At what point do progressives stop being Democrats' whipped dogs and start acting like a movement capable of putting the Dems in their proper place as the party of the people? David Sirota wrote today about Obama's latest call to increase war spending beyond its already ludicrous proportions.

How many of the extreme right-wing and criminal policies of Bush-Cheney has Obama adopted? How many of those extreme right-wing policies has he exceeded? Last month, knowledge that Obama has gone a step further than Bush, authorizing the executive branch to murder American citizens on the flimsiest of rationales. This sh__ has GOT to end.

Given that O's SOTU will propose a vile goulash of war, neo liberal austerity, abridgements of civil rights, foot dragging on climate change, meaningless tax cuts double talk on Wall Street bonuses, vague, but increasingly apparent gestures in the direction of cutting Medicare and Social Security, etc.

Why the hell is there absolutely no organizing or even discussion of massive protests against the slide into barbarism which O is willingly and enthusiastically presiding over?

Jon Walker over at Fire Dog Lake makes a very effective argument about why learning the wrong lesson from the defeat of Martha Coakley in Tuesday's Massachusetts Senate race will lead to disaster.

And why did all this happen? Because four Blackwater military contractors were killed. Not only that, but the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (yes, it's a government committee) "fault Blackwater in Fallujah ambush." (Unfortunately, this report came out 3 years after the fact. We never seem to know these things at the time, or our 'leaders' don't.) So, because four contractors were killed, we basically go into a city use depleted uranium and other toxic weapons and destroy the entire city, killing thousands. This is clearly a war crime, and people need to be taken to task for it.

It looks like the Pentagon is continuing on its all-out offensive to keep the Guantanamo Bay prison camp open by trying to put cosmetic touches on a prison set up on inherently unconstitutional grounds: indefinite seizure and gaining intelligence by torture.

WASHINGTON, (AFP) – A Pentagon report has found conditions at the controversial Guantanamo prison in line with the Geneva Conventions, but called for the isolation of some inmates to be eased by allowing them more social contact and recreation.

Think Progress:

In an analysis of trends in suicide attacks worldwide since 1981 (pdf), researcher Assaf Moghadam presents a pretty shocking statistic:

Iraq accounts for 1,067 suicide attacks in the period under review — “a number that accounts for more than half (54.8%) of all suicide attacks since 1981. The sheer volume in which this tactic has struck Iraq is even more impressive since no suicide attacks were recorded in Iraq prior to the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has been showing an increase in the number of these groups for a quite a while. They are not confined to the Old Confederacy. SPLC hate group map. Current SPLC Intelligence report. 2008 summary. You can subscribe to the report and search their archives. I recommend.

The two groups that concern me the most are the KKK and Neo-Nazi groups, though they are not the only ones. It looks to me like they are stepping up their recruiting efforts, and read a while back in a trustworthy source that the military has a problem with white supremacists joining up, volunteering for combat units, and then returning to civilian life with those skills. A sort of “train the trainer” from hell. If you just scanned the The Timothy McVeigh Finishing School the first time around, you might want to give it a close read. It’s an important piece of this puzzle.

I want to be clear about what I know versus what I just think, and do my best to avoid fearmongering, so this is going to take a little work.

Here is a plain English story that I am comfortable labeling a historical account, with a little psychology thrown in toward the end for good measure. Everything in here is there either because I am sure research will confirm it, or because I live down here and knew it was going on at the time.

There are few headlines sweeter than this. Bye, Bye, Blackwater:

U.S. will not renew Blackwater contract in Iraq

Fri Jan 30, 7:00 pm ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. State Department has told Blackwater Worldwide, the private security firm whose guards are accused of killing Iraqi civilians while protecting U.S. diplomats, that it will not renew its contract in Iraq.

The move was not a surprise following Iraq's decision to deny a license to Blackwater, which drew intense criticism after its guards opened fire in Baghdad traffic in 2007, killing at least 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians.

