December 2006 (98)

Olbermann: Bush s strategy fails because it depends on his credibility.
Only this president, only in this time, only with this dangerous, even messianic certitude, could answer a country demanding an exit strategy from Iraq, by offering an entrance strategy for Iran.
Only this president could look out over a vista of 3,008 dead and 22,834 wounded in Iraq, and finally say, Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me - only to follow that by proposing to repeat the identical mistake .

.. in Iran.

Only this president could extol the thoughtful recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, and then take its most far-sighted recommendation - engage Syria and Iran - and transform it into threaten Syria and Iran - when al-Qaida would like nothing better than for us to threaten Syria, and when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would like nothing better than to be threatened by us.
This is diplomacy by skimming; it is internationalism by drawing pictures of Superman in the margins of the text books; it is a presidency of Cliff Notes.
And to Iran and Syria - and, yes, also to the insurgents in Iraq - we must look like a country run by the equivalent of the drunken pest who gets battered to the floor of the saloon by one punch, then staggers to his feet, and shouts at the other guy s friends, Ok, which one of you is next?

Mr. Bush, the question is no longer What are you thinking? but rather Are you thinking at all?

I have made it clear to the prime minister and Iraq s other leaders that America s commitment is not open-ended, you said last night.
And yet - without any authorization from the public, which spoke so loudly and clearly to you in November s elections - without any consultation with Congress (in which key members of your own party, including Senators Sam Brownback, Norm Coleman and Chuck Hagel, are fleeing for higher ground) - without any awareness that you are doing exactly the opposite of what Baker-Hamilton urged you to do - you seem to be ready to make an open-ended commitment (on America s behalf) to do whatever you want, in Iran.
Our military, Mr.

Bush, is already stretched so thin by this bogus adventure in Iraq that even a majority of serving personnel are willing to tell pollsters that they are dissatisfied with your prosecution of the war.
It is so weary that many of the troops you have just consigned to Iraq will be on their second tours or their third tours or their fourth tours - and now you re going to make them take on Iran and Syria as well?
Who is left to go and fight, sir?

Who are you going to send to interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria?
The line is from the movie Chinatown and I quote it often: Middle of a drought, the mortician chuckles, and the water commissioner drowns. Only in L.

A.!
Middle of a debate over the lives and deaths of another 21,500 of our citizens in Iraq, and the president wants to saddle up against Iran and Syria.

Maybe that s the point - to shift the attention away from just how absurd and childish this latest war strategy is (strategy, that is, for the war already under way, and not the one on deck).
We are going to put 17,500 more troops into Baghdad and 4,000 more into Anbar Province to give the Iraqi government breathing space.
In and of itself that is an awful and insulting term.

The lives of 21,500 more Americans endangered, to give breathing space to a government that just turned the first and perhaps the most sober act of any democracy - the capital punishment of an ousted dictator - into a vengeance lynching so barbaric and so lacking in the solemnities necessary for credible authority, that it might have offended the Ku Klux Klan of the 19th century.
And what will our men and women in Iraq do?
The ones who will truly live - and die - during what Mr.

Bush said last night will be a year ahead that will demand more patience, sacrifice, and resolve?
They will try to seal Sadr City and other parts of Baghdad where the civil war is worst.
Mr.

Bush did not mention that while our people are trying to do that, the factions in the civil war will no longer have to focus on killing each other, but rather they can focus anew on killing our people.
Because last night the president foolishly all but announced that we will be sending these 21,500 poor souls, but no more after that, and if the whole thing fizzles out, we re going home.
Most importantly, perhaps, Mr.

Bush, the plan fails because it still depends on your credibility.
You speak of mistakes and of the responsibility resting with you.
But you do not admit to making those mistakes.

And you offer us nothing to justify this clenched fist toward Iran and Syria.
In fact, when you briefed news correspondents off-the-record before the speech, they were told, once again, if you knew what we knew hellip; if you saw what we saw hellip;
If you knew what we knew was how we got into this morass in Iraq in the first place.
The problem arose when it turned out that the question wasn t whether we knew what you knew, but whether you knew what you knew.

You, sir, have become the president who cried wolf.
All that you say about Iraq now could be gospel.
All that you say about Iran and Syria now could be prescient and essential.

We no longer have a clue, sir.
Many of us are as inclined to believe you just shuffled the director of national intelligence over to the State Department because he thought you were wrong about Iran.
Many of us are as inclined to believe you just put a pilot in charge of ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because he would be truly useful in an air war next door in Iran.

Your assurances, sir, and your demands that we trust you, have lost all shape and texture.
They are now merely fertilizer for conspiracy theories.
The pile has been built slowly and with seeming care.

I read this list last night, before the president s speech, and it bears repeating because its shape and texture are perceptible only in such a context.
Before Mr. Bush was elected, he said nation-building was wrong for America.

He said he would never put U.S. troops under foreign control.

Last night he promised to embed them in Iraqi units.
Because of Osama bin Laden. Al-Qaida.

Terrorism in general.
To liberate Iraq. To spread freedom.

To spread Democracy. To prevent terrorism by gas price increases.
Because this was a guy who tried to kill his dad.

Because - 439 words in to the speech last night, he trotted out 9/11 again.
In advocating and prosecuting this war he passed on a chance to get Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
To get Muqtada al-Sadr.

To get Bin Laden.
He sent in fewer troops than the generals told him to. He ordered the Iraqi army disbanded and the Iraqi government de-Baathified.

He short-changed Iraqi training. He neglected to plan for widespread looting. He did not anticipate sectarian violence.

