The Silence of the Lambs

We should seriously ask ourselves the question, "Why are Americans so passive in the face of massive economic violence perpetrated on themselves and their children?"

It appears to me to be the result of one of the most successful social conditioning campaigns in history. Whatever relates to commodities and productivity has become supremely real; whatever relates to political obligations has become supremely unreal. Social bodies such as governments have become simply targets for exploitation to which no loyalty or even elementary moral consideration is required. On the other hand, corporations can be permitted even the most invasive destruction of privacy because of the commodities they control.

Having given their loyalty to the corporate system, Americans become deeply conflicted at stories of corporate robbery. Since they usually share the same values as the corporations that have robbed them, they are often half-tempted to celebrate the successful heists, heists they themselves would have gladly participated in, despite what they tell themselves. The government and the values it represents have become an abstraction (inspiring or otherwise) to them, the representative of a power that is alien to their lives, while the values of the corporate world are ever present and pressing.

It is critical to understand the outside and inside of the crisis from their perspective. They see themselves as inside the corporate system, but view the government from the outside. They also see the “financial crisis” as a phenomena external to the system they are a part of. It is largely an abstraction to them, something that pundits talk about, but which doesn’t directly affect their world, even if they lose their job or house. This “externalizing” attitude applies to the crisis as a whole. Since they are actually an intimate part of the system and what they do is by definition the result of worthy motives, the crisis must be caused by abuses of the system which are external to the system’s normal operations. Therefore, the crisis is the result of a fortuitous combination of circumstances that threatens the smooth operation of the system, but is not part of the system itself.

Their ability to see this crisis as the inevitable result of the ordinary operation of profit system has been systematically deleted. This is one reason why the corporate media so easily runs diversionary maneuvers that distract attention from the primary theft – the robbery of trillions of dollars by those who caused the crisis. That robbery is an abstraction to most Americans, but when culprits are found to be receiving bonuses from the tax money, their outrage swells because the crime has become personal at that point. In other words, they have a strong affinity toward private profit, but public obligations have become unreal, which demonstrates why such crises are inevitable. The witnesses of the crime cannot see it as a crime because their attitudes have been shaped by the same causes as the crimes themselves.

So strongly have they internalized the profit system that they see the system as a victim in the same way as they feel their own victimization. The dominant analysis of the crisis as the fault of various malefactors - reckless speculators, greedy and overpaid executives, and the self-indulgent American consumer — allows the evil to be personalized and externalized at the same time. The cause is always external to the system itself, just as the system that they participate in is not part of the “financial crisis” which the system generated. The key theme of media coverage of the crisis is to reinforce its personal and subjective aspects, to focus microscopically on personal faults and moral failings so as to isolate causes away from the nature of the system itself. The mortgage crisis is explained as the result of unregulated personal greed, as if this evil could be separated from the nature of the profit system, which obviously depends on it as the primary motivating force behind all economic activity.

What we must see is that by internalizing the profit system so profoundly, Americans have no vantage point outside the system to criticize it without condemning themselves. Until they can face their own moral visage in the mirror, they will remain easily manipulated victims of their own victimization.

What They Won't Tell You

You won't hear the hate. You won't hear the weeping of the mothers. You will be smothered in "concern". But the Israelis will pay in their souls for what they have done to the people of Gaza. Watch them fall apart over the next few years, eaten from the inside out by what they have done, by the violation of their own soul, no other.

"Tell her, tell her about the army, tell her to be proud of the army. Tell her about the family of dead girls, tell her their names why not, tell her the whole world knows why shouldn’t she know? tell her there’s dead babies, did she see babies? tell her she’s got nothing to be ashamed of. Tell her they did it to themselves. Tell her they want their children killed to make people sorry for them, tell her I’m not sorry for them, tell her not to be sorry for them, tell her we’re the ones to be sorry for, tell her they can’t talk suffering to us. Tell her we’re the iron fist now, tell her it’s the fog of war, tell her we won’t stop killing them till we’re safe, tell her I laughed when I saw the dead policemen, tell her they’re animals living in rubble now, tell her I wouldn’t care if we wiped them out, the world would hate us is the only thing, tell her I don’t care if the world hates us, tell her we’re better haters, tell her we’re chosen people, tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel? tell her all I feel is happy it’s not her.

Don’t tell her that.

Tell her we love her.

Don’t frighten her."

- Seven Jewish Children, Caryl Churchill.

Obotomy

Obama's vision is timid and conventional and fails to challenge the ruling assumptions that have resulted in the current crisis.

"Aside of the immense injustice and irony of this, the main macroeconomic consequence of these bailouts then is that the upper crust will emerge from this crisis even richer relative to everybody else, and literally by extorting hard cash from everybody else." - comment on Paul Krugman's New York Times column "The Market Mystique", March 27, 2009.

The system is working normally. The fact that those who made themselves wealthy by exploiting unregulated holes in the system are now about to become much wealthier means that the system is doing what it was designed to do. An informed citizenry will not be able to influence Obama because he owes no loyalty to them. His election was financed directly by Wall Street and he is serving his masters well. Nothing is less important to Washington today than public opinion.

erplus is exactly correct that "the real scandal is that we are all being taxed in order to pay for the resurgence of a self-anointed neo-feudal upper crust" - that was the point of the banking crisis. Read Matt Taibbi's "The Big Takeover: How Wall Street Insiders are Using the Bailout to Stage a Revolution" if you want the inside story. Obama wants to return to the status quo before the financial crash which began two years. He and his team can't imagine that there may be something fundamentally wrong with what was happening two years ago.

We need to get over the illusion that citizen pressure counts for anything in Washington. We need to question the entire system and awaken the imagination that lies latent within us - to imagine another type of economic system altogether. What so many commentators on the crisis fail to recognize is that we are not "all in this together". There are some who are making a massive profit out of this crisis and we know exactly who they are. The rest of us will be taxed in various ways to pay for those profits and we know who we are. Warfare is being waged against us and we are too cowed to respond effectively. And that too means the system is operating according to plan.

"In the world of high finance, the rules are a little different. When you lose, the federal government steps in to cover your losses. You get to keep paying yourself a nice bonus, more in a year than most people will see in a lifetime of work. And you--along with colleagues who've changed job descriptions and now work for the government--get to plan the 'rescue' to your collective advantage." - Alan Maass,
"How the great AIG heist was pulled off"

The ruling elite see the present crisis as a prime opportunity to consolidate their wealth and the imaginationless Obama plays fiddle for them with gusto. Obama says we are all in this together, which means you get to plan your 'rescue' with the full endorsement of the Treasury. Not so fortunate those who have to work for a living.

"Now, the hedge funds are among the firms that AIG is preparing to pay off with money from the federal bailout. In other words, taxpayer dollars will end up in the pockets of financial speculators who bet on millions of homeowners' lives being ruined by a downturn in the housing market." - Alan Maass, "How the great AIG heist was pulled off"

Bet on ruin and you will be rewarded. Sorry, but Obama has the imagination of a gnat. His bailout will ensure the profits of the majors for decades to come.

Anger is not Enough

Is the president really trapped? Is popular anger even worth noticing?

Populist outrage can only be a force in American politics if it is possessed of a critique that cannot be easily undermined by the corporate media. In order words, popular outrage can only act as a force for change if it is informed outrage – anger that includes an alternative vision of how financial power could be organized and administered.

What we are currently experiencing is quite different. The media campaign over AIG bonuses is a classic diversionary maneuver. It focuses public anger on a tiny 165 million in bonuses while the 200 billion dollar transfer takes place without objection. After some ritual legislation, the outrage over bonuses will be vindicated and the massive transfer can take place unnoticed.

As Greider accurately portrays it, “many people have thrown off sullen passivity and are trying to reclaim their role as citizens.” Yet his very characterization betrays the progressive removal of that role from the citizenry over a period of many decades. Most have long since succumbed to a purely private vision of their role in society and have no model for the role of a public citizen. As David Michael Green put it recently, “Just as in Orwell's ‘1984’, the most powerful effect you can have on people is not by physically limiting their behavior, per se, but instead by getting them to limit themselves in terms of the concepts they are even capable of entertaining.” - David Michael Green, “Barack Obama and the Altar of Greed”, March 20, 2009.

