Aussies going to Scribble Jam

AS THE DJ drops the needle, a slow beat pounds out across an eagerly waiting audience in Newtown.

Dressed in a grey hoodie and jeans, MC Joel Rapaport steps up to the mic, nods his head to the music and tries desperately to think.

As a competitor in the hip-hop competition Scribble Jam, the 24-year-old rapper has roughly four seconds to think up almost a minute's worth of rhyming verse. It's Saturday night and the crowd is baying for blood - it wants to see him cut down his opponent with the funniest and nastiest insults he can conjure.

He'd only just survived the first round after his female opponent, Arrow, cast aspersions on everything from his height to his testicle size.

"I thought I had lost in the first round. I was ready to go home," he says. "But then I was up against [MC] Pig. He's a friend of mine, but hey - he's called Pig - so I based my second round totally on farmyard animals."

By the time the night was over, Rapaport was one of the final four MCs selected for the Scribble Jam state finals on May 6. He and fellow finalists JRF, Anonymous and Reflect are a step closer to representing Australia at international finals in Ohio, the competition that launched the careers of rappers such as Eminem, Dose One and Sage Francis.

The Scribble Jam competition has precipitated a flurry of hip-hop activity throughout Australia. In each state, hip-hop communities have been conducting heats, searching for the best rappers and DJs to battle at state and national finals. The national winners in the MC and DJ divisions will represent Australia at the US Scribble Jam in August.

Last year, for the first time, the American MC finals were won by an Australian rapper, Justice, and this is the first year heats have been held in Australia.

Justice, who will be judging at the state finals along with US rapper Supernatural, says the Australian winner will meet a new standard of battling when they get to the American competition.

"The style of battling is completely different. Over there, it used to be about punchlines but now it's all about the rhyme structure - if you drop five multi-syllabic rhymes in a row then that's better than one great punchline."

Arrow, who was knocked out of last Saturday's heats, reckons you can boil the Australian technique down to three types.

"There's the staunch rappers who crash tackle you, try to psyche you out. Then there's the jellyfish that have one sting and for the rest of the night the audience doesn't feel anything more. Then you have the slippery, snaky type who come in and attack you from all sides very quickly, darting in and out," she says. "They are the hardest; you have to listen to the beat, look at what they are wearing and remember what they said so you can flip it. It takes a lot of brain juice."

Arrow, who won last year's local competition, BattleAxe, says she's "very excited" to have Scribble Jam in Sydney.

"It's an institution and it's where Eminem cut his teeth and was discovered by Dr Dre. Last year when Justice won, I'll never forget that," she says. "You know how some people are like, 'Where were you when Princess Di died?' For us it was 'Where were you when Justice won?' "

JRF, who survived Saturday night's insults about his long hair and the imagined sexual exploits of his mother, estimates he spends about 16 hours a day thinking in rhymes.

"When we practise, we get a bunch of mates who come over and have big rhyme sessions with five MCs at least," he says. "We play different word games like you use a word that rhymes with letters like A or C, or choose a topic like 'jumping' and rhyme about that for eight bars and then pass it to the next one, making up stories."

Sydney MC The Tongue, who hosted last Saturday's heats in Newtown, says he practises by turning the pages of magazines and battling against the faces he sees. "There's also a whole scene of dirt-digging on your opponent," he says. "I've been to battles where there were guys that made assumptions about me from my photo, they ask other guys what sort of clothes I wear, do their research."

In a competition where sledging is the aim of the game, there's a surprisingly strict code of conduct. Touching your opponent is not allowed, and most battles are more likely to end with a good-natured handshake than fisticuffs. Sexist and homophobic insults might get a giggle out of some audiences, but the discerning punter knows these cheap pot-shots usually mean a rapper is lost for words. It's a freestyle competition, so lines that are clearly rehearsed will go down like a lead balloon and whatever you do, don't rap in an American accent.

"I used to rhyme with an American accent because I come from New Zealand and that's how I learnt to rhyme," says JRF. "I got bagged a bit for that because I didn't have the Aussie flow."

Then there's the choke: finding yourself stuck for words while the crowd boos.

"Choking always leaves me pretty gutted. You think of too many things at once and nothing comes out," says a NSW finalist, Anonymous. Better to let the words flow thick and fast, without stopping to think.

"So fast that when you walk off stage, sometimes you can't even remember what you have just said. The down side is it only lasts for a night - your fame is only for a night and at the next battle you start again."

Rapaport says that despite his knack for it, he doesn't even particularly enjoy battling.

"I don't think that many people really enjoy it but it's so hard to get your music heard; you come across so many rappers but it's the battle MCs who have got so much exposure," he says.

But Anonymous says Eminem's 2004 movie, 8 Mile, followed by Justice's victory at last year's Scribble Jam, breathed new life into the Australian battle scene.

"It's pretty dope at the moment. There's a lot of stuff happening and a lot of young people coming up through the ranks," he says.

"It's really booming and its a good time for it to boom."

Iraq's Transformation

This is indeed strange history in the making: Western officials who invaded a country, wiped out its mechanisms of order, unleashed pent-up ethnic furies, and indirectly rule it with their military divisions are advising the natives to speed up their grasp of democracy: Compress into two years the political modernization process that Great Britain and the United States themselves required over half a millennium to refine, from the Magna Carta to the American revolution.

read more...

America's Fake News Pandemic

A report released yesterday by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) and Free Press exposes corporate propaganda's infiltration of local television news across the country.

The Center, which authored the report, monitored local news broadcasts for 10 months and caught 77 local stations that had slipped corporate-sponsored "video news releases" - segments promoting commercial brands and products - into their regular news programming. These advertisements were dressed up as real news and passed off to unsuspecting viewers as legitimate. At no time during the airing, did the local correspondents reveal the corporations as the source of the material.

Collectively, the stations implicated in the report reach more than half of the U.S. population.

This illegal deception is a breach of the trust between local stations and their communities. By disguising advertisements as news, stations violate both the spirit and the letter of their broadcasting licenses, which obligate them to serve the public interest.

read on..

Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed... How Corporate-Funded Propaganda Is Airing On Local Newscasts As "News"

"The Queen of the VNR" Robin Raskin Reveals Why She Appears In Corporate-Sponsored "News Segments" & Why She Feels Stations Need To Disclose Who Is Funding the VNRs

FCC Commissioner Says Broadcasting VNRs Without Disclosure May Violate Federal Law

John Bolton - Avoiding Defeat on Human Rights

After the Bush administration's multiple failures to forge common policy with its allies and developing countries at the United Nations on Iraq, nuclear proliferation, human rights, and UN reform, it has at last made a strategically sound decision: the United States will not run for a seat on the UN's newly constituted Human Rights Council.

The administration's decision wisely acknowledges that the president's personal representative to the UN, conservative firebrand John Bolton, cannot win an election for the United States in the General Assembly, not even in the Western group.

Rather than face a humiliating defeat at the hands of Portugal or Greece, the administration will not seek a seat for the United States at all.

While politically realistic, the decision not to run constitutes a damning admission that the administration's belligerent policies have squandered America's global leadership.

The one-time leader of the Free World and the planet's pioneering constitutional democracy cannot muster half the votes in an assembly where democracies now constitute the majority.

Administration policies have blighted America's traditional reputation as a leader on human rights.

A government forfeits that mantle when it countenances torture, on graphic display at Abu Ghraib; secretly renders Muslim-surnamed individuals to torturers among Arab secret police; refuses to permit UN rights monitors to see detainees at Guantanamo who have been imprisoned for years but not accounted for; and refuses to compel states to honor consular obligations to foreign nationals accused of capital crimes.