He sent in troops without life-saving equipment. He gave jobs to foreign contractors, and not Iraqis. He staffed U.

S. positions there, based on partisanship, not professionalism.
He and his government told us: America had prevailed, mission accomplished, the resistance was in its last throes.

He has insisted more troops were not necessary. He has now insisted more troops are necessary.
He has insisted it s up to the generals, and then removed some of the generals who said more troops would not be necessary.

The fall of Baghdad, the death of Uday and Qusay, the capture of Saddam. A provisional government, a charter, a constitution, the trial of Saddam. Elections, purple fingers, another government, the death of Saddam.

As they stood up, we would stand down. We would stay the course; we were never about stay the course.
We would never have to go door-to-door in Baghdad.

And, last night, that to gain Iraqis trust, we would go door-to-door in Baghdad.
He told us the enemy was al-Qaida, foreign fighters, terrorists, Baathists, and now Iran and Syria.
He told us the war would pay for itself.

It would cost $1.7 billion. $100 billion.

$400 billion. Half a trillion. Last night s speech alone cost another $6 billion.

And after all of that, now it is his credibility versus that of generals, diplomats, allies, Democrats, Republicans, the Iraq Study Group, past presidents, voters last November and the majority of the American people.
Oh, and one more to add, tonight: Oceania has always been at war with East Asia.
You have lost the military.

You have lost the Congress to the Democrats. You have lost most of the Iraqis. You have lost many of the Republicans.

You have lost our allies.
You are losing the credibility, not just of your presidency, but more importantly of the office itself.
And most imperatively, you are guaranteeing that more American troops will be losing their lives, and more families their loved ones.

You are guaranteeing it!
This becomes your legacy, sir: How many of those you addressed last night as your fellow citizens you just sent to their deaths.
So the next president has to pull the survivors out of Iraq instead of you?

It rsquo;s winter in the United States, and in most places seasonably cold. Perspiration on the brow of Miss Liberty in New York City at 70 degrees last week reminds us that global warming is in our faces, deceptively so, as Big Apple residents gleefully cavorted in Central Park wearing shorts and smugly quipping that the East Coast was somehow cheating Old Man Winter out of his annual freeze-fest.
The Boy Emperor is escalating the war in Iraq in the name of ending it, just as his predecessors of the sixties and seventies told us that the U.

S. was ldquo;winning the war in Southeast Asia rdquo; and that they ldquo;had a plan rdquo; for victory. Consciously or not, most Americans are weary of war, and even more exhausted economically as rosy financial page forecasts do not compute with the moment-to-moment realities in middle-class households.

Hollywood is mirroring the despair with films like ldquo;Children Of Men rdquo;, ldquo;Blood Diamond rdquo;, and ldquo;The Good Shepherd rdquo;. The winter of our ennui is dark, cloudy, and cold.
I have often warned against the soporific of hope, with no apologies to Barack Obama for his best-selling THE AUDACITY OF HOPE.

In my 2005 article ldquo; rdquo;, I invited readers to abandon the notion of hope which fosters denial and connotes unwarranted optimism, and create instead, myriad options for navigating the daunting challenges of climate chaos, energy depletion, and global economic meltdown. ldquo;Hope rdquo; tends to infantilize us, pointing to somewhere down the road in a feel-good, never-never land of possibility contingent on someone or something besides one rsquo;s own efforts, whereas ldquo;options rdquo; are the adult stuff of the here and now, demanding that we cease relying primarily on the other and attend contemplatively to authentic choices in the moment and beyond.
That being said, I look around in the midst of this particularly gray January and continue to notice the vibrant, intelligent, humane, courageous, and indeed revolutionary choices being made by people in warmer climates to the south.

The most colorful and iconoclastic, a guy named Hugo, not only proclaims that the government of the United States is being run by a dry-drunk named ldquo;The Devil rdquo;, but at home, has all but silenced what little opposition remains toward his particular version of the Bolivarian Revolution, and is one neighborhood at a time.
But not all Latin American leaders share Hugo rsquo;s flare for the dramatic. Much less is heard of Morales, Lula, Correa, Bachelet, or Ortega.

In the first place, most Americans can scarcely locate Venezuela on a map let alone the other nations allying with its president in re-making the Central and South America. Furthermore, little attention is paid to the complexity and profundity of their policies. ldquo;The Pink Tide, rdquo; as mainstream media obtusely names it, implying bandwagon socialist group-think, is unequivocally momentous mdash;historically, politically, economically, and morally.

Unlike Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, and Nicaragua are not transforming their societies with petrodollars, but through wealth re-distribution and by breaking the economic stranglehold that the United States has held on their nations through the ldquo;credit cartels rdquo; of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Are their policies impeccable? Of course not.

Nor have they rid their nations of the last vestiges of corporate capitalism and its piratization of resources. As Mark Weisbrot notes in his article
Of course, all of these governments are still a long way from coming up with a sustainable, long-term development strategy. This is not necessarily because they don rsquo;t want one, but mainly because ndash; after decades of corrupt rule, as well as the deliberate shrinking of the state rsquo;s capacity for economic regulation and decision-making ndash; they simply don rsquo;t have the administrative capacity to even make such plans, much less implement them.

Foreign Affairs [the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations] has run three articles since the beginning of the year warning of the dangers of Latin America rsquo;s left-populist drift, as well as sorry state of U.S.-Latin American relations.

The news reports, editorials, and op-ed pages of America rsquo;s major newspapers mostly carry the same themes.
If one hears at all about events in Latin America, they will most likely be framed by mainstream media in terms of the ldquo;good left rdquo; and ldquo;bad left rdquo;, depending on how vocal leftist movements in those countries have been in their opposition to the United States, how ldquo;market-friendly rdquo; they are, or how socialist their orientation is. In any event, we know that the Bush administration is very worried about the re-making of Latin America.

