Rebuilding America: Mix & match

Sam Smith

 If you want to scare the establishment, get people together who it doesn't think belong together. If you are students having a problem with your principal don't just go to his or her office with the usual troublemakers; walk in with some of the smartest kids, some jocks, a few punks, blacks, whites, latinos, and, best of all, the kids who never seems to be interested in doing anything at all. Once when we were fighting freeways in Washington, I looked up on a platform and there was the Grovesnor Chapman, the chair of the white elite Georgetown Citizens Association, and Reginald Booker head of a black militant organization called Niggers Inc., and I said to myself, we are going to win. And we did.

My old friend, the late Chuck Stone, really knew how to get along with other people. When he was columnist and senior editor of the Philadelphia Daily News, 75 homicide suspects surrendered to him personally rather than take their chances with the Philadelphia police department. Black journalist Stone also negotiated the end of five hostage crises, once at gun point. "I learned how to listen," he said. Stone believed in building what he calls "the reciprocity of civility." His advice for getting along with other Americans: treat them like a member of your family.

Show everyone respect and you'll walk comfortably among every class, subculture and ethnicity in this land. Don't show respect and you'll live a lonely life.

Part of that respect is towards yourself. Don't apologize for who you are. Don't be afraid to argue with someone just because they are of a different ethnicity. Arguing with someone is a form of respect too, because it means you really care about what they think. But bear in mind that in a community, your view is just an opinion and not a rule.

If you are a member of an ethnic or other minority, remember that as an activist your role is to provide solutions to problems and not merely to be a symptom of them. To be a survivor and not a victim.

During the civil rights movement, black leaders spoke not only to those of their own culture but to many whites, especially young whites like myself. The most influential book I read in college was Martin Luther King's 'Stride Toward Freedom' and it wasn't on any required reading list. Cesar Chavez had a similar cross-cultural appeal. But then as African Americans became more successful in politics there was a understandable but unfortunate tendency to retreat to a constituency you knew you could rely upon. And so black leaders became much less influential in the white community.

It's an important lesson for any young black or latino activist.
Don't let your story be ghettoized; instead take that story and find the universal in it, and use that story to move those who don't look like you but can understand the story because you made it theirs, too. The greatest ethnic success stories in America have come when a minority learned to lead the majority, as the Irish and Jews often did in the past century.

I hear over and over that blacks and latinos can't work together politically, but I can almost promise you that the next great ethnic leader in this country is going to be someone who ignores that cliché and creates a black-latino coalition which, after all, will represent thirty percent of the people in this land.

The Hllary horror show

Sam Smith

 If and when, as now seems likely, Hillary Clinton is nominated as the next Democratic candidate for president, the nature of political debate will change radically.

Right now, the Republicans are keeping quiet, waiting for it to happen and then all hell will break loose.

The reason is that the true story of Hillary Clinton has been ignored, mythologized and repressed by the media, the Democratic Party and the fan libs pushing her candidacy. That works for now, but won't when a real campaign is underway.

This is why the Progressive Review has been reminding readers of the real Hillary Clinton in recent weeks and will continue to do so, albeit without hope that it will have any effect.

After all the Hillary Clinton myth has been nurtured by the same sort of liberal thinking that created the Obama campaign, even though - as with HC - there was plenty of evidence (some of it published by the Review before the election) that Obama was not the man he and his supporters said he was. 

There are two reasons liberals - or more accurately post-liberals - have been so easily misguided. First, they have moved significantly to the right. Liberalism no longer is based heavily on economic progress, civil liberties and a sane foreign policy. It has become class based and can often barely contain its contempt for Americans not sufficiently of its ilk.

Secondly liberalism assumes that with ethnic and gender equality only virtue is fairly distributed. In fact, so are dishonesty, incompetence  and corruption.

Once the Democrats have fallen irreversibly into the GOP trap, the story of Hillary Clinton will suddenly shift.

Instead of just being the heroic first woman headed for the White House, she will also:

 - become the first First Lady ever to come under criminal investigation and to almost be indicted according to one of the special prosecutors

- the candidate who, in providing testimony to Congress,said that she didn't remember, didn't know, or something similar 250 times

- the candidate who had three business partners end up in prison

- the candidate who - with her husband - ran a resort scam  in which almost half the purchasers lost their land because the financing scheme.

-  the candidate who got the White House to fire seven long-term employees so her favorite private company could get the president's travel arrangement gig. One White House staffer was even falsely accused of crimes but was acquitted in two hours of jury deliberation.

- the candidate came up with a healthcare plan that would have charged patients up to $5000 for failing to pay premiums on time and doctors up to $10,000 a day for faulty paperwork. ,

- the candidate who made nearly $100,000 on a suspicious cattle futures scheme that cost her $1,000.


And that's just a few to give a feel of the problem. It's one the Democrats could easily avoid, but right now it looks like they don't even want to think about it.

Whistleblowing in the winds of Washington

Sam Smith

For more than twenty years I’ve been a board member of the Fund for Constitutional Government which, among its activities, has assisted in funding several groups deeply involved in helping whistleblowers.

So the Edward Snowden story is anything but a new one to me. In fact, one of the funded groups – the Government Accountability Project – aided a couple of whistleblowers now being widely quoted in the Snowden case. Thomas Drake, and Bill Binney were clients of GAP. And both had worked for the NSA.

As a whistleblower site explains it: “In September 2002, three retired NSA employees and a retired congressional staffer filed a complaint accusing the NSA of massive fraud, waste and mismanagement. . .Drake did not sign the complaint because, still working at NSA, he feared retaliation. However, Drake became a critical material witness, fully cooperating with the investigation and using proper channels to provide investigators with thousands of documents – classified and unclassified.”

And, reports Wikipedia, “In 2010 the government alleged that Drake 'mishandled' documents, one of the few such Espionage Act cases in U.S. history. Drake's defenders claim that he was instead being persecuted for challenging the Trailblazer Project. On June 9, 2011, all 10 original charges against him were dropped. Drake rejected several deals because he refused to "plea bargain with the truth". He eventually pled to one misdemeanor count for exceeding authorized use of a computer; Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project, who helped represent him, called it an act of ‘civil disobedience.’"

I remember sadly Drake’s visit to a FCG board meeting, realizing that this man, who had shown integrity so rare in the capital, was no longer a senior official of NSA but working at an Apple store.
And the secrets don’t have to be even classified.

Wikipedia records people like James E Hansen, a top NASA scientist, who got into trouble as late as 2005 for revealing data that showed 2005 was the warmest year in a century. “Restrictions were placed on his ability to speak publicly about climate change research, including a requirement that public affairs staff review his lectures, papers, and web postings before releasing them. News media were repeatedly denied interviews with Hansen by his supervisors, and drafts of his reports are severely edited before publication”

About the same time Rick Piltz of the US Climate Change Science Progress obtained documents that “showed that a White House official with no scientific training was editing climate change science program reports in an attempt to confuse and obscure the perceived human impact on global warming. That official, previously a lead lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, was hired by Exxon Mobil mere days after leaving the White House (on the heels of the story).’

Hansen and Piltz were GAP clients.

Another group FCG helps fund is the sainted Project on Government Oversight, which has pursued matters from the profoundly corrupt to correcting a ridiculously naïve reflection of how the nature of our government has come to be misunderstood even on Capitol Hill, i.e. explaining to new staffers why members of Congress don’t have to file Freedom of Information requests to get information from the executive branch.

And, “in 2004, POGO filed a lawsuit against then-Attorney General John Ashcroft for illegally retroactively classifying documents critical of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The classification came to light after Sibel Edmonds, an FBI translator, discovered that intercepted memos relevant to the September 11 terrorist attacks had been ignored due to poor translation. POGO ultimately won the lawsuit.”

Then there was our long time board member, Ernie Fitzgerald who revealed the $2.3 billion cost overrun of a Pentagon airplane project. Richard Nixon fired him for that and only after extensive litigation was he restored to his post, where he didn’t give up, discovering in the 1980s that his agency was spending $600 a piece on some toilet seats and $400 apiece for some hammers.

