From: "Gregory Elich" 
Subject: Terrorism Meets Reactionism
Newsgroups: soc.politics.marxism
Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2001 14:51:37 CST
Organization: AT&T Worldnet



Terrorism Meets Reactionism

by Michael Parenti

When almost-elected president George W. Bush announced his
war on terrorism in the aftermath of the September 11
attacks, he also was launching a campaign to advance the
agenda of the reactionary Right at home and abroad. This
includes rolling back an already mangled federal human
services sector, reverting to deficit spending for the
benefit of a wealthy creditor class, increasing the
repression of dissent, and expanding to a still greater
magnitude the budgets and global reach of the US military
and other components of the national security state.
Indeed, soon after the terrorist attacks, the Wall Street
Journal ran an editorial (September 19), calling on Bush to
quickly take advantage of the "unique political climate" to
"assert his leadership not just on security and foreign
policy but across the board." The editorial summoned the
president to push quickly for more tax-rate cuts, expanded
oil drilling in Alaska, fast-track authority for trade
negotiations, and raids on the Social Security surplus.

More for War

Bush himself noted that the attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon offer an opportunity to strengthen
America. As numerous conservatives spoke eagerly of putting
the country on a permanent war footing, the president
proudly declared the first war of the twenty-first century
against an unspecified enemy to extend over an indefinite
time frame. Swept along in the jingoist tide, that gaggle of
political wimps known as the US Congress granted Bush the
power to initiate military action against any nation,
organization, or individual of his choosing, without ever
having to proffer evidence to justify the attack. Such an
unlimited grant of arbitrary powerin violation of
international law, the UN charter, and the US
Constitution--transforms the almost-elected president into
an absolute monarch who can exercise life-and-death power
over any quarter of the world. Needless to say, numerous
other nations have greeted the presidents elevation to King
of the Planet with something less than enthusiasm.

And King of the Planet is how he is acting, bombing the
already badly battered and impoverished country of
Afghanistan supposedly to get Osama bin Laden. Unmentioned
in all this is that US leaders have actively fostered and
financed the rise of the Taliban, and have long refused to
go after bin Laden. Meanwhile, the White House announces
that other countries may be bombed at will and the war will
continue for many years. And Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
D. Wolfowitz urges that U.S.  armed forces be allowed to
engage in domestic law enforcement, a responsibility that
has been denied the military since 1878.

Under pressure to present a united front against terrorism,
Democratic legislators are rolling over on the issue of
military spending.  Opposition to the so-called missile
defense shield seems to have evaporated, as has willingness
to preserve the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The lawmakers
seem ready to come up with most of the $8.3 billion that the
White House says it needs to develop the missile defense
shield and move forward with militarizing outer
space. Congress is marching in lockstep behind Bush's
proposal to jack up the military budget to $328.9 billion
for 2002, a spending increase of $38.2 billion over the
enacted FY 2001 budget. Additional funds have been promised
to the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence
Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other
skulduggery units of the national security state.

Having been shown that the already gargantuan defense budget
was not enough to stop a group of suicidal hijackers armed
with box cutters, Bush and Congress thought it best to pour
still more money into the pockets of the military-industrial
cartel. (Incidentally, the next largest arms budget is
Russia's at $51 billion. If we add up the defense
allocations of all the leading industrial nations, it comes
to less than what the United States is already spending.)

Many of the measures being taken to fight terrorism have
little to do with actual security and are public relations
ploys designed to (a) heighten the nation's siege psychology
and (b) demonstrate that the government has things under
control. So aircraft carriers are deployed off the coast of
New York to guard the city; national guardsmen dressed in
combat fatigues and armed with automatic weapons patrol the
airports; sidewalk baggage check-ins and electronic tickets
are prohibited supposedly to create greater security. Since
increased security leads to greater inconvenience, it has
been decided that greater inconvenience will somehow
increase security or at least give the appearance of greater
security.

Then there is that biggest public relations ploy of all, the
bombing of hillsides and villages in Afghanistan, leaving us
with the reassuring image of Uncle Sam striking back at the
terrorists. To stop the bombing, the Taliban offered to hand
over bin Laden to a third country to stand trial, but this
was rejected by the White House. It seems that displaying US
retaliatory power and establishing a military presence in
that battered country are the primary US goals, not
apprehending bin Laden.