And rightfully so--not only will the crumbling of the credit cartel exacerbate, but also the glaring contrast between electoral democracy as it is taking form in Latin America and the extinction of privacy, civil liberties, and clean elections in the U.S. Indeed, the Imperial Bully has much to fear from nations whose past enslavement it engineered, whose torture mechanisms it blessed then turned a blind eye to, whose painstaking grassroots transformation of neighborhoods and communities the Bully capriciously labels ldquo;socialist rdquo; or ldquo;leftist rdquo; as its peoples demonstrate with their lives and love that cooperation and re-localization are more powerful than corporate capitalism ever has been or will be.

The great hope of Latin America-and what it has to offer to the world-is a vast collection of vibrant social movements that dare to question everything from their own governments to the way corporations pollute their lands. Sometimes they express themselves in the polls, sometimes they don t. Sometimes they call themselves the left, and sometimes they call themselves the people or nothing at all.

Labels don t matter. What matters is the search for new ways of governing that reduce the inequality, increase real democracy, and end the hunger and poverty.
Call it pink, red, blue, purple, or chartreuse: to get anywhere, social movements will have to display all these colors and more.

Whatever its hue though, the tide in Latin America seems to be rising.
I know little of what the world will actually be like in ten years. Miss Liberty will probably be sweating year-round; the American middle class is likely to be twice as squeezed as it is today, and the blood spilled for oil may have filled the oceans.

Geopolitics is a crap shoot played by madmen. Climate chaos, wars for resources, the status of the dollar, global pandemics mdash;all are terrifying realities of the not-so distant future. Yet on this bleak January day, I feel the warm breezes of the south blowing across the Empire, and while they may not save the world from itself, a glow of glee fills my chest when I remember that they are a force with which the Bully must reckon.

* U.S. policy on Venezuela likely to harden after Negroponte rsquo;s confirmed
* In Honduras, Negroponte was more a conspirator than a benign diplomat
* As second in command at the Department of State, Negroponte will be the de facto supreme arbiter of Latin American policy directives under Rice, who is known for her inattention to the region

President Bush rsquo;s nomination of current director of National Intelligence John Negroponte for the position of deputy secretary of state brings bad news for Latin America.

If proven, the allegations of Negroponte rsquo;s sordid involvement in the Central American ldquo;dirty wars rdquo; of the 1980s should fundamentally disqualify him for any job in public service; at the very least, his nomination requires a serious inquiry into the deep stains on his record. There is compelling evidence that Negroponte routinely covers up his complicity in a variety of questionable entanglements, including being aware of, if not helping to guide and facilitate funding for, a Honduran military death squad in 1983 while serving as U.S.

ambassador in Tegucigalpa. With a newly elected U.S.

Congress that has been given a mandate to fix the country rsquo;s profoundly troubled foreign policy, now is the time for this country rsquo;s policymakers, particularly the new Democratic majority, to call into question yet another of Bush rsquo;s egregious foreign policy errors-in-the-making.
Considering Bush rsquo;s ldquo;with us or against us rdquo; doctrine which was richly applied to the southern nations during the reign of such hard-right State Department figures as Otto Reich and Roger Noriega, it is not surprising that the White House has continuously elevated very controversial figures ndash; like former UN ambassador John Bolton ndash; to prominent positions in the administration. But even today, with a new Democratic congress committed to reforming an increasingly unpopular foreign policy, the White House does not appear to be changing its tack.

President Bush continues to promote controversial advocates of the Reagan Cold War strategy, as in the case of Robert Gates (the Iran-Contra scandal-implicated former deputy director of the CIA), who was recently made Secretary of Defense following the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld. Like Negroponte when asked about the details of his Honduran service, Gates consistently displayed memory loss when it came to his familiarity with a roster of illegal and black box initiatives during that period.
The nomination of John Negroponte is a brazen move that displays a lack of sensitivity to the damage he has done to the United States rsquo; image abroad and the creation of democratic initiatives in the Americas.

It is an especially poor choice because it is made at a time when U.S.-Latin American relations have hit an all-time low.

Since the war in Iraq began, Latin America has fallen from Washington rsquo;s attention. What few initiatives were directed at the region tended to be purely ideological in nature or Cuba-related. If U.

S. policy toward the region is to take a constructive path, it must be under the guidance of an authentic democrat. Under this definition, Negroponte is a poor candidate for the task.

The U.S. needs a proactive diplomat with both knowledge of the region ndash; which Negroponte certainly has ndash; and a constructive engagement-based plan ndash; which isn rsquo;t likely given his history.

Negroponte rsquo;s imminent confirmation brings with it the strong possibility that the U.S. might move from its current status of protracted neglect to a preoccupation with making up for lost ground in its regional standing that would take on Venezuela as well as some of the less militant ldquo;Pink Tide rdquo; nations with their left-leaning, reform-minded goals.

It is possible, that in response to recent elections that have once again elevated regimes intent on pursuing their own political paths, the State Department under Negroponte will redouble its efforts to revive its ideologically-dominated Latin American policy of previous Republican presidencies. While Negroponte rsquo;s portfolio will not specifically underline Latin America, he will, if he follows the practice of his predecessor, Richard Armitage, dabble in any area of his choice. Since he held two ambassadorships in Latin America, and given Secretary Rice rsquo;s famous indifference to the region, his influence over hemispheric issues is likely to be considerable, particularly when it comes to dealing with Venezuela with a big stick.

