Overthrowing Tyrannical Regimes Is A Must For Muslims

There is no doubt that enduring political tyranny is the fundamental root-cause of the many ills plaguing the Arab world from Morocco to Bahrain. Hence, it is essential that this tyranny be eradicated if the estimated 300 million Arabs will have any real hope for a better tomorrow. 
 
We all know that there is not a single Arab country that really enjoys any real semblance of democracy, perhaps with the exception of Lebanon, a country with 35 religious sects and denominations which have maintained an uneasy and often bloody coexistence since independence in the mid 1940s.
 
Some Arab regimes have succeeded in bribing their often politically-unconscious masses into submission and pacification by granting them hefty financial inducements. But life is more than just eating and mating, and people in some of these oil-rich countries are beginning to ask the hard questions the despotic dynastic rulers have always dreaded.
 
In other countries, especially the so-called republics, the comparatively more tyrannical regimes continue to employ the same stale nationalistic rhetoric which the masses have been hearing ad nauseam and got fed up with for many decades.
 
The stale slogans include, inter alia, references to western imperialism, Zionism, capitalism and reactionary forces. Indeed, ever since the end of the Second World War, any Arab daring to demand basic human rights and civil rights from the tyrannical regimes and ruling juntas has been automatically charged with collaboration with Israel or being an agent for Capitalistic or imperialistic forces.
 
Numerous prominent Arab intellectuals and thinkers were executed on concocted charges. We all remember the great Egyptian Islamic thinker Sayed Qutb as an outstanding example of the victims of Gamal Abdul Nasser's tyranny.
 
Nasser, undoubtedly a charismatic autocrat, tried to create a false Arab religion, comprising a combination of socialism and anti-Islam Arab nationalism. As we all know, this religion died an ignominious death in 1967 when Israel defeated Egypt, Syria and Jordan and seized the remainder of Palestine, including the Aqsa Mosque, as well as the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula and the Syrian Golan Heights.
 
We should also remember the fact that a few months before that fateful war, the atheistic Baath party declared the "end of Islam" when one of its leading officials, Ibrahim Makhos, wrote in  the Syrian army magazine, Jayshu Shab (or the people's army) that “Allah,  religion and morality ought to be viewed as mere  mummies in the museum of history.”!
 
Similarly, Gamal Abdul Nasser was declared as the "last Arab prophet," although he was responsible for the greatest Arab defeat since the Crusades seized Jerusalem in 1099.
 
The reason for this historical background is to remind readers that the current Arab regimes are mere "extensions" -in every conceivable respect- of past regimes in Cairo and Damascus. For example, Gen. Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, the mass murderer who ordered his henchmen to open fire indiscriminately on peaceful protesters at Rabaa, openly claims he is a political incarnation of Nasser. 
 
Similarly, Bashar el-Assad, the Hitler of Syria who didn't hesitate to exterminate his own people with deadly chemical weapons, says he is following the footsteps of his father Hafez el-Assad, the cursed tyrant who murdered tens of thousands of innocent Syrians in Hama and who is widely believed to have ceded the Golan Heights to Israel in 1967 when he was commander-in-chief of the Syrian army.
 
Criminals par excellence
 
The secular Arab media, much of which is vehemently hostile to Islam, keeps referring to Islamists and other free-minded individuals taking part in the current revolutions in both Syria and Egypt as "terrorists." 
 
However, a thorough examination of outstanding facts would reveal that the true terrorists are the regimes, not their opponents. 
 
In fact, there are numerous damn reasons justifying and even necessitating revolution against these nefarious regimes from the religious, moral, human and political perspectives.
 
In the following paragraphs, I will present some of the hard-pressing reasons making revolution a must.
 
First, some of these regimes, such as in Syria, have been shamelessly trying to change the religion of 90% of Syrians-from Islam to Godless secularism or heretical Shiism (whereby Ali Bin abi Taleb is worshipped as God incarnate).
 
Indeed, on every occasion, spokesmen and mouthpieces of the Syrian regime boast of being the guardians of secularism in the Arab world. By making the false claim, they hope to obtain a certificate of good conduct from the West, especially in the aftermath of 9/11 events in the US, when west governments became more allergic to anything Islamic.
 
Well, true secularism means freedom of religion, first and foremost. It also implies, as in the U.S., protection of religion from government interference. But in Syria and Egypt, this is not the case as everyone working in the mosques and Islamic affairs ministries -from the lowest ranking employee to the cabinet Minister- is appointed by the Intelligence apparatus.  In Egypt, the Sheikh of Azhar must be answerable to the tyrant ruling to the country. This was amply evident in the absolute and unequivocal support and backing of the Sheikh of Azhar to the bloody coup against the only democratically-elected president in Egypt's history.
 
This means that religion is manipulated by the government as religious officials must always be loyal to the regime, not to Islam or to God. This explains the fact the official religious establishment in Egypt and Syria as well as other Arab countries are siding with the manifestly evil and murderous regimes, although it is manifestly clear from the Islamic perspective that many of these regimes are apostates.
 
Second, in Syria and Egypt, one has to be a member of an atheistic or secular party in order to practice his political rights. The new Egyptian Constitution, being prepared by secular fanatics handpicked by the murderous military junta, allows for the formation of political parties based on atheism, secularism, even sexual perversion but not on Islam. This happens in a country whose constitution stipulates in its second article that Islam is "state religion."
 
And in Syria, which also proclaims Islam as state religion, anyone convicted of affiliation with an Islamist political party is executed before a firing squad. But this doesn't prevent the regime from claiming that Syria is the most democratic country under the sun.
 
