How corporate power is ruining your life, explained in animated GIFs   

  April 1970, when 20 million Americans hit the streets to celebrate the first Earth Day:  

  

And it wasn’t just a party. People of all ages and political stripes were demanding regulations protecting earth, air, water, and wildlife.

 

Not everyone was happy about it, though. When Lewis Powell, a corporate lawyer from Richmond, Virginia, heard about Earth Day:

Why? Powell served on the board of directors of several international corporations—corporations whose profitability would be hampered by all the new regulations.

 

When Powell thought of a way to stop them:

 

He schemed up a memo—titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System”—and presented it to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on August 23, 1971. In it, he laid out a broad plan: corporate leaders would use an “activist-minded Supreme Court” to enact “social, economic, and political change” in favor of corporate power.

 

What the rest of America was doing:

 

The memo was secret, so barely anyone knew about Powell’s plot until much later.
 

Really, Powell’s idea wasn’t totally new. He had already sued the U.S. government on behalf of the cigarette industry, saying the government’s assertion that cigarettes were dangerous was controversial and that cigarette companies had a right under free speech to promote their product in whatever way they liked. It worked. America’s response was to keep ‘em lit:

 

 

And when President Nixon nominated Powell for the Supreme Court and the Senate voted him in (less than six months after the Chamber read his memo):

 

 

With Powell on the Court, corporations got busy creating legal foundations to fund lawsuits across the country. They introduced the idea that corporations were “persons,” “speakers,” “voices,” and “protectors of our freedoms.” They said that government regulations over pollution, wages, or political spending made corporations feel like this:



 

Meanwhile, Americans were cleaning house. The Clean Water Act was passed in 1972. After this came the Endangered Species Act (1973), the first fuel economy standards for cars (1975), and the Toxic Substances Control Act (1976).

Americans:

Powell:

 

“Strength,” Powell had written in his memo, “lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years.”

 

By 1978, Powell and his cronies were ready to take his plan to the next level. A few corporations got together to challenge a Massachusetts law banning corporate spending in referendum ballots. They wanted to use corporate funds to defeat a progressive income tax vote later that year.

When they lost, progressives were all:

 

But then they took their case to the Supreme Court, where Justice Powell had been waiting for just such an opportunity: 

 

Powell cast the deciding vote (5-4), declaring that “corporations are persons” and corporate money is “speech” under the First Amendment, ushering in the current era of corporate power.

  

 

Between 1978 and 1984, Justice Powell overrode laws citizens had agreed on, in favor of legislation benefitting the pharmaceutical, energy, tobacco, and banking industries. By the time he resigned in 1987, the corporate world had made up its mind:

 

When the agribusiness industry spends $75-145 million a year lobbying to make sure America always has a good supply of junk food at its fingertips:

 

Meanwhile, Americans: 

 

“The health of Americans is secondary to layers of taxpayer subsidies and preferential treatment for corporate food giants and coal and utility corporations, resulting in epidemic-level rates of obesity, asthma, and type 2 diabetes,” writes Jeffrey D. Clements for YES! Magazine. And this in spite of healthy profits for pharmaceutical and health care corporations (which spent over $2 billion lobbying the government between 1998 and 2010). 

 

That’s not all. Between 1998 and 2010, military contractors spent over $400 million and ExxonMobil spent $151 million lobbying. But “control of our energy policy by global fossil fuel corporations and unregulated corporate lobbying, even for weapons the Pentagon doesn’t want,” Clements writes, “leads to endless war in the Middle East and uncontrolled military spending.”

It also means we continue to drive everywhere. When we build roads for cars that pollute the air and suburbs that destroy wilderness:

 

So, we pay with our health, with endless war, and destruction of the environment—but there's more. Corporate rule is also why we’re broke.

 

Yep. Between 1998 and 2010 the Chamber of Commerce spent $739 million lobbying in favor of big business. The results? “Corporate-friendly trade and tax policies have moved jobs overseas, destroyed our manufacturing capacity, produced vast wage and income inequality, and gutted local economies and communities,” writes Clements.

What that means for the corporate elite:

  

What that means the rest of us:

Then, in 2010, the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission gave corporations the go-ahead to spend as much as they wanted influencing elections. 

Politicians who failed to do what corporate lobbies asked were punished with negative ads funded by the corporate elite. So now when our elected officials look at us:

 

And while corporations love consumers, this is what they say when we try to act like citizens:

 

Case in point: Monsanto, when Vermonters tried to enact labeling laws for recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH):

 

And when people try to get environmental protections, fair wages, or an end to military offensives, one corporation or another is always:


 

 

Nearly 80 percent of the public opposes the Citizens United decision. That it hasn’t been reversed goes to show how skewed the current balance of power is. Many representatives and citizens’ groups are calling for a constitutional amendment to reverse it and end money's use as "speech" altogether. When that day comes, we may finally be able to slow climate change, end war, get healthy, and get paid.

 

This article is based on Jeffrey D. Clements essay, “Rights are for Real People,” from the Spring 2012 issue of Yes! Magazine. Clements is the author of the book Corporations Are Not People.

Three and a half months ago, the walls upstairs at the Church of the Prophecy in Far Rockaway, a low-income coastal neighborhood of New York City, were covered with maps of where help was most needed. The church was a hub for the Occupy Sandy relief effort after Hurricane Sandy. Now, nearly five months after the hurricane struck, the maps have been replaced by posters extolling the virtues of collective struggle and art made by neighborhood children enrolled in Occupy Sandy’s twice-weekly after-school program.

“The kids missed a month and a half of school,” explained Luis Casco, a member of the church’s congregation who pulled strings to help move Occupy into Far Rockaway. The after-school program was, in part, his brainchild. “We figured we’d start helping the kids and we could win over their parents. Then we could actually start bigger projects,” he said.

One of those bigger projects is a worker-run cooperative initiative, organized by Occupy Sandy and supported by the Working World, an organization that specializes in incubating collectively owned businesses.

The initiative is well suited to Far Rockaway because worker-run enterprises have a history of flourishing in environments of economic distress or political upheaval. In 2001, when Argentina defaulted on its international loans and the country’s ownership class fled, Argentines took over abandoned factories and established networks of producers and distributors. In Venezuela, worker-run cooperatives were at the heart of the vision for 21st-century socialism, and Hugo Chavez’s administration helped create tens of thousands of collectively owned businesses over the last 14 years. Most notably, Spanish workers in the Basque region created the Mondragon Corporation, the world’s largest federation of cooperatives, during the Franco dictatorship in the 1950s. Today more than 250 enterprises operate under the Mondragon banner, and the federation, which spans 77 countries and employs 83,000 workers, has been widely praised.

