Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? Obama is from America, Birthers are from Kookistan

If there’s ever been a phenomenal, breathtakingly ludicrous political fringe, excluding the organization that actively pursues legislation that legalizes man-boy love, it would have to be the “birthers”. Boy, I really yearn for the days of Karl Rove.

I’m referring of course to a noisome movement of obstreperous ultra-right wing nut jobs that is currently hell-bent on co-opting the entire GOP’s “Just say No” agenda by relentlessly questioning the veracity of President Obama’s birth certificate. Moreover, the birthers have managed to convince themselves that Barack Obama was not born in a manger in the United States, and therefore is ineligible for the presidency. And to think all us loony liberals were contumaciously clinging to absurdist, unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud, voter disenfranchisement and intimidation, ballot alteration, ballot substitution, ballot box stuffing, and ballot destruction so as to deny the Presidency of George W. Bush.

At any rate, one woman claims to have an authentic copy of President Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate.

Orley, I have a better question. Have you asked your doctor if Thorzine is right for you?

Indeed, it has been abundantly shown that there is not a modicum of authenticity, or even the vaguest ambiguity, to validate the birther claim. Hawaiian public officials have stated ad nauseam that Barack Obama was, indeed, born in Honolulu on August 4, 1961, and they have happily supplied copies of his certificate of birth to the birthers upon demand. If you’re a die-hard birther, however, you must believe that these sinister Hawaiian officials are involved in some diabolical scheme to infiltrate your minds with hope and change. How else do you explain how Hawaiian pineapples could wind up on a pizza?

Alarming enough, a recent political survey discovered that 83 percent of Democrats and Independents absolutely, positively believe–no shit–that Barack Obama was born in the United States, whereas only a mere 42 percent of Republicans believe he was. That a fairly sizable chunk of Republicans are unconvinced is irrefutable proof that the party is drifting further and further away from reality, ensnared in the brazen lies and rumors propagated by far-right wing radio and television.

But it isn’t just relegated to Fox News or Rush Limbaugh...

Seemingly beyond the healthy bounds of sanity is CNN anchor Lou Dobbs, who has been devoting countless shows to the birther lunacy, despite the fact the he claims to not believe in it. It is almost equivalent to not believing in leprechauns and coming into work every day in a green cap, orange beard, and green-striped shoes.  Of course, controversy is nothing new to Mr. Dobbs who has often substituted objectivity and the truth in his unrelenting crusade against illegal immigration by regularly citing erroneous facts and figures.

Mr.  Dobbs’ undying love affair with the “birther” story is increasingly becoming a quite an issue for CNN, which prides itself on presenting news without the fervent left/right biases commonly found on MSNBC and Fox News.  But hey, at least he’s not screaming at illegal aliens anymore.

One must ask what the motivations are for the birther movement for orchestrating such a patently absurd campaign? Is it the fact that some people are uncomfortable with the first African American president? Is it that some people had the bongo drums played on their soft spots like Ricky Ricardo?

Nonetheless, any attempt at explaining the birther movement is akin to debating whether it’s hot or cold in Atlantis. In sum, nothing remotely substantive can be extracted from this committed (non pun intended) mass of sad, pathetic, and miserably uninformed people. I just hope that they find a better scanner.

Review of Underground: My Life With SDS and the Weathermen

Underground: My Life With SDS and the Weathermen
by Mark Rudd
324 pages, Morrow, $25.99

In mentioning to people that I was reviewing his book, I’ve been surprised to find Mark Rudd less widely remembered than I’d expected.  It appears that if you didn’t arrive in college by a certain point, you don’t know who he is, the drop off in recognition coinciding with part two of the tale told in his new memoir, Underground: My Life With SDS and the Weathermen.  Up to that point he was famous long ago, no doubt.  Chairman of Columbia University’s Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and its 1968 student strike coordinating committee, he was the very model of a modern student radical.  (Although just how archetypical is disputed: a photo caption in the book calls him “the prototype of the Doonesbury character, Megaphone Mark,” but in Boston the word was that the model was local writer Mark Zanger who’d gone to Yale with Gary Trudeau.)