After you listen to this stuff for a couple of decades something like the Snowden story is not all that surprising. And you learn that whistleblowers and their protectors are among the most valuable souls in the capital. Most people, though, aren’t that fortunate. The Washington establishment and its embedded media don’t want these stories remembered. And so premeditated amnesia accomplishes what improper secret classification couldn’t.

Further, after listening to this stuff of a couple of decades you also realize that whistleblowers fail to fulfill the fantasies of either their fans or their attackers. For one thing, there is no college that offers a course in whistleblowing. All whistleblowers are amateurs and that can be dangerous, confusing and depressing. Fortunately, the staff at groups like POGO and GAP not only know how to help on legal, public relations and political aspects of the problem, they also are good therapists, which is immensely valuable since telling the truth in Washington is one of the most dangerous things to do in town.

One learns from these folks that whistleblowers are ordinary people who find themselves in an extraordinary situation and – for reasons ranging from passion for the decent to a simple habit of honesty – react in a way that gets them on the front page of newspapers and the front row of a courtroom.

Yet, as Jack Shafer of Reuters put it:

Leakers like Snowden, Manning and Ellsberg don’t merely risk being called narcissists, traitors or mental cases for having liberated state secrets for public scrutiny. They absolutely guarantee it. In the last two days, the New York Times’s David Brooks, Politico’s Roger Simon, the Washington Post‘s Richard Cohen and others have vilified Snowden for revealing the government’s aggressive spying on its own citizens, calling him self-indulgent, a loser and a narcissist.

And we forget that:

Secrets are sacrosanct in Washington until officials find political expediency in either declassifying them or leaking them selectively. It doesn’t really matter which modern presidential administration you decide to scrutinize for this behavior, as all of them are guilty. For instance, President George W. Bush’s administration declassified or leaked whole barrels of intelligence, raw and otherwise, to convince the public and Congress making war on Iraq was a good idea. Bush himself ordered the release of classified prewar intelligence about Iraq through Vice President Dick Cheney and Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to New York Times reporter Judith Miller in July 2003.

Finally, as Christopher Pyle wrote in Consortium News:

Why can’t these politicians respect Mr. Snowden for what he is: an ordinary young man who does not claim to be a hero, but is willing to go to jail, if necessary, to start a debate over what our bloated intelligence community and do-nothing Congress are doing to our liberties?

Part of the answer is that the politicians don’t want to admit that Congress (and the courts) have failed to exercise adequate oversight over a giant network of secret agencies and corporations that is wasting billions of dollars on worthless surveillance and, in the process, invading the privacy of millions of Americans and endangering the capacity of reporters, leakers, and crusading members of Congress to check the secret abuses of secret government.

Rebuilding America: Become an existentialist

Sam Smith

The history of existentialism is murky and confusing, for those lumped in the category have agreed on neither religion nor politics. But for the purposes of getting a life rather than tenure, Jean Paul Sartre's definition works pretty well. Sartre believed that existence precedes essence. We are what we do. This is the obverse of predestination and original sin with their presumption of an innate essence. Said Sartre, "Values rise from our actions as partridges do from the grass beneath our feet."

In fact, some existentialists argue that we are not fully us until we die because until that moment we are still making decisions and taking actions that define ourselves. Even the condemned person, one said, has a choice of how to approach the gallows.

Wrote Sartre: "Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism . . . Man is condemned to be free. . . From the moment he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does."

To show just how murky existentialism can be, one of the most famous existentialist writers, Albert Camus, even denied he was one.

Perhaps this antipathy stemmed in part from the fact that Camus was a novelist rather than a philosopher like Sartre, and perhaps because they disagreed on politics, but whatever you want to call it, few have spoken as wisely on behalf of the uncertain human spirit. "There is no love of life without despair of life," said Camus. "Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful."

These are not the precise and pedagogical words of a philosophy rising, yet, as with art and love, there is no particular reasons why life should be hostage to logical words, among the least fluid of human expressions. Robert Frost, asked to explain a poem, replied that if he could have said it better he would have written it differently. Louis Armstrong, asked for a definition of jazz, replied that if you have to ask, you'll never know. And, said Gertrude Stein, there ain't no answer. There never was an answer, there ain't going to be an answer. That's the answer.

Quakerism also prescribes personal witness as guided by conscience - regardless of the era in which we live or the circumstances in which we find ourselves. They were early existentialists.

There are about as many Quakers today in America as there were in the 18th century, around 100,000. Yet near the center of every great moment of American social and political change one finds members of the Society of Friends. Why? In part because they have been willing to fail year after year between those great moments. Because they have been willing in good times and bad -- in the instructions of their early leader George Fox -- "to walk cheerfully over the face of the earth answering that of God in every one."

Those who think history has left us helpless should recall the abolitionist of 1830, the feminist of 1870, the labor organizer of 1890, or the gay or lesbian writer of 1910. They, like us, did not get to choose their time in history but they, like us, did get to choose what they did with it.

Would we have been abolitionists in 1830?

In 1848, 300 people gathered at Seneca Falls, NY, for a seminal moment in the American women's movement. On November 2, 1920, 91 year-old Charlotte Woodward Pierce became the only signer of the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions who had lived long enough to cast a ballot for president.

Would we have attended that conference in 1848? Would we have bothered?

On the other hand, there was the time in early 1960 when four black college students sat down at a white-only Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, NC. Within two weeks, there were sit-ins in 15 cities in five southern states and within two months they had spread to 54 cities in nine states. By April the leaders of these protests had come together, heard a moving sermon by Martin Luther King Jr. and formed the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Four students did something and America changed. Even they, however, couldn't know what the result would be.

In a world dominated by dichotomies, debate, definition and deconstruction, existentialism suggests not a result but a way, not a solution but an approach, not goal but a far and misty horizon. It is, says Robert Solomon "a sensibility .... an attitude towards oneself, an attitude towards one's world, an attitude towards one's behavior."

The sense of being individually responsible yet part of a seamless web of others produces neither certainty nor excuses. One can, one must, be responsible without the comfort of being sure. Camus once admitted that he would be unwilling to die for his beliefs. He was asked why. "What if I'm wrong?" And when he spoke of rebellion he also spoke of moderation:

There does exist for man, therefore, a way of acting and thinking which is possible on the level of moderation which he belongs. Every undertaking that is more ambitious than this proves to be contradictory. . . Finally, it is those who know how to rebel, at the appropriate moment, against history who really advance its interests. … The words that reverberate for us at the confines of this long adventure of rebellion are not formulas of optimism, for which we have no possible use in the extremities of our unhappiness, but words of courage and intelligence which, on the shores of the eternal seas, even have the qualities of virtue.

The existential spirit, its willingness to struggle in the dark to serve truth rather than power, to seek the hat trick of integrity, passion and rebellion, is peculiarly suited to our times. We need no more town meetings, no more expertise, no more public interest activists playing technocratic chess with government bureaucrats, no more changes in paragraph 324B of an ineffectual law, no more talking heads. Instead we need an uprising of the soul, that spirit which Aldous Huxley described as "irrelevant, irreverent, out of key with all that has gone before . . . Man's greatest strength is his capacity for irrelevance. In the midst of pestilences, wars and famines, he builds cathedrals; and a slave, he can think the irrelevant and unsuitable thought of a free man."

We need to think the unthinkable even when the possible is undoable, the ideal is unimaginable, when power overwhelms truth, when compulsion replaces choice. We need to lift our eyes from the bottom line unto the hills, from the screen to the sky, from the adjacent to the hazy horizon.

The key to both a better future and our own continuous faith in one is the constant, conscious exercise of choice even in the face of absurdity, uncertainty and daunting odds. We are constantly led, coaxed and ordered away from such a practice. We are taught to respect power rather than conscience, the grand rather than the good, the acquisition rather than the discovery. The green glasses rather than our own unimpeded vision. Oz rather than Kansas.

Any effort on behalf of human or ecological justice and wisdom demands real courage rather than false optimism, and responsibility even in times of utter madness, even in times when decadence outpolls decency, even in times when responsibility itself is ridiculed as the archaic behavior of the weak and naive.