Even with the heavy burden of its arch-conservative policies, the United States could still salvage a majority vote if it had serious diplomatic representation at the United Nations that practiced the politics of coalition-building rather than polarization.

We can sustain coalitions if our representatives act as if they believe that the United States shares the aspirations of most of humankind for peace and security, disarmament, improved living standards, and a sustainable environment.

Unfortunately, John Bolton sabotaged Western efforts at last September's world summit for a strong, comprehensive declaration covering all four of these areas; a declaration that would have spelled out the details of a strong Human Rights Council.

Instead, under his direction the United States demanded removal of a pledge to raise aid to improve the most basic living standards, a pledge that President Bush had already affirmed at a summit in Mexico in 2002.

He forced deletion of any mention of controlling nuclear weapons. He threw away all the "carrots" to win poorer countries' support for American reform priorities on human rights.

The president's recess ambassador shows no patience for building coalitions with his country's inferiors, opting instead to bully them and ridicule them as "a target-rich environment."

On his watch, U.S. diplomats have all but vanished from the rounds of policy seminars organized in UN circles by nongovernmental organizations and other countries' delegations.

The U.S. mission was notoriously disengaged in the debate over a reformed human rights council.

For all the rhetoric about ensuring that only countries with sterling human rights records should be permitted to serve on it, Bolton's one fresh proposal was to install the United States and China among five permanent and unaccountable members of the human rights council.

To his credit, Bolton recognized that with its current policies affecting human rights, the United States would fail any litmus test of virtue in the Western group. After long decrying "closed slates" from regional groups that offer no more candidates than the number of seats to be filled, the United States stunned human rights groups by opposing their call to require competitive elections recognizing that the United States now could lose a free and fair election.

It took some chutzpah for America's interim representative to denounce the new Council as insufficiently reformed, and then to vote against it at the head of the vast coalition he had assembled of three countries dependent on U.S. aid; Israel, Marshall Islands, and Palau.

America's mission to the UN is led by someone with all the political delicacy of a Tom DeLay, but without the hammer of rewards and punishments; and ideological affinity; that DeLay used to marshal his thin congressional majority.

At least, like DeLay, Ambassador Bolton knows to withdraw rather than face certain defeat in an election. America's loss of a Human Rights Council election can no longer be explained away in Washington as evidence of the iniquity of the rest of the world.

Having learned from Iraq to challenge rather than echo a fraudulent conservative narrative, long supine Democrats showed they were ready to cite an election loss as the irrefutable proof of America's loss of global leadership under aggressive Bush policies.

And they would be right.

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt

For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread 'democracy' throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.

Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the 'Israel Lobby'. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country - in this case, Israel - are essentially identical.

Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing that given to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct economic and military assistance since 1976, and is the largest recipient in total since World War Two, to the tune of well over $140 billion (in 2004 dollars). Israel receives about $3 billion in direct assistance each year, roughly one-fifth of the foreign aid budget, and worth about $500 a year for every Israeli. This largesse is especially striking since Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to that of South Korea or Spain.

Other recipients get their money in quarterly installments, but Israel receives its entire appropriation at the beginning of each fiscal year and can thus earn interest on it. Most recipients of aid given for military purposes are required to spend all of it in the US, but Israel is allowed to use roughly 25 per cent of its allocation to subsidise its own defence industry. It is the only recipient that does not have to account for how the aid is spent, which makes it virtually impossible to prevent the money from being used for purposes the US opposes, such as building settlements on the West Bank. Moreover, the US has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems, and given it access to such top-drawer weaponry as Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 jets. Finally, the US gives Israel access to intelligence it denies to its Nato allies and has turned a blind eye to Israel?s acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Edited Version of paper

How a seemingly noncontroversial academic paper set off a political firestorm within the foreign policy establishment.

Following up on the "Israel Lobby"

Counterpunch - Why the US May Be Acting Against Its Own Interests in the Middle East

Iran Showdown Tests Power of "Israel Lobby"

The Hyperpower Hype

Exporting Ruins
By Tom Engelhardt

Just last week, a jury began to deliberate on the fate of Zacarias Moussaoui, who may or may notnewly released recordings of 911 operators responding to calls from those about to die that day in the two towers were splashed across front pages nationwide. ("All I can tell you to do is sit tight. All right? Because I got almost every fireman in the city coming?") have been the missing 20th hijacker in the September 11th attacks. At the same time,

Over four and a half years later, September 11, 2001 won't go away. And little wonder. It remains the defining moment in our recent lives, the moment that turned us from a country into a "homeland." With Iraq in a state of ever-devolving deconstruction, the President's and Vice President's polling figures in tatters, Karl Rove (Bush's "brain") again threatened with indictment, the Republican Party in disarray, and New Orleans as well as the Mississippi coast still largely unreconstructed ruins, perhaps it's worth revisiting just what exactly was defined in that moment.

A DIY World of Terrorism

The brilliance of the al-Qaeda assault that day lay in its creation of a vision of destruction out of all proportion to the organization's modest strength. At best, al-Qaeda had adherents in the thousands as well as a "headquarters" and training camps located in the backlands of one of the poorest countries on the planet.

Its leaders made the bold decision to launch an attack on the political and the financial capitals of what was then regularly termed the globe's "sole hyperpower." Although this face-off might have seemed the ultimate definition of asymmetric warfare, in terms of theatrical value -- no small thing in our world of 24/7 news and entertainment -- the struggle turned out to be eerily symmetrical. By the look of it (but only the look), the Earth's lone superpower met its match that day. With box cutters, mace, two planes, and the use of Microsoft piloting software to speed their learning curve, a few determined fanatics, ready to kill and die, took aim at the two most iconic (if uninspired) buildings at the financial heart of the American system and managed to top the climax of any disaster film ever shot. What they created, in fact, was a Hollywood-style vision of the apocalypse, enough so that our media promptly dubbed the spot where those two towers crumbled in those vast clouds of dust and smoke, "Ground Zero," a term previously reserved for an atomic explosion.

This was -- let's be blunt -- an extraordinary accomplishment for a tiny band of men with one of the more extreme religious/political ideologies around; and, if the testimony under CIA interrogation of al-Qaeda's Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is to be believed -- summaries were released at the Moussaoui sentencing hearing -- what happened seems to have stunned even him. ("According to the CIA summary, he said he ?had no idea that the damage of the first attack would be as catastrophic as it was.'")

And yet, so many years later, there have been no follow-up attacks here. This was obviously never the equivalent of breaking through military lines in war. There were no al-Qaeda troops poised to pour through that breach, ransack the rubble, and spread across New York; nor, like the Japanese at Pearl Harbor (to which the 9/11 assault was often compared), did al-Qaeda launch a simultaneous set of strikes elsewhere. Of this sort of activity the group was incapable. Such acts were far beyond its means.

By the look of it, there weren't even sleeper cells in the U.S. ready to launch devastating follow-up attacks. (Given the Bush administration's record from New Orleans to Iraq, we can take it for granted that its officials would have been incapable of stopping any such well-planned attacks.) As far as we can tell, most of the major terrorist assaults launched since then, from Bali to Baghdad, were essentially franchised operations, undertaken by groups who claimed a kinship of inspiration and ideology; and, in a number of devastating cases, including London and Madrid, by small, self-organized groups, brought to a boil by Bush's War in Iraq, who struck on their own as, in essence, al-Qaeda wannabes. What al-Qaeda has really been promoting, because it was never capable of promoting much else, is a DIY world of terrorism.

