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Iraq holding thousands in secret prisons: lawmaker

Friday, October 31st, 2008

Iraqi opposition lawmaker claims government holding thousands in unofficial prisons

An Iraqi opposition lawmaker claimed Thursday that thousands of his countrymen are being mistreated in detention centers outside the official prison system.

Sunni legislator Mohammed al-Daini claimed the government and paramilitary groups control 420 unofficial detention centers to hold people without legal justification.

Speaking through an interpreter, al-Daini told reporters in Geneva he had gained access to 13 such prisons and obtained government reports that proved the existence of a secret detention network.

He offered no proof for his claim that prisoners are executed or raped in the centers, but said he would provide evidence to U.N. human rights officials and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Calls to Iraqi government representatives in Geneva were not returned.

According to a United Nations report, some 51,000 people were detained by U.S. forces and the Iraqi government at the end of last year. The report said some abuse had reportedly taken place during initial interrogations when detainees were held at unacknowledged locations before transfer to official detention facilities.

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Genuine UK Activists Invade and Occupy UK Power Plant

Friday, October 31st, 2008

Because they care about the issue — not about Youtube hits, UK truthers take note ;)

By Alex Felsinger |

The crown jewel of Greenpeace’s naval arm, the Rainbow Warrior, pulled in to the harbor alongside the Kingsnorth coal-fired power plant today before six activists stormed the facility to prepare to project video of impacts of global warming onto the plant’s giant smokestack.

The action comes mere months after a jury acquitted Greenpeace protesters who had vandalized the same smokestack. The court ruled that the activists were acting in the public’s interest because the power plant will cause property destruction in the future due to its release of climate-changing greenhouse gases.

So far, Greenpeace says there have been no arrests.

 

The activists hope to prevent the owners of the plant, E.ON, from going through with their plan to build another coal plant nearby. Greenpeace says the new plant would spew as much greenhouse gas as the world’s 30 least-polluting countries combined. To symbolize this, 30 volunteers carried the flags of those countries into the power plant.

Two of the protesters were among the original ‘Kingsnorth Six,’ who were acquitted of all wrongdoing amid controversy this summer.  Police have not reported whether the activists will face charges for today’s action.

You can follow any developments through Greenpeace UK’s website.

Photo courtesy of Greenpeace UK.

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Passport Service dismisses 14 for database abuses

Friday, October 31st, 2008

The Identity and Passport Service (IPS) says it has dismissed 14 people over the last three years in relation to passport database abuses.The IPS is now closely involved in building the government’s national identity card database.

Of 16 cases where data protection is said to have been breached, all but one involved members of staff who had legitimate access to the Passport Application Support System database.

But those investigated were shown to have used this access for unauthorised checks not related to their duties. The other case involved a contractor misusing data.

In two cases, investigations did not lead to dismissal, leaving 14 staff being shown the door by the IPS.

The Home Office released the figures in response to a parliamentary written question from shadow home affairs minister James Brokenshire.

The figures show that the problem of unauthorised IPS database checks seems to be worsening.

In 2007-08, the IPS disciplined eight people, with seven being sacked. In 2006-07 it disciplined six and fired five, and in 2005-06 it disciplined and sacked two staff.

The released figures come at a sensitive time for the government, as it starts to issue national identity cards to foreigners from outside the European Economic Area, and gets ready to issue ID cards to workers in security sensitive areas such as airports next year.

Computer Weekly

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Capitalism is bankrupt

Friday, October 31st, 2008

Until A few weeks ago, supporters of free market capitalism were confident enough to proclaim that their system was the only way that the world could be organised. Now their certainties have vanished.

The economic crisis that started in banking and finance has spread quickly to the wider economy. Now it threatens to engulf whole countries, bringing untold misery to millions.

Belarus, Hungary, Iceland, Pakistan and Ukraine all stand on the brink of bankruptcy. Beyond them are even bigger countries – including Poland, Russia, Argentina and Turkey – whose economies are in danger of collapse.

As their currencies slide and exports falter, all of these countries have been forced to borrow heavily just to ensure that they can pay their bills.

Some have so little in their foreign exchange reserves that they will only last a matter of weeks without an injection of cash. They have been forced to beg the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for emergency loans.

But the IMF – an organisation dominated by the rich countries of the West – will only extend its help at a price.

During past crises, it has demanded swingeing cuts in government budgets, privatisation of industries and the liberalisation of markets. Struggling nations are now preparing themselves for the worst.

In Pakistan, where already millions cannot afford food or the fuel to cook it with, the government has announced the ending of fuel subsidies and the removal of a cap on gas and electricity prices. This is to be accompanied by big cuts in government spending.

In Hungary, the government has suggested a massive assault on its state pension and the slashing of pay as part of the bailout of the economy.

If the past is anything to go by, the IMF will endorse these measures but demand much more for its money.