The events at Columbia very simply set the standard for the student activism of the day.  SDS and the Columbia Student Afro-American Society (SAS) had mounted a campaign fundamentally challenging their prominent university’s role – from the global to the local.  They wanted Columbia out of the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), in Rudd’s words, “an obscure twelve-university consortium” that in the Vietnam era developed “such techniques and weapons as the use of chemical herbicides to destroy the insurgents’ jungle cover – the horrible ‘defoliation’ using highly toxic Agent Orange, and the use of airpower for counterinsurgency.”  And there “was even an IDA report on the suppression of ghetto insurgency.”   And the two organizations also opposed the school’s plan to build a new gym in Morningside Park, taking their lead from Harlem residents who considered it an unwanted encroachment upon their neighborhood.

Protests eventually led to the student take over of five university buildings.  There were over seven hundred arrests, several hundred injuries, and a student strike.  Columbia dropped both IDA and the gym.  Tom Hayden, SDS leader of an earlier day who had actually participated in the Columbia building take overs, wrote a Ramparts magazine piece calling for “two, three, many Columbias,” to echo Che Guevara’s call for “two, three, many Vietnams.”

After being expelled from Columbia, Rudd dedicated himself to helping spread the word through SDS, which was at the time the loosest of organizations.  Get five students willing to plunk down five dollars apiece for dues and you had a nationally recognized chapter and you could say and do what you wished.  But by 1968, there were many chapters where you would find a new flavor in the mix – the Progressive Labor Party.  PL were the Marxists your mother, J. Edgar Hoover, and the comic books you read as a kid all warned you about, humorless dogmatists who argued in terms that you knew must be (poorly) translated from some other language – Chinese, presumably, as they appeared to be Maoists.

PL did have the useful side effect of making some people curious enough to actually read Karl Marx and associates because they figured that no one would ever have heard of him if he was actually as ridiculous as these people made him out to be.  But as Rudd puts it, “The most pernicious effect of PL was that SDS regulars, myself included, became convinced that we needed a well-worked-out revolutionary theory – and dogma.”  And his crowd came up with a doozie: a manifesto called “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”  (after a Bob Dylan lyric) which gave the group the name that stuck – the Weathermen.

No one who took part is likely to forget the 1969 SDS national convention.  After having your picture snapped by photographers from every government agency that maintained an interest in such things and submitting to frisking (pretty much like an airport today, but unusual for the time), you entered the vast and gloomy Chicago Coliseum for a couple of days of theater of the absurd.  First up was a group from Ohio and Michigan – literally – they leapt up on their chairs in the midst of some procedural debate and start waving Little Red Books, chanting “Mao, Mao, Mao Tse-Tung!  Dare to struggle, dare to win!”  Rudd explains that the event was intended tongue in cheek, as a sort of mockery of PL, a possibility I had not previously entertained since it had seemed of a piece with everything else that happened at the gathering.

The Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), a faction that had developed in the organization’s national office, comprising the Weathermen and another group with which they had already split, controlled the agenda and brought in a representative of the Black Panther Party to denounce PL and when that maneuver went bad on them, they declared PL expelled from SDS.  But since it was not clear that RYM actually commanded more support than PL, rather than try to physically eject them, RYM opted to repair to an inner chamber of the Coliseum and the two conventions proceeded at odds with one another under one large roof.  (And separate friskings for each convention.)

In the inner hall, Bob Avakian (who has himself now been underground for nearly three decades even though it’s not clear if anyone’s looking for him) delivered an amazingly fast speech retroactively outlining the principles of unity that had necessitated PL’s expulsion from SDS.  They included support for the revolutionary governments of China, Cuba, North Vietnam, and North Korea.  And when someone from the crowd shouted out “and Albania,” Avakian added “and Albania,” without missing a beat.  Now, that’s comedy – and they used to say that Maoists had no sense of humor!  Mark Rudd was elected national secretary of the truncated organization.  He announced the need to “bring the war home.”