Until 1947, the United States habitually told the truth about at least one thing. The job title of the Pentagon's highest ranking civilian was the Secretary of War. But the recent slaughter of tens of millions in the Second World War had given the Pentagon's real function a bad name. So Democrat Harry Truman rebranded the Department of War, naming it the Department of Defense. From that day, the Secretary of War became the Secretary of Defense. War plants, war expenditures and bloodthirsty war industries became more benign-sounding defense plants, the defense expenditures and the patriotic defense industry.

McClatchy's top story today tells how a Kuwaiti subcontractor to our old friend KBR has been holding about a thousand men from India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh in warehouses near Bahgdad for three months. These poor guys paid more than $2000 for the privilege of being treated this way.

The story has more heartbreakers in it than I have time to extract, so go read. Just a taste:

A group of about 50 men living in tents about a mile away were even worse off than the men in the warehouses, and they appeared to be victims of human trafficking. They live in huts they built with tarps and pieces of carpet, and said they had no access to food or water.
...

So hat tip to BTD at Talk Left for the link to Matt Yglesias piece regarding the "Bush Doctrine". Unfortunately, for varying reasons, each author's post focuses on the Palin angle (Bashing Palin for Yglesias, combating PDS for BTD).

What is missing is exploring one of the reasons why people who aren't thrilled about Obama (to put it mildly) still could find a reason to vote for him over risking McCain in office: John McCain apparently believes in Bush's idea of prophylactic (he would call "preventive") war.

From Yglesias:

I'm just all about linking and not saying anything tonight. Still...Your Prozac Army:

One in six American soldiers in Afghanistan and one in eight in Iraq are taking daily doses of prescription antidepressants, sleeping pills or painkillers to help them cope with the stresses of combat, according to figures contained in a US Army mental health advisory team report seen by The Herald.

The findings mean that at least 20,000 troops are on medication such as Prozac or diamorphine while serving in the front line or on equally dangerous convoy escort or driving duties in conflicts where insurgents regularly target the supply chain.

While the vast majority would have been barred automatically from combat roles in earlier wars on medical and safety grounds, the pressure to provide up to 200,000 soldiers at any given time for the two major deployments has led to a relaxation of the rules.

Keep reading, it gets "better."

Odd, weird, kewl, something else? I guess I don't know.

This is one of those 'posted without comment' thingees, but I think I'll add it to m y Netflix list, just for fun.

Groups

Social groups have specific characteristics: (a) they consist of two or more people who (b) interact in an ordered fashion, (c) share specific values and norms, and (d) have at least some sense of unity and common goals.

Group conformity / obedience

One of the main influences that groups exercise over their members lies in their capacity to induce conformity – the process through which members modify their behavior to comply with the group’s norms or decisions. Research shows that group pressure does not have to be intense to produce conformity.

One such experiment was conducted by Solomon Asch (1956) to show the power of groups to influence behavior. Asch assembled 6 to 8 students, all accomplices except one, the subject of the experiment. The students were shown a line on card 1 and asked to pick the corresponding line on card 2 (see diagram).

It is obvious that the correct answer is A. At first, Asch’s accomplices answered correctly but in further rounds of the experiment they started answering incorrectly. Asch wanted to see what the subject would do: would he provide the correct answer despite the group’s incorrect consensus or would he go along with the group?

One third of the subjects went along and provided the wrong answer and later admitted they knew it but did not want to be singled out. In other words, they were willing to compromise their judgment for the sake of going along with the group’s (wrong) answer.

Here is a video to illustrate this dynamic further:

  Read more…

Here is the second part of my review of Manfred Steger's The Rise of the Global Imaginary (part 1 here). In the last part of the book, Steger focuses on the sometimes conflicting ideologies derived from the global imaginaries.

Starting from the collapse of the USSR, Steger argues (correctly, I think) that the first winning ideology in the decontestation game was market globalism, the ideology that managed to decontest "globalization" in the limited sense of deregulated markets on a global scale.

