2011.09.08 — Luck Finished & a Fushigi*

Finished today. Began 2011.08.20.

★★★★☆

Joan Barfoot.
Luck.
Toronto: Vintage Canada. ISBN: 978-0-676-97701-1 (0-676-97701-4).

Barfoot likes to play with how the obvious in people can be so wrong. And she does this very well, again, in Luck, where she adds the ambivalence of luck, especially that of perceived luck, both good and bad.

The stage upon which Barfoot's characters explore luck is in the extended quasi-family dynamics of three disparate women living together who find their relatively impersonal work-based relationship instantly and confusingly personalized by the sudden death of Nora's middle-aged husband.

I thoroughly enjoyed how Barfoot introduces Nora with an early morning scream at her discovery that the husband she had laid down with the night before has become in their sleep a corpse. She is a successful mixed media graphic artist and Barfoot's nuance and detail make her very interesting. But as day one of the post-mortem evolves Barfoot quietly and slowly expands the depths and complexity of the other two characters to the point that Nora eventually becomes the least interesting of the three characters.

The story is told primarily through Nora, but the other two get to tell their tales too until they are all fully fleshed out. Sophie, the personal assistant who was traumatized by the failure of her good intentions to change or even ameliorate evil in the world and is in hiding inside Nora's household from that and her own do-gooder hypocrisy. There is Beth, the beautiful and pliable model who appears to the other two as an oddly vain and empty-minded ex-beauty queen with nothing of interest to offer them except to be the butt of their condescension and feigned tolerance for her compulsive need to push on them her complex health teas and other infusions.

The exploration of luck begins with how each of them have felt lucky: Nora for having found Phil and Beth and Sophie; Sophie for having found Phil and Nora; and Beth for having been found by Nora. But it is an ambivalent sort of luck because it has trapped them all in a pattern of relative unchanging — I was going to write, "comfort" but that's not quite right. Undemanding familiarity, perhaps, because their interpersonal demands are not of family, not of work mates, not of school mates. Oddly, they relate to each other from the strict requirements of their own self-interests which have been unthreatened by the others' own sell pre-occupations.

And with the ostensible bad luck of Phil dying young all that changes. The barriers of self-interest are breached in ways that are unexpected to all women and disorienting, The exploration is at times delightful and sad. Barfoot is unafraid to present characters who are seriously flawed and undoubtedly unlikable, but with such sympathy that I cared to see how each of them survived. The characters are complex enough that their interpersonal and psychological devolutions are not predictable. And the ending is a very pleasant surprise of character development.

So, with all that, and even though I thoroughly enjoyed the book I am still hesitant to give this five stars because it didn't quite blow me away, hence my having given it …

★★★★☆.

But, as luck would have it, Luck participated in two small fushigis. The first was so small and odd that I wasn't going to blog it, but after the second one popped up blogging them both became worthwhile.

Earlier this week I flipped through my cable company's free video on demand movie listings with the hope of finding a diverting comedy. Nothing stood out. But out of desperation I looked at the synopsis of the unknown to me Prada to Nada, which by its title was likely to be at least an attempt at comedy. I became a bit more interested when I saw that it was based on Jane Austen's great novel Sense and Sensibility. Sometimes, if the writing is good, such transformations can be very entertaining, like 10 Things I Hate About You which was a remake of The Taming of the Shrew.

It turns out that the IMDb reviewers have given Prada a cumulative 4.8 rating. Yup, that's about what I'd give it, too. However, the following day there occurred a curious overlapping between the movie and Luck. In Prada the flower The Bird of Paradise had a role in helping bridge the gap between the once rich Orange County girl and her circumstance of poverty in East LA. The Bird of Paradise is just seeable in the picture above. Below is another, picture:

So, the next day after having learned something about a flower about which I know nothing and have barely heard of, I read the following:

Then when storytelling time was over, she watched as her mysterious uncle, that flamboyant, raving bird of paradise, stepped up to the front (156).

When was the last time you read a book

character described as a 'raving bird of paradise'? So, as you can see this is an odd fushigi because I didn't know until the movie about a flower named after a bird, and within 48 hours I get two references to it.

But what did give me the impetus this fushigi began when I read:

The music Nora and Sophie finally chose yesterday is no Tom after all, but a Leonard — a Cohen song they agreed would suit all of them. Nora and Sophie and Philip. "It's very long," Sophie said, "but beautiful."

"Yes."

"it's not exactly funeral music."

"No."

Now, after a service in which music must constitute only the most minor shock and surprise, the opening bars of Dance Me to the End of Love commence their grim lilt (232-3).

Those were amongst the last words I read before leaving for work on the morning of September 7, 2011. When I started my car to go to work, I hear the last three or four words of Tom Power, the CBC-R2 morning host, before he spun up … yup, you guessed it, 'Dance me to the End of Love.'

Yup, I find that puzzling too. And I always love music fushigis.

2011.09.01 — Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media: Finished 2011.06.18

Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky.
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.
New York. Pantheon Books, 2002.
Pages: 480. ISBN: 978-0-375-71449-8.

Note: The cover shown is to the 1988 edition, 412 pages: ISBN 0-679-72034-0.

Begun 2011.04; finished 2011.06.17.

★★★★★

It's been many weeks, now, since I finished Manufacturing and started this review. In that time I have been wrestling with how to verbalize the feelings that this book has evoked. Sadly, the best description I can give is that it is easily and by far the most disturbing book I have ever read. Writing and re-writing that sentence, with its rather flaccid sentiment took me three days. My brain seems to have been hit hard with the breadth and depth of my state sanctioned and media promulgated ignorance and disinformation. But it has been stunned into gibber-jabber at economic actions that can only be called evil but have been either ignored or sanitized by our media.

I am disappointed and surprised that my having read eight of Chomsky's 150+ books a total of 13 times before tackling Manufacturing did not prepare me against being overwhelmed by the calm, incisive, and persuasive descriptions of both the immeasurable brutality of American foreign policy and the vile complicity of the press. Yes, I knew it was bad — I had come to that conclusion on my own long before I discovered NC.

When I began reading Manufacturing I proceeded with the naïve thought that I'd flag those bits that resonated with me in order to blog at least some of them. And at first that is exactly what did: many of the early pages are purpled with stickies, and it was at that time that it was with excitement, perhaps even zeal, that I blogged those two oh so perfect citations.

But I flagged fewer and fewer pages because I began to realize that what I was reading could not be effectively snipped into even longish quotations. The book is only properly read as a wholeness because every piece of writing supports Herman's and Chomsky's arguments: removing words here and there weakened them because isolated they seem too unbelievable. Before this book I actually thought I understood Chomsky when he's commented that the modern media's need for concision is an extremely effective tool to delimit argument and promote ignorance within the acceptable and the delimited known. And I now understand why he has such vehemence whenever he refutes anyone trying in anyway to mollify in even the tiniest degree the evil that is America's actions in South Vietnam.

Reading Manufacturing created an epiphany. I feel I have been ripped from the flawed world that I thought I had some understanding of and dropped into the fetid mire of an alternative universe.

In response to a comment I made about Manufacturing a co-worker stated the trope about the important role the media played in shortening the Vietnam War. His particular point was of the brutal war photography of a famous photographer (whose name I've now forgotten) who achieved much acclaim for the brutal photographs he took. I found myself unable to even open my mouth to contradict him his belief about the media's role in ending that war. How could I begin to re-articulate the entire text of Manufacturing, which would be the minimum required to exorcise that mystification? It would require both an acceptance of the scale of America's Machiavellian brutality that is all but unimaginable and that that brutality was not only knowingly condoned but significantly abetted by just about all of the news journals and their expert commentators and propagandizing editing and editorializing.