“Collective approach pays big dividends,” read a headline about Mondragon in The Financial Times last year, while the New York Times noted the “use of workers’ share capital and loans” has enabled the federation to remain stable through vacillations in global markets, including the ongoing financial crisis.

While Mondragon shows what is possible down the line, Far Rockaway residents are at the very beginning of the process. At one of the crowded early meetings of the cooperative initiative, children and adults buzzed about, fraternizing with disposable plates of food in their hands as extra folding chairs were arranged. Several parents whose children attended the after-school program arrived, bringing their friends and neighbors along. Most were Spanish-speaking immigrants who, having spent their lives working for someone else, were eager to learn more about cooperatives.

Many in Far Rockaway lost their jobs when Hurricane Sandy rendered commutes impossible for flooded local businesses. For those without U.S. work papers, finding new employment has been difficult.

“It’s really hard to find a new job when you don’t have papers,” Casco explained. “Their homes were destroyed, they don’t have the resources to go to welfare and FEMA ain’t helping them.”

Others, such as Olga Lezama, managed to keep their jobs after the storm, but the prospect of holding on to the profits of their labor has piqued their interest. Lezama currently works as an upholsterer for a high-end furniture company. By Lezama’s calculations, her boss makes approximately $500 every hour off the furniture that she and her co-workersupholster, while she earns roughly $100 a day.

“It hurts my feelings and my pockets,” she said. “My job and my efforts and my everything goes to them.”

By her side was her husband, Carlos Lezama, a carpenter who specialized in cabinets. The pair hope to work with others in the community to form a home-design cooperative, a service in high demand after the storm, which ruined the ground floors of most of the region’s low-lying bungalows.

“We go to stores and buy cheap furniture, cabinets and stuff, and we’re wasting our money,” Lezama said. “In two months, the cabinet is no good. So we have go buy it again. Our people deserve good stuff.” 

Workers controlling capital 

Occupy Sandy has allocated $60,000 of the $900,000 it raised in the initial flood of generosity following the storm toward forming cooperatives, an initiative they hope to spread across storm-affected areas if it proves successful in Far Rockaway. The Working World, an organization that provides zero-debt micro-finance loans to new cooperatives, has offered to provide monetary support, but for now the organization is mostly lending advice and training. At one of the early meetings, Brandon Martin, The Working World’s founder, showed the crowd a slideshow of other projects the organization has helped launch. Images of a beekeepers’ cooperative in the countryside of Nicaragua and a shoe factory in Buenos Aires glowed on the wall behind Martin as he outlined the benefits of workers sharing resources and making decisions democratically.

“A cooperative is workers controlling capital, instead of capital controlling workers,” said Martin. “It’s about reorganizing the economy around who’s really in control.”

The Working World finances itself by collecting a small percentage of the profits that member collectives generate, money that the organization reinvests in establishing new enterprises. Martin explained that the idea originated in ancient Sumeria where the word for interest was the same as the word for calf.

“If the cow I lent you has babies,” explained Martin, “I loaned you my cow, so I can have some the babies. That would be the interest.”

But if the cow was sterile, the Sumerians didn’t collect interest. The same works for Working World’s loans today. The organization only collects once a cooperative generates a steady profit, a model that avoids forcing people into debt if their business fails.

Interest grows 

The Sumerians, for their part, eventually altered their lending practices such that they collected interest regardless of the outcome. The legacy of that shift is still with us today; few in Far Rockaway can call their surroundings their own. Walk through the neighborhood in the middle of a business day and you’ll see iron grating pulled down over storefronts and plywood covering the windows of large shopping complexes. Those stores that are open often bear the insignias of chain outlets that carry money out of the neighborhood and into the coffers of large corporations. Worker-run cooperatives, in contrast, could offer a way for community members to sell the products of their labor without selling their labor itself — a shift that would keep capital within the community and cash in the pockets of workers.

At the following cooperative meeting a week later, the crowd had grown. People discussed plans for a scrap metal business and a cleaning-workers’ collective. One man pulled a citizens’ band radio out of his winter coat, explaining that drivers in the taxi cooperative he hoped to form could use it to communicate. He’d been doing research; nine other drivers were needed to secure an operating license from the city.

There is obvious enthusiasm in the neighborhood for worker-run enterprises. But are there limits to what these businesses can achieve while embedded in a broader economic framework of competition and exploitation? And does the focus on cooperatives represent a shift in direction for Occupy, one that veers away from a direct fight for systemic transformation?

“We can’t fight the city,” one Occupy Sandy organizer confided. “But we can build co-ops.”

Building an alternative 

Richard Wolff, professor of economics at the New School and author of Democracy at Work, a study of cooperative businesses, argues that forming cooperatives can be the first step in enacting a sweeping social and economic shift. Wolff envisions a transformation, similar to the social shift from feudalism to capitalism, in which cooperatives replace corporations and goods are distributed through a democratically planned economy.

The cooperatives that Wolff talks about, and the ones that Occupy Sandy is aiming to establish, are more accurately known as worker self-directed enterprises: businesses that organize democratically collective ownership at the point of production.

“When the workers get together and decide how to distribute the income in such an enterprise, would they give the CEO $25 million in stock bonuses while everybody else can barely get by?” Wolff asks rhetorically.

He stresses the difference between the productive and distributive side of economies, explaining that worker-run cooperatives are the often-overlooked prerequisite for achieving an egalitarian distribution of wealth and resources. “There is the question of what exactly an alternative to capitalism is,” he explains. “I’ve stressed worker-self-directed enterprises as a different way of organizing production.” On the other hand are markets, which distribute the fruits of production. Wolff believes that the mistake of many 20th-century socialists was to imagine that the elimination of markets would create social egalitarianism, even though production had not yet been reorganized into a democratic model.

Given the pull between the productive and distributive side of economies, cooperatives must form networks to survive. Collaboration between networked enterprises allows these businesses to curb market pressures and, if the network manages to spread, to gain political power.

As Brandon Martin emphasizes, also, workers in new cooperatives must labor long hours to meet production quotas, just like with any other business, since their enterprise still has to compete for a market share. “Can one cooperative change that?” asks Martin. “No. But a cooperative economy might.”

Olga Lazema, however, isn’t thinking about the theoretical potential for cooperatives to challenge capitalism. She’s imagining the positive possibilities for her own neighborhood.