For many campus SDS chapters, the first order of business that fall was a name change.  For the new Weatherman leadership, it was organizing for an October national action scheduled to coincide with the beginning of the trial of the “Chicago 8″ for alleged conspiracy to disrupt the 1968 Democratic Convention.  The more the Weatherman organized for it, the clearer it became that they intended to literally fight the police, and the more people decided to make other plans for that period of time.  Eventually only two hundred or so showed up for what had become known as the “Days of Rage.”

When a documentary film called Weather Underground appeared in 2003,  I went to see it with some hesitation.  It seemed a necessary enough film and yet wasn’t there still something of a glow of admiration for the Weathermen about it?  I was glad enough to find that most of the participants interviewed in the film now seemed to understand that their project had been insane. Still, I didn’t leave the theater thinking that these were a bunch of people whose political opinions I’d ever be likely to seek out.  There were a couple of exceptions, though.

I’d only met Rudd once, in 1968,  at a lower Manhattan, upper floor warren of antiwar offices in whose shared space he was, appropriately enough, running off something on the mimeograph machine, as radicals were wont to do “in those pre-Xerox, pre-digital days” he writes of.  (The book’s dates also suggest that it might really have been him that I spotted walking down Market Street, San Francisco with long hair and a beard a couple of years later; no conversation that time, however.)  But somehow I’d always had the vague impression of him sharing a certain arrogance common among some student leaders of the day – a perception that his book seems to confirm, as he notes that “In my speeches at rallies, I had taken to referring to [Columbia University] President Kirk as ‘that shithead.’”  So it came as a particular surprise to me that of all of the people in the film, the one who stood out as most profoundly chastened by the whole experience was Mark Rudd.

It is that same Mark Rudd you will find in the pages of “Underground,” which makes for a very useful book.  “Underground” gives you your fill of the background to the headlines – the “Wargasm,” the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, the Timothy Leary jailbreak, and all the rest – with no suggestion that it was all okay because the participants meant well.

Considering it the most important student organization to have come along in decades, Rudd writes that “The destruction of SDS … was an historical crime,” a judgement buttressed by the fact that no organization of comparable significance has followed it, either.  As an anonymous analyst wrote in his FBI file, “By their stubborn adherence to pseudo-Marxist/Maoist dogma which is out of step with the present realities, RUDD and his colleagues have alienated a large segment of potential and heretofore willing followers.”  Rudd writes, “I couldn’t have said it any better.”

After seven years underground, during which “rather than doing any useful political work we were just surviving,” he surfaced to surrender.  Due to the federal government’s own illegal tactics, all of the major charges against the Weathermen had been dropped and Rudd slipped into a quiet life as a math teacher in New Mexico where he has been politically active on the local level.  Today, he calls the 1974 Weather Underground proclamation, “Prairie Fire: The politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism,” “omniscient to the point of arrogance” and the infighting that went on in its wake “beyond absurd.”  There is, however, a clear line in his mind as to when he went “over the cliff” and he writes of the Columbia Strike with pride, even including a campus map.

There’s more of Rudd’s sex life in the book than some might really want to know, but then his line “My penis was a magic wand of liberation” may make it all worthwhile.  And overall, even though you never needed a Weatherman to know which way the wind blew, in  “Underground,” Rudd has, after all these years, reestablished himself as someone whose opinion it might be worth asking.

Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? History Matters: Understanding Current Iranian Relations

In light of the recent unrest in Iran and heightened tensions between the United States and Iran, it is important to understand the historical path that has led us to this point.

In this light, I recently had the honor of reading Tim Werner’s book, Legacy of Ashes, the history of the CIA, an immaculately researched work based on the years the writer has written on Intelligence for the New York Times. Even I who suspect incompetence, exaggeration, and pure lying at every level am stunned. According to Werner, almost every action taken by the CIA since World War II has been illegal, dishonest, deceptive, and not successful in the long run. In the worst incidents, one of which I will attempt to outline, the results have been catastrophic for vast numbers of people. Millions have paid with their lives, torture and brutality have been let loose on the country, and certainly the results have been contrary to the best interests of the United States and the World in general. In this piece, I will deal with the situation in Iran and how it has been almost entirely created by the CIA, with some assistance from British Intelligence. It is entirely because of the CIA’s past meddling in Iran that Barack Obama must be very careful in his criticisms of recent events.

