The Radical Thought of Martin Luther King, Jr


This article was originally posted on Policymic 01/16/12 with the title "Why Martin Luther King Would Not Get Along With Mitt Romney or Barack Obama"

Today marks the birthday of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Both political parties will likely use the opportunity to try to appropriate the man for their own political agendas. Both liberals and conservatives will try to affiliate themselves with King, but neither are correct. However sanitized his public image is today, King's words are those of a brave and radical man who would be shunned by both of America’s mainstream political parties.

For example, in discussing the strange behavior of American troops supposedly sent to “liberate” Vietnam, King said, “We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops … We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators?” Would this view be at home on the stage of any of the recent Republican primary debates? Does anyone think that the DNC will host any voices asking similar questions about America’s modern day imperialist adventures in the 2012 election?

King famously said of the Vietnamese, “they watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees … So far we may have killed a million of them — mostly children.” What would this man say of our current drone-friendly president, who has ordered the push-button murders of who-knows-how-many foreigners, many (if not most) of them civilians?

King would be firmly against people like GOP candidate Mitt Romney, the draft-dodging protestor of anti-war draft dodgers, when he speaks of the necessity of counseling young men of military age on “our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection.”

It would be easy to go on at length about King’s principled stand against U.S. imperialism (and not just in Vietnam), to provide passage after passage where he abjures the methods of his own government in favor of a policy of compassion and peace. But it is not only foreign policy where King disagrees with the American political consensus.

When it comes to domestic issues, and especially racial policy, King’s stances are in conflict with both the Republican Party – whose stance on racial oppression seems to vary between ‘it is a relic of the past’ and 'white people are the real victims' – and with the tepid liberal non-solution of “tolerance” presented by the Democrats. This is embodied perfectly by King in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail in the person of the “white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;’ who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a ‘more convenient season.’"

King identified the source of racial oppression not as a flaw of bigotry in individual people but in a “system that still oppresses us.” His advice was to organize to obtain the power necessary to fight the entrenched and oppressive systems of racism and empire in this country.

When it came to economics, King committed the cardinal sin of questioning the benevolence and usefulness of the capitalist system, asking, "Why are there forty million poor people in America? … When you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy.” No pundit in America would ever question the idea of private property by asking, "Who owns the oil?" and “Who owns the iron ore?” and "Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two-thirds water?"

Neither did King limit himself to these broader questions of inequality and exploitation. He proposed concrete policies to combat poverty and inequality, including the creation of a national guaranteed income program, which he estimated would cost $20 billion a year, and said “if our nation can spend $35 billion a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam, and twenty billion dollars to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God's children on their own two feet right here on earth.”

King was radical in the truest, most original sense of the word. He understood that problems of oppression cannot be confronted piecemeal but must be solved through a total transformation of society, something he expressed by saying "America, you must be born again!” While most of the political establishment rejects this idea, a radical social transformation is, and has been, the only real path to the country and the world King and people like him wished to live in. The words of Langston Hughes, quoted by King and many others, remain just as relevant today as when they were written:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Hugo Chavez Gives Heating Aid to U.S. Poor Following Obama Budget Cuts

This article was originally posted on Policymic 01/16/12

Many poor Americans in colder climes will doubtless be dismayed to hear that shortly after ringing in the New Year, Congress and the president have decided to cut 25% from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, (LIHEAP) showing once again their preference to default on the needy and vulnerable rather than asking the most powerful and wealthy to make even the smallest sacrifices.

Far more welcome news came from Citgo Petroleum Corporation, a subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, which announced that it would be continuing its six-year-old program of providing heating oil to poor Americans free of charge. The contrast between the values displayed by the American and Venezuelan governments – the “good guys” and “bad guys,” respectively, of the American political consensus – could not be more striking. 

$1.2 billion will be cut from LIHEAP, reducing its budget to $3.47 billion. Thankfully the initial requests of the Obama administration to cut the program’s funding to $2.5 billion were not carried out. In 2011, 8.3 million people were helped by LIHEAP, although there were more people eligible than the program was able to assist. According to the National Energy Assistance Director’s Association (NEADA) 90% of families participating in the program contain at least one “vulnerable” member, defined as the elderly, children, and the disabled.

