The True Path to Peace

The common wisdom about the current economic crisis is summed up well in a recent speech by David Korten of YES! Magazine: "From the late 70s onward, Wall Street market fundamentalists mobilized to roll back the rules to unleash a consolidation of corporate power and de-link it from public accountability. Their right-wing social-engineering experiment allowed Wall Street to colonize the Main Street economy, decimated the middle class, undermined democracy and sense of community, reduced our national happiness index, and brought financial, social, and environmental devastation wherever it has reached." - David Korten, "Path to a Peace Economy", Oct. 31, 2009.

Korten's speech points in the right direction, but a deeper analysis of the current economic system is vital. For instance, he says, "Our economic institutions have been designed by Wall Street interests to secure personal economic and political power in the hands of members of a small ruling elite." Absolutely true, but could it be that there is something inherent to the capitalist system that requires a financial elite that behaves like Wall Street?

My purpose is not to criticize his vision, which I admire, but to suggest that his economic prescriptions don't attack the real problem. The economy of the 50s, 60s and early 70s seems like a golden age in hindsight, but there were some very concrete political reasons why "the market rules of the day protected the public interest." Unfortunately, he doesn't examine these reasons.

The corporate elite did not gladly acquiesce in strong labor unions because they were concerned with the public good. They were forced into it, kicking and screaming, by powerful social movements that wouldn't take no for an answer. The features that he uses to illustrate the wonderful economic climate of that time were the result of these same democratic forces. They did not arise naturally, but were the result of long, hard struggle by leftist activists. The right-wing forces that Korten bemoans were equally active in the 50s and 60s, but they weren't as free to enforce their ideology because of these opposing forces.

The distinction he makes between the Wall Street economy and the Main Street economy is a false one. Moreover, this distinction obscures the real forces at work in the Great Recession. The distinction contrasts the "real" economy of producing goods to satisfy people's need and the "false" economy of financial speculation. In fact, the whole point of capitalism is ever expanding financial circulation leading to higher profit margins. When the crisis hit, trillions were not poured into ensuring a vigorous manufacturing sector, but into the financial system. This was not some wicked Wall Street plot, but the very nature of the capitalist system. Obama and his economic advisors are correct, Main Street can't survive without the financial circulation provided by Wall Street. Too much of the "left" wants to live in the illusion that we can have capitalism with a human face.

What's deceptively seductive about this approach is that it supports the central task of the ruling ideology, which is to impose a narrative which places the blame for the meltdown not on the system itself, but on the abuse of the system by "corrupt" bankers and corporate executives. That's why the nightly denunciations of "Wall Street greed" actually help prop up the system. This is part of the "purging process" necessary to a healthy capitalist system. In this way, the system itself is protected as well-meaning liberals try to regulate it into health. The underlying message is that the capitalist system, while far from perfect, corresponds most closely to human nature, and as such provides us with the least bad of the various alternatives. Radical change will only make things worse.

And that is the ideology that is so rarely challenged by the left. We must indeed "change the prevailing stories about the nature of wealth" and measure wealth by the vitality of our children, the quality of life, and a thriving natural world. But this cannot be done by dreaming about the "local" economics of the 50s and 60s. Capitalism converts Earth's natural capital into toxic garbage because that's the fastest way to maximize profit. Once that monster enters the radar screen, then will the waiting at last be over.

The U.S. Game in Honduras

Clinton's words should send chills down the spine of lovers of peace, "I’m very pleased to announce that we’ve had a breakthrough in negotiations in Honduras. I want to congratulate the people of Honduras as well as President Zelaya and Mr. Micheletti for reaching an historic agreement." Zelaya and Micheletti have signed an agreement following the intervention in Tegucigalpa of a high-level delegation from the US State Department.

As might have been anticipated by readers of this blog, the terms of the agreement will consolidate the central aims of the coup, while betraying the political and social demands of those who have resisted the coup, suffering violent state repression for these past four months.

The background of this agreement are the persistent efforts to support the coup leaders by the U.S. State Department. "There is ample evidence that the Obama administration was deeply involved in plans by Zelaya’s opponents within the Honduran ruling elite—sections of business, the military, the political establishment and the Church—to destabilize or topple his government. The New York Times on Tuesday cited an unnamed US official as saying that US Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Thomas Shannon and US Ambassador to Honduras Hugo Llorens spoke to 'military officials and opposition leaders' in the days before the coup. He said, 'There was talk of how they might remove the president from office, how he could be arrested, on whose authority they could do that.'
...
It appears that the Obama administration was seeking to effect a de facto coup, but without a direct use of the military and under the cover of constitutional legality. That would, it hoped, reverse Washington’s declining influence in Latin America and pave the way for an offensive against Chávez and his left nationalist allies in Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador and other countries aligned with Venezuela in the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas." - "HONDURAS: What Deal? The Fat Lady has Many Sisters", Oct. 30, 2009

The purpose of Obama's coup in Honduras is to reverse the erosion of U.S. corporate hegemony in Latin America due to rising people's power movements that have profoundly altered the political landscape.

Here are some salient points made by Pastors for Peace:

"● Any agreement that restores President Zelaya to office without giving him control over the military — the same military that carried out the coup! — is a victory for the coup forces, or an outright trap.

● While the two parties have signed an agreement, the demands of the Honduran people — for a constitutional assembly and the restoration of democracy and constitutional law — have not been addressed.

● The agreement does not create space for free and fair elections. In fact it directly aligns the coup military with the Supreme Electoral Commission appointed by Micheletti. (This same Supreme Electoral Commission was just invited to Washington, DC last week by right-wing Cuban-American Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), where they testified to Congress that “nothing has changed” in Honduras since the coup.)

● The agreement has not ended the repression and human rights violations; and it remains to be seen whether repression will intensify in the days to come."