Imperial Past

It is incumbent on all observers of the Middle East to be aware of Persia’s ancient history. [ Iran was at that time known as Persia; I will use both names interchangeably.] Unlike most of the surrounding Arab states, which were all established by the Treaty of Versailles in 1918 at the end of World War I after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, Persian History stretches back Millennium, and Persians are intensely proud of that history. Shortly before World War II, Britain purchased a controlling share of the Anglo- Persian oil company. At the time, these oil reserves were the largest known to the world.  For most of the next two decades Iran was run by a Cossack, Reza Khan, who seized power, proclaimed himself Shah of Persia, and held onto it through electoral fraud. During his reign, the British took the vast majority of the oil revenue. British oil executives enjoyed private clubs, while Iranian oil workers lived in deplorable conditions without electricity or running water. Iran asked for a 50/50 split of revenues with Britain, which was rejected outright.

In April 1951, the “Majlis,” a major group in the Iranian Parliament, voted to nationalize Iran’s oil production. Mohammed Mosaddeq who was voted as Iran’s prime minister a few days after the Majlis vote to nationalize the oilfields supported the issue and took it to the United Nations. The British immediately undertook an effort to try to depose Mosaddeq, and even drew up plans to invade and seize the oilfields.

The United States, while opposing any invasion, agreed to attempt a coup to depose the legitimate government that had been lawfully elected in a fully functioning democratic process. The CIA plot was code named, “Operation Ajax.” The plan was approved by President Eisenhower and the British Prime Minister. The CIA had previously stashed away sufficient funds and guns to support 10,000 tribal warriors for 6 months for another venture which had been shelved, and that money was now available for this effort.

The Coup

The CIA bribed Iranian Senators, Military Officers, and Publishers. They paid for and recruited Goon Squads to beat those opposed to the Coup. The coup was accomplished by a 3-pronged attack. First, the press denounced Mosaddeq as anti-Islamic, a Communist, and a Jew. Hundreds of thousands of pamphlets were also printed up and distributed, particularly around the capital of Tehran. The Shah was recruited and his forces were used to attack the heavily defended home of Mosaddeq. The coup was accomplished on August 19, 1953. It started with a demonstration in a gym by weightlifters and circus strongmen recruited by the CIA for the day. They shouted anti-Mosaddeq statements, and chanted, “Long live the Shah” while marching through the streets. The crowd joined them along with two major religious leaders, one being Ayatollah Khomeini, the future leader of Iran, after being exiled by the Shah. By the afternoon the CIA agents had seized control of Radio Iran. At least 100 people died that day, and at least 200 more perished when Mosaddeq’s house was invaded. The Prime Minister escaped, but later surrendered. He was imprisoned and later held under house arrest until his death.

The Shah was given 1 million dollars in cash and pronounced prime minister. He became the centerpiece of American Policy in the Middle East for years to come. The Shah maintained his position through a new intelligence service, the Savak, who were CIA trained. The Savak were to become reviled throughout Iran. Their powers allowed them to censor the press, arrest, and detain without any lawful process. Torture, starvation, and sleep deprivation were only some of the techniques for which they were to become reviled.

The Revolution

Revulsion against the Shah built up in Iran and among those exiled abroad. Finally by January 1979, demonstrations against the Shah could not be resisted, the Shah was toppled from his throne, and the Ayatollah Khomeini, who had been exiled in France, was bought back to lead a new Islamic Republic. Unfortunately, as in most revolutions, the initial leaders often tend toward fanaticism and move to seizing all power in their own hands. It usually takes many years until the moderates ultimately gain enough support to overthrow them. The French Revolution and the Soviet Revolution are two good examples. The Ayatollah was true to historical form, crushing all opposition groups and centralizing power for himself and a few other radical clerics.

By November 1979, much of the population were enraged by the policies of the USA as described by the controlled press. Students who had been demonstrating outside the US embassy seized the embassy and all its employees. In total 52 diplomats were seized and imprisoned inside the embassy for a total of 444 days. Initially there had been calls by the students to execute the hostages, but eventually views softened, and diplomatic endeavors ultimately led to their release.