The cuts come at a time when the cost of heating oil has reached $3.93 a gallon, up 57 cents from last year. This is a 22-year high, according to the Energy Information Administration. The escalating price of heat is especially threatening to people living on a fixed income, including the retired.

Citgo expects to help more than 400,000 Americans this year with a 100-gallon donation of heating oil and said that in addition to providing assistance to private citizens, Citgo would also provide assistance to 250 homeless shelters. 

Venezuela’s generosity towards its northern neighbor began in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina had ravaged the Gulf Coast, when Citgo donated $1 million to disaster relief and President Hugo Chavez offered to send food, water, fuel, and other humanitarian assistance.  Chavez was not taken up on his offer by the U.S. administration.  That same year, in response to a call by 12 U.S. Senators for oil companies and oil producing nations to donate heating oil to help ease the pain of high prices caused by hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Venezuela rose to the occasion once again. Despite criticism from the American government, the program has continued each winter since.

Heating oil is not the only humanitarian assistance promoted by the Chavez government.  Over the last decade, Venezuelan doctors, many of them trained in Cuba, have provided free medical care, including surgeries all around Latin America.  In New York's South Bronx, Citgo has donated millions to support community building organizations, including natural food co-ops, environmentally sound recyling programs, and youth groups.

Indeed, several days before Citgo announced its 2012 assistance program, President Obama criticized Venezuela’s ties to Cuba and Iran, saying "It is up to the Venezuelan people to determine what they gain from a relationship with a country that violates universal human rights and is isolated from much of the rest of the world."  It is to the credit of Venezuela that it continues its relationship with one nation that often finds itself at odds with the rest of the world over human rights – the U.S. itself.  Obama went on to cast aspersions on human rights and democracy in Venezuela – despite the fact that both have been strengthened immensely since the American-friendly two-party oligarchy that ran the country for decades was thrown out in Venezuela’s 1999 elections. No more are hundreds massacred in the streets of Caracas, nor do paramilitary death squads roam Venezuela murdering labor organizers – unlike in neighboring American ally Colombia.

As the U.S. continues to export warfare and empire on the backs of its increasingly-struggling citizenry, and Venezuela exports doctors and free heating, long-held and infrequently-examined assumptions about U.S. benevolence must be questioned. 

Shame on Obama for leaving the most vulnerable Americans in the cold. The poor, retired, and disabled of this country deserve better than that.

NDAA Another Broken Promise by President Barack Obama and an Attack on Civil Liberties


This article originally appeared on Policymic 01/09/12

On the last day of 2011, President Barack Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act(NDAA) for the upcoming year, following the Act’s passage through the Senate (with an 86-13 margin) and House of Representatives (283-136). Passing an NDAA has been an annual act of the government for decades, but included in this year’s NDAA are provisions asserting “the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons … pending disposition under the law of war.” The vague definition provided by the bill for “covered persons” includes supporters of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda or “associated forces,” as well as “any person who has committed a belligerent act.” What constitutes associated forces or belligerent acts, though, is left to the president to determine. In addition, the bill also authorizes “enhanced interrogation techniques,” i.e., torture.

Obama’s handling of the NDAA has been nothing but deception and broken promises. 

First, the president pledged to veto the NDAA, should it reach his desk. He did not. He signed it, and in doing so broke his campaign promises to end the use of torture and roll back Bush-era curtailments of civil liberties. The NDAA also includes provisions which make it even more difficult to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp – another broken promise for Obama. Additionally, despite pledging, “I will not use signing statements to nullify or undermine congressional instructions as enacted into law” during his time as Senator, he did exactly that. 

The signing statement itself includes language expressing Obama’s “serious reservations” about the bill, including a promise “not to authorize the indefinite detention without trial of American citizens.” However, this promise is nothing but a cruel joke in light of Senator Carl Levin’s (D-Mich.) disclosure of the fact that the Obama administration expressly asked language preventing American citizens from being subject to indefinite detention without trial to be removed from the final bill. 

One of the few provisions of the bill that the administration seems to really object to is section 1029, which requires the Attorney General to confer with the Pentagon before filing criminal charges against suspected terrorists. Obama’s signing statement claims that this section limits flexibility, and states the administration’s intention to ignore it.