“A lot of people, their houses went like nothing,” she said, referring to Sandy’s destruction. “They have nothing. We could go there, build a small kitchen or whatever they need. Why not?”

Image of Far Rockaway cooperative meeting by Peter Rugh.  

Faced with shrinking budgets and a test-centric reform agenda, high school students across the country are fighting back. Risking expulsion and even arrest, students are confronting broken policies with walkouts, boycotts, and other creative actions.

This post originally appeared at Waging Nonviolence.  

“You’re going to be expelled,” an administrator at Northwestern High School in Hyattsville, Md., just twenty minutes away from the Washington, D.C., line, told the two boys sitting in her office on March 1, 2012.

“What?” Ricardo Fuentes, then a junior, asked, feigning ignorance.

“Project Xbox.”

Project Xbox was the code-name for the walkout that Fuentes had helped plan with El Cambio, an activist student group at Northwestern, for the National Day of Action for Education that day. Hours before the walkout he and his friend had been pulled into the office and confronted by the school’s administration. Administrators had pinpointed the two boys as key organizers — though only Fuentes was actually involved — and were determined to put a stop to it. They held the boys in the room for seven hours, offering to let them out only to visit lunch periods to tell people to stop the walkout. Fuentes, already resigned to his fate, refused to cooperate.

That afternoon, the sound of 400 students walking out of class — nearly a third of the school’s population — flooded Northwestern’s halls. Students were met at the door with teachers, administrators, security and police officers. They could see canine units waiting for them in the parking lot. Students turned back and started marching through the halls, searching for another exit, when they were blocked off at staircases. In the end, Fuentes and three of his friends were suspended for six days for helping to organize the walkout.

The walkout was not an aimless excuse to skip school, but a calculated response to a specific list of grievances. El Cambio’s communiqué, which it circulated in advance of the walkout, named seven grievances: disgusting bathroom conditions, enormous class sizes, teachers who had been refused pay raises three years in a row, the denial of promised funding for their band to go to nationals, cuts to funding for English-as-a-second-language programs, exploited and deported Filipino teachers, and the lack of a meaningful student role in the decision-making process. These grievances describe the conditions of many of Prince George’s County public schools. In a state that has been ranked number one in education for five consecutive years, Prince George’s County has only a single school that performs at or above the Maryland average, with almost all other schools falling well below it.

El Cambio found support among some teachers, who privately coached and guided the first-time organizers or gave their tacit approval. But others opposed the students’ activism altogether. One teacher went as far as to admonish Fuentes for El Cambio’s inclusion of teachers’ concerns among their grievances.

Though Northwestern’s walkout is exceptional in the region, it is not altogether unique. In the past year, for instance, there have been a series of walkouts in high schools in New York City, most notably the May 1, 2012, walkout of students at Paul Roebson High School in Brooklyn organized with Occupy Wall Street.

High school organizing presents a different kind of situation than college organizing. In public high schools, students are closely tied to their neighborhoods and their homes. They are not merely temporary residents, as many college students are, but members of their communities. Most of them have grown up in the area or lived there for a long time; many will continue to live there for most of their lives. They have a long-term commitment to the quality of their schools and neighborhoods. Meanwhile, high schoolers live under demanding, unyielding schedules determined by administrators who routinely ignore and marginalize students’ voices.

“I think that high schoolers always get forgotten,” Fuentes said. “They think that everything is easy for us, and it’s not.”

“It is authoritarian. We don’t feel like we have any power,” said Shane James, a senior at Northwestern who was suspended for helping to organize the walkout with El Cambio. “When you have no power over what dominates your life, you feel like you are powerless as a person. How are you supposed to learn to be an individual with ideas and a critical thinker if you don’t feel like you have control over your own ideas?”

Increasingly, public high schools are inundated with standardized tests and regimented expectations, from which any deviation is considered a chaotic interruption by the administration. In response to this kind of environment, in early January, teachers at Garfield High School in Seattle voted to refuse to administer the Measure of Academic Progress tests and waged a small war against their administration. Their boycott of the tests has inspired similar boycotts among teachers and students in high schools across the country, including in Portland and Rhode Island.

“We’re opting out because we want to send this greater message about not standardizing our education system,” Alexia Garcia, the student representative of Portland Public Schools student union. Her student union, which is sanctioned by the district, in conjunction with the Portland Student Union, a student-run organization in Portland high schools, launched an opt-out campaign just a couple weeks after the Seattle teachers did. In Portland, high school juniors must take the Oregon Assessment of Skills and Knowledge exam, which is used to assess Portland public high schools — and, starting next year, teachers. Based on this assessment, each school is given a grade, and it must test at least 95 percent of students in every demographic in order to get a passing grade. The goal of the opt-out is to give every school a failing grade by lack of participation, and thus compromise the whole process.

“We want to send the message that we’d like to see a more holistic approach and holistic evaluation,” Garcia said. “There is so much more to a student than how they perform on a test.”

Portland students have found support not only from their community but from their teachers. The teachers’ union can’t officially support the students or its members could risk losing their teaching licenses, but teachers have privately voiced their approval of student’s actions. Administrators, predictably, have not received the opt-out campaign so kindly. They’ve sent letters to parents stressing the importance of standardized testing. Administrators in Portland have done everything they can to end the student protest.

“We need a new mentality about how schools are supposed to function and how to educate kids,” James said. “You’re not going to educate kids by telling them to shut up and be quiet. You’re going to educate kids by letting them speak out and question authority — by letting them challenge things and really act on their interests and their passions.”

Image of gravestone protest signs at John Muir High School in Pasadena, California, by Jerome T, licensed under Creative Commons.   

Secretive, paranoid, and aggressive, our militarized, hyper-masculine political culture feeds violence abroad and in the home. As John Stuart Mill argued, the subjection of nations has everything to do with the subjection of women.  

This post originally appeared at TomDispatch.  

Picture this. A man, armored in tattoos, bursts into a living room not his own. He confronts an enemy. He barks orders. He throws that enemy into a chair. Then against a wall. He plants himself in the middle of the room, feet widespread, fists clenched, muscles straining, face contorted in a scream of rage. The tendons in his neck are taut with the intensity of his terrifying performance. He chases the enemy to the next room, stopping escape with a quick grab and thrust and body block that pins the enemy, bent back, against a counter. He shouts more orders: his enemy can go with him to the basement for a “private talk,” or be beaten to a pulp right here. Then he wraps his fingers around the neck of his enemy and begins to choke her.