Actually, reading just Manufacturing would likely not be enough, because without additional awareness outside of it and Chomsky Consent is probably unbelievable despite the hundreds of references and extended citations from everyone from Kissenger to President Carter. The scale of the deliberate and utter ruthless annihilation of democracy in Vietnam and Cambodia for the direct and clearly delineated and articulated, but unreported, purposes of American world hegemony is incredulous and sickening. And Vietnam cannot be dismissed as a reporting gaff because the improper reporting of American hegemony continued in South and Latin America. Perhaps most tellingly with how the media reported the rape, murder and mutilation of nine American church women who had left America to provide aide to those being killed by American backed, trained and financed henchmen.

As I mentioned, I was originally going to site lots of things. But after many weeks of struggle, I've decided to focus on why I've used the words 'evil' and 'sickening' to describe the government of America's behaviour in Vietnam and the media's complicity. To set that up, here's an excerpt that perhaps gives a hint of the scale of America's destruction of South Vietnam while they were reportedly 'saving' it:

… [T]here was little [media] reaction when B-52 raids in "the populous [Mekong] delta" were reported in 1965, with unknown numbers of civilian casualties and hordes of refugees fleeing to government-controlled areas "because they could no longer bear the continuous bombings."⁷² The victims fell under the category of "the unfortunate accidental loss of life incurred by the efforts of American military forces to help the South Vietnamese repel the incursion of North Vietnam and its partisans," as explained by Sidney Hook while condemning Bertrand Russell because

he "plays up" these meritorious actions "as deliberate American atrocities."⁷³…

Not only was there no reaction to these and subsequent atrocities, but there was also no attempt to place them in the context of what had immediately preceded — that is, to make them intelligible. Indeed, there was little awareness of the background, because the media were so closely wedded to U.S. government goals and perceptions that they never sought to learn the facts. As the war progressed, ample evidence became available from U.S. government sources to explain why the United States had been forced to resort to violence in "the populous delta," as elsewhere, as we described in the preceding section. But such materials, inconsistent with the preferred image of the United States defending South Vietnam from Communist terror and aggression, had little impact on news reporting or commentary, except for occasional illustration of the difficulties faced by the United States in pursuing its noble cause.

The reason for the U.S. resort to violence was overwhelmingly clear by the time of the outright U.S. invasion in 1965, and would have been no less clear before had any serious effort been made to determine the facts. As noted above, the United States was compelled by the political and social successes of the southern Viet Minh (NLF, "Viet Cong") to shift the struggle away from the political arena, where it was weak, to the arena of violence, where it was strong, a typical response to a classic dilemma.

It is in this context that we can understand the resort to B-52 raids in "the populous delta" and elsewhere to destroy the civilian base of the indigenous enemy, expanding the failed efforts of the strategic-hamlet program and earlier terror. The U.S. media continued to report the subsequent atrocities, but from the standpoint of the aggressors. One had to turn to the foreign press to find reports from zones held by the South Vietnamese enemy — for example, those of the pro-Western correspondent Katsuichi Honda, who reported in the Japanese press in the fall of 1967 from the Mekong Delta, describing attacks against undefended villages by gunboats in the Mekong River and helicopter gunships "firing away at random at farmhouses," "using the farmers for targets as if in a hunting mood": "They are hunting Asians. . . . This whimsical firing would explain the reason why the surgical wards in every hospital in the towns of the Mekong delta were full of wounded." His reports were available only to readers of antiwar literature, not the "objective" media, which had no interest in how the war might appear from the standpoint of the Vietnamese victims of the attack by the United States and the local forces it established.⁷⁴

The media continued to observe and discuss atrocities blandly, not considering them as controversial or as raising any moral issue — in fact, not regarding them as atrocities at all, although we detect no such reserve with regard to the violence of official enemies. The respected columnist Joseph Harsch describes the frustrations of an American pilot dropping bombs "into a leafy jungle" with "no visible result" and without "the satisfaction of knowing what he achieved":

A hit on a big hydroelectric dam is another matter. There is a huge explosion visible from anywhere above. The dam can be seen to fall. The water can be seen to pour through the breach and drown out huge areas of farm land, and villages, in its path. The pilot who takes out a hydroelectric dam gets back home with a feeling of accomplishment. Novels are written and films are made of such exploits. . . . The bombing which takes out the dam will flood villages, drown people, destroy crops, and knock out some electric power. . . . Bombing the dam would hurt people.⁷⁵

Nevertheless, it is better to bomb trucks, he concludes, although there would plainly be no moral barrier to the much more satisfying alternative rejected on tactical grounds.

In the South, bombing of dikes and virtually limitless destruction was an uncontroversial tactic, as in the Batangan Peninsula, where 12,000 peasants (including, it appears, the remnants of the My Lai massacre) were forced from their homes in an American ground sweep in January 1969 and shipped off to a waterless camp near Quang Ngai over which floated a banner saying: "We thank you for liberating us from Communist terror." The Times reported that the refugees had lived "in caves and bunkers for many months" because "heavy American bombing and artillery and naval shelling" had destroyed their homes, as well as a dike that was "blasted by American jets to deprive the North Vietnamese [sic] of a food supply." It was left unrepaired, so that two years later "the salt water of the South China Sea continues to submerge the fields where rice once grew." The reason, according to an American official, is that the people "were written off as communists," and for the same reason the region was left in ruins: "the hills that overlook the flooded paddies, once scattered with huts, are ... filled with bomb fragments, mines and unexploded artillery shells," and "B-52 craters nearly 20 feet deep pock the hills."⁷⁶

Bombing of dikes in the North, occasionally reported,⁷⁷ was controversial, as was the bombing of North Vietnam generally. The reason is that the cost to the United States might be high because of a potential Chinese or Soviet response, regarded as a serious and dangerous possibility, or because of the impact on international opinion.⁷⁸ But these questions did not arise in the case of U.S. terror against the South Vietnamese, which therefore proceeded without notable concern or, it seems, much in the way of planning. In the Pentagon Papers, we find extensive discussion and debate over the escalation of the bombing against the North, while there is virtually nothing about the far more destructive bombing, defoliation, destruction of vast areas by Rome plows, etc., in South Vietnam, where we were "saving" the population from "aggression." With regard to South Vietnam, the planning record is limited to the question of deployment of U.S. troops, which again raised potential costs to the United States.⁷⁹ (194-6)

As this chapter continues, the destruction of the South Vietnam, which myth has it was being saved by the US from the evils of communism, was just about as destroyed as a land can possibly be destroyed without life there actually being fully exterminated. (I won't elaborate on the US's destruction of Cambodia, which is almost completely unknown and unreported and as extensive.)

This history I can take. I can handle this, it is a political-economic choice of enforced hegemony with weaponry and mass death. But what did throw me for a loop was what the USA did following South Vietnam's near annihilation at their hands. So two more clips from Manufacturing:

…The gradual withdrawal of the increasingly demoralized U.S. military forces led to a diminution of visible protest by the early 1970s, but the "Vietnam syndrome" was never cured. As late as 1982, 72 percent of the public (but far fewer "opinion makers" and, to judge by other evidence cited earlier, virtually none of the "American intellectual elite") regarded the Vietnam War as "more than a mistake; it was fundamentally wrong and immoral," a disparity between the public and its "leaders" that persists as of i986.¹⁵⁷

The primary task facing the ideological institutions in the postwar period was to convince the errant public that the war was "less a moral crime than the thunderously stupid military blunder of throwing half a million ground troops into an unwinnable war," as the respected New York Times war correspondent Homer Bigart explained, while chastising Gloria Emerson for her unwillingness to adopt this properly moderate view.¹⁵⁸ The "purpose of the war" must be perceived as "preventing North Vietnam from subjugating South Vietnam" (John Midgley), "the real enemy, of course, [being] North Vietnam, supplied and sustained by the Soviet Union and China" (Drew Middleton)¹⁵⁹ — all in defiance of the plain facts. The primary issue was the cost to the United States in its noble endeavour; thus Robert Nisbet describes the "intellectual pleasure" he derived from "a truly distinguished work of history" with a chapter covering the i96os, "with emphasis on the Vietnam War and its devastating impact upon Americans," obviously the only victims worthy of concern.¹⁶⁰ To persuade elite opinion was never much of a problem, since these were the reigning conceptions throughout, and clearly privilege, along with media access, accrues to those who follow this path. But the public has nevertheless remained corrupted.