Crossing the Line, Apocalypse Bound

Despite the limitless look of the destruction on September 11, 2001, the dangers al-Qaeda posed were of a limited nature. After all, it took the group a long time to meticulously plan each of its attacks, whether on the WTC, or the USS Cole in a harbor in Yemen, or two U.S. embassies in Africa. Years could pass between major attacks. When Osama bin Laden, according to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's CIA testimony, pushed for launching the attack on the World Trade Center in May 2001, seven months after the waterborne assault on the USS Cole, Mohammed ignored him because they simply weren't ready.

Their attacks could be devastating locally, killing startling numbers, but that would be the end of matters for months or even years to come. Other than a finely tuned sense of the power of timing, theatrics, and publicity (which indicated just how "modern" a group calling for the return of a medieval Caliphate really was), the only thing al-Qaeda could brandish was an implicit futuristic threat: That someday they, or another group like them, might get their hands on an actual apocalyptic weapon, leaking out of the arsenals or labs of one of the two former Cold War superpowers or from those of proliferating lesser powers. Then they might create an actual Ground Zero, subjecting some city somewhere, possibly here, to a genuinely apocalyptic moment.

Certain analysts had long feared just this. One was Robert Jay Lifton who, back in 1999, wrote a far-seeing if little noticed book, Destroying the World to Save It, about the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan. It too had been led by a fanatically driven leader possessing a vision of the end of the world that probably was, Lifton says, "as old as death itself." But whereas past religious groups had waited in expectation or terror for the predicted end of time to arrive, Aum's guru set out to make it happen, to trigger Armageddon. He actually managed to finance and set up his own science labs, attract scientific types to his cult, and create a poor man's weapon of mass destruction, the deadly nerve gas Sarin.

In 1995, his followers let imperfectly produced Sarin loose in the Tokyo subway system during a morning rush hour. Due to Aum's amateurishness, few people were killed; but, as Lifton wrote, the cult had nonetheless crossed a "line" that few even knew existed. It became "the first group in history to combine ultimate fanaticism with ultimate weapons in a project to destroy the world." Its acts were also a reminder that, sooner or later, weapons of mass destruction of one sort or another might indeed fall out of the control of states and into the hands of groups, cults, or even individuals who might feel none of the restraints states turn out to be under when it comes to their use.

This was an insight that lay just below the surface of our world until September 11, 2001, but that everyone evidently sensed -- otherwise that Ground Zero label would never have come so naturally to mind. Thought about with a cold eye, the single most important set of acts the Bush administration could have undertaken -- other than bringing to justice those who had launched the murderous assaults -- would have been to nail down the globe's nuclear as well as chemical and biological arsenals, and the Cold War labs that had produced them. It's worth recalling that the largely forgotten anthrax killer or killers, who closed down Congress and killed postal workers that same September, used weaponized anthrax, evidently from the American weapons labs. In addition, genuine national security would have meant putting full-scale efforts into reversing the global proliferation of nuclear weapons -- rather than just focusing ineptly on a couple of rogue states you were eager to whack anyway. You would certainly not have broken open the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, encouraged a state like India in its militarized nuclear dreams, or launched a major expansion and "modernization" of the already staggering American nuclear arsenal.

But of course nothing like this happened. In that terrible moment when a choice might have been made between the vision of apocalypse and the reality of al-Qaeda, between a malign version of the smoke-and-mirrors Wizard of Oz and the pathetic little man behind the curtain, the Bush administration opted for the vision in a major way. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and other top officials chose to pump up al-Qaeda into a global enemy worthy of a new Cold War, a generational struggle that might comfortably be filled with smaller, regime-change-oriented, "preventive" hot wars against hopelessly outgunned enemies who -- unlike in those Cold War days -- would have no other superpower to call on for aid.

Hyper about Power

That radioactive decision, not the 9/11 attacks, determined the shape of our world. Bush declared his "crusade" -- make no bones about it -- against Islam (though al Qaeda was the fringiest of "Islamic" groups) and the Middle East. It was, above all, to be a crusade to dominate the energy heartlands of the planet.

In its own way, al-Qaeda was ready to accept the Bush version of itself. After all, our President had just elevated it into the major leagues of enemyhood, right up there with the big boys of history. Via various videos, including one just before the 2004 presidential elections, al-Qaeda's leaders entered into a thoroughly bizarre "conversation" with the Bush administration, which, in press conferences, answered in kind. What a compliment! Who could reject a recruiting tool of that sort, right out of someone's Hollywood fantasies. Why not be a group of Islamic Dr. No's? (If only the Bush administration had reacted as James Bond did: "World domination. The same old dream. Our asylums are full of people who think they're Napoleon. Or God.")

On their part, Bush and his cohorts were all-too-ready to dance with this minor set of apocalypts, in part because they were themselves into fantasies of world domination -- and considered themselves anything but mad. With visions of a "New Rome" -- and a one-party democracy at home -- dancing in their heads, they took that handy, terrifying image of the apocalypse in downtown New York and translated it into every sort of terror (including mushroom cloudsspraying poisons along the East coast). In this way, they stampeded the American people and Congress into their crusade of choice. threatening to go off over American cities and unmanned aerial vehicles

The story of what followed you know well. Miraculously, al-Qaeda grew and the United States shrank. For one thing, it turned out that top American officials and the various neocons who worked for them or simply cheered them on from Washington's think-tanks and editorial pages, had been taken in by their own hype about American military power. They deeply believed in their pumped-up version of our hyper-strength, our ability to do anything we pleased in a world of midgets; and with the Soviet Union gone, if you just checked out military budgets and high-tech weapons programs, it might indeed look that way. Economically, however, the U.S. was far less strong than they imagined and its military power turned out to be far more impressive when held in reserve as a threat than when put to use in Iraq, where our Army would soon be stopped dead in its half-tracks.

In retrospect, the Bush administration badly misread the U.S. position in the world. Its officials, blinded by their own publicity releases on the nature of American power, were little short of self-delusional. And so, with unbearable self-confidence, the administration set out flailingly and, in just a few short years, began to create something like a landscape of ruins.

Today, we stand in those ruins, whether we know it or not, though the Ground Zero of the Bush assault was obviously not here, but in Iraq. Starting with their "shock and awe," son-et-lumière Sidney Blumenthal recently put it in another context, "Like all failed presidents, Bush is a captive in an iron cage of his own making. The greater his frustration, the tighter he grips the bars.") air assault on downtown Baghdad (which they promoted as if it were a hot, new TV show), they turned out to want their apocalyptic-looking scenes of destruction up on screen for the world to see no less than al-Qaeda did. It took next to no time for them to turn huge swaths of Iraq into the international equivalent of the World Trade Center. And it's a reasonable guess -- these people being painfully consistent in their predilections -- that it's only going to get worse.

Just a quick look at the situation in Iraq today reveals levels of chaos and a "steady diet of carnage" that not long ago might have seemed unimaginable. The Bush people now find themselves oscillating weekly between desperate policy non-alternatives, while a low-level, vicious, Lebanon-style civil war develops on the ground. Just last week, "Iraqi troops" with U.S. advisors were reported to have raided a Shiite mosque complex in a Baghdad neighborhood controlled by the forces of Moqtada al-Sadr's militia. A number of civilians, including an 80 year-old Imam, were killed, provoking an angry Shiite response, including calls for the sacking of Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador, indicating that a new stage had been reached.

