Where Are We Going and Why Are We In This Handbasket?

Digby:

Addie Stan clarifies the historical moment for us by throwing a glass of ice cold water in our faces and telling us to wake the hell up:

SNIP

She concludes:

We’re in the grips of a shift in national identity, one in which democracy and adherence to human rights as stated national values (however flawed in their actual execution) are giving way to an acceptance of authoritarian rule. And we’re allowing our country to align itself against the democracies of the world at the hands of a president who is looking more and more every day like a traitor. A president who is helping to fuel the rise of the authoritarian right in Europe.

Just days after Trump walked away from the G-7 consensus statement with a slam at the prime minister of Canada, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it was planning to “strengthen the northern border.”

And that announcement, you could say, “barely registered.”

 Don't despair.  Fight.

Foreign Policy Blowback

Because if a normal president had set out to make Central America the source of our own destruction, she could not be more successful than the Orange Loser is about to become.

Erik Loomis at LGM:

But for as terrible as all of this is, it’s only getting worse under Trump:

The Trump administration has made clear that human rights considerations are inconsequential to its foreign policy. But the human cost of these policies in Central America and Mexico will be incalculable, and will create blowback. Instead of suppressing migration and stabilizing the region, these measures will escalate the rampant violence that has sent desperate refugees fleeing from their communities to the United States in search of sanctuary, perpetuating a cycle of misery for which Washington bears significant responsibility, but from which it offers little relief.

There is much more horrifying detail at the link. Given what the United States owes Central America for more than a center of war and exploitation, at the very least, we should open our borders to any Central American who wants in. It’s the least we can do. But we can do much more and we should. Alas, Central America is always seen as a problem in American foreign policy circles, with at best a shrug about how the U.S. did so much to create these problems.

Ru Paul Nails It

Via Digby:

Do you want a pompous braggart who doesn't know anything about diplomacy? Or do you want a badass bitch who knows how to get shit done? That's really the question.

How to Fight ISIS

Via Juanita Jean:

THIS Is American Exceptionalism

When we save lives, not take them. When we prevent civil wars through aid and assistance, not cause them with military attacks. When we make friends instead of enemies.

Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf paid emotional tribute to the American people on Thursday as the United States formally wound up its successful five-month mission to combat the west African nation's Ebola outbreak.

With Liberia now in recovery from the worst outbreak of the deadly virus in history, the visiting Sirleaf thanked the United States for coming to the region's aid in its hour of need.

"America responded, you did not run from Liberia," Sirleaf told US lawmakers in Washington, expressing the "profound gratitude" of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.

Liberia, once the country worst hit by Ebola, has registered 4,037 of around 9,600 deaths in the epidemic, which began in Guinea in December 2013.

At its height in the final four months of last year, Liberia and Sierra Leone were recording between 300 and 550 confirmed, suspect and probable cases a week.

It was in some of the darkest days in August when the Liberian leader said she reached out to US President Barack Obama and to the US Congress amid "grim and terrifying" international predictions that before the end of January at least 20,000 people would die every month.

View gallery

Ebola survivor James Mulbah, 2, stands with his mother, Tamah Mulbah, 28, who also recovered from Ebola

But with US help, including a military force which reached 2,800 personnel at one point, there are now only one to three new infections each week in Liberia.

"We are chasing the very last element of the chain of transmission we have," Sirleaf said, praising all the international and regional military and aid workers who "reached beyond their fears and ran towards the danger and not from it."

When I traveled in Europe thirty years ago, there were people there still living who remembered the American troops who liberated them during World War II in France and Italy and Belgium and the Netherlands. People in Germany who remembered the Marshall Plan that saved them from starvation and economic catastrophe. People who would never forget, and would always view Americans as heroes, as saviors.

That's the "essential nation" I love, the one I think President Barack Obama loves, too.

That's the nation vicious morons like George W. Bush and torture-porn-lovers like Dick Cheney will never even know.

The nation repugs and freakzoids and warmongers and gun nuts can't even imagine.

"The one constant in an uncertain world"

Cthulu!  A display of jingoism by the one empire in an uncertain world is not going to save the dems in November, Mr. President.



Full transcript here.