There is strong evidence that from 1981 to 1985, John Negroponte used his role as U.S. ambassador to Honduras to cover up human rights abuses conducted by a military-sponsored death squad responsible for the murder of almost 200 opponents of Honduran cooperation with the Reagan administration-sponsored covert war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua.

Negroponte was appointed ambassador to Honduras at a time when the Honduran government already had become a base of operations and a safe haven for Contra fighters. He attempted to derail the Contadora peace process, which he insisted would endanger the ldquo;special project rdquo; of providing arms to anti-Sandinista rebels operating out of Honduras. The U.

S. position on the peace process unquestionably led to the prolonging of the Central American wars. Even more disturbing is the complete lack of reporting by the U.

S. embassy on the human rights abuses that were carried out by the Honduran military at the time. It is unlikely that the abuses simply weren rsquo;t noticed by the embassy.

The previous U.S. ambassador, Carter-appointed Jack Binns, spoke out against the State Department rsquo;s disregard for the human rights abuses that were occurring.

Binns warned U.S. officials of the abuses being perpetrated by Honduran military leaders, such as the militantly anti-Communist commander of the country rsquo;s armed forces, General Gustavo Alvarez.

Not surprisingly, the Reagan administration promptly replaced Binns with the more reliable Negroponte.
Negroponte would later extol Alvarez as being a reliable source of information and a model democrat. In correspondence released through the Freedom of Information Act, Negroponte described the General rsquo;s ldquo;commitment to democracy rdquo; despite strong evidence of his leading role in human rights abuses alleged by a number of Honduran human rights groups and civic leaders.

Despite Negroponte rsquo;s close working relationship with Alvarez, he later denied any knowledge of ldquo;death squad-type activities rdquo; perpetrated by Alvarez rsquo;s Battalion 316 at his 1989 Senate confirmation hearing for his nomination as ambassador to Mexico, ignoring the strong evidence of its primary role in carrying out such misdeeds which was documented in a comprehensive investigation by the Baltimore Sun. Alvarez did not end up well. After fleeing to California with purportedly over a million dollars in bribe payouts, he later returned to Honduras, where he was murdered, reportedly for not sharing his U.

S.-supplied booty with his fellow commanders.
Following the Iran-Contra scandal, Negroponte rsquo;s meteoric rise to the upper echelons of power within the State Department continued uninhibited.

After serving as ambassador to Mexico and the Philippines, Negroponte was nominated as the ambassador to the United Nations in February 2001. As expected, there was an uproar among human rights activists over what transpired in Honduras. During his confirmation hearings, congressional Democrats requested an investigation of his past record.

Senator Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat who has been opposing the shortcomings of Washington rsquo;s Latin American policy since the early 1980s, took the lead in challenging Negroponte rsquo;s qualifications. During the nomination process, several accused death squad members who had been living in North America were abruptly deported. Some have suggested that this was a political move to deprive the Senate Foreign Relations Committee of potentially valuable, if embarrassing, sources of testimony against Negroponte.

There were many doubts over the prospects that he would be awarded the UN seat, given the disturbing questions about Negroponte rsquo;s past and his ability to serve as a highly scrupled representative of the U.S. to the world body.

Dodd insisted that Negroponte had refused to admit that the U.S. had ldquo;shad[ed] the truth about the extent and nature of ongoing human rights abuses in the 1980s, rdquo; and that many of the allegations of abuses in Honduras during Negroponte rsquo;s tenure had later been validated by proceedings heard before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and in other venues.

In spite of repeated reiterations that he had no memory of human rights abuses and other acts of selective amnesia which had become a hallmark of the way that Negroponte handled such inquiries, Dodd called for additional documentation of the charges being leveled against Negroponte. But it was here that Negroponte benefited from the unfortunate occurrence of September 11. In an expectedly acquiescent political move by the Committee, which was determined to display solidarity, his nomination was approved only days after the attacks.

Dodds said that he did not want to ldquo;stand in the way rdquo; of the nomination of a UN ambassador at such a critical juncture in the nation rsquo;s history.
In 2004, Bush once again turned to Negroponte when he appointed him as ambassador to Iraq. In the atmosphere of ebullient patriotism that followed September 11 and the invasion of Iraq, the confirmation proceeded without any significant objections.

The same was the case in 2005, when Negroponte was confirmed as the first director of national intelligence by a vote of 98 to 2. Now, however, the Democrats have won a majority in both the House and the Senate for the first time in over a decade. This was mainly due to the widespread discontent with George W.

Bush rsquo;s foreign policy. This means that the Democrats have the opportunity to push a platform of reform and renewal of this country rsquo;s Latin American agenda as a part of their overall revitalization of Washington rsquo;s image abroad. With Negroponte rsquo;s nomination as deputy secretary of state, the new Congressional leadership must firmly assert itself by finally turning a critical eye on U.

S. past foreign policy with John Negroponte rsquo;s actions in Honduras in the 1980s being a prime candidate for close examination.

A very strong case exists that Negroponte committed any number of grave sins of omission and commission which, in effect, converted his embassy in Honduras into a murky and blotched post.

During the years of the Reagan administration rsquo;s war against leftist governments and movements throughout Central America, U.S. diplomats often overlooked the operation of, and in many cases helped to facilitate, violent anti-leftist factions.

If the United States intends to promote democracy abroad, it is crucial that its second highest-ranking diplomat not be guilty of effectively allowing human rights abuses to continue to go ignored in the name of U.S. national interest, and that his nomination not be easily confirmed in the name of cordiality.