There is far more to this than personal witness. In fact, it is when we learn to share our witness with others -- in politics, in music, in rebellion, in conversation, in love -- that what starts as singular testimony can end in mass transformation.

Here is an approach of no excuses, no spectators, with plenty of doubt, plenty of questions, plenty of dissatisfaction. But ultimately a philosophy of peace and even joy because we will have thrown every inch and ounce of our being into what we are meant to be doing which is to decide what we are meant to be doing. And then to walk cheerfully over the face of the earth doing it.

MORE NOTES ON REBUILDING AMERICA

Rebuilding America: Change the culture & politics will folllow

Sam Smith - Under the present political rules there is virtually no chance of decency, fairness or common sense prevailing, because these rules function in a culture that is largely devoid of such values. To change anything, you have to change the culture, in our case a culture of greed, social indifference, arrogance and cruelty that has thrived for some three decades.

This culture is not just a matter of law, or even of corporate propaganda and manipulation. It has also included distorted education by supposed intellectuals and their universities, sleazy business school concepts so pervasive that even virtuous non-profits adopted them, and selfish values passed on by a media that thought it was just saying the obvious.

This is not new. Every major change requires a cultural transformation. Sure, the politicians will ultimately inscribe it as law, but before that there must be a massive alteration in how people see, understand, and believe things.

Think about the civil rights movement. Before it, even those who knew there was something badly wrong didn’t know what to do about it, didn’t dare say it, or didn’t know who else might be thinking the same thing. The movement liberated these suppressed feelings and gave them a visible and powerful new home long before the first civil rights measure was passed.

So it is today. For three decades America has increasingly been going along with the lies of the corporate elite. In time, these lies became remarkably successful in destroying the culture of progress that had blessed this land from the New Deal to the Great Society, and had dramatically improved the role of the worker, the middle class, blacks, and women, just to name a few.

And then it stopped.

But, again, it wasn’t a law or a collection of laws at first. It was a change in the language, the values, the icons and the clichés. It was a new culture that incrementally eradicated what had preceded it and replaced it with what we have today.

To get a sense of how irrational and strange this change has been, consider that among today’s major pop cultural icons are Lindsay Lohan and the Kardashians. Now look at our political icons and consider how similar they are: vapid, talentless, unreliable creatures famous merely for being famous. 

Each movement of cultural change does it differently. Some want admission to the culture. Some want to turn it upside down. Some want to make it irrelevant. Some dream of replacing it with something far better.

And within each movement, each individual can see it differently and perhaps a consensus will be hard to reach.

There is a lusty tradition in American politics of citizens of disparate sorts, places, and status coming together to put power back in its proper place. At such times, the divides of politics, the divisions of class, the contrasts of experience fade long enough to reassert the primacy of the individual over the state, democracy over oligopoly, fairness over exploitation and community over institution. This could be such a time if we are willing to risk it, and one of the soundest way to start is to trade a few old shibboleths for a few new friends.

MORE WAYS TO REBUILD AMERICA

Barack Obama: Our first Common Core president

Sam Smith

As I was reading about Common Core standards I suddenly realized why Barack Obama likes this weird stuff so much: he is a Common Core exemplar, our first Common Core president.

To play the Common Corista's game you need to handle facts, evaluate texts, achieve increased levels of complexity, have a progressive development of reading comprehension, dissect challenging informative discourse, acquire new knowledge, insights, and consider varying perspectives as you read.

And your writing should be logical arguments based on claims, solid reasoning, and relevant evidence.

Bored yet?

If so, it may have something to do with the lack of mention of imagination, metaphor, anecdotes, critical judgment, wisdom, enthusiasm, conscience, story telling, humor, or history. And it certainly doesn't include such earlier exemplar standards such as "if you can't be funny, be interesting" (New Yorker editor Harold Ross) or "write drunk, edit sober." (Ernest Hemingway).

The idea behind Common Core standards is to produce students who are are robots giving the appearance of skill without straying from whatever the current cliches of proper thought demand. New ideas, creativity, morality, appeals to the heart and soul rather than to approved norm are not welcomed. The Common Coristas don't even want their students wasting much time on fiction, history, civics, or social studies.

It's like learning music by memorizing all the chords, tunes, riffs and runs. It still don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

Obama is ideally suited for this since he is our first robotic president, smart, analytical and properly spoken, but, as Gertrude Stein put it, "There's no there there."

The closest thing to a creative political act he has come up with is a 2,000 page healthcare plan randomly comprised of the good, the bad and the indecipherable.

It would get high grades on a Common Core exam but since it is meant to function in real life rather than just in a classroom it leaves much to be desired.

A real politician would have come up with something more like Social Security or Medicare, something that you don't need an economist or lawyer to explain to the average citizen, something that inspires enthusiasm, and which brings in votes rather than endless questions.

Real politicians also come up with metaphors for what they're doing, tell stories that illustrate it, make friends across the aisle to get it passed, and don't stand behind a lectern talking to the American people like we were all in Political Science 101.

And real politicians have a lot of personal friends, something that Obama seems to be strikingly short on.

Those who think that data, process, and analysis are all you need for a good idea, a good policy or a good few years in office are increasingly amongst us.

As for the rest of us, we face a future that is not only rife with pretentious, well-spoken and well argued incompetence, carefully documented and carelessly executed, but also one that is sadly dull, soulless and cruel.

Our only recourse is to flunk the Common Core standards and return to being human.

The silent war

Sam Smith

The biggest war America has fought since World War II began about three decades ago.

It was a silent war without explosions or gunfire. And it was not about geography, because it was a modern war. Instead, it was about money and power.

During these three decades more money and power has been transferred from America’s many to the few at its top than at any time in this country’s existence - a successful civil war by America’s elite against its masses.

A few battles the top has won:

 - The wealth of the top 1% of households is up over 100% since the 1980s.

- The wealth of the poorest 40% of households down over 60% since the 1980s

- Food stamp use is at record levels

- The bottom 90% is earning only $59 more than in 1966

- Wages have fallen to a record low as a share of America’s gross domestic product.

- In the 1950s, corporations paid nearly a third of the federal government’s bills. In 2012 it was a tenth.

- Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs. Today, less than 65 percent of all men in the United States have jobs.

And so on.

While it’s true that the recent economic crisis was not as bad as the Great Depression, it is also true that the New Deal worked hard to restore a decent economy, while the current administration has placed little emphasis on helping those at the bottom – or even in the middle. Instead it has bailed out banks while leaving foreclosed homeowners largely to suffer on their own. It has done little to create new jobs and has repeatedly aligned itself with the austerity aristocracy.

One can’t imagine Obama speaking as FDR once did:

“For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.”

I carry in my pocket a Wiki clip describing the 1930s Works Progress Administration  that illustrates how stunningly different Roosevelt’s New Deal was from Barack Obama’s My Deal: “The WPA employed 8.5 million people in its seven-year history, working on 1.4 million projects, including the building or repair of 103 golf courses, 1,000 airports, 2,500 hospitals, 2,500 sports stadiums, 3,900 schools, 8,192 parks, 12,800 playgrounds, 124,031 bridges, 125,110 public buildings, and 651,087 miles of highways and roads.”

Even a Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, fostered a federal interstate highway program that would eventually cover 45,000 miles.

Obama, on the other hand, has talked of infrastructure but has done little. And while banks have been bailed out, their officers have escaped needed prosecution even as the Occupiers, whose first target was Wall Street, have suffered nearly 8,000 arrests. Meanwhile, some 67,000 bridges need repair.

But then a major goal of the silent war has been to dismantle the progress that Democrats had brought the country under the New Deal and the Great Society.

The two Democratic presidents of this period – Bill Clinton and Obama – have some interesting things in common

Both were carefully vetted by the Democratic Leadership Council, a rightwing group dedicated to dismantling the party’s progressive past. The leading Democratic candidate for 2016, Hillary Clinton, was also an active member of the DLC, which has been so successful that it has now retired, leaving its papers with, yes, the Clinton Foundation.  