An ancillary task has been to keep the devastation that the United States left as its legacy in Indochina hidden from public view. Indeed, one finds only scattered reference to this not entirely trivial matter in the U.S. media—a remarkable achievement, given the agency of destruction and its scale. Keeping just to Vietnam, the death toll may have passed three million. In an article entitled "Studies Show Vietnam Raids Failed," Charles Mohr observes that the CIA estimated deaths from bombing of the North at well over 30,000 a year by 1967, "heavily weighted with civilians."¹⁶¹ Crop-destruction programs from 1961 had a devastating impact, including aerial destruction by chemicals, ground operations to destroy orchards and dikes, and land clearing by giant tractors (Rome plows) that "obliterated agricultural lands, often including extensive systems of paddy dikes, and entire rural residential areas and farming hamlets," leaving the soil "bare, gray and lifeless," in the words of an official report cited by Arthur Westing, who compares the operations to the "less efficient" destruction of Carthage during the Punic Wars. "The combined ecological, economic, and social consequences of the wartime defoliation operations have been vast and will take several generations to reverse"; in the "empty landscapes" of South Vietnam, recovery will be long delayed, if possible at all, and there is no way to estimate the human effects of the chemical poison dioxin at levels "300 to 400% greater than the average levels obtaining among exposed groups in North America."¹⁶²

In the South, 9,000 out of 15,000 hamlets were damaged or destroyed, along with some twenty-five million acres of farmland and twelve million acres of forest. One-and-a-half million cattle were killed, and the war left a million widows and some 800,000 orphans. In the North, all six industrial cities were damaged (three razed to the ground) along with twenty-eight of thirty provincial towns (twelve completely destroyed), ninety-six of 116 district towns, and 4,000 of some 5,800 communes. Four hundred thousand cattle were killed and over a million acres of farmland were damaged. Much of the land is a moonscape, where people live on the edge of famine, with rice rations lower than those in Bangladesh. Reviewing the environmental effects, the Swedish peace-research institute SIPRI concludes that "the ecological debilitation from such attack is likely to be of long duration." The respected Swiss-based environmental group IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources) concluded that the ecology is not only refusing to heal but is worsening, so that a "catastrophe" may result unless billions of dollars are spent to "reconstruct" the land that has been destroyed, a "monumental" task that could be addressed only if the United States were to offer substantial reparations, a possibility that cannot be considered in a cultural climate of abysmal ignorance, chauvinism, and the self-righteous pursuit of self-interest. Destruction of forests has increased the frequency of floods and droughts and aggravated the impact of typhoons, and war damage to dikes (some of which, in the South, were completely destroyed by U.S. bombardment) and other agricultural systems has yet to be repaired. The report notes that "humanitarian and conservationist groups, particularly in the United States, have encountered official resistance and red tape when requesting their governments' authorization to send assistance to Vietnam"—naturally enough, since the United States remains committed to ensure that its achievements are not threatened by recovery of the countries it destroyed (my emphasis).¹⁶³

There is little hint of any of this, or of the similar Carthaginian devastation in Laos and Cambodia, in mainstream U.S. media coverage. Rather, with remarkable uniformity and self-righteousness, the problems of reconstruction, hampered further by the natural catastrophes and continuing war to which the United States has made what contribution it can, are attributed solely to Communist brutality and ineptitude. The sole remaining interest in postwar Vietnam in the U.S. media has been the recovery of remains of U.S. personnel presumed to be killed in action; the Vietnamese preoccupation with other matters serving as further proof of their moral insensitivity.

In one of his sermons on human rights, President Carter explained that we owe Vietnam no debt and have no responsibility to render it any assistance because "the destruction was mutual,"¹⁶⁴ a statement that elicited no comment, to our knowledge, apart from our own— a fact that speaks volumes about the prevailing cultural climate. Some feel that there may once have been a debt but that it has been amply repaid. Under the headline "The Debt to the Indochinese Is Becoming a Fiscal Drain," Bernard Gwertzman quotes a State Department official who "said he believed the United States has now paid its moral debt for its involvement on the losing side in Indochina." The remark, which also passed without comment, is illuminating: we owe no debt for mass slaughter and for leaving three countries in ruins, no debt to the millions of maimed and orphaned, to the peasants who still die today from exploding ordnance left from the U.S. assault. Rather, our moral debt results only from the fact that we did not win. By this logic, if the Russians win in Afghanistan, they will have no moral debt at all. Proceeding further, how have we paid our moral debt for failing to win? By resettling Vietnamese refugees fleeing the lands we ravaged, "one of the largest, most dramatic humanitarian efforts in history" according to Roger Winter, director of the U.S. Committee for Refugees. But "despite the pride," Gwertzman continues, "some voices in the Reagan Administration and in Congress are once again asking whether the war debt has now been paid. . . ."¹⁶⁵

The media are not satisfied with "mutual destruction" that effaces all responsibility for some of the major war crimes of the modern era. Rather, the perpetrator of the crimes must be seen as the injured party. We find headlines reading: "Vietnam, Trying to Be Nicer, Still Has a Long Way to Go." "It's about time the Vietnamese demonstrated some good will," said Charles Printz, of Human Rights Advocates International, referring to negotiations about the Amerasian children who constitute a tiny fraction of the victims of U.S. aggression in Indochina. Barbara Crossette adds that the Vietnamese have also not been sufficiently forthcoming on the matter of remains of American soldiers, although their behavior may be improving: "There has been progress, albeit slow, on the missing Americans." The unresolved problem of the war is what they did to us. Since we were simply defending ourselves from "internal aggression" in Vietnam, it surely makes sense to consider ourselves the victims of the Vietnamese.

In a derisive account of Vietnamese "laments" over the failure of the United States to improve relations with them, Barbara Crossette reports their "continuing exaggeration of Vietnam's importance to Americans" under the headline: "For Vietnamese, Realism Is in Short Supply." The Vietnamese do not comprehend their "irrelevance," she explains with proper imperial contempt. U.S. interest in Vietnam, she continues, is limited to the natural American outrage over Hanoi's invasion of Cambodia (to overthrow our current ally Pol Pot), and its failure to be sufficiently forthcoming "on the issue of American servicemen missing since the end of the war." She cites a Pentagon statement noting that Vietnam "has agreed to return the remains of 20 more servicemen" and expressing the hope that the Communists will proceed "to resolve this long-standing humanitarian issue." She quotes an "Asian official" as saying that "We all know they have the bones somewhere. ... If Hanoi's leaders are serious about building their country, the Vietnamese will have to deal fairly with the United States." When a Vietnamese official suggested that the U.S. send food aid to regions where starving villagers are being asked to spend their time and energy searching for the remains of American pilots killed while destroying their country. State Department spokeswoman Phyllis Oakley reacted with great anger: "We are outraged at any suggestion of linking food assistance with the return of remains," she declaimed. So profound is the U.S. commitment to humanitarian imperatives and moral values that it cannot permit these lofty ideals to be tainted by associating them with such trivial concerns and indecent requests.¹⁶⁶ It is difficult to know how to react to a cultural climate in which such words can be spoken, evoking no reaction.

According to standard state and media doctrine, South Vietnam (i.e., the client regime that we established) lost the war to North Vietnam — the official enemy, since the U.S. attack against the South cannot be conceded. "North Vietnam, not the Vietcong, was always the enemy," John Corry proclaims in reporting the basic message of an NBC white paper on the war,¹⁶⁷ a stance that is conventional in the mainstream. Corry is indignant that anyone should question this higher truth … (238-41)

And:

...