The economic shockwave that is spreading across the world is not confining itself to poorer economies. Already the Bank of England estimates the cost of the financial crash at $2.8 trillion – a sum so big that it defies comprehention.

And despite the billions spent on bank bailouts, scores of British firms announced major redundancies this week.

We are told that these shutdowns are inevitable and that it is pointless to resist. There is simply a lack of a demand for the goods that are produced, it is said.

But while goods pile up unsold and workers are laid off, millions of people go without the things they need because they can’t afford to buy them.

And the skills and machinery in each closing factory could offer solutions to some of the greatest problems facing humanity. For example, engineers who once made cars could be employed to make generators for alternative sources of energy.

We have the resources to build a better world. So far, the stranglehold of capitalism has been a barrier. Now it is up to us all to ensure that its hold is broken.

© Copyright Socialist Worker

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Next U.S. president must scrap Guantanamo

Friday, October 31st, 2008

The head of Amnesty International called on Thursday for the winner of next week’s U.S. presidential election to shut the Guantanamo Bay detention centre in Cuba within 100 days of taking office.

Irene Khan also urged the U.S. Congress to investigate human rights abuses at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo and by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan during President George W Bush’s administration, and take action against those responsible.

“I hope whichever candidate wins that they will pay very serious attention to restoring the U.S, as a human rights champion at home and abroad,” the veteran Bangladeshi human rights lawyer said.

Democratic candidate Barack Obama and his Republic rival John McCain have called for the closure of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo, which holds about 255 suspected members of al Qaeda, the Taliban and associated groups.

McCain has said the detainees should be moved to the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

“Both candidates have actually said they will look into the closure of Guantanamo … We certainly hope that they will give attention to it in the first 100 days,” Khan told Reuters and another news agency on the sidelines of a corruption conference in Athens.

“We would like to see them close it (in 100 days).”

More than 750 foreign captives have been held without trial at the base in the seven years since President Bush declared a war against terrorism in response to the September 11 attacks.

The prison and its military tribunals have been widely condemned by human rights groups and governments around the world, including close allies of the United States, who say they do not meet international legal standards.

“I hope that in the U.S. there will be a congressional investigation … and then action will be taken against those responsible for human rights abuses,” Khan said, citing the illegal detention of terrorism suspects and the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

She called on the eventual winner of Tuesday’s U.S. election to expose the secret detention of terrorism suspects and to make an immediate impact on foreign crises, such as the five-year-old conflict in the Darfur region of western Sudan, where experts believe 200,000 people have been killed.

She called on the international community to throw its support behind an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir to face charges of masterminding a genocide campaign in Darfur.

The African Union has urged the U.N. Security Council to block the warrant, saying it could upset political efforts to end the fighting between rebels and government forces, but Khan said political discussions had proved fruitless.

Khan warned that global financial turmoil could distract Western governments from combating human rights abuses and cut aid budgets. In the developing world, it could increase poverty and social unrest and tempt governments into authoritarian crackdowns.

“Human rights are not a luxury for the good times and we need to focus on human rights when times get tough because that’s the real test,” said Khan, head of Amnesty since 2001. (Editing by Michael Roddy)

Reuters North American News Service

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The End is at Hand (to Leftist Conspiracy Theories)

Friday, October 31st, 2008

By Dave Lindorff

With the polls continuing to show Barack Obama holding a steady or even growing lead heading into Election Day, especially in the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Colorado, New Hampshire and Virginia, and with Democratic challengers looking strong in at least 10 Senate races and dozens of open-seat or Republican-held House races, it’s looking like this will be a big win for Democrats, both in the presidential and the Congressional races.

Hopefully one thing such an across-the-boards win will lead to would be a withering away of the self-destructive conspiracy-theory paranoia that has gripped much of the Left over the last eight years.

Once largely emblematic of the far Right, which saw black helicopters of the dreaded United Nations behind every mountain, Jews running everything, Communists working nefariously under every bed, fluoridation plots, an immigrant assault on the Anglo-Saxon gene pool, and a liberal cabal out to steal their assault hunting rifles, now the Left is awash in the same kind of fevered thinking.

Chief among the leftist conspiracy theories are that the Bush/Cheney administration was behind the 9-11 attacks, that the current administration has plans to cancel or annul the November 4 election and institute martial law, that there are plans for a “false flag” attack on American forces which will be used to justify an all-out war against Iran, that there is a false-flag terror attack planned inside the US set for before the election, designed to throw the vote towards John McCain, that the Wall Street meltdown and subsequent bail-out are a deliberate scheme to steal the nation’s assets and funnel them into Republican pockets, and that Republican operatives have the technological capability, and plan to steal the current election by manipulating the results on the electronic voting machines used by many election districts. In a variant of the Right’s anti-Semitic ravings, the Left attributes god-like powers to the Israel lobby and its formal lobbying organization, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)

Never mind that some of these conspiracies are mutually exclusive (if Bush and Cheney are going to declare martial law, they should have no need to steal the election), or that it’s getting pretty late in the game for others to actually happen. The common thread running through these conspiracies is that “they” (the Republicans, AIPAC or the ruling corporate elite, as the case may be), have superhuman powers beyond our wildest imaginations, as well as flawless execution, and are going to achieve their evil ends no matter what we do.