For one thing, it's now clear that there may no longer be "Iraqi troops." In this case, the attackers turned out to be a Kurdish unit with American advisors, evidently perfectly happy to slaughter Sadr's backers. What exists, what we're "standing up" (so we can "stand down," as the President regularly puts it) are Shiite units, Kurdish units, and even relatively modest units of Sunni troops. As Robert Dreyfuss recently commented, all of this signals "that the United States is now fighting virtually the entire Iraqi Arab population. Only the non-Arab Kurds seem loyal to the United States now, and the notoriously fickle Kurds, famed for shifting their allegiances on a dime, can't be counted on as permanent friends, either."

Meanwhile, the country is officially without a government. As Dreyfuss sums the situation up, "Post-Saddam Iraq has become a nightmare, a Mad Max world in which warlords rule." While American power remains enormous there, it has proved less wieldable than anyone in the Bush administration ever imagined. The leading Shiite spiritual figure, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, hasn't even bothered to open a letter from our President; previous Shiite allies have started denouncing us; Baghdad's provincial council has suspended "cooperation" with the U.S. military and the U.S. embassy.

So here's a future scenario to imagine: Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish troops all roaming urban neighborhoods, all engaging in revenge killings against the others, all with their own American advisors. It is no longer beyond the bounds of possibility that Americans could find themselves on every side of a future civil war; or, no less likely, that all sides could be attacking American troops -- or both; and so, of course, could the Iranians whom the Bush administration, in another catch-22, threatens to attack and yet desperately needs.

In the meantime, the American air war against Iraqi cities quietly ratchets up and, amid the ruins, huge permanent American bases like the 19 square-mile Al-Asad airbase in Anwar Province -- with its 17,000 troops, Burger King, Pizza Hut, car dealership Yellow and Blue bus routes, and "PX jammed with customers" -- thrive. Only recently, the administration requested from Congress hundreds of millions more dollars to construct stronger perimeter defenses, better runways with permanent lighting, more permanent dining facilities and the like at the largest of these bases.

While the basics of everyday life in urban Iraq continue to peel away and the Iraqi oil industry looks to be on its last legs, the Pentagon delivers electricity, potable water, and fuel, not to speak of i-Pods, televisions, Internet access, and other goodies to our massive bases, some of which, visiting reporters tell us, now resemble small American towns and to which the administration hopes to withdraw most of its troops sooner or later. At a time when Daniel Speckhard, director of the U.S. Iraq Reconstruction Management Office, is putting the country on notice that it can "no longer count on U.S. reconstruction funds," you might forgive an Iraqi for wondering how the administration that "liberated" their country could have done so much so efficiently for its soldiers and yet be so incapable of doing much of anything for the rest of the country.

The Rubble of Victory

At the moment, our bases exist like little untouched Edens in the eye of the storm. Undoubtedly, administration officials still imagine us camping out in the ruins in 2009 or 2019 -- after all, for a while the Pentagon actually referred to these ziggurats of modern Iraq as "enduring camps" -- while large cities like Mosul stew in their uncollected garbage and polluted sewage water, ever more rundown, ever more shot up, ever less under anyone's control. ("The Americans are now just one more of the tribes of Mosul," Patrick Cockburn of the British Independent quotes "one Arab source" as saying.)

It's true that some neocons once imagined chaos as a kind of acceptable fallback position in the Middle East, if the best of all worlds didn't work out. But this was the fantasy of people who had essentially never made it out of the Washington world of think tanks, punditry, and politics, who were desperately ready to be dazzled by the tales of Ahmed Chalabi and other exiled Iraqi Scheherazades. Anyone today who thinks that we can simply retreat to those permanent bases and protect the oil, while Iraq sinks further into chaos, while the ruins spread, should really think again.

"Imperial overreach" is too fancy a term for what the Bush administration has actually done. While its officials have talked a great game when it came to achieving "victory" in Iraq and exporting democracy to the Middle East, its main exports have turned out to be mayhem and ruins. And those it can continue to export. With every new move, yet more rubble, yet more terror, and undoubtedly yet more terrorists in Iraq and, sooner or later, in the wider region will be created. This is where the most essential choices made by the President, Vice President, and their chosen officials in the days after September 11, 2001 have taken us.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has recently come out in paperback.

Copyright 2006 Tom Engelhardt

Throwing Stones at Venezuela

U.S. criticism of Hugo Chavez's politics only serves to highlight the weakness of our democracy at home.

It's certainly no surprise. Even over a year ago, journalists were remarking at the "left turn" that so many Latin American countries were making. Of late, however, we only hear about Hugo Chavez and Venezuela. The South American country has taken the place of Cuba as the new whipping boy of alternative political models. But the targeted arguments -- coming mainly from the United States -- that depict Chavez as a tyrannical despot do little more than make the United States look the defensive paranoid for so mischaracterizing Venezuela's politics.

From Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to Pat Robertson, absurd public comparisons of President Hugo Chavez to Hitler and calls for assassination, it's clear that U.S. public figures love to vilify Chavez. The defamations have now been firmly established in mainstream politics -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice continues to allege that Venezuela poses the greatest threat to Latin America. Why? Rice accuses Chavez of leading a "Latin brand of populism that has taken countries down the drain."

AlterNet spoke to Bernardo Alvarez, Venezuela's ambassador to the United States, during his recent trip through California to meet with civil society groups and Latino leaders. When asked why he thought Chavez and Venezuela were so vilified, Alvarez stated, "For the first time, people are taking seriously that the major problems in the world are poverty and social exclusion -- not terrorism. These allegations are simply to avoid discussing these true problems; they are an attempt to undermine and divert from true economic development."

Whether or not this is the true motivation behind this administration's reluctance to engage in dialogue is up for debate. One thing, however, is clear: The press has spent far more energy exploring largely unsubstantiated allegations of fraud and corruption targeting Chavez than exploring the reality of his agenda.

After getting the obligatory controversial questions out of the way -- is Chavez planning to run for president in 2013? Are the United States and Venezuela too ideologically different to have meaningful discussions? What do you say to the allegations that Venezuela is becoming a dictatorship akin to Castro's Cuba? -- a common thread emerged in Alvarez's oft-repeated answers. Strung together, it goes something like this:

Chavez is not an accident. His election expresses a new awakening of people and participation. Chavez and Venezuela are not an anomaly in an otherwise "normal" world. We're talking about the entire hemisphere, here. These are societies trying to find alternative ways of dealing with the same problems. It is better that they understand what is happening in Venezuela as part of a broader process.

Alvarez is obviously quite good at responding to questions that start with "How do you respond to the allegations that." He has learned to (sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly) work in details of Chavez's agenda amidst these usual suspect questions. Without asking, I learned that Chavez has extended health care to 10 million Venezuelans, defeated illiteracy in two years, given three million Venezuelans ID cards so that they can access social programs and vote, and worked to rebuild oil refineries and guarantee security of supply and accessible prices.

Members of the media, trying to substantiate the obsessive fixation on Chavez-as-tyrant, have let the wild accusations frame our dialogue about Venezuela. You won't read much about Chavez's focus on the eradication of poverty -- extended even to the United States through the heating oil program that is bringing over 40 million gallons of discounted and free oil to low-income Americans in eight states. Rather, you'll get an earful of the Texas congressman Joe Barton seeking an investigation into the program. You have to read academic publications like Political Affairs Magazine to get to the irony behind the facts:


The only change in Venezuelan oil supply to the U.S. in the past three years has been this year's program to provide 40 percent discounts on 49 million gallons of heating fuel for poor people in Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware, and soon Vermont and Connecticut. How bizarre that Texas Republican congressman Joe Barton has launched an investigation into this humanitarian offering, instead of investigating the U.S, multinational oil companies that posted over $100 billion in corporate profits last year due to soaring gasoline prices.