The War with Iraq

Less than a year after the hostages were released, Iraq invaded Iran. Many believe that the US was implicit in that invasion. There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein felt emboldened to invade by US animosity toward Iran. The US did provide helicopters to Iraq and satellite intelligence to pinpoint bombing targets. The war was viscously fought by both sides, with estimates of casualties going as high as 2 million. To give some idea of the intensity I will cite 2 examples. First, when low on armaments, the Iranians sent children armed only with wooden rifles to overwhelm Iraqi lines. The children had been convinced that they were impermeable to bullets. These children were in turn mowed down by reluctant Iraqi forces. Similarly horrific was the use of human bodies in the marshes to the South. The Iraqis used Iranian bodies to fill ditches for their tanks to pass over. Saddam Hussein first tried his chemical weapons on Iranian troops in this war.

Finally in 1988 after 8 years of the terrible conflict, a ceasefire was effected, the border remained unchanged, 2 million were dead, and there was massive damage to the infrastructure of both countries. Just prior to the ceasefire, there was another incident by the US that made the Iranian view of the US even worse. A US warship, the USS Vincennes, shot down an Iranian civilian airliner resulting in 290 deaths. While the official investigation concluded that it was done in error, that was largely disbelieved by the Iranian public.

If we view the present turmoil in Iran through the eyes of those who have lived through these events, it is terribly obvious why Barack Obama must be very careful with his words about the present turmoil. If not for interventions by the CIA and British Intelligence, Iran might be a very different country today.

Recent Days

With this proper context, let’s now take a brief look at more recent events. Iran’s Supreme ruler is currently Ali Khamenei, who succeeded Ayatollah Khomeini after his death. The Supreme ruler controls the Armed Forces, Radio and TV, Security, the Chief Judge, and the Guardian Council. There is an elected council and president, who mainly deal with day-to-day governing matters and economics. Anyone who wishes to run for those positions must first be approved by a body loyal to the Supreme Leader. The rejection rate however is close to 80%. From 1997-2005, there was a moderately progressive President Sayed Mohammed Khatemi. However, he failed to deliver on any serious reformist policies.

It should be noted that directly after 9/11, there was a street demonstration of over 1 million in support of the US. All of this was support was lost by continuing US sanctions on Iran, the disastrous War in Iraq, and the Bush White House’s grouping of Iran in the “Axis of Evil.” In 2005, Sayed Mohammed Khatemi lost the presidential election to the ill informed, firebrand Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This swing to the right was probably largely a result of the three factors mentioned above.

Of course, during the recent election, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was reelected, likely by fraud. It is my opinion that the Supreme Leader did not wish to have a reformist President to deal with now that there was no longer George Bush in the White House, but rather the new more popular US President, Barack Obama. A moderate President was OK when the White House could be counted on to alienate the average Iranian, but could not be risked with Barack Hussein Obama in the White House.

What Does This All Mean?

How it will all play out is anyone’s guess. Effective change is unlikely as the Military and Security services are protected from the poverty and poor economy suffered by the average Iranian. It is encouraging that the Obama administration has chosen a policy of engagement, rather than strict neoconservative rigidity. However, engagement alone will not be the magic bullet needed to fully reverse a century of bad blood, imperialism, and CIA sponsored coups. When dealing with Iran in this light, incremental progress on any front will be a huge step forward.

Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? From Bangkok to Bangalore, What Isn’t Outsourced?

In an age of shrinking economies and a time when it seems nothing is made in the USA anymore except financial scandals, many pundits say the question is not what is outsourced but simply what is not. In California, a state with governance marred by bankruptcy and disputes between Governor Schwarzenegger and the legislature, discussion of outsourcing has morphed into radical action: the governor decided last week to outsource the California legislature to China.

“Yah, I’ve had enough already with the little girlie-men in de California legislature, you know?” the governor said on Meet the Press last Sunday. “Dis is it. I’m gonna CRUSH deir little GIRLIE-MUSCLES and send dem all to China to squabble over dere! If dey don’t like it, dey can lump it. A few sessions with a bunch of tight-wadded Chinese bean counters is just what dey need. Let dem shut up and enjoy some dim sum for a change while I balance da budget.”

