cunt sauce

BEPSR PEAR ISTO GESO

Not really in the discussion, but.... No control over the consumer, hmmm sure, I'll bite... Not usually.... but.... What about the forest dwelling indigenous people in Brazil that are forced out of their land by the government (that is made up of corporate elites and corporately funded politicians) to clear room for animal-agriculture so you can have cheap crappy beef here in the United States??? Angel, you never seem to think about the dark side of capitalism that you don't have to wake up and face everyday. Civilization, ESPECIALLY Industrialized Capitalism would not be possible without widespread coercion and atrocities. Just because you don't see it in your life AOD, it doesn't mean it isn't happening. Your $50 shoes were made by a child in Indonesia who has been treated like shit for their entire lives. She's probably indigenous. Her parents or grandparents lived off the forest and they lost the ability to find their own sustenance when their government pushed them out and sold their land to transnational corporations. So since there's no other way to support their lives they slave away for 50 cents a day at the shoe sweatshop. In order to ship them to America, the company needs a boat right? This boat is made out of aluminum and iron and many other things that come from publicly funded strip mining operations (ecologically destructive). The iron and aluminum are smelted in a factory powered by a publicly funded hydroelectric dam (also highly ecologically destructive). The profits generated are privatized. The boat got here with the awesome power of oil, a fossil fuel that requires publicly funded warfare or greedy U.S. and/or Euro sponsored dictatorships (also publicly funded) to extract it from their people's land base. The only reason why shit's so cheap is because of public subsidies and externalized costs. The production, distribution and consumption phases of the economic system are highly abstracted in this current state of civilization. Pretty much every consumer good is tainted with slavery or violence, you don't see it in your every day life: electronics, pineapples, coffee, bananas, cocoa, precious metals, oil, timber etc.. All wealth is derived from Labor and Nature. Without exploiting people that don't have access to land we can't have cheap consumer goods and "THEY" can't have an income. Globalization shifts income from worker to investor, and shifts the costs from investors to communities. We don't need forestry, agricultural, or industrial programs run by corporate and governmental elites (same thing these days); we need local control of land and markets. Your hero Adam Smith's invisible hand of economics- his free-market, only worked when the market was local, face-to-face, voluntary, transparent, low-tech, and based on ethical, mutual relationships. Its been a long time since that was the case. Please don't start with the "go live like a cave-man" thing either. It makes you sound like a technology-loving idiot who has no understanding of how the majority of the people on this planet live. have fun picking my rant apart.. I look forward to rebuttals..

Roderick T. Long: Whichever party is out of power always begins to emphasise its libertarian-sounding side in order to divert anti-government sentiment toward support of that party rather than toward genuine radical opposition to the entire establishment. By the same token, the party that’s in power employs alarmist rhetoric about the other side’s supposed anti-government radicalism in order to drum up support for its own policies. Thus events like the Tea Parties serve the interests of both parties; people with libertarian leanings get diverted into supporting one half of the bipartisan duopoly, the antistate message getting diluted by mixture with (in this case) right-wing statist crap about war and immigration and the Kulturkampf. Those turned off by this creepy right-wing stew get diverted into supporting the other half of the bipartisan duopoly, with any libertarian sentiments likewise getting diluted into (in this case) left-wing statist crap about gun control and the need to impose regulation on some imaginary laissez-faire economy. And so the whole power structure ends up being reinforced. I saw this game under Clinton, I saw (almost) everyone switch teams under Bush, and now they’re all switching back again. And so we get Republican pundits and politicians suddenly howling about Obama’s fascism when they’ve never supported anything but fascism in their entire lives; and on the other side we get Democrats ridiculing the very sorts of concerns about oppression and civil liberties violations that they pretended to take seriously under Dubya’s reign. Is it worth libertarians’ and/or anarchists’ while to participate in such events? Sure; because while the voices at the podium tend to be statist apparatchiks, the crowds will tend to be a mixture of statist yahoos and genuinely libertarian-leaning folks, and outreach to the latter is always worth a try – in Kierkegaard’s words, “to split up the crowd, or to talk to it, not to form a crowd, but so that one or another individual might go home from the assembly and become a single individual.” But of course the organisers of such events are on the lookout for us and always do their best to try to narrow the boundaries of discussion.