It is unsurprising that Obama signed the NDAA, despite his declared intent to veto it. After all, it was not so long ago that the President signed off on the extra-judicial assassination of American citizen Anwar al-Alwaki before announcing that fact to the world, following up that assassination with the killing of Alwaki’s 16-year old son. To go from assassination to imprisonment is hardly that large a step.

Indefinite detention without trial is, of course, not a new policy for the U.S., as the involuntary residents of Guantanamo Bay could tell you. Nor is torture or summary execution. What is sinister about the turn that America has taken in the last decade is that these actions are no longer denied. They are no longer reviled as being barbaric, or “the method of the enemy.” Instead they are justified in the name of security and safety.

Obama has the dishonor of being the man to sign those abhorrent practices into law. He will not be remembered fondly.

Re: Comments on "Kazakhstan, Libya, and the Double Standards of Western 'Humanitarian' Intervention"


This article was originally posted on Policymic on 01/05/12 with the title "Kazakhstan Shows Western Human Rights Interventions Remain Hypocritical"

Recently, I published an article on PolicyMic entitled "Kazakhstan, Libya, and the Double Standards of Western 'Humanitarian' Intervention." It argued that it was hypocritical of the West to use human rights as a reason to intervene in other countries when it is so clearly dismissive of those rights elsewhere in the world. Comments on the piece were largely critical, and as the different commentators mostly raised the same points, I’ve decided to address them together rather than piece-meal in the comments section of the original article.  

The first point raised was “Kazakhstan is much more remote than Libya, and borders Russia, so how can you expect a humanitarian intervention to take place there?”

This is a reasonable question and I can’t say that it never crossed my mind while I was writing the article. However, in response, I would ask readers to take a moment to imagine if Kazakhstan’s recent crimes had taken place 25 or 30 years ago, when Kazakhstan was still a part of the Soviet Union. Intervention, for the reasons mentioned in the comments on my article (and others besides), would still be impossible. However the Western response would likely not be to shrug and gently chide Kazakhstan, as happened last month. The massacre would be publicized as evidence of the immutable Stalinist evil of the Soviet Union, a reason to break off détente, another argument for the boycott of the Moscow Olympics. It would, at the very least, see far more publicity than Kazakhstan has. 

The West, even if it were mostly powerless to affect conditions in Soviet Kazakhstan, would protest vehemently. However, it would do this at the same time it was supporting the repressive regimes of Pakistan, Indonesia, Chile, and Egypt, among many others. It would do this at the same time it funded the Contra death squads of Central America and the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. I would think that the hypocrisy in this position is obvious.  

The second criticism raised was that “It is impossible for the West to intervene everywhere all the time, so you should be thankful that they manage to take action when they can.” 

The problem with this argument is that it presupposes several things, first that the West cares about human rights at all, which is sadly not borne out by the record. If human rights were a concern, immeasurable good could be accomplished easily, not through intervention, but merely by ending the support given by the West to dictators around the world. 

However this is politically impossible. The West fears democracy in the third world, since it often leads to people like Hugo Chavez being elected, leaders who have the temerity to announce that the wealth of their countries will be used to help the people of that country, rather than funneled out of the country by foreign banks and other corporations. 

So in practice, the West supports dictators and sponsors coups as a safeguard against this sort of popular democracy. This is obvious if we look at the history of Iran, where a democratically elected leader was deposed after attempting to nationalize foreign oil companies, or if we look at what happened to Allende in Chile, or Arbenz in Guatemala or many, many others, from Pakistan to Guiana.

Secondly, when the West does intervene directly, when it eschews the use of local allies like Pinochet, Suharto, or the Shah, its actions are hardly better than those of its proxies. In the name of humanitarian intervention, the West imposes collective punishment on the civilian population of enemy states. We have seen this in Serbia, Iraq, and recently in Libya. Claims of humanitarian motivation are somewhat undercut by a strategy of war that seems to focus on destroying power plants, sewage treatment centers, and factories. In addition to the methods of Western intervention, even the weapons used sharply undermine any claims of benevolence. In Iraq, subject to nearly two decades of bombardment by the United States, the use of depleted uranium weapons is likely behind the considerable increase in cancers and birth defects found among Iraqis.

