Last month I posted my thoughts on something that I called “The GAME”, which is an entity that greatly constrains political debate in our country. I said that I found this to be terribly repressive. By so restraining official political debate in our country, we are forced to live in a world where “mainstream” reality and actual reality are two very different things – like Alice in Wonderland. This has two very bad consequences.
The lesser of the two very bad consequences is that it tends to make a person who harbors an alternate view of reality (someone whom mainstream people refer to as “conspiracy theorists”) feel somewhat psychotic. A typical
definition of psychosis is “any severe mental disorder in which contact with reality is lost or highly distorted”. Though I don’t
believe that I’m psychotic, sometimes I feel like I am because my view of reality differs so much from the “mainstream”. Even one of my somewhat progressive friends said to me a couple years ago, during a
discussion of 9/11, “It must be terrible to be you, thinking that your government would do such terrible things to its own people”. Well, no. I don’t feel that it’s terrible to be me at all. But I sure do wish that there were more people who shared my general view of reality with me, or at least opened up their mind to possibilities that have been foreclosed by the GAME.
The much worse consequence is that those who run the GAME, whoever they are, use it to elevate themselves at the expense of everyone else. Considering the state of our world today, those consequences are truly tragic.
They include in a nutshell, war, imperialism, genocide, and extreme mal-distribution of wealth throughout the world and within our own country.
Here is one of the most haunting second hand accounts I’ve ever read about the GAME:
I walked into El Presidente’s office two days after he was elected and congratulated him… I said “Mr. President, in here I got a couple hundred million dollars for you and your family, if you play the game – you know, be kind to my friends who run the oil companies, treat your Uncle Sam good.” Then I stepped closer, reached my right hand into the other pocket, bent down next to his face, and whispered, “In here I got a gun and a bullet with your name on it – in case you decide to keep your campaign promises.” I stepped back, sat down, and recited a little list for him, of presidents who were assassinated or overthrown because they defied their Uncle Sam: from Diem to Torrijos – you know the routine. He got the message.
That was John Perkins, quoting an anonymous source in his book, “
The Secret History of the American Empire – Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth about Global Corruption”.
In last month’s post about “
The GAME” I asked several questions about its origin, purpose, rules, players, and masters, and I cited several books that I felt gave me some insight into the GAME, but I couldn’t answer the questions very well. In this post I further consider some related issues.
The GAME’s Masters on Imperialism and WarIt should be noted that, although the Bush administration took war mongering and profiteering and imperialism to new heights in recent U.S. history, this did not start with them. It has been rampant in our country for a long time, as I note in
this post. Ira Chernus
writes about the long-term consensus of the GAME’s masters on foreign affairs and imperialism, which of course tends to involve us in multiple wars and other illegal foreign interventions. For clarity, I italicize the many references to the GAME’s masters:
There is a longstanding bipartisan consensus in the foreign-policy establishment that the U.S. must control every strategically valuable region of the world – and none more so than the oil heartlands of the planet. That's been a hard-and-fast rule of the elite for some six decades now. No matter how hard the task may be, they demand that presidents be rock-hard enough to get the job done. So whatever "leave Iraq" might mean, no candidate of either party likely to enter the White House on January 20, 2009 can think it means letting Iraqis determine their own national policies or fate. The powers that be just wouldn't stand for that. They see themselves as the guardians of world "order." They feel a sacred obligation to maintain "stability" throughout the imperial domains, which now means most of planet Earth – regardless of what voters may think.
Americans should think of what this means with regard to our current occupation of Iraq. Some candidates for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination promised to withdraw all
combat troops from Iraq. But what does that mean exactly? What will be the purpose of our
non-combat troops left behind? Will the Iraqi insurgents be ok with that? And if they’re not ok with it, will we need to bring combat troops back in (or keep them there indefinitely) to protect the non-combat troops? Chernus speaks on this issue:
Newspapers and the TV news constantly report on various plans for the "withdrawal of American troops" from Iraq, when what's being proposed is the withdrawal of American "combat troops" or "combat brigades." This isn't a matter of splitting hairs; it's the difference between a plan for full-scale withdrawal and a plan to remain in Iraq in a different military form for the long term. American combat brigades only add up to
perhaps half of the troops we presently have in that country. And yet, most Americans… would have no way of knowing that withdrawal isn't withdrawal at all…
Chernus emphasizes that this applies to Democrats as well as Republicans, and that our “drive for hegemony” and “order and stability” must be disguised in altruistic terms:
The top Democrats agree that we must leave significant numbers of U.S. troops in Iraq, not only for selfish reasons, but because we Americans are so altruistic. We want to prevent chaos and bring order and stabilization to that country – as if U.S. troops were not already creating chaos and instability there every day…The U.S. is always a force for order, "helping" naturally chaotic foreigners achieve "stability"… The global "stability" that keeps us secure and prosperous is also a boon for the people we "stabilize."