Lost in all this is the fact that US leaders have been the
greatest purveyors of terrorism throughout the world. In
past decades they or their surrogate mercenary forces have
unleashed terror bombing campaigns against unarmed civilian
populations, destroying houses, schools, hospitals,
churches, hotels, factories, farms, bridges, and other
nonmilitary targets in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, East Timor,
the Congo, Panama, Grenada, El Salvador, Guatemala, Angola,
Mozambique, Somalia, Iraq, Yugoslavia, and numerous other
countries, causing death and destruction to millions of
innocents. Using death squad terrorism US leaders have also
been successful in destroying reformist and democratic
movements in scores of countries. Of course hardly a word of
this is uttered in the corporate media, leaving Bush and
company free to parade themselves as the champions of peace
and freedom.

In time, the American people may catch wise that the
reactionaries in the White House have not the slightest clue
about how they are going to save us from future
assaults. They seem more interested in and are certainly
more capable of---taking advantage of terrorist attacks than
in preventing them. They have neither the interest nor the
will to make the kind of major changes in policy that would
dilute the hatred so many people around the world feel
toward US power. They are too busy handing the world over to
the transnational corporate giants at the expense of people
everywhere. And as of now, they have no intention of making
a 180 degree shift away from unilateral global domination
and toward collective betterment and mutual development.

Reactionary Offensive on the Home Front

Several bills pending in Congress are designed to expand the
definition of terrorism to include all but the most
innocuous forms of protest. S 1510, for example, treats
terrorism as any action that might potentially put another
person at risk. The bill gives the Feds power to seize the
assets of any organization or individual deemed to be aiding
or abetting terrorist activity. And it can be applied
retroactively without a statue of limitations. A telephone
interview I did with Radio Tehran in mid-October, trying to
explain why US foreign policy is so justifiably hated around
the world, might qualify me for detention as someone who is
abetting terrorism. Other bills will expand the authority of
law enforcement officials to use wiretaps, detain
immigrants, subpoena email and Internet records, and
infiltrate protest organizations. In keeping with the
reactionary Rights agenda, the war against terrorism has
become a cover for the war against democratic dissent and
public sector services. The message is clear, America must
emulate not Athens but Sparta.

One of the White Houses earliest steps to protect the
country from terrorist violence was to cut from the proposed
federal budget the $1 billion slated to assist little
children who are victims of domestic abuse or
abandonment. Certainly a nation at war has no resources to
squander on battered kids or other such frills. Instead
Congress passed a $40 billion supplemental, including $20
billion for recovery efforts, much of it to help clean up
and repair New Yorks financial district.

Bush then came up with an emergency package for the
airlines, $5 billion in direct cash and $10 billion in loan
guarantees, with the promise of billions more. The airlines
were beset by fiscal problems well before the September
attacks. This bailout has little to do with fighting
terrorism. The costs for greater airport security will
mostly likely be picked up by the federal government. And
taken together, the loss of four planes by United and
American Airlines, the impending lawsuits by victims
families, and higher insurance rates do not of themselves
create industry-wide insolvency, and do not justify a
multibillion dollar bailout. The real story is that once the
industry was deregulated, the airlines began
overcapitalizing without sufficient regard for earnings, the
assumption being that profits would follow after a company
squeezed its competitors to the wall by grabbing a larger
chunk of the market. So the profligate diseconomies of free
market corporate competition are once more picked up by the
US taxpayerthis time in the name of fighting terrorism.

Meanwhile some 80,000 airline employees were laid off in the
several weeks after the terrorist attack, including ticket
agents, flight attendants, pilots, mechanics, and ramp
workers. They will not see a penny of the windfall reaped by
the airline plutocrats and shareholders, whose patriotism
does not extend to giving their employees a helping hand. At
one point in the House debate, a frustrated Rep. Jay Inslee
(D-Wash.) shouted out, "Why in this chamber do the big dogs
always eat first?" Inslee was expressing his concerns about
the 20,000 to 30,000 Boeing workers who were being let go
without any emergency allocation for their
families. Sen. Peter G. Fitzgerald (R-Ill.) expressed a
similar sentiment when casting the lone dissenting vote in
the Senate against the airline bailout: "Congress should be
wary of indiscriminately dishing out taxpayer dollars to
prop up a failing industry without demanding something in
return for taxpayers." It remained for Sen. Hillary Rodham
Clinton (D-N.Y.) to explain on behalf of the Bush warmongers
why the handout was necessary: "We need to look at
transportation again as part of our national defense."

The post-September 11 anti-terrorism hype is serving as an
excuse to silence any opposition to drilling in the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge. Our nation needs oil to maintain
its strength and security, we hear. Against this
manipulative message, the environment does not stand much of
a chance. Likewise, US Trade representative Zoellick
enlisted the terrorism hype in the White Houses campaign to
surrender our democratic sovereignty to corporate dominated
international trade councils. In a Washington Post op-ed
(September 20) Zoellick charged that opposition to fast
track and globalization was akin to supporting the
terrorists. House Republican leaders joined in, claiming
that trade legislation was needed to solidify the global
coalition fighting terrorism. Here was yet another
overreaching opportunistic attempt to wrap the flag around a
reactionary special interest.