That the United States suffered a "defeat" in Indochina is a natural perception on the part of those of limitless ambition, who understand "defeat" to mean the achievement only of major goals, while certain minor ones remain beyond our grasp. The perception of an unqualified U.S. "defeat" in the media retrospectives and similar commentary is understandable in part in these terms, in part in terms of the alleged goal of "defending freedom" developed in official propaganda and relayed by the ideological institutions.

Postwar U.S. policy has been designed to ensure that the victory is maintained by maximizing suffering and oppression in Indochina, which then evokes further gloating here. Since "the destruction is mutual," as is readily demonstrated by a stroll through New York, Boston, Vinh, Quang Ngai Province, and the Plain of Jars, we are entitled to deny reparations, aid, and trade, and to block development funds. The extent of U.S. sadism is noteworthy, as is the (null) reaction to it. In 1977, when India tried to send a hundred buffalo to Vietnam to replenish the herds destroyed by U.S. violence, the United States threatened to cancel "food-for-peace" aid, while the press featured photographs of peasants in Cambodia pulling plows as proof of Communist barbarity, the photographs in this case were probable fabrications of Thai intelligence, but authentic ones could, no doubt, have been obtained throughout Indochina. The Carter administration even denied rice to Laos (despite a cynical pretense to the contrary), where the agricultural system was destroyed by U.S. terror bombing. Oxfam America was not permitted to send ten solar pumps to Cambodia for irrigation in 1983; in 1981, the U.S. government sought to block a shipment of school supplies and educational kits to Cambodia by the Mennonite Church [my emphasis].¹⁸⁴

A tiny report in the Christian Science Monitor observes that the United States is blocking international shipments of food to Vietnam during a postwar famine, using the food weapon "to punish Vietnam for its occupation of Cambodia," according to diplomatic sources. Two days later. Times correspondent Henry Kamm concluded his tour of duty as chief Asian diplomatic correspondent with a long article in which he comments "sadly" on the "considerably reduced quality of life" in Indochina, where in Vietnam "even working animals are rare," for unexplained reasons, in contrast to "the continuing rise, however uneven in many aspects, of the standard of living" elsewhere in the region. In thirty-five paragraphs, he manages to produce not one word on the effects of the U.S. war or the postwar policy of "bleeding Vietnam," as the Far Eastern Economic Review accurately terms it.¹⁸⁵ (247-8)

I don't know why, but the deliberate kicking of the Vietnamese by America's political elite, after their country had been utterly destroyed by American armaments, struck me as far more evil than the decision to destroy them was in the first place. The emotional turmoil that this has evoked in me is still rumbling around my system. I am not sure how, but something changed in me, and I'm at a kind of loss about how to bring that change into my official and proper and comfortable life.


Notes

72. Takashi Oka, Christian Science Monitor, December 4,1965; Bernard Fall, "Vietnam Blitz," New Republic, October 9, 1965.

73. Sidney Hook, "Lord Russell and the War Crimes 'Trial,'" New Leader, October 24, 1966.

74. See Noam Chomsky. At War With Asia. Pantheon Books, 1971, ISBN 9780006326540, pp. 98f.

75. "Truck versus Dam," Christian Science Monitor, September 5, 1967.

76. Henry Kamm, New York Times, November 15,1969; New York Times, April 6, i97i. See Chomsky, For Reasons of State, pp. 225f., for more details.

77. E.g., Amando Doronila, "Hanoi Food Output Held Target of U.S. Bombers," AP, Christian Science Monitor, September 8,1967, three days after Joseph Harsch's philosophical reflections just cited.

78. See George Kahin, Intervention, pp. 338f., 384, 400, on these perceived risks.

79. See Chomsky For Reasons of State, pp. 4f., 70ff., for documentation from the official record (373-4).

…

157. John E. Rielly, Foreign Policy (Spring 1983, Spring 1987). Rielly, ed., American Public Opinion and U.S. Foreign Policy 1987, Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, p. 33. In the 1986 poll, the percentage of the public that regarded the Vietnam War as "fundamentally wrong and immoral" was 66 percent, as compared with 72 percent in 1978 and 1982. Among "leaders" (including representatives of churches, voluntary organizations, and ethnic organizations), the percentage was 44 percent, as compared with 45 percent in 1982 and 50 percent in 1978. The editor takes this to indicate "some waning of the impact of the Vietnam experience with the passage of time"; and, perhaps, some impact of the propaganda system, as memories fade and people are polled who lack direct experience.

158. New Republic, January 22,1977, see Marilyn Young, "Critical Amnesia," The Nation,, April 2,1977, on this and similar reviews of Emerson's Winners and Losers. '

159. John Midgley, New York Times Book Review, June 30,1985; Drew Middleton, New York Times, July 6, 1985.

160. Review of Paul Johnson, Modem Times, in New York Times Book Review, June 26, 1983, p. 15.

161. New York Times, May 28,1984. A CIA analysis of April 1968 estimated that "80,000 enemy troops," overwhelmingly South Vietnamese, were killed during the Tet offensive. See note 44, above.

162. Arthur Westing, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (February 1981); Colin Norman, Science, March 11, 1983, citing the conclusion of an international conference in Ho Chi Minh City; Jim Rogers, Indochina Issues, Center for International Policy (September 1985). On the effects of U.S. chemical and environmental warfare in Vietnam, unprecedented in scale and character, see SIPRI, Ecological Consequences of the Second Indochina War (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1976).

163. Ton That Thien, Pacific Affairs (Winter 1983-84); Chitra Subramaniam, Pacific News Service, November 15, 1985; both writing from Geneva.

164. News conference, March 24, 1977; New York Times, March 25, 1977.

165. Bernard Gwertzman, New York Times, March 3, 1985.

166. Barbara Crossette, New York Times, November 10, 1985, February 28, 1988; AP, April 7, 1988.

167. John Corry, New York Times, April 27, 1985. (p378)

…

184. See our Political Economy of Human Rights: the Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, II, 84, i66ff., 342; Daniel Southerland, "No Pens and Pencils for Cambodia," Christian Science Monitor, December 4, 1981; AP, "U.S. Bars Mennonite School Aid to Cambodia," New York Times, December 8,1981; Joel Charny and John Spragens, Obstacles to Recovery in Vietnam and Kampuchea: U.S. Embargo of Humanitarian Aid (Boston: Oxfam America, 1984), citing many examples of "explicit U.S. policy" under the Reagan administration "to prevent even private humanitarian assistance from reaching the people of Kampuchea and Vietnam."

185. Louis Wiznitzer, Christian Science Monitor, November 6,1981; Kamm, "In Mosaic of Southeast Asia, Capitalist Lands Are Thriving," New York Times, November 8, 1981. (p379)

2011.08.09 — Conversations with Carl Jung and Reactions from Ernest Jones Finished 2011.08.02 & a Fushigi*

When I read the back cover, it struck me that this book is the transcript of a snippet of Jung I saw interviewed on a documentary I saw on Jung and dreams called, I think, The Wisdom of the Dream. (Google confirmed it.) I remember the clip clearly because Jung, who looked old, had a giant old-style microphone hanging from his neck like a giant pendant.

Paraphrased, I remember Jung saying with great emphasis: "The unconscious really is unconscious, and so you can't know. The best that can be done is to infer it by its effects on consciousness."

Well, it turns out that this is indeed the book of that interview, and here is the passage:

Dr. Jung: As soon as research comes to a question of the unconscious, things becomes necessarily blurred, because the unconscious is something which is really unconscious! So you have no object—nothing. You only can make inferences because you can't see it; and so you have to create a model of this possible structure of the unconscious(38).

But on to the grist.

Conversations with Carl Jung & Reactions from Ernest Jones.
by Richard Isadore Evans. D. Van Nostrand Company (Canada) Ltd. (Reinhold), 1964.

Group photo 1909 in front of Clark University. Front row: Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, Carl Jung;
Back row: Abraham A. Brill, Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi.