Following this line of thinking (if it can be called that), there’s no point in voting, because “they” are going to steal the election anyhow (and that, of course, is if the election is even held next week!). There’s no point in going to rallies or marches in Washington DC, because “they” are going to attack Iran and start World War III anyhow. Public protest is also dangerous, because “they” are going to declare martial law, and then all of us who go out and publicly oppose the government will end up locked away in detention camps in the Mojavi desert.

I confess, as a journalist, to having unwittingly aided and abetted some of this conspiracy thinking, for example with my reporting on the evidence that all four of the so-called “black boxes” from the two planes that hit the World Trade Center on 9/11 were recovered, and that the FBI actually has them, despite its testimony to the contrary before the 9-11 Commission. I make no apology for, and still stand by that report, which was based upon reliable sources at the National Transportation Safety Administration and in the New York Police Department, but I want to stress that such a report does not justify going beyond asking the logical question, “What is the government hiding here?” to making the wild speculation that it means the government planned and carried out those attacks.

I also reported on solid evidence in 2006 that the Bush/Cheney administration was moving several aircraft carrier battle groups into position in the Persian Gulf in advance of Congressional off-year elections in what appeared to be possible plans for an attack on Iran. I still believe that may have been the administration’s game plan, but that it was derailed by senior Republican leaders who prevailed on James Baker, chair of the Iraq War Study Group, to release his team’s bi-partisan study three months early, which called for negotiations with Iran and Syria in order to bring peace and stability to the Iraq region. I would add that this is a far cry from imagining that the administration was planning to fake an Iranian attack on American forces.

I am not saying that governments don’t engage in treacherous conspiracies. Certainly the faked tale of a Gulf of Tonkin incident was a conspiracy designed to allow the Johnson administration to begin an all-out war against the Vietnamese. And certainly there was a conspiracy in the Bush/Cheney administration during 2002 and early 2003 to mislead and lie to the Congress and the American people about Saddam Hussein’s alleged links to 9-11 and to global terrorists. But those relatively simple conspiracies actually prove my point—both have been clearly exposed thanks to leaks, turncoats, and good investigative reporting.

What I am saying is that the grander conspiracies being concocted in the more fevered brains of some people on the Left do not hold up under careful and critical inspection. The biggest failings they share are two: first of all, conspiracies as grand as multi-state election thefts via electronic fraud, and the carrying out of a two-front, high-casualty mass terrorist act on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, require the cooperation of such large numbers of people that leaks, turncoats, informants and simple screw-ups are inevitable; and secondly, this administration in particular has shown itself to be phenomenally inept, intellectually stunted, and tactically clueless. The War in Iraq, which was supposed to be a “cakewalk,” has been an unmitigated disaster for Republicans. The War in Afghanistan is a fiasco. The War on Terror, while a success in terms of helping Republicans win seats in Congress in 2002, and Bush to win re-election in 2004, has been a bust longer term. Management of the US economy has been a model of incompetence. So has the grand plan to crush Democrats and create a dominant Republican Party for the next century. The Rovian campaign strategy of lies, smears and dirty tricks, while initially successful, appears to have worn out its effectiveness in just three two-year national election cycles.

None of this would matter except that I think the Left’s embrace of conspiracy-theories has become profoundly damaging to the whole progressive movement. Conspiracy thinking produces a deep cynicism towards positive action and towards the kind of long-term organizing upon which real social and political change depends. When people think that the fix is in, they are not inclined to put time and energy into the hard work of organizing unions, working to get local candidates elected to office, running for positions on party committees, etc. Conspiracy thinking also leads people on the left to completely write off the Democratic Party as a vehicle for progressive change, as the notion that “they” run everything is broadened to include in the term “they” the elected Democrats in the White House and Congress. Democrats may be weenies, but such a conflation of Republicans and Democrats is also self-defeating nonsense, as is the notion that Obama is “just another tool” of the corporate/imperialist power structure. Democrats are not just Republicans by another name, and Obama is not just McCain or Bush with a better tan.

The reality is that if Obama is elected president, and if Democrats end up gaining solid control of Congress, it will be critically important for progressives to organize powerfully to press this new government to do the right things—promptly ending the two wars in the Middle East, taking strong and far-reaching action to tackle global warming, restoring some basic equity to the economic and tax system, making health care affordable and available to all, restoring the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, demanding punishment for those in the current administration who have committed crimes, and so on.

We cannot expect Obama, or the Democrats in Congress who have proven themselves to be such gutless compromisers, to take significant progressive actions on their own. They must be driven by force of public action to do the right thing.