To explore the tenets of market globalism, Steger reviews the writings of one of its main proponents and popularizers: Thomas Friedman. Needless to say, this is painful to read as is anything related to Thomas Friedman (hence no links), however he is indeed a central figure in the promotion of market globalism. He is also a good representative of the way this ideology was promoted by the political, economic and corporate elites in the 1990s (or the transnational capitalist class as Leslie Sklair calls this group, Friedman belongs to the ideological sub-group of the TCC).

  Read more…

Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

I know Robert Fisk is controversial. But he lives and breathes the Middle East and has intimate knowledge of it. In his latest column for the Independent, he reports on the restraint that Al Jazeera has shown considering the amount of atrocities on tape it receives:

""We've trained ourselves not to go to the maximum in our feelings when we see terrible things like this," Ayman Gaballah, Al Jazeera's deputy chief editor, says bleakly. And I can see why. There are other tapes, other outrages too terrible to show. George Bush wanted to bomb the station's headquarters in Doha but staff have shown great sensitivity with what they show the world from Iraq. There is no proof that any of Al Jazeera's reporters was ever tipped off about anti-American attacks before they happened – in Iraq, I investigated these claims in 2003 and 2004 – but plenty of proof that some things are too awful to see.

vastleft*:

Many people believe the press failed to do its job in the run up to the Iraq war. Has Beltway reporting changed as a result?

Gwen Ifill:

I am not sure what you mean by "Beltway reporting."

Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

Two good pieces on Al Qaeda landed in my Newsreader this week and they both point in the same direction, albeit in different terms. The first one is from Tony Karon who questions the current relevance of Al Qaeda as the big post-9/11 bogeyman. For Karon, Al Qaeda is irrelevant and always was. In this respect, Al Qaeda is comparable to Trotsky... Huh? How does the comparison apply?

"Al-Qaeda is irrelevant, and yet U.S. hegemony in the Middle East is facing an unprecedented challenge from Islamist-nationalist groups. To understand the link between al-Qaeda’s weakness and the greatly expanded strength of groups such as Hamas, Hizballah, the Muslim Brotherhood and, of course, Iran, over the past seven years, it’s worth turning to the 20th century precedent: Leon Trotsky and his followers vs. the larger, nationally-focused parties of the left in the mid 20th century.

Trotsky rejected pragmatism and compromise by nationally-based leftist movements and insisted, instead, that they subordinate their specific national interests and objectives to the fantasy of “world revolution.” And as a result, long before his murder by Stalin, he found himself holed up in Mexico City, manically firing off communiques denouncing all compromise, and being largely ignored by the more substantial parties of the left world-wide. He had become an irrelevant chatterbox, caught up in a frenzy of his own rhetoric while world events simply passed him by. The same can be said of Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri — it is not al-Qaeda, but the likes of Iran, Hamas, Hizballah, and the Muslim Brotherhood that represent the future of the nationalist-Islamist challenge to Western power in the Middle East."

What makes Al Qaeda seemingly powerful are two factors: the one mentioned by Karon, that is, the fact that the United States treats Al Qaeda as this omnipresent threat of global proportion and reacts to every action as if it were the beginnings of a terrorist apocalypse. The second one, which I think is relevant here and contributes to the first, is that fact that Al Qaeda, being a non-state group, articulates itself opportunistically to nation-based movements (Algeria, Philippines, Indonesia, or Iraq).  Read more…

In November of 2006, Bill Moyers was asked to give the Sol Feinstone Lecture on The Meaning of Freedom, an endowed serial event for the men and women cadets of West Point.

It is an amazing speech to read, and it should warm the hearts of all liberals that West Pointers are being exposed to material like that Bill Moyers chose to honor them with.

I suppose I could, and perhaps should, leave the link and let you go and read it, but I've decided to highlight certain aspects of Moyers' lecture, although you should still go and read the extended excerpt published at TOM PAINE from which I am working.