Loving the Wrong-Doer Obama

Either worshiping or hating the man Obama plays directly into the power strategy that is currently being implemented by the financial elite. Gandhi has shown us how to conduct the spiritual warfare that leads to genuine victory. Here he describes the physical qualifications required for a Satyagrahi (one who struggles nonviolently): "In the dictionary of the non-violent there is no such word as external enemy. But even for the supposed enemy he will have nothing but compassion in his heart. He will believe that no man is intentionally wicked, that there is no man but is gifted with the faculty to discriminate between right and wrong, and this if that faculty were to be fully developed, it would surely mature into non-violence. He will therefore pray to God that He may give the supposed enemy a sense of right and bless him." - M.K. Gandhi, "Non-violent Resistance", p. 93.

In our struggle against the wrong-doer Obama, we should always assume and appeal to his heart. Corrupted as it may be (and as ours may be) by power relations, it still remains a heart capable of good and, in his case, he gave concrete proof of his capacity for progressive sentiment in the recent past. Rather than attack him, I believe we should build on his good words, to shame him into truth through the power of our own truth, not to belittle or impugn his motives. To do otherwise is to promote the evil we battle against.

The Empire of Illusion

Another rousing Obama success was recently noted by Glenn Greenwald: "...the surviving banks are bigger and more powerful than ever, thus maximizing our dependence on them, and the primary stated goal of the bailout (increasing lending) has not been achieved." The stated goal will not be achieved because it was never intended. More lending would lead to greater empowerment for those at the bottom of the economic pyramid. The purpose of the "Obama" revolution is to ensure perpetual dependency on the financial oligarchy in the interest of maximized profit. It is the anticipation of those profits that is currently driving the Wall Street rally.

Why is so little effort being devoted to hiding the installation of members of the financial elite in key positions of political power? The "Obama" strategy is to habituate the public to seeing these executives in positions of political authority. By doing so, we will gradually be induced into accepting their control over our political institutions. lready in the health care debacle of the last three months, we have come to accept the control of the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries over Congress and the executive branch. Eventually, we will accept direct control over public policy by industry executives.

The corporate media plays its role here by pumping out pundit-authorized intellectual haze over the real issue: the direct administration of public policy by and for the interests of the financial elite. With the placement of their man Obama in the executive branch, they have little fear of large-scale resistance. The marketing strategy used in the Obama campaign has been extraordinarily successful and they are now proceeding to consolidate their gains, both in terms of the profits reaped from public funding, as well as their now visible control over the policies that lead to those profits. It is precisely Obama's progressive image that authorizes the next phase: the transparency of their control.

The aura of Obama's progressive credentials, recently reinforced by the Nobel Prize, allows us to accept corporate control and appear enlightened at the same time. The underlying reality is as Henry Kaufman in his recent book "The Road to Financial Reformation" states, "When the current crisis abates, the pricing power of the huge financial conglomerates will grow considerably, at the expense of borrowers and investors." Kaufman, "The Road to Financial Reformation", p. 229. Solidifying this pricing power and preparing future profits is clearly one of the prime goals of the "Obama administration."

The destruction of real wealth which this entails is accepted as a personal failure by the working population, who now scramble to find new ways to please their corporate masters. And those masters will surely find ways for us to fulfill their needs.

Lifting the Burden of Truth

The key insight of Naomi Klein's recent article "Obama's Bad Influence" is here: "Within forty-eight hours of the US announcement Italy, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Poland had pulled out. Unlike the United States, these governments had all signed the 2001 declaration, so they had no reason to object to a document that reaffirmed it. It didn't matter. As with the climate change negotiations, lining up behind Obama, with his impeccable reputation, was an easy way to avoid burdensome international obligations and look progressive at the same time--a service the United States was never able to provide during the Bush years."

This is the reason behind Obama's Nobel Peace Prize: It enhances his reputation so that other countries can evade their responsibilities by imitating his example. The purpose of the Obama presidency is to scuttle climate change action, reaffirm neo-colonialism, and re-financialize the bubble economy so that capitalism can put off its inevitable reckoning.

The "duck and parry" strategy of "Obama" is dictated by the class interests that it serves. The purpose of "Obama" is to deflect the growing possibility of mass rebellion against capitalistic domination long enough to ensure that the security apparatus is in place to incarcerate those who with sufficient consciousness to resist.

Why do I put "Obama" in quotes? Because the tendency to personalize this strategy by attributing it to the man Obama serves the atomizing purposes of the ruling elite. In fact, what the corporate media refers to as "Obama" or the "Obama administration" is the idealization of a power structure. "Obama" represents a marketing strategy designed to cover a series of moves which the ruling elite is carrying out to protect their interests in energy resources, military power, and financial control. To attribute these moves to the man Barack Obama helps reinforce their strategy by falsely making him its source. Eventually, they will abandon the man Obama and another will be selected to surface their interests, but the resistance must continue to target the principalities and powers that enforce the strategy rather the man who is its transitory incarnation.

On Nobel Prize Winners

"You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives—the flower of our youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps. Your generals are coming home from their harvest bringing sheaves with them, in the shape of other thousands of sick and wounded and insane to drag out miserable lives, wrecked in body and mind. You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and of the horror of the water torture." - from the floor of the House of Representatives in 1902, denouncing U.S. imperialism in the Philippines.

What too many in the peace movement fail to understand is that war is not the enemy, but only a symptom of the real enemy. Fighting war, just like fighting climate change, will be an endless losing battle as long as the real enemy is not engaged. Many noble souls such as Walter Wink, whom I consider one of the great theologians of our time, reify war and violence, making them evils-in-themselves that can be targeted through nonviolent strategies. This approach to war and violence makes them symptoms that can be cured through the therapy of nonviolent resistance, but nonviolence must be made far more profound if it is truly to achieve the healing which we crave.

Long before the first missile is fired, the greatest violence has already worked its will. This violence is the choice of profit-making over human welfare and it condemns a billion of our fellow images of God to near starvation every minute that we breathe. As long as we tolerate this evil, wars will continue to proliferate because the conditions for their growth are always present. We have to begin with justice from top to bottom in all aspects of life.