Maybe when this election goes right and isn’t stolen, making Obama the president, and debunking the vote-theft fear-mongers, and when Obama goes on to be inaugurated in January, without being blocked by a military coup, these paranoid conspiracy theories will fade away and people on the Left will start working to make change happen instead of imagining reasons why it can’t or just moaning that “they” are going to destroy us all.

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

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CIA officers could face trial in Britain over torture allegations

Friday, October 31st, 2008

Attorney General to investigate abuse claims

By Robert Verkaik 

Senior CIA officers could be put on trial in Britain after it emerged last night that the Attorney General is to investigate allegations that a British resident held in Guantanamo Bay was brutally tortured, after being arrested and questioned by American forces following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in 2001.

 

The Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has asked Baroness Scotland to consider bringing criminal proceedings against Americans allegedly responsible for the rendition and abuse of Binyam Mohamed, when he was held in prisons in Morocco and Afghanistan.

The development follows criticism of US prosecutors by British judges who have seen secret evidence of torture committed against Mr Mohamed, including allegations his torturers used a razor blade to repeatedly cut his penis. The Attorney’s investigation is expected to include allegations that MI5 colluded in Mr Mohamed’s rendition. Mr Mohamed, 30, an Ethiopian national and British resident, was arrested in Pakistan in 2002, when he was questioned by an MI5 officer.

On Tuesday, Government lawyers wrote to the judges hearing Mr Mohamed’s case against the UK government in the High Court. In the letter they said “the question of possible criminal wrongdoing to which these proceedings has given rise has been referred by the Home Secretary to the Attorney general for consideration as an independent minister of justice”. Baroness Scotland has been sent secret witness statements given to the court and public interest immunity certificates for the proceedings.

Mr Mohamed, 30, accuses MI5 agents of lying about what they knew of CIA plans to transfer him to a prison in north Africa, where he claims he was subjected to horrendous torture. Mr Mohamed, who won asylum in the UK in 1994, has been charged with terrorism-related offences. He awaits a decision on whether he is to face trial at the US naval base. He is officially the last Briton at Guantanamo. Last night his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, said: “This is a welcome recognition that the CIA cannot just go rendering British residents to secret torture chambers without consequences, and British agents cannot take part in US crimes without facing the music. Reprieve will be making submissions to the Attorney General to ensure those involved, from the US, Pakistan, Morocco, Britain, are held responsible.”

Richard Stein, of Leigh Day, representing Mr Mohamed in the High Court proceedings, said: “Ultimately the British Government had little choice once they conceded that a case had been made that Binyam Mohamed was tortured. The Convention Against Torture imposes an obligation on signatory states to investigate torture.”

In August two judges ruled allegations of torture were at least arguable and that MI5 had information relating to Mr Mohamed that was “not only necessary but essential for his defence”.

The judges have read statements and interviews with Mr Mohamed between 28 and 31 July, 2004 when he says he was forced to confess to terrorism. The judges said: “This was after a period of over two-and-a-half years of incommunicado detention during which Binyam Mohamed alleges he was tortured.”

He was first held in Pakistan in 2002, where a British agent interrogated him; he was then sent to Morocco by the CIA and allegedly tortured for 18 months. He was rendered to the secret “Dark Prison” in Afghanistan, where his torture is alleged to have continued. Since September 2004, he has been in Guantanamo Bay.

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McCain Racism, Hypocrisy on Khalidi Issue

Friday, October 31st, 2008

This Is The Lowest McCain Has Sunk Yet

By Juan Cole

The increasingly sleazy John McCain, who once promised to run a clean campaign, has now attacked my friend Rashid Khalidi and attempted to use him against Barack Obama. Khalidi is an American scholar of Palestinian heritage, born in New York and educated at Yale and Oxford, who now teaches at Columbia University. He directed the Middle East Center at the University of Chicago for some time, and he and his family came to know the Obamas at that time. Knowing someone and agreeing with him on everything are not the same thing.

Scott Horton has a fine, informed and intelligent discussion of the issue.

I know it may seem a novel idea to people like McCain and Palin, but it would be worthwhile actually reading Khalidi’s book on the Palestinian struggle for statehood. (I urge bloggers interested in this issue to link to his book, which the American reading public should know).

At the least, read a whole essay Khalidi has written.

Far from being a knee-jerk nationalist, Khalidi has been critical of the decisions of the Palestinian leadership at key junctures in modern history.

McCain’s and Palin’s attacks on Khalidi are frankly racist. He is a distinguished scholar, and the only objectionable thing about him from a rightwing point of view is that he is a Palestinian. There are about 9 million Palestinians in the world (a million or so are Israeli citizens; 3.7 million are stateless and without rights under Israeli control in the West Bank and Gaza; and 4 million are refugees or exiled in the diaspora; there are about 200,000 Palestinian-Americans, and several million Arab-Americans, many living in swing vote states). Khalidi was not, as the schlock rightwing press charges, a spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization. He was an adviser at the Madrid peace talks, but would that not have been, like, a good thing?