As a senator, Obama showed up on the “New Democrat Directory” of the DLC but asked to be removed for it wasn’t the image he wanted to sell to liberals. Yet less than six months after being elected president, he told a congressional group that he was a “New Democrat,”  a code phrase for party dismantlers of the New Deal and Great Society.

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had something else in common. They both had ties to the CIA as young men, a good place for the establishment to check out up and coming applicants to its ranks.

Bill Clinton, according to several agency sources interviewed by biographer Roger Morris, worked as a CIA informer while a Rhodes Scholar in England. Although without visible means of support, he traveled around Europe and the Soviet Union, staying at the ritziest hotel in Moscow. During this period the US government was using well educated assets such as Clinton as part of Operation Chaos, a major attempt to break student resistance to the war and the draft.

They found the right guy. When he reached the White House he helped get rid of important social welfare programs, create job smashing projects like NAFTA, and approved the repeal of legislation that for decades had prevented banks from acting like casinos. And, like Obama, he would never meet a civil liberty he truly liked.

As just one example of the results: before NAFTA, America had a trade surplus with Mexico of $1.6 billion.  By 2010, trade deficit with Mexico was $67 billion.

A young Obama made one or two trips to Pakistan, funded by unknown sources, where he met prominent figures. His mother worked for a number of large institutions with close ties to the CIA and he eventually got a job with Business International, a CIA front. Bill Blum wrote during Obama’s first presidential campaign:

“In his book, not only doesn't Obama mention his employer's name; he fails to say when he worked there, or why he left the job. There may well be no significance to these omissions, but inasmuch as Business International has a long association with the world of intelligence, covert actions, and attempts to penetrate the radical left -- including Students for a Democratic Society -- it's valid to wonder if the inscrutable Mr. Obama is concealing something about his own association with this world.”

Obama clearly passed his tests and by early 2004, wrote Chicago Tribune reporter and biographer David Mendell, 

“Word of Obama's rising star was now spreading beyond Illinois, especially through influential Washington political circles like blue chip law firms, party insiders, lobbying houses. They were all hearing about this rare, exciting, charismatic, up-and-coming African American who unbelievably could win votes across color lines. . . [His handlers and] influential Chicago supporters and fund-raisers all vigorously worked their D.C. contacts to help Obama make the rounds with the Democrats' set of power brokers.”

According to Mendell, Obama had cultivated the support of the privileged few by advocating fiscal restraint and "calling for pay-as-you-go government" and extoling “the merits of free trade and charter schools." He "moved beyond being an obscure good-government reformer to being a candidate more than palatable to the moneyed and political establishment."

A candidate markedly different from who many in a few years would think they were voting for. 

Clinton and Obama helped to end America’s traditional two party system. And they helped create a nation that so pessimistic that even liberals thought a Clinton or Obama was the best they could do.  

There were many other silent war victims, among the saddest being America’s children. Our kids are now being trained to be cultural robots as education bullies remove curiosity, imagination, creativity, cooperation, civics and wisdom from their curriculum. Destroyers of public education like the Gates Foundation and Arnie Duncan want our children to become mere microchips that absorb and regurgitate data and values without ever having to think about, or act upon, what they really mean.

Many who didn’t go along were drugged as the definition of mental disorder expanded to meet the need for compliance in mind and deed to those in charge

And those who sought comfort in their own drugs were arrested and thrown into jail at levels far greater than during alcohol prohibition.

There has also been an unprecedented attack on over half the Bill of Rights, most recently demonstrated by the Obama administration’s assault on the right of privacy, freedom of the press, and  protection from seizures without warrants.

And we have a deteriorating environment that hardly gets on either the government agenda or on the evening news of a media so unwilling to challenge the elite that even the White House Correspondents Association won’t stand up for fellow reporters abused by the administration. 

While it is true that during this period, the status of women, blacks,  and latinos improved relative to that of white men, there is also overwhelming evidence that, in an absolute sense, everyone’s rights markedly declined.

The death toll of the silent war – such as victims from drug prohibition, welfare cutbacks and environmental indifference - has easily exceeded that of any war since WWII. Our climate has been extraordinarily and perhaps permanently endangered. Community has been replaced by Facebook and Iphones and our schools are becoming more like boot camps. Even our universities – where voices of freedom and sanity once broke the silence around them – are now quiet and dutiful recipients of government and corporate grants.

Finally, those responsible for these changes have no particular loyalty to our country. If you are the CEO of a multinational corporation your products need not be made here, your workers hired here, nor your profits deposited here. You no longer need American workers, American customers,  nor an American commitment. America for our elite is now just another address to reach those whose minds and actions are far away. 

Robert A.G. Monks, a former corporate lawyer, corporate CEO, founder of companies, and bank chairman told it well in his book, Citizens Disunited, as Ralph Nader describes:

[Monk] quotes an Apple executive who told The New York Times: "We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries. We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems." Monks responds: "This is what greed looks like in the global epoch of corporatism: plunder the Treasury, to be sure, but then deny all sense of responsibility to your country of domicile, outsource all obligations, and, like maggots, set to work destroying the host from inside by exporting its jobs and depleting its revenue sources."

He then cites Clyde Prestowitz, founder of the Economic Strategy Institute, who wrote that, as a top U.S. government trade negotiator, he went to great lengths to open up the Japanese market for Apple in the early nineteen eighties, adding: "We did all we could and in doing so came to learn that virtually everything Apple had for sale, from the memory chips to the cute pointer mouse, had had its origins in some program wholly or partially supported by U.S. government money."

Monks sums up: "Henry Ford's great success was built in part on his decision to pay his workers a high enough wage so that they could afford the products they were producing. No more. The shrinking middle class, the widening gap between the rich and the poor – these are some of those American ‘problems' that American-born-and-bred corporations like Apple really have no time for."

If you find all this unbelievable, listen to Warren Buffet who has stated, “Of course there is a class war, but it's my class, the rich class, that is waging the war, and we're winning.” Or as the 19th century journalist Henry Demarest Lloyd put it, “If our civilization is destroyed, it will not be by barbarians from below. Our barbarians come from above.”

The barbarians from above have caused more damage to our country than the terrorists they would have us surrender our democracy in order to fight. The barbarians from above have killed more people and caused more loss of life, permanent damage to the environment, economy and civilized community. 

But they had done it quietly, using lies instead of bombs, hedge funds instead of explosions, and misdirected budgets instead of random assaults. But it has still been a deadly war.

Whether and how we can end it remains unclear, but one thing is certain.

We can’t save ourselves without ending the silence.

From our overstocked archives: Notice

Progressive Review, 2000 - The Review intends to resist as long as possible the unruly and repugnant trend towards Germanization and cyberization of the English language. If for no other reason than it makes spell-checking more tedious, TPR will continue to frown upon compound words and excessive capitalization (especially in the middle of words).

TPR believes, as a rule, that only something one might expect find in a telephone book, on a door or a map, or in a bibliography or discography, should be capitalized and that proper spacing must be maintained or we willsoonfindourselvesreadingsomethinglikethis. 

Even at the risk of offending corporate lawyers and public relations departments TPR will, wherever possible, translate such words back into English. It will also continue to regard the ugly and ubiquitous appendage known as "dot com" as the moral equivalent of "Inc." or "Ph.D." or "Esq." and will excise it for other than ironic purposes.

In the beginning Monsanto patented the earth

Sam Smith -Having been involved in farming on and off much of my life, I was stunned to hear on CSPAN radio the justices of the Supreme Court speaking of soy beans as though they were a product of Monsanto.

At least that's how it sounded. To be sure, Monsanto had fired a gene gun into some seeds that gave them a friendly attitude towards the corporation's Roundup herbicide but apparently unrealized by the justices is the fact that soybeans are a product of nature and not of capitalism and the legal system. 

In the portion of the debate I heard, no one bothered to mention this.

As I understood Monsanto's successful argument, if it invented a DNA twister that would allow inoculated prospective parents to have their child avoid measles, those parents' payment for the shots would be good for their baby but not for the baby's children, in which case another license fee would be required even if another shot wasn't. And all three generations were be considered effectively patented by Monsanto  even if there is more to life than the avoidance of measles. They might even have to wear a shirt that confirmed the fact.