Anger is not enough because anger can be quickly redirected toward new targets when it is convenient. Greider perpetuates the fantasy of citizen action in declarations such as “Timely intervention by the people could save the country from some truly bad ideas now circulating in Washington and on Wall Street.” But how, exactly, can the people intervene? Writing forceful letters to their congressional representatives? Do they even notice such campaigns anymore?

The Obama campaign is a perfect illustration of the realities of American democracy today. He was elected in one of most successful political advertising campaigns in recent memory, largely paid for with Wall Street money. To invoke Obama’s “independent base of support” as a possible counterweight to his Wall Street sponsorship is to confuse cause and effect. The advertising campaign had a deep understanding of the dissatisfaction of the public and used that to garner mass public support. The size of his “independent base of support” demonstrates outstanding marketing effectiveness. This doesn’t mean that those targeted by the campaign are not sincere in their admiration for Obama.

But unfortunately it does mean that they cannot act as a coherent political force. Obama understands this and his efforts are focused, as he says, on redirecting that anger: "I don't want to quell anger. People are right to be angry. I'm angry," he told reporters on Wednesday. Then he pivoted: "What I want us to do is channel our anger in a constructive way." This is precisely the role of the Democratic Party – to act as a lightning rod for those social forces that could push for fundamental social change and redirect them into safe channels where they can help prop up the current order.

Greider accurately characterizes the objective sought by the Obama administration: “Whatever the intentions, this ‘reform’ would effectively legitimize the existence of a corporate state. This concentrated power would be neither socialism nor capitalism, but a grotesque hybrid that combines the worst qualities of both systems. Government and politics would become even more responsive to big money, but also able to tamper intimately with private enterprise, picking winners and losers based on political loyalties, not on performance. Capitalism with its inherent tendency toward monopoly would have the means to monopolize democracy.” Obama’s actions indicate his true loyalties.

Mobilized citizens are indeed the answer, but who will do the mobilizing?

Informed Outrage

Is the president really trapped? Is popular anger even worth noticing?

Populist outrage can only be a force in American politics if it is possessed of a critique that cannot be easily undermined by the corporate media. In order words, popular outrage can only act as a force for change if it is informed outrage – anger that includes an alternative vision of how financial power could be organized and administered.

What we are currently experiencing is quite different. The media campaign over AIG bonuses is a classic diversionary maneuver. It focuses public anger on a tiny 165 million in bonuses while the 200 billion dollar transfer takes place without objection. After some ritual legislation, the outrage over bonuses will be vindicated and the massive transfer can take place unnoticed.

As Greider accurately portrays it, “many people have thrown off sullen passivity and are trying to reclaim their role as citizens.” Yet his very characterization betrays the progressive removal of that role from the citizenry over a period of many decades. Most have long since succumbed to a purely private vision of their role in society and have no model for the role of a public citizen. As David Michael Green put it recently, “Just as in Orwell's ‘1984’, the most powerful effect you can have on people is not by physically limiting their behavior, per se, but instead by getting them to limit themselves in terms of the concepts they are even capable of entertaining.” - David Michael Green, “Barack Obama and the Altar of Greed”, March 20, 2009.

Anger is not enough because anger can be quickly redirected toward new targets when it is convenient. Greider perpetuates the fantasy of citizen action in declarations such as “Timely intervention by the people could save the country from some truly bad ideas now circulating in Washington and on Wall Street.” But how, exactly, can the people intervene? Writing forceful letters to their congressional representatives? Do they even notice such campaigns anymore?

The Obama campaign is a perfect illustration of the realities of American democracy today. He was elected in one of most successful political advertising campaigns in recent memory, largely paid for with Wall Street money. To invoke Obama’s “independent base of support” as a possible counterweight to his Wall Street sponsorship is to confuse cause and effect. The advertising campaign had a deep understanding of the dissatisfaction of the public and used that to garner mass public support. The size of his “independent base of support” demonstrates outstanding marketing effectiveness. This doesn’t mean that those targeted by the campaign are not sincere in their admiration for Obama.

But unfortunately it does mean that they cannot act as a coherent political force. Obama understands this and his efforts are focused, as he says, on redirecting that anger: "I don't want to quell anger. People are right to be angry. I'm angry," he told reporters on Wednesday. Then he pivoted: "What I want us to do is channel our anger in a constructive way." This is precisely the role of the Democratic Party – to act as a lightning rod for those social forces that could push for fundamental social change and redirect them into safe channels where they can help prop up the current order.

Greider accurately characterizes the objective sought by the Obama administration: “Whatever the intentions, this ‘reform’ would effectively legitimize the existence of a corporate state. This concentrated power would be neither socialism nor capitalism, but a grotesque hybrid that combines the worst qualities of both systems. Government and politics would become even more responsive to big money, but also able to tamper intimately with private enterprise, picking winners and losers based on political loyalties, not on performance. Capitalism with its inherent tendency toward monopoly would have the means to monopolize democracy.” Obama’s actions indicate his true loyalties.

Mobilized citizens are indeed the answer, but who will do the mobilizing?

Cognitive Regulatory Capture

While some may think that that Obama is dumb as a bag of hammers for serving the interests of the Wall Street elite, there is another way of viewing the matter. In this view, Obama has his role to play and, frankly, he is playing it brilliantly.

One way to characterize Obama’s political decisions is this: “But if you're willing to risk the entirety of a potentially great presidency on making sure that a handful of already wealthy sociopaths who got rich destroying the global economy are not denied massive taxpayer-funded bonuses to keep them in jobs they've already completely mishandled, despite the fact that many of them took the money and left the job anyhow - if that's you, and you're the new president of the United States with a load of challenges and lots of public good will solidly behind you - well, then, you're dumber than a bag of hammers.” - David Michael Green, “Barack Obama and the Altar of Greed”, March 20, 2009.

The definition of stupidity depends on what the real goal is. If the goal of Barack Obama is to “fix the economy”, meaning to restore it to its previous state before the cascading effects of loss of trust in the subprime mortgage-based securities, then what he is doing makes perfect sense. He is pumping massive amounts of equity into the failed system in order to reinflate the bubble economy and thus restore it to its previous state. Bonuses make sense in this context because they are the primary motivating factors for those who created the bubble economy. He can only be considered stupid if his goal is truly to transform the current banking system. But nothing in his rhetoric or practice indicates that it is – his goal is preservation of the status quo, nothing more, nothing less.

Aiding corporate pirates is no sign of stupidity, but more like his assigned concept of operations. He was elected in one of most successful political advertising campaigns in recent memory, largely paid for with Wall Street money, precisely so that the transfer of wealth to the banking elite could take place under the covers of a pragmatic and moral administration. His popular credit is being spent wisely by Wall Street metrics. It is being used to cover the transfer of hundreds of billions of Treasury dollars from government programs into the coffers of hedge fund managers and investment bankers. So far Wall Street is extremely pleased with his efforts on their behalf – hardly evidence of stupidity.

David Michael Green assumes that eventually public outrage will undermine Obama’s efforts to ensure the smooth transfer of wealth to the ruling elite, but he is probably mistaken in this regard. The current “outrage” over AIG bonuses is a classic diversionary maneuver. It focuses public interest on a tiny 165 million in bonuses while the 200 billion dollar transfer takes place without objection. After some ritual legislation, the “outrage” over bonuses will be vindicated and the massive transfer can take place unnoticed.

To invoke Obama’s “independent base of support” as a possible counterweight to his Wall Street sponsorship is to confuse cause and effect. The advertising campaign had a deep understanding of the dissatisfaction of the public and used that to garner mass public support. The purpose of his campaign was to divert social unrest into safe channels that would not challenge Wall Street interests. The “independent base of support” is a measure of marketing effectiveness. It in no way represents an alternative to the Wall Street base, but is the result of the brilliant marketing made possible by that support.

Green is on target in his concept of “mind capture”: “Just as in Orwell's ‘1984’, the most powerful effect you can have on people is not by physically limiting their behavior, per se, but instead by getting them to limit themselves in terms of the concepts they are even capable of entertaining.” - David Michael Green, “Barack Obama and the Altar of Greed”, March 20, 2009.