Began 2011.07.15; Finished 2011.08.02.

☆☆☆☆ out of ☆☆☆☆☆.

This blog is not my review of why this book just barely eked four stars, but because of a bizarre fushigi that arose on the last day I read it. And, to add a bit of irony to the synchronicity-petite, it arose from Sigmund Freud's biographer, Ernest Jones, citing Freud cautioning about man's place in the natural environment:

Dr. Evans: Now another important problem, articulated not so long ago by Julian Huxley, deals with the conflict between the extreme advances in man's technological development and his very limited socio-psychological development. For example, means have been created technologically that could destroy all mankind, while our socio-psychological development, our ability in human relations, has not come far enough to insure us against such an event.

Dr. Jones: Yes, I've written something on that very matter. As a matter of fact, the third volume of my Freud biography finishes on that note, so please allow me to read the final paragraphs. They deal with those two fundamental instincts that Freud worked on so much — the sexual and the aggressive:

When we consider the breath-taking achievements of man in art and in science, we must judge there are no limits foreseeable to his power to attain happiness and security. But this vision is offset by one as somber as that is glowing. In it are three main strands. The advances in medical science, which are now bound to continue rapidly, combined with the increase in general prosperity, have diminished the natural selection of quality. They have also brought about such an enormous increase in quantity of population that the time cannot be far distant when the resources of the earth to sustain it will be seriously strained. Moreover, greed and lack of foresight have not only failed to nourish those resources, ultimately the soil and the minerals of the earth's crust, but are ruining them at a truly alarming pace. Still graver is the consideration that man's destructive powers have been so fortified by the recently acquired knowledge of new weapons that it is now within his reach to achieve devastation beside which the efforts of an Attila, a Timurlane or a Genghis Khan are but the puny gestures of an infant. It is now no longer massacre that is threatened, but the possible extinction of all life on this planet. There needs only a madman in the seat of authority of the kind we have just witnessed to set this holocaust ablaze, nor can we be sure that someone less mad may not bring it about.

Amid the turmoil of conflicting ideas in which we live, in the spheres of art, of science, and above all of politics where statesmen of towering importance can display in their savagery, fear and unreasonableness, all the worst features of an undisciplined nursery, there seems to be one proposition commanding nearly universal assent. The control man has secured over nature has far outrun his control over himself. Man's unhappiness and the threats of doom overhanging him proceed from this unassailable truth. Man's chief enemy and danger is his own unruly nature and the dark forces pent up within him (p140-1).

So, now comes the fushigi: later that afternoon I saw on the TV-News a story about something called Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which if you haven't heard of it, is where man's plastic waste collects because of the natural tidal patterns, in the North Pacific Gyre. The mass of garbage is reported to be about the size of Texas! Here's one small image:

Photo Courtesy of treehugger.com. Go to link to see other interesting photos.

2011.07.07 — Year 501: The Conquest Continues — begun 2011.06.23

Noam Chomsky.
Year 501: The Conquest Continues.
Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1993. ISBN 189543162X.

Year 501 book has begun exceptionally well, and so even before finishing it I give it

★★★★★ out of ☆☆☆☆☆.

My enthusiasm arises with my discovery that with Y501 Chomsky has very directly addressed the history of economics and its propagandized ideology versus its pragmatic 'reality.' Chomsky has actually looked at the real world economic and social consequences of our so-called democratizing economic practices. That examination includes the roles by which the economic prractices of the 'haves' are used as a club to open or keep open to exploitation the resources of the have-nots. Chomsky with great irony uses the accepted economic designations 'North' and 'South' that were used to delineate between these groups, with Russia and much of eastern Europe getting lumped in with the 'South'.

I am on page 103 and this is without doubt one of Chomsky's best works. I confess that I am likely biased towards it because of my interest in economic ideology and Y501 is ... I'm trying to find the right adjective. With Y501 Chomsky confirms with historical detail and the usual endless and invaluable references that my economic criticism is well founded. He is filling in and broadening the economic understanding and conclusions I have already come to and that I have been articulating far less effectively than him for many years. For example, see Death by Freezing: The Ideology of Economics that I wrote almost twenty years ago.

The book is chock-a-block full of interesting and well documented examples of just how delusional is the idea that 'free market' / capitalistic economies create social wealth with an invisible hand. As well as citing how free market economies have created poverty for the many and extreme wealth for the few, Chomsky also cites examples of economic success that have been the result of explicitly NOT following so-called IMF / free market rules. The most obvious being Japan.

Some have suggested — only half in jest — that Japan's support for the Brookings Institution and other advocates of standard [economic] doctrine is intended to reinforce belief in the classical theory, to the detriment of its commercial rivals^3-3(101).

Note: I've included the footnotes from the text with live links to them. To see the footnoted references click on the footnote superscript. To return to where you were reading in the text click the 'back' button on your web browser. I have included, when available, links to the various references, publications, people, events, and organizations within the text and in the footnotes in order to make research a little easier.

And the timing of my beginning to read Y501 is very interesting because of the financial crisis in Greece. But then again, in the last 20 years when hasn't there been some kind of world jeopoardizing economic crisis demanding tax payer paid rescues?! But what is interesting is to read how effective has been the IMF's history of successfully fixing myriad broken economies since its inception in the late 1940s.

A quick look at the IMF's history affirms that the violent opposition by Greece's citizenry is well-founded, despite the media's consistent line that only with economic and social austerity is prosperity possible. And, despite its easily measured failures it would seem that with their economic clubs, perhaps abetted by the effectiveness of the propagandized 'free-market' economic ideology, Greece is preparing to fix their economy by essentially gutting and immolating the economy of the civilian population, with the net fix being to pad the accounts of the ruling elite.

As it turns out, and almost fushigi-like, Chomsky makes several very critical references to the real effects of IMF instituted and directed changes that have been foisted on various countries versus what they ideologically claim to do for them. (And it is affirming to read someone other than myself criticizing the IMF's effect, which I do vociferously and frequently with co-workers and just about anyone within ear shot. Having read Chomsky will allow me to relax from feeling like just another economic Cassandra!)

Now, for some Chomsky. From Chapter 2 The Contours of World Order:

2.4. The End of the Affluent Alliance
...

The complaints of those who continue to maintain their iron control with little challenge are not without their comic aspects. For every 100 articles berating the left-fascists who control everything, there might be one responding weakly that the takeover is not so complete as claimed, and none telling the truth —which is obvious enough, if only from the distribution of views allowed to surface. But restricting thought is a serious matter, and respected figures do not crack a smile as they march in the parade, bewailing the fact that they may have lost some comparative literature department (perhaps to a right-wing "deconstructionist" or liberal "relativist" denounced as left-fascists).

To the totalitarian mentality, even the slightest deviation is an awesome tragedy, and evokes the most impressive frenzy. And the spectacle makes a useful contribution to entrenching further the ideological controls that prevent the rascal multitude from attending to what is happening around them.