If I were a soybean I would be totally insulted by the court's decision, for it implies that it is my herbicide resistance and not my delicious and nutritious taste that defines my being.

If I were more godly, I would consider it atrociously anti-Christian. What's next? In the beginning, Monsanto patented earth?

And as one with some farming experience - including working on an organic beef farm my parents started before Silent Spring - I can promise you I have never heard the term "exhaustion doctrine" used in connection with any living creature or plant until the Supreme Court took up the matter.

There are a lot of other reasons to worry about Monsanto but I'm also worried about a Supreme Court that refers to a plant as a "self-replicating technology" that was "invented" by a corporation.

Did Monsanto plant the seed, care for it, harvest it and sell it?

Its role in the whole process was, in fact, pretty damn small. That's the way nature works.

And if you don't believe me, ask any farmer. Or God.

The end of the First American Republic and the rise of the gradocracy

This is the last in our series, based in part on an remix of earlier pieces, on things that helped cause the collapse of the First American Republic. 

Sam Smith

 

About sixty years ago, America was just a decade past the last war it would ever win. The length of the average work week was down significantly from the 1930s but real income had been soaring and would continue do so through the 1970s. We had a positive trade balance and the share of total income gained by the top 1% of the country was only around 8%, down from 24% in the 1930s.

As Jermie D. Cullip describes it:

"From 1950 to 1959, the total number of females employed increased by 18%. The standard of living during the fifties also steadily rose. Most people expected to own a car and a house, and believed that life for their children would be even better. . . The number of college students doubled. Getting a college education was no longer for the rich or elite

"The decade of the fifties was a decade of major breakthroughs in technology. James Watson and Francis Crick won the Nobel Prize for decoding the molecular structure of DNA. Tuberculosis had all but disappeared, and Jonas Salk's vaccine was wiping out polio in the United States. . .

"Over the decade the housing supply increased 27 percent . . . Growth in the economy also led to increasing popularity of other financial intermediaries. Life insurance companies flourished for the first half of the decade and a large number of new private firms entered the market to absorb the excesses of personal savings.

“Savings and Loan Association holdings of mortgage loans during the decade clearly demonstrate the boom in construction at this time. In 1950 $13.6 billion was held rising to $60.1 billion in 1960. Another important growth in the 1950s capital markets was in pension funds. This industry grew from $11 billion in 1950 to $44 billion in 1960.

"By mid-1955, the country had pulled out of the previous year's recession and gross national product was growing at a rate of 7.6 percent. The boom was so great that the budget for 1956 predicted a surplus of $4.1 billion. With the surges in production and the economy, the 1950s is often recognized as the decade that eliminated poverty for the great majority of Americans. Over the decade, GNP per capita almost doubled and the public welfare reacted accordingly as the cost of living index rose by just 1 percent and unemployment dropped to 4.1 percent'"

All in all not a bad decade to be in if you were running a business. So much so, in fact, that some began griping about it all in books like The Organization Man and plays like Death of a Salesman.

But here is the truly amazing part - given all we have been taught in recent years: America did it even as its universities were turning out less than 5,000 MBAs a year.

By 2005 these schools graduated 142,000 MBAs in one year.

There are plenty of worthy arguments to be made correlating the rise of business school culture with the decline of our economy and our country. A cursory examination of American business suggests that its major product has become wasted energy. And not just the physical sort Compute all the energy loss created by corporate lawyers, Washington lobbyists, marketing consultants, CEO benefits, advertising agencies, leadership seminars, human resource supervisors, strategic planners and industry conventions and it is amazing that this country has any manufacturing base at all. We have created an economy based not on actually doing anything, but on facilitating, supervising, planning, managing, analyzing, tax advising, marketing, consulting or defending in court what might be done if we had time to do it. The few remaining truly productive companies become immediate targets for another entropic activity, the leveraged buyout and the rise of the killer hedge fund.

And it was not just business school graduates that were the problem. In 2009, the Washingtonian Magazine estimated there were 80,000 lawyers in Washington.

The law has always been a favored profession for the Congress. Even Thomas Jefferson complained, “If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour? "

But the interesting thing about lawyers in Washington, is that the percent in Congress actually declined in recent years. Using the Washingtonian’s estimates, about a third of the attorneys are in the government bureaucracy and a large part of the other two thirds are paid to influence them.

In short, instead of having lawyers just writing laws, we have them administering government and lobbying those who do.

As for our presidents, while 40% in the past century have had law degrees, Barack Obama and William Howard Taft are bookends in the sense that they were far more into the law than almost all their colleagues, many of whom seem to have used the law as an early way station on their road to something important.

Taft was an assistant prosecutor, superior court judge, solicitor general and and a federal court of appeals judge.

On the other hand, Gerald Ford opened a law firm and one year later was an ensign in the World War II Navy. Coolidge was a country lawyer. Bill Clinton had his eye on bigger things, serving as a law professor for just a year before running for Congress. FDR was in the state house within two years of his law degree

In fact, the commitment to law was so weak that Richard Nixon could declare that he was, in the words of Wikipedia, “the only modern president to have worked as a practicing attorney,” He had risen to full partner.

It was a given until recent times, that from a political point of view, understanding law or economics or business was a valuable asset but one that fell far behind social intelligence upon which successful politics relied. As my father, a lawyer who worked in the New Deal, would tell my buddies, “Go to law school, then do something else.” Roosevelt wasn’t as gracious towards the academic elites: “"I took economics courses in college for four years, and everything I was taught was wrong."

Obama thus represents a new era in American politics: the ultimate triumph of the gradocracy. Here is Wikipedia’s summary of his early career:

“In late 1988, Obama entered Harvard Law School. He was selected as an editor of the Harvard Law Review at the end of his first year and president of the journal in his second year.  During his summers, he returned to Chicago, where he worked as an associate at the law firms of Sidley Austin in 1989 and Hopkins & Sutter in 1990. After graduating with a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard in 1991, he returned to Chicago. 

“In 1991, Obama accepted a two-year position as Visiting Law and Government Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School to work on his first book. He then taught at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years—as a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996, and as a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004—teaching constitutional law. 

"In 1993, he joined Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a 13-attorney law firm specializing in civil rights litigation and neighborhood economic development, where he was an associate for three years from 1993 to 1996, then of counsel from 1996 to 2004. His law license became inactive in 2007. 

Key to such a career is intense attention to process, regulations, the manipulation of language and data. Applied to politics, this means the human factor can start to bring up the rear. Politics is then no longer like music in which soul and skill are melded; instead it becomes another bureaucracy. Good evidence of this in the Obama years would be Obamacare, a two thousand page hard to decipher collection of virtue, uncertain results, payoffs to the health industry, and excessive paper work. A good politician of another time would have led with something that everyone understood, such as lowering the age of Medicare, and then adding on their favorite sweetheart deals.

Another example of gradocracy is what has happened to public education. A two hundred year old hallmark of American democracy is now being dismantled for a combination of corrupt profit and distorted theory. Data collection – i.e. standardized tests – has taken time previously used for history, civics, and other things that gave mere facts some context. And taken time away from sports or theater, things that forced one to apply skill and knowledge in a cooperative manner.

Theory – subject to no testing at all - has replaced empirical wisdom. And teachers have been reduced to minor bureaucrats dutifully fulfilling procedures of dubious or destructive value. Add to this the corrupt goals of the education industry that is driving the war on public education and you have one of the most profound examples of child abuse that we have known.

It is not that it is wrong to study or practice the law, economics, business or education. But to usurp other skills, behavior, empirical knowledge and types of wisdom makes no more sense than for a dentist to attempt to instruct an attorney on how to address the court because he’s an expert on teeth.

Finally, at times, it seems that there are no governments anymore, only budget offices. As the numerologists have risen in power, programs increasingly became transformed into line items. Numbers began serving as adjectives, ideas were reduced to figures and policy became a matter of where one placed the decimal point.

We have been taken over by legal lemmings, process perverts, and data drones.

