I’ve been trying to write something for a couple of weeks now and finding little success at it. This is annoying for several reasons, one of which is that in the absence of new titles my blog is now attracting the kind of crowd I could feed with the left-overs in my fridge, not that I’d mind. But there are already millions of webLogs out here in space, and this one, however brilliant and insightful, is already rushing toward obscurity...
I’d give it up, I really would, but for the visceral response I still have to the enormous lies in the daily press and the undeniable reality of living in an America so well brainwashed that sustained screaming would not necessarily be the act of a crazy person.
The something I’ve been trying to write about is, well, to be blunt, what Peter Dale Scott calls “deep politics.” I’ve been trying to write about it not only because that’s what’s being played out right now on the world stage –– after all, it’s always being played out –– but because it’s become a bit more visible than usual, necessarily, I believe, due to the circumstances attending it.
Deep politics. Scott being able to speak for himself, I can say only what the term means to me: it’s the stuff that’s going on that doesn’t show up on CNN or in national (or local) publications. We get, as you know, cover stories. The cover stories are promoted for two reasons. First, to distract attention from something else, and, second, to create a propaganda wall of “reliable” and “trusted” authority.
Cover stories are always necessary when things have gotten messy. For example, the murder of a head of state, even when it’s not the U.S. President, can sometimes cause quite a stir. When that’s going to happen, it’s always good to create a fiction ahead of time. For example, if a nation’s leader is to be removed, or killed, he or she must be painted as ‘anti-democratic’, ‘unstable’, and ‘power-mad’, not to mention a friend of someone we already don’t like, a favorite whipping boy being Castro or, now, Hugo Chavez. That’s not very hard to do given that the mass media has long been owned and operated by the same guys who sponsor the event in question.
History is loaded with examples. When the CIA kills a foreign head of state, the deceased is demonized, viz. Allende in Chile, Arbenz in Guatemala, Sukarno in Indonesia, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and so on. That way, Americans are given the gift of misconception; we are able to dismiss any troubling thoughts about whether such a foreign policy is, perhaps, reprehensible, because probably the dead guy was no good, allied with commies, or, these days, terrorists.
Americans are really good at pretending to be ignorant as shit, especially given the last sixty years of our history, and therefore it doesn’t take much.
What I’ve been trying to write about is Honduras, in the context of deep politics. Because not only is the truth being rather blatantly buried in and by the mass media, but the story underlying it appears to be itself a cover for something else.
On the surface, we’ve got a military coup. American media describe the leaders as dissident military officers, supported by Hondurans concerned that the President, Manuel Zelaya, was undermining democracy.
The first articles in The New York Times, that august journal of crap still trading on an old reputation, and Associated Press stories out of Tegucigalpa, leaned heavily on the explanation that the coup had occurred because Zelaya planned to manipulate his way into remaining in power beyond expiration of his term.
From the first AP dispatch:
“Zelaya, a leftist ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, had refused to cancel an unpopular constitutional referendum that some saw as an attempt by him to stay in power beyond the one-term limit. The (Honduran) Supreme Court had deemed the referendum illegal.”
It would’ve been precisely as accurate to write:
“Zelaya, a communist and notorious sex pervert, had refused to cancel an unpopular referendum that some saw as an attempt by him to sell the nation’s children into slavery...”
Zelaya's referendum, planned for the day the coup took place, was a nonbinding poll. It only asked voters if they wanted to have an actual referendum on reforming the country's Constitution on the November ballot. Even if Zelaya had gotten everything he was looking for, a new president would have been elected on the same November ballot. So Zelaya would be out of office in January, no matter what steps were taken toward constitutional reform. Further, Zelaya has repeatedly said that if the Constitution were changed, he would not seek another term.
The AP dispatch, therefore, itself exposes its fraudulence. Not to mention: if the referendum was “unpopular”, then it wouldn’t pass anyhow. Right?
Zelaya’s ouster at gunpoint was carried out not by “patriotic” Honduran officers so dedicated to democracy that they had to prevent incipient tyranny but by military men trained at the notorious U.S. death squad training academy called the School of the Americas. (The S.O.A. has nearly been closed by vote of Congress on two occasions, but it survives on the claim that it teaches Latin officers the benefits of democracy, a flagrantly ludicrous story; it has changed its name to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, but little else).
Zelaya, you see, had become a severe problem for the Honduran ruling class and its North American ‘friends’ in the CIA and corporate worlds. A wealthy man himself, Zelaya had identified more and more with the poor. He was moving to slow the appropriation of his country’s resources, perhaps even reverse it, by the multinationals. That could not be tolerated.
But there is another layer of power struggle whose fingerprints can be found here, and it involves President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the CIA.