AVI LEWIS: Zanon Ceramics. After two years under worker control, it’s the granddaddy of this new movement. Today, the factory is in production with 300 workers. Decisions are made in assemblies: one worker, one vote. Everyone gets exactly the same salary. NAOMI KLEIN: It wasn’t always like this. A couple of years ago, the owner claimed that the plant was no longer profitable, that it had to be shut down. The workers refused to accept that fate. They argued that the company owed so much to the community in debts and public subsidies that it now belonged to everyone. In the Menem years, the Zanon factory had received millions in corporate welfare, and the owners still ran up huge debts. Now that his workers have restarted the machines, he’s back. Video requires real player: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/12/a_look_at_argentinas_economic_rebellion November 12, 2010 AMY GOODMAN:We are on the road in Buenos Aires, Argentina. When we flew in yesterday, our first stop here in the Argentine capital was the Plaza de Mayo where mothers of the disappeared continue to march every Thursday afternoon holding the pictures of their children and grandchildren who were disappeared. Thirty thousand people were disappeared during Argentina’s military dictatorship, which ended in 1983. Well, two weeks ago, tens of thousands of people gathered here in Buenos Aires to mourn the passing of the former Argentine president Néstor Kirchner. He headed Argentina from 2003 to 2007 as it struggled to recover from a crippling financial meltdown. His wife, Cristina Kirchner, is the current president of Argentina. Today, she’s in South Korea taking part in the G20 summit—this, as a group of financiers took out an ad in the Wall Street Journal demanding Argentina be thrown out of the G20. See, in 2001, Argentina defaulted on $95 billion in foreign loans. The next two years saw record protests and social upheavals, and unemployement was at an all-time high. Soon after taking office in May 2003, Néstor Kirchner told the International Monetary Fund Argentina would only give its creditors 35 cents back for every dollar they were owed. The IMF restructured Argentina’s debt. Néstor Kirchner is also credited with reforming the judiciary and armed forces and paving the way for dozens of trials involving people accused of torture and other abuses during the military dictatorship. We’ll talk more about these trials later in the show today, but first we go to some analysis of the economic transformations in Argentina since the massive street protests of 2001. Joining me here in Buenos Aires is Ezequiel Adamovsky. He’s a historian at the University of Buenos Aires. He has been involved in the student movement in the neighbourhood assemblies that emerged in Buenos Aires after the protests in December 2001. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Professor Adamovsky, Ezequiel. Talk about what happened. For viewers and listeners who are watching and listening all over the world right now, put Argentina in a political and geopolitical context. EZEQUIEL ADAMOVSKY: I think the most important thing to take into account was that Argentina, during the 1990s, was the most extreme experiment in neoliberal transformation. We had the most radical program of reforms at that time, which ended up in massive unemployment, impoverishment of more than half of the population of the country, and in 2001, finally, the collapse of the whole economic system. At the same time, we had a crisis of credibility in the political system. Since every single political party was proposing the same types of measures, neoliberal measures, population lost confidence in all politicians at the same time. So we—in 2001, we had the vast majority of the population rejecting neoliberal measures and not having any political alternative in the established political parties as to how to continue ruling this country. So that was the moment in which the rebellion happened. And the rebellion was basically, at the same time, a rejection of austerity measures and also a rejection of the political system. The main slogan of the rebellion was "They must all go," meaning that all politicians should leave the political scene. So, up until this, there was no political alternative then. But the most interesting aspect of the rebellion was that precisely at that moment, large social movements started to experiment new forms of political representation, new political slogans and programs. And some of the measures that you just mentioned, which Néstor Kirchner took after 2003, were actually the measures that the rebellion itself was proposing. For example, the renewal of the Supreme Court was one of the demands of this vast social movement in 2001. AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, the renewal of the Supreme Court? EZEQUIEL ADAMOVSKY: Well, one—Néstor Kirchner is credited with changing the utterly corrupt Supreme Court that we had in the ’90s with a new one that we have now with more or less respectable judges. That was one of the main demands of the rebellion in 2001. AMY GOODMAN: How did you participate? And, I mean, the significance, for people to understand these protests in 2001, the uprising in the streets? How many people were in the streets? I mean, you had very much, I mean, the middle class out, as well as the students, smashing the windows of banks. EZEQUIEL ADAMOVSKY: That is right. It’s impossible to say how many people participated. But in the rebellion of December 2001, it was millions of people in the streets, in Buenos Aires but also in most of the cities throughout the country. And it was the middle class, but also the lower classes in the outskirts of cities, as well. So it was a very special moment of solidarity between lower and middle classes against these neoliberal measures. AMY GOODMAN: You have written several books. One of them is called Anti-Capitalism for Beginners: The New Generation of Emancipatory Movements. What do you mean? EZEQUIEL ADAMOVSKY: Well, that book was about trying to communicate, wider audiences, the ideas that social movements in Argentina were debating at that time. So we had the sense that we were debating all sorts of new ideas, but we didn’t have channels to spread all these ideas to larger audiences. So, the basic idea was that we were experiencing then the birth of a new sort of—a new formula of anti-capitalist movements, different from anti-capitalists of the past, at the same time being inheritors of that tradition, but also experimenting with new ideas and trying to reach better outcomes than the movements of the past. AMY GOODMAN: Ezequiel Adamovsky, it’s interesting, your latest book is called The History of the Middle Class, and there’s a lot of discussion of the middle class in the United States, because of the economic pressure and the economic meltdown in the United States while the middle class lasts there. But why did you write a book on the history of the middle class? How has it changed here in Argentina? EZEQUIEL ADAMOVSKY: Well, I think I wrote that book without knowing it, perhaps, because I believe that there’s no deep social change possible without solidarity between the lower class and at least part of the middle class. And since I believe that the capitalist political system is about separating those two classes in different fields, I think that the most important challenge that we have, politically speaking, is to reunite part of the middle class with lower class in new kind of bonds and links of solidarity. In Argentina, the middle class suffered a process of impoverishment throughout the ’90s. There was a new phenomenon called the "new poor," meaning people who used to be middle class but they were now poor people. And that process, funnily enough, it reapproached, from the identity viewpoint, the identity of the middle class, impoverished middle class, and the lower class. And historically speaking, in Argentina, there was a big gap between those two, the middle class usually rejecting any contact with poor people. But that slightly changed in the ’90s. And in part, the 2001 rebellion was possibly due to that. AMY GOODMAN: One of the remarkable fallouts from the economic collapse of 2001 was that workers in Argentina began taking over factories abandoned by their owners. Latin America’s most prosperous middle class suddenly found itself in a ghost town of abandoned factories and mass unemployment. What happened next is the story of a documentary by well-known author Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis called The Take. In suburban Buenos Aires, 30 unemployed auto parts workers walked into an idle factory, rolled out sleeping mats, and refused to leave. All they wanted was to restart the silent machines. AVI LEWIS: Zanon Ceramics. After two years under worker control, it’s the granddaddy of this new movement. Today, the factory is in production with 300 workers. Decisions are made in assemblies: one worker, one vote. Everyone gets exactly the same salary. NAOMI KLEIN: It wasn’t always like this. A couple of years ago, the owner claimed that the plant was no longer profitable, that it had to be shut down. The workers refused to accept that fate. They argued that the company owed so much to the community in debts and public subsidies that it now belonged to everyone. In the Menem years, the Zanon factory had received millions in corporate welfare, and the owners still ran up huge debts. Now that his workers have restarted the machines, he’s back. Are you going to get your factory back? LUIS ZANON: [translated] I’m going to get it back. NAOMI KLEIN: How are you going to do it? LUIS ZANON: [translated] The government will give