There are components of Chavez's agenda that merit skepticism, but the cheap oil program hardly qualifies. Critics have raised Venezuela's record of human rights violations. And while police violence against protesters has attracted rebukes from human rights organizations like Amnesty International, AI make clear that the weak record of human rights preceded Chavez: "President Chavez's administration introduced several important improvements in the 1999 Constitution to protect civil and political as well as economic, social and cultural rights." The problem is that many of these measures have yet to implemented.

Perhaps the meatiest and most interesting issue that Ambassador Alvarez touched upon was whether Chavez's agenda to eradicate poverty can be achieved through democratic means. When asked about the difference between Cuba's form of socialism and Venezuela's "new socialism," Alvarez noted,

Our revolution was made in peace, following a democratic path. But, we are looking for social justice. There is no real democracy if there is no social justice. We have to go beyond representative democracy to a participatory social system. If you don't fight poverty, you will have a very weak democracy.

So what if the kind of social justice that Chavez is seeking is at odds with the brand of democracy that currently exists in Venezuela? This is an interesting tension to explore especially in light of Alvarez's emphasis on Chavez's current intent to consolidate the infrastructure that will enable a "cultural transformation" before he leaves office: "From the very beginning," said Alvarez, "we understood that we were there not only to be another government, but that we were elected because we represented the desire and expectations of a whole transformation of society."

That's quite a charge. But, instead of reading about the ins and outs of Chavez's methodology, we consistently get sensationalized non-news. A recent article from The Economist, "Mission Impossible," reads, "Poverty is at last falling under Hugo Chavez, but not nearly as much as it should have "

No one seems to think that poverty is abating. "If only there were 50 Chavezes in the country,"sighs Minerva, a middle-aged woman from the outskirts of Caracas. "But he's all on his own. End poverty? That will take 50 years."

Better to quote Minerva than cite economic stats of a per capita growth rate of 17.9 percent in 2004 and 9 percent last year -- making it one of the fastest-growing countries in the region. Or independent polls that put Venezuelan approval of Chavez at 70 percent (an approval rating that President Bush only saw immediately following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.)

We are led to think that Chavez is bad because his plans to turn the formerly elitist Venezuelan political structure on its head and end poverty just aren't happening fast enough. Similarly, in a recent Foreign Policy article, Javier Corrales writes:


Civil society has not disappeared, as it did in Cuba after the 1959 revolution. There is no systematic, state-sponsored terror - there is certainly no efficiently repressive and meddlesome bureaucracy - In fact, in Venezuela, one can still find an active and vociferous opposition, elections, a feisty press and a vibrant and organized civil society. Venezuela, in other words, appears almost democratic - Undeniably, Chavez has brought innovative social programs to neighborhoods that the private sector and the Venezuelan state had all but abandoned - He also launched one of the most dramatic increases in state spending in the developing world.

Difficult to tell from this excerpt that the thrust of the article is to depict Chavez as a modern tyrant. Corrales gets one thing right -- trashing the United States is an effective way for many Latin American leaders to gain populist support. And the United States is playing right into this political tactic by posing so trashable a target. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has officially announced an "inoculation strategy" that involves trying to isolate Venezuela by organizing other countries against Chavez.

As Rice works the isolation strategy, using the mainstream media as a pulpit for her fulminations, Chavez continues to build alliances with other Latin American governments and political leaders around the world. While both Chavez and Rice have employed fairly vacuous public talking points and rhetoric, the differing strategies make all the difference. As the Bush administration works to slander Chavez and allege that his government consorts with terrorists, Chavez is sending poor Americans oil. It just sets up a scenario in which Ambassador Alvarez can say things like this:

Some people ask why we are helping the U.S. poor. Why not? Are they a different kind of poor people? Those are the kinds of things that people should do. We do it with energy because that's what we have. Other countries should do it with what they have. It's part of our philosophy. We're talking about an alternative model here, and we have to demonstrate what that is.

Ambassador Alvarez continues to meet with civil society groups and the media, confidently asserting that the Venezuelan government is committed to developing real instruments for participatory democracy -- starting at the grassroots.

There's always a place for criticism and cynicism, especially when it comes to politicians who claim to be developing a new political ideology, but the Bush administration's tactic of slandering a democratic and reform-minded government that has an approval rating this president can only envy is a guaranteed losing battle. The more members of the Bush administration chastise Chavez's democracy, the more embarrassing the hypocrisy becomes.

Rice told students at Johns Hopkins that she hoped Chavez will "recognize the importance of democratic values for real, not just claiming that because you're elected you are exercising democratic values. When people are elected, they have a responsibility to follow democratic values, and we have to call it for what we see."

If only our administration could heed its own advice.

Google Goes K Street

The web giant has gone to great lengths to keep the internet open to all, but by teaming up with Republican lobbyists, it's politics as usual.

Google is setting up a political operation in Washington and collecting big-name lobbyists with Republican connections faster than you can search the Web for Jack Abramoff.

At first, I thought it was another of those famed Google April Fools' Day jokes, just a week early. They may have pioneered a new business model, but they're apparently relying on politics-as-usual. The question is, why do they have to?

Google argues that it has to play the game to maintain the ability of all Internet users to get quality, high-speed access to the Web. If the Internet service providers -- Comcast, TimeWarner and others -- are able to charge for transmitting information over the pipes, the Internet could become segregated into haves and have-nots. This is why Network neutrality -- or Net neutrality -- is important, and it is a good thing that Google is opposing the ISPs on this.

Google wants "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible." But what doesn't make sense is the choice to abandon unconventional ways. Google appears to have embraced the rules of the so-called K Street Project. For a decade or more, Republicans in Congress have used the K Street Project to strong-arm businesses to hire only Republican lobbyists and to make donations only to GOP candidates.

Google has hired Washington powerhouse lobbying firm Podesta Mattoon. Though known as a bipartisan firm, Podesta Mattoon will probably hand this account to Lauren Maddox, a former staffer for Newt Gingrich. And Google has retained public relations flak Stuart Roy, recently of indicted Texas Republican Rep. Tom DeLay's staff, to direct its political PR and strategy. They are also setting up a D.C. office and have hired old Republican hand Harry W. Clark, who claims the company will soon hire a political director with ties to Republicans.

And it won't end with hires: "The folks I've talked to," Clark told The New York Times, "everybody recognizes that the employee contributions were weighted heavily toward Democrats, and they're waiting to see a course correction." (Since 2001, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, Google employees have donated $361,294 to federal candidates, parties and political action committees, with all but roughly $10,000 going to Democrats or their allies.)

But is a course correction the right move? Is there a better way to conduct politics, perhaps found within Google's own business model?

What would a true Google approach to politics look like? It probably wouldn't wear a suit, charge $500 an hour or perpetuate an exclusive campaign finance system in which a few well-connected corporations, interest groups and wealthy donors win out while the rest of us get left behind. Google has retained public relations flak Stuart Roy, recently of indicted Texas Republican Rep. Tom DeLay's staff, to direct its political PR and strategy.

Take the Net neutrality debate. Instead of obeying consultants in Washington who will urge Google executives to give more to Republicans (or to Democrats if they take back Congress), what if Google worked to hand the Net neutrality issue over to the people? Instead of setting up an office in Washington, what about setting up a virtual campaign center on the Web?

Let's make this debate about what is right about democracy in America by engaging citizens and asking them to join the fray. Americans don't need a clash of the corporate titans, with both sides claiming to be pro-consumer. We don't want to be spoken for. If Net neutrality is won with an insider strategy without engaging real people, it will be fought all over again next year.