Three items:
1. Principal advisers to the junta are Lanny Davis, who is both a political operative and close friend and associate of Hillary Clinton, and Bennett Ratcliff, another close Clinton friend and former senior executive for one of Washington’s most powerful public relations firms. Davis, former legal counsel to Bill Clinton and central to Hillary Clinton’s recent campaign for President, has made millions as a lobbyist for multi-national corporations.
2. The U.S. government maintains military bases and a military presence in more than one hundred nations around the world. Honduras is no exception. At Soto Cano air base, about 60 miles north of Teguchigalpa, there are more than eight hundred American soldiers.
3. Honduras has been a part of the U.S. “anti-drug” program, with more than a million dollars annually going to its military. This program is widely known to be directed by the CIA as a rather thin cover for “anti-terror” activity, the new euphemism (remember “anti-Communist”?) for popular control and suppression of dissent. The leader of the coup, General Romeo Vasquez, is a graduate of S.O.A.
There is little doubt that Barack Obama opposes the coup. His public statements have been unambiguous, terming the military overthrow of Zelaya illegal. Unless he is dissembling completely, Obama didn’t know about this in advance.
But some people certainly did. It is inconceivable, for example, that Lanny Davis and Bennett Ratcliff did not know. As the advisers to Micheletti and the generals, Davis and Ratcliff would have been the source for planning the public relations aspect of the coup.
The military leadership’s story is that Zelaya’s referendum threatened democracy because it might have led to his being able to remain in power after his term expires in January of 2010. Though false on its face, the mainstream U.S. media bought this line without questioning it.
What the media does not mention is that the coup leaders have shut down television and radio stations and arrested journalists. It has imposed curfews and killed dissidents and demonstrators.
Since the Zelaya referendum was not about, and could not possibly have led to, a new term for the President, how come the military attacked his home, spraying it with bullets, and kidnapped Zelaya?
The fake new President, a corrupt hack named Roberto Micheletti, actually told the press, “I’m sure that 80 to 90 percent of the Honduran population is happy with what happened today.” Let’s see: an “unpopular referendum” (according to the AP stories) was averted with an act of violence against the President, and this act would please practically everybody in the country.
If you are having trouble with the logic of this, you would not be alone. It’s not only transparent it’s so thinly scripted that it would be laughed at by an ordinary fifth-grader. I mean, if there was no need to oust Zelaya anyway, and he couldn’t get elected to a county commission, why did this happen?
It happened because there was in fact a deep, desperate need to take over Honduras, a need nobody’s expressing because it is so disgustingly immoral that even a crazy-assed cover story was considered better than telling the truth. We may wonder what that is.
On one level, the first one down, let’s say, it’s about power and money. No surprise here. It’s always about power and money. The Zelaya referendum only sought to learn the voters’ opinion about whether the Honduran constitution –– in its present form, written by Americans and their friends among the Honduran ruling class –– should be open to amendment. Specifically, given it’s origins, the present constitution makes it impossible for Honduras to control its own natural and national resources. Monetary, corporate empires wish to own these resources, as we know. cf Iraq. Oil companies are all over these situations, as have, increasingly, other concerns which seek to control a nation’s water supply.
Read that again. It is not a joke.
But there are popular movements growing all over Latin America and they are shaking off a century of foreign control. In nation after nation, and specifically in the neighborhood of Honduras, democratic elections are yielding populist issues and candidates. It’s not “Kitten Comes To Hollywood.” There are serious struggles for power going on everywhere; in Latin American nations, the U.S. runs various secret spy and security operations, sometimes through surrogates, sometimes directly.
It is clear that the U.S. government, acting as business agent for Bechtel, Halliburton, Chevron, Monsanto, and so forth, can not always send in the Marines. This might be an unpopular policy domestically, not to mention there aren’t that many Marines. So it’s done in other ways: through secret operations, many of them involving murder. Recently we have been treated to the fact that Dick Cheney actually ran a death squad operation out of his office, an international one, and that black ops teams entered other nations carrying death lists.
Is any of this getting through out there?
Barack Obama is President, but his election didn’t do shit about the very real, permanent empire America has long ago become. This empire has seen renegade President before; it got rid of the last couple.
Historians who know the real story of the Kennedy administration (and, for that matter, Eisenhower’s), know that a President who wishes to change ANYTHING in the direction of monetary or social fairness in the country is in serious trouble. It is simply not permitted to deprive the monsters of anything.
This is also obvious in international policies. How else would you explain the undeniable fact that Halliburton received billions of dollars for projects which it did not complete, or in which safety shoddiness led to the deaths of American service members. These were no-bid contracts. They are not in jail. How is that possible?
