Failed States¶
Metadata¶
- Author: Noam Chomsky
- ASIN: B000Q9IU7U
- ISBN: 978-0805082845
- Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000Q9IU7U
- Kindle link
Highlights¶
Among the hardest tasks that anyone can undertake, and one of the most important, is to look honestly in the mirror. — location: 67 ^ref-7053
China has led efforts in the United Nations to preserve outer space for peaceful purposes, in conflict with the United States, which, along with Israel, has barred all moves to prevent an arms race in space. — location: 205 ^ref-4035
Clinton’s expansion of NATO in violation of Washington’s “categorical assurance” to Gorbachev that if he “would agree to a reunited Germany remaining in NATO, the alliance would not expand eastwards to absorb former members of the Warsaw Pact.” — location: 270 ^ref-48608
spite of the unprecedented statement by the G8 scientists ahead of next month’s Gleneagles summit—George W. Bush, the US president, insists we still do not know enough about this literally world-changing phenomenon.” Washington then “succeeded in removing language calling for prompt action to control global warming” and eliminating such inflammatory statements as “Our world is warming,” because “Mr. Bush has said global warming is too uncertain a matter to justify anything more than voluntary measures.” — location: 330 ^ref-7734
President Bush “is right that Iraq is a main front in the war on terrorism, but this is a front we created.” — location: 406 ^ref-42311
Between 1980 and 2003, there were 315 suicide attacks worldwide, initially for the most part by the secular Tamil Tigers. Since the US invasion, estimates of suicide bombings in Iraq (where such attacks were virtually unknown before) range as high as 400. — location: 411 ^ref-11947
Bush has “created a new haven for terrorism in Iraq that escalates the potential for Islamic violence against Europe and the United States,” — location: 416 ^ref-28242
Hadji Murád — location: 426 ^ref-33345
Washington blocked his efforts to join the attack against the secular enemy Saddam Hussein. — location: 427 ^ref-21037
Sheikh Tantawi of Al-Azhar, “one of the first Muslim scholars to condemn Al Qaeda [and] often criticized by ultraconservative clerics as a pro-Western reformer . . . ruled that efforts to stop the American invasion are a ‘binding Islamic duty.’” — location: 437 ^ref-823
“US forces and policies are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the early 1990s. As a result. . . it is fair to conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden’s only indispensable ally.” — location: 443 ^ref-23243
that a general strategy of preventive war is likely to bring about precisely the outcome that Bush and Rice wish to avert.” — location: 462 ^ref-58946
Seeking to provoke Iraq into some action that could be portrayed as a casus belli, London and Washington renewed their bombing of Iraqi targets in May 2002, with a sharp increase in September 2002. In the nine months leading up to the official start of the war in March 2003, US and UK planes flew almost 22,000 sorties, hitting 391 “carefully selected targets,” — location: 506 ^ref-3637
Psychological warfare specialists in the Eisenhower administration advised that the United States should “covertly stimulate acts and attitudes of [defiance] short of mass rebellion aimed at . . . provoking open Soviet intervention in both the GDR [East Germany] and the other satellites,” — location: 522 ^ref-6041
It is possible that current US military actions across Syria’s borders are likewise designed to provoke some pretext for attack on the one Arab state that is currently defying Washington’s orders. — location: 530 ^ref-61520
These sites had been secured by UN inspectors, but the invaders dismissed them, leaving the sites unguarded. The immediate consequence was sophisticated and massive looting of these installations. — location: 546 ^ref-36003
A Jordanian journalist was informed by officials in charge of the Jordanian-Iraqi border after US and UK forces took over that radioactive materials were detected in one of every eight trucks crossing into Jordan, destination unknown. — location: 550 ^ref-27006
The official justification for the invasion was to prevent the use of WMDs that did not exist. The invasion provided the terrorists who had been mobilized by the United States and its allies with the means to develop WMDs—namely, equipment that the United States and others had provided to Saddam Hussein, — location: 554 ^ref-44322
The invasion of Iraq is perhaps the most glaring example of the low priority assigned by Washington planners to the threat of terror, but there are numerous others. — location: 568 ^ref-53577
Tax cuts for the rich rank far higher as a priority than protection of the population from terror. — location: 606 ^ref-4964
as many as 100,000 people in a densely populated area could die within 30 minutes if a single, 90-ton freight car carrying chlorine were punctured,” — location: 610 ^ref-39050
All of this illustrates how low the priority of preventing terror is in comparison with corporate welfare. — location: 614 ^ref-6991
This peculiar mixture of supreme arrogance, utter incompetence, and passion for obedience has had catastrophic consequences, quite possibly laying the groundwork for much worse to come. — location: 638 ^ref-20950
justice and law when dealing with terrorists. Rather, leading terrorists are given presidential pardons over the strong objections of the Justice Department, which wants them deported on grounds of national security — location: 657 ^ref-8833
Dora María Téllez, the heroine of the popular struggle that overthrew the vicious Somoza regime in Nicaragua, was denied a visa to teach at the Harvard Divinity School. She was deemed a terrorist because she had helped overthrow a US-backed tyrant and mass murderer. — location: 667 ^ref-5679
Fortunately, Western commentators are saved from the unambiguous conclusion, thanks to our self-exemption from the most elementary of moral principles, the principle of universality. — location: 675 ^ref-45432
It is a rational calculation, on the assumption that human survival is not particularly significant in comparison with short-term power and wealth. And that is nothing new. These themes resonate through history. The difference today is only that the stakes are enormously higher. — location: 690 ^ref-46734
The crucial issue throughout the post-World War II period, however, has been control, more so than access or profit. And that concern for “critical leverage” in world affairs will presumably remain true for the foreseeable future. — location: 716 ^ref-9872
AMONG THE MOST salient properties of failed states is that they do not protect their citizens from violence—and perhaps even destruction— or that decision makers regard such concerns as lower in priority than the short-term power and wealth of the state’s dominant sectors. Another characteristic of failed states is that they are “outlaw states,” whose leaderships dismiss international law and treaties with contempt. — location: 718 ^ref-31745
The attack began with a bombing campaign intended to drive out all but the adult male population; men ages fifteen to forty-five who attempted to flee Falluja were turned back. The plans resembled the preliminary stage of the Srebrenica massacre, though the Serb attackers trucked women and children out of the city instead of bombing them out. — location: 851 ^ref-62916
“Why has America given itself the right to call on UK and Australian and other armies for help and we don’t have the same right?” — location: 862 ^ref-8101
Thus the front page of the world’s leading newspaper was cheerfully depicting war crimes for which the political leadership could be sentenced to severe penalties under US law, the death penalty if patients ripped from their beds and manacled on the floor happened to die as a result. — location: 881 ^ref-62105
The new constitution, the Wall Street Journal notes, has “far deeper Islamic underpinnings than Iraq’s last one, a half century ago, which was based on [secular] French civil law,” and had granted women “nearly equal rights” with men. — location: 945 ^ref-47362
The conclusions of the study, carried out on rather conservative assumptions, are that “the death toll associated with the invasion and occupation of Iraq is probably about 100,000 people, and may be much higher.” — location: 956 ^ref-30133
discussion turned to the sacking of Baghdad by Hulagu Khan and his vicious atrocities. A philosophy professor commented that “Hulagu was humane compared with the Americans,” — location: 973 ^ref-16674
old ethnic-religious divisions to which Iraq is now “regressing” under the occupation, — location: 976 ^ref-46558
The relatively high nutritional levels of Iraqis in the 1970s and 1980s, even through the war with Iran, began to decline severely during the decade of the sanctions, with a further disastrous decline after the 2003 invasion. — location: 986 ^ref-49574
The authors of the study comment that it is as if college students in Germany estimated Holocaust deaths at 300,000, in which case we might conclude that there are some problems in Germany—and if Germany ruled the world, some rather more serious problems. — location: 1003 ^ref-47230
It is an interesting comment on the prevailing moral-intellectual culture that unsupported slander of opponents who are unidentified is considered legitimate practice, particularly among those who modestly describe themselves as “the decent left”—indeed highly meritorious, as long as the conclusions come out the right way. — location: 1019 ^ref-32433
It is a remarkable fact that Washington planners have had more trouble controlling Iraq than Russia had in its satellites or Germany in occupied Europe, where the countries were run by domestic governments and security forces for the most part, with the ruling power in the background to sustain the client regimes. — location: 1029 ^ref-6802
March 1991, when Bush I authorized the tyrant to crush the Shiite rebellion that might have overthrown him. — location: 1036 ^ref-53764
“the terrible years of the U.N. sanctions . . . incomes had dropped to one-fifth of pre-war [1990] levels, infant mortality had doubled, and only a minority of Iraqis had access to clean water.” — location: 1042 ^ref-25270
half of all sewage treatment tanks were still inoperable after having been destroyed along with power supplies by the US and UK bombing in 1991, which “unleashed epidemics of typhoid and cholera.” — location: 1043 ^ref-27913
The sanctions, he wrote, “treat Iraq as a massive refugee camp to be provided with emergency relief. What Iraqis need is to be able to regenerate their economy and resume reconstruction and development. This means that essential services and the infrastructure have to be given a high priority, and the import programme has to be geared to raising domestic production,” precisely what the US-imposed sanctions regime prevented. — location: 1052 ^ref-54987
Halliday resigned in protest in 1998, condemning the sanctions as “genocidal.” Von Sponeck resigned two years later, for similar reasons. — location: 1058 ^ref-16776
Unless people are at least given the opportunity to overthrow a tyrannical regime, no outside power has the right to carry out the task—inevitably for its own purposes, and in this case, with horrifying results. — location: 1061 ^ref-20632
the comparison to South Africa, where the sanctions evaded by the Reaganites were welcomed by the black majority despite the harm caused them. That criterion, regularly ignored, should be a primary factor in judging the propriety of sanctions. — location: 1168 ^ref-3131
When an international tribunal was established to try war crimes in the Balkan wars, a group of international lawyers requested the tribunal to investigate NATO crimes during the Serbian bombing campaign, presenting documentary evidence recorded by the major international human rights organizations, along with revealing admissions by the NATO command. — location: 1183 ^ref-49267
the United States is self-exempted from the fundamental principles of world order that it played the primary role in formulating and enacting. — location: 1196 ^ref-42309
“If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.” — location: 1215 ^ref-9487
In short, the Mexican press concluded, “Rice was telling the Mexicans . . . that while they had a water treaty to live up to, the United States could simply withdraw from a signed agreement that it found ‘inappropriate.’ — location: 1239 ^ref-29657
Therefore, contrary to what others mistakenly believe, it was quite appropriate for Washington to refuse to pay its UN dues from the Reagan years until 2001, when Washington changed course because it then needed international support. — location: 1253 ^ref-777