It's time for some new, citizen-focused paradigms in politics, in how campaigns are run -- like the Clean Elections bill moving through the California state legislature -- and in how people relate to elected officials on important issues. It is already happening all around us with open-source approaches to politics like CivicSpace and Colorado-based ProgressNow, the political blogosphere with sites like DailyKos, and online fundraising. Why would Google place its bets on K Street rather than nurturing, pioneering and accelerating this innovation and change?

"Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one," company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin said when they announced the innovative IPO auction almost two years ago.

So, Google, what shall it be? A complete political upgrade? Or politics as usual?

Democracy in the Muslim World and the White House

Since 9/11, the United States has pursued what the White House calls a "forward strategy of freedom" predicated on the belief that a dearth of democracy in Muslim countries has led to the spread of a deadly strain of Islamic extremism.

However, as the first returns come in on this democratization effort in the Muslim world, there is growing anxiety in the U.S. about the resulting character of these nascent, freely elected governments.

Fear is growing that radicals may hijack democracy.

Recent Islamist electoral successes in Iran, Egypt and the Palestinian territories have given rise to questions about the ability of liberal forces to prevail against fundamentalism.

For the United States, the fear is real, though perhaps tinged with a bit of Islamophobia: How terrible an irony it would be if this grand effort to spread liberty abroad resulted in anti-U.S. Islamic states imposing Sharia, or Islamic law, on their people.

There are some who say that "stability" not liberty is what the U.S. should be promoting throughout the Islamic world.

Their view is that championing electoral democracy does not immediately serve U.S. interests abroad, particularly in the war on terrorism.

They say the war against terrorism must be waged with an iron hand, not kid gloves woven from the fabric of constitutional liberties.

These views on democracy and stability in the Muslim world are not only wrong but carry grave consequences.

In a way, Washington's strategy may be viewed as expiation for past sins, when the U.S. was a stumbling block to democracy in the Middle East.

Iran was a democracy in 1953 when the CIA engineered the coup that transformed it into an absolute monarchy.

The U.S. also has supported other tyrants in the region, including, of course, Saddam Hussein.

All of this in the name of stability and security in the decades-long confrontation with the communist bloc.

Is Washington really caught between the Scylla of supporting dictators and the Charybdis of promoting democracies that could bring Islamist radicals to power?

The best answers to the question of whether America should reassess its strategy lie in Indonesia and Turkey, refreshing examples of Muslim democratic self-assertion.

Seven years ago, Indonesia plunged headlong into democracy after more than 30 years of autocratic dictatorship.

As the largest Muslim nation in the world, it stands out as perhaps the most significant political phenomenon in the recent history of democracy. Indonesians have gone to the polls twice since, and they overwhelmingly rejected the Islamist radicals.

The press in Indonesia is free, and the elections are fair. Fundamental liberties are enshrined in the constitution and fully recognized and respected by the powers that be.

As fledgling democracies, Indonesia and Turkey still have a long way to go.

In Indonesia, it is in fulfilling the socioeconomic objectives of democracy that can only happen over time.

In Turkey, the containment of an unrestricted military establishment has aided in that country's European Union ascension.

Nevertheless, they now stand as beacons, both for Muslim nations and for those who seek to help them.

To be successful in its efforts to spread freedom, the U.S. must remember that constitutional democracy cannot take root in a society, whether secular or Islamic, without the firm commitment of the politically empowered to protect the fundamental rights to liberty, equality and freedom of all.

The true cultivation of democracy requires more than simply the introduction of elections.

It also requires the establishment of democratic processes and a leveling of the political playing field.

It needs the guarantee of a separation of powers and the liberation of the judicial system from the stranglehold of autocrats and tyrants.

Most of all, it requires the protection of fundamental liberties and a free press.

It is in these prerequisites of democracy that the U.S. and the Muslim world need to invest, with far more significant effort, for the causes of liberty to truly prevail.

ANWAR IBRAHIM is a former finance minister and deputy prime minister of Malaysia. He is a visiting professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in Washington. For six years he was a political prisoner in Malaysia and was released from jail in September, 2004.

Internationally, his courageous and firm refusal to surrender his principles and ideals in the face of the unprecedented attacks on his political and personal life while in prison enhanced his standing in the West, while his message of tolerance and reform resonate within the Islamic world.

When War Crimes Are Impossible

Is President Bush guilty of war crimes?

To even ask the question is to go far beyond the boundaries of mainstream U.S. media.

A few weeks ago, when a class of seniors at Parsippany High School in New Jersey prepared for a mock trial to assess whether Bush has committed war crimes, a media tempest ensued.

Typical was the response from MSNBC host Tucker Carlson, who found the very idea of such accusations against Bush to be unfathomable. The classroom exercise "implies people are accusing him of a crime against humanity," Carlson said. "It's ludicrous."

In Tennessee, the Chattanooga Times Free Press thundered in an editorial: "That some American 'educators' would have students 'try' our American president for 'war crimes' during time of war tells us that our problems are not only with terrorists abroad."

The standard way for media to refer to Bush and war crimes in the same breath is along the lines of this lead-in to a news report on CNN's "American Morning" in late March: "The Supreme Court's about to consider a landmark case and one that could have far-reaching implications. At issue is President Bush's powers to create war crimes tribunals for Guantanamo prisoners."

In medialand, when the subject is war crimes, the president of the United States points the finger at others. Any suggestion that Bush should face such a charge is assumed to be oxymoronic.

But a few journalists, outside the corporate media structures, are seriously probing Bush's culpability for war crimes. One of them is Robert Parry.

During the 1980s, Parry covered U.S. foreign policy for Associated Press and Newsweek; in the process he broke many stories related to the Iran-Contra scandal. Now he's the editor of the 10-year-old website Consortiumnews.com, an outlet he founded that has little use for the narrow journalistic path along Pennsylvania Avenue.

"In a world where might did not make right," Parry wrote in a recent piece, "George W. Bush, Tony Blair and their key enablers would be in shackles before a war crimes tribunal at the Hague, rather than sitting in the White House, 10 Downing Street or some other comfortable environs in Washington and London."

Over the top? I don't think so. In fact, Parry's evidence and analysis seem much more cogent -- and relevant to our true situation -- than the prodigious output of countless liberal-minded pundits who won't go beyond complaining about Bush's deceptions, miscalculations and tactical errors in connection with the Iraq war.

Is Congress ready to consider the possibility that the commander in chief has committed war crimes during the past few years? Of course not. But the role of journalists shouldn't be to snuggle within the mental confines of Capitol Hill. We need the news media to fearlessly address matters of truth, not cravenly adhere to limits of expediency.

When top officials in Lyndon Johnson's administration said that North Vietnam had launched two unprovoked attacks on U.S. vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin, the press corps took their word for it. When top officials in George W. Bush's administration said that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the press corps took their word for it.

We haven't yet seen any noticeable part of the Washington press corps raise the matter of war crimes by the president. Very few dare to come near the terrain that Parry explored in his March 28 article "Time to Talk War Crimes."

That article cites key statements by the U.S. representative to the Nuremberg Tribunal immediately after the Second World War. "Our position," declared Robert Jackson, a U.S. Supreme Court justice, "is that whatever grievances a nation may have, however objectionable it finds the status quo, aggressive warfare is an illegal means for settling those grievances or for altering those conditions."

During a March 26 appearance on the NBC program "Meet the Press," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice tried to justify the invasion of Iraq this way: "We faced the outcome of an ideology of hatred throughout the Middle East that had to be dealt with. Saddam Hussein was a part of that old Middle East. The new Iraq will be a part of the new Middle East, and we will all be safer."

