The Ruthless Truth blog

Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch
Tue, 01 Jun 2010 10:35 EDT

Graduates of the class of 2010, I’m honored to have been asked to address you today, but I would not want to be you.
I graduated in 1966 on a gloriously sunny day; then again, it was a sunnier moment in this country. We were, after all, still surfing the crest of post-World War II American wealth and productivity. The first oil crisis of 1973 wasn’t even on the horizon. I never gave a thought to the gas I put in the tank of the used Volkswagen "bug" I bought with a friend my last year in college. In those days, the oil for that gas had probably been pumped out of an American well on land (and not dumped in the Gulf of Mexico). Gas, in any case, was dirt cheap. No one thought about it — or Saudi Arabia (unless they were working for an oil company or the State Department).
Think of it this way: in 1966, the United States was, in your terms, China, while China was just a giant, poor country, a land of — as the American media liked to write back then — "blue ants." Seventeen years earlier, it had, in the words of its leader Mao Ze-dong, "stood up" and declared itself a revolutionary people’s republic; but just a couple of years before I graduated, that country went nuts in something called the Cultural Revolution.
Back in 1966, the world was in debt to us. We were the high-tech brand you wanted to own — unless, of course, you were a guerrilla in the jungles of Southeast Asia who held some quaint notion about having a nation of your own.
Here’s what I didn’t doubt then: that I would get a job. I didn’t spend much time thinking about my working future, because American affluence and the global dominance that went with it left me unshakably confident that, when I was ready, I would land somewhere effortlessly. The road trips of that era, the fabled counterculture, so much of daily life would be predicated on, and tied to, the country’s economic power, cheap oil, staggering productivity, and an ability to act imperially on a global stage without seeming (to us Americans at least) like an imperial entity.
I was living in denial then about the nature of our government, our military, and our country, but it was an understandable state. After all, we — the "sixties generation" — grew up so much closer to a tale of American democracy and responsive government. We had faith, however unexamined, that an American government should and would hear us, that if we raised our voices loudly enough, our leaders would listen. We had, in other words, a powerful, deeply ingrained sense of agency, now absent in this country.
That, I suspect, is why we took to the streets in protest — not just because we despaired of American war policy, which we did, but because under that despair we still held on tightly to a hope, which the next decades would strip from our world and your generation. And we had hopeful models as well. Remember, the great Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was still a force to be reckoned with — and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, the riots of 1968, the burning ghettoes, the shock of American troops occupying American inner cities, as yet had no reality for us.
Even in protest, there was a sense of… well, the only word I can think of is "abundance." At the time, everything seemed abundant.
President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program was expansively underway in the midst of war — and even guns and butter seemed (for a while) a plausible enough combination for a country like ours. The Peace Corps, that creation of the Kennedy presidency — which my future wife joined in 1964 — was still new and it, too, encapsulated that sense of American abundance and the hubris that went with it. It was based, after all, on the idea that you could take a bunch of American kids like you, just out of college, with no particular skills, and ship them off with minimal training to needy nations around the world to improve life, all as part of a great Cold War publicity face-off with the Soviet Union.
And those kids, who turned out in droves to experience something bigger and better than themselves, did often enough find ingenious ways to offer limited amounts of help. The Peace Corps was but one small measure of a pervasive sense — about to be shattered — of our country’s status as the globe’s preeminent can-do nation. There was nothing we couldn’t do. (Hadn’t we, after all, singlehandedly rebuilt devastated Europe and Japan after World War II?)
Then, of course, there was "the war." Vietnam, that is. It was the oozing oil spill of that moment, regularly referred to as "an American tragedy" (never a Vietnamese one). The tragic aspect of it, above all, seemed to be that victory would not come; that, as Henry Kissinger would later put it, speaking of communist North Vietnam, "I can’t believe a fourth-rate power doesn’t have a breaking point."
The very idea of defeat — hardly mentionable in those years but ever-present — was corrosive to what, in a book of mine, I once called America’s "victory culture." Because the Vietnamese refused to give way in that "meat grinder" of a war in which millions of Vietnamese (and tens of thousands of American soldiers) would die, doubt, like that oil seeping into the Louisiana marshes today, oozed into the crevices of American life, and began to eat away at confidence.
Even the nightmare of war, however, had a positive side — and you can thank the draft for that. The U.S. then had a civilian, rather than a professional (verging on mercenary) army. It was, in a sense, still faintly in the tradition of the "people’s armies" that began with the French Revolution’s levée en masse. For young men nationwide and those who knew them, the draft — the possibility that you, or your son, husband, lover, friend, might actually end up fighting America’s misbegotten war in Southeast Asia — ensured, strangely enough, a deeper connection both to war and country, something now absent in most of your lives.
With rare exceptions, you, the class of 2010, live unconnected to the wars America has been fighting these last nine-plus years. As a result, you also live in avoidance not of a draft, but of the damage our country is doing to itself and others in distant lands. That kind of denial is a luxury in a country now far less well known for its affluence and still squandering what wealth it has on wars and armaments. Today, it’s guns, not butter, and that fateful choice, regularly renewed, seems totally divorced from your lives (though you will, in the end, pay a price for it).
When it came to this country and its wars, my education took place not in the classroom, but extracurricularly, as part of an antiwar movement. It involved a kind of stripping down of so much I thought I knew, so much I had been taught or simply absorbed. Much that I had to unlearn about this country is now your birthright, for better or worse.
Can’t-Do America
Who can deny that our American world is in trouble? Or that our troubles, like our wars, have a momentum of their own against which we generally no longer raise our voices in protest; that we have, in a sense, been disarmed as citizens?
You, the graduating class of 2010, are caught in a system; then again, so are our leaders. In recent years, we’ve had two presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who could not be mistaken for one another. In most obvious ways — style, thinking, personality, politics, sensibility, impulses — they couldn’t be more different, as have been the ways they have approached problems. One was a true believer in the glories of American military and executive power, the other is a manager of a declining power and what passes for a political "pragmatist" in our world. Yet, more times than is faintly comfortable, the two of them have ended up in approximately the same policy places — whether on the abridgement of liberties, the expansion of the secret activities of military special operations forces across the Greater Middle East, the CIA drone war in the Pakistani borderlands and elsewhere, the treatment of prisoners, our expanding wars, Pentagon budgets, offshore oil drilling and nuclear power, or other topics which matter in our lives.
This should be more startling than it evidently is for most Americans. If the policies of these two disparate figures often have a tweedledum-and-tweedledee-ish look to them, then what we face is not specific party politics or individual style, but a system with its own steamroller force, and its own set of narrow, repetitive "solutions" to our problems. We also face an increasingly militarized, privatized government, its wheels greased by the funds of giant corporations, that now regularly seems to go about the business of creating new Katrinas.
Compared to the long-gone world I graduated into, yours seems to me little short of dystopian, even if, on the surface, it still has something of the look of American abundance. If nothing changes in this equation, your experience, as far as I can tell, will be of ever less available, ever less decent jobs and of ever less wealth ever less well distributed, as well as of a federal government ("the bureaucracy") that has everything to do with giant corporations, their lobbyists and publicists, and the military-industrial complex — and nothing to do with you.
You have grown increasingly used to an American world in which a war-fighting state armed with increasingly oppressive powers offers you a national security version of "safety," directed by Fear Inc. and based on waning liberties. You seem to me deeply affected by, but detached from, all of this.
In many ways, given our situation, your response seems reasonable enough. The problem is: if you simply duck and go about your lives as best you can, what can this country hope for?
Unfortunately, your disconnect is, I suspect, made more severe because your lives are encased in what I would call a grid of exterminationism. It was in my youth, of course, that the world became exterminable, thanks to nuclear weapons. Today — with other threats, especially global warming and resource scarcity, joining those doomsday weapons in what feels like a fatal brew — how could you not feel despair, whether fully recognized or not? How could you not have the urge to avoid looking toward the horizon, toward a future too grim to think about? If you can’t imagine a future, however, you probably can’t form a movement to change anything.
In short, you, graduates of 2010, through no fault of your own are, it seems, living in our 51st state, a state of American denial, in a nation that is being hollowed out (as the paltry governmental response to the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico indicates). As we now know, America’s aging infrastructure — its bridges, dikes, levees, dams, drinking water transport systems, roads, and the like — is quite literally hollowing out, as well as springing "leaks," and not a mile under the water either. Little is being done about this.
The hollowing out, however, goes deeper — right down to the feeling that, with disaster in the air, little can be done and nothing reversed. The can-do nation of my youth has given way to a can’t-do nation with a busted government.
I think I can guarantee you one thing, for instance, about the historic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. When the commissions have commished, and Congress has investigated, and the president has re-staffed the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service, and the pundits have pontificated, and everything else that could possibly happen has happened, we will, once again, have learned next to nothing — other than, perhaps, how to drill for offshore oil at the depth of one mile marginally more safely. We will not be any closer to an alternative energy future. We will not have one mile more of high-speed rail.
Nothing that matters will have happened. And months from now, BP will again be announcing profits in the billions and pouring more money into the pockets of politicians heading for Washington, while the people of Louisiana, among others, will be left to their misery as the 24/7 media moves on to the next set of disasters, real or ephemeral.
When the first deep-water oil spill happened in Santa Barbara, California, in 1969, Americans were shocked and there were actual protests. In the streets. Shock, that is, was followed by the urge to act. As parts of the Gulf of Mexico are being turned into a dead sea, shock there may be and even complaint, but next to no protest. Here’s a recent headline that catches something of the mood of the moment: "A nation mesmerized: Can BP plug the Gulf gusher?" Mesmerized is a good word for it. The whole world is watching — and nothing more. The media tells us that there is anger, and there’s certainly plenty to be angry about. But look around. Do you see anger? Does outrage march past you any day of the week?
Is this the American world you really want?
Leaving the 51st State
Call it fate, but on this graduation day, the skies are grey, a light rain is falling, and a surprisingly heavy fog has cut this tent off from the campus on which you’ve spent four years. Think of it as a message from the gods and let me, like any reader of oracles, do my best to interpret it for you.
Usually, graduation speakers are intent on encouraging graduates to sally forth into the world, get a job, and have a life. I have a different message in mind. After all those courses, seminars, papers, tests, it’s time for you to sally forth and get an education — on your own and under terrible circumstances. You’ll have to find your own teachers, assign your own papers, and carry on your own seminars in the noisy precinct of your mind or among your friends and acquaintances. The subject? What is to be done with America.
I was born in a country that thought it could rebuild anything. You’re living in one lacking recuperative powers. Our resources are now being mobilized to fight two obscure and remarkably pointless, if destructive, trillion-dollar wars in distant Afghanistan and Iraq that most Americans pretend aren’t even going on. In the meantime, you have never been called upon to mobilize for anything. You have never been asked to sacrifice anything for the greater good. Even as nothing is being asked of you, your future is nonetheless being sacrificed. If you leave this campus and do nothing, your life will be far worse for it.
When I began, I said I wouldn’t want to be you. That’s because the task before you is grotesquely super-sized. You undoubtedly sense this, sense that somehow you need to free yourself from so much these years have taught you in order to imagine a future for us all.
You’ve been robbed of the sense that you could matter — outside your own small world and your individual life. It’s the worst sort of thievery. Worse than that, it’s a lie. If you believe it, though, it will become so. Given the size of the problems at hand, given what needs to be mended on our wounded planet, the easier path is to settle down for good in the 51st state.
On the other hand, yours could be the ultimate American odyssey. You could have stories to tell your children, and your children’s children that would be memorable indeed. The question is: What is to be done with America? What will you do with it?
I know what I’d suggest as a start. Tens of thousands of dollars and, for many of you, mountains of debt later, get an education. If you can’t do it in the daylight of the workaday world, do it at night. You’re young. Drink coffee. Stay up late. If you don’t feel that you owe it to yourself (and you do), then you owe it to the American world that you would like your children to live in.
I feel no pride over the oil-slimed, war-making, money-blowing country that my generation has left you. Not for a second. I wouldn’t chose to be you, not given the tools we’ve left you to work with. But you are, of course, you. That’s the one choice you can’t make, so make something of it.
We’re constantly reminded that we need heroes. We have a tendency now to call the soldiers fighting needless wars thousands of miles away our "heroes." But what hero struggles halfway across the planet when his home is on fire? What we need is another kind of hero, another kind of bravery: you marching off this campus and out of the 51st state. You facing up to the miserable world you’re in, figuring out its parameters, and doing something about it.
And here’s the good news: in bad times, action engenders hope. So act. It’ll feel better to do so.
It’s time for me to end and for you to form into your ranks, depart this tent, and with your banners flying, your heads held high, into the fog that covers this campus, into a future that’s anything but clear or beckoning. Still, I’m counting on you. End the American state of denial — or else.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. His new book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books), will be published in June.