“new thinking in the law of war,” which takes international law and treaties to be “private contractual rules” that the more powerful party “is free to apply or disregard as it sees fit”: sternly enforced to ensure a safer world for investors, but quaint and obsolete when they constrain Washington’s resort to aggression and other crimes. — location: 1259 ^ref-55734
But in the longer term, by far the most important was that such an operation (and the reasoning that led to the decision to undertake it) threatened to undermine the very fabric of international relations. That decision repudiated a century of slow, intermittent and often painful progress towards an international system based on cooperative security, multilateral decision-making, collective action, agreed norms of behaviour and a steadily growing fabric of law — location: 1285 ^ref-26931
The NPT was based on two central agreements: “In return for renouncing the option of acquiring nuclear weapons for themselves, ‘non-nuclear-weapon states’ were promised, first, unimpeded access to nuclear energy for nonmilitary use, and second, progress on nuclear disarmament” — location: 1293 ^ref-48749
whatever the original intentions, the NPT is now a convenient instrument of US foreign policy.” — location: 1297 ^ref-20594
“They were an allied country” before 1979, so therefore they had a genuine need for nuclear energy. — location: 1347 ^ref-41397
the invasion of Iraq, as widely predicted, increased the threat of nuclear proliferation, — location: 1350 ^ref-22809
Washington has gone out of its way to instruct Iran on the need for a powerful deterrent, not only by invading Iraq, but also by strengthening the offensive forces of its Israeli client, which already has hundreds of nuclear weapons as well as air and armored forces larger and more advanced than any NATO power other than the United States. — location: 1352 ^ref-21404
major European firms as Thyssen-Krupp and the British oil giant BP have withdrawn major investments in Iran, fearing US government sanctions or other consequences of actions “offensive to the US.” — location: 1361 ^ref-21767
If logic and moral truisms mattered, the US and British governments and supporters of their doctrine of “anticipatory self-defense” should be calling on Iran to develop a nuclear deterrent. — location: 1366 ^ref-24290
According to South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun, “North Korea professes that nuclear capabilities are a deterrent for defending itself from external aggression. In this particular case it is true and undeniable that there is a considerable element of rationality in North Korea’s claim.” — location: 1373 ^ref-53138
the primary reason the NPT now faces collapse is the failure of the nuclear states to live up to their obligation under Article VI to pursue “good faith” efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons. — location: 1384 ^ref-52814
“reluctance by one party to fulfil its obligations breeds reluctance in others.” — location: 1388 ^ref-8310
November, the UN Committee on Disarmament voted in favor of a verifiable FISSBAN. The vote was 147 to 1, with two abstentions: Israel, which reflexively sides with the US position, and Britain, which explained its abstention on the grounds that the resolution “had divided the international community at a time when progress should be a prime objective”—divided it 147 to 1. — location: 1406 ^ref-59490
“if governments simply ignore or discard commitments whenever they prove inconvenient, we will never be able to build an edifice of international cooperation and confidence in the security realm.” — location: 1428 ^ref-35581
the primary threat to the NPT is US government policy. — location: 1445 ^ref-53310
For the first time in history, a state—the “idealistic New World”—was observing “principles and values,” acting from “altruism” and “moral fervor,” while leading the “enlightened states.” It was therefore free to resort to force for what its leaders determine to be right. — location: 1486 ^ref-56187
The legitimacy of use of force is not the only issue on which public opinion in the United States diverges sharply from elite political culture. Another case, already mentioned, is the Kyoto protocols. And there are many others, matters bearing directly on the state of American democracy, to which we return in chapter six. — location: 1508 ^ref-37791
To bring the defeated war criminals to justice, it was necessary to devise definitions of “war crime” and “crime against humanity.” — location: 1513 ^ref-9237
Aerial bombardment had been used so extensively and ruthlessly on the Allied side as well as the Axis side that neither at Nuremberg nor Tokyo was the issue made a part of the trials. — location: 1517 ^ref-63525
“to punish the foe—especially the vanquished foe—for conduct in which the enforcing nation has engaged, would be so grossly inequitable as to discredit the laws themselves. — location: 1523 ^ref-7501
Madeleine Albright, who observed that every president has a position much like the Bush doctrine in his back pocket, but it is simply foolish to smash people in the face with it and to implement it in a manner that will infuriate even allies. — location: 1578 ^ref-11915
A little tact is useful. — location: 1579 ^ref-13505
And now it has gotten worse with Trump, with people looking back fondly at the Bush years
Secretary of State Powell, who instructed the UN that it could be “relevant” by endorsing US and UK plans to invade Iraq, or it could be a debating society. — location: 1582 ^ref-29725
rendering the UN “utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook” — location: 1592 ^ref-28441
Clinton informed the Indonesian generals in mid-September 1999 that the game was over. They instantly withdrew, revealing with brilliant clarity just where responsibility lies for the crimes of the preceding quarter century, — location: 1596 ^ref-63200
Kissinger deserves credit for his honesty, and his understanding of intellectual opinion, which indicates no concern over such explicit demand for rights denied to others—rights with lethal impact, in this case. — location: 1604 ^ref-18347
the most detailed inquiry into the Srebrenica massacre, by the Dutch government, concluded that Milošević had no connection to it, and that he “was very upset when he learnt about the massacres,” the Dutch scholar who headed the team of intelligence specialists reported. The study describes the “incredulity” in the Belgrade government, including Milošević, when they learned of the executions. — location: 1615 ^ref-50945
Suppose, however, that someone were to unearth a document in which Milošević orders the Serbian air force to reduce Bosnia or Kosovo to rubble, with the words “Anything that flies on anything that moves.” The prosecutors would be overjoyed, the trial would be over, and Milošević would be sent off to many successive life sentences for the crime of genocide—a death sentence, if the tribunal followed US conventions. — location: 1620 ^ref-18620
Adams established “the lofty, idealistic tradition” in his justifications for General Andrew Jackson’s conquest of Spanish-held Florida in the first Seminole war of 1818. The war was justified in self-defense, Adams argued. — location: 1636 ^ref-21484
All of Bush’s predecessors, Gaddis explains, recognized that US security was threatened by “failed states”: dangerous power vacuums that the United States should fill to guarantee its own security, from Florida in 1818 to Iraq in 2003. — location: 1643 ^ref-7092
We learn a lot about the precedents for current doctrines, and the current consensus, by examining the omitted information. — location: 1646 ^ref-55551
Florida was a problem both because it had not yet been incorporated into the expanding “American empire,” in the terminology of the Founding Fathers, and because it was a “haven for Indians and runaway slaves . . . fleeing either the wrath of Jackson or slavery.” — location: 1651 ^ref-37647
“the Seminoles survive in the national consciousness as the mascot of Florida State University”—an example that is all too familiar, and a “painfully precise” reflection of how we make use of our freedom, while condemning with derision those who refuse to face up to their own sordid past. — location: 1663 ^ref-31618
reminding historians not to search for truth in official explanations of events.” — location: 1669 ^ref-59242
by endorsing Jackson’s crimes, Adams transferred the power to make war from Congress to the executive branch, in violation of the Constitution. — location: 1675 ^ref-15403
“it is now established as an irreversible precedent that the President of the United States has but to declare that war exists . . . and the war is essentially declared.” — location: 1682 ^ref-54776
Adams also established the “presidential ‘rhetoric of empire’ designed to marshal public (as well as congressional) support for its policies.” The rhetorical framework, “a durable and essential aspect of American diplomacy inherited and elaborated by successive generations of American statesmen but fundamentally unchanged over time,” — location: 1687 ^ref-2233
three pillars: “the assumption of the unique moral virtue of the United States, the assertion of its mission to redeem the world” by spreading its professed ideals and the “American way of life,” and, always, “the faith in the nation’s divinely ordained destiny.” The theological framework reduces policy issues to a choice between good and evil, thus undercutting reasoned debate and fending off the threat of democracy. — location: 1689 ^ref-43261
“crime once exposed had no refuge but in audacity.” — location: 1696 ^ref-27883
The pretext was to liberate Cuba from Spain. The effect, however, was to block Cuba’s liberation and to turn it into a “virtual colony,” as it remained until 1959.22 — location: 1701 ^ref-4274
Hietala describes the efforts of the Jacksonians to gain a monopoly over cotton, which played roughly the same role in the industrial economies as petroleum does today. — location: 1704 ^ref-34246
plant,” President Tyler observed after the annexation of Texas in 1845 and the conquest of almost half of Mexico, the United States had acquired “a greater influence over the affairs of the world than would be found in armies however strong, or navies however numerous.” He went on to say that the monopoly over cotton “now secured, places all other nations at our feet. . . . An embargo of a single year would produce in Europe a greater amount of suffering than a fifty years’ war. — location: 1706 ^ref-18306
the logic of the annexation of Texas was essentially that attributed to Saddam Hussein when he conquered Kuwait. There are, of course, many differences. Iraq’s claim to Kuwait had deep roots, stemming from the days when Britain established the borders of Iraq to ensure that Britain, not Turkey, would have control of the oil of the north, and that the British colony of Kuwait would effectively bar Iraq’s access to the sea. — location: 1713 ^ref-33656
the killings and atrocities did not precede but followed the bombing, as the indictment of Milošević has also revealed. That could hardly have come as a surprise. The violence was predicted by NATO commander Wesley Clark as soon as the bombing began, quite publicly. — location: 1759 ^ref-30354
“The direct result of the bombing was that almost one million people fled Kosovo into neighboring countries and about 500,000 people were displaced within Kosovo itself, a tremendous catastrophe for the people of Kosovo”—compounded by serious crimes under Western military occupation afterward. — location: 1795 ^ref-9202
According to Western sources, about 2,000 people were killed on all sides in the year prior to the invasion, many by Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guerrillas attacking Serbs from Albania in an effort, as they openly stated, to elicit a harsh Serbian response that could rally Western opinion to their cause. — location: 1808 ^ref-4014
an astonishing justification for the bombing contrived by some of its supporters, though not put forth by British and American authorities: that the NATO attack was justified by the crimes at Srebrenica, or Bosnia generally. — location: 1816 ^ref-12996
as the war drums were beating over Kosovo in early 1999, Indonesia began to escalate its crimes in East Timor. Its record in early 1999 was far more criminal than anything reported from Kosovo, — location: 1819 ^ref-40313
these crimes, approaching true genocide, were supported throughout by the United States and Britain (also France and others), continuing right through the atrocities of August-September 1999, which finally aroused sufficient protest that Clinton called off the hounds. The conclusion follows at once, and suffices to reveal the shocking immorality of the Srebrenica excuse for bombing. — location: 1823 ^ref-58173