Much of the assault on Khalidi comes from the American loony Zionist Right, which quietly supports illegal Zionist colonies in the West Bank and the ethnic cleansing of the remaining Palestinians. They have been tireless advocates of miring the US in wars in Iraq and Iran to ensure that their dreams of ethnic cleansing are unopposed. They are a tiny, cranky but well-funded group that has actively harassed anyone who disagrees with them (at one point, cued by Daniel Pipes, they cyberstalked Khalidi and clogged his email mailbox with spam for weeks at a time). All opinion polling shows that most American Jews are politically liberal, overwhelmingly vote Democrat, and support trading land for peace to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Khalidi is their political ally in any serious peace process, which many have recognized.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has repudiated the “Greater Israel” fantasy that drives the Middle East Forum, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Commentary, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, the Hudson Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and other well-funded sites of far-right thinking on Israel-Palestine that have become, with the rise of the Neoconservatives, highly influential with the US Republican Party. Olmert’s current position is much closer to Khalidi’s than it is to the American ideologues.

That McCain should take his cues from people to the right of the Neoconservatives shows fatal lack of judgment and signals that if he is elected, he will likely pursue policies that are very bad for Israel, forestalling a genuine peace process (which would involve close relations with Palestinians!)

McCain even compared the gathering for Khalidi that Obama attended to a “neo-Nazi” meeting! I mean, really. this is the lowest McCain has sunk yet.

McCain is bringing up Khalidi in order to scare Jewish voters about Obama’s associations, and it is an execrable piece of McCarthyism and in fact much worse than McCarthyism since it is not about ideology but rather has racial overtones. Not allowed to pal around with Arab-Americans, I guess. What other ethnic groups should we not pal around with, from McCain’s point of view? Is there a list? Are some worse than others?

Ironically, as the Huffington Post showed, while John McCain was chairing the International Republican Institute, he gave over $400,000 to Rashid Khalidi’s Center for Palestine Research and Studies for work in the West Bank.

Here is Lou Dobbs letting McCain have it over this piece of hypocrisy.

The rightwing American way of speaking about these issues is bizarre from a Middle Eastern point of view. Lots of real living Israelis have close ties to actually existing Palestinians. There are 12 Palestinian members of the Israeli Knesset, and they have helped keep the Kadima government in power. Here is PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas with current Israeli Prime Minister Tzipi Livni; Livni has repeatedly negotiated with the PLO as foreign minister of Israel. McCain’s entire line of attack assumes that Palestinian equals “bad” and ignores Israel’s and the Bush administration’s support for the PLO against Hamas.

As the Young Turks pointed out, before the ’straight talk express’ became the ‘mealy-mouthed train wreck,’ McCain advocated direct negotiations with Hamas when it was in control of the Palestinian Authority after the 2006 elections.

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‘A Fake Banking History of the United States’

Friday, October 31st, 2008

By Thomas J. DiLorenzo |

Ask yourself this question: was the housing price bubble, which has burst, caused by (a) a Fed policy of too much liquidity, which caused artificially low interest rates, which in turn caused a great deal of malinvestment, or (b) a Fed policy of too little liquidity which caused high interest rates and a credit-starved economy? If you chose answer b, congratulations, you may have a future as a celebrated author, historian, and Wall Street Journal commentator.

Answer b is a theme of a truly ridiculous article by John Steele Gordon in the October 10 issue of the Wall Street Journal online entitled “A Short Banking History of the United States.” The article is an attempt to defend the Fed, its founding father, Alexander Hamilton, and the regime that it finances. (Gordon is the author of a book entitled Hamilton’s Blessing which sings the praises of a large public debt, something that Hamilton himself called a “public blessing.”)

Rather than faulting the Fed for creating yet another boom-and-bust cycle, Gordon blames the current economic debacle on “the baleful influence of Thomas Jefferson.” Jefferson was the foremost opponent of a bank capitalized with tax dollars and operated by politicians and their appointees from the nation’s capital — Hamilton’s Bank of the United States (BUS), a precursor of the Fed. Thus, despite the fact that the real blame for the current economic crisis lies squarely in the lap of the Fed and its ideological underpinnings — particularly the legends and myths surrounding Hamilton — Gordon attempts to convince us that opposition to politicized, centralized banking is the real problem. Anyone who believes this could easily be persuaded that up is down, white is black, and day is night. The purpose of the Fed, according to Gordon, is to serve as a sort of a monetary benevolent despot: “To guard the money supply … regulating the economy thereby.”

Right-wing statists like Gordon, like left-wing statists, have adopted the custom of smearing Jefferson as a slave owner not so much because they are appalled that he owned slaves, but because their objective is to denigrate his laissez-faire/limited-government political philosophy. Gordon includes the Jefferson slavery smear in his article, but fails to mention that his hero Hamilton also owned “house slaves,” which were brought into his marriage by his wife Eliza; he once purchased six slaves at an auction; and he supported the return of runaway slaves to their “owners” under the Fugitive Slave Clause of the original Constitution.