The Services of the News Media

The news media serves many purposes for the ruling elite. However, these purposes would suffer damage if the media were to be too easily accused of propaganda. Therefore, dissident voices are tolerated and even rewarded because they provide the necessary contrast that is needed to reinforce the preferred voices. Viewers are conditioned to fall helpless victims to what is offered them. The deceived multitudes are today captivated by the myth of success far more than the successful are. It is precisely their will to believe that maintains the system’s momentum. Ignoring their own self-interest, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. Their misplaced love for the wrong which is done them is more potent than the most agile coercion by the ruling authorities. By craftily inculcating the demand for trivia the media shreds the attention that might otherwise be turned against it. The liberal elites are despised while the viewers’ hatred of them is manipulated by those very elites. The result is a constant reproduction of the soothing illusions of the ruling class, who pay gladly to have their deeds hidden from themselves.

Building the Kingdom of God in Honduras

"Because a people disorganized becomes a mass that can be toyed with, but a people that organizes itself and fights for its values and for justice is a people that demands respect." - Oscar Romero, Archbishop of El Salvador, murdered by U.S. trained paramilitary fighters during Mass in 1980

Only when our Christian resistance becomes serious enough to be reckoned with the transgressors, as Jesus did on the cross, will it be taken seriously by the oppressed. The Honduran people, led spiritually by Fr. Andres Tamayo, a Catholic priest who has assumed a prominent role in the resistance, have begun a qualitative shift in resistance strategy. Before Gandhi began the Salt March in 1930, he entered a state of contemplation in which he achieved unity with the people. In the words of James Douglass, "Gandhi dropped into a silent void, 'reduced himself to zero' in the Buddhist formula which he often repeated as a keynote for the man of non-violence, and found on the far side of nothingness the people, in whom God lived patiently, awaiting the full release of his unifying, liberating power. Gandhi dropped into the well of existence, where he could 'not see any light coming out of the surrounding darkness,' and there in deep solitude was given in a flash the symbol united darkness and light. Gandhi lost himself and found his life in the suffering of the people of God - all the people, Indian, British, all those whose inner life he felt and touched in darkness and in light, all of suffering mankind brought together for a moment in a handful of salt." - James Douglass, Resistance and Contemplation, p. 89.

In the same way, we Christians in resistance must now see the face of Jesus in the suffering Honduran people. This is an act of true solidarity in which we no longer see ourselves as separate from them, as "Americans" whose concern with their struggle is merely political. Instead, we are one with them as Gandhi was one with the Indians and British locked in the same terrible embrace as the U.S.-backed coup leaders and the ever-growing resistance. In this way, we discover in ourselves a fountain welling up to eternal life, the fountain of satyagraha that pours out freshness when "the depths within ourselves pass over into the needs of a suffering people." - James Douglass, ibid.

The Honduran people have come alive to the kingdom, with so many now becoming conscious that he or she is responsible in his or her own soul for the freedom of their country. Those of us who cannot physically support their struggle must unite with them in the silence of our hearts. The most revolutionary act is for an individual to realize that within him or herself lies the capacity for liberation. Liberation does not come from waiting for someone in the upper reaches of the power structure to do something honest and humane. That may or may not happen. In this case, it appears exceedingly unlikely that the Obama administration will act concretely for justice. Within ourselves is the revolutionary well-spring which we must awaken.

As a first step, we renounce the social sin of individualism, caring only for our own and refusing to participate in public life. This is a sin against truth because it denies our relationship to the whole of which we are a part, a whole without which we could not live for an instant. Our spirituality cannot breath independently of the world that surrounds us, but constantly receives and returns the air which nourishes the whole world. Falsely isolated within our commodified pleasures, our minds literally dis-integrate, they lose their integration with the world that we form a part of. We renounce the sin of not caring about struggles for justice in other parts of the world and neglecting those in our own. We renounce the lie of merely personal salvation and acknowledge that all true salvation is both individual and communal.

We also renounce looking above for communal salvation. The illusion that Presidents and legislatures will bring social justice by themselves is a cruel lie, though one that is constantly reinforced by the corporate media. Just as the Indians could not depend on the British to bring them independence, we cannot depend on the Obama or any other administration to bring us social justice. Once we rule ourselves, both personally and communally, the powers above become less relevant. The power they represent is death and we must never cease to wrestle with death, as Gandhi taught.

Indeed, this renunciation is part of a greater inner purification which we must undergo. We renounce the fixation on results with which our culture imbues us. The kingdom will come when it comes, but we should not consume ourselves with looking for it "here and there", as it says in the Gospels. We must not become absorbed in brooding over its signs, "which will only result in frustration and violence or a loss of faith and nerve." - James Douglass. We must become absorbed into the means of liberation embodied fearlessly in our own life and action.

Read the story of the new mass resistance strategy in Honduras: A qualitative step forward for the organized struggle in Honduras
and consider in prayer what support to give. Learn about the work of Fr. Andres Tamayo here: On the Road to Tegucigalpa with Father Andrés Tamayo.

Surrender to Utopia

The typical U.S. anti-socialism meme resembles this recent post in Common Dreams: "Socialism goes against human nature. Humans are greedy creatures, just look at a toddler crying if it doesn't get the toy someone else has. In adults, the greed becomes more sophisticated and predatory. So I hate to agree with the scums on the Right, socialism IS utopia." - Common Dreams, "Is Obama a Socialist?" comment on Sept.27, 2009

The reply, which I fully endorse, went as follows: "But other aspects of human nature include solidarity, sacrifice, cooperation, and compassion - aspects which our society does not usually reward. Should our society reward these aspects, and there is no reason why it can't, then we can have a society that reflects these more cooperative, if not humane, aspects of human nature rather than the self-centered and destructive aspects our society does reflect. Societal design isn't written in stone, it isn't delivered by the gods, it is a manifestation of social and political choices. Different choices will yield different outcomes. Socialism does not go against human nature, as you suggest, it merely appeals to different aspects of human nature than capitalism does. Socialism is not utopia, and the 'right' is wrong to say so, and you are wrong to believe it is so." - Common Dreams, "Is Obama a Socialist?" comment on Sept.27, 2009

But we must go farther. The choice of whether to reward greed and self-interest or cooperation and compassion is not a neutral one. Another part of human nature, as well documented in history as greed and war, is the human tendency to transcend its own nature, to constantly repudiate a static condition in which no moral or spiritual growth occurs. There is a logic to social and political choices that truly inspire humanity. Socialism may not in and of itself be a utopia, but utopia lives within all of us and drives to constantly create and destroy all would-be utopias.

