If I’ve Lost Philip

In February of 1968, Walter Cronkite went to Viet Nam to cover the aftermath of the Tet offensive. After he returned, on February 27, 1968, Cronkite delivered an editorial commentary on national television suggesting that the war was not winnable in any conventional sense. He recommended peace negotiations.

Legend has it that President Johnson, hearing of this editorial, said something along the lines of “If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America.”

We have now experienced our own Cronkite moment here in Vermont, but concerning a different subject. Philip Baruth has declared that he “is now officially off the bus.” The bus in question is the Barack Obama campaign bus.

Let me explain. Philip Baruth is a University of Vermont professor, blogger, recently elected Vermont State Senator, and former Obama delegate at the Democratic National Convention. He wasn’t just a delegate, he was a slavering, raw-meat-eating, both-fists-in-the-air Obama delegate. He campaigned harder for that delegate spot than most candidates for elected office. Philip came out early for Obama and all through the 2008 campaign he was active and vocal in his support.

And now, this: “It’s not just that Obama hasn’t differentiated himself substantially from George W. Bush. On domestic spying and increased drone attacks and Gitmo and now extending the Bush-era tax cuts, Obama is choosing to govern more or less like a first-term President Lieberman.”

Senator Joe Lieberman? That’s Baruth-speak for dog puke. After the dog has eaten feces.

President Obama is too busy to notice us small-fry Vermont bloggers. Still, if he only knew. He’d be saying, “If I’ve lost Baruth, I’ve lost the core of the Democratic Party.”

An Imperial Presidency, Like It Or Not

“Empire,” “emperor,” and “imperial” all derive from the Latin word imperare, to command. Originally the term imperator was given by acclamation to a successful military commander. It later obtained its more political meaning.

With President Obama’s announcement of an escalation of troop numbers in Afghanistan, the word empire takes on a new meaning for me. It’s a question of who, or what, is commanding.

I can pile up many arguments as to why remaining in Afghanistan, much less increasing our presence, is a bad idea. I can point to history, with the stories of empire after empire breaking their teeth on the rock-strewn mountains of Central Asia. I can lay out the thesis of Jonathan Schell in his book The Unconquerable World, where he outlines the inevitable long-term failure of imperial occupations when opposed by determined indigenous forces. I can point to the mission creep of this invasion, which sought to eliminate an Al Qaeda presence that is no longer there. (The best estimate of the U.S. government is that there are perhaps 100 people associated with Al Qaeda hunkered down in Afghanistan. Not including Osama bin Laden.)

I can consider the unsavory lose-lose choice we face in Afghan government. Presently we support the second most corrupt government on the planet. Hamid Karzai’s warlord and crony-ridden kleptocracy, kept in place by U.S. cash and firepower, has near zero legitimacy after a clumsily rigged election. About 30 of the 238 members of the Afghan parliament are actually showing up to work. What is left of the hundreds of millions of dollars in aid money after Karzai’s friends and relatives have skimmed their share isn’t even being spent.

The alternative force is the Taliban, a group of medievalist religious fanatics. They gained control of Afghanistan originally because the Afghan people preferred legalistic religious zealotry to the indigenous mafiosi known as the Northern Alliance.

So, what shall it be, murderous thieves or murderous zealots? In some provinces, after experiencing extortion and rape at the hands of the Afghan National Police the locals are swinging towards the Taliban. I’ll predict that the Taliban will win this one. They are religious reactionaries, but only a century retrograde of most of the rural Afghan population. They offer people some level of personal security and rule of law. 14th century law, but law nevertheless.

But none of this really matters. What matters is the imperator, and Barack Obama does not hold that office.

An empire has its own momentum. The arc of its story line is stronger than the people who serve it. An empire has its own reasons. Like a shark, it has to keep moving or die.
We still have over 750 military bases around the globe. Like the British Empire of the 19th century, the sun never sets upon us. We are, however, a waning empire. Our client states are leaving us. We have overspent. The corporate virus that infects our body politic has restructured our economy from a manufacturing powerhouse into an unsustainable paper chase. And yet our president can’t look at an obvious disaster in the making, perhaps our final disaster, and turn in a different direction.

I am reminded of a couple of parasitic organisms that modify the host’s behavior. The lancet fluke has a life cycle that includes the cow, the snail, and the ant. When it infects an ant it takes over the ant’s motor nerve system and makes it climb to the top of a grass stem and wait. This makes it more likely to be eaten by a grazing cow and continue the cycle. Likewise, the Toxoplasma gondii parasite, which cycles between the guts of cats and mice, makes mice less fearful of the smell of cats. Biologists have found many other instances where parasites have modified the behavior of their hosts to their own benefit and the host’s peril.

So it is with the U.S. We, the people, have been sold a narrative of the necessity of military force. Evidence that it isn’t working is marginalized in our public discourse. I should be more precise – it isn’t working for the average Afghan or for the average American. For the average Fortune 500 military contractor it is working fine. Hundreds of billions of dollars have churned into the accounts of Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR), Lockheed Martin, Blackwater, and hundreds of other corporate beneficiaries. They, in turn, finance the campaigns of like-minded legislators. KBR even blackmailed generals in the field into approving suspicious invoices with threats of non-performance of vital support services. The Department of Justice is underfunded and understaffed so it can’t adequately pursue these corporate criminals. The military-industrial complex is taking us down from within.