Indeed, nearly all of the “first families” of the New York City of Hamilton’s time — his main social and political circle — were slave owners. As Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow has written, during Hamilton’s time, “New York City, in particular, was identified with slavery … and was linked [economically] through its sugar refineries in the West Indies” (where Hamilton was born and raised). By the late 1790s slaves were “regarded as status symbols” by the wealthiest New York families.

Gordon spreads several other falsehoods about Jefferson in the leading paragraphs of his article. This in itself is telling, for it shows that court historians like John Steele Gordon fully understand the importance of Hamilton’s statist political philosophy in propping up the Fed and the regime that it finances. Gordon claims that Jefferson, a lifelong businessman, “hated commerce,” “hated banks,” and “may not have understood the concept of central banking.” He also argues that Hamilton, by contrast, had a “profound understanding of markets” because he worked as a bookkeeper for British slave-owning sugar-plantation operators and exporters as a teenager on the Caribbean island of St. Croix. This is nonsense on stilts, as the philosopher Jeremy Bentham is supposed to have said with regard to another spurious claim.

What Jefferson opposed was Hamilton’s mercantilist policies of government-controlled banking, corporate welfare, protectionist tariffs, heavy excise taxation, excessive public debt, and other interventions. Unlike Hamilton, Jefferson had read and understood Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and his Theory of Moral Sentiments, as well as the work of David Ricardo, Jean-Baptiste Say (who Jefferson tried to get to join the faculty of the University of Virginia), Richard Cantillon, and other economic theorists of that era. Hamilton was ignorant of or ignored all of this. His major intellectual influence was a propagandist for the British mercantilist regime named Sir James Steuart.

As Murray Rothbard wrote in an article entitled “A Future of Peace and Capitalism,”

Jefferson was very precisely in favor of laissez-faire, or free-market, capitalism. And that was the real argument between [Hamilton and Jefferson]. It wasn’t really that Jefferson was against factories or industries per se; what he was against was coerced [economic] development, that is, taxing the farmers through tariffs and subsidies to build up industry artificially, which was essentially the Hamilton program. Jefferson … was a very learned person. He read Adam Smith, he read Ricardo, he was very familiar with laissez-faire classical economics. And so his economic program … was a very sophisticated application of classical economics to the American scene … classicists were also against tariffs, subsidies, and coerced economic development…. The Jeffersonian wing of the founding fathers was essentially free-market, laissez-faire capitalists.

Compared to Jefferson, Hamilton was an economic ignoramus. His reputation as some kind of financial genius has been greatly exaggerated and fabricated, as the great late-nineteenth-century Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner wrote in his 1905 biography of Hamilton. In his Report on Manufacturers, for example, Hamilton presented the cockeyed notion that international competition would cause higher prices and protectionism would cause lower prices by causing domestic producers to compete more vigorously with each other. History had proven this to be an absurd idea long before Hamilton’s time.

Hamilton also condemned transportation costs, calling them “an evil which ought to be minimized” through protectionism. Of course, transportation costs also affect interstate trade, but Hamilton never voiced his opposition to them in that context. Hamilton was such a mercantilist that he even argued in favor of “a monopoly of the domestic market” by banning all imports altogether. It is little wonder that William Graham Sumner referred to Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures as a mass of economic confusion, just the opposite of a “profound and practical understanding of markets.”

Jefferson was not the only prominent opponent of Hamilton’s scheme to establish a bank operated by politicians out of the nation’s capital. James Madison also opposed the First Bank of the United States (BUS). The Virginia Senator John Taylor was as learned on the subject of political economy as Jefferson was, and immediately recognized the danger of imitating the Bank of England as a financier of mercantilist subsidies. “What was it that drove our forefathers to this country?” he asked. “Was it not the ecclesiastical corps and perpetual monopolies of England and Scotland? Shall we suffer the same evils in this country?” Hamilton’s answer would have been “why yes, we shall, for it is the surest route to accumulate power and wealth for myself and my fellow Federalists.” As Gordon wrote, “Hamilton wanted to establish a central bank modeled on the Bank of England.”

John Steele Gordon’s “short history” of banking is completely filled with falsehoods. Throughout his article, he blames Jefferson’s opposition to central banking for economic problems that were in fact created by Hamilton’s Bank of the United States.

As Murray Rothbard wrote in A History of Money and Banking in the United States (p. 69), as soon as Hamilton’s bank was established it

promptly fulfilled its inflationary potential by issuing millions of dollars in paper money and demand deposits, pyramiding on top of $2 million in specie. The Bank … invested heavily in loans to the United States government…. The result of the outpouring of credit and paper money by the new bank of the United States was … in increase [in prices] of 72 percent [from 1791–1796].