The Siren Call of Ecological Despair

Erich Fromm, who has a section in the "Sane Society" called "The Principle of Nonfrustration" seems particularly relevant to the current ecological crisis. As Aldous Huxley said in Brave New World, the principle of the current world order is: "Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today." Happiness has become the instant realization of wishes, and these wishes, moreover, are largely dictated by corporate marketing departments who form the personal images that we unconsciously emulate.

In the context of the current climate crisis, this attitude translates into deliberate self-deception. Psyches formed by the principle of non-frustration cannot cope with our inherent limitations. We are impelled to achieve higher and higher degrees of satisfaction, which in real terms mean greater and greater exploitation of the world's limited resources. To accept this reality would mean a sudden and devastating sense of despair. Eventually, if we had the courage, we would crawl out of that despair, but being the people we currently are, we simply can't face it. We WILL have our satisfaction, even if it means starvation for hundreds of millions of our fellow creatures.

We have been transformed into a system of desires and satisfactions. This is the system that guides us without the use of force. No matter what the depth of our disappointment with the satisfactions on sale, we return to them again and again because alternatives have been systematically excluded from consciousness. We are eternal infants, never weaned from our receptive orientation. Aldous Huxley described it well, "There's no such thing as a divided allegiance; you're so conditioned that you can't help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren't any temptations to resist." - Brave New World.

Indeed, the temptation to save the planet sheds dim light compared to those temptations to which we have become addicted. And the corporations continue to sing their siren song and we, unlike Odysseus, are not bound to the ship's mast, but steer passionately toward the empire of illusion:

"First you will raise the island of the Sirens,
those creatures who spellbind any man alive,
whoever comes their way. Whoever draws too close,
off guard, and catches the Sirens' voices in the air -
no sailing home for him, no wife rising to meet him,
no happy children beaming up at their father's face.
The high, thrilling song of the s=Sirens will transfix him,
lolling there in their meadow, round them heaps of corpses,
rotting away, rags of skin shriveling on their bones..."

- The Odyssey, Book 12, verses 44 - 52.

Capitalism and the Technologies of Desire

I applaud Robert Jensen's spirited defense of the "narrow gate," in his recent article, Is Obama a Socialist? Reflection on the Degradation of Politics and the Ecosystem. His is one of many efforts to break through the constricted vision of twentieth century ideologies to embrace the many dimensions of liberation: economic, political, and even religious.

The demonization of "socialism" plays a central role in the capitalist strategy of consent that tells us much about why it has succeeded so spectacularly against its rivals. This communication strategy represents "socialism" as the repression of the unlimited ("free") indulgence of desire which corporations constantly encourage. This is represented symbolically by the "nanny" state, a potent image that embodies the repressive morality which it fears. The real content of the word "freedom" in modern political speech is "immediate satisfaction of desire", in particular the artificial desires that are stimulated to a fever pitch with the apparatus of modern marketing.

Capitalism enslaves the imagination through a highly-developed technology of desire. Capitalism captures and distorts human desire so that rather than serving the good of humanity or the glory of God, desire operates according to the golden rule of production for the market. This insight has major consequences for progressive counter-strategies.

Capitalism is successful because it creates a constant stream of new desires which demand immediate satisfaction. By redirecting desire into these carefully controlled channels, attention that might be directed to social concerns follows the groove of personal satisfaction and image. It works by convincing us that this system alone lets us participate in images of personal success. We participate in these images through the stimulation and immediate satisfaction of artificial desires, with all the infantile reasoning that this implies and encourages.

Religious mythology as represented by the "mega-church" phenomenon also plays a significant role. "Sinfulness" in the form of greed, sexual indulgence, selfishness, drugs, and corruption embodies the image of a "fallen" world that can only be magically redeemed. It becomes part of orthodox religious belief that the features of contemporary capitalism are the unalterable features of fallen humanity. Rather than believing that we are God's agents who can liberate ourselves through his gifts, as Jesus taught, we are forced into the belief that "Jesus" will magically liberate us through miraculous events. These beliefs reinforce the faith that capitalism can continue forever.

For instance, George Gilder says, "... man is not finite; the human mind is not bound in material brain...the energy crisis is essentially a religious disorder, a failure of faith. It can be overcome chiefly by worship; by a recognition that beyond the darkness and opacity of our material entrapment is a realm of redemptive spirit, reachable through that interplay of faith and fact which some call science, others poetry, but which is most luminously comprehended as forms of prayer." - George Gilder, The Spirit of Enterprise.

This is precisely the idolatry which enraptures the contemporary religious mind and cultivates the belief that the "creativity" of our economic system will always save us, no matter what "reality" may say. The fuel behind the fire that is devouring our planet is the constant stimulus of new desires which can only be satisfied by the organized productive capacity of globalized capital.

Resistance to climate change can't gain traction because it presents itself as a restriction on the satisfaction of infinite desire. The dynamic of capitalism is that we can become endlessly more through the multiplication of new technologies. Climate change activism opposes this irrationalism, and so can be easily characterized as dull, repressive, and totalitarian - in a word "socialist".

What Jensen and contemporary socialists call for is the liberation of desire from this bondage. Submission to this bondage is rapidly destroying its own ecological foundation, which is right now causing natural destruction that will take millennia to heal.

Capitalism creates a spiritual void and then fills it with an unending stream of artificial desire to quell the boredom and despair engendered by the thwarting of social development.

Squandered Summer? or the Maestro?