Obama is no more capable of entertaining an alternative to the present financial system than a modern teenager can imagine reading a book for the sheer pleasure of the ideas to be found in it. Our creative notions have been catastrophically constrained and our politicians can no longer imagine a world not controlled by current financial powers. Obama has a decisive motivation to sell out those who voted for him – selling them out will motivate the stock market like nothing else.

The Prison of Obama's Perception

Obama team decisions need to be placed in a broader context. They appear to have made decisions at the beginning of the crisis that have locked them into automatic behavior. Their first decision, perhaps implicit, was to commit to the banking system as it currently exists. They decided that there was no fundamental problem with investment banks, hedge funds, or the shadow banking system that has grown up in the past 8 years. Once this decision was made, their tactics follow inevitably. Since the system is fundamentally sound, problems must be due to technical factors that can be corrected through methods such as monetary policy. If these tactics aren't working, it can only be because they haven't been applied forcefully enough. The advisers Obama chose are incapable of perceiving the fundamental flaws of the system they are desperately attempting to prop up. Until they do, the hole will keep getting deeper.

What basis do we have for assuming that they are not owned by financial interests? All of their behavior so far indicates that their decisions are dictated by the desire to preserve the financial system as it has existed for the past 8 years. No break with Bush policy is detectable in that regard. So it seems to me that the burden of proof is on those who do not believe that the primary motivating factor of the Obama economic team is to preserve the financial interests of those whose speculations have resulted in the current crisis.

These tactics are of a piece with Obama's endorsement of the Bush war policy, as it was well put by the Wall Street Journal, "But more important than Mr. Obama's implicit repudiation of his own positions as a candidate (and the implicit vindication of Mr. Bush's position, to say nothing of John McCain's) is his decision to maintain a sizable U.S. military presence in Iraq -- in the range of 35,000 to 50,000 troops -- past the August 2010 'withdrawal' date. That 'transitional force' is roughly the size of the U.S. military presence in South Korea through the Cold War. And its mission, involving training of Iraqi forces, U.S. force protection and 'targeted counter terrorism missions,' largely describes what the U.S. is already doing in Iraq." - Obama's Bush Vindication, Wall Street Journal, Feb. 28, 2009

Blinded by ideology, the Obama administration can't see outside the economic and military terms of reference which have been bequeathed to them. The ruling elite needs to secure access to the energy resources of the Middle East and they intend to rely on military force. In addition, they wish to keep open a secondary energy access option in Afghanistan with regard to the upcoming pipeline which will snake its way to the Persian Gulf in case there is disruption by Iran of the Gulf of Hormuz. Those are the primary motivating factors in Obama's Mideast policy.

A pattern is emerging in Obama's definition of "change". To his administration, "change" apparently means redefinition of terms. As Anthony Arnove describe the Iraq withdrawal deception, "Obama calls the troops who will stay in Iraq through the end of 2011 'residual forces' and non-combat troops, but this is just doublespeak. Combat troops are simply being renamed non-combat troops through a verbal sleight of hand, but will certainly be able to use lethal force and will find themselves in combat situations." - Moved On from the Struggle, Anthony Arnove, March 20, 2009.

All of these deceptions flow from the fundamental decision to preserve the financial and military system as it existed at the time of Obama's election. Unless and until that system is challenged, all decisions will be calibrated according to the need to preserve that system, as Edward Liddy's testimony so forcefully declared. Those who doubt this analysis should listen carefully to Liddy's testimony on the Real News: http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=3435&updaterx=2009-03-20+06%3A35%3A56

The fundamental theme of the Obama administration is "preservation" - slavish continuity with the current financial and military system. They are clearly operating from a playbook that originated before the current financial meltdown. Their war policy is also operating from a similar playbook. Consider Jeremy Scahill's recent findings about the massive payments made to Blackwater mercenaries: "The Obama administration has paid the mercenary firm formerly known as Blackwater nearly $70 million to operate in Iraq and, according to The Washington Times, may keep the company on the payroll months past the official expiration of its Iraq contract in May" - President Obama, Why Did You Pay Blackwater $70 Million in February?, Alternet, March 17, 2009.

A good example of Obama's "change" is the change of mercenary corporations contracted to carry out the subjugation of the Iraqi people, "Earlier this week, The Washington Post reported that some of Blackwater's armed operatives may simply be rehired by two other US mercenary firms that are expected to take over Blackwater's work in Iraq under the Obama administration: Triple Canopy and DynCorp. Now, The Washington Times reports that the State Department has signed contracts with Blackwater that appear to extend the company's presence in Iraq at least until September 2009." - President Obama, Why Did You Pay Blackwater $70 Million in February?, Alternet, March 17, 2009.

Change we can believe in, indeed.

Power Consolidated

“The only way around this problem is to seize power from the elite, such that the people themselves become the power structure. The elite *as a class* must be destroyed.”

This is the goal toward which we must aim and short-term strategies must never lose focus on the ultimate aim. A number of forces are converging in the present crisis. David Harvey’s analysis of the bailout strategy highlights one element (from Is This Really the End of Neoliberalism? 3/14/2009 (http://www.counterpunch.org/harvey03132009.html): “…the banks are using the money not to lend to anybody but to buy other banks. They are consolidating their class power.”

In other words, the bailout is part of a new power consolidation by the ruling elite who understand that the current class division is insufficient to maintain their dominance in the face of ecological crisis and resource wars. Therefore, we explain the crisis as “a class event in which a certain structure of exploitation broke down and is about to be displaced by an even deeper structure of exploitation.” as David Harvey puts it.

The fact that bailout money is being redirected to troop buildups demonstrates that the elite is placing its faith in military force as the guarantee of continued dominance. The recent Gaza massacre in which new DIME weapons were tested on a captive population is indicative of the repression strategy likely to be pursued in case of civil unrest.

The Obama phenomena has managed to absorb and divert most of the progressive political forces that might have been able to work for fundamental change, as was Wall Street’s intention in promoting him. The “Obama strategy” has turned out to be a brilliant move so far. It has allowed them to cover the renewed centralization of their financial power through the transfer of Treasury funds to their coffers. This accomplishes two key purposes: 1) It weakens the financial power and capacity for independent action of the majority; 2) It allows them to consolidate bank ownership into a few major players.

I would also like to add an obligatory denunciation of conspiracy theories. They are counterproductive and unnecessary. The motivations behind this “conspiracy” are not hidden. They are summarized in a recent blog post on this blog: “It is very doubtful that the elite gather together in secret to plan world domination. It is simply the case that those who control political and economic power instinctively understand the best ways to continue their dominance and act on that understanding both individually and as a class. They are not “evil”, but are usually acting in good conscience, though with a conscience formed in a peculiar way. Their conscience is formed by their experiences of economic success, which they generalize into working tools for the formation of mass economic policy. They do not speculate on the roots or final ends of their policy, but they are certain that obedience to their policy will maintain their control and their success. And for them that is only goal worth achieving.”

Empire Rebranded

"...we assume it to be a makeover, a brand alteration, an attempt precisely to +reduce+ pressure on the system to change." Precisely. The ruling elite knew that pressure from below would start to mount from many easily identifiable forces, so they turned to their staunch allies in such times. The role of the Democratic party in the U.S. has always been to act as a lightning rod for social discontent. Soaring rhetoric diverts dissident forces into safe channels where the potentially disruptive energy can be safely drained off. The rising energy of change becomes enervated through its redirection toward party structures that use it to prop up a failing system.

A recent posting on this blog helps clarify the issue: "The gushing enthusiasm over Obama has been manufactured in order to evoke the illusion of change. This illusion is extremely useful for many purposes, but primarily because it allows the same policies to be pursued with different apparent justifications. The masses by necessity live on hope. Nurturing this hope is a key factor in the continuing dominance of the command and control system of which Obama is now the visible symbol. Decent people will endure hardship as long as they believe that those at the top truly have their best interests at heart. Obama symbolizes the intelligence, compassion, and unruffled endurance that are required to realize this drama."

The troops will not be withdrawn from Iraq until the system consolidates its control - it's that simple. The urgency of controlling the resources in this region becomes more pressing by the day, so what is unpopular, particularly during the economic crisis will be relabeled. In the immortal words of Chomsky, "The basic principle, rarely violated, is that what conflicts with the requirements of power and privilege does not exist.”