it back to me. The government will give it back to me. AVI LEWIS: That means the workers can never rest. They keep a 24-hour guard at the factory, and everyone is equipped with a slingshot, in case the police show up. NAOMI KLEIN: Their struggle against authority has even won them fans in one of Argentina’s biggest rock bands. Bersuit is in town, and the band is dedicating its show to the workers of Zanon. MEMBER OF BERSUIT: [translated] What the guys in Zanon did, fighting against the police with just marbles, like when we were kids, with slingshots against real weapons, they took over the factory. AVI LEWIS: But as we discovered walking down Main Street, Zanon’s real weapon is the support of the community. NAOMI KLEIN: What do you think of the Zanon plant under worker control? MAN AT COUNTER: [translated] That it works better than under the former owners, because at least people are working. The tiles are cheaper, and the future is brighter than it was under the owners. All they did was get subsidies from the state, nothing else, and they kept the money for themselves. WOMAN AT COUNTER: [translated] All I know is that the community supports them 100 percent, because they’re not stealing, they’re not killing anyone. On the contrary, they’re working to feed their families. BARBER: [translated] There are many companies that should be in the hands of the workers. But it seems that this is not politically convenient. That’s the real problem. CROWD: [translated] And now that we are in production, Mr. Zanon, you can kiss our asses! NAOMI KLEIN: What do you think of this slogan of the workers, which is “Zanon es del pueblo,” “Zanon is of the people”? LUIS ZANON: [translated] What can I say? It’s not true. It’s not of the people. The investment was mine, all the work was mine. I put in everything. It can’t be “of the people.” AVI LEWIS: You’re standing in front of $90 million worth of factory, which you and your companeros have taken over for your own benefit. We have a word for that. It’s called stealing. RAUL GODOY: [translated] There’s another word: "expropriation." And that’s what we’re going for. NAOMI KLEIN: The Zanon workers have gathered thousands of signatures supporting their demand for definitive expropriation. They donate tiles to local hospitals and schools. AVI LEWIS: And Zanon’s community building has paid off. Since the workers’ takeover, they have fought off six separate eviction orders. Each time, thousands of supporters have flocked to the factory, set up defenses, and been ready to put their bodies between the machines and the police. Each time, the judges’ trustees have retreated, leaving the factory under worker control. For now, Zanon really is the property of the people. AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt of Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein’s The Take about the occupied factories. Professor Ezequiel Adamovsky, as we wrap up, the significance of this recovered factory movement and also how you’d place it in the context of what happened before, in the last decades, the dictatorship that caused the disappearance of, what, roughly 30,000 Argentines? EZEQUIEL ADAMOVSKY: Well, the dictatorship that we had after 1976 implemented also for the first time a neoliberal program in Argentina. And the consequence of that was the drastic reduction of the industrial sector in Argentinian economy. Throughout the '90s, we also had a big loss of thousands of firms throughout the country. And it was interesting that the occupied factories movement started by a measure of the workers to defend their jobs. But soon after that, they moved into trying to prove that actually factories could be run by the workers themselves, actually better than the businessmen. And in 2002 and 2003, there were already over 200 occupied factories being run by the workers in Argentina, including the biggest—for example, the biggest tile factory in the whole of Latin America, which is still running under workers' control. Most of those companies are today still running successfully. So it was very inspiring for—although there were not very many companies. It was only, one could say, only 200 cases. But 200 cases were of a great significance to prove that there were alternatives against neoliberalism, and those alternatives were being tested and implemented by the people themselves and not by politicians or elites. AMY GOODMAN: Well, Ezequiel Adamovsky, I want to thank you very much for being with us. He is a professor at the University of Buenos Aires. Among his books, Anti-Capitalism, and his most recent book, The History of the Middle Class. Professor Adamovsky teaches history at the University of Buenos Aires. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, we’ll talk about what happened during the dictatorship with the dictatorship’s survivors. Stay with us.

