Bulletin N° 575
Subject: ON BITTER
DISAPPOINTMENT AND STOIC RESIGNATION.
20 July
2013
Grenoble, France
Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
Our collective
history is a series of failed revolutions and our existence is an accumulation
of scar tissues produced by these dashed expectations. We have more in common
than we are presently able to perceive, and what differences that do exist are
trivial by comparison. We have been enticed into dead-end movements and
programmed for exploitation and failure, left unable to reach out to one
another for support and even inhibited from asking clearly for aid when we need
it. Torn from any sense of community, our lives have become abstractions
issuing from the ubiquitous calculations of predatory capitalist production.
We’ve been screwed, and we know it.
A poem I recently
read, entitled “Co-Workers,” expresses this acute state of alienation:
The Nose knows…
The Straw just sucks and blows;
The Imposter comes and goes;
The White Hare frets that everyone one may not like him,
While Cheesecake seems to think that something might be missing.
Economic
anthropologist, David Graeber, has written a radical
account of the history of finance. In his book, Debt, The First 5,000 Years (2012), he
discusses the controversy over money, whether it is a material commodity (e.g.
gold, silver, etc.) or simply exists as a social convention, an abstract unit
of measure, like a gram, a meter, or a fluid liter.
At the end of this
400-page essay, Graeber addresses the question of debt, and the widely shared sacred
principle that “we must all pay our debts.”
… the principle has
been exposed as a flagrant lie. As it turns out, we don’t “all” have to pay our
debts. Only some of us do. Nothing would be more important than to wipe the
slate clean for everyone, mark a break with our accustomed morality, and start
again.
What is a debt, anyway? A debt is just a
perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence.
If freedom (real freedom) is the ability to make friends, then it is also,
necessarily, the ability to make real promises. What sorts of promises might
genuinely free men and women make to one another? At this point, we can’t even
say. It’s more a question of how we can get to a place that will allow us to
find out. And the first step in that journey, in turn, is to accept that in the
largest scheme of things, just as on one has the right to tell us our true
value, no one hass the right to tell us what we truly
owe.(p.391)
Graeber in this book and elsewhere has called for
“a kind of Biblical-style Jubilee” where all people would be the beneficiaries
of what now only the “too-big-to-fail” financial institutions have access to:
namely, "wipe the slate clean.” His argumentation is well documented and
convincing. It is a radical departure from many of the assumptions of world
civilizations, but, on the other hand, his alternative vision is not altogether
unfamiliar . . . .
The 10 items
below offer readers an opportunity to envision their own alternatives during this
debacle of the American empire, “under surveillance.” Old answers to new
questions are not sufficient, and the exclusionary measures implied
in new answers in the face of limited
growth are far from being acceptable. Readers are invited to evaluate
the obstacles in their own lives: What are the micro-macro connections between the global
political economy and our behavior in daily life? This may be the new domain of both
aesthetic and social science research for the production of human liberation and social well
being in an ever-prospering environment.
Item
A., from
Mark Crispin Miller, is an article
by Alberto Riva on former US President
Jimmy Carter’s assessment of the state of US
“democracy” today.
Item B., sent to us by Reader Supported News, is an
article first published in the Guardian UK by Glenn Greenwald, on the tactics of the NSA.
Item C.,
sent to us by by Reader Supported News, is an
article first published in Digital Journal, by Ralph Lopez, on illegal NSA spying on Americans before 9/11.
Item D. from Reader Supported News, is an
article by Chris Hedges, first
published in Common Dreams on the Aim of Spying: “Censorship
Item E., sent to us by CannonFire,
is an interview with former NSA satellite technician, Russ Tice, on the Aim of Spying: “Blackmail.”
Item F., from Democracy Now! is an interview with
Joshua Oppenheimer, the director of a groundbreaking new documentary called
The
Act of Killing.
Item G., from Moyers & Company, is an article by Greg
Kaufmann on the US Congress
pursuing “self-interests”instead of public interests.
Item H. , from GRITtv, is an
interview with Ralph Nader, on his
new book, Told
You So.
Item I., from Jim O’Brien, is a list of current
articles of interest selected by Historians Against
the War.
Item J. is a discussion of Jeremy
Scahill’s recent book, Dirty
Wars and a short except from his film by the same name, documenting the
desperate demise of empire in the 21st century.
And finally, we
offer readers a look at the documentary film on “Astroturf Democracy” and the “Color Revolutions” :
Comment
la C I A prépare les révolutions colorées
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2HzWwjZcpw
Sincerely,
Francis Feeley
Professor of
American Studies
University of
Grenoble-3
Director of Research
University of
Paris-Nanterre
Center for the
Advanced Study of American Institutions and Social Movements
The University of
California-San Diego
http://dimension.ucsd.edu/CEIMSA-IN-EXILE/
_______________
A.
From Mark Crispin Miller :
Date: 20 July
2013
Subject: Former
US President Jimmy Carter on US ‘democracy’.
Jimmy
Carter: US “has no functioning democracy”
http://www.salon.com/2013/07/18/jimmy_carter_us_has_no_functioning_democracy_partner/
The
former president weighs in on NSA and the future of Internet platforms like
Google and Facebook
By Alberto Riva
Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter is so concerned
about the NSA spying scandal that he thinks it has essentially resulted in a
suspension of American democracy.
“America does not at the moment have
a functioning democracy,” he said at an event in Atlanta on Tuesday sponsored
by the Atlantik Bruecke, a private nonprofit association working to further
the German-U.S. relationship. The association’s name is German for “Atlantic
bridge.”
