Left Right, Left Right.

 Letter from America TRIBUNE,
25 January 2012
 IAN WILLIAMS

The conservative right has some old leftist failings

 The United States invented the loyalty oath, inflicting it, ironically, on the loyalists who had had the temerity to disagree with the founding fathers. In fact, proportionately more Americans fled the 13 ex-colonies after 1776 than Russians and French left their countries after their revolutions. In a similar form, for much of the 20th century, the left made various shibboleths a test of authentic “lefthood”, whether support for the nationalisation of assorted numbers of companies from 50 to 500, support for Provisional IRA terror, support for gay marriage, Cuba and Hugo Chávez. Such “support” was, and usually still is, inconsequential in its practical effects on its subjects.
 The issues might have more tangible reality than Gulliver’s Big-enders and Little-enders warring about which end to begin a boiled egg, but the real purpose of declarations like this is not to change the world but separate the pure in heart from the thought-criminals and to reinforce the collective identity of the former by presenting a common foe. Such tests are not nuanced; they are intended to divide, not grade. The American right has now totally adopted this old leftist habit. For the past decade, the Republican Party’s conservative activists have had a list as long as the Lord High Executioner’s. Complete opposition to abortion, to teaching evolution, gay marriage, to any tax increases at all, to any cuts in defence expenditure and most recently and (one hopes suicidally) to any controls at all on the sale or ownership of weapons of mass murder.

That many of these tests are mutually exclusive in the real world matters not one jot. The cynical swine who manipulate these issues are trying to mobilise donations, on the one hand, and a broad mass of activist nutters – “the wackos”, as one lobbyist described them in the case of Jack Abramoff, that, unusually, resulted in a six -year sentence for corruption. Abramoff’s lobbyists had enlisted the evangelical right, “the wackos”, to stop the extension of gambling to riverboats in the south, evoking the morbid fundamentalist sense of sin. But, in fact, the fundamentalists were duped into acting on behalf of the Indian tribes who wanted to maintain their monopoly on legal gambling and were prepared to pay Abramoff big dollars to do so.

 In the current context, the National Rifle Association invokes the United Nations as a threat to American sovereignty and gun-owners’ rights, not because there is any substance whatsoever for such allegations, but because it acts as an adjuvant in a vaccine, adding the conspiratorial fervour and energy of American xenophobia to the gun lobby’s efforts. Indeed, perhaps the only thing saving the UN from more such outpourings is that it is easier to harness the bile of the many Americans who hate Barack Obama because he is black – which is, of course, true – but also that they see him as a foreigner, a Muslim.

Last weekend was Martin Luther King Day in the US, as well as President Obama’s inauguration say in Washington DC. While both stand as a symbol of progress, we can be sure that the American media will not dwell on King’s real record as a democratic socialist, a supporter of unions and strikes and an opponent of the Vietnam War, let alone as the victim of FBI spying. That Americans celebrate such days is a sign of progress, but when you look at how many Americans believe three impossible things before breakfast, and even how the media lionise politicians who should really be in a padded cell rather than voting in the chambers of the US Congress, you have to wonder.
It would be difficult to pin down precisely the cause of this tide of irrationality that we hope has now reached a peak, but a major contributing factor has to be Rupert Murdoch and Fox News, which has succeeded in bringing into the mainstream views that had hitherto been regarded as deranged and outlandish. The good news is that, in the long term, enough Americans are dismayed enough by such ravings to turn out to vote against them. We can hope that the conservative ideologues have won the party but lost the country.