the primary reasons were stressed clearly throughout by Clinton, Blair, and others, reaffirmed by Secretary of Defense William Cohen, and confirmed by Clark’s memoirs: to assure “the credibility of NATO,” meaning the United States, — location: 1827 ^ref-35002
When history is crafted in the service of power, evidence and rationality are irrelevant. — location: 1830 ^ref-9529
“the Court can only regard the alleged right of intervention as the manifestation of a policy of force, such as has, in the past, given rise to most serious abuses and such as cannot, whatever be the defects in international organization, find a place in international law . . . ; from the nature of things, [intervention] would be reserved for the most powerful states, and might easily lead to perverting the administration of justice itself. — location: 1849 ^ref-41444
In a democratic culture, substantial evidence should be required along with serious argument refuting apparent counterevidence. — location: 1867 ^ref-41377
It is necessary to dismantle the structures of deception erected by doctrinal systems, which adopt a range of devices that flow very naturally from the ways in which power is concentrated. — location: 1871 ^ref-51792
Mikhail Gorbachev’s “public relations can be as much a threat to American interests in Europe as were [Leonid] Brezhnev’s tanks.” — location: 1877 ^ref-54154
The impassioned denunciations of the awful crimes of Saddam that impelled the United States to punish the people of Iraq managed to avoid the words “committed with our help, because we do not care about atrocities that contribute to our ends.” — location: 1882 ^ref-38501
Saddam was brought to trial for his crimes. The first trial dealt with atrocities he had committed in 1982—the year when the Reagan administration dropped Iraq from the list of states supporting terrorism so that military and other aid could flow to the murderous tyrant, aid that continued until he committed the first crime that mattered: disobeying (or possibly misunderstanding) US orders in August 1990. — location: 1884 ^ref-60250
It is necessary to create misimpressions not only about the current “Great Satans,” but also about one’s own unique nobility. — location: 1890 ^ref-26613
With its “new spiritual energies” revived under Nazi rule, Germany was at last able “to take on its historic mission” of saving the world from “annihilation” at the hands of the “indifferent mass” elsewhere, primarily in the United States and Russia. — location: 1899 ^ref-41708
Even individuals of the highest intelligence and moral integrity succumb to the pathology. — location: 1902 ^ref-56873
England, Mill explained, selflessly bore the costs of bringing peace and justice to the world, while “the fruits it shares in fraternal equality with the whole human race,” including the “barbarians” it conquered and destroyed for their own benefit. — location: 1908 ^ref-25005
We then face a puzzling paradox, which is miraculously resolved in the United States by proclaiming a sudden “change of course”—an event that takes place every few years, effacing inappropriate history as we march on to a glorious future. — location: 1914 ^ref-21330
The task of “creating the misimpression that it is the Soviet Union that you are fighting” was facing obstacles. The Reagan administration’s public relations system sought to deal with the problem by fevered pronouncements about the “evil empire” and its tentacles everywhere about to strangle us— — location: 1931 ^ref-41644
By the end of the millennium, “total [US] military and police assistance in the hemisphere exceeded economic and social aid.” This is a “new phenomenon,” the analysts point out: “even at the height of the Cold War, economic aid far exceeded military aid. — location: 1941 ^ref-41842
In September 1989, just as the Berlin Wall was about to crumble, Bush I redeclared the “war on drugs” with a huge government-media propaganda campaign. — location: 1949 ^ref-23479
The “war on drugs” also had an important domestic component: much like the “war on crime,” it served to frighten the domestic population into obedience as domestic policies were being implemented to benefit extreme wealth at the expense of the large majority. — location: 1952 ^ref-37544
Later came the “axis of evil,” which we must destroy in self-defense, following the will of the Lord as transmitted to his humble servant—meanwhile escalating the threat of terror, nuclear proliferation, and perhaps “apocalypse soon.” — location: 1957 ^ref-49450
since 1947, “America has been the chief perpetrator of ‘preemptive’ state terror” and innumerable other “ ‘rogue’ actions,” causing immense harm, “always in the name of democracy, liberty, and justice.” — location: 1962 ^ref-36021
“failed states” are identified by the failure to provide security for the population, to guarantee rights at home or abroad, or to maintain functioning (not merely formal) democratic institutions. — location: 1995 ^ref-45434
The world dominant power is consciously choosing policies that typify outlaw states, that severely endanger the domestic population and that undermine substantive democracy. — location: 2000 ^ref-54909
“to conserve . . . faith in liberal democracy” analysts must “distort. . . evidence, and transform the rational consistency in US policy (the defense of capitalist interests) into irrationality (unfounded fear of Communism).” — location: 2008 ^ref-40645
The basic reasons were explained in internal documents from the Kennedy-Johnson years. State Department planners warned that the “very existence” of the Castro regime is “successful defiance” of US policies going back 150 years; the threat is not Russians, but intolerable defiance of the master of the hemisphere, much like Iran’s crime of successful defiance in 1979, or Syria’s rejection of Clinton’s demands. — location: 2038 ^ref-23817
The author of the 1992 measures to tighten the blockade proclaimed that “my objective is to wreak havoc in Cuba” (Representative Robert Torricelli of New Jersey, later senator). — location: 2046 ^ref-17671
April 1960: Castro would be removed “through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship [so] every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba [in order to] bring about hunger, desperation and [the] overthrow of the government.” — location: 2054 ^ref-45128
The dangers are particularly grave, Schlesinger elaborated, when “the distribution of land and other forms of national wealth greatly favors the propertied classes . . . and the poor and underprivileged, stimulated by the example of the Cuban revolution, are now demanding opportunities for a decent living.” The whole system of domination might unravel if the idea of taking matters into one’s own hands spread beyond Cuba’s shores. — location: 2067 ^ref-46817
“Castroism still retains much of its popular appeal. If, in the longer term, the Cuban revolution succeeds in achieving a stable regime, which appears to meet the aspirations of the depressed classes, there will be a serious risk that it will inspire similar revolutions elsewhere in Latin America.” — location: 2071 ^ref-1790
Sober European statesmen feared that the virus of the American revolution might poison the civilized world order. The reaction was far more furious when Haiti became the first free country in the hemisphere in 1804, after a brutal struggle against the combined forces of civilization: England, France, and the United States. — location: 2076 ^ref-47980
the Soviet economy began to stagnate, largely because of the huge military programs undertaken in reaction to Kennedy’s military buildup and his refusal to consider the offers of sharp mutual reduction in offensive weapons by Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev, who was hoping to avoid an arms race that would devastate the far weaker Soviet economy. — location: 2083 ^ref-55411
The appeal of the antifascist resistance required the United States and United Kingdom to move quickly, and often brutally, to dismantle the resistance and its accomplishments, particularly in northern Italy, where workers had taken over plants and the germs of a free self-governing society were beginning to flourish. — location: 2104 ^ref-13417
Washington backed the installation of Europe’s first postwar fascist government in Greece in 1967, continuing its support until the dictatorship was overthrown in 1974. — location: 2114 ^ref-19473
1965 Suharto coup and the huge slaughter that immediately followed, establishing one of the most brutal regimes of the late twentieth century. There was no further concern about democracy, or about awesome human rights violations and war crimes. Suharto remained “our kind of guy,” as the Clinton administration described him, until he committed his first real crime, in 1998: dragging his feet on IMF orders and losing control over the population. — location: 2122 ^ref-14302
Canada’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate Lester Pearson identified the outside threat to Vietnam as “Russian colonial authority,” although there were no Russians in sight but tens of thousands of US-armed French forces in plain view. — location: 2130 ^ref-5188
the northern half of Vietnam, divided by the United States after it undermined the 1954 international agreement on unification and elections (which, it recognized, would have come out the wrong way). — location: 2134 ^ref-48291
The administration’s own primary sources reveal that the major provinces in the South were being taken over by indigenous forces roused to resistance by the brutal repression of the US client state in southern Vietnam, with only reluctant support from the northern part of the divided country. — location: 2141 ^ref-45381
Indonesia was protected by the “staggering mass slaughter” of 1965, a “gleam of light in Asia,” the New York Times exulted. The reaction captured the undisguised Western euphoria over the outcome of the massacre of hundreds of thousands of people, mostly landless peasants, and the destruction of the only mass-based political party, the Indonesian Communist Party, as the country was opened up to free Western exploitation by crimes that the CIA compared to those of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. — location: 2169 ^ref-37319
The public version of the domino theory maintained that Ho Chi Minh would conquer Southeast Asia, Nicaragua would take over Central America and soon after the hordes would be sweeping over Texas, with the Russians only a footstep behind, — location: 2182 ^ref-34600
The internal version of the domino theory, however, is never abandoned, because it is plausible: successful independent development and steps toward democracy, out of US control, might well have a domino effect, inspiring others who face similar problems to pursue the same course, thus eroding the global system of domination. — location: 2184 ^ref-35731
it was constantly necessary to sell intervention by creating the misimpression that it is the Soviet Union that you are fighting—or China, or the Sino-Soviet axis, or the Huns (Woodrow Wilson’s pretext for invading Haiti and the Dominican Republic), or narco-traffickers—or whatever can be conjured up. On these matters, the documentary record is rich, and remarkably consistent. — location: 2187 ^ref-46372
When Washington decided to support France’s reconquest of Vietnam, intelligence was instructed to demonstrate that the Viet Minh resistance was a mere tool of Russia or China (or both). — location: 2191 ^ref-2714
US intelligence was so deeply indoctrinated that for the two-decade period recorded in the Pentagon Papers, up to 1968, it was scarcely able even to entertain the possibility that North Vietnam might be pursuing national interests rather than serving as a loyal puppet of its masters—hardly in question, whatever one thinks of Hanoi. — location: 2194 ^ref-28188
the world has undergone many dramatic changes, but no less striking—and of far-reaching significance for the future—are the fundamental continuities in these policies, with tactical modifications and shifting of justifications adapted to circumstances. — location: 2206 ^ref-40551
aid-to-Russia program more as a matter of ‘good faith’ than for its value to the Soviet war effort,” Kimball adds, estimating its value at about 10 percent of Russian production, — location: 2215 ^ref-57280
Truman’s generally pragmatic view was tempered, however, by his genuine affection and admiration for “old Joe,” whom he regarded as “a decent fellow [who] can’t do what he wants to” because, as Truman put it in 1948, he is “a prisoner of the Politburo.” — location: 2223 ^ref-47639
in private he continued to describe old Joe as “honest” and “straightforward,” “as near like Tom Pendergast as any man I know, — location: 2226 ^ref-7486