In Beijing, however, the Chinese government was less than receptive to the idea. “We already have provincial legislatures,” trade minister Shi Guangsheng said yesterday. “First of all, this is not a trade issue. If the Americans wish to outsource all their private-sector employment, we are more than happy to assume ownership of the American middle class. But the California Congress would most likely find little to occupy them in China. We already have provincial legislatures, and besides, we don’t have any girlie-men in China and frankly we don’t want any.”

California lawmakers aside, it is well known that just about everything else American has already been outsourced. Americans no longer even lick their own stamps, that function having been exported to dingy streets from Bangkok to Bangalore. In Bangkok, Thailand, the stamp-licking company sign, tucked away between the fishmongers and laundries, says ME LICKEE, YOU LIKEY? Inside, what looks like a sweatshop is actually a stamp-licking room with part-time workers assiduously licking American stamps and sticking them on envelopes that will be shipped back to the United States, thus explaining why U.S. First Class letters are so often delayed.

In Bangalore, India, the stamp-licking concession belongs to the Sir Leaks a Lot Corporation. Asked about the misnomer, Operations Manager Varnish Singhalong told a Demockracy.com reporter, “Ah, yes, that was an English error. Because we can’t spell very well in this organization. But it doesn’t matter anyway. We are stamp lickers, not a call center. Besides, ‘Sir Licks A Lot” doesn’t sound very dignified. “Sir Leaks a Lot” might at least suggest we are plumbers.”

New outsourcing initiatives in the U.S. include the exporting of obesity. US customers call up the International Lardbutt Company in Cambodia and buy them a gallon-sized Slurpee for five cents, which the foreign surrogate proceeds to slurp down by proxy and get fat.

And the American’s hunger pangs? “Hey, I suck it up,” said one happy male customer in Houston. “A little rumbling in the tummy is worth it. I slim down and I feel like I’m a patriot, exporting death by obesity to the heathen abroad. The time difference of 12 or 13 hours means the poor devil has to get up at three in the morning to suck one down, but hey, nobody put a gun to their heads forcing them to get paid slurping Slurpees in the middle of the night. I’d call that a pretty good job.”

As for Hollywood, it was only a matter of time. “Hollywood has essentially been outsourced to Bollywood, no doubt about it,” a studio executive who wished to remain anonymous said. “Bollywood makes more movies in a year than McDonald’s flips burgers, and for one-tenth the cost. By the way, are burgers still made here? Anyway, why should we pay Brad Pitt millions for his pretty face when we can give some crooner in India a couple of bucks and a pack of Marlboros to sing and dance around the script? We’ll save hundreds of millions a year that we can pay ourselves in bonuses.”

Are there any projects in the works? “Our first Indian film will be a Mumbai remake of Michael Clayton with Arjun Rampai in the Clooney role and Preity Zinta as the Tilda Swinton character,” the executive said. (The Swinton role of “Karen” has been changed to “Kali.” Kali is the name of the wife of Shiva the God of Death referred to in the original version.) A journalist who was shown pre-release clips from the famous Clayton ending reports a song-and-dance fest featuring a love triangle, angry parents and a hero who fights and defeats a plethora of gangsters, none of which has anything to do with the original plot, although some modified dialogue remains. “See, now, that’s just not the way to go here, Kali,” Rampai croons in sync with his dance steps. “You know, for someone as smart as you, you really are lost, aren’t you? I’m the easiest part of the equation, and you want to kill me? Don’t you know who I am? I’m a fixer. I’m a bagman. I fix anything from illegitimate caste-climbers to bent Maharajas, and you want to kill me? Five million rupees—that’s to forget about your lower-caste origins.” Kali tiptoes across the set, arms flailing, singing “This discussion will have to take place in another setting, oh yes, oh yes, take place in another setting!” Rampai swirls to her side and belts, “DO I LOOK LIKE I’M NEGOTIATING?”