But then, as Peter Hennessy Whitehall, former head of the British Civil Service put it: “The business of the civil service is the orderly management of decline.”
 Conclusion

This concludes the sad part of the story, overwhelming evidence that America’s first republic has been wrecked and that its culture is but a bad imitation of what it once was. This evidence has come from politics, education, business, the arts, and the media.

Even what is perhaps the best exception is also a highly ironic one: remarkable advances in cyber technology have encouraged us to be more isolated from communities and more defined by our niche interests than the common values that create a functioning society.

About the most important job of a democracy -- next to serving its people -- is to make sure it stays a democracy. Forms of government don't have tenure, and governments that rely on the consent of the governed -- rather than, say, on tanks and prisons -- require constant tending. As things now stand, we could easily become the first people in history to lose democracy and its constitutional freedoms simply because we have forgotten what they are about.

The major political struggle has become not between conservative and liberal but between ourselves and our political, economic, social and media elites. Between the toxic and the natural, the corporate and the communal, the technocratic and the human, the competitive and the cooperative, the efficient and the just, meaningless data and meaningful understanding, the destructive and the decent.

Today almost every principle upon which this country was founded is being turned on its head. Instead of liberty we are being taught to prefer order, instead of democracy we are taught to be follow directions, instead of debate we are inundated with propaganda. Most profoundly, American citizens are no longer considered by their elites to be members or even worker drones of society, but rather as targets - targets of opportunity by corporations and of suspicion and control by government.

So what the hell do we do about it?

In Washington there is a neighborhood known as Shaw that until the modern civil rights movement and desegregation, was an African-American community shut out without a vote, without economic power, without access, and without any real hope that any of this would change.

Its response was remarkable. For example, in 1886 there were only about 15 black businesses in the area. By 1920, with segregation in full fury, there were more than 300.

Every aspect of the community followed suit. Among the institutions created within these few square miles was a building and loan association, a savings bank, the only good hotel in the Washington where blacks could stay, the first full-service black YMCA in the country, the Howard Theatre (opened with black capital twenty years before Harlem's Apollo became a black stage) and two first rate movie palaces.

There were the Odd Fellows, the True Reformers, and the Prince Hall Lodge. There were churches and religious organizations, a summer camp, a photography club, settlement houses, and the Washington Urban League.

Denied access to white schools, the community created a self-sufficient educational system good enough to attract suburban African-Americans students as well as teachers with advanced degrees from all over the country. And just to the north, Howard University became the intellectual center of black America. You might have run into Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, or Duke Ellington, all of whom made the U Street area their home before moving to New York.

All this occurred while black Washingtonians were being subjected to extraordinary economic obstacles and being socially and politically ostracized. If there ever was a culture entitled to despair and apathy it was black America under segregation.

Yet not only did these African-Americans develop self-sufficiency, they did so without taking their eyes off the prize. Among the other people you might have found on U Street were Thurgood Marshall and Charles Houston, laying the groundwork for the modern civil rights movement.

Older residents would remember the former neighborhood with a mixture of pain and pride -- not unlike the ambivalence found in veterans recalling a war. None would voluntarily return to either segregation or the battlefield but many would know that some of their own best moments of courage, skill, and heart had come when the times were at their worst.

Another example is Umbria, a section of Italy north of Rome remarkably indifferent to 500 years of its history, where even the homes and whole villages seem to grow like native plants out of the rural earth rather than being placed there by human effort. Yet the Umbrians have been invaded, burned, or bullied by the Etruscans, Roman Empire, Goths, Longobards, Charlemagne, Pippin the Short, the Vatican, Mussolini, the German Nazis, and, most recently, the World Trade organization. Umbria is a reminder of the durability of the human spirit during history's tumults, an extremely comforting thought to an American these days.

Or consider the increasingly cited novel, 1984. Orwell saw it coming, only his timing was off. The dystopia described in 1984 is so overwhelming that one almost forgets that most residents of Oceana didn't live in it. Only about two percent were in the Inner Party and another 13% in the Outer Party. The rest numbering some 100 million were the proles.

Orwell's division of labor and power was almost precisely replicated in East Germany decades later, where about one percent belonged to the General Secretariat of the Communist Party, and another 13% being far less powerful party members.

As we move towards - and even surpass - the fictional bad dreams of Orwell and the in many ways more prescient Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World,', it is helpful to remember that these nightmares were actually the curse of the elites and not of those who lived in the quaint primitive manner of humans rather than joining the living dead at the zenith of illusionary power.

This bifurcation of society into a weak, struggling, but sane, mass and a manic depressive elite that is alternately vicious and afraid, unlimited and imprisoned, foreshadows what we find today - an elite willing, on the one hand, to occupy any corner of the world and, on the other, terrified of young men with minimal weapons.

Strange as it may seem, it is in this dismal dichotomy between countryside and the political and economic capitals that the hope for saving America's soul resides. The geographical and conceptual parochialism of those who have made this mess leaves vast acres of our land still free in which to nurture hopes, dreams, and perhaps even to foster the eventual eviction of those who have done us such wrong.

Successfully confronting the present disaster will require far more than attempting to serially blockade its serial evils, necessary as this is. There must also be a guerilla democracy that defends, fosters, and celebrates our better selves - not only to provide an alternative but to create physical space for decent Americans to enjoy their lives while waiting for things to get better. It may, after all, take the rest of their lifetimes. We must not only condemn the worst, but offer witness for the better. And create places in which to live it.

Some reasons Obama is screwing up

To understand why Obama isn't doing better, examining political issues only takes you so far. Here are some non-political problems that belong in the mix.

Sam Smith, 2012 -  I plan to vote for Barack Obama despite considering him a pretty lousy and reactionary president. I’ll be doing this because I don’t consider presidential elections a choice of leaders but of battlefields. I also believe that in such elections, poker is a better guide than virtue. Obama is the best bet for a lousy hand.

That said, with eight months left to go, I’d like to get something off my chest  while it’s still relatively safe to say things like this. I not only don’t like Obama’s politics, I don’t like him all that much either. And I’m convinced that I’m not alone and that a major part of Obama’s problem is not political but personal.

I was reminded of this watching that video of Harvard law school student president Obama lecturing his classmates. I was surprised that even at such a young age he was so preachy and didactic, albeit combined with the occasional and thoroughly scripted moment of light humor. It is as though he has gone through his entire life standing behind a virtual pulpit and teleprompter, where he berates, grates and irritates.

There are several things wrong with this: for one thing it carries the subtext – you might call it critical speech theory if you were at Harvard Law - that the listener is not as bright as the speaker and, for another, it gets boring pretty quickly. Obama typically assumes the role of a professor, which leaves the listener in the position of a student rather than of a fellow citizen.

While the view of many towards Obama is driven by antipathy towards his ethnicity, I suspect there are many more, like me, who hear in Obama not the voice of blackness but of Harvard Law School, a robot of rigorously rehearsed rationality who seems somehow incapable of normal conversation, passion or beliefs.

It is the sound of otohbotoh – on the one hand, but on the other hand. It is the sound of data without dreams, of citations without soul, of examination without empathy, and anecdotes seemingly pulled from a TV commercial rather than from real life.

I also sense in Obama the character of someone who from an early age was told repeatedly that he was greater than, in fact, he was. This narcissism occasionally spills out, such as in comparisons of himself with other presidents or speaking of what he is going to do without any reference to Congress’ constitutional role in the matter.

Obama grew up in a culture in which data, legal details, management procedures, and presumed process takes precedence over what is actually accomplished. His administration reflects this in a two thousand page healthcare bill and a prescription for a national  electronic health database with so little concern for privacy. And soon, his solicitor general will be defending this bill before the Supreme Court,  arguing the superiority of a commerce clause that only lawyers can love over the rest of our Constitution. But, in the end, esoteric legal arguments don’t change many votes.

Further, to exercise the aforementioned skills, it is necessary that the federal government become a haven for law and business school graduates, data demons and process pushers. We’ve been headed this way a long time, and Obama is only the most recent and most exaggerated of the lot, but you get little sense he values anything that stems from actual experience, pragmatic suggestion, or advisers who are wise, inspired, or sensitive. He doesn’t even seem to like to talk with people from the Hill.