But, in a new essay on April 3, Parry points out that "this doctrine -- that the Bush administration has the right to invade other nations for reasons as vague as social engineering -- represents a repudiation of the Nuremberg Principles and the United Nations Charter's ban on aggressive war, both formulated largely by American leaders six decades ago."

Parry flags the core of the administration's maneuver: "Gradually, Rice and other senior Bush aides shifted their rationale from Hussein's WMD to a strategic justification, that is, politically transforming the Middle East." He concludes that "implicit in the U.S. news media's non-coverage of Rice's new rationale for war is that there is nothing objectionable or alarming about the Bush administration turning its back on principles of civilized behavior promulgated by U.S. statesmen at the Nuremberg Tribunal six decades ago."

Although the evidence is ample that President Bush led the way to aggressive warfare against Iraq, the mainstream U.S. news media keep proceeding on the assumption that -- when the subject is war crimes -- he's well cast as an accuser but should never be viewed as an appropriate defendant.

Norman Solomon is the author of the new book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death."

What if the South had won the Civil War?

Kevin Wilmott's sly mockumentary imagines an America that is very different from today's -- or is it?

One hundred forty-one years ago today, General Robert E. Lee issued "General Orders No. 9," instructing all Confederate troops to "return to their homes." On the previous day, April 9, 1865, he had surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, ending the Civil War.

But what if the roles had been reversed? What if it had been Lee accepting Grant's surrender? Certainly, we'd be living in a very different America today -- or would we?

Those are the questions addressed by "CSA: The Confederate States of America," currently showing in theaters around the country. The film presents an alternative history in which the nation that emerges from the Civil War becomes, by the 21st century, an exclusively Christian imperialist power, run by and for prosperous white men and regarded by most of the world as a bizarre aberration. In other words, "CSA" is a work of fiction that's uncomfortably real.

The premise of "CSA" is that the Confederacy, with help from European powers, wins the American Civil War, annexes the Union states and enforces slavery as the law of the land. The film's writer-director, Kevin Willmott, an assistant professor of theater and film at the University of Kansas, tells the story of the postwar Confederacy through a faux "British Broadcasting System" documentary, complete with vintage still photos and film footage, talking-head historians and banjo music.

Broadcast on a present-day "Confederate Television Channel 6," the program is accompanied by racist commercials that you just might see if you lived in a full-blown consumer society in which, as one politician puts it, "a new generation of young Americans is excited about owning Negroes."

"CSA's" appalling words and images are delivered in what's probably the only packaging most movie audiences would tolerate: layer upon layer of outrageous humor. The few times I've viewed the film, most people in audience did manage to laugh out loud, even as they squirmed.

Gloom and passion

Like "CSA" itself, Willmott somehow combines a gloomy view of history and a passion for justice with affability and infectious humor. Last week, in Salina, Kan., I spoke with him about "CSA" and the mirror it seems to be holding up to the USA.

Willmott says he wants to help put to rest what he calls the Big Lie: that the Civil War was simply a war over regional differences, between an old agricultural economy and a new industrializing one. Not so, he says -- the war was fought "because Confederates wanted the right to own African people."

By plunging into that long-standing historical dispute, Willmott knows he's asking for trouble. "People say, 'Well, you know, not very many Southerners even owned slaves. Why would a whole nation fight a war for the benefit of just the wealthy few who did?' But that just makes the Civil War the same as all wars, doesn't it? Most people don't know why we're in Iraq, and it's doing them no good, but there we are."

America and the world have endured some nasty jolts since Willmott first wrote the screenplay for "CSA": Republican efforts to suppress the black vote in 2000 and 2004; a foreign policy that in the eyes of many has become a racist crusade, complete with torture; rising anti-gay and anti-immigrant fervor; the devastation left by Hurricane Katrina. That more recent history, says Willmott, has helped bolster one of the film's main themes: that the old Confederacy is far from dead.

Hard-line immigration policies, he says, are an example of modern slavery: "The economic need for immigrants is clear-cut. Corporations need cheap, cheap, cheap workers in big numbers. On the other hand, the country's saying, "We'll arrest you simply for working for us for nothing, arrest you for being poor."

In "CSA," there are no demands to build a wall along the border with Mexico -- it's a CSA colony. Instead, a wall is built along the entire Canadian border, to keep slaves from escaping to the other side of the "Cotton Curtain." But, says Willmott, in a real United States so heavily dependent on immigrant labor, just as in his fictional modern-day slave state, we live with an "invented reality": "Like magic, your hotel room gets cleaned up every day. You know that whoever did that for you, someone you never saw, may be technically illegal. And we come down hard on those people."

For Willmott, the Katrina disaster revealed to Americans the legacy of slavery, in the starkest terms. Like the plight of immigrants, he says, the lives of people in places like New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward are invisible most of the time. "Our society tends to change only when we hit the wall and explode. When that happens, we wake up for a while and say, 'Well, I guess that won't work anymore.'"

Parallel realities

Willmott's documentary may be a work of imagination, but it's concocted from all-too-real ingredients. In the movie, post-Civil War relations between white people of the North and South are eventually healed through recognition of their joint "superiority" over their black slaves. In real history, the North's tacit approval of Southern segregation laws in the late 19th and early 20th centuries served the same purpose. Historian C. Vann Woodward described that era in his brilliant 1959 book, "The Strange Career of Jim Crow": "Just as the Negro gained his emancipation and new rights through a falling out between white men, he now stood to lose his rights through the reconciliation of white men."

In the movie, the triumphant Confederate Army conquers most of Latin America (a campaign the real South had planned to carry out in the event of victory), and the resulting dominion over peoples of various colors brings the (white) people of the CSA even closer together. In real history, bloody victories in the Caribbean and the Philippines did the job; in Woodward's words, "As America shouldered the White Man's Burden, she took up at the same time many Southern attitudes on the subject of race."

Of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, "CSA's" true-grey Confederate historian (played by Rupert Pate) says, "By the grace of God, we obtained a weapon that put the entire foreign world of coloreds in their place." Nor was much fictionalizing needed in describing the war on native Americans and their culture; events are depicted almost exactly as they occurred.

In the CSA of the 1980s, a national Family Values Initiative recommends that owners read to their servants the notorious New Testament directive, "Slaves, obey your masters with fear and trembling," a passage that is still cited with approval in some religious circles in the real USA.

Other scenes bring to mind the current Iraq quagmire. For example, the CSA's early-20th century military campaign in Latin America goes far less well than expected; as a Canadian historian played by Evamarii Johnson puts it, the CSA "underestimated the will of the South American people to remain free." In a "clip" from a Hollywood movie about the war, a young Marine lieutenant mourns the loss of his comrades and questions the wisdom of trying to conquer "a whole world of red, brown, black and yellow people." He tells a battled-hardened sergeant, "They'll always outnumber us!" The sergeant growls back, "This world was made for the God-fearin' It's ours, it was always ours -- we just ain't claimed it all yet!"

The two talking-head historians ensure that "CSA" is, so to speak, fair and balanced. While Pate describes as "terrorism pure and simple" a rash of bombings in the 1960s by a Canada-based slave-liberation group, the "John Brown Underground," Johnson points out that "terrorism to one is patriotism to another."

The commercial breaks that punctuate the documentary have at least one foot planted solidly in reality. An "Ask your veterinarian" ad for a prescription drug called "Contrari" features smiling, placid slaves for whom the "little blue pill" gives "all day control." Shirtless black men are apprehended in a promo for a slave-recapture reality show called "Runaway" that looks and sounds exactly like Fox's COPS. An electronic monitoring device called the "Shackle" sounds the alarm "when your property strays from your designated area."