Third, the secular but fascist regimes legalize and encourage every conceivable violation of the Islamic faith, including gambling, prostitution, usury, media promiscuity and atheism. Indeed, it is well known that while religious people are refused admission into numerous jobs and occupations, atheists and unreligious people are readily accepted into the army, air-force, intelligence and other "sensitive" fields. 
 
In fact, in Syria, and ever since the Baathist coupe of 1963, only Alawites and non-Muslims are accepted in high-ranking jobs in the security apparatuses. In some cases, Sunnis are accepted as a cover-up. However these Sunnis are stripped of any real authority or power.
 
One Syrian official intimated to this writer that even an Alawhite janitor in any given ministry in Syria has more real power than a Sunni cabinet minister.
 
Fourth, the ruling regimes in most Arab countries are decidedly anti-democratic. In fact, Arab regimes and democracy cannot be used in the same sentence. They are an eternal oxymoron. Indeed, the highest strategy of any Arab state is to keep the current regime in power. Every other consideration is subservient to that strategy.
 
Sometimes, some of these regimes are forced to organize elections, mainly under foreign pressure. But before they embark on holding the elections, they promulgate draconian laws designed to maximize the chances of success for anti-Islam secular candidates and/or regime supporters, and minimize the chances of the Islamists. 
 
And in case the Islamists win despite all the odds and hurdles as happened in Egypt in 2012, the regimes, or the deep state apparatus ( e.g. the justice system), resort to canceling the elections altogether for "technical or procedural reasons." 
 
The reason the elections results are cancelled is simple. These people are infinitely corrupt. They are big thieves to say the very least. Hence, they are really worried that any clean government which might arise as a result of the democratic process would put them behind bars and recover the millions of dollars that they have embezzled. 
 
Hence, they follow the adage “let us eat them for lunch before they eat us for dinner."
 
Real Conflict
 
The real conflict in the Arab world is not between Islam and secularism, although secularism is not part of Islam as there is no real separation between mosque and state.
 
The real conflict is actually between fascism, which often dons a secular attire, and democracy. The problem for the fascists is that they can't allow true democracy to take root in their countries for two main reasons.
 
First, a true democracy would overthrow the tyrants sooner or later, forcing them to lose their grip on power and privileges, especially the huge thefts they amassed at the expense of the people.
 
Second, a true democracy would sooner or later bring the Islamists to the fore.
 
Hence, the most "reasonable option" for these fascists is to seek alliance with pseudo-liberals, leftists, and religious minorities on the ground that the Islamists are their "common enemy."  
 
To conclude, the Islamists have every right under the sun to revolt against these criminal and bankrupt regimes. Indeed, the Islamists are damn correct in claiming that their very religion (Islam) is at stake especially if these regimes are allowed to linger unopposed and unchallenged.
 
Khalid Amayreh is an American-educated journalist living in al-Khalil in occupied Palestine.

Double Standards On Tyranny & Terrorism

Egypt has long been ruled by a military dictatorship — a tyrannical one, one that has had no reservations whatsoever about rounding up people, incarcerating them indefinitely without trial, torturing them, and executing them.

How did this tyrannical regime become so powerful? It did so in large part with the billions of dollars in cash and weaponry that the U.S. government has delivered into the hands of the Egyptian military and intelligence forces over a period of many years. The more money and armaments, the better able the tyrants have been to tyrannize the Egyptian people.

The fact is that U.S. officials have long believed in Egypt’s military dictatorship, especially given its long, loyal friendship with the U.S. government, much like the Shah of Iran’s dictatorial regime, which was installed into power by the CIA.

Like the Iranian people, who ultimately revolted against the CIA-installed dictatorship in their country, the Egyptian people revolted against their pro-U.S. dictatorial regime. But rather than end the military dictatorship that has ruled their country for decades, the Egyptians so far have settled for simply ousting the head of the dictatorship, Hosni Mubarak. Even though Mubarak was gone, the military establishment in Egypt has remained in control and has shown no interest in relinquishing its omnipotent control over the country.

To this day, the U.S. government continues to ply the Egyptian military with a billion dollars per year in U.S. taxpayer-funded cash and armaments.

The Egyptian government considers people who try to overthrow the government to be terrorists. That’s not too surprising. It’s also how the Syrian dictatorial regime characterizes Syrians who are currently trying to violently overthrow Syria’s dictatorship.

But what’s interesting is that the Egyptian military authorities are not the only ones who consider Egyptians who try to violently overthrow their government to be terrorists. So does the U.S. government!

Why is that interesting?

Well, for one reason because the Declaration of Independence, one of America’s two founding documents, expressly states that people have a fundamental right to abolish their government when it becomes tyrannical.

Another reason is that the United States itself was founded in violent resistance to the tyranny of the British colonists’ own government.

In fact, when one compares the tyranny under which the British colonists in America were suffering at the hands of their own government in 1776, it pales to insignificance compared to what the Egyptian military dictatorship has been doing to the Egyptian people for the past several decades.

Yet, here in the United States, U.S. officials take the same position as their Egyptian military counterparts: that any Egyptian citizen who actually exercises the right expressed in the Declaration of Independence is a terrorist.

More important, the U.S. government also takes the position that any American citizen who exhorts the Egyptian people to violently overthrow their dictatorial regime is a supporter of terrorism and will be arrested, prosecuted, and convicted in U.S. federal court of providing material support to terrorism.

Consider the case of the New York lawyer Lynne Stewart. That 73-year-old woman is currently residing in a federal penitentiary. Her crime? She passed a note from her client, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, aka “the blind sheikh,” to the press that exhorted Egyptians to violently overthrow the Egyptian regime. For that, she was convicted of providing material support to terrorists and sentenced to 10 years in jail.