The BUS charter was not renewed after its first twenty years. Gordon blames Jefferson for this, but the above-mentioned economic instability that was caused by the BUS surely played a role. (And I’m sure Jefferson would have been proud to accept the credit for the demise of the BUS.) The BUS was revived after the War of 1812 (in 1817) and it immediately “ran into grave difficulties through mismanagement, speculation, and fraud,” wrote James J. Kilpatrick in his book, The Sovereign States. Consequently, “a wave of hostility toward the Bank of the United States swept the country,” which eventually led to President Andrew Jackson’s veto of the bank rechartering bill.

In 1817 the BUS quickly lent $23 million with a specie reserve of only $2.3 million. This flood of cheap credit created a brief economic boom, and then the inevitable bust, or depression, known at the time as the Panic of 1819. As Murray Rothbard wrote in The Panic of 1819, personal bankruptcies abounded, especially among farmers who had overextended themselves thanks to the BUS’s cheap credit; and there was for the first time large-scale unemployment in American cities, with manufacturing employment in Philadelphia falling from 9,700 employed persons in 1815 to only 2,100 in 1819. This was all Jefferson’s fault, says John Steele Gordon.

Another one of Gordon’s false claims is that “The Civil War ended … monetary chaos when Congress passed the National Bank Act,” which would become the state’s monopolistic monetary regime until the creation of the Fed in 1913. In reality, the so-called Independent Treasury System that existed from the early 1840s to 1863 was arguably the most stable monetary system in US history. Modern economic scholars have evaluated the Lincoln regime’s National Currency Acts and have arrived at the opposite conclusion of Gordon’s. In an article entitled “Money versus Credit Rationing: Evidence for the National Banking Era, 1880–1914″ (in Claudia Goldin, ed., Strategic Factors in Nineteenth-Century American Economic Growth) Michael Bordo, Anna Schwartz, and Peter Rappaport concluded that this Hamiltonian system “was characterized by monetary and cyclical instability, four banking panics, frequent stock market crashes, and other financial disturbances.”

Gordon notes that “inflation took off in the 1960s” but does not blame the actual cause of the inflation — the Fed and its legalized counterfeiting operations. He concludes by praising the regime’s current plans to nationalize the financial markets by assuming stock ownership in banks and appointing the US Treasury secretary as the nation’s first financial dictator. He thinks this will finally, at long last, achieve Hamilton’s dream of a “unified and coherent regulatory system free of undue political influence.”

Of course, no government institution in the history of the world has ever been free of political influence, due or undue. This is perhaps Gordon’s most spectacularly stupid remark.

“Unified” or centralized regulation of industry has long been a goal of statists who favor regulatory dictatorship as opposed to a governmental regime that delegates “too much” regulatory power. Gordon himself bemoans the “conflicting” regulations on the banking industry that have been imposed by the Fed, and the FDIC, FSLIC, SEC, and other federal regulators.

The system of financial regulatory dictatorship that Gordon praises, and which is about to be forced down the throats of the American public, has been tried before in other countries. During one of its own periodic financial crises, Italian government officials complained bitterly, as Gordon does, of regulation that has been “disorganic” and “case by case, as the need arises.” The Italian regime altered its regulatory system so that it could pursue “certain fixed objectives,” just as Gordon argues for a “unified and coherent regulatory system.” This highly centralized or even dictatorial regulatory system, the Italians argued, would supposedly “introduce order in the economic field” and achieve the goal of “unity of aim” with regard to government regulation of industry.

All of the words in quotation marks in the preceding paragraph, except for the last ones, are the words of Benito Mussolini. The “unity of aim” phrase was from Mussolini apologist/propagandist Fausto Pitigliani. There is, after all, a very keen similarity between Hamiltonian mercantilism — or an economy directed and controlled by government, supposedly “in the public interest” but in reality for the benefit of a privileged few — and the economic fascism of Italy (and Germany) of the 1920s and ’30s.

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The Triumph of Ignorance: How Morons Succeed in U.S. Politics

Friday, October 31st, 2008

Obama has a lot to offer, but until our education system is fixed or religious fundamentalism withers, anti-intellectuals will flaunt their ignorance.

How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the United States come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity that has permitted mankind’s closest living relative to spend two terms as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and other such gibbering numbskulls get to where they are? How could Republican rallies in 2008 be drowned out by screaming ignoramuses insisting that Barack Obama is a Muslim and a terrorist?

Like most people on this side of the Atlantic, I have spent my adult life mystified by American politics. The United States has the world’s best universities and attracts the world’s finest minds. It dominates discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed nations (with the possible exception of Australia), learning is a grave political disadvantage.