AynRandy Gets Middle East Exactly Backwards

Really hard to figure out this one: is the Tribble-Toupeed One really that grossly ignorant of decades of Israeli occupation of the West Bank or is he so completely owned and occupied by AIPAC that he doesn't care about the damage he's doing?

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul will introduce a bill this week, calling for an end of U.S. aid to Palestine until it recognizes Israel’s right to exist, which could be seen as an attempt to drum up pro-Israel support prior to a possible 2016 bid.

“Israel cannot be expected to negotiate with an entity that does not believe it should exist and that has used terrorist tactics to seek its end,” the Republican senator said in a statement Monday.

The biggest - by several orders of magnitude - obstacle to Middle East peace is the categorical refusal of Israel's fanatically right-wing government to stop its slow-motion genocide of Palestinian Arabs.

For decades, American presidents and Secretaries of State have begged Israel to stop building Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, to stop building the apartheid wall, to stop undermining the Palestinian economy, to stop attacking and arresting and detaining without charges every random Palestinian who catches an Israeli soldier's eye.

The only way to force this Bully Israel to the table is to cancel all U.S. aid to Israel - all the billions of tax dollars in military aid - and transfer it to humanitarian aid to Palestinian Arabs.

Israel is not the plucky, secular, socialistic democracy of 1948 or even 1978. It's a nuclear-powered bully that's on a downhill path to self-destruction.

It'll take the whole Middle East and a big chunk of the U.S. with it if we don't stop it.

Palestinian Arabs aren't the enemy any more.  Israel is.

Russia is Repugs' Fault

Believe me, I'm just as tired of calling out repugs for their lies and their obstruction and their venality and their hypocrisy and their war on women and their racism and on and on and on as you are of hearing it.
But the moment we stop catching them in every anti-democratic, anti-american word and act is the moment they win and we're fucked.
Rude Pundit:

Perhaps when speaking about Obama's muscle or fat on dealing with crises overseas, every so-called expert should put in a big, neon-glowing caveat: Anyone who can send a drone plane to missile murder the fuck out of someone any time he wants while most foreign leaders just roll their eyes over it is never truly weak on the world stage.
However, that said, what Republicans ought to be doing is crowing about how they weakened the president. For what was their goal in the last five years except to use obstruction, attack, and lying to degrade Obama and his presidency? Rather than get all pissy that Obama appears weak, do a fuckin' victory lap. Slap each other on the back. Have a celebratory Scotch and a circle jerk. You did it, GOP. You so weakened President Obama at home that it may well have weakened him when it comes to foreign policy.
See, Republicans love to say that Obama ultimately relenting on bombing Syria or refusing to admit that Benghazi is the worst thing that ever happened, worse than a dozen 9/11s covered in a Pearl Harbor sauce, demonstrates to Vladimir Putin that he's just a pushover, a pussy, a child when it comes to dealing with world powers. But they don't mention that the Senate GOP has prevented confirmation of dozens of officials in the State Department, that place that handles this part of the job. This follows years of filibustering of nominees. When she was Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton once told a Senate panel regarding the blocking of nominees to diplomatic positions, "It became harder and harder to explain to countries, particularly countries of significance, why we had nobody in position for them to interact with...their view does color whether the United States … is in a position going forward to demonstrate the kind of unity and strength and effectiveness that I think we have to in this very complex and dangerous world."
You know what emboldens foreign leaders to do shit without giving a damn what the United States might do? You know what weakens this country in the eyes of the world? When they see that the president can't get anything passed in the Congress. When they see that he can't even get a fucking ambassador confirmed by lawmakers. So take a fuckin' bow, Republicans, especially the ones who are bitching about Obama's "weakness." You did it. Own that shit.
Of course, Republicans never own what they've done. Because ultimately, if their talking point, their fiction, of a weak Obama is true, it's also because of the wreckage left behind by the last president, who was enabled by the very people who still, for some reason, are allowed to talk about what is good for the country.

If You've Sunk to Arresting Toddlers, You've Lost the Moral High Ground

If you're arresting four-year-olds, you have a problem that can't be solved by arrested four-year-olds.