No, that invader isn’t an American soldier leading a night raid on an Afghan village, nor is the enemy an anonymous Afghan householder. This combat warrior is just a guy in Ohio named Shane. He’s doing what so many men find exhilarating: disciplining his girlfriend with a heavy dose of the violence we render harmless by calling it “domestic.”

It’s easy to figure out from a few basic facts that Shane is a skilled predator. Why else does a 31-year-old man lavish attention on a pretty 19-year-old with two children (ages four and two, the latter an equally pretty and potentially targeted little female)? And what more vulnerable girlfriend could he find than this one, named Maggie: a neglected young woman, still a teenager, who for two years had been raising her kids on her own while her husband fought a war in Afghanistan? That war had broken the family apart, leaving Maggie with no financial support and more alone than ever.

But the way Shane assaulted Maggie, he might just as well have been a night-raiding soldier terrorizing an Afghan civilian family in pursuit of some dangerous Talib, real or imagined. For all we know, Maggie’s estranged husband/soldier might have acted in the same way in some Afghan living room and not only been paid but also honored for it. The basic behavior is quite alike: an overwhelming display of superior force. The tactics: shock and awe. The goal: to control the behavior, the very life, of the designated target. The mind set: a sense of entitlement when it comes to determining the fate of a subhuman creature. The dark side: the fear and brutal rage of a scared loser who inflicts his miserable self on others.

As for that designated enemy, just as American exceptionalism asserts the superiority of the United States over all other countries and cultures on Earth, and even over the laws that govern international relations, misogyny -- which seems to inform so much in the United States these days, from military boot camp to the Oscars to full frontal political assaults on a woman’s right to control her own body -- assures even the most pathetic guys like Shane of their innate superiority over some “thing” usually addressed with multiple obscenities.

Since 9/11, the further militarization of our already militarized culture has reached new levels. Official America, as embodied in our political system and national security state, now seems to be thoroughly masculine, paranoid, quarrelsome, secretive, greedy, aggressive, and violent. Readers familiar with “domestic violence” will recognize those traits as equally descriptive of the average American wife beater: scared but angry and aggressive, and feeling absolutely entitled to control something, whether it’s just a woman, or a small country like Afghanistan.

Connecting the Dots 

It was John Stuart Mill, writing in the nineteenth century, who connected the dots between “domestic” and international violence. But he didn’t use our absurdly gender-neutral, pale gray term “domestic violence.” He called it “wife torture” or “atrocity,” and he recognized that torture and atrocity are much the same, no matter where they take place -- whether today in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Wardak Province, Afghanistan, or a bedroom or basement in Ohio. Arguing in 1869 against the subjection of women, Mill wrote that the Englishman’s habit of household tyranny and “wife torture” established the pattern and practice for his foreign policy. The tyrant at home becomes the tyrant at war. Home is the training ground for the big games played overseas.

Mill believed that, in early times, strong men had used force to enslave women and the majority of their fellow men. By the nineteenth century, however, the “law of the strongest” seemed to him to have been “abandoned” -- in England at least -- “as the regulating principle of the world’s affairs.” Slavery had been renounced. Only in the household did it continue to be practiced, though wives were no longer openly enslaved but merely “subjected” to their husbands. This subjection, Mill said, was the last vestige of the archaic “law of the strongest,” and must inevitably fade away as reasonable men recognized its barbarity and injustice. Of his own time, he wrote that “nobody professes” the law of the strongest, and “as regards most of the relations between human beings, nobody is permitted to practice it.”

Well, even a feminist may not be right about everything. Times often change for the worse, and rarely has the law of the strongest been more popular than it is in the United States today. Routinely now we hear congressmen declare that the U.S. is the greatest nation in the world because it is the greatest military power in history, just as presidents now regularly insist that the U.S. military is “the finest fighting force in the history of the world.” Never mind that it rarely wins a war. Few here question that primitive standard -- the law of the strongest -- as the measure of this America’s dwindling “civilization.”

The War Against Women 

Mill, however, was right about the larger point: that tyranny at home is the model for tyranny abroad. What he perhaps didn’t see was the perfect reciprocity of the relationship that perpetuates the law of the strongest both in the home and far away.

When tyranny and violence are practiced on a grand scale in foreign lands, the practice also intensifies at home. As American militarism went into overdrive after 9/11, it validated violence against women here, where Republicans held up reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (first passed in 1994), and celebrities who publicly assaulted their girlfriends faced no consequences other than a deluge of sympathetic girl-fan tweets.

America’s invasions abroad also validated violence within the U.S. military itself. An estimated 19,000 women soldiers were sexually assaulted in 2011; and an unknown number have been murdered by fellow soldiers who were, in many cases, their husbands or boyfriends. A great deal of violence against women in the military, from rape to murder, has been documented, only to be casually covered up by the chain of command.

Violence against civilian women here at home, on the other hand, may not be reported or tallied at all, so the full extent of it escapes notice. Men prefer to maintain the historical fiction that violence in the home is a private matter, properly and legally concealed behind a “curtain.” In this way is male impunity and tyranny maintained.

Women cling to a fiction of our own: that we are much more “equal” than we are. Instead of confronting male violence, we still prefer to lay the blame for it on individual women and girls who fall victim to it -- as if they had volunteered. But then, how to explain the dissonant fact that at least one of every three female American soldiers is sexually assaulted by a male “superior”? Surely that’s not what American women had in mind when they signed up for the Marines or for Air Force flight training. In fact, lots of teenage girls volunteer for the military precisely to escape violence and sexual abuse in their childhood homes or streets.

Don’t get me wrong, military men are neither alone nor out of the ordinary in terrorizing women. The broader American war against women has intensified on many fronts here at home, right along with our wars abroad. Those foreign wars have killed uncounted thousands of civilians, many of them women and children, which could make the private battles of domestic warriors like Shane here in the U.S. seem puny by comparison. But it would be a mistake to underestimate the firepower of the Shanes of our American world. The statistics tell us that a legal handgun has been the most popular means of dispatching a wife, but when it comes to girlfriends, guys really get off on beating them to death.

Some 3,073 people were killed in the terrorist attacks on the United States on 9/11. Between that day and June 6, 2012, 6,488 U.S. soldiers were killed in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing the death toll for America’s war on terror at home and abroad to 9,561. During the same period, 11,766 women were murdered in the United States by their husbands or boyfriends, both military and civilian. The greater number of women killed here at home is a measure of the scope and the furious intensity of the war against women, a war that threatens to continue long after the misconceived war on terror is history.