Therefore the war in Iraq will soon cease to exist. Reporting will decline to a fraction of a percent of news coverage and Iraq will be forgotten. Rather than complain about the lies in the news media, I prefer to approach them in the way John Pilger suggests. If studied intently, their pronouncements are an excellent barometer of where elite sentiment is trending at the moment. In the case of Iraq, the trend is toward silent domination.

The Church After Gaza

Once upon a time, a major Catholic theologian named Johann Baptist Metz wrote a seminal essay called “The Church after Auschwitz”. In this essay, he cited the sad, profound words of Elie Wiesel, “The thoughtful Christian knows that it was not the Jewish people that died at Auschwitz, but rather Christianity.” This judgement applies not to the religion of Jesus Christ, but to that form of Christianity that not merely turned its eyes from the systematic slaughter of 6 million Jews, but actively aided and abetted that slaughter through its direct support for the Nazi regime.

At the heart of this struggle over the meaning of Christianity is the struggle over what it means to be human. We cannot be Christian unless we are first human beings. We hear much today about “not dwelling on the past” with regard to the crimes of the Bush administration, but “looking forward”. However the question raised by Metz in this essay remains, “Are we human beings really more humane when we are able successfully to forget such a horrible fact about ourselves?”

The horrible fact today is that we Christians sat and watched while thousands of innocent people were maimed and slaughtered in Gaza at the beginning of this year. Of course, the news media presented it as a battle of equals with good and evil on both sides, but does this make us less culpable? No more or less than the Germans of Hitler’s time.

Where was Jesus Christ during the Gaza slaughter? Was he standing with the Palestinians who stood fast with a courage and dignity under the missiles or did he laugh with the Israeli soldiers who mowed down civilians like cockroaches? If there is no Jesus Christ for us in Gaza, how can there be a Jesus Christ for us anywhere else?

There are magic Christians who worship a miracle maker who blesses the utopia of unending commodities. And there is a Jesus who sits trembling with a Palestinian father who waits in sickness for the missile to destroy his family. In Jesus Christ, the nearness of God is guaranteed to Christians, but to which Christianity is this promise applied? Is a Christianity that prays with its back turned to the Palestinians part of the promise or do such Christians worship something whose name none dare speak? When Jesus looks on us on the last day, will he thrust us into the same deadly isolation that we have thrust the Palestinians? Or perhaps he only cares about “religious” issues, like same sex marriage?

Unless we can see the world through Palestinian eyes, our Christianity remains dead. Unless we can see the world through the eyes of the poor, we are blind to the glory of God. We can know nothing of courage and dignity unless we recognize the strength of spirit found in the Palestinians who walked to devastated hospitals with bullets in their backs. Otherwise, how can we hear the cry of Jesus in Hebrews 5:7 “loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death”? Such a Christianity is not the religion of the crucified one, but a myth of the victors.

The attack on Gaza was an attack on everything that must be holy to us. To humiliate those whose dignity is under our protection, to kill to satiate an artificially induced bloodlust resulting from infantile racism, is to reject the Israel for whom Jesus died.

The Illusion of Change

The gushing enthusiasm over Obama has been manufactured in order to evoke the illusion of change. This illusion is extremely useful for many purposes, but primarily because it allows the same policies to be pursued with different apparent justifications. The masses by necessity live on hope. Nurturing this hope is a key factor in the continuing dominance of the command and control system of which Obama is now the visible symbol. Decent people will endure hardship as long as they believe that those at the top truly have their best interests at heart, but require sacrifices of them during crises. Obama symbolizes the intelligence, compassion, and unruffled endurance that are required to realize this drama.

Before describing the forces that control Obama, as they controlled Bush and Clinton before him, I don't think there's a need to buy into conspiracy theories. The conspiracy is out in the open, not hidden. There is a psyops operation going on against the American people, but the propaganda machine and those behind it are fairly easy to identify. It consists of the heads of transnational corporations and Wall Street banks, along with their minions in government. It consists of those who have grown fabulously rich from neoliberal policies and wish to continue imposing the same policies. No need to invoke the Bilderburg Group or the Trilateral Commission. It's important not to mystify the struggle by making oppression appear to be the product of a secret group because that makes it seem as if we only need to eliminate this evil group and the New Age will dawn. The truth is less dramatic and more challenging. The ruling elite does not consist of evil individuals who are constantly scheming towards world domination, but of clever and accomplished people of differing moral characters, who have pursued a strategy that has resulted in great personal success. That success has been accomplished in a particular economic and political context that they wish to preserve because by preserving it, they can preserve their wealth and sense of accomplishment. So far their strategy seems to be working extremely well.

The point is that the ruling elite propagandize themselves as much as those whom they wish to control. The nature of their domination has been clearly set forth by Herbert Marcuse, “In the social reality, despite all change, the domination of man by man is still the historical continuum that links pre-technological and technological Reason. However, the society which projects and undertakes the technological transformation of nature alters the base of domination by gradually replacing personal dependence (of the slave on the master, the serf on the lord of the manor, the lord on the donor of the fief, etc.) with dependence on the “objective order of things” (on economic laws, the market etc.). To be sure, the ‘objective order of things’ is itself the result of domination, but it is nevertheless true that domination now generates a higher rationality – that of a society which sustains its hierarchic structure while exploiting ever more efficiently the natural and mental resources, and distributing the benefits of this exploitation on an ever-larger scale. The limits of this rationality, and its sinister force, appear in the progressive enslavement of man by a productive apparatus which perpetuates the struggle for existence and extends it to a total international struggle which ruins the lives of those who build and use this apparatus. – “The One-Dimensional Man” The result of the “objective order of things” is false consciousness, described as follows: “…To the degree to which they correspond to the given reality, thought and behavior express a false consciousness, responding to and contributing to the preservation of a false order of facts. And this false consciousness has become embodied in the prevailing technical apparatus which in turn reproduces it.” – “The One-Dimensional Man”. Through technology the dominance of the ruling elite is enforced and the objective order of things established.

So, there is no need to posit an all-knowing Bilderburg group on one side and the ignorant, propagandized masses on the other. This dramatized image of the domination system actually serves the purposes of that system by pretending that those who recognize the obvious fact that the owning classes control virtually all economic and political power in this society are “conspiracy theorists”. “Conspiracy theory” is also the product of a slave mentality in which the masters are all-powerful deities and the slaves must accept and cooperate in their own oppression. It is very doubtful that the elite gather together in secret to plan world domination. It is simply the case that those who control political and economic power instinctively understand the best ways to continue their dominance and act on that understanding both individually and as a class. They are not “evil”, but are usually acting in good conscience, though with a conscience formed in a peculiar way. Their conscience is formed by their experiences of economic success, which they generalize into working tools for the formation of mass economic policy. They do not speculate on the roots or final ends of their policy, but they are certain that obedience to their policy will maintain their control and their success. And for them that is only goal worth achieving.

To make the point more transparent, we need to contrast the personal and the political, which the corporate media tend to confuse. Barack Obama is by all reports a decent, intelligent, and compassionate man. But like many intelligent and compassionate men, he has become entangled in power webs that favor certain types of decisions over others. The leaders who make these decisions are, in their minds, simply recognizing the “objective order of things”, regrettable as that order may be in certain instances and sometimes contrary to their personal morality. Nevertheless, precisely because they are decent and compassionate men, they must sacrifice their personal values to ensure the greater good of the whole, conditioned as it is by the “objective order of things” which must be respected.

This is a point well worth expanding on because it goes to the heart of why capitalism “succeeds”. Its driving force is the success of the leading members of society. These members have mastered behaviors that this social and economic order rewards. In their own eyes, their actions are dictated by noble aspirations for success and many of them are quite altruistic in wanting to spread the formula for this success to others. For them to fail to apply this formula would be felt as moral degeneration and they view those who cannot do what they do as insufficiently ambitious. The key understanding is that their success shapes the rules through which this society governs. Exceptions to the rule are experienced as unnecessary concessions to weakness, which must be overcome as quickly as possible. Capitalism does not arise from a secret conspiracy of bankers plotting world domination. Its main support consists of decent, compassionate individuals such as Barack Obama who wish to apply the rules that led to their “success” to as many as possible.