From early 1944 Western military intelligence was “marking the Soviets as the next enemy” and withholding crucial information about German forces from the Russians while obtaining “superbly detailed and accurate” information about Russian military forces. — location: 2231 ^ref-20448
“Operation Unthinkable.” His “stated objective was ‘the elimination of Russia,’” Aldrich writes. The plans, only declassified in 1999, “called for a surprise attack by hundreds of thousands of British and American troops, joined by 100,000 rearmed German soldiers,” while the Royal Air Force “would attack Soviet cities from bases in Northern Europe.” Nuclear weapons were soon added to the mix. Earlier Cadogan had raged about how the Russians are “dominated by an almost insane suspicion,” requiring “infinite patience” as we try to deal with them “as though we thought they were reasonable human beings.” — location: 2243 ^ref-21086
The dilemma is a persistent one in attempts to deal with the unpeople of the world. — location: 2248 ^ref-24955
NSC 68 — location: 2269 ^ref-27347
The assault on Cuba was intensified, but reframed: it was no longer defense against the Russians, but rather Washington’s sincere dedication to democracy that required strangulation of Cuba and US-based terror. — location: 2282 ^ref-62468
the costs and risks of the coming phases of the industrial economy were to be socialized, with eventual profits privatized, — location: 2297 ^ref-11013
those who channel public funds to development of the economy and those who profit from these decisions know better. — location: 2303 ^ref-31779
sometimes argued that concealing development of high-tech industry under the cover of “defense” has been a valuable contribution to society. — location: 2305 ^ref-1778
“the free world’s reliance on energy supplies from this pivotal region,” — location: 2321 ^ref-21008
the end of the Cold War would not change security policies significantly: — location: 2325 ^ref-20821
The problems remain, as before, insurgencies resulting from “the underdeveloped world’s growing dissatisfaction over the gap between rich and poor nations,” which may “jeopardize regional stability and our access to vital economic and military resources,” on which the United States and its allies will become “more and more dependent.” — location: 2327 ^ref-47419
to ensure “unimpeded access” both to “developing economic markets throughout the world” and “to the resources needed to support our manufacturing requirements.” — location: 2331 ^ref-42485
“the perceptions of the contradictions and uncertainties of a globalized world [to] come even more to the fore than is the case today,” — location: 2338 ^ref-24870
“gaps will widen between those countries benefiting from globalization . . . and those underdeveloped nations or pockets within nations that are left behind.” — location: 2339 ^ref-17411
The United States “increasingly will have to battle world public opinion, which has dramatically shifted since the end of the Cold War,” — location: 2344 ^ref-64935
Huntington’s observations about the need to create misimpressions to control the domestic population illustrate what should be the merest truism: professions of benign intent by leaders should be dismissed by any rational observer. — location: 2347 ^ref-41936
If we are serious, we will ask about their actions, paying little attention to their words, an elementary observation that has inspired a rich literature from Pascal to Zamyatin to Orwell. — location: 2351 ^ref-40941
“as fantasies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were unmasked, the Bush administration increasingly stressed the democratic transformation of Iraq, and scholars jumped on the democratization bandwagon.” — location: 2359 ^ref-22650
“as the search for illegal weapons in Iraq continues without success, the Bush administration has moved to emphasize a different rationale for the war against Saddam Hussein: using Iraq as the ‘linchpin’ to transform the Middle East and thereby reduce the terrorist threat to the United States”—more accurately risk enhancing the terrorist threat, — location: 2367 ^ref-26962
David Brooks explained, as “Noah Feldman . . . observes, people in the Middle East don’t always act rationally,” despite our patient tutelage and Britain’s before us. — location: 2381 ^ref-60849
sound bites, media amplification, and saturation advertising are not effective among primitive people who think that sustained argument and lively discussion are components of democracy. — location: 2396 ^ref-32921
he is consistently apologetic for the Suharto regime, always turning the focus toward matters of business, investment, and the local and regional stability the iron-fisted Suharto helped promote.” — location: 2450 ^ref-3445
Wolfowitz consistently “championed policies that undermine democracy and human rights in the sprawling archipelago,” — location: 2466 ^ref-52743
In 2002, they supported a military coup to overthrow the elected government of Venezuela, headed by Hugo Chávez, but had to slink away in the face of overwhelming condemnation in Latin America, where democracy is not considered as “quaint” and “obsolete” as it is in Washington. — location: 2478 ^ref-35359
most US citizens believe that the public has little influence on government decisions and few believe that Congress will conform to “the decisions the majority of Americans would make.” US citizens rank their own government below Britain, Sweden, Canada, and others on the scale ranging from not democratic at all to completely democratic. — location: 2493 ^ref-56173
Only now under President Chávez, the former parachute colonel elected to office in 1998, has medicine started to become something of a reality for the poverty-stricken majority in the rich but deeply divided—virtually non-functioning—society. Since he won power in democratic elections and began to transform the health and welfare sector which catered so badly to the mass of the population progress has been slow. But it has been perceptible—not least because Venezuela has joined with Cuba in a joint health strategy which has brought perhaps 20,000 Cuban doctors and other health professionals here and spread them around the country from Caracas to remote spots where Venezuelan doctors refuse to serve. — location: 2504 ^ref-37677
the op-ed was rejected. That came as no surprise to Walker. He is also the author of the major scholarly studies of Nicaragua, and through the 1980s, when Nicaragua was the top story of the day, he sent several op-eds a year to the New York Times. None appeared. — location: 2520 ^ref-28528
the 1984 Nicaragua elections, which had doctrinally unacceptable results—the Sandinistas won—and therefore did not take place, though they were closely observed and generally approved, including by hostile observers and a delegation of specialists on Nicaragua sent by the professional association of Latin America scholars, all suppressed. — location: 2528 ^ref-46236
In Iraq, the private security firms that are the second-largest component of the “coalition of the willing are dipping into experienced pools of trained fighters,” almost 70 percent from El Salvador, it is estimated. — location: 2537 ^ref-40422
“US plays down human rights situation in Uzbekistan. A dangerous policy: increasing repression combined with poverty will promote Islamic terrorism.” — location: 2548 ^ref-14172
Dissatisfied, he compelled Washington to shift its air bases to neighboring tyrannies. “The US is trying to cover its retreat behind a smokescreen of belated concern for human-rights abuses in Uzbekistan,” Murray wrote. “Suddenly one of their most intensively courted allies has been discovered—shock horror—to be an evil dictator. (Remember Saddam?)” — location: 2557 ^ref-2733
There are good reasons for the imperial powers and their acolytes to insist that we should forget about the past and move forward: the familiar refrain of “change of course” that is invoked every few years. — location: 2580 ^ref-8293
How states and societies engage their pasts affects how they develop.” — location: 2584 ^ref-21990
Britain’s actions from the days when it created modern Iraq for its own convenience, ensuring Iraq’s dependency. — location: 2590 ^ref-45355
in British-dominated Iraq, “Wealth and power have remained concentrated in the hands of a few rich landowners and tribal sheikhs centered round the Court in a brutally repressive society.” — location: 2592 ^ref-32819
the virus of independent nationalism — location: 2597 ^ref-14858
Qasim’s goals went well beyond “political independence, dignity and unity, in brotherly cooperation with other Arabs.” He also wanted “to increase and distribute the national wealth, . . . to found a new society and a new democracy, [and] to use this strong, democratic, Arabist Iraq as an instrument to free and elevate other Arabs and Afro-Asians and to assist the destruction of ‘imperialism,’ — location: 2600 ^ref-12193
“The Central Intelligence Agency, under President John F. Kennedy, conducted its own regime change in Baghdad, carried out in collaboration with Saddam Hussein” and the Baath Party. It was “ ‘almost certainly a gain for our side,’ National Security Council aide Robert Komer informed Kennedy the day of the takeover.” The usual hideous atrocities followed, including a slaughter of “suspected Communists and other leftists,” using lists provided by the CIA, much as in Guatemala in 1954 and in Indonesia two years after the overthrow of Qasim. — location: 2618 ^ref-52360
Baathists systematically murdered untold numbers of Iraq’s educated elite,” Morris continues, including “hundreds of doctors, teachers, technicians, lawyers and other professionals as well as military and political figures.” — location: 2622 ^ref-40821
fear of Iraqi democracy persisted without change even when Saddam became an enemy in 1990. In the following months and through the war, the democratic opposition within Iraq was not only barred from Washington but by the media as well. — location: 2628 ^ref-7660
Iran could live with a more or less democratic and sovereign Iraq. It is hard to imagine how Washington and London could do so. — location: 2635 ^ref-36158
Iraqis may have no love for Iran, but they would prefer friendly relations with their powerful neighbor to antagonism and conflict, and would be likely to join in the efforts to integrate Iran into the region, which were under way long before the US and UK invasion. — location: 2636 ^ref-41213
a loose Shiite-dominated alliance comprising Iraq, Iran, and the oil regions of Saudi Arabia, independent of Washington and controlling the bulk of the world’s energy resources. Washington’s ultimate nightmare—almost. — location: 2646 ^ref-42819
The Iraqi minister dismissed US concerns about Iranian meddling in the region, saying, “Nobody can dictate to Iraq its relations with other countries.” — location: 2656 ^ref-16054
“it may be the ultimate irony that the United States, which, among other reasons, invaded Iraq to help bring liberal democracy to the Middle East, will play a decisive role in establishing its second Shiite Islamic state.” — location: 2667 ^ref-36784
among the difficulties that have stood in the way of democratic transformation for many years in the Middle East, today too the “final barrier [is that] the world’s sole superpower does not really want it to happen, — location: 2681 ^ref-35299
In Vietnam, Washington planners could fulfill their primary war aims by destroying the virus and inoculating the region, then withdrawing, leaving the wreckage to enjoy its sovereignty. — location: 2684 ^ref-20432
Iraq cannot be destroyed and abandoned. It is too valuable, and authentic sovereignty and even limited democracy would be too dangerous to be easily accepted. — location: 2685 ^ref-31839
some fundamental principles. Crucially, occupying armies have no rights, only responsibilities. Their primary responsibility is to withdraw as quickly and expeditiously as possible, in a manner to be determined primarily by the occupied population. — location: 2691 ^ref-49900
One way to evaluate the entire discussion of democracy promotion is to ask how these issues are dealt with, or if they are even raised—questions that regrettably do not require much inquiry. — location: 2703 ^ref-59819
“Where democracy appears to fit in well with US security and economic interests, the United States promotes democracy. Where democracy clashes with other significant interests, it is downplayed or even ignored.” — location: 2711 ^ref-20391
Where US influence was least, in South America, progress toward democracy was greatest, particularly in the early 1980s when “the Reagan administration was trying to support the military governments that were on the way out [and] if anything, the US policy of that period worked against the democratic trend.” — location: 2719 ^ref-57809