John Negroponte has been charged with serious crimes, and they must be examined.
Without a doubt, George W. Bush is a lame duck with an even lamer foreign policy.

We may well call from our own cells ldquo;Dead man walking! rdquo; Yet, just as the late Saddam Hussein, Bush remainspublicly defiant, the model of a patriotic strongman in a time of national calamity.
As with the late Saddam Hussein, the national calamity Bush addresses -- our Middle East militarism -- is entirely of his own making.

As with the late Saddam Hussein, Bush fancies himself a strategic genius with an under-appreciated political vision. As with the late Saddam Hussein, the number of his devotees has long dwindled, with those remaining faithful tending to do so for tradition rather than principle.
In the fifty states, we grieve our more than three thousand dead American troops, our 400 or so dead American contractors, and our 50,000 physically and psychologically scarred Americans.

Occupied Iraq surely grieves its 650,000 dead Iraqis, its millions of wounded, its 25 to 40%unemployment rate, its lost oil revenues. It is abundantly clear that these Iraqi deaths and economic crimes are not the result of Saddam Hussein rsquo;s leadership. This fact is not missed by either average Americans or Iraqis.

We can certainly understand why our pimped out and bitch-slapped Iraqi Prime minister Nouri Maliki wants to quit. We wonder at the barely suppressed rage of George H.W.

Bush and his team as their compromise path to save the presidency for Jeb -- if not salvage what rsquo;s left of the U.S. Army -- is tasted and then quickly spat out by baby Bush.

We are amazed that the tinpot politics of the strutter-in-chief and his replacement of occupation-hardened Army leaders in Iraq by uniformed apparatchiks who promise more genuflecting death and destruction for the glory of the king.
Americans, through elections, polling, activism, lawsuits and personal sacrifice, have shifted their opinion of the war in Iraq, and now overwhelmingly reject the Bush Middle East militarism. At this point, even if we could agree that the goal was really permanent bases in the heart of the Middle East, a regional Sunni political implosion, shattered Iraqi society, and escalated economic and military aggression towards Israel rsquo;s arch enemy and China rsquo;s future energy provider -- we would still sadly have to agree that it didn rsquo;t work out, and it has been neither lawful, successful nor worth the cost.

Even cheerleading neoconservatives simper that the ldquo;war rdquo; wasn rsquo;t conducted properly, with enough commitment, or appropriate enthusiasm. For them, the applicable maxim isn rsquo;t ldquo;pride goeth before a fall, rdquo; but the New Testament parable of the tares and the wheat. They see the field, after all their hard work, contaminated by weeds, made ugly, unprofitable, even embarrassing.

They say, ldquo;An enemy hath done this, rdquo; unable to recognize their own handiwork.
Yet, the dead men continue to walk. Bush rsquo;s New strategy for Iraq will be unveiled soon, and will almost certainly include more dead men and women on all sides.

In Bush rsquo;s final two lame duck years, in spite of a somewhat resistant Congress and an angry American public, he will be able to achieve at least as many dead Americans in Iraq as he has since 2003. We haven rsquo;t even mentioned dead Americans in the Afghan front against Iran, or the utter catastrophe that is post-invasion Afghanistan. Bush is lame indeed, but in a very real way, he will manage to continue the mayhem in the Middle East through inertia, if not by design.

The challenge is to shift the dynamic here at home, in our own prisonhouse of misplaced faith in government, our own illusions of goodness where instead there is only the now-metasticized military-industrial-congressional complex described by President Dwight D. Eisenhower nearly fifty years ago. Three generations since then, and maybe more, have disregarded, or perhaps never understood what we were paying for, in treasure and in constitutional principle.

To imagine freedom from our current foreign policy imbroglio, we step into dangerous territory. It is estimated that 60 million American voters have a financial stake in the military-industrialcomplex, not counting those who invest in the many American companies that rely on militarism abroad and at home to provide shareholder dividends. As we contemplate a draft, we forget that we really and truly don rsquo;t need one.

Undereducated and underemployed young people may complain, but they don rsquo;t really count. Increasingly, college students are willing to take any paying job, including one offered in the name of ldquo;service rdquo; and patriotism. Their parents and grandparents will accept the draft as well, in the name of that societal restructure that Eisenhower warned against, and has now become the norm.

Thus, the dead man walking is not just our increasingly confused and cartoonish Mr. Bush. We see dead men walking in the discredited Republican party, once valued for both fiscal restraint and political seriousness.

We find them in the United States Army, and in nearly every office of the E-ring of the Pentagon. We see dead men walking as we watch the young men and women who have been sent to the Middle East to spread ldquo;democracy rdquo; at the point of the gun, tooccupy in a land that will never accept our occupation, and doesn rsquo;t need it. Finally, here at home, many Americans who otherwise would stand up and act to reject their government instead cower.

Because for all of our understanding of the farce, and our recognition of the cure -- leaving Iraq immediately -- too many Americans live paycheck to paycheck, burdened bypersonal and national debt -- to the tune of $440,000 for every American household. At least 60 million of us truly believe we need that Department of Defense paycheck, that military contract, that service-sector job that sucks greedily at the military-industrial teat.
Thus, Americans of all parties seem to be nastily cheering George W.

Bush as he marches into the valley of the shadow of death, fearing no evil and intending even more murder, more destruction, more breaking of banks and breaking of hearts. Better him than us, we mutter. But we are all dead men walking.

A couple of weeks back, out in Omaha, I happened to share a ride to the airport with a pair of United pilots. Both were classics of the type mdash;trim, square-jawed, silver-haired, twangy-voiced white men, one wearing a leather jacket. Sam Shepard or Paul Newman could rsquo;ve played them.