Getting the Picture 

Think about Shane, standing there in a nondescript living room in Ohio screaming his head off like a little child who wants what he wants when he wants it. Reportedly, he was trying to be a good guy and make a career as a singer in a Christian rock band. But like the combat soldier in a foreign war who is modeled after him, he uses violence to hold his life together and accomplish his mission.

We know about Shane only because there happened to be a photographer on the scene. Sara Naomi Lewkowicz had chosen to document the story of Shane and his girlfriend Maggie out of sympathy for his situation as an ex-con, recently released from prison yet not free of the stigma attached to a man who had done time. Then, one night, there he was in the living room throwing Maggie around, and Lewkowicz did what any good combat photographer would do as a witness to history: she kept shooting. That action alone was a kind of intervention and may have saved Maggie’s life.

In the midst of the violence, Lewkowicz also dared to snatch from Shane’s pocket her own cell phone, which he had borrowed earlier. It’s unclear whether she passed the phone to someone else or made the 911 call herself. The police arrested Shane, and a smart policewoman told Maggie: “You know, he’s not going to stop. They never stop. They usually stop when they kill you.”

Maggie did the right thing. She gave the police a statement. Shane is back in prison. And Lewkowicz’s remarkable photographs were posted online on February 27th at Time magazine’s website feature Lightbox under the heading “Photographer As Witness: A Portrait of Domestic Violence.”

The photos are remarkable because the photographer is very good and the subject of her attention is so rarely caught on camera. Unlike warfare covered in Iraq and Afghanistan by embedded combat photographers, wife torture takes place mostly behind closed doors, unannounced and unrecorded. The first photographs of wife torture to appear in the U.S. were Donna Ferrato’s now iconic images of violence against women at home.

Like Lewkowicz, Ferrato came upon wife torture by chance; she was documenting a marriage in 1980 when the happy husband chose to beat up his wife. Yet so reluctant were photo editors to pull aside the curtain of domestic privacy that even after Ferrato became a Life photographer in 1984, pursuing the same subject, nobody, including Life, wanted to publish the shocking images she produced.

In 1986, six years after she witnessed that first assault, some of her photographs of violence against women in the home were published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, and brought her the 1987 Robert F. Kennedy journalism award “for outstanding coverage of the problems of the disadvantaged.” In 1991, Aperture, the publisher of distinguished photography books, brought out Ferrato’s eye-opening body of work as Living with the Enemy (for which I wrote an introduction). Since then, the photos have been widely reproduced. Timeused a Ferrato image on its cover in 1994, when the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson briefly drew attention to what the magazine called “the epidemic of domestic abuse” and Lightbox featured a small retrospective of her domestic violence work on June 27, 2012.

Ferrato herself started a foundation, offering her work to women’s groups across the country to exhibit at fundraisers for local shelters and services. Those photo exhibitions also helped raise consciousness across America and certainly contributed to smarter, less misogynistic police procedures of the kind that put Shane back in jail.

Ferrato’s photos were incontrovertible evidence of the violence in our homes, rarely acknowledged and never before so plainly seen. Yet until February 27th, when with Ferrato’s help, Sara Naomi Lewkowicz’s photos were posted on Lightbox only two months after they were taken, Ferrato’s photos were all we had. We needed more. So there was every reason for Lewkowicz’s work to be greeted with acclaim by photographers and women everywhere.

Instead, in more than 1,700 comments posted at Lightbox, photographer Lewkowicz was mainly castigated for things like not dropping her camera and taking care to get Maggie’s distraught two-year-old daughter out of the room or singlehandedly stopping the assault. (Need it be said that stopping combat is not the job of combat photographers?)

Maggie, the victim of this felonious assault, was also mercilessly denounced: for going out with Shane in the first place, for failing to foresee his violence, for “cheating” on her already estranged husband fighting in Afghanistan, and inexplicably for being a “perpetrator.” Reviewing the commentary for the Columbia Journalism Review, Jina Moore concluded, “[T]here’s one thing all the critics seem to agree on: The only adult in the house not responsible for the violence is the man committing it.”

They Only Stop When They Kill You 

Viewers of these photographs -- photos that accurately reflect the daily violence so many women face -- seem to find it easy to ignore, or even praise, the raging man behind it all. So, too, do so many find it convenient to ignore the violence that America’s warriors abroad inflict under orders on a mass scale upon women and children in war zones.

The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq had the effect of displacing millions from their homes within the country or driving them into exile in foreign lands. Rates of rape and atrocity were staggering, as I learned firsthand when in 2008-2009 I spent time in Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon talking with Iraqi refugees. In addition, those women who remain in Iraq now live under the rule of conservative Islamists, heavily influenced by Iran. Under the former secular regime, Iraqi women were considered the most advanced in the Arab world; today, they say they have been set back a century.

In Afghanistan, too, while Americans take credit for putting women back in the workplace and girls in school, untold thousands of women and children have been displaced internally, many to makeshift camps on the outskirts of Kabul where 17 children froze to death last January. The U.N. reported 2,754 civilian deaths and 4,805 civilian injuries as a result of the war in 2012, the majority of them women and children. In a country without a state capable of counting bodies, these are undoubtedly significant undercounts. A U.N. official said, “It is the tragic reality that most Afghan women and girls were killed or injured while engaging in their everyday activities.” Thousands of women in Afghan cities have been forced into survival sex, as were Iraqi women who fled as refugees to Beirut and particularly Damascus.

That’s what male violence is meant to do to women. The enemy. War itself is a kind of screaming tattooed man, standing in the middle of a room -- or another country -- asserting the law of the strongest. It’s like a reset button on history that almost invariably ensures women will find themselves subjected to men in ever more terrible ways. It’s one more thing that, to a certain kind of man, makes going to war, like good old-fashioned wife torture, so exciting and so much fun.

Ann Jones, historian, journalist, photographer, and TomDispatch regular, chronicled violence against women in the U.S. in several books, including the feminist classic Women Who Kill (1980) and Next Time, She’ll Be Dead (2000), before going to Afghanistan in 2002 to work with women. She is the author of Kabul in Winter (2006) and War Is Not Over When It’s Over (2010). 

Copyright 2013 Ann Jones

Image by CMY Kane, licensed under Creative Commons.  

 

Environmental activists can easily come off as preachy, but Reverend Billy keeps it fresh with street theatre and the occasional dose of irony. Here's a glimpse into what's goes through his head as he protests mountaintop removal—from his new book,  The End of the World . This  excerpt  originally appeared at Reality Sandwich.     

There are about 80 of us, Savitri and myself and an eclectic mixed up group of Europeans, South Americans and Russians.