Keystone Cops in FBI endanger the world

Iran Assassination Plot Has Earmarks of FBI Care and Feeding

By Ian Williams, October 19, 2011

Last weekend the Martin Luther King memorial was unveiled in Washington, evoking  his speech “I have a dream.” I was having a dream too, but mine wandered between nightmare and “déjà vu all over again.” Unlike many on the left in the USA, when I see President Obama I see a fundamentally decent person reading a script written by others -- which in this dream is like Colin Powell reciting his fundamentally flawed brief at the UN about Iraqi weapons.
The taurine faecal evidence of an Iranian plot to kill a Saudi envoy in the US has all the conviction of Hitler describing Polish infiltration into German territory in 1939 -- and all the humiliation of seeing a decent person’s integrity being abused.
The “plot” recalls how much of American governmental behavior evokes the unreformed eighteenth century British polity on which it is based. Apart from the overtly corrupt electoral system gerrymandered into an American version of rotten boroughs and the Gradgrindish attitudes to public welfare, that is no more apparent than in the legal system.
Maybe they no longer hang people for pickpocketing any item worth more than a shilling, but they do execute quite a few on dubiously assembled evidence that relies on paid informants and, especially in the case of the FBI, on paid instigators.
So one does not have to join the  Iranian Ayatollah Fan Club to be skeptical of the latest allegations. It is a sad fact that almost every terrorist plot the FBI has unearthed for many years -- even before 9-11 -- has also been planted and nurtured by the FBI. Even in the long-forgotten first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 it was an Egyptian officer who was also a paid FBI informant who seems to have instigated the completely inept plot, for which arch-enemy of the Mubarak regime Sheik Omar Abdul-Rahman is still serving a life sentence -- or not, since the actual charges of conspiracy and sedition are reminiscent of days of repression in Britain around the time of the Peterloo massacre that moved Shelley to stirring verses, rarely taught in English Lit classes.
It does not take a close shave with Occam’s razor to question whether Teheran really sent a wire transfer of a $100,000 to the USA to secure the assassination of the Saudi Ambassador. Firstly, every transfer of more than $10,000 has to be registered, and rings alarms bells for money laundering, and secondly, sadly, among Mexican cartels, that sum buys a wholesale massacre, not a retail murder.
Then there is the old question, Cui Bono? Who would benefit? One can never totally discount the stupidity of the Iranian regime, but this goes beyond expectations. Iran would gain little from offing a Saudi diplomat -- but lose lots. The FBI gets itself yet another (contrived) terrorist plot to justify its huge spending and the intrusions into civil liberties it has been allowed under the so-called “war on terror.” Its previous record of getting informants and instigators who are paid and pardoned of other crimes to set up the weak and gullible to be arrested with a fanfare certainly fits the script here: an arrested drug smuggler paid to suborn an Iranian immigrant second hand car salesman struggling under a huge debt load.
But Israel wants an excuse to attack Iran -- and hitherto even a complaisant Washington has warned against that. Obama might not support, but if persuaded by these amateur theatricals, like Colin Powell, he might not oppose an assault very vigorously. And there are many in his administration for whom the question “Is it good for Israel?” outweighs whether it is good for Obama, let alone America.
Even if this were just Keystone Cops stuff from a xenophobically insular FBI, without thought for the international consequences, it could have profound international consequences. Quite apart from the  sanguinary consequences to Israel itself, not to mention to Iran and the region, of any solid manifestation of Netanyahu’s bellicosity, a closure of the Gulf and removal of a huge portion of the world’s oil supplies would be all that is needed to bring the whole house of cards, dollar and Euros, tumbling down.
And to return to Martin Luther King, let us remember, despite official American media amnesia. King was a democratic socialist, who was assassinated while being tailed by the FBI, as he supported a strike by a municipal workers’ union. He knew the FBI well -- he would be properly skeptical of any claim they made. And he would be occupying Wall St, not calling for war on Iran.

Prophet With Honour, Martin Luther King and the Memphis Garbage Strike

Tribune Review 28 June 2007

Prophet with Honour

The USA that preaches democratization to the rest of the world could adduce Martin Luther King Day as one its qualifications. There are of course a few contradictions to that. King spent his public life fighting against segregation. In the self-proclaimed leading country of the free world, for most of his lifetime black people were lynched for trying to vote, arrested for trying to ride on segregated buses or eat in segregated restaurants and were refused housing in vast tracts of America. And it is worth remembering that when King was shot in Memphis Tennessee, there celebration many whites in the south celebrated.

King tried with some degree of success to build a movement of labour unions, churches and liberals to achieve the progress that was made, in return for which the FBI tailed him constantly, and in an early, pre-internet form of swiftboating, maligned him as a communist. A complaisant press reprinted and amplified these slurs, while a New Left and Black Power movement reviled the democratic socialist King as an “Uncle Tom,” for trying to use non-violent and constitutional methods to achieve practical progress in real time and the real world rather than pontificating about pie in some future revolutionary sky.

Almost four decades later, Doctor King’s body lies a-moulderin’ in his grave, while his soul has been misappropriated by his former enemies across the political spectrum. Equally vacuous pious platitudes come from across the political spectrum, whether the New Democrats who denounce the unions, poor people and minorities whose cause King had so eloquently championed as “Special Interest groups”, and the old Southern Democrats and Republicans who worked so hard to maintain the vengeful white spirit of Dixie.

Michael Honey’s richly detailed history “Going Down Jericho Road,” is a telling reminder of those forgotten days when leaders could stand strong for principles and try to rally people behind them, instead of relying on focus groups to triangulate their policies.

Not many people remember that King was assassinated in Memphis because he was there rallying support for a garbage workers’ strike. The union’s members were black, but their struggle for union recognition was a battle for union rights in the South, as well as for shedding the shadow of the Confederacy in the South.

And hanging over it was the Vietnam War, which King had righteously denounced, even though it risked losing him crucial allies, including the leadership of the AFL-CIO. Honey shows the complexity of the struggle, perhaps one of the last times that democratic socialists had any major influence in American life. The unions lent support, even though their white members in the South were not generally in the forefront, and it was not until the assassination that LBJ ordered his Labour Secretary down to Memphis to find a solution.

At times, the parochial detail may seem overwhelming, but Honey’s narrative shows the complexities of the period, rescuing it from the retrospective false simplifications of iconography.

King’s murder certainly helped win the Memphis strike, but it also possibly destroyed the big chance for a democratic socialist coalition to develop in the USA. Without that vision, the clear beacon light of progress that he had projected split into the “rainbow coalition” of disparate interests that broke on the all too, too solid flank of conservatism.

Honey records that King considered that American Capitalism had failed his people, and preferred the European social democracy. He was, and is, right, and King’s memory should remind European allegedly socialist reformers trying to bring in American values of that. Martin Luther King day may be a Federal holiday and also for fifty states, but most American workers still have no statutory right to take it, or any other vacation or holiday off.


Going Down Jericho Road

Michael Honey





“Going Down Jericho Road”
Michael Honey, WW Norton & Company