(As an interesting aside, the New York Times related that in his acceptance speech Morsi promised to work for the release of Abdel Rahman, who is currently serving a life sentence in a federal penitentiary for conspiracy to commit terrorist acts within the United States, something that an Obama official said had a “zero chance” of happening.)

So, under U.S. law it’s presumably still okay to recite the principle expressed in the Declaration of Independence — that people suffering under tyranny have the right to violently overthrow their government. But as the Stewart case has demonstrated, under U.S. law it is now illegal to exhort foreigners to actually exercise that right within their own country … but with the following caveat: It’s illegal to do so only when the regime happens to be a loyal member of the U.S. Empire, such as Egypt’s military dictatorship. If the dictatorship is not a member of the U.S. Empire, like with Syria, then it is apparently still legal for Americans to exhort people to violently overthrow their dictatorship, as demonstrated by the fact that President Obama and many members of Congress are currently exhorting Syrians to do precisely that.

It all goes to show how the U.S. national security state that was brought into existence in 1947, as well as the U.S. government’s embrace of a vast overseas military empire, have warped and perverted American values. U.S. officials, especially in the Pentagon and the CIA, have become much like the British soldiers in the movie “The Bridge Over the River Kwai.” In that movie, the British POWS became so vested with building an enormous bridge on orders of their Japanese captors that they totally lost sight of who the enemy was. In the same way, U.S. officials have become so vested with their partnership with the Egyptian military dictatorship that they have lost sight of the fact that tyranny and oppression should always be the enemy of the American people.

Via: "The Future Of Freedom Foundation"

Can The Military's Hold On Egypt Be Broken?

Mohamed Morsi, Egypt's president, has only been in power for two months but he seems to be keen to stamp his authority on Egypt.

In a move that surprised the nation, he dismissed Field Marshall Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, the chief of armed forces, and his number two, General Sami Annan. Tantawi had been in the post for more than 20 years.

In total, seven members of the military's top brass were removed days after the chief of intelligence was fired over the recent attacks in Sinai.

General Abdel Fattah El Sissi, the former head of military intelligence, replaced Tantawi as defence minister.

In a speech on Sunday night, Morsi praised the armed forces and said he wanted them to concentrate on their role of protecting the nation.

In addition to the sackings, the president annulled a controversial supplementary constitutional declaration that transferred much of his power to the military. Instead he issued his own declaration, giving the president full executive and legislative powers.

And it was this move that was particularly welcomed in Tahrir Square, where Morsi's supporters gathered to celebrate, chanting "Go away Field Marshall".

Egypt's military played a pivotal role in the foundation of the modern state. After it overthrew the country's monarchy in 1952, the four subsequent leaders of the country were military officers - a trend that only changed when Morsi was elected.

The military has historically been held in high regard by the Egyptian people, who praised their refusal to fire on peaceful demonstrators during the revolution.

But many Egyptians have grown tired of the military's privileged position in society. Some estimate their vast business empire - that includes construction, hotel and petrol industries - is worth around 20 per cent of Egypt's economy.

So, is this the beginning of a transition to civilian rule in Egypt? Or is the Muslim Brotherhood just tightening its grip on the country? And what role will Egypt's wealthy military play in the future?

"By the end of the Mubarak regime the military was the silent guarantor of the regime's stability, but it didn't necessarily have an active political role. That was reserved for the president and his inner circle. So this is not the norm for the military in terms of exercising direct political authority. Now clearly the ambitions of some military officers changed in reaction to the uprising in January 2011. It is unclear, with the sidelining of Tantawi and Annan, if this represents a new direction, perhaps a shift with respect to how the military wants to position itself politically .... Parliamentary elections loom large. The extended hold of the president on all the levels of authority I think is something we should be worried about."

Michael Wahid Hanna, a fellow at the Century Foundation

Anti-Tyranny Quotes For These Times

Compiled by Gary G. Kohls, MD

“As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.” -- Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas

"The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice." -- Mohandas Gandhi

"You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil system never deserves such allegiance. Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil. A good person will resist an evil system with his or her whole soul." -- Gandhi

"Cowardice asks the question - is it safe? Expediency asks the question - is it politic? Vanity asks the question - is it popular? But conscience asks the question - is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it because it is right." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

”In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.“ -- George Orwell

“If you see injustice and say nothing, you have taken the side of the oppressor."­ -- Desmund Tutu,.South African Anglican Archbishop

“When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses … the (actual) truth will seem utterly preposterous and the speaker (of the actual truth), a raving lunatic." -- Dresden James

“Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.” -- Henry David Thoreau (commenting on a less virulent, pre-Luftwaffe/Royal Air Force/USAF/NASA time in history, when the warmongering militarists [and the obedient warrior class], the ChickenHawk politicians [and their dumbed-down, deaf and blind voter-supporters], the war-profiteering billionaires, corporations and financiers [and the blindered, amoral investor class that hopes to become them] only ruled over the earth and the sea - and not the air)

“Those who take oaths to politically powerful secret societies cannot be depended on for loyalty to a democratic republic.” -- President John Quincy Adams

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." -- Voltaire

“Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.” -- Mikhail Gorbachev

“If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other... No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." -- James Madison, Chief Architect of the Constitution
"The greatest tyrannies are always perpetrated in the name of the noblest causes." -- Thomas Paine

“Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.” -- Frederick Douglass

"I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." -- Thomas Jefferson, September 23, 1800, as inscribed on the Jefferson Memorial

"Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle! Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong that will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." -- Thomas Paine, from his incendiary, anti-tyranny publication, Common Sense

“Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst.” -- Tom Paine

“He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.” -- Tom Paine

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" -- Edmund Burke (British Statesman and Philosopher, 1729-1797)

”A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.” -- Edward Abbey (1927-1989)

“The most important topic on earth: peace. What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children — not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women — not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.” -- US President John F. Kennedy, American University commencement address, Washington, 10 June 1963. (Five months later Kennedy was assassinated.)

"Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder and it is the working class who fights all the battles, the working class who makes the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely sheds their blood and furnishes their corpses, and it is they who have never yet had a voice - in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace. They are continually talking about their patriotic duty. It is not their duty but your patriotic duty that they are concerned about. There is a decided difference. Their patriotic duty never takes them to the firing line or chucks them into the trenches." -- Eugene V. Debs

“War is the terrorism of the rich. Terrorism is the war of the poor!” -- Peter Ustinov

"When you let people do whatever they want, you get Woodstock. When you let governments do whatever they want, you get Auschwitz." -- Doug Newman
[From The Fountain of Truth: http://www.thefot.us]

"There is no scientific evidence . . . " is supposed to mean, "They have looked for it and it has not been found," instead of, "They have not looked for it and, therefore, it has not been found." -- Dr. Hans Moolenburgh from: “Fluoride: The Freedom Fight” (pp. 157)

“A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.” -- Aristotle

"Military power is as corrupting to the man who possesses it as it is pitiless to its victims. Violence is just as devastating to the soul of the perpetrator as it is to the body and souls of those who are victims of it." -- American Friends (Quakers) Service Committee

Following are some anti-tyranny quotes from antifascist author George Orwell’s (1903 – 1950). Orwell is most famous for Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty Four (1949), in which he is warning his readers about Fascism.
Ed. Note: It is worth mentioning that Orwell “put his money where his mouth was”. He went to Spain in 1936 and fought with America’s Lincoln Brigade against the fascist general Francisco Franco’s army in the Spanish Civil War.

”In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.“ -- George Orwell

“When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys. “ -- George Orwell - 1936

We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and to remain alive.” -- George Orwell – 1937

“It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.” -- George Orwell – 1938

“It’s frightful that people who are so ignorant have so much influence.” -- George Orwell – 1940

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” -- George Orwell – 1945 (in one of Orwell’s introductions to Animal Farm that was not published until 1970, 20 years after his death)

“A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.” -- George Orwell – 1946

Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem invincible.” -- George Orwell – 1946

Below are Seven Quotes from Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is about a conscienceless state/corporate tyranny (whose laws are ruthlessly enforced by obedient police/military goon squads).

“WAR IS PEACE; FREEDOM IS SLAVERY; IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. (the Party's slogans inscribed on the Ministry of Truth building).”

“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”

“War hysteria increases in intensity as one rises in the social scale. Those whose attitude toward the war is most nearly rational are the subject peoples of the disputed territories. To these people the war is simply a continuous calamity which sweeps to and fro over their bodies like a tidal wave.”

“Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.”

“We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

“There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy.... Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

Gary G. Kohls, MD, Duluth, MN, for Every Church A Peace Church (www.ecapc.org)

Do We Have The Makings Of A Real Revolution?

Unless the spirit of the last year continues to grow and becomes a major force in the social and political world, the chances for a decent future are not very high.

By Noam Chomsky
May 8, 2012
Courtesy Of "Alter Net"

The Occupy movement has been an extremely exciting development. Unprecedented, in fact. There’s never been anything like it that I can think of.  If the bonds and associations it has established can be sustained through a long, dark period ahead -- because victory won’t come quickly -- it could prove a significant moment in American history.

The fact that the Occupy movement is unprecedented is quite appropriate. After all, it’s an unprecedented era and has been so since the 1970s, which marked a major turning point in American history. For centuries, since the country began, it had been a developing society, and not always in very pretty ways. That’s another story, but the general progress was toward wealth, industrialization, development, and hope. There was a pretty constant expectation that it was going to go on like this. That was true even in very dark times.

I’m just old enough to remember the Great Depression. After the first few years, by the mid-1930s -- although the situation was objectively much harsher than it is today -- nevertheless, the spirit was quite different. There was a sense that “we’re gonna get out of it,” even among unemployed people, including a lot of my relatives, a sense that “it will get better.”

There was militant labor union organizing going on, especially from the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations). It was getting to the point of sit-down strikes, which are frightening to the business world -- you could see it in the business press at the time -- because a sit-down strike is just a step before taking over the factory and running it yourself. The idea of worker takeovers is something which is, incidentally, very much on the agenda today, and we should keep it in mind. Also New Deal legislation was beginning to come in as a result of popular pressure. Despite the hard times, there was a sense that, somehow, “we’re gonna get out of it.”

It’s quite different now. For many people in the United States, there’s a pervasive sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. I think it’s quite new in American history. And it has an objective basis.

On the Working Class

In the 1930s, unemployed working people could anticipate that their jobs would come back. If you’re a worker in manufacturing today -- the current level of unemployment there is approximately like the Depression -- and current tendencies persist, those jobs aren’t going to come back.

The change took place in the 1970s. There are a lot of reasons for it. One of the underlying factors, discussed mainly by economic historian Robert Brenner, was the falling rate of profit in manufacturing. There were other factors. It led to major changes in the economy -- a reversal of several hundred years of progress towards industrialization and development that turned into a process of de-industrialization and de-development. Of course, manufacturing production continued overseas very profitably, but it’s no good for the work force.

Along with that came a significant shift of the economy from productive enterprise -- producing things people need or could use -- to financial manipulation. The financialization of the economy really took off at that time.

On Banks

Before the 1970s, banks were banks. They did what banks were supposed to do in a state capitalist economy: they took unused funds from your bank account, for example, and transferred them to some potentially useful purpose like helping a family buy a home or send a kid to college. That changed dramatically in the 1970s. Until then, there had been no financial crises since the Great Depression. The 1950s and 1960s had been a period of enormous growth, the highest in American history, maybe in economic history.