If only it were just a matter of a squandered summer. Frank Rich's editorial in the New York Times this Sunday "Obama's Squandered Summer" focuses on the tactical and strategic errors of the Obama administration, but a shift of perspective quickly unblurs the actual scenery and highlights the superb successes Obama has achieved this summer. His behavior this summer appears incompetent only if one assumes that his goal was to get a health care package that addressed the needs of ordinary Americans. If, on the other hand, he was responding to the needs and desires of the pharmaceutical and health insurance industries, then his strategy has been a model for others to emulate.

Writers who are given a national stage usually reinforce the notion that presidents are primary actors within the drama of national politics, that their decisions and tactics are decisive factors guiding the development of the historical moment. This meta-message is far more important that the well-wrought details of their critiques. As long as we focus on personality and style, the real forces behind the health care debacle can be safely ignored.

Once we step away from personalities, it quickly becomes obvious that Obama is carrying out the interests of his class, conveniently masked by his progressive image. He is serving the interests of the health insurance industry because they are representative of those who have advanced his career and who will support his continued advancement as long as he is useful to them. Public opinion counts for nothing in this realm.

"Obama is a master when it comes to embodying what the formerly left Christopher Hitchens once (in a book about the Clintons) called 'the essence of American politics' - 'the manipulation of populism by elitism.' The president is a maestro at executing what former Clinton administration official David Rothokopf calls 'the violin model,' under which 'you hold power with the left hand and you play the music with the right.' In other words, 'you' gain and keep office with populace-pleasing progressive-sounding rhetoric but govern in standard service to existing dominant corporate and military institutions." - Paul Street, "They Employ a Lot of Our Friends: Left Reflections on Obama's Corporatist Health Care Speech", Sept. 12, 2009.

Don't Feed the Frenzy

Many liberal pundits have fallen into a frenzy of Obama-bashing, but they’re blasting at the wrong target. Obama is not the cause of this crisis. He stands at the end of a long trail of decisions made by powerful elites in business and government over many decades. These decisions box the type of decisions that can be made into tight crevices, into one of which Obama is now cramped. One man, even if he is President, can't reverse the momentum of that long trail. As beautiful a sight as it would be to see Obama challenging the power of Wall Street, we can easily foresee what the consequence would be. The ruling elite would find a way to remove him, either politically or physically, if necessary.

However, a real leader would have used the opportunity, even if he faced certain defeat. He would realize that "the political center" is an optical illusion. He would have instinctively understood that Republican support could only be a cruel hoax. Instead, he would have rallied his newly fledged legions of young fans and proclaimed positions radical enough to get them excited, even if he secretly knew they would face severe obstacles. He would set the bar high enough for real achievement to be possible.

But Obama was not that leader. The reason he never challenged entrenched power is that he was chosen by that power to fulfill specific corporate goals. This is how David Michael Green characterizes the health care debacle, “I mean, if you had asked me in January, ‘How could Obama bungle this program most thoroughly?’, I would have written a prescription that varies little from what we've observed over the last eight months: Don't frame the issue, but instead let the radical right backed by greedy industry monsters do it, on the worst possible terms for you. And to you. Don't fight back when they say the most outrageous things about your plan. In fact, don't even have a plan. Let Congress do it. Better yet, let the by-far-and-away-minority party have an equal voice in the proceedings, even if they ultimately won't vote for the bill under any circumstances, and even while they're running around trashing it and you in the most egregious terms. Have these savages negotiate with a small group of right-wing Democrats, all of them major recipients of industry campaign donations. Blow off your base completely. Cut secret sweetheart deals with the Big Pharma and Big Insurance corporate vampires. Build a communications strategy around a series of hapless press conferences and town hall meetings, waiting until it's too late to give a major speech on the issue. Set a timetable for action and then let it slip. Indicate what you want in the bill but then be completely unclear about whether you necessarily require those things. Travel all over the world doing foreign policy meet-and-greets. Go on vacation in the heat of the battle. Rinse and repeat.” David Michael Green, “After Obama”, Sept. 4, 2009. This wonderful paragraph may not be simply a caricature of incompetence. The result of his political moves will be the defeat of real health care reform for at least the next four years. There are many who would consider that a significant success.

Another foreseeable result of the cumulative crises which he is bound to mishandle will be the election of a far-right Republican president in 2012. This Republican may have the intellectual chops of an Arnold Schwartzenegger or the feckless, good-old-girl charm of Sarah Palin, but it won't matter. This president will take orders from the same corporate headquarters as Obama, but with the incomparable advantage of arriving after 4 years of feckless "liberalism." It's the Hannity and Colmes strategy. Use a cartoonish liberal cliche to highlight the granite chin of fascism.

This new president will be empowered to wipe away what's left of the Constitution, establish military rule, and eliminate all government programs other than the armed forces, law enforcement, and the prison system. Anything less will be characterized as "Obamism.”

The hard truth is that we love our illusions and no longer care whether they are grounded in reality. Obama provoked the illusion of liberalism, evoking memories of real decency once embodied by the term. And we bought the illusion, secretly knowing that it was no longer possible. Once the chosen messiah failed to live up to the illusion he represented, the crowd turned vicious. But the illusion had already worked its magic. The purpose of the brilliant marketing campaign was accomplished. Now it is simply a matter of re-establishing dominance from Caracas to Kabul. And that is the formula for insanity. Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

Smart Power: the Obama Way

There is a pattern in Obama's behavior. First, he makes a strong rhetorical flourish that apparently contains a ringing endorsement of liberal policy. However, on close examination, it is found to contain subtle hedging, a slight obscuring of the issue inserted to provide cover for later. This is usually followed by a lengthy phase in which right wing forces accuse him of "socialism" in various verbal disguises or openly. Rather than countering these forces with a strong and principled defense, he "reaches out" to the other side in a way that allows them to provide the default framing of the issue. It is here that he maneuvers most skillfully, but emphatically not for the liberal position he apparently endorsed at the beginning. Expect no "simple, pithy formulas" here.