Cross-posted from the Global Sociology Blog

Standard Operating Procedure is a book co-authored by Philip Gourevitch (also author of the great We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow, We Will Be killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda and writer for the New Yorker) and Errol Morris (director of the great documentary The Fog of War, among others) who also directed the documentary of the same title (incredible website that is well worth checking out with tons of great information that supplement the book very well and makes you impatient for the film to be shown in your area... not yet for me, unfortunately).

The book and documentary are about the Abu Ghraib scandal, of course. We might think that we had read, seen and heard (see also the excellent HBO documentary Ghosts of Abu Ghraib) everything we could probably stomach about this sorry mess but we were wrong. Besides, as a country, we deserve to have this thing shoved in our face on a regular basis because, as the book states, this stain is our own.

And let's remember that the story of Guantanamo Bay has not been told yet. Who knows what horrors will come out of there? (Although this post by DDay over at Digby's place, relating how the US offered its Gitmo facilities to the Chinese for torturing purposes and the fact that we're stuck there because we have a whole bunch of people we can neither trial - because they've been tortured - nor release, because, huh, who cares about their excuses anymore... seems to me there will be no end to the evils to be dug up there). And there's more coming out every day lately: see McClatchy (one of the only decent remaining reporting outfits), the BBC, and Jeralyn at Talk Left.

But back to the book itself.   Read more…

Samantha Power's book, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World, would have received much more, and well-deserved, publicity if she had not made a stupid comment to a journalist regarding Senator Hillary Clinton. As a result, she resigned from Barack Obama's campaign and this has probably affected her promotion of the book. It is a shame because it is indeed a fascinating book regarding the complex and frustrating internal workings of the United Nations through the prism of another fascinating figure: Sergio Vieira de Mello.

Why won't the war end? Money, of course.

U.S. lawmakers have a financial interest in military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, a review of their accounts has revealed.

Members of Congress invested nearly 196 million dollars of their own money in companies that receive hundreds of millions of dollars a day from Pentagon contracts to provide goods and services to U.S. armed forces, say nonpartisan watchdog groups.

Plenty of Dems on that list. I think too often points like these are left out of discussions about the war, when it will end, why it goes on. Some argue the war is the only real stimulus to the economy, and when it ends the preznit of the time will be the guy/gal without the seat in an economic game of musical chairs (from the perspective of the rich). We'll see. But the amounts this article mentions are peanuts, compared to the real profit being pocketed by those unelected, unrevealed by our press, figures who appoint and select "our" politicians. Trillions, that's the relevant perspective. Where'd they go?

In anticipation of Petraeus' testimony this week, it might be helpful to have some reality-based talking points about recent events in Iraq to bulwark against the inevitable flurry of right-wing BS and journalistic laziness soon to come:

Juan Cole breaks most of them down very succinctly, referring also to Frank Rich in today's NYT (more on that later):

1. The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and the Da'wa Party, which back Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, are closer to Iran than the Sadr Movement.

2. It was al-Maliki's parliamentary coalition that sought the cease fire by asking their Iranian patrons to broker it.

3. The main motivation for the attack on Sadrist neighborhoods in Basra was to ensure that ISCI wins the elections in that key oil province in October.

[paragraph broken into bullet points by me]

Obama's top Iraq advisor has written a paper in which he advises that through negotiations with the Iraqi government “the U.S. should aim to transition to a sustainable over-watch posture (of perhaps 60,000–80,000 forces) by the end of 2010 (although the specific timelines should be the byproduct of negotiations and conditions on the ground).” (Emphasis mine.)

Now, of course, Obama's campaign denies that this position is his position, but Colin Kahl heads his Iraq working group and Obama has never said how many troops he'd leave on the ground in Iraq. Obama's advisors have also said that he wouldn't rule out using Blackwater and other mercenaries in Iraq.

Like it or not, our next president will have to deal with conflicts all over the world. The nature of warfare has been changing (a lot of ink has been spent on this already) but obviously, this administration did not read the memo.