And it was egalitarian.  The lowest quintile did about as well as the highest quintile. Lots of people moved into reasonable lifestyles -- what’s called the “middle class” here, the “working class” in other countries -- but it was real.  And the 1960s accelerated it. The activism of those years, after a pretty dismal decade, really civilized the country in lots of ways that are permanent.

When the 1970s came along, there were sudden and sharp changes: de-industrialization, the off-shoring of production, and the shift to financial institutions, which grew enormously. I should say that, in the 1950s and 1960s, there was also the development of what several decades later became the high-tech economy: computers, the Internet, the IT Revolution developed substantially in the state sector.

The developments that took place during the 1970s set off a vicious cycle. It led to the concentration of wealth increasingly in the hands of the financial sector. This doesn’t benefit the economy -- it probably harms it and society -- but it did lead to a tremendous concentration of wealth.

On Politics and Money

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle. The legislation, essentially bipartisan, drives new fiscal policies and tax changes, as well as the rules of corporate governance and deregulation. Alongside this began a sharp rise in the costs of elections, which drove the political parties even deeper into the pockets of the corporate sector.

The parties dissolved in many ways. It used to be that if a person in Congress hoped for a position such as a committee chair, he or she got it mainly through seniority and service. Within a couple of years, they started having to put money into the party coffers in order to get ahead, a topic studied mainly by Tom Ferguson. That just drove the whole system even deeper into the pockets of the corporate sector (increasingly the financial sector).

This cycle resulted in a tremendous concentration of wealth, mainly in the top tenth of one percent of the population. Meanwhile, it opened a period of stagnation or even decline for the majority of the population. People got by, but by artificial means such as longer working hours, high rates of borrowing and debt, and reliance on asset inflation like the recent housing bubble. Pretty soon those working hours were much higher in the United States than in other industrial countries like Japan and various places in Europe. So there was a period of stagnation and decline for the majority alongside a period of sharp concentration of wealth. The political system began to dissolve.

There has always been a gap between public policy and public will, but it just grew astronomically. You can see it right now, in fact.  Take a look at the big topic in Washington that everyone concentrates on: the deficit. For the public, correctly, the deficit is not regarded as much of an issue. And it isn’t really much of an issue. The issue is joblessness. There’s a deficit commission but no joblessness commission. As far as the deficit is concerned, the public has opinions. Take a look at the polls. The public overwhelmingly supports higher taxes on the wealthy, which have declined sharply in this period of stagnation and decline, and the preservation of limited social benefits.

The outcome of the deficit commission is probably going to be the opposite. The Occupy movements could provide a mass base for trying to avert what amounts to a dagger pointed at the heart of the country.

Plutonomy and the Precariat

For the general population, the 99% in the imagery of the Occupy movement, it’s been pretty harsh -- and it could get worse. This could be a period of irreversible decline. For the 1% and even less -- the .1% -- it’s just fine. They are richer than ever, more powerful than ever, controlling the political system, disregarding the public. And if it can continue, as far as they’re concerned, sure, why not?

Take, for example, Citigroup. For decades, Citigroup has been one of the most corrupt of the major investment banking corporations, repeatedly bailed out by the taxpayer, starting in the early Reagan years and now once again. I won’t run through the corruption, but it’s pretty astonishing.

In 2005, Citigroup came out with a brochure for investors called “Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances.” It urged investors to put money into a “plutonomy index.” The brochure says, “The World is dividing into two blocs -- the Plutonomy and the rest.”

Plutonomy refers to the rich, those who buy luxury goods and so on, and that’s where the action is. They claimed that their plutonomy index was way outperforming the stock market. As for the rest, we set them adrift. We don’t really care about them. We don’t really need them. They have to be around to provide a powerful state, which will protect us and bail us out when we get into trouble, but other than that they essentially have no function. These days they’re sometimes called the “precariat” -- people who live a precarious existence at the periphery of society. Only it’s not the periphery anymore. It’s becoming a very substantial part of society in the United States and indeed elsewhere. And this is considered a good thing.

So, for example, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, at the time when he was still “Saint Alan” -- hailed by the economics profession as one of the greatest economists of all time (this was before the crash for which he was substantially responsible) -- was testifying to Congress in the Clinton years, and he explained the wonders of the great economy that he was supervising. He said a lot of its success was based substantially on what he called “growing worker insecurity.” If working people are insecure, if they’re part of the precariat, living precarious existences, they’re not going to make demands, they’re not going to try to get better wages, they won’t get improved benefits. We can kick ’em out, if we don’t need ’em. And that’s what’s called a “healthy” economy, technically speaking. And he was highly praised for this, greatly admired.

So the world is now indeed splitting into a plutonomy and a precariat -- in the imagery of the Occupy movement, the 1% and the 99%. Not literal numbers, but the right picture. Now, the plutonomy is where the action is and it could continue like this.

If it does, the historic reversal that began in the 1970s could become irreversible. That’s where we’re heading. And the Occupy movement is the first real, major, popular reaction that could avert this. But it’s going to be necessary to face the fact that it’s a long, hard struggle. You don’t win victories tomorrow. You have to form the structures that will be sustained, that will go on through hard times and can win major victories. And there are a lot of things that can be done.

Toward Worker Takeover

I mentioned before that, in the 1930s, one of the most effective actions was the sit-down strike. And the reason is simple: that’s just a step before the takeover of an industry.