 

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/209640-American-Denial-Living-in-a-Can-t-Do-Nation

William Astore
TomDispatch
Tue, 20 Apr 2010 16:00 EDT

An Introduction by Tom Engelhardt:
It’s hard to miss these days. The headlines tell the story — repetitively. Everyone, it seems, is on the take. The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Goldman Sachs with securities fraud for creating and selling "a mortgage investment that was secretly intended to fail" — and then betting against its own customers. JPMorgan Chase which, in a pinch in 2008, happily took taxpayer dough, just reported $3.3 billion in profits for the first quarter of 2010, a jump of 55% over the previous quarter. The bank set aside $9.3 billion in what’s called "compensation and benefits" for its employees in 2009.
Even when they lose, they win. According to James Kwak of the Baseline Scenario website, on a deal in which JPMorgan swallowed $880 million in losses, its bankers still managed to walk away with up to $10 million in compensation. As he wrote, "JPMorgan’s bankers did just fine, despite having placed a ticking time bomb on their own bank’s balance sheet." Meanwhile, Robert Rubin, who helped create the world that led to the 2008 financial meltdown as Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, then took a top position at Citibank and made more than $100 million before it tanked on his watch. As economist Dean Baker puts it, "In the fall of 2008, when Citigroup was saved from bankruptcy with a taxpayer bailout, Rubin quietly slipped out the back door (with his money), resigning from his position at Citigroup." Only recently Rubin made the headlines for offering the least apologetic (non-)apology imaginable for taking the American people to the cleaners.
And when it comes to taking, according to Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times, "more than 125 former Congressional aides and lawmakers are now working for financial firms as part of a multibillion-dollar effort to shape, and often scale back, federal regulatory power." In other words, the regulators and their aides legislate the rules and then simply step through that infamous revolving door and pick up a handsome check on the other side. There are, in fact, at least 11,000 well-employed registered lobbyists in Washington today. A $3.4 billion "industry" in 2009, lobbying is definitely a field to get into, even in bad times, and according to the Christian Science Monitor, "when the cost of grass-roots efforts and of strategic advisers are all counted, total spending on influencing policy in Washington approaches $9.6 billion a year."
As for the money flowing into politics from corporate deep pockets, 2008 not only saw the first billion-dollar presidential campaign, but at $1.7 billion, more than doubled the 2004 campaign’s costs, and no one expects 2012 to be anything but more expensive. All this is, of course, known to anyone who glances at the front page of a daily newspaper, but what exactly do we make of it all? What does it add up to? William Astore, historian and TomDispatch regular, has a suggestion, but before you start his piece, you might want to close your purse or button that back pocket with your wallet in it. Otherwise, they could be picked bare by the time you’re done.

American Kleptocracy
How Fears of Socialism and Fascism Hide Naked Theft
By William J. Astore
Kleptocracy — now, there’s a word I was taught to associate with corrupt and exploitative governments that steal ruthlessly and relentlessly from the people. It’s a word, in fact, that’s usually applied to flawed or failed governments in Africa, Latin America, or the nether regions of Asia. Such governments are typically led by autocratic strong men who shower themselves and their cronies with all the fruits of extracted wealth, whether stolen from the people or squeezed from their country’s natural resources. It’s not a word you’re likely to see associated with a mature republic like the United States led by disinterested public servants and regulated by more-or-less transparent principles and processes.
In fact, when Americans today wish to critique or condemn their government, the typical epithets used are "socialism" or "fascism." When my conservative friends are upset, they send me emails with links to material about "ObamaCare" and the like. These generally warn of a future socialist takeover of the private realm by an intrusive, power-hungry government. When my progressive friends are upset, they send me emails with links pointing to an incipient fascist takeover of our public and private realms, led by that same intrusive, power-hungry government (and, I admit it, I’m hardly innocent when it comes to such "what if" scenarios).
What if, however, instead of looking at where our government might be headed, we took a closer look at where we are — at the power-brokers who run or influence our government, at those who are profiting and prospering from it? These are, after all, the "winners" in our American world in terms of the power they wield and the wealth they acquire. And shouldn’t we be looking as well at those Americans who are losing — their jobs, their money, their homes, their healthcare, their access to a better way of life — and asking why?
If we were to take an honest look at America’s blasted landscape of "losers" and the far shinier, spiffier world of "winners," we’d have to admit that it wasn’t signs of onrushing socialism or fascism that stood out, but of staggeringly self-aggrandizing greed and theft right in the here and now. We’d notice our public coffers being emptied to benefit major corporations and financial institutions working in close alliance with, and passing on remarkable sums of money to, the representatives of "the people." We’d see, in a word, kleptocracy on a scale to dazzle. We would suddenly see an almost magical disappearing act being performed, largely without comment, right before our eyes.
Of Red Herrings and Missing Pallets of Money
Think of socialism and fascism as the red herrings of this moment or, if you’re an old time movie fan, as Hitchcockian MacGuffins — in other words, riveting distractions. Conservatives and tea partiers fear invasive government regulation and excessive taxation, while railing against government takeovers — even as corporate lobbyists write our public healthcare bills to favor private interests. Similarly, progressives rail against an emergent proto-fascist corps of private guns-for-hire, warrantless wiretapping, and the potential government-approved assassination of U.S. citizens, all sanctioned by a perpetual, and apparently open-ended, state of war.
Yet, if this is socialism, why are private health insurers the government’s go-to guys for healthcare coverage? If this is fascism, why haven’t the secret police rounded up tea partiers and progressive critics as well and sent them to the lager or the gulag?
Consider this: America is not now, nor has it often been, a hotbed of political radicalism. We have no substantial socialist or workers’ party. (Unless you’re deluded, please don’t count the corporate-friendly "Democrat" party here.) We have no substantial fascist party. (Unless you’re deluded, please don’t count the cartoonish "tea partiers" here; these predominantly white, graying, and fairly affluent Americans seem most worried that the jackbooted thugs will be coming for them.)
What drives America today is, in fact, business — just as was true in the days of Calvin Coolidge. But it’s not the fair-minded "free enterprise" system touted in those freshly revised Texas guidelines for American history textbooks; rather, it’s a rigged system of crony capitalism that increasingly ends in what, if we were looking at some other country, we would recognize as an unabashed kleptocracy.
Recall, if you care to, those pallets stacked with hundreds of millions of dollars that the Bush administration sent to Iraq and which, Houdini-like, simply disappeared. Think of the ever-rising cost of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, now in excess of a trillion dollars, and just whose pockets are full, thanks to them.
If you want to know the true state of our government and where it’s heading, follow the money (if you can) and remain vigilant: our kleptocratic Houdinis are hard at work, seeking to make yet more money vanish from your pockets — and reappear in theirs.
From Each According to His Gullibility – To Each According to His Greed
Never has the old adage my father used to repeat to me — "the rich get richer and the poor poorer" — seemed fresher or truer. If you want confirmation of just where we are today, for instance, consider this passage from a recent piece by Tony Judt:

In 2005, 21.2 percent of U.S. national income accrued to just 1 percent of earners. Contrast 1968, when the CEO of General Motors took home, in pay and benefits, about sixty-six times the amount paid to a typical GM worker. Today the CEO of Wal-Mart earns nine hundred times the wages of his average employee. Indeed, the wealth of the Wal-Mart founder’s family in 2005 was estimated at about the same ($90 billion) as that of the bottom 40 percent of the U.S. population: 120 million people.