curve is the greatest.

all from benchkrusher.

TAKE THAT J.P. MORGAN/CHASE More bank graffiti. Stick it to the fucking man.

AQ WALDY

Well I'll be...... Mr. WeAreKilluminati: Good look writing for your school paper. Try citing Clifford Carnicom as an expert next time you write a piece and tell me how that works out. The point I was trying to make was that the websites posted in this thread as evidence of Chemtrails like: Infowars.com Lightwatcher.com chemtrails911.com are not credible sources of information. To use that in Journalism would be extremely crass. Most instructors don't even let me use websites as information. Databases that search through Academic Journals, Peer-Reviewed Journals, Academic Research Studies, Newspapers, JSTOR, Gale etc... those are legit. But testimony from Clifford Carnicom (a man who refused to appear on the news to defend his position i might add)? 911truth.com? How can one even argue with that shit? If you don't accept these crackpot websites as truth you are just ousted as being in denial or part of the conspiracy itself. CASEK: I think there is some truth to the Geo-Engineering. People have been talking about that for a while now. Technically, repainting the tops of mountains with biodegradable white paint would be considered geo-engineering. It lowers the temperature by increasing the amount of light reflected off the earth and radiating out into space and reduces the amount of energy absorbed by the crust. Nothing too crazy about that. I am mainly attacking Chemtrail conspiracies and crappy researching when I posted that bit about internet education.

Awesome.......... writing skills....Journalism major.. I call bullshit.

I voted for Senator Russ Feingold, the only one who voted against the Patriot Act. He also voted against NAFTA, GATT, CAFTA and the War in Iraq. Only one that was really important to me, I don't really keep up on attorney general, sherrif, reps and all that. Medical Marijuana for seriously ill folks was on the ballot as well. :)

This thread is full of people who majored in interwebz studies at the World Wide Community College.net

Well would you look at that.... We agree. :) I just hope you see the light and notice no one, not even YouTube Rhetoric-Laden Internet Star Ron Paul is going to significantly change anything.

Doesn't it depend on your perception of "God"? Some view "god" as the universe, or the laws to which we have no control over that govern our lives.

While economics, class struggle, division of labor etc play a pivotal role in our lives, how about we keep this thread about the U.S. aggressive foreign policy (whether you agree if its just or not, it is definitely aggressive) and past actions that have been widely documented by academia but largely ignored by mainstream media. And to the cynics. Criticism is welcome, just please keep it civil. "Chomsky is a fucktard" or "Americaz da best" will be returned with a Neg. Refute the argument or be dismissed as an ignoramus that is incapable of typing a simple paragraph that occupies half a minute of your time. Inane Chitchat and random misplaced character attacks dilute the thread of its potential for rational, intelligent discourse. This internet shit is so serious y'all you don't even know.

No, Keep it up. It's dope!

Yep, I know a 4 people serving so that speaks for the entire military population. Glad I could clear that up for you Spit! Yeah, poor might be a stretch, maybe economically disadvantaged would be a better choice, but how many upper class people do you know in the military? The only reason I can think of why someone would risk their lives for a little bit of college money is if they didn't have money for college to begin with.

The emperor wears no clothes. 95% of the resources are owned by less than 5% of the nation. Instead of reforming Capitalism, maybe it would be wiser to keep pushing it to a crash. To a collapse. Class War. The military is made up of mostly poor people, so maybe their desperateness could be directed to a more productive cause. It isn't the niggers, it isn't dem damn illegal immigrants, it isn't the towel-heads, its the fucking transnational corporations, the banking elite and the corrupt government that protects them. Organization of the IWW nature maybe, or the Zapitista's would be a good role model for a revolutionary movement too I suppose.

Wouldn't it be a great world if the general public weren't moved by flashyness, rhetoric, clever 30 second ads or news stories that are supposed to inform you of an issue, etc but instead by reason and logic. I think this sucks that there isn't a lot of critical thinking going on in the mass society, but I don't see any reason why the people opposing the policies of those in power can't use the same weapons (entertainment, emotions, propaganda etc) to push an agenda until the general public has a better ideological defense. It seems like now a days as long as you have millions of dollars you can push any agenda you want and you are sure to gain at least a good portion of support. This sucks. But unless your going to cry anarchy, and putsch our leaders and destroy corporate media, you might as well use the tools in place to your advantage.