Through the 1970s, as the decline was setting in, there were some important events that took place.  In 1977, U.S. Steel decided to close one of its major facilities in Youngstown, Ohio. Instead of just walking away, the workforce and the community decided to get together and buy it from the company, hand it over to the work force, and turn it into a worker-run, worker-managed facility. They didn’t win. But with enough popular support, they could have won.  It’s a topic that Gar Alperovitz and Staughton Lynd, the lawyer for the workers and community, have discussed in detail.

It was a partial victory because, even though they lost, it set off other efforts. And now, throughout Ohio, and in other places, there’s a scattering of hundreds, maybe thousands, of sometimes not-so-small worker/community-owned industries that could become worker-managed. And that’s the basis for a real revolution. That’s how it takes place.

In one of the suburbs of Boston, about a year ago, something similar happened. A multinational decided to close down a profitable, functioning facility carrying out some high-tech manufacturing. Evidently, it just wasn’t profitable enough for them. The workforce and the union offered to buy it, take it over, and run it themselves. The multinational decided to close it down instead, probably for reasons of class-consciousness. I don’t think they want things like this to happen. If there had been enough popular support, if there had been something like the Occupy movement that could have gotten involved, they might have succeeded.

And there are other things going on like that. In fact, some of them are major. Not long ago, President Barack Obama took over the auto industry, which was basically owned by the public. And there were a number of things that could have been done. One was what was done: reconstitute it so that it could be handed back to the ownership, or very similar ownership, and continue on its traditional path.

The other possibility was to hand it over to the workforce -- which owned it anyway -- turn it into a worker-owned, worker-managed major industrial system that’s a big part of the economy, and have it produce things that people need. And there’s a lot that we need.

We all know or should know that the United States is extremely backward globally in high-speed transportation, and it’s very serious. It not only affects people’s lives, but the economy.  In that regard, here’s a personal story. I happened to be giving talks in France a couple of months ago and had to take a train from Avignon in southern France to Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris, the same distance as from Washington, DC, to Boston. It took two hours.  I don’t know if you’ve ever taken the train from Washington to Boston, but it’s operating at about the same speed it was 60 years ago when my wife and I first took it. It’s a scandal.

It could be done here as it’s been done in Europe. They had the capacity to do it, the skilled work force. It would have taken a little popular support, but it could have made a major change in the economy.

Just to make it more surreal, while this option was being avoided, the Obama administration was sending its transportation secretary to Spain to get contracts for developing high-speed rail for the United States, which could have been done right in the rust belt, which is being closed down. There are no economic reasons why this can’t happen. These are class reasons, and reflect the lack of popular political mobilization. Things like this continue.

Climate Change and Nuclear Weapons

I’ve kept to domestic issues, but there are two dangerous developments in the international arena, which are a kind of shadow that hangs over everything we’ve discussed. There are, for the first time in human history, real threats to the decent survival of the species.

One has been hanging around since 1945. It’s kind of a miracle that we’ve escaped it. That’s the threat of nuclear war and nuclear weapons. Though it isn’t being much discussed, that threat is, in fact, being escalated by the policies of this administration and its allies. And something has to be done about that or we’re in real trouble.

The other, of course, is environmental catastrophe. Practically every country in the world is taking at least halting steps towards trying to do something about it. The United States is also taking steps, mainly to accelerate the threat.  It is the only major country that is not only not doing something constructive to protect the environment, it’s not even climbing on the train. In some ways, it’s pulling it backwards.

And this is connected to a huge propaganda system, proudly and openly declared by the business world, to try to convince people that climate change is just a liberal hoax. “Why pay attention to these scientists?”

We’re really regressing back to the dark ages. It’s not a joke.  And if that’s happening in the most powerful, richest country in history, then this catastrophe isn’t going to be averted -- and in a generation or two, everything else we’re talking about won’t matter. Something has to be done about it very soon in a dedicated, sustained way.

It’s not going to be easy to proceed. There are going to be barriers, difficulties, hardships, failures.  It’s inevitable. But unless the spirit of the last year, here and elsewhere in the country and around the globe, continues to grow and becomes a major force in the social and political world, the chances for a decent future are not very high.

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.  A TomDispatch regular, he is the author of numerous best-selling political works, most recently, Hopes and Prospects,Making the Future, and Occupy, published by Zuccotti Park Press, from which this speech, given last October, is excerpted and adapted. His web site is www.chomsky.info.

Copyright 2012 Noam Chomsky

You Are All Suspects Now

What Are You Going To Do About It?

By John Pilger,
April 30, 2012
Courtesy Of "Anti-War"

You are all potential terrorists. It matters not that you live in Britain, the United States, Australia, or the Middle East. Citizenship is effectively abolished. Turn on your computer and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s National Operations Center may monitor whether you are typing not merely “al-Qaeda,” but “exercise,” “drill,” “wave,” “initiative,” and “organization,” all proscribed words. The British government’s announcement that it intends to spy on every email and phone call is old hat. The satellite vacuum cleaner known as Echelon has been doing this for years. What has changed is that a state of permanent war has been launched by the United States and a police state is consuming Western democracy.

What are you going to do about it?

In Britain, on instructions from the CIA, secret courts are to deal with “terror suspects.” Habeas corpus is dying. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that five men, including three British citizens, can be extradited to the U.S. even though only one has been charged with a crime. All have been imprisoned for years under the 2003 U.S.-U.K. Extradition Treaty, which was signed one month after the criminal invasion of Iraq. The European Court had condemned the treaty as likely to lead to “cruel and unusual punishment.” One of the men, Babar Ahmad, was awarded 63,000 pounds compensation for 73 recorded injuries he sustained in the custody of the Metropolitan Police. Sexual abuse, the signature of fascism, was high on the list. Another man is a schizophrenic, who has suffered a complete mental collapse and is in Broadmoor secure hospital; another is a suicide risk. To the Land of the Free they go — along with young Richard O’Dwyer, who faces 10 years in shackles and an orange jumpsuit because he allegedly infringed U.S. copyright on the Internet.