Why such a great demand for economists and others with abysmal records?Christopher Hayes
notes that President Obama’s economic advisors have been highly instrumental in the creation of economic policies that greatly benefited the few at the great expense of the many (though he doesn’t say it was purposeful):
Many on the Obama economic team, most notably (Larry) Summers, director of the National Economic Council, facilitated the creation of the bubble economy and the deregulatory mayhem that brought us to this moment. Indeed, Summers, who has consolidated his power in the White House to the point that the press refers to him as Obama's "chief economic adviser," was a proponent of policies – from the lifting of capital controls in developing economies to the repeal of Glass-Steagall – that proved spectacularly misguided.
Hayes also comments on the question of why there is a small cadre of well known and highly influential Washington insiders who continue to be hired for major government positions despite the absence of a record of achievement that shows them to be deserving of such consideration:
So one might ask: why do these people keep getting plum jobs? Two reasons. The first is a simple rule about Washington, which is that membership in the establishment comes with lifetime tenure. Working inside the Beltway means never having to say you're sorry. If Henry Kissinger, international man of mystery cum war criminal, can flit around Washington and be fondly invoked in presidential debates as a sage of foreign relations – Well then, everyone else, no matter what they’ve done, can as well…
Naomi Klein expressed similar sentiments in an
interview with Matthew Rothschild. In response to the question “What do you make of this group of corporatists and Clinton retreads that are surrounding Obama on the economic front?” she replied:
I would say it’s disappointing, but… This is who surrounded Obama during the whole campaign. He’s been taking advice from Larry Summers and Bob Rubin and Paul Volcker all along… To me it’s just shocking that Larry Summers is a leading economic advisor… He was the main architect in the Treasury for the
shock therapy in Russia that impoverished sixty million people… He cheer led Boris Yeltsin as he attacked the Russian parliament, dissolved democracy, and suspended the constitution. And Summers played a key role in the shock therapy in Thailand and South Korea in 1998. So he has a dismal track record…. He fought tooth and nail alongside Alan Greenspan to prevent the derivatives industry from being regulated…Larry Summers is treated like a savior of the economy.
In my post about “The GAME” I asked about Obama’s role with respect to the GAME. Is he an active participant or a passive enabler, or does he intend to make inroads towards its ultimate destruction? I expressed ambivalent views on the subject and concluded that how he handles the Bush administration war crimes is likely to give us a very big clue.
Bu let me be clear about something. Asking these questions is not meant as an insult to President Obama. This is a tremendously complex and difficult to grasp issue. In her interview with Matthew Rothschild, Naomi Klein expressed the ambivalence on this issue that I feel, and which I’m sure a lot of other DUers feel. Speaking of Election Day 2008, she said:
Obviously, I’m keenly aware of what a centrist Obama is, and that there will be lots of disappointments to follow. But that doesn’t negate the power of that evening. I have some really hard-core anarchist friends, and I told them, “Listen, you’re not going to take this night away from me ….” It was a fantastic night in D.C….
Klein then went on to talk of how disappointed she was in Obama’s choice of economic advisors, as I described above.
Ira Chernus describes how Obama appears to be playing the GAME with respect to foreign affairs. Speaking of the doublespeak necessary to convince the GAME masters of a candidate’s intention to play the GAME, while simultaneously satisfying the desire of U.S. voters to disengage from Iraq, Chernus wrote of the 2008 presidential race:
On Iraq, candidates Dennis Kucinich and Bill Richardson don't meet that test… The Democrats currently topping the polls, on the other hand, are proving themselves eminently qualified in doublespeak.
"The single most important job of any president is to protect the American people," he (Obama) affirmed in a
major foreign-policy statement last April. But "the threats we face…. can no longer be contained by borders and boundaries…. The security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people." That's why the U.S. must be the "leader of the free world."
To Obama, everything and everyone everywhere is of strategic concern to the United States." To control everything and everyone, he wants "the strongest, best-equipped military in the world.… A 21st century military to stay on the offense." That, he says, will take at least 92,000 more soldiers and Marines – precisely the number
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has recommended to President Bush. Like Hillary,
Barack would remove all "combat brigades" from Iraq, but keep U.S. troops there "for a more extended period of time" – even "redeploy additional troops to Northern Iraq" – to support the Kurds, train Iraqi forces, fight al Qaeda, "reassure allies in the Gulf," "send a clear message to hostile countries like Iran and Syria," and "prevent chaos in the wider region." "Most importantly, some of these troops could be redeployed to Afghanistan…. to stop
Afghanistan from backsliding toward instability."
