...and he has now spoken.
From Wikipedia:
Branfman was working as an educational advisor for the U.S. government in Laos, when in September 1969 thousands of refugees fled into the Laotian capital of Vientiane. Working as a translator for international media, he began to interpret thousands of villagers' stories, telling of planes dropping bombs.
Told by U.S. officials in Laos that Americans had nothing to do with the bombs, Branfman became consumed with the desire to understand what was happening. Gathering details, he journeyed to Washington and spoke at a special session of the U.S. Senate Committee on Refugees, exposing the U.S. government's covert activities.
If that's not enough to establish credibility, then keep in mind that he was a policy advisor to Thom Hayden, Jerry Brown, and Gary Hart, and would have been the President's Economic Advisor if Hart had won in 1988. Keep in mind his story of being with Noam Chomsky as he cried, twice, across 40 years. Keep in mind that Noam Chomsky, in turn, described him as the counterpart to Jeremy Scahill from the 60s.
Mr. Branfman is embarking on a 4 part series regarding the Executive Branch of the United States, and launches with this page.
Many have expressed surprise that under President Obama - a former Constitutional Law Senior Lecturer who promised transparency, protection forwhisteblowers and respect for international law when running for office - U.S. Executive Branch agencies have:
- Built up a fleet of 7,000 drones, operating from a growing number of secret bases around the world, as they train more drone than conventional pilots; waged automated war in an ever-expanding number of nations, lawlessly murdering thousands of human beings without even knowing their names, while greatly strengthening America's foes (see chart below), destabilizing allied governments and, in the case of Pakistan, greatly increasing the risk of nuclear materials falling into anti-American hands;
- Created the top-secret Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) consisting of 60,000 persons operating in 75 nations, the first unit of American assassins in U.S. history, who have illegally murdered manythousands more people and conducted night raids recalling World War II Gestapo movies which, according to Afghan President Karzai, have helped strengthen the Taliban and destabilize his government;
- Prosecuted more whistleblowers and journalists than even Messrs. Cheney and Bush;
- Collected records of millions of phone calls of Americans citizens fromVerizon, Sprint, ATT and other phone carriers, and spied on millions more Americans' search histories, email content, file transfers and live chats while on the Internet;
- Authorized the use of drones in the United States, which the Federal Aviation Administration estimates could lead to 30,000 drones in U.S. skies by 2020, leading privacy advocates to fear their massive use by police departments to spy on Americans;
- Claimed the President’s right to kill or imprison without trial any American citizen;
- Increased paramilitary training and equipment, and created secret police spying operations in thousands of states and cities around the nation (see chapter 7, “Report Suspicious Activity”, Top Secret America, by Dana Priest and William Arkin);
- Created “huge biometric databases – with fingerprints and iris scans – of nearly 100 million people” ( Top Secret America , p. 53);
- As Priest and Arkin have also revealed, the Executive Branch has created “a jaw-dropping 1,074 federal government organizations, and nearly two thousand private companies involved with programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence in at least 17,000 locations across the United States – all top secret. The biggest growth had come within the many agencies and large corporations that had existed before the attacks and had since inflated to historic proportions.” This has amounted to "a parallel top secret government whose parts had mushroomed in less than a decade into a gigantic, sprawling universe of its own, visible only to a carefully vetted cadre, and its entirety, as Pentagon intelligence chief James Clapper admitted, visible only to God." (pp. 52, 86).
Under Mr. Obama, America is still far from being a classic police-state of course. But no President has done more to create the infrastructure for a possible future police-state. This infrastructure will clearly pose a serious danger to democratic ideals should there be more 9/11s, and/or increased domestic unrest due to economic decline and growing inequality, and/or massive global disruption due to climate change, and/or a President with even less scruples than Mr. Obama.
This series stands out most prominently for how it chooses to address the failures of the current presidential administration - from a structural rather than personal standpoint. As Branfman says, the Executive Branch that Obama "nominally heads" is
"the most powerful institution in the history of the world, one that has killed, wounded or made homeless well over 20 million human beings, mostly civilians, since 1962 - far more than any other government in the world."