The current frame of the debate is that the health insurance industry is an unchangeable fact of nature, which may need a tweak here and there, but is fundamentally inalterable. Once that's conceded, the public option has already been implicitly removed from consideration. Instead of choosing to fight against the right-wing onslaught, by, for instance, using those who staffed his campaign to pack town hall meetings, he uses the noise provided by the right to make an ascending series of concessions until he arrives at the place he intended to be in the first place. The basic intent is to make a tweak or two to the current system so that it can more efficiently extract profit from patients. Once the battle has been lost, he will make "the moral case for reform." In this way he covers the final retreat by using his liberal credentials.

But notice how he has built up his political credit with both the right and left. To the left, he provides rhetorical concessions. To the right he provides the substance of what they want but rebranded to make it more palatable. For instance, the proposed non-profit co-ops, which act as a flimsy nightgown to cover the real deed. Taxpayer money used to subsidize the health care plan will go straight towards health care company profits, while they provide the same shoddy care as before. Thereby, he maintains his true power base. His role is to provide marketable justifications for maintaining the current relationships of economic and political power. In that art, he is a master.

The Fetishism of Commodities

The best way to understand this idea and its power is by considering a product such as a Nike tennis shoe. In some societies, teenagers have killed for a Nike. No one dies for not having a Nike, but having one fills a psychological need so powerful that it can sweep away moral inhibitions, even those regarding human life. There seems to be a mysterious and infinite being behind this commodity which promises profound personal fulfillment. Nike is not a tennis shoe, but a life model, as the publicity agent puts it.

So what is this mysterious being who can command human sacrifice? A fetish is an inanimate object such as a tree, a stone, a statue etc. that has been given human properties. It has become infused with a supernatural personality and often commands worship and sacrifice. A commodity is a manufactured object such as a tennis shoe, but its distinguishing characteristic is that it is produced for the purpose of getting something else, profit, rather than fulfilling a real human need, though it may do that as well.

Now when the teenager seeks for a Nike, he is not actually seeking an efficient and comfortable shoe, he is seeking a relationship with a power outside himself. He knows that in order to have a chance of being accepted by the right gang, the tennis shoe is the condition of possibility. But the tennis shoe would not be the passport to acceptance unless it had an aura about it that spelled success, achievement, a life model. Those who don't attain to this aura have failed in some essential and mysterious way.

Hopefully, I've managed to communicate an idea that lies at the heart of our economic system and has profound religious overtones. Such is the fascination that keeps the tremendous talents that we have potentially, the talent to create harmonious ecologies, to bring out the human potentialities of technology, to create a world centered on the fulfillment of human need locked tightly behind the walls of fantasy. Here we rot in the capitalist Disneyland while the life that sustains withers and dies in the onslaught unleashed by our lack of responsibility and infinite appetite for self-indulgence.

The Illusion that Power can Produce What the Heart Desires

The illusion that prevents the acceptance of liberation theology is that spirituality involves turning away from this world to another world where we will one day make our home. God has already given us our home. It surrounds us on all sides. In the conventional view of Christianity the things of this world are of little value or moment because they are destined shortly to be transcended by altogether different reality in which our eternal destiny will be realized. Therefore, good spiritual practice means to regard material reality lightly, as a symbol of the spiritual realities where we will one day find our true home.

But the question liberation theology asks is: "Are there actually two realities, one spiritual and the other material, between which we must conduct a careful balancing act?" Or is there perhaps a single reality within which the totality of our destiny must be played out? The theology which labels itself "liberationist" and which I believe forms the basis of a new reformation of the Christian faith, answers that there is a single reality which is spiritual and material at the same time.

What has worked most powerfully against the acceptance of liberation theology by today's Christians is one of the most sophisticated systems of manufactured consent ever created. This manufactured consent, well-analyzed by Noam Chomsky among others, consists of a corporate-controlled media that carefully frames every issue to support corporate interests. It creates a system of mutually reinforcing messages that define the frameworks within which all issues can be debated. It inculcates the illusion of freedom of debate in order to more effectively constrain the terms of the debate. Points of view such as liberation theology are mysteriously excluded from the dialogue.

Of course, recent trends in Christian theology have also served to exclude anti-capitalist viewpoints. But these trends did not arise in an economic and political vacuum. So dangerous is the viewpoint of liberation theology to the dominant classes in the U.S. that its language has been made incomprehensible to those whose minds have been formed by neoliberal ideology. In fact, the dominant religion in the U.S. is the fetishism of commodities, a form of idolatry that most Christian communities have embraced and branded with a set of Christian themes.

But is not the very purpose of religion to tear us away from the things of this world so that we can rest in the love of God? It depends on what we mean by "love of God". "The spirit of Yahweh is the spirit of interhuman justice-definitive, total justice. Luke describes such justice in this way: "The whole group of believers had one heart and one soul, and no one called his own anything that he had; rather they held everything in common' (Acts 4:32)." (Miranda, Marx and the Bible). Note that love of God is described in economic terms - shared ownership, the end of individual possession, and sharing of talents are the key elements which express the disciples' living out of the resurrection of Jesus, as is made explicit in the following verse, "With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all." (Acts 4:33). "For faith in the resurrection of Jesus reveals that salvation stands not for accumulation of wealth, but for the formation of human communities where all people are acknowledged, irrespective of wealth and other social characteristics." Jung Mo Sung, "Desire, Market, and Religion", p. 25.

The love of God and living out the resurrection by the Apostles was located particularly in the sharing of material possessions, which was regarded as a sign of the Kingdom of God. In their eyes, the life of God was expressed in the community of goods, the unity of individual and community that formed the basic social unit of the kingdom. They never considered the abandonment of the material world as a requirement of the kingdom of God, which would forever be found in this world of inextricably intermeshed spiritual and material reality.