The Reagan administration “came to adopt prodemocracy policies as a means of relieving pressure for more radical change, but inevitably sought only limited, top-down forms of democratic change that did not risk upsetting the traditional structures of power with which the United States has long been allied.” — location: 2724 ^ref-49781
when Alvarez’s oppressive methods were well known to the US Embassy, the Reagan administration awarded him the Legion of Merit medal for ‘encouraging the success of democratic processes in Honduras.’” Negroponte praised Alvarez’s “dedication to democracy,” — location: 2749 ^ref-58337
When the government of Honduras finally tried to deal with these crimes and bring the perpetrators to justice, the Reagan-Bush administration refused to allow Negroponte to testify, as the courts requested. — location: 2753 ^ref-49022
United States often overthrew democratic governments, often installing or supporting brutal tyrannies: Iran, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, and a long list of others. The Cold War pretexts regularly collapse under investigation. What we do find, however, is the operative principle that Carothers describes: democracy is a good thing if and only if it is consistent with strategic and economic interests. — location: 2758 ^ref-60872
US opposition to struggles for reform of deeply unjust and undemocratic societies “has historically subverted [democracy], both at home and abroad” while serving “the ‘security interests’ of privileged elites in the hemisphere, who have benefited most from the social status quo.” — location: 2763 ^ref-31053
matters are different “when her own concept of democracy, closely identified with private, capitalistic enterprise, is threatened by communism,” commonly a cover term for the threat of independent development. — location: 2770 ^ref-46793
Haiti, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. In these cases, as in others, we find that policies did not materially change with the onset of the Cold War, and that during the Cold War years the conflict was rarely relevant beyond providing misimpressions. — location: 2778 ^ref-51451
sending his troops to dissolve the National Assembly “by genuinely Marine Corps methods,” in the words of the marine commander, Major Smedley Butler. The reason was the assembly’s refusal to ratify a US-designed constitution that gave US corporations the right to buy up Haiti’s lands—regarded by the invaders as a “progressive” measure that Haitians could not comprehend. — location: 2781 ^ref-30648
Horrors continued unabated, along with US support, until Haiti’s first democratic election in 1990. — location: 2786 ^ref-44067
Against enormous odds, the population chose their own candidate, the populist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide, while the US-approved candidate, former World Bank official Marc Bazin, received 14 percent of the vote. — location: 2788 ^ref-13463
When a military coup took place a few months later, the Organization of American States imposed an embargo. Bush I announced that he would violate it, exempting US firms. — location: 2795 ^ref-19843
After three years of horrendous state terror, Clinton allowed the elected president to return, but on a crucial condition: that he adopt the program of the defeated US candidate in the 1990 election. — location: 2798 ^ref-57735
Repeated requests by the elected government of Haiti for his extradition were rejected by Washington, or simply ignored—in one striking case, right in the midst of the furor over the unwillingness of the Taliban to follow Washington’s orders to turn over 9/11 suspects without evidence. — location: 2807 ^ref-37360
What survives in the doctrinal system is that Haiti has been “battered by storms of [its] own making,” and that the despair of Haitians over their wrecked country is “a sorry comment on the failed governments” since Aristide assumed office in 1991. — location: 2813 ^ref-27539
Guatemala, Washington’s destruction of the elected government “triggered a ghastly, four-decade-long cycle of terror and repression that led to the death of perhaps two hundred thousand Guatemalans,” — location: 2816 ^ref-51104
The death toll was equivalent in per capita terms to 2.25 million in the United States, greater than all wars in American history combined, including the Civil War. — location: 2828 ^ref-29070
After the United States regained control in 1990, Nicaragua declined to become the second poorest country in the hemisphere, after Haiti—which also holds the prize as the prime target of US intervention in the past century; Nicaragua is second. — location: 2830 ^ref-63068
Costa Rica, the one functioning country in Central America (and the only one not to have experienced direct US intervention). — location: 2833 ^ref-58659
International relief goes largely to paying debt, mostly to the mafia-style financial system that developed after the victory of Washington’s terrorist war and economic strangulation in the 1980s. — location: 2840 ^ref-13566
The victory of US terror was so complete that the “democracy” that emerged from the wreckage—a “Victory for US Fair Play,” as a New York Times headline enthusiastically proclaimed after the 1990 election—has been considerably more willing to follow IMF-World Bank directives than its neighbors. — location: 2842 ^ref-34015
privatization demanded by the international financial institutions tends to correlate with disaster for the population. — location: 2845 ^ref-49672
In 1996, before the neoliberal dictates were followed in Nicaragua, its electrification rate was the same as Guatemala’s; now it is just over half as high. Nicaragua has plenty of reserve capacity, but there is no profit incentive to supply it to rural regions or the great mass of poor people. The familiar and quite natural outcome of neoliberal programs. — location: 2848 ^ref-24380
Perhaps Nicaraguans suffer from the irrationality that has always caused such frustration in the civilized West, much like the Iraqis who today find it “entirely incomprehensible that foreigners have been unselfishly expending their own blood and treasure to help them.” — location: 2853 ^ref-48958
The substantial progress of the early years in Nicaragua after the overthrow of the US-backed dictatorship, which greatly impressed development agencies and international institutions, has been sharply reversed. — location: 2856 ^ref-8223
United States to pay the reparations ordered by the highest international authorities, the World Court and Security Council. — location: 2858 ^ref-34336
For the most part, representatives of the 33 other nations taking part emphasized the need for social justice, warning that democracy itself could be threatened by mounting economic difficulties and inequality,” in no small measure a consequence of US military intervention, terror, and economic doctrines and policies. — location: 2870 ^ref-1187
increases in terror and chaos were widely anticipated consequences of the invasion of Iraq. — location: 2879 ^ref-9525
Throughout American history, democracy promotion has been “central to US political identity and sense of national purpose” and to the way “the United States defines its political interests.” It has been the heart of “American exceptionalism. — location: 2884 ^ref-3234
encouragement of “economic liberalization” (which for the region means effective takeover of the economies by Western corporate power); — location: 2892 ^ref-15171
“the reason [the elections of January 2005] took place was the insistence of the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who vetoed three schemes by the USled occupation authorities to shelve or dilute them.” — location: 2906 ^ref-34729
“although the United States initially opposed early elections in Iraq, after Ayatollah Sistani turned huge numbers of his followers out in the streets to demand such elections, Washington had little choice but to agree.” — location: 2907 ^ref-26548
“it was only when it became clear that the US could not withstand a Shia uprising that elections turned out to have been an immediate American goal all along.” — location: 2911 ^ref-30849
To ensure that elections would be free, the most important independent media were expelled from the country, notably the Qatar-based channel Al-Jazeera, which is despised by the ruling tyrants in the region because it has been a leading force for democratization in the Arab world. — location: 2919 ^ref-4771
no media can be tolerated that are not under US control, whether public or private. Also very familiar practice, and entirely understandable. — location: 2927 ^ref-58917
Nicaragua, under intense US attack, was bitterly condemned for censorship, with scrupulous care to suppress the fact that its major newspaper was openly supporting overthrow of the government by terrorist forces of the superpower that was also funding the journal. — location: 2936 ^ref-28682
the shameful record of the United States under little direct threat at all, — location: 2939 ^ref-61132
In Washington’s regional client regimes, independent media were blown up by state terrorists, who also murdered editors and journalists or forced them to flee, arousing scarcely any notice in the country that bears primary responsibility for the crimes. — location: 2939 ^ref-25308
On the eve of the election, two experienced correspondents wrote that “the one thing every Iraqi agrees upon is that occupation should end soon,” which would be in direct conflict with the US objective of constructing “a US-friendly democracy that would allow America to replace its military presence in Saudi Arabia . . . with one in Iraq that would allow America to keep shaping the regional balance of power.” — location: 2947 ^ref-27644
There would have been no point to the invasion if the United States could not maintain a dependable client state and military basing rights. — location: 2954 ^ref-2530
whatever the Iraqi leadership may want, “they could find publicly defending any US troop presence difficult.” — location: 2956 ^ref-42031
The major task in the subversion of Iraqi democracy is to pressure political elites to accept “vague promises” and to retain as much as possible of the illegal economic regime imposed by the invaders, based on the standard principle of opening the country and its resources to foreign control (primarily US and UK), under the guise of “economic liberalism.” — location: 2957 ^ref-29068
Blair insists that the “coalition is in Iraq [by] permission” of the interim Iraqi government that it installed, — location: 2965 ^ref-18996
more than 70 percent of all Iraqis wanted US forces out by fall 2003, — location: 2974 ^ref-29876
reconstruction effort “appears to have failed, with the poll showing that 71 per cent of people rarely get safe clean water, 47 per cent never have enough electricity, 70 per cent say their sewerage system rarely works and 40 per cent of southern Iraqis are unemployed.” — location: 2993 ^ref-10588
the occupiers will seek to bar the threat of a sovereign Iraq that is “democratic” in more than the traditional sense of US and UK practice in their domains. — location: 3000 ^ref-64443
huge explosion killing eighty people and wounding two hundred, mostly women and girls leaving the mosque exit where the bomb was placed. The attack, aimed at a Muslim cleric who escaped, was traced to the CIA and Saudi intelligence, apparently operating with British help. — location: 3010 ^ref-56651
he tried to wheel himself away from Israeli tanks, which apparently drove over him, ripping his body to shreds. Rashid was crushed in his wheelchair when one of Israel’s huge US-supplied bulldozers demolished his home with the family inside. — location: 3028 ^ref-9689
Rather than welcome Hezbollah’s transformation into a political party, thus supporting Lebanese democracy, Congress preferred to follow the president’s lead, continuing to punish Hezbollah for its real crime. Organized in 1982 in response to Israel’s US-backed invasion of Lebanon, Hezbollah drove the invader from the country. For twenty-two years Israel had defied Security Council orders to withdraw, in the process carrying out many terrible atrocities with impunity, thanks to US support. — location: 3046 ^ref-32153
“That virtually the entire United States Congress, including erstwhile liberal Democrats, would collude with such an agenda is yet another frightening example of how far to the right political discourse in this country has evolved.” — location: 3049 ^ref-6025
for Washington, democracy promotion ranks low in comparison with the need to punish Iran for overthrowing the murderous tyrant, the shah, imposed in 1953 by the US and UK coup that destroyed the Iranian parliamentary system. — location: 3068 ^ref-37916
even if Iraqis can recover what they had accomplished despite imperial dominance, it takes impressive faith to believe that the current hegemons will permit such options in more than the traditional sense of “top-down” rule by elites linked to US power, with democratic forms of little substance—unless they are compelled to do so, by their own populations in particular. — location: 3090 ^ref-64847