2.5. The "Vile Maxim of the Masters"

The world economy has not returned to the growth rates of the Bretton Woods era. The decline of the South was particularly severe in Africa and Latin America, where it was accompanied by rampant state terror. It was accelerated by the neoliberal economic doctrines dictated by the world rulers. The UN Economic Commission for Africa found that countries pursuing the recommended IMF programs had lower growth rates than those that relied on the public sector for basic human needs. The disastrous impact of neoliberal policies in Latin America was particularly striking.^2-34

On occasion, developed societies take their own rhetoric semi-seriously and fail to protect themselves from the destructive impact of unregulated markets. The consequences are much the same as in the traditional colonial domains, if not so lethal. Australia in the 1980s is a case in point. Free market experiments carried by the Labor government succeeded in reducing national income by over 5 percent a year by the end of the decade. Real wages declined, Australian enterprises fell under foreign control, and the country advanced towards the status of a resource base for the Japan-centered state capitalist region, which maintained its dynamic growth thanks to the radical departures from neoliberal dogma that had spurred development in the first place. In Britain after a decade ofThatcherism, "prospects remain bleak because of insufficient reinvestment in the physical UK economy," the director of a US investment firm observes, echoing a Japanese counterpart who says, "We think it will take a long time for the UK economy to recover."^2-35

As noted, the rich industrial societies themselves are taking on something of a Third World cast, with islands of extreme wealth and privilege amidst a rising sea of poverty and despair. This is particularly true of the US and Britain, subjected to Reagan-Thatcher discipline. Continental Europe is not too far behind, despite the residual power of labor and the social contract it has defended, and Europe's ability to export its slums through the device of "guest workers." The collapse of the Soviet empire offers new means to establish the North-South divide more firmly within the rich societies. During the May 1992 strike of public workers in Germany, the chairman of Daimler-Benz warned that the corporation might respond to strikes by transferring manufacturing facilities for its Mercedes cars elsewhere, perhaps to Russia, with its ample supply of trained, educated, healthy and (it is hoped) docile workers. The chairman of General Motors can wield similar threats with regard to Mexico and other sectors of the Third World. And East Europe. While GM plans to close 21 plants in the US and Canada, it has opened a $690 million assembly plant in East Germany with great expectations, heightened by the fact that, thanks to 43 percent unofficial unemployment, workers are willing to "work longer hours than their pampered colleagues in western Germany" at 40 percent of the wage and with few benefits, the Financial Times reports. Capital can readily move; people cannot, or are not permitted to by those who applaud Adam Smith's doctrines when it suits their needs.

It is not that Daimler-Benz is greatly suffering from the labor costs that management deplores. Two weeks after issuing the threat to move Mercedes production to Russia, the same chief executive, Edzard Reuter, announced the "excellent result" of an exceptionally strong first-quarter performance for 1992, with a profit rise of 14 percent and a 17 percent increase in sales, largely abroad; German workers are not quite the intended market for the Mercedes division, the chief profit earner for this huge conglomerate, which will slash up to 10,000 jobs in 1992, Reuter added, with another 10,000 to follow. Such facts. however, do not impress the US press, where the news columns bitterly assailed striking German workers for their "soft life," long vacations, and general lack of understanding of their proper place as tools of production for the rich and powerful. They should learn the lessons taught to American workers by the Caterpillar corporation at the same time: profits and productivity up, wages down, the right to strike effectively eliminated by the free resort to scabs ("permanent replacement workers").^2-36

These are the fruits of the fierce corporate campaign undertaken as soon as American workers finally won the right to organize in the mid 1930s, after long years of bitter struggle and violent repression unmatched in the industrial world. Perhaps we may even return to the days when the admired philanthropist could preach the virtues of 'honest, industrious, self-denying poverty' to the victims of the great depression of 1896, shortly after he had brutally crushed the steel workers union at Homestead, while announcing that the defeated workers had sent him a wire saying, 'Kind master, tell us what you wish us to do and we will do it for you." It was because he knew "how sweet and happy and pure the home of honest poverty is' that Carnegie sympathized with the rich, he explained, meanwhile sharing their grim fate in his lavishly appointed mansions.^2-37.

So a well-ordered society should run, according to the 'vile maxim of the masters' (54-57).

And from Chapter 3 North-South/East-West:

3.3. Return to Normalcy
...

'Unexpected side effects' of the invisible hand have also been found in Russia, again eliciting much surprise. A front-page New York Times headline reads: 'The Russian's New Code: If It Pays, Anything Goes.' 'It is not just a matter of crime, corruption, prostitution, smuggling, and drugs and alcohol abuse,' all on the rise: 'There is also a widespread view that ... people are out for themselves and anything goes' — unlike the United States, where pursuit of the 'vile maxim of the masters' is unknown, or the Third World domains that have been subject to our helping hand. 'Swindles and bribes are hardly a new phenomenon in Russia,' correspondent Celesting Bohlen observes, and were familiar in the 'old Communist system' — again, unlike the US and its clients.

During the same days, the Times was reporting the saga of President Fernando Collor of Brazil, the fair-haired boy of Washington and the business community, who broke new records in corruption in a richly-endowed country that has been a 'testing area' for US experts for half a century (see chapter 7). One may recall a few domestic examples of corruption as well, from the days of the Founding Fathers, no slouches in this game, and on to the Reaganites and Wall Street in the 1980s. Corruption is an intrinsic feature of "the old Communist system," the ideological institutions (correctly) proclaim: [however] under "capitalist democracy," it is an aberration, quickly corrected.

The new "ostentatious wealth sets most citizens' nerves on edge," Bohlen continues, describing the standard consequences of neo-liberal remedies. "Crime has soared in Russia after the collapse of Communism, as it did in Eastern Europe," including white-collar crimes, which have "taken off." But "the levels of crime are still well below New York's standards." There is still room for progress towards the capitalist ideal.

The economies of Eastern Europe stagnated or declined through the eighties, but went into free fall as the IMF regimen was adopted with the end of the Cold War in 1989. By the fourth quarter of 1990, Bulgaria's I industrial output (which had previously remained steady) had dropped 17 percent, Hungary's 12 percent, Poland's over 23 percent, Romania's 301 percent. The UN Economic Commission for Europe reported in late 1991 that the region's output had declined 1 percent in 1989,10 percent in 1990, and 15 percent in 1991, predicting a farther decline of 20 percent for 1991, with the same or worse likely in 1992. One result has been a general disillusionment with the democratic opening, even some growing support for the former Communist parties. In Russia, the economic collapse has led to much suffering and deprivation, as well as "weariness, cynicism, and anger, directed at all politicians, from Yeltsin down," Brumberg reports, and particularly at the ex-Nomenklatura who, as predicted, are coming to be the typical Third World elite serving the interests of the foreign masters. In public opinion polls, half the respondents considered the August 1991 Putsch illegal, one-fourth approved, and the rest had no opinion.

Support for democratic forces is limited, not because of opposition to democracy, but because of what it becomes under Western rules. It will either have the very special meaning dictated by the needs of the rich men, or it will be the target of destabilization, subversion, strangulation, and violence until proper behavior is restored. Exceptions are rare.^3-20

Loss of faith in democracy is of small concern in the West, though the "bureaucratic capitalism" that might be introduced by Communists-turned-yuppies is a potential problem. In the Western doctrinal system, democratic forms are meritorious as long as they do not challenge business control. But they are secondary: the real priority is integration into the global economy with the opportunities this provides for exploitation and plunder.

With IMF backing, the European Community (EC) has provided a clear test of good behavior for Eastern Europe. In the old days, the Russians had to prove that they were not "flirting with the thought" of supporting the aspirations of "the common man." Today, East Europe must demonstrate that "economic liberalization with a view to introducing market economies" is irreversible. There can be no attempts at a "Third Way" with unacceptable social democratic features, let alone more substantive steps towards democracy and freedom, such as workers' control. The chief economic adviser to the EC, Richard Portes, defined acceptable "regime change" not in terms of democratic forms, but as "a definitive exit from the socialist planned economy—and its irreversibility." One recent IMF report, Peter Gowan notes, "concentrates overwhelmingly on the Soviet Union's role as a producer of energy, raw materials, and agricultural products, giving very little scope for the republics of the former Soviet Union to play a major role as industrial powers in the world market." Transfer of ownership to employees, he notes, "has commanded strong popular support in both Poland and Czechoslovakia," but is unacceptable to the Western overseers, conflicting with the free market capitalism to which the South must be subjected.

