The Digital Dispatch

From NOEBIE.net

Politics

Benghazi: The Real Scandal

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Last week, I posted an update on Facebook noting that Congressional critics and the news media are fundamentally asking the wrong questions about Benghazi. Though it is obvious that the GOP’s focus on the “scandal” represents the worst sort of partisan opportunism – there is, I believe, another story here. It’s not a story about security at the compound, or the military response to the attacks, or what may have been said on television afterward. It’s a story about our government’s complicity to (and culpability for) the attacks themselves.

There is an excellent essay out today from Bill Van Auken that unpacks the situation in great detail.

In its intervention in Libya, Washington utilized Al Qaeda-linked fighters as a proxy ground force in the war to topple the secular regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, arming and advising them and using them to follow up the massive US-NATO bombing campaign. Christopher Stevens was very much the point man in this relationship, having carefully studied the Islamist opponents of Gaddafi before the launching of the war for regime-change. He was deployed in April 2011 to Benghazi, where he coordinated the arming, funding and training of the so-called rebels, elements previously denounced by the US as terrorists and, in some cases, abducted, imprisoned and tortured by the CIA.

So all of the reported “confusion” within the State Department and the Intelligence Community in the wake of the attacks is complete and utter nonsense, as is the portrayal of their interactions as simple bureaucratic interagency bickering. They knew from the very beginning what had happened – that their own assets were involved. The purpose of all the frantic scrambling and deception after the fact was to conceal our government’s relationships with their supposed Al-Qaeda terrorist enemies. There is simply no other way it all makes sense.

The circus sideshow being orchestrated by the GOP is not merely cynical political maneuvering. It misses the point. It helps to conceal from public view the true nature of the events at Benghazi, and ensures that there will be no discussion of the more serious and important issues involved.

READ MORE: Benghazi and the deepening crisis of the Obama administration – WSWS.

May Day Joint Statement

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The first of May is a moment for us to remember the Chicago Haymarket Martyrs of 127 years ago. These Chicago anarchists helped to lead the major battle of the day, not only for the 8 Hour Day, but also for social liberation.

Chicago’s Four Star Anarchists and several other allied groups have issued a joint statement titled Remembering the Past, Fighting for Tomorrow. It includes a short history of May Day, an examination of present conditions, a positive vision for our world and a call to action.

I commend it to you as appropriate for this May Day, 2013. Click here to read it.

Solidarity!

★★★

This Is No Time For Austerity

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Yesterday 350 prominent economists issued a statement urging our lawmakers and the Obama Administration to focus on jobs and economic growth, not the budget deficit. I suspect that their plea will be largely ignored, unless we, the people, take responsibility for our own future and rise up in opposition to austerity.

Here is part of what the economists wrote.

The U.S. economy, once in free-fall toward a new depression, has begun to recover. But we are still mired in a prolonged slump marked by mass unemployment, rising poverty, and declining wages. And the fragile recovery is threatened by obsessive concern with cutting deficits that has infected both parties.

As even Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke recognizes, it is long term unemployment, not excessive deficits or debt, that is now inflicting the greatest human toll and economic damage. Polls show that voters agree joblessness and a bad economy are much higher priorities than deficits.

Yet too many in Washington are fixated on cutting public spending to balance the budget, not on how to put people back to work and get our economy going. There is no theory of economics that explains how we can deflate our way to recovery. Businesses are not basing investment decisions on how much Congress cuts the debt in 2023. As Great Britain, Ireland, Spain and Greece have shown, inflicting austerity on a weak economy leads to deeper recession, rising unemployment and increasing misery.

Indeed, reports this morning indicate that a second recession has already hit the Eurozone.

Please share this information widely. I’ll continue to post more on what we’re facing (and how to resist) in the coming days and weeks. Please comment or email with your own ideas and links to share as well.

Read the Economists’ Full Statement: Jobs and Growth, Not Austerity – Campaign for America’s Future.

P.S. The image above depicts firefighters in protest over budget cuts at Thessalonika, Greece on September 8th, 2012.

Come Home America

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“From secrecy and deception in high places, come home America. From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation, come home America. From the entrenchment of special privilege and tax favoritism, from the waste of idle hands to the joy of useful labor, from the prejudice based upon race and sex, from the loneliness of the aging poor and the despair of the neglected sick, come home America. Come home to affirmation that we have a dream, come home to the conviction that we can move our country forward, come home to the belief that we can seek a newer world, and let us be joyful in the hoped homecoming for this land is your land, this land is my land…this land was made for you and me.”