Wealth concentration is only one aspect of our increasingly kleptocratic system. War profiteering by corporations (however well disguised as heartfelt support for our heroic warfighters) is another. Meanwhile, retired senior military officers typically line up to cash in on the kleptocratic equivalent of welfare, peddling their "expertise" in return for impressive corporate and Pentagon payouts that supplement their six-figure pensions. Even that putative champion of the Carhartt-wearing common folk, Sarah Palin, pocketed a cool $12 million last year without putting the slightest dent in her populist bona fides.
Based on such stories, now legion, perhaps we should rewrite George Orwell’s famous tagline from Animal Farm as: "All animals are equal, but a few are so much more equal than others."
And who are those "more equal" citizens? Certainly, major corporations, which now enjoy a kind of political citizenship and the largesse of a federal government eager to rescue them from their financial mistakes, especially when they’re judged "too big to fail." In raiding the U.S. Treasury, big banks and investment firms, shamelessly ready to jack up executive pay and bonuses even after accepting billions in taxpayer-funded bailouts, arguably outgun militarized multinationals in the conquest of the public realm and the extraction of our wealth for their benefit.
Such kleptocratic outfits are, of course, abetted by thousands of lobbyists and by politicians who thrive off corporate campaign contributions. Indeed, many of our more prominent public servants have proved expert at spinning through the revolving door into the private sector. Even ex-politicians who prefer to be seen as sympathetic to the little guy like former House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt eagerly cash in.
I’m Shocked, Shocked, to Find Profiteering Going on Here
An old Roman maxim enjoins us to "let justice be done, though the heavens fall." Within our kleptocracy, the prevailing attitude is an insouciant "We’ll get ours, though the heavens fall." This mindset marks the decline of our polity. A spirit of shared sacrifice, dismissed as hopelessly naïve, has been replaced by a form of tribalized privatization in which insiders find ways to profit no matter what.
Is it any surprise then that, in seeking to export our form of government to Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve produced not two model democracies, but two emerging kleptocracies, fueled respectively by oil and opium?
When we confront corruption in Iraq or Afghanistan, are we not like the police chief in the classic movie Casablanca who is shocked, shocked to find gambling going on at Rick’s Café, even as he accepts his winnings?
Why then do we bother to feign shock when Iraqi and Afghan elites, a tiny minority, seek to enrich themselves at the expense of the majority?
Shouldn’t we be flattered? Imitation, after all, is the sincerest form of flattery. Isn’t it?

William J. Astore is a TomDispatch regular; he teaches History at the Pennsylvania College of Technology and served in the Air Force for 20 years, retiring as a lieutenant colonel.

 

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/207190-American-Kleptocracy-How-Fears-of-Socialism-and-Fascism-Hide-Naked-Theft

Jo Comerford
TomDispatch
Sun, 11 Apr 2010 18:10 EDT

An Introduction by Tom Engelhardt:
If you’re an average American taxpayer, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have, since 2001, cost you personally $7,334, according to the "cost of war" counter created by the National Priorities Project (NPP). They have cost all Americans collectively more than $980,000,000,000. As a country, we’ll pass the trillion dollar mark soon. These are staggering figures and, despite the $72.3 billion that Congress has already ponied up for the Afghan War in 2010 ($136.8 billion if you add in Iraq), the administration is about to go back to Congress for more than $35 billion in outside-the-budget supplemental funds to cover the president’s military and civilian Afghan surges. When that passes, as it surely will, the cumulative cost of the Afghan War alone will hit $300 billion, and we’ll be heading for two trillion-dollar wars.
In the meantime, just so you know, that $300 billion, according to the NPP, could have paid for healthcare for 131,780,734 American children for a year, or for 53,872,201 students to receive Pell Grants of $5,550, or for the salaries and benefits of 4,911,552 elementary school teachers for that same year.
April 15th is almost upon us, and Jo Comerford, TomDispatch regular as well as the NPP’s executive director, decided to take a look at one restive American community under the gun (so to speak) as tax day rolls around again. Our wars seem — and are — so far away, so divorced from American lives. If someone you know well hasn’t been wounded or killed in one of them, it can be hard to grasp just how they are also wounding this society. Here’s one way.