Whether one believes Obama's heart is filled with anguish, good intentions, malice, elitism, or some combination is irrelevant in this context. The president has far less control over the rest of the institution than many from his most devoted admirers to his most outspoken detractors recognize. Branfman notes that the foreign policy of the executive branch has remained remarkably stable from the Cold War forward, despite the broadly varying approaches that have been attributed to each of the different administrations. Thus, when discussing the "Evil", "Lawlessness", and "Authoritarianism" of the Obama administration, the quality of Obama's character is an unnecessary and unknowable distraction.
The first entry consists of 6 pages, generally focused upon the grossly immoral, self-perpetuating war on terror, followed by 7 pages of quotes from across the spectrum further supporting the central thrust. I will continue adding links to the remaining installments as they are presented.
Please share the original articles. Get as many eyes as possible onto this article. Develop tactics for getting past the particular alliances and dyed-in alleigances that keep so many from hearing these ugly truths. If you can break through to one more person because of this piece, it will be worth your effort.
Part 1: June 9, 2013: America's Most Anti-Democratic Institution: How the Imperial Presidency Threatens U.S. National Security
Part 2: June 26, 2013: World's Most Evil and Lawless Institution? The Executive Branch of the U.S. Government
Part 3:
Part 4:
Comments
Some of his other writing
Fred Branfman has also for a long time been exploring, dealing with feelings regarding, and writing about mortality. In 2005, he wrote the following, which gave me a startling insight into baby boomers, and thus into the generation that continues to define American political culture.
Does this resonate for anyone else?
Yes, this resonates
Cougars, anyone? But I see the source as arising in media culture, which has programmed us to glorify youth and at best tolerate the elderly. As a contrast, Ram Dass tells the story of seeing his teacher in Asia. The teacher beams at him and says by way of congratulation, "You've grown old!"
Wish I could discuss this further. I have to run.
It certainly is sourced in media culture.
Take an entire generation, sprung from parents who want to run from memories of the war and the depression, teach them in school that desks will protect them from nuclear bombs, shower them with all the benefits of empire and hide the costs paid by exploited third world nations, indoctrinate them in the promise of better living through chemistry, impress upon them the notion that consumption is a means of contributing to society, and then park them in front of a cathode-ray babysitter, presenting the impossibly happy fantasy worlds of Mayberry, Leave it to Beaver, and Disney as what "normal" life is like and any discomfort and unhappiness in their own home is an aberration rather than a common feature of life.
The baby boom generation is the first generation that had television from childhood forward. Correlation doesn't imply causation, and television wasn't the only means of spreading propaganda in history, but it seems like more than mere coincidence.
thanks, chipmo...
this is what we need to do, break thru the crap and get people to see the reality.
Yes.
So much crap to fight, and not all of it external. I'll admit that when trying to serve the shifting paradigm, I've enjoyed unleashing some inner id, or whatever the post-Freudian term for that is these days. And I've told myself that I wasn't writing for the person I argued with but with others who might read what I wrote. Maybe I was right. Most likely I don't have the energy to approach it a different way. But eventually, after yelling at the internet for years now, I'm more than ready to state that there is a better way and the satisfaction of yelling has worn thin.
It's orders of magnitude more difficult, of course. One of the problems we face is the perception that all news must include a positive side, a gleam of hope, a way out...because even many who would be our allies believe that "No one is going to support negativity". This is what I loved about the article; it seems to indicate a way to discuss the evils committed by the Obama administration that has buffers built into it to counter Obamabot defensiveness. It blames Obama but blames the entire institution at the same time. I'm excited for the next 2 pieces.
Take a look at this book and the reviews
I haven't read it, but I think I get it. Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. An interesting aspect of her argument is how insistence on postive thinking dovetails with self blame. One sees this dynamic in play from defenders of the status quo and of the administration: "You need to stop being so negative." "You only look at the bad things." As though the war crimes and miitarization will get all better if I would only put on my rose-colored glasses. And "yeah, it's your fault if you get cancer, too," (Ehrenreich's personal starting point).