But it is precisely in their success that their blindness lies. Having mastered the rules so superbly, much of the world’s suffering becomes invisible to them, not because they are consciously ignoring it, but because minimizing those realities is part of the definition of their type of success. In reality, massive suffering is the reverse side of their achievements, but those achievements would not be possible unless they saw only the towering city and not the foundation it rests on.

What they cannot see is that the “objective order of things” did not spring up full-grown out of the void. It is in fact the creation of human beings, who could have decided to make different choices. A good example is the Jewish settlements on the West Bank. At this point in time, Barack Obama is obliged to recognize the objective fact that hundreds of thousands are already living on Palestinian land. It is regrettable that they have done this illegally, but that does not negate the “objective facts.” These facts have become part of the objective order of things that must be respected. The decision to remove these settlements becomes more impractical with each passing day, but did this situation arise due to some unknown physical law? No indeed, these “objective realities” were consciously created by political agents precisely so that the facts on the ground would enforce a certain power relationship between Jews and Palestinians. In deciding to back the Israelis, Obama is simply recognizing political reality and trying to work within the system to make whatever “progressive change” is realistically possible.

What is invisible to these good and intelligent men (and women) is that by working within the constraints of the “objective order of things”, no real change in that order is possible. What is implicit in this decision is to accept, willingly or not, the current state of power relationships which are the result of political maneuverings in the recent or distant past. The inability to challenge these relationships restricts the latitude of one’s own political maneuvering so that those relationships can never be transcended except by the pressure of events. And, as helpful as events may be, they can never by themselves provide the theoretical standpoint which allows leaders to guide the people through them to a more compassionate and sane society. Reacting to the pressure of events is passive, not the active, guiding role that only a sound theoretical viewpoint can provide.

Unless and until Obama can step out of the frames in which the financial elite have bracketed him, there can only be a continuance of the same system, in whatever crippled fashion may now be possible.

To dramatize the constraints applied to economic policy options, consider the media reaction if it were suggested that the assets of the banks which have caused the current crisis be expropriated and distributed to the population at large. Yet what could be more just or economically sane? And what would more quickly restore prosperity and economic justice? Yet such a suggestion would be so far outside the pale of current dialog as to be considered absurd.

How about considering the immediate elimination of harmful or useless industries, such as arms manufacturing, or the banking and insurance industries? If the boss at your workplace doesn’t place the interests of the workers first, why not consider direct action that cripples the boss's ability to make a profit and force him to recognize the justice of the workers' demands? Such ideas are taboo in the mainstream media and we have been socialized in a thousand different ways to instinctively reject such ideas as totally unrealistic.

What is important to see is why these ideas are taboo. They have not been carefully researched by teams of advanced economists and found to be scientifically defective. Instead, they do not accord with the elite’s success strategy described above. That strategy is exclusively focused on capital accumulation and increased profit margins. But it does not promote the human welfare of any but a tiny minority and even then only if you define human good in terms of the accumulation of commodities. The welfare of the vast majority is a possible side effect of the main goal, but one that can quickly be ejected if it interferes with profit maximization.

The choice is socialism or barbarism. If we continue to subsist in an economy focused on profit maximization, the planet will eventually (and in the not-too-distant future) become incapable of sustaining life. If we decide to make human welfare, not profit, the goal of economics, then a long and brilliant future lies ahead of us.

Mounting Anger

The financial elites do not care about the anger of the American taxpayer because they don't have to. Obama’s decisions are implicitly controlled by the same financial interests that caused the crisis in the first place. A careful examination of his Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan (HASP) plan reveals the following: HASP will in most cases depend on the voluntary participation of private banks. In other words, there will be almost no obligations by the banks to actually lend the money to homeowners. If you know anyone who's tried to a get a loan from one of the bailed-out banks lately, it's easy to see what the new plan will entail. Innumerable hurdles designed to make it very difficult for homeowners to qualify will be erected by the banks while they take taxpayer money to build up their business in other ways. In particular, the bill says that anyone who is deemed able to "afford" their present rates will not qualify. If a mortgage company decides that refinancing a loan will cost them more than sending the house into foreclosure, they will be free to deny refinancing.

Instead of suffering for their destruction of the world economy, the banks will not be required to write down the values of their vastly overpriced loans, much less relinquish control over the resulting derivative securities (CDOs, SIVs, and all the rest of it). Instead of writing down the bad debt, as has been done in many previous crises, the banks will retain the unrealistic current value of their loans, with the difference paid for by the very taxpayers who are being thrown out of their homes.

In other words, the HASP bill is mostly window-dressing to cover another mass transfer of funds to the banks. The financial elite that Obama represents brook no limit, however mild, to its power and prerogatives. It would appear that having bought into their own "free market" propaganda, they now find themselves staring into the void. They know that the old game is over and they are attempting to build up a cushion at taxpayer expense so that they can ride out the storm.

Why don't they have to care? Because the opinion of the American people counts for nothing in Washington and Wall Street. In a thousand ways, Americans have been socialized into accepting a certain image of themselves that makes rebellion against the system almost impossible. This has allowed the growth of a modern aristocracy which has now consolidated its control over every aspect of official political, cultural and economic life.

Those of us who believe that Jesus came to bring social justice into the world must now make a commitment to fight this modern aristocracy. But we must fight them with the weapons of conscience, not bombs and guns. Bombs and guns are what they believe in and the fruit of their warfare is plain for all to see. Violence is always counterproductive because it always denies the power of conscience to move men’s hearts to embrace justice. We must believe in the power of conscience from the depths of our souls, remembering that the goal can never be achieved through the manipulation of human bodies with the technical instruments of control. Such a course will always dehumanize both us and those who choose to make themselves our opponents. The path to social justice always leads to deeper humanization by recreating ourselves as agents of truth.

Remove Our Names from Your Blood-Stained Wall

“Mr. President of the State of Israel, I am writing to you to intervene with the appropriate authorities to withdraw from the Yad Vashem memorial dedicated to the memory of Jewish victims of Nazism, the name of my grandfather, Moshe Brajtberg, gassed at Treblinka in 1943, and those of other members of my who family died during deportation to various Nazi camps during World War II. I ask you to honor my request, Mr. Chairman, because what took place in Gaza, and more generally, the injustices to the Arab people of Palestine for sixty years, disqualifies Israel to be the center of the memory of the harm done to Jews, and thus to all humanity.” - Jean-Moïse Braitberg

The attacks had been planned months in advance. On Saturday, December 27, 2008, school had just let out. Thousands of Gazan school children poured into the streets, oblivious of the darkness that invaded their parent’s eyes. As the children milled about devastated streets, Israel struck. Four hours later, 150 men, women, and children lay dead. The word “terror” for them was simply a slur laid upon their tribe just as “savage” had been laid on African-Americans a hundred years before. But they were dead, and their mothers and fathers wailed while the world looked on in silence.

In June 2007, the noose was tightened around Gazan necks. Then began a siege in which every aspect of the lives of the people came under surveillance and control. They were totally dependent on Israel for fuel, electricity, cooking gas, medical supplies, food supplies (even flour), and building material. The means of life were cut off like air to a man strapped to a table with tape across his mouth while interrogators pinch his nostrils shut. Israel made sure that the Palestinians remained barely alive.

“You see, since my childhood, I lived in amongst survivors of the death camps. I saw the numbers tattooed on their arms, I heard the story of torture; I knew the impossible grief and I shared their nightmares. I was taught that these crimes must never happen again, that never again must man, because of ethnicity or religion despise other man, mock his Human Rights of living a safe, dignified life, without barriers, and hope, so remote be it, of a future of peace and prosperity.” - Jean-Moïse Braitberg

“I lived in amongst survivors.” The Palestinians have survived Israel’s honor. The war’s strategic concept was to terrorize the civilian population by unremitting attacks from the air, sowing indiscriminate death and destruction. This has the side benefit of saving the pilots from seeing the anguish they inflict since the Palestinians have no anti-aircraft weapons. The simple calculation of childish cruelty: if the entire life-supporting infrastructure in the Strip is utterly destroyed and total anarchy ensues, the population will rise up and overthrow the Hamas regime. Such fantasies factors out Palestinian honor which now gushes forth to bring life to a battered people.