Shock and awe

Willmott obtained $10,000 in seed money from the Public Broadcasting System to start making "CSA," with the prospect of more funding once he had a draft version of the film. But, he says, when PBS representatives saw the draft, they said, "You've gotta be kidding!" After "CSA" awed an audience at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, PBS notified Willmott that, because of the funding the network had provided, it had first rights to the film. So, he says, "We showed them the finished version. They said, 'You've gotta be kidding!'" PBS dropped any claim to "CSA."

The History Channel showed some interest, but Willmott says it too, "chickened out." "They preferred that slavery stay in the deep past." But "CSA" found a distributor (IFC Films), got a high-profile endorsement ("Presented by Spike Lee") and finally went up on the big screen.

Despite, or maybe because of, the film's unpalatable message, reviews of "CSA" have been overwhelmingly positive. One harshly critical exception appeared last month, predictably, on the website of the hard-right American Spectator. Shawn Macomber expressed shock that any director would, as Willmott has done, portray an America that oversees an empire of "puppet democracies," launches an unprovoked, preemptive attack on another nation (Japan, in the film), tolerates Hitler's racial theories and outlaws all non-Christian religions. Macomber seems to regard such policies as inconceivable in the good old USA.

Willmott says negative reactions to "CSA" generally fall into two categories. "Conservatives tend to say, 'This is not our America.'" (That was also President Bush's reaction to the very real torture photos from Abu Ghraib prison.) On the other hand, "The typical liberal response is, 'It makes me feel bad, and I don't like that."

Black pain

The idea that the nation owes reparations to black Americans for having enslaved their forebears has surfaced from time to time but has never made much political headway. Willmott neatly flips the question in the film, having present-day CSA politician John Ambrose Fauntroy V (played by Larry Peterson) demand monetary reparations from Canada in return for "lost labor" -- slaves who'd escaped across the CSA's northern border 100 years previously. Reparations like that would be fully respectable in the current world economic order. "Governments ask for reparations all the time," says Willmott. "But if you can't understand black pain, you can't understand reparations for slavery."

In "CSA," there is a brief moment in the 1960s when abolition of slavery seems within reach, but it's never achieved. In real life, the '60s also brought hope of racial equality, but the succeeding four decades have seen the Republican Party pit working-class white voters against minorities, partly reversing earlier gains. In his 2001 book "Democracy Heading South: National Politics in the Shadow of Dixie," Augustus B. Cochran provided this deadpan explanation of the GOP's success in courting the majority race: "The advent of black participation in the Democratic Party has also been a significant factor in the appeal of the Republican Party for many white voters."

The United States electoral college map of 2004 matches up almost perfectly with the map of mid-19th-century slavery. All former slaveholding states have become Republican "red states" and 17 of the 20 free states (as of 1860) are now "blue." (The map's colors have reversed almost perfectly since 1900, when Democratic-led, pro-segregation state governments were on the rise.)

Meanwhile, from the 19th to the 21st century, the nation's political center of gravity has shifted steadily southward. Cochran cited three "legs" of Old South-style government that have become strong national trends in recent decades. One leg is the increasing irrelevance of political parties, however hot the apparent conflict between them. A second is the narrow electoral base; if people who don't vote (by law in the Old South, by choice today) were counted at the polls, they would be the majority party. And, writes Cochran, "The third leg of the Solid South was a racist political system designed to maintain white supremacy," while today, "Conservatives, by raising the specter of race, divide the potential majority of citizens along racial lines, making a class coalition, and indeed majority rule, untenable."

What's the matter with the USA?

That divide-and-conquer strategy, of course, has led many millions of nonrich white people to vote in seemingly illogical patterns, against their own economic interests -- a paradox tackled in the 2004 bestseller by Willmott's fellow Kansan Thomas Frank: "What's the Matter with Kansas?"

To Willmott, that paradox "is really the point of the film. People always want to look for logical reasons, but majority support for all kinds of things is not founded on logic. The era of Jim Crow segregation was terrible for poor white folks, but they supported it because they could feel they were better than the black folks down the road."

In putting up with a dysfunctional system, the citizens of Willmott's "CSA" are not very different from the real majority in today's America. As Rupert Pate's character explains, slavery was "not an economic necessity"; instead, "our fond attachment to slavery is what defines us as a people, as a nation."

Conventional wisdom says it's the preoccupation with "moral values" that has led many millions of Americans to vote in recent elections against their own economic interests and for the interests of a wealthy few. If that's the case, I asked Willmott, why have most black Americans not bought the scam, voting instead in the interests of the country's working-class majority? After all, polls show that blacks are as deeply concerned about non-economic issues as other Americans, maybe more so.

"Our experience has taught us not to be fooled by what everyone says is good for you," he said. "When you're not included, you have the advantage of being able to stand back and look at things more objectively, from the outside."

The rebels of the South, like the right-wing politicians of today, claimed to be fulfilling the wishes of the Founding Fathers. The "Great Seal of the Confederacy" had at its center none other than George Washington. In Kevin Willmott's film, Washington is hailed as the "Father of the Confederacy," a status the slaveholding Virginian would surely hold in any present-day CSA.

Willmott puts it this way: "America started out as the CSA. Lincoln tried to make it the USA. But we didn't really get the USA for another century, until the Civil Rights movement." Now and for the past quarter-century, he says, America has been trying to decide: "Do we want the CSA or the USA? Americans are divided. A lot of people still don't really want to embrace freedom."

Stan Cox is a plant breeder and writer in Salina, Kan.

Uncertainty...

Riverbend, my favorite Iraqi blogger files a report on watching Iraqi TV in Baghdad:

I sat late last night switching between Iraqi channels (the half dozen or so I sometimes try to watch). It's a late-night tradition for me when there?s electricity- to see what the Iraqi channels are showing. Generally speaking, there still isn't a truly "neutral" Iraqi channel. The most popular ones are backed and funded by the different political parties currently vying for power. This became particularly apparent during the period directly before the elections.

I was trying to decide between a report on bird flu on one channel, a montage of bits and pieces from various latmiyas on another channel and an Egyptian soap opera on a third channel. I paused on the Sharqiya channel which many Iraqis consider to be a reasonably toned channel (and which during the elections showed its support for Allawi in particular). I was reading the little scrolling news headlines on the bottom of the page. The usual- mortar fire on an area in Baghdad, an American soldier killed here, another one wounded there? 12 Iraqi corpses found in an area in Baghdad, etc. Suddenly, one of them caught my attention and I sat up straight on the sofa, wondering if I had read it correctly.

"The Ministry of Defense requests that civilians do not comply with the orders of the army or police on nightly patrols unless they are accompanied by coalition forces working in that area."

That's how messed up the country is at this point.

Read the Rest of Baghdad Burning:
riverbendblog.blogspot.com

Keeping the Light on Katrina: Who Is Killing New Orleans?

Abandon New Orleans?? Posted 12/9/2005

A few blocks from the badly flooded and still-closed campus of Dillard University, a wind-bent street sign announces the intersection of Humanity and New Orleans. In the night time distance, the downtown skyscrapers on Poydras and Canal Streets are already ablaze with light, but a vast northern and eastern swath of the city, including the Gentilly neighborhood around Dillard, remains shrouded in darkness.

The lights have been out for six months now, and no one seems to know when, if ever, they will be turned back on. In greater New Orleans about 125,000 homes remain damaged and unoccupied, a vast ghost city that rots in darkness while les bon temps return to a guilty strip of unflooded and mostly affluent neighborhoods near the river. Such a large portion of the black population is gone that some radio stations are now switching their formats from funk and rap to soft rock.

read on...