Further,  if Obama and his wife have any sizable number of friends not dependent on power and political circumstances, it is a well kept secret. People without unpowerful friends are people to be careful of.

Finally, Obama is not honest. Not in a slimy way, like, say, a former Arkansas governor, but in an intellectually manipulative fashion. He frequently seems to be attempting to dredge up some verbal slick trick that will  get him through the evening news, but it just reinforces the idea that he is not someone you can count on. It began with his presidential campaign, which portrayed him as a liberal, which he certainly wasn’t. 

Progressive Review, 2009 - As we have noted, one of the unanswered questions about Barack Obama is how a young politician of such little achievement got so far so fast - from state senator to president in four years. Bill Blum provides new light on the subject.

To understand this phenomenon, it is important to recognize that if a young Obama was vetted or otherwise used by the CIA, it was not all that unusual. From the 1950s on, the agency repeatedly interfered in the education of the talented young by recruiting or co-opting them for its own purposes. Yale's Skull & Bones Club, for example, was a classic case of a recruitment camp for future intelligence types. The purpose - for the short run - is more information, and - for the long run - a supply of US future government officials whom the agency trusts and can use. And it often begins with a bright college student an insider thinks might fill the bill. . . .

Bill Blum, Anti-Empire Report - In his autobiography, "Dreams From My Fathers", Barack Obama writes of taking a job at some point after graduating from Columbia University in 1983. He describes his employer as "a consulting house to multinational corporations" in New York City, and his functions as a "research assistant" and "financial writer." The odd part of Obama's story is that he doesn't mention the name of his employer.

However, a New York Times story of 2007 identifies the company as Business International Corporation. Equally odd is that the Times did not remind its readers that the newspaper itself had disclosed in 1977 that Business International had provided cover for four CIA employees in various countries between 1955 and 1960. The British journal, Lobster Magazine -- which, despite its incongruous name, is a venerable international publication on intelligence matters -- has reported that Business International was active in the 1980s promoting the candidacy of Washington-favored candidates in Australia and Fiji. In 1987, the CIA overthrew the Fiji government after but one month in office because of its policy of maintaining the island as a nuclear-free zone, meaning that American nuclear-powered or nuclear-weapons-carrying ships could not make port calls. After the Fiji coup, the candidate supported by Business International, who was much more amenable to Washington's nuclear desires, was reinstated to power.

In his book, not only doesn't Obama mention his employer's name; he fails to say when he worked there, or why he left the job. There may well be no significance to these omissions, but inasmuch as Business International has a long association with the world of intelligence, covert actions, and attempts to penetrate the radical left -- including Students for a Democratic Society -- it's valid to wonder if the inscrutable Mr. Obama is concealing something about his own association with this world.

Colony Net, 2008 - In an effort to shore up his foreign policy credentials during the primary campaign, the junior senator from Illinois - then in a tight primary contest with Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania - bragged about the time he had spent in Pakistan. He argued that Clinton's foreign policy "experience" consisted only of quick photo ops, while he had spent "quality time" with "real people." Not only that, he had actually gone on a partridge-hunting trip near the Pakistan city of Larkana. His partridge-hunting apparently impressed the gun owners of Pennsylvania very little, inasmuch as Clinton won that primary by 10 per cent.

Eager to impress the Pennsylvania crowd with his "foreign policy experience" and knowledge of guns, Obama thus let slip the fact that he'd been to Pakistan. (It is believed that he made two trips to Pakistan.) There must have been more to that trip than meets the eye, however, because the candidate has said virtually nothing about it since. You won't find anything on the Obama campaign site. . .

Astute readers may have begun to wonder how a struggling young college student with a divorced, middle-class mother managed to fund a three week trip to Pakistan. . . But Barry Obama-Soetoro was off shooting partridges in Pakistan, hosted by a young man named Muhammed Hasan Chandio. Chandio's family owned a substantial amount of land in the region, and Obama apparently met him while both were students. (Chandio is currently a financial consultant in New York, and a donor to the Obama campaign.). . .

Another of Obama's hosts in Pakistan was Muhammadian Mian Soomro, Obama's senior by about 11 years, son of a Pakistani politician and himself a politician, who became interim President of Pakistan when Pervez Musharraf resigned in August of 2008. Soomro has said that "someone"? personally requested that he "watch over" Barack Obama, but will not name that individual . . .

A trip to Pakistan is no doubt more than a jaunt to a Florida beach. Few Americans would consider traveling there now, thinking it to be a dangerous place. In 1981, when one of Obama's possible two trips there occurred, it was less safe. Because of the war between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, millions of Afghan refugees fled to Pakistan, which was under martial law. The Afghan "mujahedeen" fighters had bases in Pakistan, and they moved back and forth to fight the Soviets. . .

In the early 1980s, Pakistan was one of the destinations Americans were prohibited from visiting - it was on the State Department's list of banned countries. Non-Muslims were not welcome, unless they were on official business, formalized through the embassy of the country of origin. The simple truth is that no young American would have a reason to or be able to visit Pakistan in 1981, unless he was on official government business of which the State Department was aware. . .

Adding to the mix is the fact that Ann Dunham, Obama's mother, had visited at least 13 countries in her lifetime, and had worked for companies that required travel to Pakistan. Her employers appear to have included the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Ford Foundation, Women's World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank. Note that USAID and the Ford Foundation have (allegedly) been used as covers for CIA agents. . . .

Obama also was one of eight students selected to study sovietology by Columbia professor Zbigniew Brzezinski who, if he wasn't a CIA official, was as close as you can otherwise get. Brzesinski is now a member of Obama's inner circle.
Progressive Review - If the Obama Pakistan story sounds somewhat familiar, it may because the Review was one of the few places that reported one of Bill Clinton's similarly interesting trips:

"1960s: Bill Clinton, according to several agency sources interviewed by biographer Roger Morris, works as a CIA informer while briefly and erratically a Rhodes Scholar in England. Although without visible means of support, he travels around Europe and the Soviet Union, staying at the ritziest hotel in Moscow. During this period the US government is using well educated assets such as Clinton as part of Operation Chaos, a major attempt to break student resistance to the war and the draft. According to former White House FBI agent Gary Aldrich Clinton is told by Oxford officials that he is no longer welcome there."

And it is worth noting that, when you throw in the Bushes, we have had a quarter century of presidents with unusually close ties to the CIA. 

A final factor from Obama's past that may help to explain his current difficulties is that he learned his politics in Chicago. Political style doesn't come only from ideology, but from culture. Different places teach people different ways of being politicians. 

For example, Jack Kennedy learned his politics in Boston, where there was a long Irish tradition of friendly leadership across difficult boundaries. 

Chicago, on the other hand,  is the place where a precinct captain once said to a vote, "What are you doing here? We've already voted you." And where a candidate ran on the slogan, "Vote for Fred and nobody gets hurt." The traditional payoff for power in Chicago was unquestioned privilege. That's why Mayor Daley was so mad when a bunch of rowdy, rude activists messed up his town at the 1968 convention. And Chicago columnist Mike Ryoko once suggested that the city's motto be, "Where's Mine?"

Obama has the feel of a successful Chicago politician. He's gotten his and he doesn't think anyone should challenge it. The only problem is that America is a little more complicated than Chicago.

The tangled web of Benghazi and birth certificates

Sam Smith - As Sir Walter Scott noted in his poem "Marmion," about the 1513 Battle of Flodden Field, "Oh what tangled webs we weave, when first we practice to deceive."

In neither of the Republicans’ two favorite scandals about Obama – Banghazi and his birth certificate – is there any evidence pointing to significant misdoings or constitution problems. What there is in both cases, however, is evidence of Obama and his crew attempting to manipulate a story in a way that ultimately badly backfired on them.

 As I wrote in 2011 of the birth certificate controversy:

If you want to insist that Obama wasn’t born in Hawaii then you not only have to believe that Governor Abercrombie is a liar but that the notices in the newspapers of the time were false. And why? Could it be that Obama’s parents were launching his presidential campaign that early?