Tax Day and America’s Wars
What the Mayor of One Community Hard Hit by War Spending Is Doing
By Jo Comerford
Matt Ryan, the mayor of Binghamton, New York, is sick and tired of watching people in local communities "squabble over crumbs," as he puts it, while so much local money pours into the Pentagon’s coffers and into America’s wars. He’s so sick and tired of it, in fact, that, urged on by local residents, he’s decided to do something about it. He’s planning to be the first mayor in the United States to decorate the façade of City Hall with a large, digital "cost of war" counter, funded entirely by private contributions.
That counter will offer a constantly changing estimate of the total price Binghamton’s taxpayers have been paying for our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since October 2001. By September 30, 2010, the city’s "war tax" will reach $138.6 million — or even more if, as expected, Congress passes an Obama administration request for supplemental funds to cover the president’s "surge" in Afghanistan. Mayor Ryan wants, he says, to put the counter "where everyone can see it, so that my constituents are urged to have a much-needed conversation."
In doing so, he’s joining a growing chorus of mayors, including Chicago’s Richard Daley and Boston’s Thomas Menino, who are ever more insistently drawing attention to what Ryan calls the country’s "skewed national priorities," especially the local impact of military and war spending. With more than three years left in his current term, Ryan has decided to pull out all the stops to reach his neighbors and constituents, all 47,000 of them, especially the near quarter of the city’s inhabitants who currently live below the poverty line and the 9% who are officially unemployed.
A Hard Hit Rust-Belt City
Like so many post-industrial rust-belt communities, Binghamton was hard hit by the financial meltdown of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed, though it faired better than a number of similar cities, in part because Ryan, his administration, and the Binghamton City Council are a smart and scrappy crew. No doubt that’s why he earned the New York State Conference of Mayors Public Administration and Management award two years running.
These days, however, even the smartest and scrappiest of mayors still has to face grim reality. In July 2009, as the city began developing the 2010 budget, Ryan projected a $7 million shortfall. Contributing factors included a likely $700,000 decline in sales tax revenue, ever rising healthcare costs, increased pension contributions to replace funds lost in the market during the collapse of 2008-09, and a $500,000 drop in the return on the city’s investment portfolio.
With worse times ahead, thanks in part to the projected end of federal stimulus money and a city drained dry of reserves, Ryan has had to face a classically unpalatable choice: raise city sales taxes from 7% to an unheard of 24% or cut city jobs. He chose jobs, as have the vast majority of mayors and governors across the country, eliminating 39 of them. In the process, he sought greater program efficiencies and wrestled with ways to increase city revenues while cutting ever closer to Binghamton’s proverbial bone.
It was in the context of this kind of local pain that Ryan was stunned to discover just how much of Binghamton’s taxes were going to the military and to our distant wars, and how little was coming back to Binghamton in the form of aid and services. "When I first saw the cost of war numbers and made the connections," Ryan remarks, "I had to wonder if we’re ever going to get our priorities straight as a nation. It’s like we’re facing an attack on government. As a mayor, I can see so clearly what increased federal spending could do for the people of my city."
Ryan’s message doesn’t resonate with all of his constituents — some have walked out on his public appearances — but he’s used to controversy and convinced that Americans had better get their heads straight soon. "People are hurting so bad," he insists, "that, like it or not, we’re all going to have to look at things seriously if we want our situation to change."
Heads should swivel, he thinks, when faced with the $138.6 million Binghamton’s taxpayers are out of pocket since 2001 for the Iraq and Afghan wars. And that’s not even counting the city’s share of the supplemental funds Congress will undoubtedly agree to this spring to cover the Afghan "surge" or the city’s portion of the basic Pentagon budget for the same period.
For a small city with an annual budget of $81.1 million, $138.6 million would be a hefty sum, even in non-recessionary times. For the same amount of money, Ryan could fund the Binghamton city library for the next 60 years, or pay for a four-year education for 95% of the incoming freshman class at the State University of New York at Binghamton, or offer four years of quality health coverage for everyone in Binghamton 19 or younger, or secure renewable electricity for every home in the city for the next 11 years. If he was feeling really flush, he could fully fund one-third of New York State’s Head Start slots for one year.
For the same sum, Ryan could also authorize a $2,900 tax refund for every woman, man, and child in Binghamton or pay the salaries of all of Binghamton’s hard-hit public school teachers and staff for about two years.
For $138.6 million, Mayor Ryan could hire 2,765 public safety officers for a year, or simply refund the 12 police positions cut in the latest budget contraction and guarantee those salaries for the next 230 years. Ridiculous? These days, no one is laughing in Binghamton or other cities like it.
A Community Starved by War
As tax day looms on April 15th, Ryan increasingly thinks about where Binghamton’s tax dollars will be heading and dreams about a government system that would have the potential to raise and spend tax revenue in the service of social benefits like affordable healthcare.
He’s disturbed by how Binghamton’s tax dollars will be distributed and what they will — and won’t — buy for his city. Consider, for instance, where the 2009 taxes paid by a median income Binghamton household actually went. That year, such a household’s income hovered around $30,000 annually, while its members paid approximately $738 in federal income taxes.
According to the tax-day analysis of the National Priorities Project (NPP), an overwhelming 218 of those dollars went to pay for military expenditures and interest on military-related debt (generated, in part, by current war spending). The next highest amount — $137 — went to healthcare, including Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
In 2009, $67, nearly 10 cents on every tax dollar, went to an aggregated category of spending NPP has titled "government," tripling it in a single year, largely thanks to the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), otherwise known as the bank bailout, whose cost every community in America has had to shoulder. Fifty-eight dollars (8.5 cents on every income-tax dollar) went to increased unemployment insurance payments and job-training initiatives, also a rise from the previous year.
Not surprisingly, the $15 that went to elementary, secondary, higher, and vocational education in 2009 represented a drop from 2008, a loss of a penny on every tax dollar. There’s no way, of course, that Mayor Ryan’s dream of free, quality education from kindergarten to college is likely to happen on but 2% of every individual federal income tax dollar. Nor will we usher in the green techno-revolution that he and President Obama both support, by spending 2.5 cents on every dollar for the combined categories of the environment, energy, and science, and another 1.3 cents of every dollar on transportation.
"It’s a double whammy," Ryan says. "We have a revenue problem and a values and priorities problem in this nation."
Some desperate city leaders have suggested that the Mayor cut workers’ pensions to help close the city’s budget gap. Matt Ryan doesn’t see that as a solution to anything. "I have secretaries making $25,000 or $30,000. I’m not about to cut their net, such as it is. We have to think long haul. We have to look at fundamental changes if we’re going to make it as a country. We should all be talking about this — all the time."
A construction crew will soon arrive to install Binghamton’s "cost of war" counter which will overlook the city’s busiest intersection and spur conversation around tax day. During the three minutes local motorists wait at the nearby traffic light, they can join Mayor Ryan in waving good-bye to $100. And Binghamton as a whole can grapple with spending $49,650 in war costs every day of 2010.

Jo Comerford is the executive director of the National Priorities Project. Previously, she served as director of programs at the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts and directed the American Friends Service Committee’s justice and peace-related community organizing efforts in western Massachusetts.

 

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/206594-Tax-Day-and-America-s-Wars-What-the-Mayor-of-One-Community-Hard-Hit-by-War-Spending-is-Doing