My article was not intended to be a feasibility study on regime change in Kazakhstan, it was intended to show the hypocrisy of governments that claim human rights as a priority and as a mandate for intervention in other states while they support egregious violations of human rights elsewhere in the world.

Kazakhstan, Libya, and the Double Standards of Western "Humanitarian" Intervention

This article was originally posted on Policymic 12/30/11

In the past two weeks, an uprising and strikeby workers in Kazakhstan's profitable oil industry has been violently suppressed by the police forces of the country's dictatorial President Nursultan Nazarbayev. The Kazakh government claims that 15 people died, while protestors say the number has reached at least 70. Hundreds more have been injured and arrested.

If this is surprising news to you, don't be embarrassed. The events in Kazakhstan have received relatively little coverage in Western media. No one is calling for an intervention to protect the Kazakh protestors. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has not written on the need to bomb Astana into rubble. This disinterest stands in stark contrast to the barrage of pro-war media that was produced in the run-up to the NATO intervention in Libya.

The reason for that inconsistency is not clear, but examination of when and where the West has intervened (or not intervened) provides the answer: Interventions take place when they will further Western economic and strategic interests, not for altruistic reasons, and the claims of the West that their interventions are "humanitarian" in nature are grotesque hypocrisy.

So what were the interests that brought NATO into Libya but have earned only calls for calm and restraint in Kazakhstan? In a word, oil. Libya and Kazakhstan both have it, but Libya, despite some opening and liberalization in recent years, still placed restraints on foreign companies that were deemed onerous by Washington. The State Department's Investment Climate Statement for 2010 on Libya noted that it "requires that at least 35% of non-Libyan businesses be controlled by Libyan individuals or companies" and complained of Libyan laws that ordered foreign oil companies working in Libya to hire Libyan Branch Managers and Finance Managers, among other things. Similarly, Wikileaks highlighted American concern over the Libyan government's "resource nationalism.”

The oil wealth of Libya was, by and large, kept in Libya. Some of it disappeared into the pockets of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and his cronies, but a good deal of it was invested in public works projects, infrastructure, and social services, with the result that Libya was one of themost developed countries in Africa and the Middle East, with social indicators like literacy, nutrition, and life expectancy considerably higher than its neighbors. It is also worth noting that much of the assets of the Libyan state will probably be privatized and sold to foreign investors now that NATO has won.

Kazakhstan, on the other hand, has encouraged foreign investment (not to mention that it has also played host to American military bases) and received praise and support for its efforts. The previous American administration considered it an important strategic ally. As recently as two months before long simmering unrest exploded into conflict on the 16th of this month,Forbes magazine was exulting that increased development of Kazakhstan's oil fields was driving up the price of shares in Chevron.

The coverage of the crises and dissent both regimes have experienced has also been markedly different. During the Libyan uprising, it was reported by sources as different as the New York Times, BBC, and Al-Jazeera that the pro-Gaddafi forces had, variously, used aircraft or heavy machine guns against crowds of protestors, been equipped with Viagra pills to facilitate the use of repeated rapes as a weapon against rebel towns, and hired African mercenaries to repress the rebels. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch did not find any evidence to support these claims. Concerns over the Nazarbayev government's long history of abuses and repression — including torture — by human rights groups have been largely ignored by the media and government. The violence, repression, and murder inflicted upon the protesting workers during their months-long strike by the police before the uprising has been absent from the coverage of the past two weeks. The New York Times in particular has printed more quotes from regime figures than from protestors, and, except for the occasional comment on the dictatorial nature of the Kazakh government, has largely left out the historical context of the uprising and of Kazakhstan in general.

This is by no means an isolated or unique example. The history of Egypt, Yugoslavia, Indonesia, Chile, and many other countries testifies to the moral flexibility of the West when it comes to dealing with and supporting human rights abusers. While each instance has its own sordid history, the thread that runs through them all is this: Economic expediency, not human rights, is the guiding factor in the West's foreign policy. The next time we hear the drum of humanitarian war sounded, we might do worse than to think back on the track record of the interventionists.

I'll be posting my old articles first, in the order they were written, just to collect all my stuff into one place.