They spent the entire trip sputtering and whining mdash;about being baited and switched when their employee ownership of the airline had been evaporated by its bankruptcy, about the default of their pension plan, about their CEO rsquo;s 40 percent pay raise, about the company to which they rsquo;d devoted their whole careers and now didn rsquo;t trust a bit, and, in effect, about turning from right-stuff demigods who worked hard and played by the rules into disrespected, sputtering, whining losers. The next morning back in New York, I read the news about the record-setting bonuses on Wall Street, an aggregate amount 1,100 percent higher than in the go-go year of 1986. The 2006 revenues at just one bank, Goldman Sachs, were larger than the GNPs of two-thirds of the countries on Earth mdash;a treasure chest from which the firm was disbursing $53.

4 million to its CEO and an average of $623,000 to everybody who works at the place.
Ordinarily, I would shrug and move on with New Yorkerly indifference mdash;the pilots are still flying, their reduced pensions notwithstanding, and I wouldn rsquo;t trade my life for any banker rsquo;s. But I haven rsquo;t been able to stop thinking about my jump-cut visions of those defeated pilots and the megabonused Wall Street guys shopping for $15 million apartments.

And as a result, this holiday fortnight has felt to me fully Dickensian mdash;the jolly bourgeois bustle and glow, as usual, but also in the foreground the conceited, unattractive rich, our Dombeys and Bounderbys and unredeemed Scrooges.
A month ago, I was ragging on CNN for presenting Lou Dobbs rsquo;s hour of pissed-off populism as if it were a traditional nightly news show, and I still think it has a serious truth-in-packaging problem. But (like Dickens rsquo;s Mr.

Gradgrind, with his epiphany about the poor in Hard Times) I now get Dobbs rsquo;s and his followers rsquo; anger and disgust about the ongoing breaches of the social contract, an American economic system that seems more and more rigged in favor of the extremely fortunate.
I know capitalism is all about creative destruction, that the pain of globalization must be endured and flexible labor markets are good; inequality is endemic; life is uncertain and unfair, sure, yeah, of course. We rsquo;re all Reaganites now mdash;or at least no longer socialists by instinct.

But during the past two decades we rsquo;ve not only let economic uncertainty and unfairness grow to grotesque extremes, we rsquo;ve also inured ourselves to the spectacle. As America has become a lot more like Pottersville than Bedford Falls, those of us closer to the top of the heap have shrugged and moved on.
The asymmetry between the Goldman boss rsquo;s compensation and that of his average employee mdash;85 times as big mdash;is virtually Ben-and-Jerry rsquo;s-like these days: An average CEO now gets paid several hundred times the salary of his average worker, a gap that rsquo;s an order of magnitude larger than it was in the seventies.

In Japan, the ratio is just 11-to-1, and in Britain 22-to-1.
Back before the Second World War, in the teens and twenties, the richest one-half of one percent of Americans received 11 to 15 percent of all income, but from the fifties through the seventies, the income share of the superrich was reasonably cut back, by more than half. The rich were still plenty rich, and American capitalism worked fine.

Starting in the late eighties, however, the piece of the income pie taken each year by the rich has once again become as hugely disproportionate as it was in the twenties. Meanwhile, the median household income has gone up a measly 15 percent during the past quarter-century mdash;and for the last five years it has actually dropped.
It used to be that when the economy thrived and productivity grew, pay for working people rose accordingly.

Yet as the Times reported this past summer, the first six years of the 21st century look to be ldquo;the first sustained period of economic growth since World War II that fails to offer a prolonged increase in real wages for most workers. rdquo;
People have put up with all this because it happened so quickly and for the same reason that the great mass of losers in casinos put up with odds that favor the house: The spectacle of a few ecstatic big winners encourages the losers to believe that, hey, they might get lucky and win, too. We have, in effect, turned the U.

S. into a winner-take-all casino economy, substituting the gambling hall for the factory floor as our governing economic metaphor, an assembly of individual strangers whose fortunes depend overwhelmingly on random luck rather than collective hard work. And it rsquo;s been unwitting synergy, not unrelated coincidence, that actual casino gambling has become ubiquitous in America at the same time.

Risk-taking is fabulous, central to the American ethos mdash;but not when it rsquo;s involuntary. Too many Americans have been too suddenly herded into our new national economic casino, and without debate turned into the suckers whose losses become the elite rsquo;s winnings.
That rsquo;s the central argument of Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker rsquo;s valuable new book, The Great Risk Shift.

Beyond our recent reversion to extreme, twenties-style income inequality, he presents data explaining the new sense of economic dread hanging over Americans. We all know that in this globalized, ultracompetitive age, job security has been beggared, but Hacker attaches startling numbers to the national anxiety. In short, people rsquo;s incomes are swinging wildly mdash;like winnings in a casino.

In 1970, a family in any given year had a one-in-fourteen chance of its income dropping by half; today, the chance is one in six. No wonder mortgage foreclosures and personal bankruptcies have quintupled during the same period. Middle-class Americans live more and more with the kind of gnawing existential uncertainty that used to be mainly a problem of the poor.

The Great Society programs of the mid-sixties mdash;Food Stamps, Head Start, Medicaid, Medicare mdash;were the final flowering of a social-welfare era that began with FDR rsquo;s New Deal 30 years earlier. The countervailing rightward pendulum swing mdash;deregulation and tax cuts under Reagan, welfare reform under Clinton, still more tax cuts under Bush mdash;has dominated our political economy for nearly the past 30 years.
In other words, the time seems to be ripening for a transformative surge of new passion and policy and political traction around the idea of economic fairness.