Pratap Chatterjee
TomDispatch
Sun, 21 Mar 2010 17:45 EDT

An Introduction by Tom Engelhardt:
Police training has been a crucial part of American counterinsurgency warfare and global policy for a long, long time. During the American occupation of Haiti, which began in 1915, the establishment and training of an American-led Gendarmerie d’Haiti would contribute to the sad, brutal modern history of that island; in the late 1950s and 1960s, U.S. police training helped shape South Vietnam into a quasi-police state ready to wield torture as a weapon of daily life; in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, U.S. police training under thuggish dictatorships led to torture and extrajudicial killings, a history painfully captured in journalist A.J. Langguth’s presciently titled book Hidden Terrors; in Central America in the 1980s, it led to a flowering of extrajudicial death squads. The story of U.S. police training could, in many ways, act as a substitute history of human rights violations.
All in all, it’s not a pretty tale and it’s not a history that’s left this country untouched, as Alfred McCoy, an expert in police training and counterinsurgency as well as the author of Policing the Empire, wrote for TomDispatch last November. What happens in our distant counterinsurgency wars, including the policing part of them, has a nasty habit of returning to these shores as ever more repressive surveillance and policing techniques in “the homeland.”
Still, when it comes to pure futility, not to speak of the generous enrichment of a few private corporate contractors, the various U.S. police-training programs in Afghanistan have surely taken the cake. As a multi-billion dollar exercise in disaster, our significantly outsourced training programs for Afghanistan’s “insecurity” forces are hard to beat. TomDispatch regular Ann Jones found this out in the summer of 2009 when she spent time with recruits being trained for an Afghan army that seemed barely to exist. She couldn’t help wondering, then, what might have happened if those training billions had gone into agriculture, health care, or a civilian job corps (either in Afghanistan or the U.S.).
Now, Pratap Chatterjee, an expert on the rise of the Pentagon’s corps of private contractors (whose classic book on the major private military contractor of our era, Halliburton’s Army, has just been published in paperback), considers the full history of our woeful Afghan police-training program. Eight years of bizarre efforts that add up to vanishingly little. At a time when desperate state governments in the U.S. are slashing budgets for everything from local education to mass transit systems, it becomes all the more remarkable how many dollars the Pentagon has poured — and continues to pour — down the Afghan rabbit hole.
Chatterjee, a TomDispatch regular, who last reported here on how corruption rules Afghanistan, returns to — you might say — the scene of the crime and offers an unparalleled history of the folly that passes for bringing “security” to Afghanistan. (If you have a moment, don’t forget to catch Timothy MacBain’s TomCast in which Chatterjee discusses the lives of contractor/trainers in Afghanistan by clicking here or, if you prefer to download it to your iPod, here.)