Actually it is the free trade agreements that threaten our
democratic sovereignty. All public programs and services
that regulate or infringe in any way upon big-money
corporate capitalism can be rolled back by
industry-dominated oligarchic trade councils. Corporations
can now tell governments---including our federal, state, and
local governments---what public programs and regulations are
acceptable or unacceptable. The reactionaries do not explain
how giving private, nonelective, corporate-dominated trade
councils a supranational supreme power to override our laws
and our Constitution will help in the war against terrorism.

Looting the Surplus

The bailout to the airline industry is only part of the
spending spree that the White House has in store for
us. Bush now endorses a stimulus of $60 billion to $75
billion to lift the country out of recession by recharging
business investment. He also has called for an additional
$60 billion tax cut which, like previous tax reductions,
would give meager sums to ordinary folks and lavish amounts
to fat cats and plutocrats. Where is all this money for
defense, war, internal security, airlines, rebuilding lower
Manhattan, tax cuts, and recharging the economy coming from?
Much of it is from the Social Security surplus fund which is
why Bush is so eager to spend.

It is a myth that conservatives are practitioners of fiscal
responsibility. Rightwing politicians who sing hymns to a
balanced budget have been among the wildest deficit
spenders. In twelve years (1981-1992) the Reagan-Bush
administrations increased the national debt from $850
billion to $4.5 trillion. By early 2000, the debt had
climbed to over $5.7 trillion. The deficit is pumped up by
two things: first, successive tax cuts to rich individuals
and corporations---so that the government increasingly
borrows from the wealthy creditors it should be taxing, and
second, titanic military budgets. In twelve years, the
Reagan-Bush expenditures on the military came to $3.7
trillion. In eight years, Bill Clinton spent over $2
trillion on the military.

The payments on the national debt amount to about $350
billion a year, representing a colossal upward
redistribution of income from working taxpayers to rich
creditors. The last two Clinton budgets were the first to
trim away the yearly deficit and produce a surplus. The
first Bush budget also promised to produce a surplus, almost
all of it from Social Security taxes. As a loyal
representative of financial interests, George W., like his
daddy, prefers the upward redistribution of income that
comes with a large deficit. The creditor class, composed
mostly of superrich individuals and financial institutions,
wants this nation to be in debt to it--the same way it wants
every other nation to be in debt to it.

Furthermore, the reactionary enemies of Social Security have
long argued that the fund will eventually become insolvent
and must therefore be privatized (We must destroy the fund
in order to save it.) But with Social Security continuing to
produce record surpluses, this argument becomes increasingly
implausible. By defunding Social Security, either through
privatization or deficit spending or both, Bush achieves a
key goal of the reactionary agenda.

How Far the Flag?

As of October 2001, almost-elected president Bush sported a
90 percent approval rating, as millions rallied around the
flag. A majority support his military assault upon the
people of Afghanistan, in the mistaken notion that this will
stop terrorism and protect US security. But before losing
heart, keep a few things in mind. There are millions of
people who, though deeply disturbed by the terrible deeds of
September 11, and apprehensive about future attacks, are not
completely swept up in the reactionary agenda. Taking an
approach that would utilize international law and diplomacy
has gone unmentioned in the corporate media, yet 30 percent
of Americans support that option, compared to 54 percent who
support military actions (with 16 percent undecided)
according to a recent Gallup poll. Quite likely a majority
of Americans would support an international law approach if
they had ever heard it discussed and explained seriously.

In any case, there are millions of people in the US who want
neither protracted wars nor a surrender of individual rights
and liberties, nor drastic cuts in public services and
retirement funds. Tens of thousands have taken to the
streets not to hail the chief but to oppose his war and his
reactionary agenda. Even among the flag-waivers, support for
Bush seems to be a mile wide and an inch deep. The
media-pumped jingoistic craze that grips the United States
today is mostly just that, a craze. In time, it grows stale
and reality returns. One cannot pay the grocery bills with
flags or pay the rent with vengeful slogans.

My thoughts go back to another President Bush, George the
first, who early in 1991 had an approval rating of 93
percent, and a fawning resolution from Congress hailing his
unerring leadership. Yet within the year, he was soundly
defeated for reelection by a garrulous governor from
Arkansas. Those who believe in democracy must be undeterred
in their determination to educate, organize, and agitate. In
any case, swimming against the tide is always preferable to
being swept over the waterfall.