From Firedoglake:

- Authorities in Israel issued an arrest warrant for Muhammad al-Majid, a Palestinian…who is 4 years old.

Meanwhile, both U.S. political parties have their Israeli handlers keeping close tabs.


Israel is no longer our son of a bitch. We're Israel's bitch.

The Only Democracy in the Middle East is Dead, and Israel Killed It

There's a lot of disagreement about whether Max Blumenthal's new book Goliath libels Israel, and I'm in no position to judge who is right.

But I know this: the Israel of the Occupation, and the Settlements, and the Abuse of Palestinians is not a friend of the United States, not a dependable ally, and not by any definition a democracy.

And Israelis know it, because they are desperately spreading self-refuting propaganda.



Max Blumenthal at The Nation:

In the post-Oslo era, as the strategy that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s inner circle refers to as “peace without peace” captured the Israeli consensus, human rights activists ratcheted up grassroots efforts to challenge the occupation of Palestine and Israel’s prevailing structure of ethno-religious discrimination. Popularly known as BDS, the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israeli institutions involved in occupation has generated shock waves in international pro-Israel circles and within the top levels of Israel’s military-intelligence apparatus. The government-linked Reut Institute has designated BDS as a key national security threat and produced a blueprint for sabotaging Palestine solidarity networks around the world.

While paranoia mounts inside Israeli policy circles about the rising tide of nonviolent global resistance, Netanyahu has grown obsessed with Israel’s withering image in the West. Under his guidance, the term “delegitimization” has become a household word signifying BDS and nearly everything done in the name of exposing Israel’s violations of international law. And thanks to Netanyahu’s instigation, Barack Obama has become the first American president to explicitly pledge to battle the pressure campaign.

Groping for a convenient solution to its public relations problems, the Israeli government has turned to hasbara. The literal meaning of this Hebrew word is “explanation,” but when put into practice, most informed observers recognize it as propaganda. The more the State of Israel relies on force to manage the occupation, the more it feels compelled to deploy hasbara. And the more Western media consumers encounter hasbara, the more likely they are to measure Israel’s grandiose talking points against the routine and petty violence, shocking acts of humiliation and repression that define its treatment of the Palestinians.

Our Ally, Saudi Arabia

We could enormously simplify and improve our foreign and domestic policy if we followed one simple rule: Whatever Saudi Arabia does or wants, do the opposite.

This, for example, is exactly the kind of "god's law" the xian dominionists will enforce in the U.S. when they get into power. 

A Saudi court sentenced two Asian housemaids to 10 years in jail and ordered their lashed 1,000 times each after they were found guilty of indulging in sorcery at their employers’ houses in the Gulf Kingdom, a newspaper reported on Monday.

Their Saudi employers reported the two maids to the Gulf country’s feared religious police, saying they had discovered that their families had been harmed because of sorcery practiced by the maids against them.

Members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice who searched the two houses in Riyadh found talismans and other magic items in the bedrooms of the two maids, Sabq Arabic language daily said.

“The court found them guilty and sentenced them to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes each,” the paper said without identifying the maids or specifying the harm they caused.

Saudi Arabia, which strictly enforces Islamic law, has beheaded many persons convicted of practicing magic over the past years.

More than two million domestic servants work in Saudi Arabia, mostly from Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Africa.

 One thousand lashes is a death penalty about five times over.

But it's not just freakazoid misogyny.

From The Nation:

The true victors of the coup are Mideast zealots who shun the ballot box as a rigged Western secular game, along with their sponsors in the bizarre theocracy of Saudi Arabia, the first country to welcome the downfall of Egypt’s only serious attempt at representative governance. For all of the fanatical blather concerning Islam that has emanated from the oil floated theocracy of Saudi Arabia, the spawning ground for Osama bin Laden and fifteen of the nineteen September 11 hijackers, it is the peaceful electoral campaigns of the populist-based Muslim Brotherhood that the Saudi royalty finds most threatening.

Now it is the turn of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, both of which denied aid to Morsi’s government, to reassert their influence over Egypt by rallying around the country’s military. As The Wall Street Journal reported Monday, “Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. are signaling they are prepared to start showering Egypt’s new government with significant funding as it transitions away from Mr. Morsi and his Islamist movement.”