Policing Afghanistan
How Afghan Police Training Became a Train Wreck
By Pratap Chatterjee
The Pentagon faces a tough choice: Should it award a new contract to Xe (formerly Blackwater), a company made infamous when its employees killed 17 Iraqis in Baghdad in 2007, or to DynCorp, a company made infamous in Bosnia in 1999 when some of its employees were caught trafficking young girls for sex?
This billion-dollar contract will be the linchpin of a training program for the Afghan National Police, who are theoretically to be drilled in counterinsurgency tactics that will help defeat the Taliban and bring security to impoverished, war-torn Afghanistan. The program is also considered a crucial component of the Obama administration’s plan for turning the war around. Ironically, Xe was poised to win the contract until a successful appeal by DynCorp last week threw the field wide open.
Some people in the U.S. government (and many outside it) believe that this task should not be assigned to private contractors in the first place. Meanwhile, many police experts are certain that it hardly matters which company gets the contract. Like so many before it, the latest training program is doomed from the outset, they believe, because its focus will be on defeating the Taliban rather than fostering community-oriented policing.
The Obama administration is in a fix: it believes that, if it can’t put at least 100,000 trained police officers on Afghan streets and into the scattered hamlets that make up the bulk of the country, it won’t be able to begin a drawdown of U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan by the middle of next year.
“The Obama administration’s strategy for the Afghan police is to increase numbers, enlarge the ‘train and equip’ program, and engage the police in the fight against the Taliban,” says Robert Perito, an expert on police training at the United States Institute of Peace and the author of a new book, The Police in War. “This approach has not worked in the past, and doing more of the same will not achieve success.”
When it comes to police training, the use of private contractors is not unusual — and neither is failure. North Carolina-based Xe has, in fact, been training the Afghan border police for more than two years, and Virginia-based DynCorp has been doing the same for the Afghan uniformed police for more than seven years now. Nonetheless, the mismanagement of the $7 billion spent on police training over the last eight years, partly attributed to lax U.S. State Department oversight, has left the country of 33 million people with a strikingly ineffective and remarkably corrupt police force. Its terrible habits and reputation have led the inhabitants of many Afghan communities to turn to the Taliban for security.
Of the training programs run by the NATO Training Mission out of Camp Eggers in Kabul, the Afghan capital, only DynCorp’s component is even fully staffed. The company supplies 782 former American police officers to dozens of training centers and military bases scattered around the country to work with the U.S. military and with European Union police mentors. Altogether there are supposed to be 4,000 of these trainers, but NATO estimates that it has only half of the staffers it needs.
In a desperate attempt to offset this shortage of trainers, Afghan Interior Minister Hanif Atmar has proposed the dispatching of 3,000 police officers annually to Jordan and Turkey for nine months of instruction abroad.
Too-Fast-Track Training
In May 2009, I visited several training sites for the Afghan security forces in and around Kabul. Major Joey Schneider of the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan escorted me around a recruitment center at the Kabul Central Police Command. There, dozens of raw recruits from Afghan villages were being tested for ever-present drugs before induction into a fast-track program to double the 5,000 police officers in Kabul before the August elections.
“After three weeks in the Kabul Security Acceleration Program, these men will get a badge, uniform, and gun and be sent out to patrol,” Schneider explained. Asked if that was really sufficient, he assured me that the new police officers would be given an additional five weeks of intensive post-election training by DynCorp contractors and international military mentors.
Three months later, a report for the European Commission written by Scott Chilton and Tim Bremmers, two police experts, in collaboration with Eckart Schiewek, a senior United Nations official, concluded that this approach was a disaster-in-the-making. It was, they claimed, causing an “absolute irresponsible downgrading” of the police force. “Our view is that the spiraling increase in police deaths and wounding will further increase with quick-fix recruiting, poor training, and equipping.”
Absurd as it may sound, this program is considered better conceived than many of the older training programs the Afghan government launched with U.S. funding. For example, a 2006 attempt to induct 11,000 villagers into a new organization dubbed the Afghan National Auxiliary Police — with only 10 days of training from DynCorp and international military mentors — was a complete and abysmal failure. One-third of the trainees in certain southern provinces, given a gun and a uniform, were never seen again. Two years later, in September 2008, the project was terminated.
A 2008 report by the well-respected International Crisis Group pointed out that such rapid-induction programs had the perverse effect of actually lowering the average literacy rate and effectiveness of the Afghan police force — and that’s without even considering the security problems created by those drop-outs with guns.
Eight Years of Failures
Until recently, Afghanistan has never really had a national police force, though before the Soviet invasion of 1979 there was a conscription system that produced rank-and-file cops working under a trained officer corps. In 2002, in the wake of the Taliban’s defeat, the Germans set up a police academy in Kabul that offered a five-year training program aimed at bringing back the officer corps. In 2003, the U.S. awarded a small contract to DynCorp to run a train-the-trainers program in Kabul, based on prior work it had done in Haiti and the former Yugoslavia.
Yet no one spent much time worrying about beat-cop training, least of all the Bush administration, which was already immersed in planning the invasion of Iraq and preferred to operate in Afghanistan with what it liked to call a “light footprint.”
By 2005, security in Kabul was deteriorating sharply. At the same time, the spectacular failure of the U.S. effort to create a brand new police force in Iraq had helped spark a bloody, devastating civil war in Baghdad, the Iraqi capital. Somewhere in this period, Bush administration officials started to wake up to the possibility that Afghanistan might be heading in the same direction. A series of new contracts were then issued to DynCorp by the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs — $1.6 billion in training work scheduled to be completed by the end of 2009. (The contracts have since been extended to June 2010.)
State Department planners seem to have taken an inordinately long time to wake up to the basic problems that Afghanistan faced in creating a viable police force. With salaries pegged at $16 a month for a beat cop in 2002, the police were particularly vulnerable to corruption in the form of extorted bribes, and to the Taliban who offered much higher wages to their fighters. Making the situation worse, the force was remarkably top-heavy. More than 20,000 officers and non-commissioned officers oversaw only 36,000 patrolmen. It was regularly alleged that they made their beat cops shake down citizens for bribes. In fact, a 2007 study by the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan that reviewed the records of 2,464 police officers found claims of drug trafficking, corruption, or assaults against more than one-third of them.
“There are some parts of Afghanistan where the last thing people want to see is the police showing up,” Brigadier General Gary O’Brien, former deputy commander of the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan, told the Canadian Press news agency in March 2007. “They are part of the problem. They do not provide security for the people — they are the robbers of the people.”
Salaries are not the only budget shortfall. Afghanistan simply has no money to pay for equipment like guns and police vehicles, or even to build police stations. Instead, for the last eight years the Afghan police have received hundreds of millions of dollars worth of donated weapons and other equipment, much of which turned out to be broken or incompatible with the equipment the force already had. Typical was a batch of thousands of Czech VZ58 rifles that look like the AK-47s Afghan policemen traditionally carry but require completely different maintenance procedures.
In another glaring example of what a lack of resources has led to, Hazeb Emerging Business, an Afghan company hired to maintain the force’s weapons, used hammers and nails to “repair” grenade launchers, because they had no idea how to fix donated weapons. In perhaps the most widely reported mishap, AEY Inc., based in Florida, and described by the New York Times as “a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur,” dispatched to the Afghan security forces 100 million Chinese cartridges, some 40 years old and in “decomposing packaging,” under a $10 million Pentagon contract.
In a country where the official literacy rate is pegged at an optimistic 30% — some estimates put the rate among police recruits at closer to 5%, or even less — most of any Western-style training curriculum proves strikingly irrelevant. To make things worse, one in five volunteers for police training is a drug-abuser, a statistic that rises to 60% in southern provinces like Helmand, which produces a significant part of the opium crop for the world’s leading narco-state.