Property for People, Not for Profit

The starting point of a Christian political system originates from the Fathers of the Church such as St. John Chrysostom: "There is something terrible about greed, any guilty of it shall be be expelled from the Church." The central principle of Christian communism can be described as follows: "Enjoying goods alone means losing them, harming both the social whole and oneself. The crucial idea here is that of benefit. Since everything belongs to God we are only beneficiaries of existing goods, and there can be no private property in the strict legal sense of exclusive rights, this right being limited, if not repealed, by the normative obligation to be useful: 'Everything belongs to God...do you not know that we will be called to account if we make poor use of it?" - Clement of Alexandria.

This principle means that a political system in which property rights trump all other values is anti-Christian at its root. Traditional Christianity has always argued that property rights are relative values and should be subordinated to spiritual values. In other words, an economic system based on the profit motive cannot be made to conform to Christian principles because it is based on greed from the root. Current economic theory further assumes that the sum of personal greed-based activity will result in the greater good of the whole, which is blatantly contradicted by the facts of our world, not to mention being the mirror opposite of Christian morality.

From the perspective of traditional ethics, "...when the usefulness of the goods produced and consumed no longer drives economic activities, but exchange value and limitless accumulation through money mechanisms, the property-owning individual falls prey to the illusion of boundless life - and the community is destroyed." Hinkelammert, "Another World is Possible". Therefore the economic and political system I would advocate would involve a rational and collective planning process for production that would focus on human need. It would regard the excessive accumulation of property by individuals or small groups as a crime against the good of the whole. It would be a world in which useful goods were distributed to all according to their need and to which each would contribute according to their talents. Such an economic practice would promote the values of sharing over competition, in accordance with Jesus' teachings in the Sermon on the Mount.

According to Christian teaching, human beings have the potential for both deep moral degradation and high spiritual attainment. Therefore a Christian economics is not one that regards all behaviors which might lead to growing profit margins as equally desirable. Some behaviors, such as compassion, sharing, care for the poor, diligence, concern for quality, craftsmanship, and so on should be encouraged, while others such as uncontrolled lust, greed, foolish self-indulgence, wastefulness, shoddy workmanship, escapism, desire for power over others, destructiveness and others, are to be discouraged by the economic system, as well as every other social mechanism. In an economic system which makes profit the supreme value, Christian values must necessarily be ignored and degraded.

So how can we envision an economic system that promotes the teachings of Jesus? The purpose of economics, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, is to provide a field within which we can strive for greater and greater heights of moral virtue. That perfection cannot be served by endless arrays of wasteful and spiritually harmful commodities which encourage foolish self-indulgence and lack of compassion for our brothers and sister who have less. More radically, a production system that doesn't consider the ecological impact of the goods that it produces and fails to meet human needs is corrupt in its root and must be abolished for the sake of human and natural life. That is the true "pro-life" position that Jesus calls us to.

Economics must promote the deepening of our humanity, not the proliferation of useless and destructive "needs." The economic picture which currently reigns is the mirror opposite of one that would promote the proliferation of higher needs, the need to love, the need for truth, the need for honor, and all that these needs imply about the true direction of human evolution. The proliferation of unnecessary material goods, especially considering the wars and theft that they necessarily entail, is a mark of shame on the human race, one that we will be long cleansing ourselves of.

Has the human race deteriorated to the point that it is no longer capable of imagining a world in which the products of spiritual achievement can be measured by other standards than their profit potential? What tyrant constrains us so fiercely that we can't think outside of the box of the commodity? The lure of endless quantity leads us to the destruction of ourselves and our planet.

In the words of John Bellamy Foster: "The goal must be the creation of sustainable communities geared to the development of human needs and powers, removed from the all-consuming drive to accumulate wealth." - John Bellamy Foster, "The Ecological Revolution", 2009

If Christianity doesn't mean this, then it has become one of the idolatrous powers which is destroying human life on this planet and has lost whatever tether it may once have had to the teachings of Jesus Christ.

What is to be Done? Part 1

The following is the first part of an essay which seeks to probe the empire for weaknesses arising from the economic crisis in order to identify a way forward for leftists. In the first part, I sketch out the current situation.

The current economic “crisis” is a crisis only for the poor and the middle class, which is scheduled for extinction. This “crisis” represents the consolidation of the economic power of the wealthy by a vast transfer of wealth from public to private hands. But this massive grab of economic power could end by destroying the class that believes itself to be making its domination permanent, and therein lies the opportunity to be explored later in this essay.

The most vocal portions of the “left” in the United States fail to see the holistic nature of the globalist strategy of capital. The anti-war movement seems to believe that one man, Barack Obama, can make a decision that will lead to the withdrawal of troops from the Middle East. The reason this is not possible is because the conquest of major portions of the Middle East is key to the control of Central Asian energy supplies, which is itself part of a much larger plan for global market control. Obama has fully accepted this plan or he would not be President today. His job is both to pursue the strategy and to damp down criticism, a job he has been doing quite effectively. Obama, far from representing a reversal of the drive toward neocolonialism, has refined but also intensified that strategy.

The truth that is so difficult to face is that the empire, by its nature, demands total control. We name this entity as “empire” precisely for that reason. The driving engine of its current moves in the Middle East is not simply to obtain oil. No doubt, the U.S. will obtain the oil, but it could have done this by many other means than military conquest.

The military element serves several purposes. In order to successfully camouflage these moves toward domination, enemies must be manufactured. It is now becoming clear that one of the primary purposes of the Iraq occupation was to give the intelligence agencies a chance to manufacture enemies in order to justify our conquest of the Middle East. Massive random round ups, accompanied by lengthy incarceration and torture, have turned a generation of Iraqis against the U.S. The same process is now being pursued in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where drone attacks have displaced millions of Pakistanis. These attacks ensure a sufficient level of hatred for the U.S. that we will be able to justify military interventions for decades to come. There will be no withdrawal from Iraq.

The point is that their tactics cannot be understood in isolation or explained by simplistic short term gains. The ruling elite thinks in much larger terms and the left must match their globalized aims with a global understanding of its own. Note carefully that we are not making statements about the morality of individual members of that class, which vary widely. We are making statements about the logic of imperial control which always tends toward gaining control of all aspects of society in order to ensure an undistorted flow of property accumulation into the coffers at the center of power.