The South, that is. Conforming to traditional practice, the EC has raised barriers to protect its own industry and agriculture, thereby closing off the export market that might enable the East bloc to reconstruct its economies. When Poland removed all import barriers, the EC refused to reciprocate, continuing to discriminate against half of Polish exports. The EC steel lobby called for "restructuring" of the East European industry in a way that would incorporate it within the Western industrial system; the European chemical industry warned that construction of free market economies in the former Soviet empire "must not be at the expense of the long-term viability of Western Europe's own chemical industry." And as noted, none of the state capitalist societies accept the principle of free movement of labor, a sine qua non of free market theory. Eastern Europe, or at least large parts of it, is to return to the Third World service role.^3-21

The situation is reminiscent of Japan in the 1930s, or of the Reagan-Bush Caribbean Basin Initiative, which encourages open export-oriented economies in the region while keeping US protectionist barriers intact, undermining possible benefits of free trade for the targeted societies.^3-22 The patterns are as pervasive as they are understandable.

The US has watched developments in Eastern Europe with some discomfort. Through the 1980s, it sought to impede East-West trade relations and the dissolution of the Soviet empire. In August 1991, George Bush advised Ukraine not to secede just before it proceeded to do so. One reason is that after Reagan's wild party for the rich, the US is not well-placed to join German-led Europe and Japan in taking advantage of the newly opened sectors of the South. Liberal Democrats urge that "foreign aid" be diverted from Central America to the USSR, warning that without the traditional export-promotion devices, the EC and Japan will exploit "the vast trade and investment potential of Eastern Europe" while "We debate how to clear up two foreign policy debacles" (Senator Patrick Leahy); no serious person would be so rude as to suggest that we might at least help wash away some of the rivers of blood we have spilled. In 1992, President Bush proposed his Freedom Support Act to remedy the problem. A "stream of high-ranking US officials and big-business leaders" lobbied for the measure, Amy Kaslow reports. Ambassador Robert Strauss urged rapid action "lest US firms lose out to competitors...in the huge consumer market of the former Soviet Union." The Act will provide "new opportunities" for US "farmers [agribusiness] and manufacturers," and "help pave the way for US corporations to explore vast new markets." There is no confusion about just whose "Freedom" is being "Supported."^3-23

3.4. Some Free Market Successes

It would only be fair to add that the IMF-Worid Bank recipe now being imposed upon the former Soviet empire has its successes. Bolivia is a highly-touted triumph, its economy rescued from disaster by the 1985 New Economic Policy prescribed by the expert advisers now plying their craft in Eastern Europe. Public employment was sharply cut, the national mining company was sold off leading to massive unemployment of miners, real wages dropped, rural teachers quit in droves, regressive taxes were introduced, the economy shrank along with productive investment, while inequality increased. In the capital, Melvin Burke writes, "street vendors and beggars contrast with the fancy boutiques, posh hotels and Mercedes-Benzes." Real per capita GNP is three-fourths what it was in 1980, and foreign debt absorbs 30 percent of export earnings. As a reward for this economic miracle, the IMF, Interamerican Development Bank, and the G-7 Paris Club offered Bolivia extensive financial assistance, including secret payments to government ministers.

The miracle that is so admired is that prices stabilized and exports are booming. About two-thirds of export earnings are now derived from coca production and trade, Burke estimates. The drug money explains the stabilization of currency and price levels, he concludes. About 80 percent of the $3 billion in annual drug profits is spent and banked abroad, mainly in the US, providing a lift to the US economy as well. This profitable export business "obviously serves the interests of the new illegitimate bourgeoisie and the 'narco-generals' of Bolivia," Burke continues, and "also apparently serves the United States national interest, inasmuch as money laundering has not only been tolerated by the United States but has, in fact, been encouraged." It is "the poor peasant coca growers" who "struggle to survive against the combined armed might of the United States and the Bolivian military," Burke writes. There are always plenty more to ensure that the economic miracle will continue, eliciting much praise.

Confirming these figures, Waltrad Morales estimates that about 20 percent of the labor force depends for a livelihood on coca/cocaine production and trade, which amounts to about half of Bolivia's GDP. The export miracle has disrupted land prices and agricultural development, "and as a consequence Bolivians can no longer feed themselves." Malnutrition for children under 5 is over 50 percent higher than the (awful) regional average. A third of the country's food must be imported. "This 'national food crisis'—further aggravated by the neoliberal economic model—has contributed to the marginalisation of the peasantry, which has forced many of them to grow coca leaf in order to survive," in a downward cycler.^3-24

On to Poland.

Achievements have also been recorded elsewhere, thanks to timely US intervention and expert management. Take Grenada. After its liberation in 1983—following several years of US economic warfare and intimidation that have been effectively barred from history—it became the largest per capita recipient of US aid (after Israel, a special case). The Reagan Administration proceeded to make it a "showcase for capitalism," the conventional formula as a country is rescued from its population and set on the right course by its benefactors; Guatemala in 1954 is another announced "showcase" that should be famous (see chapter 7.7). The reform programs, which brought the usual social and economic disaster, are condemned even by the private sector they were designed to benefit. Furthermore, "the invasion has had the long-term effect of neutering the island's political life," Carter Special Assistant Peter Bourne reports from Grenada where he is teaching at the Medical School whose students were "rescued": "No creative vision aimed at plans for solving Grenada's social and economic ills has emerged from the lackluster and pliantly pro-American leaders" as the island suffers from record levels of alcoholism and drug abuse, and "crippling social malaise," while much of the population can only "flee their beautiful country."

There is, however, one bright spot, Ron Suskind reports in a frontpage Wall Street Journal article headlined "Made Safe by Marines, Grenada Now is Haven for Onshore Banks." The economy may be "in terrible economic shape," as the head of a local investment firm and member of Parliament observes—thanks to USAID-run structural adjustment programs, the Journal fails to add. But the capital "has become the Casablanca of the Caribbean, a fast-growing haven for money laundering, tax evasion and assorted financial fraud," with 118 offshore banks, one for every 64 residents. Lawyers, accountants, and some businessmen are doing well; as, doubtless, are the foreign bankers, money launderers, and drug lords, safe from the clutches of the carefully crafted "drug war."^3-25

The US liberation of Panama recorded a similar triumph. The poverty level has increased from 40 percent to 54 percent since the 1989 invasion. Guillermo Endara, sworn in as President at a US military base on the day of the invasion, would receive 2.4 percent of the vote if an election were held, according to 1992 polls. His government designated the second anniversary of the US invasion a "national day of reflection." Thousands of Panamanians "marked the day with a 'black march' through the streets of this capital to denounce the US invasion and the Endara economic policies," the French press agency reported. Marchers claimed that US troops had killed 3000 people and buried many corpses in mass graves or thrown them into the sea. The economy has not recovered from the battering it received from the US embargo and the invasion. A leader of the Civic Crusade, which led the middle-class opposition to Noriega, told Chicago Tribune reporter Nathaniel Sheppard that "Economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. against our will in 1987 to oust Noriega did nothing to hurt him but ruined our economy. Now we believe the sanctions may have been part of a plan to destroy our economy in such a way that we would not have strong ground to demand dignity and better treatment from the US." George Bush's June 1992 visit, which ended quickly in a well-publicized fiasco, "focused attention on long-simmering animosity toward Bush" for the invasion, Sheppard reported; the "rifle-toting American troops" in residential neighborhoods are a particular irritant, and the mood was not improved when security forces accompanied by "about eight American personnel" invaded the home of a National Assembly member, rifling through papers, taking passports, firing shots, and intimidating his wife, who was home alone, he alleged.

A post-invasion report on Panama presented to the UN Committee of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights by Mexican Ambassador Javier Wimer reports that the economy has collapsed, with "catastrophic effects in the areas of food, housing, and basic services such as health, education, and culture." Human rights violations are on the rise as a result of the invasion and subsequent efforts to "liquidate the vestiges of the former nationalism," with labor rights under particular attack along with any institutions that might be "nuclei of civic protest and political opposition." The governments of Panama and the US are jointly responsible for "serious and systematic" human rights violations, his report concluded. According to the respected Central America Report (Guatemala, CAR), the US drug war may be providing a cover for attacks on community activists by the security forces and other human rights abuses.