“You’ll tell me Mr. President, that Israel has the right to defend itself against people launching rockets into Israel, or suicide bombers that destroy innocent Israeli lives. My response to that is that my humanism doesn’t vary according to the nationality of the victims.” - Jean-Moïse Braitberg

To be an Israeli is to have no crimes to pay for. Their crimes have all been absolved by the Holocaust, which cleanses from every sin. Their eternal innocence preens itself and basks in unquenchable moral ascendancy. When they kill children, it is not murder, but the elimination of “terrorists”, untermensch whose existence is another holocaust burning at the feet of the chosen ones, sacrifices to the Moloch which they have named “God.”

“By displaying the names of my family members at the Yad Vashem Memorial, in the heart of the state of Israel, your state imprisons my family memories behind the barbed wires of zionism, and makes it hostage of a so-called moral authority which commits every day the abomination of denying justice.
So, please, remove the name of my grandfather from the shrine dedicated to cruelty against Jews so that it no longer justifies the injustice being done to the Palestinians.” - Jean-Moïse Braitberg

“Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.”

The Need for Deeper Analysis

“The major problem now is that these entities -- the ones that ought to be applying pressure on Obama from the Left and opposing him when he moves too far Right -- are now completely boxed in. They've lost -- or, more accurately, voluntarily relinquished -- their independence. They know that criticizing -- let alone opposing -- Obama will mean that all those new readers they won last year will leave; that all those new dues-paying members will go join some other, more Obama-supportive organization; that they will prompt intense backlash and anger among the very people -- their members, supporters and readers -- on whom they have come to rely as the source of their support, strength, and numbers.” – Glenn Greenwald, “Obama and Liberals: A Counter-Productive Relationship”, Feb. 13, 2009.

The deeper question is why did they relinquish their independence? According to Greenwald’s analysis, they gave it up because “Many online political and ‘news’ outlets -- including some liberal political blogs -- discovered that the most reliable way to massively increase traffic was to capitalize on the pro-Obama fervor by turning themselves into pro-Obama cheerleading squads.” In other words, they cared more about the size of their membership rolls than their “principles”. They bought into the notion that membership equals influence, when the opposite is more likely the case, depending on the members. Attention comes to those who blend with the choir, but they have to sing the same dull song.

The term for this behavior is opportunism. If your organization values opportunities more than principles, then principles tend to become the icing on the political product you are offering and the real goal becomes sales quantity. Deep political convictions can be very powerful, but they have to be real. The sad truth is that Democrats (and associated groups) no longer possess such commitment, though they are still able to imitate conviction with considerable rhetorical ability.

It is only at the point where such groups and their so-called principles end that real analysis begins. “Obama co-opted huge portions of the Left” – is this a real left? Left means convictions about the way the relationships of society are aligned. It does not mean anger at Bush or disgust with Wall Street greed. These are worthy sentiments indeed, but if they find no deeper ground, then they are as effervescent as the moods of Britney Spears - and just as meaningful. A left that is devoted to a person rather than ideas is not a left at all, but a Tiger Beat cover.

These so-called left groupings lost the battle because they never fought it. The Right is still capable of political conviction and therein lies its power. “For the moment, on one issue after the next, one can vividly observe the harm that comes from a political faction being beholden to a leader rather than to any actual ideas or political principles.” – Glenn Greenwald. Harm? What is the bond that holds the vast “Left” to its leader? If no ideas are involved, then what is the motivation? Star power? People devoted to stars are not leftists – they are teeny boppers grown old.

The diagnosis begins with the disease which Greenwald has so ably uncovered. To do this, we must speak of shared ideas. The ultimate taboo in Democratic circles which pride themselves on their “pragmatism” is a theoretical critique of this society. “Pragmatism” to them means reacting to immediate events with immediate and barely thought-out “solutions”. Lacking an explicit body of theory on how this society and its economy function, such “solutions” inevitably reinforce the current power relationships while making cheap gestures toward the poor and middle class. Unless you have a measure for what progress means, your progressivism becomes meaningless. When progress is defined “pragmatically”, it starts to mean whatever the powerful want it to mean at a particular moment. This type of “pragmatism” ultimately means doing whatever is necessary to perpetuate the current economic relationships, not questioning them. It takes two distinct parties to make a real compromise, otherwise one can only compromise oneself.

Without progressive theory, there can be no progressive movement. If we are people of political conviction, then we have a critique of the economic and power relationships in this society and how those relationships need to change. We do not engage in battle with the Right merely with a game of numbers, but we must fight on three fronts: the theoretical in which progressive ideas triumph over the those of the Right, the political, in which progressives gain access to the levers of power, and the economic, in which the principles of economic justice are enforced. Real change has never come from any other source.

Obama's Secret Priorities

The sad fact that Obama represents no change from the fundamental priorities of the Bush and Clinton administrations is rapidly becoming manifest. A renewed surge for the war in Afghanistan appears to be one of the few campaign promises he intends to keep. This week, his Attorney General explicitly endorsed Bush's policy on renditions and Bush's refusal to recognize the jurisdiction of US courts in any legal proceedings against those who kidnap and torture foreign nationals. His solicitor general has explicitly endorsed Bush’s policy on enemy combatants.

I strongly endorse the proposals of the Families for a Peaceful Tomorrow, but I must ask myself, as a Christian: "Do I not have an obligation to reflect on why such proposals have so little chance of even being considered, much less implemented?" Jesus did not understand his mission in isolation from its social and political context and neither should we.

Let's examine the first of these proposals in this light. "Set a swift timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO military forces, to be substituted by U.N. forces for short-term security." In order for this to be implemented, we must seriously ask, "Why are the troops there?" Obviously, they are not there to protect the Afghan people or promote democracy. The U.S. not only indiscriminately kills Afghan civilians, but it supports the Northern alliance who are the chief violators of human rights in that country. They also support the Karzai government which is so corrupt that his brother is one of primary heroin dealers in the region. I could go on, but students of the war know that other interests are being served than those of the Afghan people.

The troops are there as part of a plan to support Western oil and gas interests in the region. Obama understands the real nature of U.S. power relationships and therefore virtually all of his plans revolve around supporting those interests. I say this not in a self-satisfied or ideological manner, but with deep sadness at this perversion of the Christian conscience.

We need to start with a critique of power relations as Jesus did when he exposed the hidden interests of the Pharisees and Sadducees. He never deceived himself about what their intentions were. Nonviolence does not entail acceptance of the self-serving proclamations made by ruling interests. We should begin by facing the reality of these interests in their full force.

Once the larger context is visible, we can begin to form a realistic strategy to fight the interests that promote the war in Afghanistan. As with Jesus, the fight will not often be spectacular, but it will be effective. Only a movement that directly challenges these underlying interests can take real steps toward the goal of ending war.

Irrational Designs: A Socialist Critique of the Software Industry

The best operating system in the world did not require billions in venture capital. It was designed by students and hobbyists during their disposable time. In other words, it was designed and produced using socialist production methods and has now achieved “market” penetration that seriously threatens the “efficient” capitalist monster Microsoft. The name of this operating system is Linux and I believe it offers a paradigm for a socialist method of production that could vastly improve the quality of software in the future. The software industry has succeeded in spite of and not because of capitalist methods of production. Software flourishes in freedom, in networks of equality, driven by bursts of uncontainable creativity which have been perverted and exploited by capitalist methods of social production.
Good software requires time, long periods of intense and lively concentration, mathematical and logical talent, and a few basic tools. There is no more wasteful time sink in software engineering than having to work around the consequences of the proliferation of poorly designed and rushed software. This proliferation is the result of sophisticated marketing campaigns which have resulted in huge profits for select corporations while doing more damage to the potential of software than any other factor. The logic of software contradicts the logic of capitalism at each step of its development.

Many will argue rather persuasively that competition is the lifeblood of software. As a software professional, I heartily endorse this proposition. But we must distinguish between two meanings of the word “competition”, which are typically slurred together by the corporate media. The competition that every software professional celebrates is competition between designs and implementations in which the one with the best features, most performance, and highest level of extensibility and interoperability flourishes over its rivals. But this is not the competition which the mavens of our mega-corporations inflict. And the destructive competition in which they thrive is at the root of a crisis that can only be solved by a full embrace of socialist methods of software production.