Follow up:

There have been exceptions over the past century: Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy and Clinton tempered their intellectualism with the common touch and survived; but Adlai Stevenson, Al Gore and John Kerry were successfully tarred by their opponents as members of a cerebral elite (as if this were not a qualification for the presidency). Perhaps the defining moment in the collapse of intelligent politics was Ronald Reagan’s response to Jimmy Carter during the 1980 presidential debate. Carter — stumbling a little, using long words — carefully enumerated the benefits of national health insurance. Reagan smiled and said, “There you go again.” His own health program would have appalled most Americans, had he explained it as carefully as Carter had done, but he had found a formula for avoiding tough political issues and making his opponents look like wonks.

It wasn’t always like this. The founding fathers of the republic — men like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton — were among the greatest thinkers of their age. They felt no need to make a secret of it. How did the project they launched degenerate into George W. Bush and Sarah Palin?

On one level, this is easy to answer: Ignorant politicians are elected by ignorant people. U.S. education, like the U.S. health system, is notorious for its failures. In the most powerful nation on Earth, 1 adult in 5 believes the sun revolves around the Earth; only 26 percent accept that evolution takes place by means of natural selection; two-thirds of young adults are unable to find Iraq on a map; two-thirds of U.S. voters cannot name the three branches of government; and the math skills of 15-year-olds in the United States are ranked 24th out of the 29 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

But this merely extends the mystery: How did so many U.S. citizens become so dumb and so suspicious of intelligence? Susan Jacoby’s book The Age of American Unreason provides the fullest explanation I have read so far. She shows that the degradation of U.S. politics results from a series of interlocking tragedies.

One theme is both familiar and clear: Religion — in particular fundamentalist religion — makes you stupid. The United States is the only rich country in which Christian fundamentalism is vast and growing.

Jacoby shows that there was once a certain logic to its anti-rationalism. During the first few decades after the publication of Origin of Species, for example, Americans had good reason to reject the theory of natural selection and to treat public intellectuals with suspicion. From the beginning, Darwin’s theory was mixed up in the United States with the brutal philosophy — now known as Social Darwinism — of the British writer Herbert Spencer. Spencer’s doctrine, promoted in the popular press with the help of funding from Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Thomas Edison, suggested that millionaires stood at the top of a scala natura established by evolution. By preventing unfit people from being weeded out, government intervention weakened the nation, according to the doctrine; gross economic inequalities were both justifiable and necessary.

Darwinism, in other words, became indistinguishable to the public from the most bestial form of laissez-faire economics. Many Christians responded with revulsion. It is profoundly ironic that the doctrine rejected a century ago by such prominent fundamentalists as William Jennings Bryan is now central to the economic thinking of the Christian Right. Modern fundamentalists reject the science of Darwinian evolution and accept the pseudoscience of Social Darwinism.

But there were other, more powerful reasons for the intellectual isolation of the fundamentalists. The United States is peculiar in devolving the control of education to local authorities. Teaching in the Southern states was dominated by the views of an ignorant aristocracy of planters, and a great educational gulf opened up. “In the South,” Jacoby writes, “what can only be described as an intellectual blockade was imposed in order to keep out any ideas that might threaten the social order.”

The Southern Baptist Convention, now the biggest Protestant denomination in the United States, was to slavery and segregation what the Dutch Reformed Church was to apartheid in South Africa. It has done more than any other force to keep the South stupid. In the 1960s it tried to stave off desegregation by establishing a system of private Christian schools and universities. A student can now progress from kindergarten to a higher degree without any exposure to secular teaching. Southern Baptist beliefs pass intact through the public school system as well. A survey by researchers at the University of Texas in 1998 found that 1 in 4 of the state’s public school biology teachers believed that humans and dinosaurs lived on Earth at the same time.

This tragedy has been assisted by the American fetishization of self-education. Though he greatly regretted his lack of formal teaching, Abraham Lincoln’s career is repeatedly cited as evidence that good education, provided by the state, is unnecessary; all that is required to succeed is determination and rugged individualism. This might have served people well when genuine self-education movements, like the one built around the Little Blue Books in the first half of the 20th century, were in vogue. In the age of infotainment, it is a recipe for confusion.

Besides fundamentalist religion, perhaps the most potent reason why intellectuals struggle in elections is that intellectualism has been equated with subversion. The brief flirtation of some thinkers with communism a long time ago has been used to create an impression in the public mind that all intellectuals are communists. Almost every day, men like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly rage against the “liberal elites” destroying America.

The specter of pointy-headed alien subversives was crucial to the elections of Reagan and Bush. A genuine intellectual elite — like the neocons (some of them former communists) surrounding Bush — has managed to pitch the political conflict as a battle between ordinary Americans and an overeducated pinko establishment. Any attempt to challenge the ideas of the right-wing elite has been successfully branded as elitism.

Obama has a good deal to offer America, but none of this will come to an end if he wins. Until the great failures of the U.S. education system are reversed or religious fundamentalism withers, there will be political opportunities for people, like Bush and Palin, who flaunt their ignorance.

George Monbiot

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