Not surprisingly, then, capability assessments of the Afghan police have been less than encouraging. At a June 2008 discussion at the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, Congressman John Tierney summed up findings on the 433 Afghan National Police units of that moment this way: “Zero are fully capable, three percent are capable with coalition support, four percent are only partially capable, 77 percent are not capable at all, and 68 percent are not formed or not reporting.”
A new plan was drawn up under which dramatic changes were made, including the raising of police salaries to $180 a month in 2010 (and in high-risk areas up to $240). In addition, increasing numbers of police salaries are now paid directly and electronically to bank accounts or cell phones, which means it’s harder for officers to dip into the meager pay of their underlings.
The officer corps has also been slashed dramatically, thanks to a new requirement that all high-level staff complete a difficult exam. By 2010, the 340 generals had been reduced to 117, the 2,450 colonels to 301, and the 1,824 lieutenant colonels to 467. (Afghan police ranks have military titles.)
Perhaps most significantly, a new, intensive training program called Focused District Development (FDD) was launched in late 2007 under which every police officer in specific districts would be removed en masse for eight weeks of training in another part of the country. In the meantime, the country’s elite police unit, the Afghan National Civil Order Police (ANCOP), was to temporarily take over local policing duties. When the original force returned, a mentorship team of 14 internationals accompanied them to provide advice and — at least theoretically — to root out corruption.
By early 2009, FDD was claiming success. Almost one in five police districts which completed the program was now considered “independently capable.” (Before 2008, that number was zero.) Unfortunately, only one-quarter of the police districts in Afghanistan have completed the FDD program to date and only 5% of the country’s police units are considered capable of operating on their own. Even this may be an illusion as an estimated 25% of police recruits quit every year — and that’s not just among the bad performers. The drop-out rate for the 2,500 strong elite ANCOP is an astronomical 65%, making any training efforts a Sisyphean undertaking.
One year after Obama promised to revamp the Afghan police aid effort by sending in more trainers and civilian experts, no one is hailing the results as an outstanding success; few even consider them a half-decent start. “Operationally, the effort is broken. Assets are misdirected, poorly managed and misused,” wrote Robert A. Wehrle, a U.S. advisor to the Afghan Ministry of the Interior, in February 2010 after returning from a 15-month stint in Kabul. “Graft and corruption in the Afghan forces are endemic, and coalition forces unwittingly enable that corruption.”
Assigning Blame
Who, then, is responsible for this dismal state of affairs? Many have pointed fingers at the State Department. A joint report from the inspectors general of the Pentagon and the State Department claims that the DynCorp contract was particularly badly managed. “The current [contract does] not provide any specific information regarding what type of training is required or any measurement of acceptability… Additionally, the current contract does not include any measurement of contractor performance.”
Indeed, DynCorp’s police trainers, who tend to hail from small American towns, are often remarkably ignorant about life in a war zone. A DynCorp trainer from Texas, who asked not to be named, typically told this reporter about his first encounter with mortars in eastern Afghanistan: “I was mesmerized by what looked like a fireworks display.” Angry U.S. soldiers yelled at him to hit the ground.
Naturally, DynCorp disputes this. “[N]either our military nor European National police were formed or trained to teach basic law enforcement skills,” Don Ryder, the DynCorp program manager, told the Commission on Wartime Contracting, a congressionally mandated body established to offer an independent assessment of contracting practices in Iraq and Afghanistan. “At DynCorp International we do not build satellites. We do not design aircraft. We do training and mentoring. That is our core competency — and this competency is represented in the DNA of our 30,000 employees worldwide.”
Most experts disagree. “DynCorp and [the] State [Department] had too few people, too few resources, and too little experience building a police force in the midst of an insurgency,” Seth Jones, a political scientist with the RAND Corporation who spent most of 2009 traveling with Army Special Forces teams in Afghanistan, told the commission. “While it may be necessary to utilize [private] contractors to help execute some security programs — including helping U.S. military or other government officials conduct some police training — contractors should not be the lead entity, as they were from 2003 to 2005.”
Not the least of the problem with Dyncorp (or Xe, if it gets the new training contract) is the cost of hiring such contractors to train police. Each expatriate police officer makes a six-figure U.S. salary, at least 50 times more than an Afghan police officer and three times as much as military mentors.
Alternative Police Programs
Mentoring programs “are based on the assumption that international mentors are the more knowledgeable actors, whose job it is to impart their wisdom and expertise to their Afghan junior partners,” observed Andrew Wilder, the former director of the Afghan Research and Evaluation Unit in Kabul, in his 2007 report on the Afghan police, “Cops or Robbers?” “In reality, however, this is often not the case. The internationals may know much more about the technical aspects of policing in the West, but the Afghans know much more about the culture and politics of policing in Afghanistan.”
Wilder proposes a radical solution: to dramatically scale back the plans for an Afghan police force. He notes that the historical role of police in Afghanistan, especially in rural areas, was limited to protecting government buildings. “Most civil disputes and criminal matters, however, were not referred to the police or courts — which were perceived to be corrupt, costly, and slow to take decisions — but were resolved using customary law and institutions.” Wilder believes any counterinsurgency efforts to fight terrorist attacks should be limited to the Afghan army and possibly a “separate paramilitary force, or gendarmerie.”
“A prevalent view, even among some international police, is that Afghanistan is unready for civilian policing and holds that the police must remain a military force while insecurity lasts,” writes Tonita Murray, a former director general of the Canadian Police College, who worked as an advisor to the Afghan Ministry of Interior in 2005. “If such a view were to prevail, only military solutions for security sector reform would be considered, and Afghanistan would be caught in a vicious circle of using force against force without employing other approaches to secure stability and peace.”
According to Robert Perito, who worked with the U.S. Department of Justice’s International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program training police in international peace operations from 1995 to 2001, the U.S. government should rethink its entire approach. It should, he says, pull back from using contractors to run its police-training program, turning instead to a strong U.S. federal workforce that is qualified to undertake police training abroad.
A New Direction?
Earlier this month, Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, head of the NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan, admitted that police training has been a train wreck since the toppling of the Taliban almost nine years ago. “We weren’t doing it right. The most important thing is to recruit and then train police [before deployment]. It is still beyond my comprehension that we weren’t doing that.”
The realization that giving illiterate, drug-prone young men a uniform, badge, and gun (as well as very little money and no training) was a recipe for corruption and disaster is certainly a first step. But how to withdraw the 95% of the Afghan police force that is still incapable of basic policing for months of desperately needed training in a country with no prior history of such things? That turns out to be a conundrum, even for President Obama.
On March 12th, the president devoted much of the monthly video conference call between his Washington national security team and his senior commanders in Afghanistan to questions about how the problem should be tackled. “The President has gone through and looked at monthly recruitment and retention goals because… we’re not going to be there forever,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters that day. “Not only are we going to need improved governance, but we’re going to need a police force that can keep the peace.”
If the Pentagon does not dramatically alter the current training scheme, it doesn’t look good for either governance or peace in Afghanistan. Yet the likelihood remains low indeed that Pentagon officials will take the advice of a chorus of police experts offering critical commentary on the mess that is the police training program there. Instead, it’s likely to be more of the same, which means more private contracting of police training and further disaster. Bizarrely enough, the Pentagon has given the Space and Missile Defense Command Contracting Office in Huntsville, Alabama, the task of deciding between DynCorp and Xe for that new billion-dollar training contract. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, as the French say: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Pratap Chatterjee is a freelance journalist and senior editor at CorpWatch. He has traveled extensively in the Middle East and Central Asia and is the author of two books about the war on terror, Iraq, Inc. and Halliburton’s Army (Nation Books, 2009), which has just been published in paperback.