The competition which has rotted our technological infrastructure is centered on marketing, not quality. Those corporations who own the marketing machines can and do drive absolute garbage onto consumer’s PCs. You will often hear them explain that they cannot afford to care too much about quality, because too much attention to quality interferes with optimal market timing. A prime example is the recent release of Vista, which is now widely recognized as an immature operating system that was rushed to market. Dozens of major examples could be cited along the same lines. The dirty secret of software is that it is a hard and complex science that that fundamentally requires the attentive capacity of a jewel cutter to do properly. It can be done, but devotion to craftsmanship is what allows it to truly succeed.

But the conditions of the modern software marketplace militate against such care and attention on every side. Unrealistic release schedules are devised by project managers who make guesses based on nothing more optimal time to market. Of course, they “consult” with developers who are encouraged to be “honest” in their time and effort estimates. But those developers realize all too well that true honesty would get them dismissed and replaced by others whose honesty was more closely tuned to the demands of market timing. While most developers want to create a product that is focused on user value, the market constantly perverts these “use-values”, resulting in buggy and insecure products that waste enormous amounts of time. Good software exists, but its survival is not a market value, but a happy and often unrepeatable exception.

The profit motive has been the incubus that has sucked the life, creativity, and potential out of the software industry, whose chaos and inefficiency mirrors the chaos of the capitalist production from which it arose. What software engineers value is the use-value of the software they create. What capitalism values is the surplus value (the difference between the cost of developing software and the licensing fees it commands in the market), not the ability of the software to interoperate successfully with software designed by rival firms. Yet this latter characteristic is precisely what leads to the greatest multiplier of use-value. The generally poor effectiveness of software is the result of the fact that it is produced by competing islands of specialized vendors who have little reason to interoperate with others and strong motivations to subvert the operation of their rivals’ work. Standards organizations attempt to bridge this gap, but support for the standards produced by these bodies is notoriously low even by the major players who have the most to gain from it.

The nature of good software is to reach out and create networks of interoperability, but such interoperability can flourish only in free productive relationships unconstrained by competing profit interests. On a truly level playing field where only the quality and usefulness of the products mattered, we would finally be able to uncover the true potential of software to improve human life. But such a utopian expectation can never be fulfilled until the system of production gains overall direction and unified planning. The idea that quality will arise from competing islands of entrenched marketing interests is as absurd as believing that unregulated financial markets will self-correct.

As Radical as Reality

“We can assert with confidence that the present system cannot survive. What we cannot predict is which new order will be chosen to replace it, because it will be the result of an infinity of individual pressures. But sooner or later, a new system will be installed. This will not be a capitalist system but it may be far worse (even more polarizing and hierarchical) or much better (relatively democratic and relatively egalitarian) than such a system. The choice of a new system is the major worldwide political struggle of our times.

As for our immediate short-run ad interim prospects, it is clear what is happening everywhere. We have been moving into a protectionist world (forget about so-called globalization). We have been moving into a much larger direct role of government in production. Even the United States and Great Britain are partially nationalizing the banks and the dying big industries. We are moving into populist government-led redistribution, which can take left-of-center social-democratic forms or far right authoritarian forms. And we are moving into acute social conflict within states, as everyone competes over the smaller pie. In the short-run, it is not, by and large, a pretty picture.” – Immanuel Wallerstein, Oct. 15, 2008.

The beginning of the post-capitalist order is taking shape in the form of the mass transfer of wealth and social control to Wall Street banks. The fact that they can now openly re-appropriate the wealth of the people without significant opposition signals the beginning of the end of democratic aspirations. In this drama, Obama plays the role of moralistic facilitator to cover the power transfer.

Though the first movement of this symphony of repression will be the new role of taxpayer as guarantor of the right to risk-free speculation by the ruling elite, the music will quickly evolve. The whip of the drum takes the form of mass layoffs which enforce the necessity of discipline, of unquestioning submission to the demands of capital. Those who object to genocide will be treated as the Israeli protesters against the Gaza atrocities who were subjected to mass arrest and imprisonment.

The billionaires who control the world economy have been endowed with enough free money to become America’s ruling elite for the rest of the 21st century. “The Bush-Obama bailout bore “small print” stipulations that have already given Wall Street a decade’s tax-free status by letting it count its financial losses against its tax liability. So not only has there been a great fiscal giveaway, there has been a tax shift off finance onto labor and industry.” Michael Hudson, “Obama’s New Bank Giveaway”, Jan. 30, 2009. It is clear that we are facing the advent of a new and brutal phase in the history of slavery, with ourselves as the subjects.

The financial elites have replaced the government as primary recipients of economic surplus, reducing the public sector to the role of supplier of value. This relationship points to a new form of slavery that is likely to become the replacement for the current wage labor system. The economic planning function once considered the sole purview of government has now been taken over by the financial sector, who now dictates to the government and will accept nothing but abject submission.

A Mother’s Choice

Here is a story from Gaza contributed by Barbara Lubin, the well-respected humanitarian leader of the Middle East Children's Alliance, a non-profit organization working for the rights and the well being of children in the Middle East by sending s shipments of aid to Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon, and supporting projects that make life better for the children.

"There are so many stories to tell from our first day in Gaza. So much pain and destruction. But there is one story in particular that I think the world needs to hear. I met a mother who was at home with her ten children when Israeli soldiers entered the house. The soldiers told her she had to choose five of her children to 'give as a gift to Israel.' As she screamed in horror they repeated the demand and told her she could choose or they would choose for her. Then these soldiers murdered five of her children in front of her." - Barbara Lubin, "Notes from Palestine", Jan. 22, 2009.

Perhaps those of us who have children can put ourselves in that woman's shoes and contemplate the choice she was forced to make. Though there are no words for what was done to this woman and any words that I may offer here will be painfully short of what needs to be said and done, I'll briefly explore the struggle that lies behind acts that only Jesus can forgive.

For sixty years, Americans have been systematically shielded from the reality of Palestine. No doubt those who truly cared could discover the truth. Today such discovery can be made with elementary online inquiries, but the mainstream news media on which most Americans rely fundamentally distorts Palestinian reality. Pandering to Israeli sensitivities, they have portrayed Palestinians not as human beings with needs and desires and moral values similar to our own, but as a species of semi-humans driven by sheer fanaticism. Every suicide bombing is transformed into a brutalizing spectacle which evokes no reflection on the historical context, but mindless gaping at the sheer irrationality of the act. Those who could perform such acts must belong to a totally different species from the "civilized" members of the world which Benjamin Netanyahu invoked before the Gaza massacre.

The forbidden question is always "What would drive ordinary human beings to such acts?" For the Palestinians that carry out these acts and voted Hamas into power in the fairest elections in the Arab Middle East were as ordinary as a teenager at the local Burger King. Most Palestinians are not hypnotized by sinister mullahs, but they face daily choices that can and do kill them and their families and they have no choice but to respond to their political and military surroundings.

The Israelis did not conceal their military strategy toward the native Palestinian population either at the founding of the state of Israel or during the latest massacre. Consider the words of Israel's most prominent military analyst, Ze’ev Schiff in 1978, "... the Israeli Army has always struck civilian populations, purposely and consciously ... the Army, he said, has never distinguished civilian [from military] targets ... [but] purposely attacked civilian targets even when Israeli settlements had not been struck." (Haaretz, May 15, 1978). The political reasons are explained by distinguished statesman Abba Eban, "’there was a rational prospect, ultimately fulfilled, that affected populations would exert pressure for the cessation of hostilities.’ The effect, as Eban well understood, would be to allow Israel to implement, undisturbed, its programs of illegal expansion and harsh repression. Eban was commenting on a review of Labor government attacks against civilians by Prime Minister Begin, presenting a picture, Eban said, ‘of an Israel wantonly inflicting every possible measure of death and anguish on civilian populations in a mood reminiscent of regimes which neither Mr.Begin nor I would dare to mention by name.’" – Noam Chomsky, "Gaza 2009", Jan. 20, 2009. The regime that dare not speak its name evokes memories of Sophies’ Choice. In this movie, a Polish woman arrives at a Nazi concentration camp and is ordered by the Nazis to choose which of her children will live and which will die. Unlike yesterday's Palestinian mother, she makes the choice.