In the past, the Bush administration resisted new national elections among the Palestinians. The thought then was that the elections would make Mr. Arafat look better and give him a fresher mandate, and might help give credibility and authority to Hamas.” — location: 3100 ^ref-13019
Israel’s stand undercut the efforts of Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas “to ease [Hamas and Islamic Jihad] away from violence [by bringing] them into the political mainstream,” — location: 3110 ^ref-53448
“Arafat, having been democratically elected by universal suffrage, repeatedly demanded the right to organise new Palestinian elections. But he was denied that right, simply because the Palestinians would certainly have elected him again.” — location: 3119 ^ref-43543
US-Israeli rejection of diplomacy led directly to the 1973 war, which was a very close call for Israel, and the world; — location: 3138 ^ref-10502
Camp David accords of 1979, in which the United States and Israel accepted the offer that Sadat had made in 1971. — location: 3140 ^ref-30441
General Shlomo Gazit, military commander of the occupied territories from 1967 to 1974, reports in his memoirs that Palestinian leaders proposed various forms of local autonomy in the territories during these years. These were transmitted sympathetically by Israeli military intelligence but rejected or ignored by the higher political echelons, which insisted on “substantial border changes” and had no intention of reaching any agreement, acting “with determination to thwart any Palestinian hopes in that direction [while] Israel forbade any political activity. — location: 3148 ^ref-33325
By adopting this extreme rejectionist stance, Gazit believes, the US-backed Labor governments of the early 1970s bear significant responsibility for the rise of the fanatic Gush Emunim settler movement, and eventually the Palestinian resistance that developed many years later in the first intifada—after years of state terror, settler brutality, and steady takeover of valuable Palestinian lands and resources. — location: 3153 ^ref-30608
Israel takes for itself 80 percent of the water extracted from West Bank aquifers, arrangements now consolidated by the “Separation Wall” on transparently fraudulent security grounds. — location: 3157 ^ref-55916
Like all occupations, Israel’s was founded on brute force, repression and fear, collaboration and treachery, beatings and torture chambers, and daily intimidation, humiliation, and manipulation. — location: 3164 ^ref-55787
A federal solution could have led to further integration of the two societies, as circumstances permitted, leading to the kind of binational arrangement that has significant roots in prestate Zionism and is quite natural in that region—in fact more generally. — location: 3171 ^ref-18044
the only serious short-term option became the two-state settlement of the international consensus that the United States and Israel have blocked. — location: 3176 ^ref-36307
It was not the villain Arafat who was “the prime obstacle to [the] realization” of a Palestinian state, but rather the United States and Israel, with the help of media and commentary that suppressed and distorted what was taking place. — location: 3178 ^ref-48602
the history conflicts radically with the righteousness of our leaders, so it must be discarded as politically incorrect. — location: 3195 ^ref-40772
the new Palestinian state “under the supervision of the United Nations for a limited period, as part of the peace process.” The vote was 153 to 3, with the United States, Israel, and Dominica opposed and one abstention (Belize). — location: 3217 ^ref-61520
it was only after the 1991 Gulf war that Washington was willing to consider negotiations, recognizing that it was now in a position to impose its own terms unilaterally. — location: 3220 ^ref-32625
It was only after he could no longer keep the population under control while Israel took over more of their lands and resources that he became an archvillain, blocking the path to peace. — location: 3224 ^ref-63831
The “Oslo peace process,” Ben-Ami wrote, was to lead to a “permanent neocolonial dependency” for the Palestinians in the occupied territories, with some form of local autonomy. — location: 3232 ^ref-34735
Israeli settlement and cantonization of the occupied territories proceeded steadily through the 1990s, with full US support. The highest rate of post-Oslo settlement expansion was in 2000, — location: 3234 ^ref-11117
Along with other significant expansion, the proposals effectively cut off the major Palestinian towns (Bethlehem, Ramallah, Nablus) from one another. — location: 3250 ^ref-57015
Pundak concludes that, though none are blameless, Netanyahu’s insincerity and Barak’s mismanagement “were the two main obstacles to reaching an agreement.” — location: 3296 ^ref-50872
the decision of occupation authority official Pliya Albek, who, with the support of the courts, rejected the appeal of a Palestinian man for compensation after the border police had killed his wife, on the grounds that he “only gained from his wife’s death because when she was alive he had to support her, but now he does not, and therefore the damage to him is at most zero.” — location: 3364 ^ref-14822
the ability of most Israelis not to see and not to grasp the extent of the vineyards and groves and orchards and fields that the people’s army of Israel turned into desert, the green that it painted yellow and gray, the sand turned over and the exposed land, the thorns, the weeds. — location: 3386 ^ref-54019
The international consequences of Israel’s decision to prefer expansion to security in 1971 extend well beyond the 1973 war of which it was the immediate cause. By refusing peace, Israel chose dependency on the United States, “the boss-man called ‘partner,’” — location: 3394 ^ref-14615
“After Israel raised a white flag and acquiesced to most of the demands,” Israel’s leading military correspondent, Ze’ev Schiff, reported, “the US made additional, harsher demands, and was said to have shown contempt for the Israeli delegation.” — location: 3403 ^ref-40393
Israel has no alternative when the boss-man speaks, and understands that it cannot rely on the domestic US lobby, which knows better than to confront state power on important matters. — location: 3407 ^ref-35624
“Operation National Trauma ‘82,” the evacuation of the settlers from Yamit in the Egyptian Sinai. That performance was described by Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk as “one of the largest brain-washing operations conducted by the government in order to convince the Israeli people that they have suffered a ‘national trauma the effect of which will be felt for generations.’” The well-orchestrated trauma was intended to create “a national consensus opposed to similar withdrawals in the remaining occupied territories”— — location: 3524 ^ref-36520
It is comforting to attribute the alleged “clash” between Islam and the West to their hatred of our freedom and values, as the president proclaimed after 9/11, or to our curious inability to communicate our true intentions. — location: 3637 ^ref-60985
“when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy.” As Muslims see it, the report continues, “American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has not led to democracy there, but only more chaos and suffering.” — location: 3641 ^ref-11679
“In the eyes of the majority of Arabs the United States appears to be opposed to the realization of the goals of Arab nationalism. They believe that the United States is seeking to protect its interest in Near East oil by supporting the status quo and opposing political or economic progress.” — location: 3647 ^ref-40209
“Our economic and cultural interests in the area have led not unnaturally to close US relations with elements in the Arab world whose primary interest lies in the maintenance of relations with the West and the status quo in their countries,” blocking democracy and development. — location: 3649 ^ref-52215
new grievances, however, beyond those reported by the National Security Council in 1958: Washington’s sanctions regime in Iraq and its support for Israel’s military occupation and takeover of the territories. — location: 3655 ^ref-7434
bitter resentment of the Western-oriented elites and the corrupt and brutal rulers backed by Western power who ensure that the enormous wealth of the region flows to the West, apart from enriching themselves. The Iraq invasion only heightened these feelings, much as anticipated. — location: 3657 ^ref-49012
The evidence concerning Washington’s actual stance and role, virtuous declarations aside, is clear and compelling, surely by the standards of complex world affairs. — location: 3664 ^ref-54029
The terrible crimes of imperial Japan led to the expulsion of the European invaders from Asia, saving many millions of lives—in India, for example, which has been spared horrifying famines since the British withdrew and was able to begin to recover from centuries of imperial domination. — location: 3668 ^ref-45574
the United States is very much like other powerful states, pursuing the strategic and economic interests of dominant sectors to the accompaniment of rhetorical flourishes about its exceptional dedication to the highest values. — location: 3672 ^ref-8902
Abroad, democracy is fine as long as it takes the “top-down form” that does not risk popular interference with primary interests of power and wealth. Much the same doctrine holds internally, — location: 3676 ^ref-41642
role of the media in undermining democratic politics, to the extent that by the year 2000 presidential elections had become a “travesty,” he concludes, with a reciprocal effect on deterioration of media quality and service to the public interest. — location: 3685 ^ref-6770
“politics is the shadow cast on society by big business” and will remain so as long as power resides in “business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda.” — location: 3690 ^ref-35523
Fundamental social change is necessary to bring meaningful democracy. — location: 3693 ^ref-45107
James Madison. He held that power should be in the hands of “the wealth of the nation . . . the more capable set of men.” — location: 3707 ^ref-34630
The rights are not those of property, which has no rights, but of property owners, who therefore should have extra rights beyond those of citizens generally. — location: 3709 ^ref-41091
Madison scholar Lance Banning observes, “it is absolutely clear that he was most especially concerned for propertied minorities among the people.” — location: 3711 ^ref-59709
Adam Smith’s observation that “civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.” — location: 3712 ^ref-13131
“to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority,” — location: 3716 ^ref-46775
. Great then is the good fortune of a state in which the citizens have a moderate and sufficient property; for where some possess much, and others nothing, there may arise an extreme democracy” that does not recognize the rights of the rich, perhaps deteriorating even beyond. — location: 3723 ^ref-51726
Aristotle and Madison posed essentially the same problem, but drew opposite conclusions. Madison’s solution was to restrict democracy, while Aristotle’s was to reduce inequality, by what amount to welfare-state programs. — location: 3726 ^ref-34212
“measures therefore should be taken which will give [all people] lasting prosperity.” The “proceeds of the public revenues should be accumulated and distributed among its poor” to enable them to “purchase a little farm, or, at any rate, make a beginning in trade or husbandry,” — location: 3727 ^ref-61120
“self-directed work defined the democrat,” a principle taken to be “the norm for all men” in the nineteenth century, — location: 3733 ^ref-13300
“the New Spirit of the Age: Gain Wealth, forgetting all but Self” — location: 3737 ^ref-59345
fact—in Woodrow Wilson’s words—that “most men are servants of corporations . . . in a very different America from the old.” In this new America—“no longer a scene of individual enterprise, . . . individual opportunity, and individual achievement”—“small groups of men in control of great corporations wield a power and control over the wealth and business opportunities of the country.” — location: 3740 ^ref-31403
other devices “to regiment the lower class.” — location: 3746 ^ref-59841
Hitler’s demonic appeal to his “divine mission” as “Germany’s savior” in a “pseudoreligious transfiguration of politics” adapted to “traditional Christian forms,” ruling a government dedicated to “the basic principles” of the nation, with “Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.” — location: 3759 ^ref-61729