One of the most important pieces I have read in years
I am referring to the last link in this article. To most Americans, this article will seem like the over-the-top ravings of a person with an agenda. The sad truth is that the situation is more stark and definitive than one would understand simply from reading the essay. There are so many examples left out, and to fully grasp the human suffering inflicted around the world by a few people in the executive branch of the USG, one must dig even deeper into personal stories. Every claim made in the extended argument that the executive branch of the US goverment is the most evil and lawless institution on earth is based on undisputed fact. People can speculate on who is running the show--bildergergs, trilateral commission, CIA etc.--but these are matters that have never been reliably proven. It is possible, however, to know the general shape of things by looking at proven, undisputed data. The article is long, I expect few people in our culture of immediate gratification will take the time to read the entire piece. I wish more would, because understanding takes more than applying one's preonceptions to a general concept--one must steep oneself in information, because understanding requires beiing willing to see long-standing assumptions and dearly held beliefs exposed as grossly inaccurate.
Since reading it a few years ago, I have felt that Harold Pinter's Nobel Lecture was the defining document of our political age. Naturally, as it shone a spotlight on actual US behavior, the hard-hitting speech by the foremost English language playwright was ignored in England and the US, which brings me to question Branfman's assertion that we are not a police state yet. I believe the blanket of media distractions, largely in the hands of those who benefit from lawless behavior by the executive, makes possible the kind of soft control foreseen by Orwell.
Three aspects of that Branfman piece stood out to me: that members of every US administration over the previous decades has undeniably committed war crimes, with the last decade being especially bloody; the level of off-hand cruelty and callous disregard for the suffering of millions; and the fact that so few people in the government even know what is being done in our names with our taxes. These general notons, most especially the second one, cannot be assimilated as a general principle--it requires looking at the specific suffering of specific individuals before multiplying by millions to reach understanding of the magnitude of the crimes.
Here are a couple of excerpts pointing to the level of callousness, the degree of suffering, and the nearly complete degree of impunity:
After describing horrors he had personally witnessed, pregnant women buried alive, children burned to death, fathers responsible for large families blinded and crippled--really, the suffereing cannot be adequately summarized--Branfman writes the following:
Pinter's speech goes farther than anything else in putting these facts into perspective:
John Pilger is another whose eyes were permanently opened by firsthand experience with the unspeakable suffering inflicted on Southeast Asia during the Vietnam era. His speech at Socialism 2009 in San Francisco should be watched in full, because it places our current situation in the same perspective as do Branfman and Pinter. An especially hard-hitting excerpt referring to our current president has received some attention. In it, Pilger refernces to Pinter's apt description:
Make this an article!
The article is certainly long enough and rich enough that it can use multiple people writing about it.
Who is running the show
Though dated, for anyone who is interested in following up, I would suggest checking out the Who Rules America blog at this link .
There is an excellent graphic which illustrates how the various groups, agencies and organizations comprise the power elite and how they are interconnected to form and implement their policies. Their polices could be described most simply as whatever it takes to increase their wealth and power. Ethics and morality, as we can see from examples in the Branfman articles appear to be of little or no concern to them.
The executive is at the center of it and is the face seen by the public. I don't think it is unreasonable to speculate that this is at least one of the reasons our current president is who he is and that he was chosen and groomed for his current role years before he became well known to most of us. He is there to implement the policies of the power elite. His charm has fooled many.
The graphic noted above is copyrighted and so I will not post it at this time. I ran onto it and saved it long ago but I cannot find it at this time. I will continue to look for it and post a link soon. I am sure that it came from the Who Rules site.
Thanks for the link
I briefly perused it and found some fascinating insights; however, I didn't see a reflection of how neoliberalism and thus transnational capitalism has been able to supercede the very nation-centric image of power.
WIlliam Robinson has been developing Leslie Sklair's theory of a Transnational Capitalist Class for at least 15 years now. This paper is huge, but it is INCREDIBLY illuminative.