First, we gather in the courtyard of Barcelona's Museum of Contemporary Art. Amen? Savitri announces that the name of our action is "Naked Grief," and that we will have to learn how to cry energetically -- with tears all the better! -- in public.  We'll do this in Deutsche Bank -- a bank that finances CO2 emissions. As we sob and moan, we will remove our clothing.  Then we will rub ourselves with coal and cry even harder.

So -- we practice crying in that courtyard.  Savitri coaches us in our exercises in public wailing.  It is easy for a few seconds, but out-and-out crying, sobbing, retching, really sorrowing for ten minutes?  It is hard to do.  We have to start crying over and over again.

To help the people who are having trouble crying on purpose, we go down into the politics of this act.  Deutsche Bank is among the banks that finance Mountaintop Removal (MTR).  Do you want to cry?  Imagine a mountain in Appalachia.  The coal company inserts dynamite into deep holes, then lifts the whole ecosystem into the air to die.  The cries of surprise and pain range across the mountain.  Nests fall from trees, deer try to run but catapult dead through the air, the creatures on the forest floor are crushed, the mountain is uprooted and broken.  Then bulldozers with wheels 40 feet high begin to push the dead "over-burden" into the neighboring valley, into the pristine mountain streams below, where the fish lay their eggs and the delicate frogs sing courtship songs. Where Mountain Laurel drops its petals and ferns grow from hundred year old beds of moss.

Do you want to cry?  MTR is a highly profitable but deadly coal-mining practice.  Long sequestered chemicals like selenium, arsenic, and mercury float down wind, cancer clusters along their flight path.  Toxins seep into the water table... it goes on and on.   Do you want to cry?

Yes, we cry, and with ever more feeling, until we are ready to walk to the bank.  Savitri leads us in her tan trenchcoat.  We walk through the narrow streets of the old city, full to bursting with mopeds and bikes and our throng.  When we get to the Deutsche Bank I hold the door open and Savitri walks out of her coat, emerging all white skin and freckles and dark red hair.  We are weeping. People disrobe to varying degrees.  We are extremely naked, for a German bank.

The inconsolable wailing has a strange power.  Among us are many Spanish folk who know all about cante jondo. They can hurl down the betrayal of the heart like no rightwing televangelist ever could.  The bank managers walk down to the first floor to see what all the trouble is about.

Read the rest of this post at Reality Sandwich. 

  

This article originally appeared at WagingNonviolence.net.  

“Every word my mother told me about this country I believed,” said Janna Hakim, a Palestinian-American college student from Brooklyn, with unwavering confidence under the vaulted ceilings of Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan on Monday. Then, Hakim continued, “she was ripped away from me and my siblings.” Her mother had been living in the United States for over 20 years before she was taken from their apartment at 6:00 a.m. during the holy month of Ramadan.

Hakim was one of many immigrants who spoke on the devastating impact of U.S. immigration policy on Monday. She was joined by immigrant activists and advocates who announced the formation of a statewide coalition called New Yorkers for Real Immigration Reform. The group includes immigrant youth and families, workers and labor organizers, civic and faith leaders and community groups. They came to make their demands for comprehensive immigration reform heard and to amplify a call for action leading up to a nationwide mobilization to be held on April 10 in Washington, D.C.

According to Jacki Esposito, Director of Immigration Advocacy of the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC), “The mass mobilization will be the culmination of hard work, legislative advocacy and mobilization of immigration communities. Today is the start of a relentless campaign to pass immigration reform in 2013.” That same day, a bipartisan group of senators released their plan for a comprehensive immigration reform bill; the following day, in a major policy speech, President Obama publicly unveiled his own plan for reform.

Hakim continued to speak of the hardship her family has undergone since her mother was deported. She and sister have become the caretakers for their younger siblings, all of whom are citizens. Their mother has since been permanently barred from the United States.

“I feel like America is my home,” said Michelle Aucapina, a 15-year-old undocumented immigrant from Ecuador. She was detained when she and her younger brother Henry attempted to cross the border by themselves in 2010. She added, “I want to study, graduate, seize the opportunities this country offers me and prove to my parents that it was worth all they have done for me.” Now, she and Henry face deportation orders.

Luis Antonio Livio, proudly wearing an orange T-shirt with the name of his immigrant rights organization, La Fuente, spoke of crossing the desert, a journey that took him three months. Fifteen years later, Livio is calling on reform, he said, “so that I can achieve my dream of being seen as ‘legal’ in this nation.”

Judson Memorial Church has a history of serving immigrants and refugees — from its inception amidst an Italian immigrant community to taking in Central American refugees during the 1980s — making it a fitting place for New Yorkers for Real Immigration Reform to announce their campaign strategy. The event was held in coordination with the Fair Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM), a national coalition of grassroots organizations in the fight for immigration reform. On Monday, FIRM held a press conference in Washington, D.C., with similar events and “echo actions” occurring around the country.

FIRM is organizing the April 10 mobilization, in which groups from all over the country will coalesce to make the voices of immigrant families heard. This marks the foundation of a renewed push for immigration reform that underscores the gravity of the issue by elevating the daily struggle that immigrant families face merely to remain intact. FIRM’s new campaign, “Keeping Families Together,” places everyday families at the forefront of the fight to demand a clear path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, a reduction in the backlogs of immigration cases that keep families apart, due process for all immigrants and an end to mass deportations.

Daniel Coates, who is the lead organizer at Make the Road New York and who works closely with FIRM, said of the campaign in an interview, “FIRM has a long history of fighting for immigration reform and has built credibility and a voice over the years. It’s a strong vehicle that is accountable to many organizations who work with immigrants on the ground, as well as [having] a great deal of capacity to work in Washington.”

Coates emphasizes the strength that immigrants, particularly the undocumented, gain from sharing their stories. “Participation in grassroots organizations, speaking to press and generally getting involved is very helpful — it supports people’s cases for being in this country and their confidence. It is the best way to build power.”

FIRM has launched a website where immigrant families can share how the immigration system has affected them through pictures and posts — poignant tales of living in the shadows. The campaign will also tour country this year; along the way, families will be able tell and record their stories at vigils and rallies, which will later be presented to their lawmakers.

“If we want to talk about family unity, we have to put families on the forefront and develop mechanisms for them to share,” explains Coates. “We need people who are directly affected by this issue to stand up and say what they want. If you don’t speak for yourself, someone else will speak for you.”

While advocates are largely pushing reform on moral and humanitarian grounds, lawmakers cannot deny that immigration is becoming a defining political issue for 2013. Latino and other immigrant voters came to the polls in unprecedented numbers during the 2012 presidential election, shifting our political landscape and sending a resounding message that immigrants will no longer be silenced.