A cursory examination of Israeli words and actions quickly demonstrates that the recent attacks on civilians were carefully foreseen and meticulously prepared. But this is merely one element in much larger strategic objective. "Israelis would mostly breathe a sigh of relief if Palestinians were to disappear. And it is no secret that the policies that have taken shape accord well with the recommendations of Moshe Dayan right after the 1967 war: Palestinians will ‘continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave.’ More extreme recommendations have been made by highly regarded left humanists in the United States, for example Michael Walzer of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton and editor of the democratic socialist journal Dissent, who advised 35 years ago that since Palestinians are ‘marginal to the nation,’ they should be ‘helped to leave.'" – Frank Barat, "On the Future of Israel and Palestine", June 6, 2008.

To highlight the existential Palestinian reality, Michael Neumann recently described their situation as follows: "But suppose a bunch of thugs install themselves, with their families, all around your farm. They have taken most of your land and resources; they're out for more. If this keeps up, you will starve, perhaps die. They are armed to the teeth and abundantly willing to use those arms. The only way you can defend yourself is to make them pay as heavy a price as possible for their siege and their constant encroachment on your living space. You're critically low on food and medical supplies, and the thugs cut off those supplies whenever they please. What's more, the only weapons available to you are indiscriminate, and will harm their families as well as the thugs themselves. You can use those weapons, even knowing they will kill innocents. You don't have to let the thugs destroy you, thereby sacrificing your innocents (including yourself) to spare theirs. Since innocents are under mortal threat in either case, you needn't prefer the attackers' to your own." Michael Neumann, "Hamas and Gaza", Jan. 13, 2009.

"I believed, and to this day still believe, in our people's eternal and historic right to this entire land," Prime Minister Olmert informed a joint session of Congress in May 2006 to rousing applause. As a Catholic, I must ask myself, "Do these people not have the right to defend themselves?" If it was my family that was threatened, would I not do everything in my power to make the oppressor feel pain until they relented? If I was given Sophies’choice, what would be my response? Even though the recent atrocities have forced literal Sophies’ choices on helpless mothers, Palestinians have faced a national Sophies’ choice for the last sixty years. They can live like dogs, as Moshe Dayan suggested, risking their own and their childrens' lives from attacks by settlers or the IDF or they can do as the Israeli’s wish them to do and run from their homeland, saving their families’ lives, but condemning them to the shame of having abandoned the life they had every right to lead. This latter choice is not a literal death, but a spiritual one that is in many ways worse. What would you choose?

The Palestinian Right to Self-Defense

I'd first like to explain why I identify the Palestinian people of Gaza with Jesus Christ. Fundamental to the gospel is God's love and predilection for the weak and abused of human history. This is not based on their moral purity or piety, but because of who God is. In the Beatitudes, the word for "poor" is ptochoi, meaning the "stooped", the "dismayed". Note that it says nothing about whether they are Christian, righteous, or members of approved social groups, but only that they are the needy, the helpless. Likewise, the word "hungering", peinontes in Greek, means to suffer deprivation resulting from evil acts of violence perpetrated over an extended period. The use of the verb klaiein, "weep", in the Beatitudes, means profound suffering as a result of permanent marginalization. So it is that those without social status, the inconsequential, those whose lives are of no value to society, who will inherit the Kingdom.

What people can be more justly spoken of in these terms than the Palestinians living in Gaza? For the past two years, Gaza has been under a blockade that includes food, medicine, and gasoline. Their only means of survival were the tunnels to Egypt that have now been blasted. Their major sources of electricity were destroyed nearly a year ago, meaning no incubators for premature babies or pumps for water and sewage. And that was just to soften them up for what they're getting now.

In the faces of this suffering people, we see the features of the man of sorrows. God's love for the ptochoi is based not on their virtue, wisdom or guiltlessness, but the fact that they are regarded as disposable human garbage by a nation that craves their land.

Next, let us consider whether the Palestinian people have the right to defend themselves. Before getting into details, I want to make it perfectly clear that Hamas fires rockets which it knows will harm innocent civilians, including children, who bear no responsibility for Israel aggression. However, I don't wish to use this fact to pretend that the violence on both sides is moral equivalent because I don't believe it is.

The Catholic Catechism points the way, "Legitimate defense can be not only a right but a grave duty for one who is responsible for the lives of others. The defense of the common good requires that an unjust aggressor be rendered unable to cause harm. For this reason, those who legitimately hold authority also have the right to use arms to repel aggressors against the civil community entrusted to their responsibility." - Catechism 2265.

The Palestinians in the occupied territories are subject to the supreme authority of Israel, a state equivalent to slavery. They have no right to vote in Israeli elections, so they have no political avenue to affect the policies that control their lives. Those who care enough to read about the daily life of Palestinians know about the women who die in childbirth at checkpoints, the destruction of Palestinian olive groves, and the theft of water supplies, all sanctioned by the Israeli government without the possibility of Palestinian redress. The Israeli government has absolute power over a people that has no say whatever in how they are treated.

The Israelis could have given the Palestinian people their own land in 1948, as most of the world urged them to do. In that case, had the Palestinian nation attacked them, they would have had the right to retaliate in self-defense. But that isn't what happened. Instead, the Israelis decided to take the land on which Palestinians were living through a settlement policy that resembles nothing so much as the "settlement policy" used by the Americans regarding the Indian territories. This amounts to raising a series of legal smokescreens to hide the actual policy which is to take all the native land and reduce the original inhabitants to cheap labor for Israeli-owned industries and simply murder or exile the rest. This policy can be easily traced from public statements by Israeli leaders from Moshe Dayan to the present, but we choose to blind ourselves to the obvious, which is particularly ironic considering the searing self-knowledge we have had to accept regarding our treatment of the American natives.

Given the growing settler movement which openly and blatantly disregards even of Israeli law to seize Palestinian land without compensation, the unstoppable strength of the Israeli right, the military protection and encouragement of outrages against Palestinians by settlers, including murder, what is the Palestinian to reasonably conclude? The only rational conclusion is that they are faced with a mortal threat not simply to their existence as a people, but to their own lives and those of their families. They have watched their land stolen outright, their orchards ruined, their wives and children murdered decade after decade by fanatics protected by the Israeli military, so what else can they believe?

They must conclude that Israel is an unjust aggressor who means to destroy them, whether quickly with F-16s or slowly through food and medicine blockades matters little. Therefore by any reasonable moral standard, emphatically including the Catholic one, they have the right to self-defense. Israel as the unjust aggressor, does not share this right. Israel's only moral option in this situation is to cease its unjust attacks on those whose rights they have violated. Until it does, it does not have the right to harm a hair on a Palestinian head.

Their situation is well-characterized by Michael Neumann in his recent article "Hamas and Gaza": "But suppose a bunch of thugs install themselves, with their families, all around your farm. They have taken most of your land and resources; they're out for more. If this keeps up, you will starve, perhaps die. They are armed to the teeth and abundantly willing to use those arms. The only way you can defend yourself is to make them pay as heavy a price as possible for their siege and their constant encroachment on your living space. You're critically low on food and medical supplies, and the thugs cut off those supplies whenever they please. What's more, the only weapons available to you are indiscriminate, and will harm their families as well as the thugs themselves. You can use those weapons, even knowing they will kill innocents. You don't have to let the thugs destroy you, thereby sacrificing your innocents (including yourself) to spare theirs. Since innocents are under mortal threat in either case, you needn't prefer the attackers' to your own." "Hamas and Gaza", Jan. 13, 2009.

Precisely the language of the Catechism: "Love toward oneself remains a fundamental principle of morality. Therefore it is legitimate to insist on respect for one's own right to life. Someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow." Catechism 2264.

Just as Jesus was dehumanized by the Roman authorities in Palestine, so today no one in power dares give the Palestinian a human face by attempting to see the situation from their viewpoint. They have no power, therefore their viewpoint and their humanity are worthless. How quickly shall we force them onto the Cross?