George S. McGovern

Acceptance Speech at the Democratic National Convention on July 14, 1972

Why I’ll Vote Green in 2012

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Having vowed that I would not vote for President Obama again after he went back on his word and signed the NDAA, I have been a man without a party for much of the year. I’ve examined all of the candidates who are on the ballot here in Illinois (and several who are not). After months of thoughtful and prayerful consideration, I’ll be voting for the Green Party ticket of Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala on November 6th.

Here’s why.

The Greens’ platform, which focuses on democracy, social justice and sustainability, reflects my deepest values and concerns. It does that better than any other party on the ballot in Illinois. Also, the Greens have a record, both in the United States and worldwide, of putting these values into action when elected. I agree with what they propose, and I trust them to hold with it once in office.

The Greens are here to stay. The Republicans and Democrats do their best to keep a lock on ballot access throughout the United States. As a result, it is difficult for other parties (whether on the left or the right) to maintain a national presence over time. The U.S. Greens have continued to grow since first winning local races in Wisconsin back in 1986. They have contested the Presidency since 1996, and as a voluntary confederacy of state parties, they continue to build from the ground up. It seems to me that this is the only way to effectively challenge the powers that be over the long term.

The Greens are worldwide. The most serious problems we face in this age are not peculiar to the Unites States. In fact, I believe that our very existence as a species on this planet depends on organizing and working in solidarity internationally. The Greens are well established in Europe and Canada, and are gaining a foothold in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and throughout the Americas. Their call to “think globally and act locally” seems a practical approach to finding and implementing solutions.

My vote for the Greens can make a difference. Michael Harrington once remarked that the Democratic Party is “the left wing of reality” in the United States. Forty years later, one might well say the same thing of the Greens. I have no illusions that Stein will be elected President in 2012, but I do believe that helping the Green Party reach the threshold that offers them likely ballot access in future elections is the one cause where my vote will actually make a difference.

I’ve not yet decided to formally join the Green Party of Illinois. I plan to continue to learn more about their activities and organization over the coming months, as I’m doing with a lot of leftist and left-leaning groups at this point. I’d also like to see where leadership emerges and consensus develops on the left as the global political and economic crisis unfolds.

I know that my decision to cast my vote for the Greens this year will draw some criticism, particularly from my erstwhile colleagues in the Democratic Party, who will say that a vote for anyone other than President Obama is, in effect, a vote for Romney. To them, I simply reply that if Obama can’t win Illinois without my vote, then his candidacy is already doomed.

I also know quite a few Illinois Socialists who are still stinging from the Green Party’s challenge to their ballot petitions this year, and who may be sore at me for giving the Greens my support. Still other friends believe that participating in the electoral process at all only serves to support a decadent system that is at the root of most of our troubles to begin with. All I can say in response is that old habits die hard. I just can’t fathom staying away from the polls, or casting a write-in vote that won’t be counted.

A Fellow Worker that I once knew was fond of musing “If all of the people who say they wish there was a viable alternative would vote for an alternative, it would be viable.” My conscience tells me to put that sentiment into practice this year.

Barry Commoner and the Citizens Party

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Jeff Faux writes at The American Prospect:

“Barry Commoner ran for president in 1980 on the ticket of the now-defunct Citizens Party, an episode few on the left remember and the obituaries dismissed as a quirky personal misadventure. It was more than that. The Citizens Party was an effort to respond to the early signals that the Democratic Party was on the way to becoming morally and intellectually bankrupt. Three decades later, that ugly process is almost complete.”

Read More: Barry Commoner and the Dream of a Liberal Third Party.

Footnote: I’m proud to say that I voted for Commoner that year. It was one of those rare times that I didn’t feel I was voting for the lesser of two evils.

Democratic Left Fall 2012 Issue

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The Fall 2012 Issue of Democratic Left, the quarterly publication of the Democratic Socialists of America, is now available for download and reading online.

Democratic Left, Fall 2012 (PDF Version)

Democratic Left, Summer 2012 (Online Viewing Table of Contents)

In This Issue

  • Labor in the Labyrinth – by Chris Maisano
  • Can the Unions Survive? Can the Left Have a Voice? – by Nelson Lichtenstein
  • Triple Jeopardy: Women Lose Public Sector Services, Jobs, and Union Rights – by Mimi Abramovitz
  • We Can Do Better: Organizing for Single-Payer in the Age of ACA – by Michael Lighty
  • Book Review, Bread and Roses – or Dust and Ashes? John Nichols, Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, From Madison to Wall Street – reviewed by Maurice Isserman
  • Book Review, The Gripes of Wrath: Frank Bardacke, Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers – reviewed by Duane E. Campbell
  • “Democracy Endangered: DSA’s Strategy for the 2012 Elections and Beyond” – by The National Political Committee of Democratic Socialists of America