When asked why this campaign’s efforts will impact change in a manner fundamentally different than past reform efforts, Esposito said, “This is a perfect storm.” She cited a committed White House as well as the power that is building in immigrant communities, which has prompted policymakers on both sides of the aisle — and even conservative commentators — to show support.

During his second inaugural address, Obama cited the lack of progress on immigration reform as the greatest failure of his first term, and he reaffirmed his commitment to repairing the immigration system. His promise comes as a slap in the face to many, since under Obama approximately 400,000 immigrants per year were deported for the past two years — more than under any previous administration. The number of individuals detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement has doubled in the last five years. The U.S.-Mexico border has been become militarized to a degree that was unfathomable under previous administrations. And at least 11 million individuals in this country remain undocumented.

More than ever is at stake, and immigrant communities are becoming increasingly unified, organized and outspoken. The coming months will be defining for them. At the close of the event at Judson Memorial Church, Joel Ponder, a young Panamanian community organizer with Queens Community House reflected on the calls for immigration reform by his fellow coalition members, many of whom have lost loved ones to deportation. “We need reform now,” he said, “or it will be too late.”

Image by Laurie Smolenski.  

 

This post originally appeared at TomDispatch. 

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For more than half a century, Noam Chomsky has been a relentless voice for justice, democracy, and universal human rights. Having revolutionized modern linguistics in the 1950s, Chomsky turned his attention to the Vietnam War in the following decade, and has since authored dozens of books on activism, propaganda, and American foreign and domestic policy. Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, where he has worked and taught since 1955. His latest book, Occupy, appeared in May 2012. Chomsky was a named an Utne Visionary in 1995.

 

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[This piece is adapted from “Uprisings,” a chapter in Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire, Noam Chomsky’s new interview book with David Barsamian (with thanks to the publisher, Metropolitan Books). The questions are Barsamian’s, the answers Chomsky’s.]

Does the United States still have the same level of control over the energy resources of theMiddle East as it once had? 

The major energy-producing countries are still firmly under the control of the Western-backed dictatorships. So, actually, the progress made by the Arab Spring is limited, but it’s not insignificant. The Western-controlled dictatorial system is eroding. In fact, it’s been eroding for some time. So, for example, if you go back 50 years, the energy resources -- the main concern of U.S. planners -- have been mostly nationalized. There are constantly attempts to reverse that, but they have not succeeded.

Take the U.S. invasion of Iraq, for example. To everyone except a dedicated ideologue, it was pretty obvious that we invaded Iraq not because of our love of democracy but because it’s maybe the second- or third-largest source of oil in the world, and is right in the middle of the major energy-producing region. You’re not supposed to say this. It’s considered a conspiracy theory.

The United States was seriously defeated in Iraq by Iraqi nationalism -- mostly by nonviolent resistance. The United States could kill the insurgents, but they couldn’t deal with half a million people demonstrating in the streets. Step by step, Iraq was able to dismantle the controls put in place by the occupying forces. By November 2007, it was becoming pretty clear that it was going to be very hard to reach U.S. goals. And at that point, interestingly, those goals were explicitly stated. So in November 2007 the Bush II administration came out with an official declaration about what any future arrangement with Iraq would have to be. It had two major requirements: one, that the United States must be free to carry out combat operations from its military bases, which it will retain; and two, “encouraging the flow of foreign investments to Iraq, especially American investments.” In January 2008, Bush made this clear in one of his signing statements. A couple of months later, in the face of Iraqi resistance, the United States had to give that up. Control of Iraq is now disappearing before their eyes.

Iraq was an attempt to reinstitute by force something like the old system of control, but it was beaten back. In general, I think, U.S. policies remain constant, going back to the Second World War. But the capacity to implement them is declining.

Declining because of economic weakness? 

Partly because the world is just becoming more diverse. It has more diverse power centers. At the end of the Second World War, the United States was absolutely at the peak of its power. It had half the world’s wealth and every one of its competitors was seriously damaged or destroyed. It had a position of unimaginable security and developed plans to essentially run the world -- not unrealistically at the time.

This was called “Grand Area” planning? 

Yes. Right after the Second World War, George Kennan, head of the U.S. State Department policy planning staff, and others sketched out the details, and then they were implemented. What’s happening now in the Middle East and North Africa, to an extent, and in South America substantially goes all the way back to the late 1940s. The first major successful resistance to U.S. hegemony was in 1949. That’s when an event took place, which, interestingly, is called “the loss of China.” It’s a very interesting phrase, never challenged. There was a lot of discussion about who is responsible for the loss of China. It became a huge domestic issue. But it’s a very interesting phrase. You can only lose something if you own it. It was just taken for granted: we possess China -- and if they move toward independence, we’ve lost China. Later came concerns about “the loss of Latin America,” “the loss of the Middle East,” “the loss of” certain countries, all based on the premise that we own the world and anything that weakens our control is a loss to us and we wonder how to recover it.

Today, if you read, say, foreign policy journals or, in a farcical form, listen to the Republican debates, they’re asking, “How do we prevent further losses?”

On the other hand, the capacity to preserve control has sharply declined. By 1970, the world was already what was called tripolar economically, with a U.S.-based North American industrial center, a German-based European center, roughly comparable in size, and a Japan-based East Asian center, which was then the most dynamic growth region in the world. Since then, the global economic order has become much more diverse. So it’s harder to carry out our policies, but the underlying principles have not changed much.

Take the Clinton doctrine. The Clinton doctrine was that the United States is entitled to resort to unilateral force to ensure “uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources.” That goes beyond anything that George W. Bush said. But it was quiet and it wasn’t arrogant and abrasive, so it didn’t cause much of an uproar. The belief in that entitlement continues right to the present. It’s also part of the intellectual culture.

Right after the assassination of Osama bin Laden, amid all the cheers and applause, there were a few critical comments questioning the legality of the act. Centuries ago, there used to be something called presumption of innocence. If you apprehend a suspect, he’s a suspect until proven guilty. He should be brought to trial. It’s a core part of American law. You can trace it back to Magna Carta. So there were a couple of voices saying maybe we shouldn’t throw out the whole basis of Anglo-American law. That led to a lot of very angry and infuriated reactions, but the most interesting ones were, as usual, on the left liberal end of the spectrum. Matthew Yglesias, a well-known and highly respected left liberal commentator, wrote an article in which he ridiculed these views. He said they’re “amazingly naive,” silly. Then he expressed the reason. He said that “one of the main functions of the international institutional order is precisely to legitimate the use of deadly military force by western powers.” Of course, he didn’t mean Norway. He meant the United States. So the principle on which the international system is based is that the United States is entitled to use force at will. To talk about the United States violating international law or something like that is amazingly naive, completely silly. Incidentally, I was the target of those remarks, and I’m happy to confess my guilt. I do think that Magna Carta and international law are worth paying some attention to.