As the law is politicized and Americanized, these travesties are not untypical. In upholding the conviction of a London university student, Mohammed Gul, for disseminating “terrorism” on the Internet, appeals court judges in London ruled that “acts … against the armed forces of a state anywhere in the world which sought to influence a government and were made for political purposes” were now crimes. Call to the dock Thomas Paine, Aung San Suu Kyi, Nelson Mandela.

What are you going to do about it?

The prognosis is clear now: the malignancy that Norman Mailer called “pre-fascist” has metastasized. The U.S. attorney general, Eric Holder, defends the “right” of his government to assassinate American citizens. Israel, the protégé, is allowed to aim its nukes at nukeless Iran. In this looking-glass world, the lying is panoramic. The massacre of 17 Afghan civilians on March 11, including at least nine children and four women, is attributed to a “rogue” American soldier. The “authenticity” of this was vouched by President Obama himself, who had “seen a video” and regarded it as “conclusive proof.” An independent Afghan parliamentary investigation produced eyewitnesses who give detailed evidence of as many as 20 soldiers, aided by a helicopter, ravaging their villages, killing and raping: a standard, if marginally more murderous, U.S. Special Forces “night raid.”

Take away the video-game technology of killing — America’s contribution to modernity — and the behavior is traditional. Immersed in comic-book righteousness, poorly or brutally trained, frequently racist, obese, and led by a corrupt officer class, American forces transfer the homicide of home to faraway places whose impoverished struggles they cannot comprehend. A nation founded on the genocide of the native population never quite kicks the habit. Vietnam was “Indian country,” and its “slits” and “gooks” were to be “blown away.”

The blowing away of hundreds of mostly women and children in the Vietnamese village of My Lai in 1968 was also a “rogue” incident and, profanely, an “American tragedy” (the headline in Time). Only one of 26 men prosecuted was convicted, and he was let go by President Richard Nixon. My Lai is in Quang Ngai province, where, as I learned as a reporter, an estimated 50,000 people were killed by American troops, mostly in what they called “free-fire zones.” This was the model of modern warfare: industrial murder.

Like Iraq and Libya, Afghanistan is a theme park for the beneficiaries of America’s new permanent war: NATO, the armaments and high-tech companies, the media, and a “security” industry whose lucrative contamination is a contagion on everyday life. The conquest or “pacification” of territory is unimportant. What matters is the pacification of you, the cultivation of your indifference.

What are you going to do about it?

The descent into totalitarianism has landmarks. Any day now, the Supreme Court in London will decide whether WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange is to be extradited to Sweden. Should this final appeal fail, the facilitator of truth-telling on an epic scale, who is charged with no crime, faces solitary confinement and interrogation on ludicrous sex allegations. Thanks to a secret deal between the U.S. and Sweden, he can be “rendered” to the American gulag at any time. In his own country, Australia, Prime Minister Julia Gillard has conspired with those in Washington she calls her “true mates” to ensure her innocent fellow citizen is fitted for his orange jumpsuit just in case he should make it home. In February, her government wrote a “WikiLeaks Amendment” to the extradition treaty between Australia and the U.S. that makes it easier for her “mates” to get their hands on him. She has even given them the power of approval over freedom-of-information searches — so that the world outside can be lied to, as is customary.

What are you going to do about it?

Drones For “Urban Warfare”

(Credit: romakoma via Shutterstock/Aurora Flight Sciences/Benjamin Wheelock)


Manufacturers Are Targeting U.S. Police Forces For Sales, As Drones Move From The Middle East To Main Street

BY JEFFERSON MORLEY
TUESDAY, APR 24, 2012 07:37 AM EDT
Courtesy Of "Salon Magazine"


In November 2010, a police lieutenant from Parma, Ohio, asked Vanguard Defense Industries if the Texas-based drone manufacturer could mount a “grenade launcher and/or 12-gauge shotgun” on its ShadowHawk drone for U.S. law enforcement agencies. The answer was yes.

Last month, police officers from 10 public safety departments around the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area gathered at an airfield in southern Maryland to view a demonstration of a camera-equipped aerial drone — first developed for military use — that flies at speeds up to 20 knots or hovers for as long as an hour.

And in late March, South Korean police and military flew a Canadian-designed drone as part of “advance security preparations” for the Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul whereprotesters clashed with police.

In short, the business of marketing drones to law enforcement is booming. Now that Congress has ordered the Federal Aviation Administration to open up U.S. airspace to unmanned vehicles, the aerial surveillance technology first developed in the battle space of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan is fueling a burgeoning market in North America. And even though they’re moving from war zones to American markets, the language of combat and conflict remains an important part of their sales pitch — a fact that ought to concern citizens worried about the privacy implications of domestic drones.

“As part of the push to increase uses of civilian drones,” the Wall Street Journal reported last week, nearly 50 companies are developing some 150 different systems, ranging from miniature models to those with wingspans comparable to airliners.” Law enforcement and public safety agencies are a prime target of this industry, which some predict will have $6 billion in U.S. sales by 2016.

Altogether, the drone industry’s lobbying group, Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, claims 507 corporate members in 55 countries. The industry proved its clout in February when Congress mandated the FAA open U.S. airspace to drones starting this year. According to the AUVSI’s annual report, the group was responsible for the legislative language ordering the FAA to expedite the applications of qualified public safety agencies seeking to fly drones weighing less than 4.4 pounds this year. Larger drones will be eligible to fly in U.S. airspace by 2015.