And this is where our current situation becomes INCREDIBLY grim. The Bush regime itself was made of members who were powerful before taking over the executive branch. Obama and Holder are wholly different. They are lawyers, who understand how to do the bidding of their powerful clients.
There is so much more to be explored here, but let me put this forward: Holder, and Obama presumably when he was part of Business International, is used to helping powerful people get away with murder. It has been his JOB to put aside any conscience he may or may not have and act on behalf of his well-paying clients. And he is now the most prominent lawyer of an executive branch that has reserved for itself the right to spy upon, intimidate, indefinitely detain, torture, and kill any American citizen that it labels terrorist, and just to be a dick, it has made the definition of terrorist so lose that it can include 89 year old Afghani men, 20 year old women who taunt bulldozers from trees, and anybody else it or its clients so choose.
The White House is now a privatized machine of precise corporate suppression and murder, operating not only above the law but above the constitution, and it is open for business to any members of the Transnational Capitalist Class.
This new situation allows for slipperiness with the law.
I've been noticing a lot of examples of this sort of thing recently, and the abiliy to flip flop between world views and their associated definitions trickles all the way down to petty arguments on such sites as dailykos. When it serves TNC, such as by keeping Americans from questioining their government too closely, the TNC can invoke nationalism. Likewise, they can appeal to notions of the world as a community when they want to do things like set up trade agreements. The current agreement being hammered out by Obama's team, I'm sure you know, would allow TNC to claim the right to ignore laws in companies and even sue sovereign states if their laws are enforced. Of course, otoh, these same companies can easily hide behind national tax laws or successfully deploy national laws to suppress and prosecute those who attempt to challenge their hegemony (say, by filming cattle operations). The people do not straddle borders and cannot pretend to be above it. There are so many examples today of this kind of selective application of the law and of reasoning in general in a way that always favors capital and always disempowers the people.
Here's a similar example: Obama can effectively suspend the constitution and international law in order to, among many things, kill people at will and bomb sovereign nations. This does not prevent supporters and woefully ill-informed people from swelling up and declare Snowden unworthy and guilty "because we are a nation of laws." Even many well-meaning people seem unaware of the fact that certainly Bradley Manning and likely Snowden are not guilty of illegality because they were true to their higher obligation to the constitution and to international law. In short, the game is becoming so rigged as to make clarity nearly impossible to achieve. TNC capital operating in a world without borders while the world remains largely organized around borders presents an almost limitless possibility of ignoring laws altogether with few people even noticing.
Marcuse: "It is the token of declining autonomy and comprehension."
Consider this:
National borders are pens in which the cattle can be kept. Some cattle are given the freedom to migrate from one pen to the other, free range cattle if you will, but ultimately only the farmers of the TCC live above the borders, managing their herds like so much industrial livestock.
Never forget the true implications of the term "Human Resources". Few have accepted the truly evil cynicism buried at the heart of that term.
Much appreciated chipmo
I was unaware of Fred Branfman. Thank you for the AlterNet links.
Very early into the Obama presidency I came to realize we had been duped regarding the hope and change meme, although his vote as a senator on the FISA Bill which provided immunity for the telecoms for their "warrantless wiretapping" was a wake-up call.
I am still shocked to realize the magnitude of just how far in the opposite direction we would be taken.
More comes to mind, pure speculation on my part but I'll leave it at this for now.
My realization occurred at nearly the same time
although, in the words that Aaron McGruder used to describe his feelings prior to Obama's first term, I remained "cautiosly pessimistic."
I've since been, just as you, shocked at how far the betrayal has swung. But Branfman helped me remember that to be shocked that Obama didn't change America's foreign policy is to have forgotten the nature of the executive branch and the little freedom that anybody would have, conman or not, to change its direction.
I wasn't at all shocked at any of that.
I was only shocked at how little we got domestically as a trade-off. I really hoped we might get some health care out of the deal. I was quite foolish on that "public option" thing.