I merely mention that to illustrate that in the intellectual culture, even at what’s called the left liberal end of the political spectrum, the core principles haven’t changed very much. But the capacity to implement them has been sharply reduced. That’s why you get all this talk about American decline. Take a look at the year-end issue of Foreign Affairs, the main establishment journal. Its big front-page cover asks, in bold face, “Is America Over?” It’s a standard complaint of those who believe they should have everything. If you believe you should have everything and anything gets away from you, it’s a tragedy, the world is collapsing. So is America over? A long time ago we “lost” China, we’ve lost Southeast Asia, we’ve lost South America. Maybe we’ll lose the Middle East and North African countries. Is America over? It’s a kind of paranoia, but it’s the paranoia of the superrich and the superpowerful. If you don’t have everything, it’s a disaster.

The New York Times describes the “defining policy quandary of the Arab Spring: how to square contradictory American impulses that include support for democratic change, a desire for stability, and wariness of Islamists who have become a potent political force.” The Times identifies three U.S. goals. What do you make of them? 

Two of them are accurate. The United States is in favor of stability. But you have to remember what stability means. Stability means conformity to U.S. orders. So, for example, one of the charges against Iran, the big foreign policy threat, is that it is destabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan. How? By trying to expand its influence into neighboring countries. On the other hand, we “stabilize” countries when we invade them and destroy them.

I’ve occasionally quoted one of my favorite illustrations of this, which is from a well-known, very good liberal foreign policy analyst, James Chace, a former editor of Foreign Affairs. Writing about the overthrow of the Salvador Allende regime and the imposition of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in 1973, he said that we had to “destabilize” Chile in the interests of “stability.” That’s not perceived to be a contradiction -- and it isn’t. We had to destroy the parliamentary system in order to gain stability, meaning that they do what we say. So yes, we are in favor of stability in this technical sense.

Concern about political Islam is just like concern about any independent development. Anything that’s independent you have to have concern about because it might undermine you. In fact, it’s a little ironic, because traditionally the United States and Britain have by and large strongly supported radical Islamic fundamentalism, not political Islam, as a force to block secular nationalism, the real concern. So, for example, Saudi Arabia is the most extreme fundamentalist state in the world, a radical Islamic state. It has a missionary zeal, is spreading radical Islam to Pakistan, funding terror. But it’s the bastion of U.S. and British policy. They’ve consistently supported it against the threat of secular nationalism from Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt and Abd al-Karim Qasim’s Iraq, among many others. But they don’t like political Islam because it might become independent.

The first of the three points, our yearning for democracy, that’s about on the level of Joseph Stalin talking about the Russian commitment to freedom, democracy, and liberty for the world. It’s the kind of statement you laugh about when you hear it from commissars or Iranian clerics, but you nod politely and maybe even with awe when you hear it from their Western counterparts.

If you look at the record, the yearning for democracy is a bad joke. That’s even recognized by leading scholars, though they don’t put it this way. One of the major scholars on so-called democracy promotion is Thomas Carothers, who is pretty conservative and highly regarded -- a neo-Reaganite, not a flaming liberal. He worked in Reagan’s State Department and has several books reviewing the course of democracy promotion, which he takes very seriously. He says, yes, this is a deep-seated American ideal, but it has a funny history. The history is that every U.S. administration is “schizophrenic.” They support democracy only if it conforms to certain strategic and economic interests. He describes this as a strange pathology, as if the United States needed psychiatric treatment or something. Of course, there’s another interpretation, but one that can’t come to mind if you’re a well-educated, properly behaved intellectual.

Within several months of the toppling of [President Hosni] Mubarak in Egypt, he was in the dock facing criminal charges and prosecution. It’s inconceivable that U.S. leaders will ever be held to account for their crimes in Iraq or beyond. Is that going to change anytime soon? 

That’s basically the Yglesias principle: the very foundation of the international order is that the United States has the right to use violence at will. So how can you charge anybody?

And no one else has that right. 

Of course not. Well, maybe our clients do. If Israel invades Lebanon and kills a thousand people and destroys half the country, okay, that’s all right. It’s interesting. Barack Obama was a senator before he was president. He didn’t do much as a senator, but he did a couple of things, including one he was particularly proud of. In fact, if you looked at his website before the primaries, he highlighted the fact that, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, he cosponsored a Senate resolution demanding that the United States do nothing to impede Israel’s military actions until they had achieved their objectives and censuring Iran and Syria because they were supporting resistance to Israel’s destruction of southern Lebanon, incidentally, for the fifth time in 25 years. So they inherit the right. Other clients do, too. 

But the rights really reside in Washington. That’s what it means to own the world. It’s like the air you breathe. You can’t question it. The main founder of contemporary IR [international relations] theory, Hans Morgenthau, was really quite a decent person, one of the very few political scientists and international affairs specialists to criticize the Vietnam War on moral, not tactical, grounds. Very rare. He wrote a book called The Purpose of American Politics. You already know what’s coming. Other countries don’t have purposes. The purpose of America, on the other hand, is “transcendent”: to bring freedom and justice to the rest of the world. But he’s a good scholar, like Carothers. So he went through the record. He said, when you study the record, it looks as if the United States hasn’t lived up to its transcendent purpose. But then he says, to criticize our transcendent purpose “is to fall into the error of atheism, which denies the validity of religion on similar grounds” -- which is a good comparison. It’s a deeply entrenched religious belief. It’s so deep that it’s going to be hard to disentangle it. And if anyone questions that, it leads to near hysteria and often to charges of anti-Americanism or “hating America” -- interesting concepts that don’t exist in democratic societies, only in totalitarian societies and here, where they’re just taken for granted.

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. A TomDispatch regular , he is the author of numerous best-selling political works, including recently Hopes and Prospects and Making the Future. This piece is adapted from the chapter “Uprisings” in his newest book (with interviewer David Barsamian), Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books).  

Excerpted from Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire,published this month by Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright (c) 2013 by Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian. All rights reserved.

Image of Egyptian protesters in Tahrir Square demanding a free Palestine by Gigi Ibrahim, licensed under Creative Commons.