resentment against a disenchanted secular world found deliverance in the ecstatic escape of unreason.” — location: 3763 ^ref-65338
Nazi propaganda techniques were borrowed from business doctrines and practices that were mostly pioneered in the Anglo-American societies. — location: 3773 ^ref-10658
“Goebbels conscripted most of the leading commercial advertising men in Germany for his propaganda ministry,” and boasted that “he would use American advertising methods” to “sell National Socialism” much as business seeks to sell “chocolate, toothpaste, and patent medicines.” These measures were frightfully successful in bringing about the sudden descent from decency to barbarism that Fritz Stern describes with an ominous warning. — location: 3776 ^ref-20656
Demonic messianism — location: 3780 ^ref-56127
When neoliberal-style programs began to take shape in the 1970s, real wages in the United States were the highest in the industrial world, as one would expect in the richest society in the world, with incomparable advantages. The situation has now drramatically changed. Real wages for the majority have largely stagnated or declined and are now close to the lowest level among industrial societies; the relatively weak benefits system has declined as well. Incomes are maintained only by extending working hours well beyond those in similar societies, while inequality has soared. — location: 3784 ^ref-18724
From 1983 to 1998, average wealth of the top 1 percent rose “a whopping 42%,” while the poorest 40 percent “lost 76 percent of their (very modest) wealth.” — location: 3793 ^ref-49490
The number of people who go hungry because they cannot afford to buy food rose to over 38 million in 2004: 12 percent of households, an increase of 7 million in five years. As the government released the figures, the House Agricultural Committee voted to remove funding for food stamps for 300,000 people, and cut off school lunches and breakfasts for 40,000 children, only one of many illustrations. — location: 3806 ^ref-908
he attributes in part to “atypical restraint on compensation increases [which] appears to be mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity,” — location: 3811 ^ref-33714
the remarkable choice of demons about to destroy us, typically those whom Americans were crushing under their boots: Indians, blacks, Chinese workers, among others. — location: 3822 ^ref-26382
anything that could be conjured up to mobilize support for the next campaign at home and abroad, commonly with domestic victims alongside those abroad who suffered far greater blows. — location: 3829 ^ref-54008
Results of polls that are unwelcome to powerful interests are often kept under wraps by the doctrinal institutions. — location: 3836 ^ref-22502
of the 28 percent of the electorate who voted for Reagan, 11 percent gave as their primary reason “he’s a real conservative.” — location: 3852 ^ref-57287
1 percent of the electorate voted for a “real conservative” in what was described as a powerful mandate for “conservatism.” — location: 3854 ^ref-52998
The worrisome crisis under discussion was that the 1960s had given rise to what they called “an excess of democracy”: normally passive and marginalized sectors—women, youth, elderly, labor, minorities, and other parts of the underlying population—began to enter the political arena to press their demands. The “crisis of democracy” was regarded as even more dangerous by the components of the elite spectrum to the right of the commission and by the business world in general. — location: 3866 ^ref-51189
Among the immediate reactions to the “crisis” were a dramatic increase in corporate lobbying and the proliferation of right-wing think tanks to ensure control of legislative programs and doctrinal institutions, along with other devices to restore order and discipline. — location: 3872 ^ref-33866
Reviewing the neoliberal experience of a quarter century, a study of the Center for Economic and Policy Research shows that it has been accompanied by much slower rates of growth and reduced progress on social indicators for countries in every quintile, rich to poor. — location: 3885 ^ref-7772
“there has been a sharp decline in growth in the neoliberal era relative to the developmental state period” that preceded it, a decline of over half, a trend that “is even more dramatic” when measured per capita, with increase in inequality and little or no reduction of poverty (when China is excluded), and devastating side effects among the most vulnerable. — location: 3888 ^ref-53047
“one of the big—and underappreciated facts of our time [is the] dramatic growth slowdown in developed and developing countries” in the quarter century of neoliberal economic policy, including, probably, an increase in poverty and in-country and between-country inequality when China (which rejected the policies) is removed and realistic poverty measures are used. The facts are sometimes obscured by the observation that conditions have generally improved under the neoliberal regime (as they almost invariably do over time under any economic regime), or by resort to a concept of “globalization” that muddles export orientation with neoliberalism, so that if a billion Chinese experience high growth under export-oriented policies that radically violate neoliberal principles, the increase in average global growth rates can be hailed as a triumph of the principles that are violated. — location: 3891 ^ref-57623
causation, it is difficult to ignore the fact that the strong and harmful tendencies associated with neoliberal policies are quite consistent with economic history over a much longer term, facts well known to economic historians. — location: 3898 ^ref-7923
Evidently, democracy reduces to empty form “if the representative and participatory processes at the national level are given no role in determining economic and social development strategies.” — location: 3902 ^ref-22111
The “agreements” are reached only by secrecy and other devices to marginalize the annoying public. In the term “North American Free Trade Agreement” (NAFTA), the only accurate words are “North American.” Other agreements are generally no different. — location: 3910 ^ref-20567
the neoliberal reforms are antithetical to promotion of democracy. They are not designed to shrink the state, as often asserted, but to strengthen state institutions to serve even more than before the needs of the substantial people. A dominant theme is to restrict the public arena and transfer decisions to the hands of unaccountable private tyrannies. — location: 3913 ^ref-50457
privatization of “services,” a category that encompasses just about anything of public concern: health, education, water and other resources, and so on. Once these are removed from the public arena by “trade in services,” formal democratic practices are largely reduced to a device for periodic mobilization of the public in the service of elite interests, and the “crisis of democracy” is substantially overcome. — location: 3916 ^ref-53452
the financial liberalization instituted from the early 1970s on. As well understood by international economists, these measures create a “virtual Senate” of investors and lenders who can exercise “veto power” over government decisions by threat of capital flight, attacks on currency, and other means. — location: 3920 ^ref-20422
Keynes considered the most important achievement of Bretton Woods to be establishment of the right of governments to restrict capital movement; in sharp contrast, the US Treasury now regards free capital mobility as a “fundamental right,” unlike such alleged rights as decent employment. — location: 3924 ^ref-10813
Bretton Woods rules also restricted financial speculation and attacks on currencies. The effect was to allow a form of “embedded liberalism,” as it is sometimes called, in which social democratic policies could be pursued. The outcome is often termed the “golden age” of capitalism (more accurately, state capitalism), with unprecedented economic growth that was also egalitarian, and enactment of significant welfare-state measures to benefit the general population. All of this has been reversed in the neoliberal period. — location: 3926 ^ref-10331
business spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year projecting imagery to delude consumers. Uncontroversially, that is the goal of advertising—not providing information. — location: 3950 ^ref-31034
one of the primary tasks of business propaganda is the “fabrication of consumers,” a device that helps induce “all the classic symptoms of state-based totalitarianism: atomization, political apathy and irrationality, the hollowing and banalization of purportedly democratic political processes, mounting popular frustration, and so forth.” — location: 3953 ^ref-7843
Economist Dean Baker finds that savings to consumers would be immense if public funding increased to 100 percent of R&D, thus eliminating the drug companies’ justifications for monopoly pricing rights. The public already plays a much greater role than acknowledged, since the development of drugs relies on fundamental science, virtually all of which is funded by the public. — location: 3973 ^ref-46695
major US drug companies spend more than twice as much on marketing, advertising, and administration as on any kind of R&D, while reporting huge profits. — location: 3976 ^ref-22235
The industry denounces such measures as “insidious”—as they are, in interfering with the right of deceit that is central to really existing markets. — location: 3984 ^ref-31343
If one is flipping a coin to pick the king, it is of no great concern if the coin is biased. — location: 3995 ^ref-1825
By and large, intensity of religious belief correlates negatively with economic development, but the United States is off the chart. — location: 4014 ^ref-39505
By the late 1980s, more than 70 percent of Americans “thought health care should be a constitutional guarantee,” while 40 percent “thought it already was.” One can only imagine what the figures would be if the topics were not virtually off the public agenda. — location: 4041 ^ref-63121
rare allusions to public support for guaranteed health care describe the idea as lacking “political support,” or “politically impossible” because of “tangled politics.” These are polite ways of saying that the pharmaceutical and financial industries and other private powers are strongly opposed. The will of the public is banned from the political arena. — location: 4044 ^ref-58771
As in the markets constructed by the PR industry, so also in the democratic elections they run, a primary task is to delude the public by carefully constructed images that have only the vaguest resemblance to reality. — location: 4047 ^ref-4229
If we understand the country to be US-based corporations rather than the population, the trade-deficit accounting thus shifts markedly. — location: 4068 ^ref-41425
The heart of any serious educational program is fostering the ability to “inquire and create,” as discussed by one of the founders of classical liberalism and of the modern university system, Wilhelm von Humboldt. Focus on testing does not advance, and probably harms, such objectives, for which quite different initiatives would be required. — location: 4071 ^ref-21108
A large majority of the public believe that the United States should accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the World Court, sign the Kyoto protocols, allow the United Nations to take the lead in international crises, and rely on diplomatic and economic measures more than military ones in the “war on terror.” Similar majorities believe the United States should resort to force only if there is “strong evidence that the country is in imminent danger of being attacked,” thus rejecting the bipartisan consensus on “preemptive war” — location: 4102 ^ref-55794
On domestic issues, overwhelming majorities favor expansion of government programs: primarily health care (80 percent), but also funding for education and Social Security. — location: 4108 ^ref-57592
Not only does the US government stand apart from the rest of the world on many crucial issues, but even from its own population. — location: 4111 ^ref-13925
“As killing and rape continue in Darfur, the United States now proposes further delay [at the Security Council] . . . the Bush administration’s rearguard campaign to avert an ICC referral is putting innocent civilians at risk in Darfur.” — location: 4125 ^ref-27471
The United States (and Israel) alone opposed a UN treaty “to protect and promote cultural diversity,” debated by UNESCO. The organization had been severely weakened by the Reagan administration and the media twenty years earlier when it sought to allow some Third World participation in international communication systems. — location: 4128 ^ref-36515
the dramatic increase in incarceration during the past twenty-five years. — location: 4134 ^ref-64666