Blaming illegal Mexican immigrants and dollar-an-hour Chinese workers for our troubles is an easy way to vent, but Lou Dobbs rsquo;s other regular targets are pretty much on the mark: corporate greedheads and their craven enablers in the political class.
For more than a generation, the Republicans have pitched themselves as the good-old-days party, appealing to the nostalgic hunger for the wholesome, coherent society and culture of mid-century, before life went crazy around 1968. What the Democrats can do now is the same thing, only different mdash;that is, appeal to the nostalgic hunger for the sense of basic economic security and fairness that prevailed before life went crazy around 1986.

Just as Republicans depicted Democrats as insanely freewheeling social experimenters determined to lavish money on the undeserving poor, the caricature can be convincingly reversed: Now the GOP is the party of arrogant, reckless risk-takers mdash;invading Iraq, denying climate change, privatizing Social Security mdash;determined to lavish money on the undeserving rich.
Populism has gotten a bad odor, and not just among plutocrats mdash;for most of the political chattering class, it is at least faintly pejorative. But I think that rsquo;s about to change: When economic hope shrivels and the rich become cartoons of swinish privilege, why shouldn rsquo;t the middle class become populists?

What Professor Hacker calls ldquo;office-park populism rdquo; will be a main engine of any new cyclical progressive renaissance. The question is whether we rsquo;ll elect steady, visionary FDR-like national leaders mdash;Bloomberg? Obama?

mdash;who can manage to keep populism rsquo;s nativist, Luddite tendencies in check.
I think practical-minded political majorities can be brought together to fix the big, important things that have nothing to do with religious faith or sex. In polls, between 60 and 70 percent of people now think ldquo;it is the responsibility of the federal government to make sure all Americans have health-care coverage rdquo; ldquo;even if taxes must be raised.

rdquo; Universal health coverage, protecting everyone against the mammoth downside economic risk of illness, would empower people to take constructive economic risks, freeing them to move to new jobs or start new businesses. We could enact de facto compensation caps for top executives, either by limiting the tax deductibility of CEO pay or, as in Britain, by making CEO pay subject to a shareholder vote every year. We can raise mdash;and certainly not further reduce mdash;taxes on the extremely well-to-do.

We rsquo;ve had a bracing, invigorating run of pedal-to-the-metal hypercapitalism, but now it rsquo;s time to ease up and share the wealth some. We can afford to make life a little more fair and a lot less scary for most people. It rsquo;s not only a matter of virtue and national self-image.

Because the future that frightens me isn rsquo;t so much a too-Hispanic U.S. caused by unchecked Mexican immigration, but a Latin Americanized society with a high-living, blithely callous oligarchy gated off from a growing mass of screwed-over peons.

I think we need to put up with the Republicans rsquo; complaining about ldquo;class war! rdquo; now in order to avoid a real one later.
This was the explanation for why thousands of indigenous rebels continued to wear black ski masks long after the gun battles stopped and talks with the government began 13 years ago.

And the same remains true today.
In a country with 12 million indigenous inhabitants, most remain invisible to the world beyond their villages.
Few Mexicans and non-Mexicans alike can name more than a handful of the 62 distinct indigenous languages spoken throughout Mexico.

But almost everyone knows about the Zapatistas.
From Dec. 30 through Jan.

2, over 1,000 people from 47 countries traveled to Oventic, a hillside Zapatista community about an hour north of San Crist o bal de las Casas, for a gathering between indigenous rebels and activists, artists and curious individuals from across the world.
The Zapatistas organized conference-style discussion sessions on indigenous autonomy, health, education, women s participation and experience, media, art, culture and land where representatives from the five rebel Zapatista regions took turns speaking on their experiences organizing village life without help or permission from the federal government.
Thousands of masked Zapatista men, women and children also attended the event attracting the eyes and camera lenses of the international visitors, and showing that their metaphor of the mask as their visibility cloak still holds.

The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) took the nation and the world by surprise on Jan. 1, 1994, when they rose up in arms, taking over major cities in the southernmost and heavily indigenous state of Chiapas.
The rebels battle cry, Ya basta!

or Enough! resonated with millions of poor Mexicans, and the EZLN s charismatic, pipe- smoking spokesperson, Subcomandante Marcos, enchanted the media and much of the middle class with witty quips to spin the government s logic on its head.
Marcos got his start as spokesperson when asked by the indigenous commanders to translate for a group of French-speaking tourists who were demanding information.

The tourists complained that they needed to catch a flight in Mexico City and Marcos response became the stuff of legend: We are sorry to bother, but this is a revolution.
After two weeks of fighting and huge demonstrations calling for peace in Mexico City, the government called a cease-fire to seek a negotiated settlement to the conflict in Chiapas, where the indigenous rebels complaints of suffering racism and abandon were widely seen as legitimate and long neglected.
After several failed attempts, the Zapatistas and the Ernesto Zedillo administration signed the San Andr e s Accords in February 1996, promising greater levels of autonomy and self-determination to the indigenous peoples of Mexico.

The EZLN had convoked all of Mexico s indigenous peoples to the dialogue so that the agreements would spread to indigenous communities across the nation and not just in Chiapas.
President Zedillo, however, refused to implement the accords, leading the Zapatistas to withdraw from further dialogue with the government until after Vicente Fox s 2000 election.
In March 2001, the EZLN indigenous commanders and the world-famous Marcos left Chiapas in a caravan that traveled through the southern and central regions of Mexico drawing huge crowds of supporters, before arriving in Mexico City to speak before Congress, calling on the elected representatives to pass the San Andr e s Accords into law.