Carter’s
remarks didn’t appear in the American mainstream press but were reported from Atlanta by
the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, whose Washington
correspondent Gregor Peter Schmitz said
on Twitter he was present at the event. The story doesn’t appear in the
English-language section of the Spiegel website and is only available in
German.
The 39th U.S. president also said he
was pessimistic about the current state of global affairs, wrote Der Spiegel, because there was “no reason for him to be
optimistic at this time.” Among the developments that make him uneasy, Carter
cited the “falling of Egypt under a military dictatorship.” As president,
Carter managed to get then-Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin to
sign the Camp David peace agreements in 1979.
Carter said a bright spot was “the
triumph of modern technology,” which enabled the democratic uprisings of the
Arab Spring; however, the NSA spying scandal, Carter said, according to Der Spiegel, endangers precisely those developments, “as
major U.S. Internet platforms such as Google or Facebook
lose credibility worldwide.”
_______________
B.
From
Reader Supported News :
Date:
15 July 2013
Subject: The Tactics of Surveillance.
http://readersupportednews.org/
The actual
story that matters is not hard to see: the NSA is attempting to collect,
monitor and store all forms of human communication.
The Crux of the NSA
Story: 'Collect it All'
_______________
C.
From Reader Supported News :
Date: 15 July 2013
Subject:
The Aims of Surveillance: 1) Intimidation.
http://readersupportednews.org/
Contradicting
a statement by ex-vice president Dick Cheney on Sunday that warrantless
domestic surveillance might have prevented 9/11, 2007 court records indicate
that the Bush-Cheney administration began such surveillance at least 7 months
prior to 9/11.
Bush-Cheney
Began Illegal NSA Spying Before 9/11
_______________
D.
From Reader Supported News :
Date: 15 July 2013
Subject:
The Aims of Surveillance: 2) Censorship.
http://readersupportednews.org/
The security
and surveillance state...has mounted a relentless and largely clandestine
campaign to deny public space to any group or movement that might spawn another
popular uprising.
_______________
E.
From
Cannon Fire :
Date:
13 July 2013
Subject:
The Aims of Surveillance: 3) Extortion.
This was is
summer of 2004. One of the papers that I held in my hand was to wiretap a bunch
of numbers associated with, with a 40-something-year-old wannabe senator from
Illinois. You wouldn’t happen to know where that guy lives right now, would
you? It’s a big white house in Washington, DC. That’s who they went after. And
that’s the president of the United States now.
Was Obama
blackmailed? Was Cheney in charge?
http://cannonfire.blogspot.fr/2013/07/obama-blackmailed.html
_______________
F.
From
Democracy Now ! :
Date:
19 July 2013
Subject: The “Founding
Fathers” of Fascism in Indonesia.
New Film Shows U.S.-Backed Indonesian
Death Squad Leaders Re-enacting Massacres
"The Act of Killing": New
Film Shows U.S.-Backed Indonesian Death Squad Leaders Reenacting Massacres
_______________
G.
From
Moyers & Company :
Date:
16 July 2013
Subject: The
US Congress in pursuit of self-interests.
Confronting
Congressional Hunger Games
http://billmoyers.com/2013/07/16/confronting-congressional-hunger-games/
_______________
H.
From GRITtv :
Date: 30 March 2013
Subject:
A Cure for Capitalism.
Ralph
Nader: Developing a Civic Personality
http://grittv.org/?video=ralph-nader-developing-a-civic-personality
_______________
From Historians Against the War :
Date: 19 July 2013
Subject:
Recent articles of interest.
http://www.historiansagainstwar.org/
Links to
Recent Articles of Interest
"Surveillance Blowback: The
Making of the U.S. Surveillance State, 1898-2020"
By Alfred
W. McCoy, TomDispatch.com, posted July 15
The author
teaches history at the University of Wisconsin
"Demystifying the NSA
Surveillance Program"
By John Prados, History News Network,
posted July 15
"The Korean War: Forgotten,
Unknown, and Unfinished"
By H. Patricia Hynes, TruthOut.org, posted July 12
By Juan
Cole, History News Network, posted July 8
The author
teaches history at the University of Michigan
"Still Preparing for Nuclear
War"
By Lawrence
S. Wittner, History News Network, posted July 8
The author is
a professor of history emeritus at SUNY Albany
"Snowden Made the Right Call
When He Fled the U.S."
By Daniel Ellsberg, Washington Post, posted July 7
"What Have Snowden and
Greenwald to Do With Gandhi?"
By Suhankar Bannerjee, CommonDreams.org,
posted June 30
By Michael Kazin, The New Republic, posted
June 26
The author teaches history at Georgetown University
By Melvin
A. Goodman, CounterPunch.org, posted June 25
This article
by a former CIA analyst discusses the use of informant networks, historically
and in the Bush and Obama administrations
Thanks for Steve Gosch, Rosalyn Baxandall,
and Larry Wittner for suggesting articles included in
the above list. Suggestions can be sent to jimobrien48@gmail.com.
J.
From Jeremy Scahill :
Date: 20 July 2013
Subject:
Recording the Desperate Demise of Empire.
Noam Chomsky,
Jeremy Scahill, and Amy Goodman discuss the book
"Dirty Wars" (Full Speech and Discussion)
“Dirty Wars" with and Goodman, Scahill ,
and Noam Chomsky
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUfMgkOMNME
For an excerpt of the film, please see : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqKQFcFT4TY