Perhaps the most prominent firm in the U.S. drone market isVanguard Defense Industries in Texas, which sold a $275,000 drone called the ShadowHawk to the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office in Texas last year. The company is run by CEO Michael Buscher, a 24-year veteran of U.S. Army Special Operations. In hisLinkedIn profile, Buscher says that VDI offers technology “that will dramatically extend U.S. national security capabilities.”

Uniquely among U.S. manufacturers, VDI touts its ability to weaponize drones for local police departments. “If you think weaponized unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are still too new to combat zones for law enforcement to consider them for domestic use, think again,” said the editors of Special Weapons for Military and Police in February:

The Kevlar fuel tank mounted beneath the ShadowHawk allows it to stay in the air long enough to provide complete surveillance of an area and engage suspects with buckshot, tear gas, grenades and less-lethal capabilities.

Vanguard has touted the weaponized ShadowHawk to police departments in Ohio and Illinois, according to emails publishedonline by the hackers collective AntiSec. The group hacked the email account of Richard Garcia, a VDI vice president and a former FBI agent, with the stated goal of causing “embarrassment and disruption” to the company. (VDI says a group of British hackers arrested in England were responsible for the hacking. VDI did not respond to a request for comment.)

Other drone manufacturers aren’t quite as open about the machines’ weaponization capabilities. Three Israeli drone manufacturers have targeted the “homeland security” market, which seems to fall somewhere between combat and law enforcement.

Israeli Aerospace Industries, which has an office in Arlington, Va., says its “Ghost” drone is “uniquely designed to support urban warfare ISR [Intelligence, Search, Reconnaissance] missions.” A video touts the Ghost’s ability to conduct day and nighttime operations silently. IAI did not respond to request for comment.

BlueBird Aero Systems, also based in Israel, boasts in a promotional video that it is “leveraging military UAS [unmanned aviation systems] know-how and innovative approaches to the military, homeland security and civilian markets.” The company says its MicroB drone can be used for “urban environment monitoring for homeland security and law enforcement.” The two-pound craft “can be autonomously launched within seconds even in a crowded urban environment, and provides up to one hour of real-time, enhanced visual intelligence of stringent situations.”

Military expertise is part of the firms’ pitch to homeland security and law enforcement customers. BlueBird says its leadership is “comprised of high-ranking military veterans as well as experts of the defense and security industries in both Israel and North America. ”Aeronautics, another Israeli drone manufacturer, touts an advisory committee that includes a former chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces.

Major defense contractors are also beginning to move into the U.S. domestic market. Jeff Brody, a vice president of AAI, a Maryland-based division of Textron that supplies unmanned aviation systemsto the Pentagon, says there is “pent-up demand and an insatiable desire” for the FAA to clarify the rules. While AAI has talked to law enforcement agencies about its products, Brody said the company needs to see new FAA regulations before it can modify war-zone drones for domestic use.

Other Pentagon contractors are already marketing to U.S. public safety agencies. Insitu, a Washington state-based subsidiary of Boeing, touts its  “Inceptor” drone as an all-weather instantaneous “eye in the sky” for U.S. police, fire and rescue workers. The Virginia-based Aurora Flight Sciences offers the Skate drone with three full-motion video cameras for police departments looking to conduct search and rescue operations and perform accident investigations. BAE Systems, another Pentagon contractor, says it has tested a small drone for civil use but a spokesman declined to answer questions about its other products for the domestic market.

With 56 domestic government agencies now authorized by the FAA to fly drones in U.S. airspace, law enforcement is leading the way in the adoption of unmanned vehicles. According to documents published last week by Electronic Frontier Foundation, 22 of the authorized agencies are primarily law enforcement departments, while another 24 entities (mainly universities) have law enforcement functions under them.

Among the domestic users are the Department of Homeland Security, which flies a fleet of nine drones over the country’s northern and southern borders, and the FBI. A Bureau spokesman declined to comment on the nature and purpose of the FBI’s drones saying that he could not discuss “investigative techniques.”

While industry spokesmen say existing laws will adequately protect civil liberties and privacy, Congress held no hearings on the implications of domestic drones, and a wide range of opponents insist the drones pose a threat to privacy.

In Washington, activist groups Code Pink, Reprieve and the Center for Constitutional Rights are holding a “drone summit” this week, declaring it is “time to organize to end current abuses and to prevent the potentially widespread misuse both overseas and here at home.”

The FAA “has the opportunity and the responsibility to ensure that the privacy of individuals is protected and that the public is fully informed about who is using drones in public airspace and why,” said U.S. Reps. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Joe Barton, R-Texas, in a letter to the FAA last week.

“How will the public be notified about when and where drones are used, who will operate the drones, what data will be collected, how the data will be used, how the data will be retained and who will have access to the date?” they asked.

Carl Schaefer , director of small UAS products for Aurora Flight Sciences, in Manassas, Va., says he isn’t worried.

“My personal view is that complaints about privacy are overblown and unfounded,” he said in a telephone interview. “Police departments want UAVs to increase awareness more quickly whether at a crime scene or a hostage situation. These guys want to see around a corner. They aren’t peering in windows. We’ve never got a request to do that kind of stuff and we’ve had very extensive discussions with potential customers.”

Ian McDonald, a vice president at Aeryon Labs, a Canadian unmanned vehicle firm, discounted concerns about the weaponization of drones. “That’s not a request we’ve had from our customers,” he said. Aeryon’s customers, which include Canadian law enforcement agencies, “want a close-in aerial perspective and to remove officers or responders from danger.”

But with a technology born in combat zones and marketed by defense contractors from countries that don’t have baseline privacy laws (U.S.) or have poor human rights records justified in the name of “homeland security” (Israel), the American public may want more explicit guarantees that they will be the beneficiaries, not the target, of drones over America.