly commend the policemen if you were to observe their ugly and inhumane treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you were to watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you were to see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys; if you were to observe them, as they did on two occasions, refuse to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together. I cannot join you in your praise of the Birmingham police department.

It is true that the police have exercised a degree of discipline in handling the demonstrators. In this sense they have conducted themselves rather "nonviolently" in public. But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation. Over the past few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends. Perhaps Mr. Connor and his policemen have been rather nonviolent in public, as was Chief Pritchett in Albany, Georgia, but they have used the moral means of nonviolence to maintain the immoral end of racial injustice. As T. S. Eliot has said: "The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason."

I wish you had commended the Negro sit inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy two year old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: "My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest." They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience' sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Never before have I written so long a letter. I'm afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?

If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.

I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil-rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood, Martin Luther King, Jr.
Published in:
King, Martin Luther Jr. 

Tao999
Tao999
Jan 21, 2013
0
#16

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9bRDNgd6E4

The roots of violence in modern USA - Stefan Molyneux. Not what you will hear from the mainstream media, but very important information IMO.

(Sorry, can't seem to embed the video. Do I need a youtube account to embed on this site?)

pawnsolo2
pawnsolo2
Apr 30, 2013
0
#17
iVjUA The 1%

 

 

Tao999
Tao999
Apr 30, 2013
0
#18

^^See also regulatory capture or public choice theory (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VYXizxR8YQ).

When a multinational can make 10x or more on their political donations by way of tax credits, subsidies, legal protections or bailouts - while the cost is less than a dollar per person in terms of increased taxes (on people who have much less inerest and incentive to understand the inner workings of government), the outcome is predictable.

Companies don't always even dislike regulation, if such regulation can create barriers to competition while the established companies get tax credits (see again lobbying), it offers them a competitive advantage that newcomers often simply cannot overcome, and at the expense of everyone else.