Unfortunately, however, one hard fact makes this story more complicated, namely that the state of Hawaii, citing its laws, will not release the president’s full birth record and Obama has failed to asked it to do so.

While the first problem can be written off to legalistic obstinacy, the second is, to put it gently, curious. Why does a Harvard lawyer let such a claim continue to fester in public without taking the simple steps necessary to quash it?

The state has produced what might be called a certificate of the certificate, giving the basics of what the original document purportedly says. CNN has suggested that the original certificate no longer exists since all such records were discarded in 2001 but the state denies it. Hawaii is, in effect, denying the absence of something it can’t or won’t produce.

No one has come up with a good answer for all this, but several explanations spring to mind: perhaps the original birth certificate has disappeared. Perhaps there is some other information on the form that might embarrass Obama. Or that perhaps that natural born problem, Rahm Emmanuel, told Obama to screw it and let the complainers go to hell.

Certainly the way Obama handled the matter during the campaign was strange.

After going through the legal and historical evidence supporting Obama’s right to be president, I concluded: “The matter, however could be far more easily resolved if someone would just come up with that damn birth certificate. Hawaii, for example, could change its law to permit it, or Obama could simply request that it be released. As it is, he has hurt himself and provided a feast for fools.”

One year later – and four since it had first became an issue – a copy of the full certificate showed up but Obama is still paying the price for trying to manipulate the story.

The Benghazi saga has some of the same feel. There is no evidence that anything unusual happened real time in that incident. Probably equivalent miscalculations are made weekly in Afghanistan and nobody even notices.

But, once again the attempt to reorganize and reinterpret the story after the fact has come back to haunt Obama and Hillary Clinton. When you have a long term admired State Department veteran blowing the whistle, you know something may be wrong.

To understand how this happens, it helps to remember that Obama, the Clintons, and their ilk consider themselves extremely clever. They also are post-modernists who believe that reality is just another thing to be repackaged.

Only sometimes it doesn’t work.

I was, in fact,  trying to ignore the Benghazi story as a waste of time. And then I heard, as CBS noted, “Greg Hicks, the former deputy chief of mission in Libya, said lawyers from the State Department told him not to cooperate with a congressional investigation into the Sept. 11 attack on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi.”

And this in the Washington Post: “In two blockbuster bits of testimony, Hicks stated that Cheryl Mills, Clinton confidante (and her husband’s impeachment lawyer) called him to instruct him not to speak with a congressional delegation and specifically Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah); meanwhile, Nordstrom indicated that State’s Accountability Review Board never interviewed the top decision makers in the department.”

Below are some clips from the Progressive Review that mention Cheryl Mills in the past. Note the similarities in the tangled webs she and Hillary Clinton weaved to accomplish their ends back then and are apparently still doing.

So far, however, Hillary Clinton has shown that, if clever enough, one can practice to deceive and get away with it, but the Benghazi incident is a healthy warning of what lies in wait if she runs for President. Such stories may be exaggerated and distorted, but they are seldom buried.

1998 Report of The House Committee on Government Reform And Oversight:

The committee believes that there is substantial evidence that in September 1996 then-Associate (now-Deputy) Counsel to the President Cheryl Mills, with the knowledge and concurrence of then-White House Counsel Jack Quinn, knowingly and willfully obstructed the investigative authority of this committee by withholding documents that were plainly responsive to the committee requests for documents and information. Moreover, when this obstruction was brought to light in a hearing before the committee, Ms. Mills lied under oath about the documents and the circumstances surrounding their non-production. Ms. Mills's actions, withholding responsive documents from the committee, delayed the committee for more than a year from obtaining important evidence . . . Moreover, the failure to produce these documents when they were discovered in September 1996 had the effect of delaying the committee's investigation long enough to allow memories of relevant witnesses to fade for more than a year until they could plausibly testify that they could no longer remember the meetings or conversations reflected in the documents. The committee believes that Ms. Mills was fully aware of these potential effects and deliberately engaged in the withholding of documents for that purpose. In the second term, she was promoted from Associate Counsel to the President to Deputy Counsel to the President.

Newsmax, 2000: In an affidavit sworn by former Freedom of Information Act division head Sonya Stewart, Stewart details the efforts of the administration to withhold secret documents demanded under the FOIA by Judicial Watch and Congress. In her affidavit Stewart voiced fears of retribution for coming forward with her explosive charges.

"I come forward to present my declaration to this Court with great trepidation and grave concern about retribution and retaliation which may be directed at me, both professionally and personally, as a result of this affidavit," she wrote. "Nevertheless, I present this declaration out of my obligation to uphold the interests of justice as I swore to do upon my installation as a federal employee. I hope, believe, and expect that the Court will protect me" . . .

As head of the FOIA offices Stewart said she was aware of the political manipulations involved in the administration's attempts to hide documents subject to the act. Among those named by Stewart as having been involved in the cover-up was former White House Deputy Counsel to the President Cheryl Mills, one of the lawyers representing Clinton in his Senate impeachment trial . . . "I know that Ms. Mills, in her position as Deputy Counsel to the President, advised Commerce officials to withhold certain documents. In my many years working for the federal government on FOIA and other matters, and in my experience gathering and responding to FOIA and Congressional requests for information, I have never known or heard of a federal agency collaborating or discussing releasing or withholding documents with White House officials . .

Progressive Review - We reported the other day that former White House lawyer Cheryl Mills, called to testify in the e-mail scandal, couldn't remember key facts and instead lectured a House committee on the issues it should be looking into rather than the missing correspondence. We have proposed a neologism for this sort of non-responsiveness: "to Hillary," after the president's wife who once told a House committee "I don't recall" or its equivalent 50 times in 42 paragraphs.

Since the media gave scant or no coverage to Mills' appearance, however, we were unable until now to find the full citation. Here is Mills hillarying the committee in all its glory:

CHERYL MILLS (upon being asked about the missing e-mails: "[Your investigations will not] feed one person, give shelter to someone who is homeless, educate one child, provide health care for one family or offer justice to one African-American or Hispanic juvenile . . . You could spend your time making the lives of the individuals you serve better, as opposed to tearing down the staff of a president with whose vision and policies you disagree."

Remember, however, that Mills is a highly trained professional. The average reader should not attempt such a reply in a court of law or before a congressional committee.

Mills performance was not reported by major media, which had lionized her during the impeachment trial. Among the slobberers was NBC's Tom Brokaw: "When Cheryl Mills, an African American lawyer, speaking to a mostly male, mostly white audience, concluded her arguments with a forceful defense of the President's record on civil rights, the note taking stopped and she had their complete attention, many of the Senators rushing up afterwards to congratulate her."

On Today, Pete Williams spoke of "A devotion that led her to conclude her defense with an emotional tribute to the President as a champion of civil rights." Said Newsweek: "A star is born."

Lost in the praise was the fact that on November 6, 1997, Mills had admitted to the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee that she and White House Counsel Jack Quinn had withheld documents for 15 months, including a memo suggesting Clinton wanted the $1.7 million White House Office Data Base shared with the DNC. A House Committee report declared her testimony to be false.

Marc Ambinder, Atlantic, 2010 - The authors [of  Game Change by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann] write on page 50 about the "war room within a war room" that Hillary Clinton put together to deal with questions about her husband's "libido." The circle of trust included media strategist Howard Wolfson, lawyer Cheryl Mills and confidant Patti Solis Doyle. The war room within a war room dismissed or discredited much of the gossip floating around, but not all of it. The stories about one woman were more concrete, and after some discreet fact-finding, the group concluded that they were true: that BIll was indeed having an affair -- and not a frivolous one-night stand but a sustained romantic relationship. . . For months, thereafter, the war room within a war room braced for the explosion, which her aides knew could come at any moment.

Progressive Review, 1995 - A burglar breaks into the car of White House lawyer Cheryl Mills as she was preparing to testify before a Senate committee on the Whitewater affair. Taken, according to a friend, were her notes on handling Vince Foster's papers after his death.