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/205254-Policing-Afghanistan-How-Afghan-Police-Training-Became-a-Train-Wreck

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Tomgram: Ira Chernus, The Wages of Fear in Israel and the U.S.

Posted by Ira Chernus at 4:00pm, Jan 17, 2010.

A country programmatically gripped by fear -- yes, that’s us for more than eight years now.  Fear of terrorism to be exact, even as truly terrible things happened in this land and elsewhere, from hurricane Katrina in 2005 to last week’s devastating Haitian earthquake, which should have put our fears into perspective.  But no such luck.

Since 9/11, the thought of “terrorism” has seized the U.S. by the throat.  People who are terrified of flying...

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Tomgram: Turse and Engelhardt, Shooting Gnats with a Machine Gun

Posted by Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse at 11:05am, Jan 14, 2010.

666 to 1
The U.S. Military, al-Qaeda, and a War of Futility
By Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt

In his book on World War II in the Pacific,

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Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, Iran, 1979 and 2010

Posted by Dilip Hiro at 4:25pm, Jan 12, 2010.

[Note to TomDispatch Readers: Slowly, slowly, the newest iteration of this website is working out its kinks and bulking up.  A number of you have written in about the missing “what we read” blogroll.  It’s now back, updated and ready for use.  Just scroll down the right column to check it out.  Tom]

The Obama administration’s Iran policy is a riddle wrapped inside a conundrum folded into a pickle.  So…

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Tomgram: Engelhardt and Turse, The CIA Surges

Posted by Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse at 5:30pm, Jan 10, 2010.

The Shadow War
Making Sense of the New CIA Battlefield in Afghanistan
By Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse

It was a Christmas and New Year’s from hell for American intelligence, that

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Tomgram: Orville Schell, What Doesn’t Work in America

Posted by Orville Schell at 9:45pm, Jan 6, 2010.

These days, everyone has experienced a little moment of shock when the unimaginable became American.  In my case, it was a relatively small thing in my hometown that recently reminded me I was in a different universe.  New York City has always had one of the great urban public transportation systems.  No one ever claimed it was a thing of beauty to look at or ride, but it got you, with remarkable efficiency and without complaint, from anywhere you happened to be to just…

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Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Blowback Effect, 2020

Posted by Michael Klare at 4:10pm, Jan 5, 2010.

You can already see a new style of writing about China emerging in our American world.  The New York Times set it off recently by publishing a front-page piece on a $3.4 billion Chinese investment in one of the planet’s last great copper reserves — in Afghanistan.  In passing, reporter Michael Wines also pointed out that Chinese energy companies had gained a stronger foothold in the future…

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Tomgram: The Year of the Assassin

Posted by Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse at 5:30pm, Jan 3, 2010.

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: We’re back for 2010!  Many thanks to those of you who ended the year with a contribution to the site — or purchased something off one of our Amazon links.  Your generosity was startling and will help make this year a good and, I hope, expansive one for us.  One small note about last year.  In his final Bill Moyers Journal of 2009, Moyers offered

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