Claims to have gotten only 70% of his objectives done, because he had to have SOMETHING to do until 2010. Funny. Apparently we're done in Iraq and If we let the Republicans back into office the same economic policies that got us into this recession would be brought back in place. (I know neoliberalism, deregulation, basically Reaganomics had a big part to play in this, but didn't Clinton policies create the big Housing failure too?) Other than a bunch of talk about not giving up hope, he also talked a little bit about the Badgers (Wisconsin Football). He says he almost succeeded in bringing up the health care reformation, the first step was getting kids back on their parents plan until they're 26.

I agree. Any atrocity committed by the US is justified in that we are entitled to all world resources and the domination of others economy, culture, government, etc.

Here's a pretty fiery article I found... I will post my thoughts if the thread picks up. America Is a Serious Terrorist Threat As you read, consider the following questions: According to Chomsky, how do wealthy Muslims view the United States? How many Lebanese died in a 1985 truck bombing authorized by the Reagan administration, according to the author? How does Chomsky define terrorism? David Barsamian: The media have been noticeably lacking in providing a context and a background for the [september 11, 2001] attacks on New York and Washington. What might be some useful information that you could provide? Noam Chomsky: There are two categories of information that are particularly useful because there are two distinct, though related, sources for the attack. Let's assume that the attack was rooted somehow in the bin Laden network. That sounds plausible, at least, so let's say it's right. If that's right, there are two categories of information and of populations that we should be concerned with, linked but not identical. One is the bin Laden network. That's a category by itself. Another is the population of the region. They're not the same thing, although there are links. What ought to be in the forefront is discussion of both of those. The bin Laden network, I doubt if anybody knows it better than the CIA, since they were instrumental in helping construct it. This is a network whose development started in 1979, if you can believe President [Jimmy] Carter's National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. He claimed, maybe he was just bragging, that in mid-1979 he had instigated secret support for Mujahedin fighting against the government of Afghanistan in an effort to draw the Russians into what he called an "Afghan trap," a phrase worth remembering. He's very proud of the fact that they did fall into the Afghan trap by sending military forces to support the government six months later, with consequences that we know. The U.S., along with Egypt, Pakistan, French intelligence, Saudi Arabian funding, and Israeli involvement, assembled a major army, a huge mercenary army, maybe 100,000 or more, and they drew from the most militant sectors they could find, which happened to be radical Islamists, what are called here Islamic fundamentalists, from all over, most of them not from Afghanistan. They're called Afghanis, but like bin Laden, they come from elsewhere. Bin Laden joined very quickly. He was involved in the funding networks, which probably are the ones which still exist. They were trained, armed, organized by the CIA, Pakistan, Egypt, and others to fight a holy war against the Russians. And they did. They fought a holy war against the Russians. They carried terror into Russian territory. They may have delayed the Russian withdrawal, a number of analysts believe, but they did win the war and the Russian invaders withdrew. The war was not their only activity. In 1981, groups based in that same network assassinated President [Anwar] Sadat of Egypt, who had been instrumental in setting it up. In 1983, one suicide bomber, maybe with connections to the same networks, essentially drove the U.S. military out of Lebanon. And it continued. By 1989, they had succeeded in their holy war in Afghanistan. As soon as the U.S. established a permanent military presence in Saudi Arabia, bin Laden and the rest announced that from their point of view this was comparable to the Russian occupation of Afghanistan and they turned their guns on the Americans, as had already happened in 1983 when the U.S. had military forces in Lebanon. Saudi Arabia is a major enemy of the bin Laden network, just as Egypt is. That's what they want to overthrow, what they call the un-Islamic governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, other states of the Middle East and North Africa. And it continued. In 1997, they murdered roughly sixty tourists in Egypt and destroyed the Egyptian tourist industry. And they've been carrying out activities all over the region, North Africa, East Africa, the Middle East, for years. That's one group. And that is an outgrowth of the U.S. wars of the 1980s and, if you can believe Brzezinski, even before, when they set the "Afghan trap." There's a lot more to say about them, but that's one part. Another is the people of the region. They're connected, of course. The bin Laden network and others like them draw