The CIA, as the enforcer part of the deal, especially in other countries but increasingly in the U.S., too, has not only toppled foreign governments but has engaged in a wide range of activities designed to destabilize or corrupt these governments, their police and their armies. This is often without the consent or even the knowledge of an American President. The CIA’s budget is secret; not even Congress, not even the President is permitted to know what that is, and historically it has augmented government funds with its own participation in international drug trafficking.
During the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, the Company, as the CIA calls itself, was getting its sea legs. It overthrew several governments with the permission of Ike (and the Dulles brothers), and a few without the permission of JFK. It was doing what it wanted and, as it turned out (JFK famously threatened to “smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind.”), Presidents were to be manipulated or handled in some other fashion.
This is not a good place to get too deeply into the JFK/CIA story, but a part of it involves CIA operations which were designed to force Kennedy to do what the Company –– and its corporate friends –– wanted him to do. Eisenhower later complained that they’d tried to manipulate him into attacking “Red” China. With JFK, the first test of will came over the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
In the last year of Ike, the CIA and Pentagon dreamed up a plan to invade Cuba and rescue the place for the mafia, AT&T, and the sugar barons, who’d been kicked out by Castro’s revolution. With Kennedy’s election, the plan continued; now, however, due to Kennedy’s caution, they’d had to promise that it would be carried out by Cuban expats and would lead to a popular uprising. No American military support would be necessary, they assured JFK.
But the CIA knew better. It knew that Castro’s revolution was not only popular but backed up by a pretty good military outfit. In order to succeed, the ‘invasion’ would require direct U.S. air cover to knock out Cuba’s air force, if not actual invasion support using U.S. troops. Running this hare-brained scheme was Allen Dulles of CIA and the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Kennedy smelled a rat from the start, expressing skepticism and demanding that the generals sign a document attesting to their opinion that the operation would work without American force. The CIA believed that once the invasion had begun Kennedy could not let it fail, that he would be forced by circumstance to intervene directly. They miscalculated. And that miscalculation triggered the chain of events which led to the President’s murder.
John Kennedy, of course, knew full well how dangerous these people were. A close friend asked him, in early 1962, whether the fictional account of an attempted military-led coup against an American President, “Seven Days In May”, could really happen. He responded that it could, and he outlined how: if there were a ‘Bay of Pigs’ event, he said, and if it was followed by a second such clash with the JCS. Later that year, he overrode the unanimous advice of the military and refused to attack Cuba.
The Cuban missile crisis, in October of 1962, brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Soviet missiles had been installed in Cuba. Had he heeded the views of his generals, several America targets, including Washington, would have been engulfed in terror. As historians have shown, the Soviet missiles, contrary to what our military had assured Kennedy, were already operational.
The crisis in Honduras today, in its internal mechanism, is eerily similar to the clash between JFK and the interests of the military and the corporate structure it advances.
There is zero chance that the plotters, being advised by Davis and Ratcliff, had not had pretty good assurance that they would not be forced out by the United States. They had direct lines not only to the CIA but to the Secretary of State as well.
Obama certainly knows this. He knows who Davis and Ratcliff are. Someone calculated that the President, beset by an unstable economy, the health care program’s eviceration at the hands of the whores in Congress, the middle east mess, Iraq, and the growing war in Afghanistan, would not have the capital or attention left to direct the necessary response in Honduras. They may be proven right.
But the immediate question of Honduras is secondary to the larger one, the deep politics question whose threads can be seen poking through the surface there. This is an empire. Why we should expect it to behave in a fashion different from other empires is a mystery of human psychology.
I’ve had troubling conversations with friends on the left. There’s a lot of anger over a lot of issues, and I share it. I mean, finally, a President who’s not obviously craven and insane, what an opportunity! Protect the Bill of Rights, prosecute the criminals, end the wars, you know the list.
I hope we can look at politics, real politics, deep politics, with eyes wide open, because if ever there was a critical time in our history, this is it.
Since November 22, 1963, it’s been the job of the President to promote military and corporate objectives. This has, not unexpectedly, led to pointless and brutal wars, unimaginable carnage, and the wasting of the earth’s treasures. Domestically, it has led to the successive looting of the nation by the Savings & Loan industry, the insurance industry, the weapons manufacturers, the energy companies, and the banks. They have taken everything.
Obama stands on the precipice along with the rest of us. Empires fall. Historically, great attempts to save a collapsing empire and return it to its best days have always failed. Those determined to strip a nation of all its treasures will not hesitate to kill on occasional Kennedy if that becomes necessary.
I think that Obama is trying very skillfully to reel us back in, and to stay alive while he’s doing it.