Obama’s call for more troops was inevitable. He could no more back out of Afghanistan than the CEO of Exxon Mobil could transform that company into an environmental non-profit. He was swept along by a legacy of imperial narrative, a corrupt Congress, the demands of thoroughly integrated corporate parasites, and the advice of generals focused on “kinetic operations” (shooting things). I shouldn’t under-emphasize the power of the imperial narrative. We keep telling ourselves a story of our exceptional nature as a nation, the inevitability of our eventual triumph, our essential goodness, our destiny as a world leader, and the justice of our military exploits. Obama couldn’t deny any of that. Political suicide is a mild term for that kind of truth telling.

The imperator is not a man in an oval office. It is the structure of our empire itself. That structure, parisitized to the crumbling point, will lurch forward till it can’t sustain itself any longer. The long, torturous, bloody, losing proposition of occupying Afghanistan is on that path.

What Obama Should Have Said

President Obama held yet another one of those pointless town hall meetings in Montana recently. It did allow him to respond to some of the absolute mythology that the health insurance industry has been promoting, but the format itself is the folksy equivalent of a show trial. There is only the illusion of discussion and thought. Television viewers get the vicarious satisfaction of seeing their views expressed, pro or con, and the president gets to make his case to the .02% of the population as yet undecided.

Here’s one exchange:

Q My name is Mark Montgomery. I'm from Helena, Montana.

THE PRESIDENT: Great to see you, Mark.

Q I appreciate you coming here. It's great to be able to do this.

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you.

Q Mr. President, I make a living selling individual health insurance. (Laughter.) Obviously I've paid very close attention to this insurance debate. As you know, the health insurance companies are in favor of health care reform and have a number of very good proposals before Congress to work with government to provide insurance for the uninsured and cover individuals with preexisting conditions. Why is it that you've changed your strategy from talking about health care reform to health insurance reform and decided to vilify the insurance companies? (Applause.)

THE PRESIDENT: Okay, that's a fair question, that's a fair question. First of all, you are absolutely right that the insurance companies, in some cases, have been constructive. So I'll give you a particular example. Aetna has been trying to work with us in dealing with some of this preexisting conditions stuff. And that's absolutely true. And there are other companies who have done the same.

Now, I want to just be honest with you, and I think Max will testify, that in some cases what we've seen is also funding in opposition by some other insurance companies to any kind of reform proposals. So my intent is not to vilify insurance companies. If I was vilifying them, what we would be doing would be to say that private insurance has no place in the health care market, and some people believe that.

I don't believe that. (Applause.) What I've said is let's work with the existing system. We've got private insurers out there. But what we do have to make sure of is that certain practices that are very tough on people, that those practices change.

Now, one point I want to make about insurance: Some of the reforms that we want for the insurance market are very hard to achieve, unless we've got everybody covered. This is the reason the insurance companies are willing to support reform, because their attitude is if we can't exclude people for preexisting conditions, for example, if we can't cherry pick the healthy folks from the not-so-healthy folks, well, that means that we're taking on more people with more expensive care. What's in it for us? The answer is if they've got more customers, then they're willing to make sure that they are eliminating some of these practices. If they've got fewer customers, they're less willing to do it.

So it's important for people -- when people ask me sometimes, why don't you just do the insurance reform stuff and not expand coverage for more people, my answer is I can't do the insurance reform stuff by itself. The only way that we can change some of the insurance practices that are hurting people now is to make sure that everybody is covered and everybody has got a stake in it, and then the insurance companies are able and willing to make some of these changes that will help people who have insurance right now. But thank you for the question. I appreciate it. (Applause.)

Sorry, Mr. President, but that was anemic. Here’s a preferable response.

THE PRESIDENT: Okay, that's a fair question, that's a fair question. First of all, I am vilifying insurance companies because they richly deserve vilifying. In fact, when you look at their behavior over the past few decades, you’ll see that they deserve prosecution for fraud. In some cases they probably deserve prosecution for murder, when denial of coverage could easily have been predicted to cause the death of the insured person. Where’s the Tarpeian rock when you need it? Whoops, any classics scholars out there? (Laughter) In ancient Rome they pitched murderers off a rocky cliff, and at least figuratively that’s what we need to do to the health insurance industry. (Applause)

They are playing at cooperation with reform efforts right now. I guess that with the Blue Dog Democrats in their pockets they expect to write in some more subsidies for themselves. They certainly aren’t acting out of the goodness of their hearts, because, well, there’s no goodness in there. Just raw profit motive.

There is ample evidence that they have groups of employees whose sole purpose is to exploit any tiny loophole in their complex contracts to deny people the coverage they paid for and that they deserve. The whole industry is based on suckering people into signing flawed contracts and then breaking those contracts when they think they can get away with it. That’s fraud. It’s also downright immoral. The executives and upper management should consider themselves lucky if they don’t end up behind bars. Once they are in prison I’d make them pay out of pocket for their medical care. (Laughter, Applause)

So, Mr. Montgomery, I consider you the equivalent of a minor errand runner for an organized crime family. Perhaps you do your job with the best of intentions, but thousands of Americans die every year thanks to the efforts of your employers, and millions more suffer pain and hardship. Tens of thousands go bankrupt. If I have my way you will be looking for a new job soon, one that doesn’t involve contractual fraud and sucking the lifeblood from the American people. I hope you enjoy your new anus. I enjoyed tearing it for you. Okay, time for one more question – back there…

In my dreams. Now it seems that the White House is backing off from the public health insurance option. The insurance companies will continue their dominance in the sole industrialized nation without a public health care program. We’ll keep forking over the money and fighting for our benefits. It’s the money, folks, the campaign money.