a lot of their support from the desperation and anger and resentment of the people of the region, which ranges from rich to poor, secular to radical Islamist. The Wall Street Journal, to its credit, has run a couple of articles on attitudes of wealthy Muslims, the people who most interest them: businessmen, bankers, professionals, and others through the Middle East region who are very frank about their grievances. They put it more politely than the poor people in the slums and the streets, but it's clear. Everybody knows what they are. For one thing, they're very angry about U.S. support for undemocratic, repressive regimes in the region and U.S. insistence on blocking any efforts towards democratic openings. You just heard on the news, it sounded like the BBC, a report that the Algerian government is now interested in getting involved in [the war against the Taliban government in Afghanistan]. The announcer said that there had been plenty of Islamic terrorism in Algeria, which is true, but he didn't tell the other part of the story, which is that a lot of the terrorism is apparently state terrorism. There's pretty strong evidence for that. The government of course is interested in enhancing its repression, and will welcome U.S. assistance in this. Supporting Israeli Occupation In fact, that government is in office because it blocked the democratic election in which it would have lost to mainly Islamic-based groups. That set off the current fighting. Similar things go on throughout the region. The "moneyed Muslims" interviewed by the Journal also complained that the U.S. has blocked independent economic development by "propping up oppressive regimes," that's the phrase they used. But the prime concern stressed in the Wall Street Journal articles and by everybody who knows anything about the region, the prime concern of the "moneyed Muslims"—basically pro-American, incidentally—is the dual U.S. policies, which contrast very sharply in their eyes, towards Iraq and Israel. In the case of Iraq, for the last ten years the U.S. and Britain have been devastating the civilian society. [Former secretary of state] Madeleine Albright's infamous statement about how maybe half a million children have died, and it's a high price but we're willing to pay it, doesn't sound too good among people who think that maybe it matters if a half a million children are killed by the U.S. and Britain. And meanwhile they're strengthening [iraqi leader] Saddam Hussein. So that's one aspect of the dual policy. The other aspect is that the U.S. is the prime supporter of the Israeli military occupation of Palestinian territory, now in its thirty-fifth year. It's been harsh and brutal from the beginning, extremely repressive. Most of this hasn't been discussed here, and the U.S. role has been virtually suppressed. It goes back twenty-five years of blocking diplomatic initiatives. Even simple facts are not reported. For example, as soon as the current fighting began last September 30 [2001], Israel immediately, the next day, began using U.S. helicopters (they can't produce helicopters) to attack civilian targets. In the next couple of days they killed several dozen people in apartment complexes and elsewhere. The fighting was all in the occupied territories, and there was no Palestinian fire. The Palestinians were using stones. So this is people throwing stones against occupiers in a military occupation, legitimate resistance by world standards, insofar as the targets are military. On October 3 [2000], [President Bill] Clinton made the biggest deal in a decade to send new military helicopters to Israel. That continued the next couple of months. That wasn't even reported, still isn't reported, as far as I'm aware. But the people there know it, even if they don't read the Israeli press (where it was immediately reported). They look in the sky and see attack helicopters coming and they know they're U.S. attack helicopters sent with the understanding that that is how they will be used. From the very start U.S. officials made it clear that there were no conditions on their use, which was by then already well known. A couple of weeks later Israel started using them for assassinations. The U.S. issued some reprimands but sent more helicopters, the most advanced in the U.S. arsenal. Meanwhile the settlement policies, which have taken over substantial parts of the territories and are designed to make it virtually impossible for a viable independent state to develop, are supported by the U.S. The U.S. provides the funding, the diplomatic support. It's the only country that's blocked the overwhelming international consensus on condemning all this under the Geneva conventions. The victims, and others in the region, know all of this. All along this has been an extremely harsh military occupation.... America's Terrorist Acts Your [view] that the U.S. is a "leading terrorist state" might stun many Americans. Could you elaborate on that? " The U.S. is the only country that was condemned for international terrorism by the World Court and that rejected a Security Council resolution calling on states to observe international law. It continues international terrorism. Violent assaults in Nicaragua are the least of it. And there are