The role of the media in this strategy is to imbue the world population with a fatalistic acceptance of the inevitability of the current system. News shows are designed to trivialize the consequences of imperial control by framing such events as having no more significance than a pop star’s latest hair style. A serious message is interwoven between the trivialities, but the trivialities make the serious message of fear easier to ingest.

One of the major factors lying behind the weakness of current resistance movements is the rejection of totalizing ideologies by the academic mainstream, the post-modernist trend that finds its media reflection in the trivializing framing noted above. Clearly the ideology of empire is a totalizing ideology, a scientifically elaborated set of strategic initiatives centered on the accumulation of capital which regards the welfare of the majority as of no consequence to its calculations. Human beings are merely human capital to be used or disposed of as necessary for the maximization of accumulation. The resistance to this ideology must have a concept of the total system and its tactics must be a reflection of this understanding. The inability to make scientifically valid propositions that potentially form a system of ordered truths make resistance to the real global power impossible because it prevents the emergence of a unified front with broad agreement on principles. Perhaps this is the primary purpose of encouraging academic trends such as post-modernism, especially when they accord so well with neoliberal economics. Such movements dissolve the potential power of the resistance at its foundation. To face a totalizing class enemy with ideologies that are localized and identity-based is to disarm oneself by default.

So the beginning is to banish the illusion that the empire can gradually evolve into something less brutal, less intrinsically inhuman. Its fundamental nature is control which must spread from one node of human activity to the next until its steel-laced spider web forbids any chink of light.

Yet in creating this web of night the empire destroys the very engine of life that it depends on in order to survive. Human capital can be kept in peak operating condition only through the fuel of hope. Once hope is removed and we are told that the current world situation is the “end of history”, that reason and humanity have nothing further to offer than the endless asymptote of capital accumulation until the ruling elite disappear into a black hole of their own infinite wealth, then the motor that drives the whole machine starts to grind loudly. This is the despair and its companion cynicism that currently grips most of those who inhabit the outer circles of the neoliberal hell. And this is the basis of real hope.

Rubble

"I realized I had never understood the true meaning of 'rubble.' Such and such was "reduced to rubble" is a phrase we hear. It is different seeing what demolished buildings actually look like. Buildings in which people were living. Buildings from which hundreds of broken bodies have been removed; so thorough a job have the Palestinians done in removing the dead from squashed dwellings that no scent of death remains. What this task must have been like, both physically and psychologically, staggers the mind.

We pass police stations that were simply flattened, and all the young (most Palestinians are young) officers in them killed, hundreds of them. We pass ministries, bombed into fragments. We pass a hospital, bombed and gutted by fire. If one is not safe in a hospital, when one is already sick and afraid, where is one safe? If children are not safe playing in their schoolyards, where are they safe?" - Alice Walker, "The Best Place One Could be on Earth", July 26, 2009.

"How doofus humans are going to look -- we thought as we marched, sang, accepted our handcuffs -- still firing rockets into apartment buildings full of families, and dropping bombs on school children and their pets, when the ice melts completely in the Arctic and puts an end to our regressive, greed sourced rage forever." - Alice Walker, "The Best Place One Could be on Earth", July 26, 2009.

"Doofus" is not exactly the word I would pick, but it does express the absurdity of our violence and greed in a way that celebrates the wisdom of the earth. It reminds us of the spiritual powers that lie behind all that we see, before whom we are mites crawling on the surface of mystery. Moreover, this mystery has a personality and a love that will one day put an end to our raging greed, and there's not a damn thing we can do about that.

Breaking the Border of Humanity

Until we feel the humanity of other peoples of the world, for instance Afghanis and Pakistanis and Hondurans, with the same intensity that we demand respect for our own, so far will our humanity be degraded and ultimately destroyed.

But a larger vision needs to be invoked. Our denial of our duties to humanity works in both directions. We have refused our duty to help create a world where everyone has adequate nourishment and health care while the rest of the world has desperately pleaded for our help. The fact that for a fraction of the cost of our luxuries this could be accomplished imposes the absolute moral obligation to do so. If our churches actually followed the teachings of Jesus, this would be beyond doubt - and would be the central moral imperative of a genuine Christianity. The tragic flaw of the American personality is complete blindness to our inherent relationship to other peoples and the natural environment, all of which have been transformed into objects to be consumed for profit. This denial of responsibility on a global scale will ultimately destroy us.

The Church of Benedict XVI continues to subsist in a world of Platonic forms untouched by history, untouched by the misery inherent in the capitalist world order that is determined to extract the last dribble of profit until the planet is reduced to a scalding desert. Regarding this system of economic idolatry, the Church is silent even as it proclaims eternal verities to the starving.

In contrast to God's attempt to share our humanity in Jesus' life and death, the Church worships an objectified God, a God who underwrites the ruling economic order, a God who can't be bothered with the massacre of Gazans, as Pope Benedict recently demonstrated in his visit to Israel.

In this regard, the Nonviolent Jesus calls out to the Honduran people to ignore the lies of the U.S. government and joyously to affirm the model of Hugo Chavez' Bolivarian Revolution as the authentic model for liberation from the dictatorship currently being imposed by U.S. corporate interests. How ironic that the U.S. State Department is currently publishing long discredited lies about Venezuela drug trafficking in Columbia. Colombian military cohorts in Honduras now want a share of the profits as well and Washington is doing everything it can to enable them to open new drug trafficking routes through Honduras.

The Honduran president has the opportunity at this moment to go beyond words, as we all do, and to march toward his capital holding the spirit force, the "truth force", the satyagraha of his people, in his heart. It could mean his death, but it would acquire a force that would place a permanent mark on the spirit of American. Or in the words of Eva Gollinger, "Personally, I think he needs to just continue inside Honduras, despite all risks, and fight to reunite with his family and his people, who have been risking their lives now for almost one month, struggling to defeat the coup regime." - Postcards from the Revolution, July 24, 2009.