In an effort led by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and Fox s National Action Party (PAN), Congress passed a reworked version of the accords that denied granting indigenous communities autonomy and in turn further bound them to federal control.
The Zapatistas and other indigenous communities across Mexico called the new law a betrayal.
The EZLN returned to Chiapas and again cut off relations with the federal government.

In the succeeding years they set about implementing the San Andr e s Accords on their own, building the foundations for complete autonomy in their forms of governance and provision of social services such as health care and education.
In 2003, the EZLN helped set up Good Government Councils, composed of men and women elected in open assemblies, to organize regional and village affairs.
The councils would replace the military leadership structure of the EZLN, following the Zapatista first rule of governance: mandar obedeciendo, or command by obeying.

This year s gathering was the first between international visitors and the autonomous councils and an opportunity to hear first-hand from the typically elusive Zapatistas about what autonomy means for them.
The people make the decisions, we only propose; we don t impose, said Jes u s, a young member of the good government council of La Realidad during the workshop on autonomy that was held in a wood and corrugated sheet metal auditorium with a dirt floor covered in pine needles as soft as any carpet.
Council members are elected in open assemblies; they serve for three years without salary, though villagers support them with food, childcare and travel funds.

In the four years of operating in Good Government Councils, Zapatistas have opened schools in every village and regional center, health clinics, women s artesian cooperatives, and organic coffee cooperatives.
For first-time visitors who do not speak one of the four indigenous languages of the region, however, one of the most impressive aspects of Zapatista villages are the murals that adorn walls throughout the community.
The murals are another way of expressing, or telling our own history, said Karina, another member of the good government council of La Realidad.

At first we had problems with brothers and sisters from other places who came and painted things that we did not understand, she said. But we talked it over, and now the whole village decides what to paint. We elect mural commissions to work with the painters so that we can explain the meaning of the paintings to all our other visitors.

And the main image in all the paintings is that of the ski-masked face, with only the eyes visible.
The face that had to be covered to be seen.

[Chilean President, Michelle Bachelet, the nation s first female chief executive]
Artists shake off a dark time, and a South American culture mdash;its poetry, music and dance mdash;reawakens.

By Agustin Gurza
Times Staff Writer

January 2, 2007

Santiago, Chile mdash; For Chileans, Sept. 11, 1973 was the day the music died.

The long, narrow South American country, home to this capital of 5.

5 million, once was an international center for Latin pop music, with groups in the vanguard of the rock en espa ol revolution and the New Song movement, a politically charged folk revival then sweeping Latin America.

Then came Chile s 9/11. Gen.

Augusto Pinochet overthrew the Socialist government of Salvador Allende, whose populist ideals had galvanized artists. Thousands were killed, including singer-songwriter V i ctor Jara, the Chilean Bob Dylan. Thousands more went into exile.

During the next decade of dictatorship, Chile went dark.

On an October visit to Santiago, I found a place still struggling to overcome its past but working to define its artistic future. Pinochet s death earlier this month at age 91 may mark a turning point in the country s drive to reclaim its cultural soul.

Today, Chile s artistic rebirth is being fueled partly by an economic boom that s considered a model for Latin American prosperity. (Ironically, some attribute this surge to Pinochet s policies.)

Signs of new life are everywhere.

I saw New Song-style troubadours leading sing-alongs in coffeehouses and animated santiagueros savoring conversations at sidewalk cafes until the wee hours. I saw street-corner tango dancers on the Paseo Ahumada and colorfully costumed folk groups performing in the colonial Plaza de Armas to help raise money for a statue of Violeta Parra, a seminal New Song figure who committed suicide in 1967 after giving the world the spiritually uplifting classic Gracias a la Vida (Thanks to Life).

I caught the hot new rock band Los Bunkers performing for enthralled university students and witnessed young couples joyously waving handkerchiefs as they danced the syncopated cueca, Chile s traditional folk form that s seeing a revival.

But the most dramatic sign of change was at Palacio de la Moneda, the stately presidential palace where Allende allegedly committed suicide. Today, the beautifully restored building is occupied by the country s first female president, Michelle Bachelet, a physician and single mother of three. Bachelet and her mother were imprisoned and tortured before fleeing into exile.

Her father, a general loyal to Allende, suffered a heart attack and died in custody.

Facing the palace in Plaza Bulnes, across Avenida Bernardo O Higgins, the city s main east-west thoroughfare, I came across an outdoor exhibition celebrating Jara s life and work through his lyrics, drawings and photos.

It was poetic justice as public art.

But the wounds are far from healed. Almost every musician I met mentioned the coup as a cultural point of reference. In Chile, time is still marked as BP and AP, Before Pinochet and After Pinochet.

Even shopping for CDs in Santiago can be fraught with meaning.

I stopped at a hole-in-the wall music store on Paseo Ahumada, a pedestrian walkway that s a cross between Broadway and the Third Street Promenade. A young clerk surveyed my selection of albums by Jara and others in the New Song movement and, as glibly as though inquiring where I was from, asked: Are you a communist?

Exorcising demons

SOME contemporary artists are actively exorcising the ghosts of the dictatorship.

The latest album by Los Tres, Chile s acclaimed rock band, opens with the disdainful No Es Cierto (It s Not True), which mocks testimony by a seemingly befuddled Pinochet about alleged human rights violations. The chorus plays on the political double-speak: I don t remember, but it s not true.

And if it is true, I don t remember.

The trio, which recently reunited after a six-year hiatus, takes a bitter shot near the end of their excellent new CD, H a galo Usted Mismo (Do It Yourself).