United States is alone in the world in locking up juveniles without possibility of parole. — location: 4139 ^ref-45558
The number of children sentenced to permanent life imprisonment has risen sharply over the past twenty-five years, at an even faster rate than for adult murderers. Such practices are in violation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified by every member state except the United States and Somalia — location: 4142 ^ref-32976
in April 2005 as “the sole dissenter in separate votes of 52 to 1 on [UN] resolutions on the right to food and the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.” — location: 4154 ^ref-51479
Dobriansky sought to dispel what she called “myths” about human rights, the most salient being the myth that so-called “ ‘economic and social rights’ constitute human rights.” — location: 4159 ^ref-19716
74 percent of the public felt that the United States should not have gone to war if Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction or was not providing support to Al Qaeda — location: 4168 ^ref-31287
in Spain public opinion was known, but not in the United States; and in Spain the issue came to a vote, almost unimaginable in the United States—more evidence of the serious deterioration of functioning democracy even by the standards of similar societies. — location: 4187 ^ref-30112
When the Bush administration released its budget in February 2005, PIPA did a study of popular attitudes about what the budget should be. It revealed that popular attitudes are virtually the inverse of policy: with considerable consistency, where the budget was to increase, the public wanted it to decline; where it was to decline, the public wanted it to increase. — location: 4193 ^ref-4417
the Bush administration insisted that funding for the victims of Hurricane Katrina must come instead from social spending, because of “the continuing support for tax cuts, including those aimed at the wealthiest Americans,” the press reported. — location: 4203 ^ref-53114
“Tax cuts remain politically sacrosanct,” much like privatized health care. In contrast, government programs “lack political support,” enjoying only popular support. — location: 4205 ^ref-60502
the public called for the deepest cuts in the programs that are most rapidly increasing, and for substantial spending increases in areas that are shortchanged. Once again, these results provide very significant information for the population of a functioning democracy. Fortunately, the United States is a very free society, so it is possible to obtain the information. Unfortunately, an individual research project is required to discover it. Media coverage appears to have been zero. — location: 4213 ^ref-41902
reveal a dramatic divide between public opinion and public policy. — location: 4218 ^ref-36263
For decades, increasing sharply during the Reagan years, polls have shown that people do not feel that the government is responsive to the public will. — location: 4228 ^ref-54270
The analysts suggest that the reservations Americans express about “democracy promotion” abroad may derive from a belief that the project might be needed at home. — location: 4232 ^ref-19457
Not only is legislation increasingly skewed to benefit the richest interests, but Congress itself has been changed,” becoming a “transactional institution,” geared to implementing the pro-business policies of the increasingly powerful state. — location: 4253 ^ref-48153
for the most part, classification protects state power from scrutiny by the “ill-informed and capricious” public, whose knowledge of what is being done in their name might endanger “freedom.” — location: 4260 ^ref-47261
Republican leadership has been reconstructing both Congress and the White House into “top-down systems,” with important decisions placed in the hands of “a tight group of West Wing loyalists” — location: 4268 ^ref-65404
In structure, the political counterpart to a corporation is a totalitarian state. — location: 4271 ^ref-12215
The World Bank and others stimulate borrowing by the rich and powerful in the poor countries, the risky loans yield high returns, and when the system crashes, structural adjustment programs transfer the costs to the poor, who never borrowed the money in the first place and gained little from it, and to the taxpayers of the North. The IMF serves as “the credit community’s enforcer,” — location: 4382 ^ref-19239
The problems caused by financial industry avarice are severe. Bankruptcy filings “rose eightfold over the last 30 years, from 200,000 in 1978 to 1.6 million” in 2004; they are expected to reach 1.8 million in 2005. “The overwhelming majority of them are personal, not business,” resulting from a steady increase in household debt, “now at record highs relative to disposable income.” — location: 4387 ^ref-7007
The rapidly escalating costs of health care are threatening a serious fiscal crisis, along with immeasurable human costs. Infant mortality is one major index. The UN Human Development Report 2005 reveals that “since 2000 a half century of sustained decline in infant death rates [in the United States] first slowed and then reversed.” — location: 4408 ^ref-44709
The financial crisis is surely no secret. The press reports that 30 percent of health care costs go for administration, a proportion vastly higher than in government-run systems, including those within the United States, which are far from the most efficient. — location: 4416 ^ref-33055
These estimates are seriously understated because of the ideological decision not to count the costs for individuals—for doctors who waste their own time or are forced to misuse it, or for patients who “enter a world of paperwork so surreal that it belongs in one of Kafka’s tales of the triumph of faceless bureaucracies.” — location: 4418 ^ref-19410
The propaganda image is that the retirement of the “baby boomers” is going to crash the system; as repeatedly pointed out, their retirement had already been financed by the Greenspan-led increase in payroll taxes in 1983. That aside, the boomers were once children, and had to be cared for then as well. And we find that during those years there was a sharp increase in spending for education and other child care needs. There was no crisis. If American society was able to take care of the boomers from ages zero to twenty, there can be no fundamental reason why a much richer society, with far higher output per worker, cannot take care of them from ages sixty-five to ninety. — location: 4450 ^ref-62697
Social Security is based on the idea that it is a community responsibility to ensure that the disabled widow on the other side of town has food to eat, or that the child across the street should be able to go to a decent school. Such evil ideas have to be driven from the mind. They stand in the way of the “New Spirit of the Age” of the 1850s: “Gain Wealth, forgetting all but Self.” — location: 4489 ^ref-22741
And the whole affair adds more to our understanding of the current state of American democracy—with most of the industrial world trailing not too far behind, as privileged and powerful sectors learn and apply the lessons taught by their leader. — location: 4496 ^ref-26229
Traditional imperial and neocolonial systems illustrate many variations on similar themes. — location: 4516 ^ref-31982
Unlike Europe, China refuses to be intimidated by Washington, a primary reason for the growing fear of China on the part of US planners. Much of Iran’s oil already goes to China, and China is providing Iran with weapons, presumably considered a deterrent to US threats. — location: 4544 ^ref-55371
Though it “hosts the world’s largest producers and fastest growing consumers of energy,” Asia still relies “on institutions, trading frameworks and armed forces from outside the region in order to trade with itself,” a debilitating heritage from the imperial era. — location: 4562 ^ref-48032
The United States “sees India as the weakest link in the emerging Asian chain,” he continues, and is “trying actively to divert New Delhi away from the task of creating new regional architecture — location: 4573 ^ref-24939
If the Asian project is to succeed, he warns, “India will have to resist these allurements.” — location: 4575 ^ref-61392
Cuba-Venezuela projects are extending to the Caribbean countries, where Cuban doctors are providing health care to thousands of people with Venezuelan funding. Operation Miracle, as it is called, is described by Jamaica’s ambassador to Cuba as “an example of integration and south-south cooperation,” and is generating great enthusiasm among the poor majority. — location: 4597 ^ref-43014
“Cuba has provided the largest contingent of doctors and paramedics to Pakistan,” paying all the costs (perhaps with Venezuelan funding), and that President Musharraf expressed his “deep gratitude” for the “spirit and compassion” of the Cuban medical teams. These are reported to comprise more than one thousand trained personnel, 44 percent of them women, who remained to work in remote mountain villages, “living in tents in freezing weather and in an alien culture” after the Western aid teams had been withdrawn, setting up nineteen field hospitals and working twelve-hour shifts. — location: 4602 ^ref-28563
Venezuela also supplied Argentina with fuel oil to help stave off an energy crisis, and bought almost a third of Argentine debt issued in 2005, one element of a region-wide effort to free the countries from the control of the US-dominated IMF after two decades of disastrous effects of conformity to its rules. — location: 4614 ^ref-63330
reported, a group of senators sent a letter “to nine big oil companies: With huge increases in winter heating bills expected, the letter read, we want you to donate some of your record profits to help low-income people cover those costs.” They received one response: from CITGO, the Venezuelan-controlled company. CITGO offered to provide low-cost oil to low-income residents of Boston, later elsewhere. — location: 4628 ^ref-27987
Quite unlike aid from the United States and other countries, which is purehearted altruism. — location: 4632 ^ref-6966
the United States is very much like other powerful states. It pursues the strategic and economic interests of dominant sectors of the domestic population, to the accompaniment of rhetorical flourishes about its dedication to the highest values. — location: 4694 ^ref-19215
a few simple suggestions for the United States have already been mentioned: (1) accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and the World Court; (2) sign and carry forward the Kyoto protocols; (3) let the UN take the lead in international crises; (4) rely on diplomatic and economic measures rather than military ones in confronting terror; (5) keep to the traditional interpretation of the UN Charter; (6) give up the Security Council veto and have “a decent respect for the opinion of mankind,” as the Declaration of Independence advises, even if power centers disagree; (7) — location: 4699 ^ref-55469
cut back sharply on military spending and sharply increase social spending. — location: 4703 ^ref-63581
we cannot be very confident about the state of public opinion on such matters because of another feature of the democratic deficit: the topics scarcely enter into public discussion and the basic facts are little known. In a highly atomized society, the public is therefore largely deprived of the opportunity to form considered opinions. — location: 4705 ^ref-5769
As in the past, rights are not likely to be granted by benevolent authorities, or won by intermittent actions—attending a few demonstrations or pushing a lever in the personalized quadrennial extravaganzas that are depicted as “democratic politics.” As always in the past, the tasks require dedicated day-by-day engagement to create—in part re-create—the basis for a functioning democratic culture in which the public plays some role in determining policies, not only in the political arena, from which it is largely excluded, but also in the crucial economic arena, from which it is excluded in principle. — location: 4714 ^ref-45731
There are many ways to promote democracy at home, carrying it to new dimensions. Opportunities are ample, and failure to grasp them is likely to have ominous repercussions: for the country, for the world, and for future generations. — location: 4718 ^ref-11014
Deterring Democracy, — location: 5230 ^ref-5070
The Hidden Hand — location: 5254 ^ref-31117
The Hidden Hand, — location: 5266 ^ref-13241
Deterring Democracy, — location: 5275 ^ref-5070
for the rural population, withdrawal of essential state services and pressures to shift to economically very hazardous export crops. — location: 5289 ^ref-54656
Necessary Illusions and — location: 5337 ^ref-46635
Unpeople, — location: 5354 ^ref-13207