also what are in comparison, minor examples. Everybody here was quite properly outraged by the Oklahoma City bombing, and for a couple of days, the headlines all read, Oklahoma City looks like Beirut. I didn't see anybody point out that Beirut also looks like Beirut, and part of the reason is that the Reagan Administration had set off a terrorist bombing there in 1985 that was very much like Oklahoma City, a truck bombing outside a mosque timed to kill the maximum number of people as they left. It killed eighty and wounded two hundred, aimed at a Muslim cleric whom they didn't like and whom they missed. It was not very secret. I don't know what name you give to the attack that's killed maybe a million civilians in Iraq and maybe a half a million children, which is the price the Secretary of State says we're willing to pay. Is there a name for that? Supporting Israeli atrocities is another one. Supporting Turkey's crushing of its own Kurdish population, for which the Clinton Administration gave the decisive support, 80 percent of the arms, escalating as atrocities increased, is another. Or take the bombing of the Sudan, one little footnote, so small that it is casually mentioned in passing in reports on the background to the Sept. 11 crimes. How would the same commentators react if the bin Laden network blew up half the pharmaceutical supplies in the U.S. and the facilities for replenishing them? Or Israel? Or any country, where people "matter"? Although that's not a fair analogy, because the U.S. target is a poor country which had few enough drugs and vaccines to begin with and can't replenish them. Nobody knows how many thousands or tens of thousands of deaths resulted from that single atrocity, and bringing up that death toll is considered scandalous. If somebody did that to the U.S. or its allies, can you imagine the reaction? In this case we say, Oh, well, too bad, minor mistake, let's go on to the next topic. Other people in the world don't react like that. When bin Laden brings up that bombing, he strikes a resonant chord, even with people who despise and fear him, and the same, unfortunately, is true of much of the rest of his rhetoric. Or to return to "our own little region over here," as [former secretary of war] Henry Stimson called it, take Cuba. After many years of terror beginning in late 1959, including very serious atrocities, Cuba should have the right to resort to violence against the U.S. according to U.S. doctrine that is scarcely questioned. It is, unfortunately, all too easy to continue, not only with regard to the U.S. but also other terrorist states.... The Politics of Terrorism National Public Radio, which in the 1980s was denounced by the Reagan Administration as "Radio Managua on the Potomac," is also considered out there on the liberal end of respectable debate. Noah Adams, the host of "All Things Considered," asked these questions on September 17 [2001]. Should assassinations be allowed? Should the CIA be given more operating leeway? The CIA should not be permitted to carry out assassinations, but that's the least of it. Should the CIA be permitted to organize a car bombing in Beirut like the one I described? Not a secret, incidentally; prominently reported in the mainstream media, though easily forgotten. That didn't violate any laws. And it's not just the CIA. Should they have been permitted to organize in Nicaragua a terrorist army which had the official task, straight out of the mouth of the State Department, to attack "soft targets," meaning undefended agricultural cooperatives and health clinics? What's the name for that? Or to set up something like the bin Laden network, not him himself but the background networks? Should the U.S. be authorized to provide Israel with attack helicopters to carry out political assassinations and attacks on civilian targets? That's not the CIA. That's the Clinton Administration, with no noticeable objection, in fact, even reported. Could you very briefly define the political uses of terrorism? Where does it fit in the doctrinal system? The U.S. is officially committed to what is called "low-intensity warfare." That's the official doctrine. If you read the definition of low-intensity conflict in army manuals and compare it with official definitions of "terrorism" in army manuals, or the U.S. Code, you find they're almost the same. Terrorism is the use of coercive means aimed at civilian populations in an effort to achieve political, religious, or other aims. That's what the World Trade Center bombing [on September 11, 2001] was, a particularly horrifying terrorist crime. And that's official doctrine. I mentioned a couple of examples. We could go on and on. It's simply part of state action, not just the U.S. of course. Furthermore, all of these things should be well known. It's shameful that they're not. Anybody who wants to find out about them can begin by reading a collection of essays published ten years ago by a major publisher called Western State Terrorism, edited by Alex George (Routledge, 1991), which runs through lots and lots of cases. These are things people need to know if they want to understand anything about themselves. They are known by the victims of course, but the perpetrators prefer to look elsewhere.