But some indicators are up. The General Accounting Office of Congress reported that drug trafficking "may have doubled" since the invasion while money laundering has "flourished," as was predicted at once by everyone who paid attention to the tiny European elite whom the US restored to their traditional rule. A study financed by USAID reported that narcotics use in Panama is the heaviest in Latin America, up by 400 percent since the invasion. The executive-secretary of the Center of Latin American Studies, which participated in the study, says that US troops "constitute a very lucrative market for drugs," contributing to the crisis. The increase is "unprecedented,... especially among the poor and the young," The Christian Science Monitor reports.^3-26

Another triumph of free market democracy was recorded in Nicaragua, where the Chamorro government and US Ambassador Harry Shiaudeman signed accords opening the way for the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to operate there "in an attempt to control the growing drug trafficking problem," CAR reports. The DEA agent in Costa Rica declared that Nicaragua is now "being used as a corridor for transferring Colombian cocaine to the United States," and a Department of Justice prosecutor added that the Nicaraguan financial system is laundering drug money. There is also a growing drug epidemic within Nicaragua, fueled by the high level of drug use by recent returnees from Miami as well as the continued economic decline and the new avenues for drug trafficking since the US regained control. "Since the installation of the Chamorro government and the massive return of Nicaraguans from Miami," CAR reports, "drug consumption has increased substantially in a country long free from drug usage." Miskito leader Steadman Fagoth accused two members of the Chamorro cabinet, his former contra associate Brooklyn Rivera and the minister of fishing for the Atlantic Coast, of working for the Colombian cartels. The Nicaraguan delegate to the Ninth International Conference on the Control of Drug Trafficking in April 1991 alleged that Nicaragua "has now become a leading link in cocaine shipments to the US and Europe." In Managua, the number of street children is rapidly increasing, as is drug addiction, which had been virtually eliminated by 1984. Ten-year-old children sniff glue on the street, saying that "it takes away hunger."

In fairness, we should mention a sign of economic progress now that the US has regained control: marketing of shoe cement to fill the children's bottles, imported through a multinational supplier, has become a lucrative business.^3-27

A conference attended by government officials and NGOs in Managua in August 1991 concluded that the country now has 250,000 addicts and is becoming an international bridge for drug transport, (in comparison 400,000 addicts are reported in Costa Rica, 450,000 in Guatemala, 500,000 in El Salvador). Addiction is increasing particularly among young people. A conference organizer commented that "In 1986 there wasn't one reported case of hard drugs consumption" while "in 1990, there were at least 12,000 cases." 118 drug dealing operations were identified in Managua alone, though it is the Atlantic Coast that has become the international transit point for hard drugs, leading to increased addiction. US journalist Nancy Nusser reports from Managua that cocaine has become "readily available only since president Violeta Chamorro took office in April 1990," according to dealers. "There wasn't any coke during the Sandinistas' time, just marijuana," one dealer said. Minister of Government Carios Hurtado said that "the phenomenon of cocaine trafficking existed before, but at a low level." Now it is burgeoning, primarily through the Atlantic Coast according to "a ranking Western diplomat with knowledge of drug trafficking" (probably from the US Embassy), who describes the Coast now as "a no man's land." In the Miami Herald, Tim Johnson reports that El Salvador too "is finding itself afflicted by a new scourge: drug trafficking." It is now outranked only by Panama and Guatemala as a corridor for cocaine shipments to the US.^3-28

Drugs are becoming "the newest growth industry in Central America," CAR reports, as a result of the "severe economic conditions in which 85 percent of the Central American population live in poverty" and the lack of jobs, conditions exacerbated by the neoliberal onslaught. But the problem has not reached the level of Colombia, where security forces armed and trained by the US are continuing their rampage of terror, torture, and disappearances, targeting political opposition figures, community activists, trade union leaders, human rights workers, and the peasant communities generally while US aid "is furthering the corruption of the Colombian security forces and strengthening the alliance of blood between right-wing politicians, military officers and ruthless narcotics traffickers," according to human rights activist Jorge Gomez Lizarazo, a former judge. The situation in Peru is still worse^3-29 (79-86).


Notes to pages 54-7 (Chapter 2 'Contours of World Order')

34. See below, ch. 7; Deterring Democracy, ch. 7. Nancy Wright, Multinational Monitor, April 1990, cited in Gar Alperovitz and Kai Bird, Diplomatic History, Spring 1992. See also James Petras, Monthly Review, May 1992.

35. Fitzgerald, Tom. Between Life and Economics. Foreign staff, "US and Japan shy from investing in UK," Financial Times, Sept. 25,1992.

36. Fisher, Marc. "Why Are German Workers Striking? To Preserve Their Soft Life," Washington Post service, International Herald Tribune, May 4; Andrew Fisher, Financial Times, May 20; Christopher Parkes, Financial Times; Kevin Done, Financial Times, Sept. 24 (GM); The Financial Times; June 4,1992. Elaine Bernard, "The Defeat at Caterpillar," ms. Harvard Trade Union Program, May 1992.

37. Sexton, Cayo Patricia. War on Labor and the Left, 83f. See ch. 11, below.

Notes to pages 79-86 (Chapter 3 'North-South/East-West')

3-3. Gerschenkron, Alexander. Econonomic Backwardness in Historical Perspective, 146, 150. Du Boff, Richard Accumuiation and Power, 176, citing [Simon] Kuznets.
...

3-20. Feffer, John. Shock Waves: Eastern Europe After the Revolution, 22, 112, 129. Brumberg, The New York Review of Books, Jan. 30; The Financial Times, Feb. 3; Robinson, The Financial Times, April 28, 1992. Haynes, European Business and Economic Development, Sept. 1992. Economic indicators; The Financial Times, Sept. 28,1992. Engelberg, The New York Times, Feb. 9; The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 4; Glaser, The New York Times, April 19; Bohlen, The New York Times, Aug. 30,1992. Continental Illinois, see p. 63. Children, see DD, ch. 7;' h. 9.5, below. Polanyi, Great Transformation.Miller, Founding Finaglers. On the Costa Rican exception and US attitudes towards it from the 1940s, see M, lllf., App. V.I; DD, 221f., 273ff.

3-21. Gowan, Peter. World Policy Journal, Winter 1991-92.

3-22. See Deere, Carmen Diana et al. In the Shadows, 213; McAfee, Kathy. Storm Signals: Structural Adjustment and Development Alternatives in the Caribbean.

3-23. See Deterring Democracy, chs. 1.6,3.3. Amy Kaslow, Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 12,1992.

3-24. Burke, Melvin. Current History, Feb. 1991; Morales, Waltrad, Third World Quarterly, vol. 13.2, 1992. See also Peter Andreas et al., "Dead-End Drug Wars," Foreign Policy, winter 1991-92.

3-25. McAfee, Kathy. Storm Signals: Structural Adjustment and Development Alternatives in the Caribbean, ch. 7. Bourne, Peter, Orlando Sentinel, April 12, 1992. Ron Suskind, The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 29,1991. Chomsky, Noam. Deterring Democracy, 162. On the suppressed history, see Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies>,177 f.

3-26. CAR (Central America Report), Sept. 27, 1991; June 5, 1992. Latinamerica press (Lima), June 4,1992. AFP, Chicago Sun-Times, Dec. 22, 1991. Sheppard, Chicago Tribune, June 18, May 22, Sept. 1, 1992. Proceso (Mexico), Dec. 2, 1992 (LANU)-Kenneth Sharpe, Chicago Tribune, Dec. 19,1991. Andreas, op. cit. Joachim Bamrud, The Christian Science Monitor. Jun. 24,1991.

3-27. CAR, Sept.20, Nov. 29, May 3,1991. Links (National Central America Health Rights Network), Summer 1992.

3-28. Felipe, Jaime. Inter Press Service, Subtext (Seattle), Sept. 3-l6; Nusser, AWnews service, Sept. 26; Tim Johnson, Miami Herald, Dec. 3,1991.

Interesting.