Jonathan Schell , writing in
The Nation “
Obama and the Return of the Real”, expresses much of the same ambivalence towards Obama’s actions that I’ve described in this post:
The election of this unreasonably talented and appealing man occurred together with a remarkable array of crises… A good deal of ink has been spilled pondering whether the avatar of "vision" (Obama) has opted instead for the status quo…
Most of Schell’s article deals with how reality has absented itself from the American scene, and why it is essential that we reclaim it. He talks of the major crises confronting our country and the world today, including the current economic crisis, a shortage of natural resources, nuclear arms, and global warming. He notes that a common cause of all of these crises is “the wholesale manufacture of delusions”. He discusses the concept of “bubble”, saying:
A bubble, in the stock market or anywhere, is a real-world construct based on fantasies. When the fantasy collapses, the construct collapses, and people are hurt.
He goes on to discuss how such fantasies have brought us to our current status:
One day someone will undertake a comprehensive study of how all these bubbles grew and why they were inflated at the same time. It will be a story of a crisis of integrity of the institutions at the apex of American life. It will recount how the largest government, business, military and media organizations, as if obedient to a single command, began to tell lies to themselves and others in pursuit of or subservience to wealth and power. Individual deceivers must arrange their untruths by themselves… Huge bureaucracies have wider options. Banks, hedge funds, ratings agencies, regulatory agencies, intelligence services, the White House, the Pentagon and mainstream news organizations can grind inconvenient truths to dust… until the convenient lies that had been wanted all along are presented to the satisfied money- or war-hungry decision-makers at the top...
In short, the mainstream… has overflowed the levees of reality and carried the country to disaster after disaster in every area of national life.
Schell concludes with the problems now facing President Obama:
If Obama makes mainstream choices, he is called "pragmatic." And it may well be so in political terms, as the poll results attest. But political pragmatism in current circumstances may be real folly, as it was on the eve of the Iraq War and in the years of the finance bubble preceding the crash… The danger is not that Obama's move into the mainstream will offend… "the left" or his "base" but that by adjusting to a center that is out of touch, he will fail to address the crises adequately and will lose his effectiveness as president.
How can progressives respond?There has been somewhat of a divide on DU in recent months between those who feel that it’s necessary to express our disappointment or criticism when Obama turns in what we see as the wrong direction and those who resent our doing that because they feel that it gives support to the Republican Party or that it tends to kill the euphoric atmosphere that arose from Obama’s election victory. I posted an essay on DU a few months ago titled “
Why Criticize Obama”, in which I presented several reasons for doing so, including “Criticism of rightward movement serves to check excesses in that direction and ensure a more successful presidency” and “Failure to criticize when appropriate sets a dangerous precedent”. Several others have expressed similar sentiments.
At the end of Naomi Klein’s interview with Matthew Rothschild, Rothschild said:
Obama is an intelligent man. Surely, he knows this litany (the problem with his economic advisors). So why do you think he is lining up with people like Summers? Is that where he is politically? Or is he trying to please Wall Street?
Klein responded by putting the emphasis back on us, the American people:
People are… comparing this moment to the early 1930s, and they’re right. But what led FDR to take those risks and be that bold was the he was under enormous pressure from grassroots movements from below. In the absence of that, Obama’s under tremendous pressure not to shock the system.
Similarly, in Ira Chernus’ article on the bipartisan consensus for war and imperialism, he ends by saying:
It's those long-range goals of the bipartisan consensus that add up to the seven-decade-old drive for imperial hegemony, which got us into Vietnam, Iraq, and wherever we fight the next large, disastrous war. It's those goals that should be addressed. Someone has to question that drive. And what better moment to do it than now, in the midst of another failed war? Unfortunately, the leading Democratic candidates aren't about to take up the task. I guess it must be up to us.
Gary Younge, in an article titled “
Beyond Hope”, strikes a similar theme and largely sums up the way I feel about this. Again, it is not a criticism of Obama, but rather a practical recognition of the way things work (or the way the GAME is played):
Tempting though it may be to savor the lingering aftertaste of a sweet, sweet victory, progressives need to take the posters down and the buttons off. These are no longer the emblems of resistance but of power. A movement that does not champion the cause of the powerless has no right to call itself progressive. And a movement that attaches itself unequivocally to power does not have the credibility or wherewithal to call itself progressive…
Our support for Obama has always been (or should always have been) contingent, as opposed to unconditional. That does not necessarily mean an antagonistic relationship but at the very least an independent one…
Since the election, the administration has attempted to reinvigorate the campaign it erected and mobilize it into a fighting force.… We can hardly blame Obama for this… You owe it to him to dial back. If you can't do it in the name of progressive politics, at least do it for the president.
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