So much for the promise of the Arab Spring; it will now be marketed as a franchise of the Saudi government. In the end, the argument was not secular versus religious, but rather whether power would reside in the ballot box or the barrel of the gun. The United States, and too many of Egypt’s self-proclaimed secular democrats, ended up on the wrong side of that choice.

Saudi Arabia, home of 15 of the 19 9/11 terrorists and Osama bin Laden.

Saudi Arabia, leader of the anti-U.S. oil boycotts of the 1970s that permanently broke the U.S. economy.

Saudi Arabia, fomenter of anti-U.S. resentment and rage around the world.

Dying for Free Trade in Colombia

"Free Trade" deals of course are nothing of the kind. They are, as we learned to our devastation from NAFTA, Kill Jobs and Pollute Workers' Neighborhoods To Enrich the Rich deals.

But the new trade deal proposed between the U.S. and Colombia is far, far worse even than that.

Michael Norby and Brian Fitzpatrick at The Nation:

But in Plaza de Bolívar, the capital’s iconic central square, comes the first sign of the humanitarian crisis that rights groups are struggling to cope with. Fifty or so families line the square holding placards; some grasping pictures of loved ones. A man with a bullhorn is lobbying for attention, determined to convince ambivalent passers-by that reports of a miraculous turnaround in Colombia are greatly exaggerated.

These are a tiny fraction of what is the world’s largest population of internally displaced people, refugees in their own country. According to Colombian NGO Consultoria para los Derechos Humanos y el Desplazamiento (CODHES), more than 5.4 million IDPs—over 10 percent of the nation’s entire population—have been displaced since 1985.

While the IDP crisis predates both of their tenures, roughly half have been displaced in the years since Uribe took office in 2002, and the number continues to rise under Santos. According to CODHES, 259,000 additional Colombians became internal refugees in 2011.

SNIP

This is what many activists and rights groups believe will be the real legacy of both men: the advancement of a blueprint drawn up decades ago to not only obliterate the insurgency but destroy organized labor and drive huge numbers of rural Colombians from their homes and farms, many of which sit on some of the richest land in the world.

Agricultural provisions within the trade agreement force Colombian farmers to compete against heavily subsidized US products that can now flood the market unhindered. The results are forecast to be devastating. An Oxfam report estimates that the average income of 1.8 million grossly under-protected small farmers will fall by 16 percent.

The study concludes that 400,000 farmers who now live below the minimum wage will see their incomes drop by up to 70 percent and will thus be forced out of their livelihoods. The alternatives open to them will only add to the misery and violence that continue to grow in rural Colombia: Oxfam’s findings mirror what the Colombian government, years before the agreement passed, feared would transpire should the CTPA be signed without addressing its many shortcomings.

SNIP 

In its 2013 World Report, Human Rights Watch reported that Colombia’s attorney general’s office was investigating 1,727 cases of extrajudicial killings involving almost 3,000 victims, allegedly carried out by state agents between 2004 and 2008. The report also stated that additional cases were reported in 2011 and 2012. As of August of last year, 539 army members (seventy-seven officers) had been convicted—fewer than 10 percent of cases.

A constitutional amendment secured by Santos late last year threatens to transfer cases of military atrocities from civilian courts to the military justice system. HRW says the move “would virtually guarantee impunity for such crimes.” Santos served as defense minister from 2006 to 2009, a period that saw his military implicated in some of the most sordid crimes of the entire conflict.

The ITUC reported that thirty-five unionists were murdered in Colombia in 2012, solidifying the country’s status as the most dangerous place on earth to be a union member. Between 3,000 and 4,000 Colombian unionists have been killed since the late 1980s.

Colombian NGO Somos Defensores reported that attacks on human rights defenders reached a ten-year high in 2012. A total of sixty-nine were murdered, up from forty-nine in 2011. Of 357 total acts of aggression, the Bacrim were blamed for 41 percent, state actors and guerrillas were responsible for 13 percent and 9 percent respectively, and the remaining culprits were unknown.

Once a splintered network of autonomous death squads, the Bacrim are now consolidating and becoming more powerful. A June 2012 report by the International Crisis Group put their numbers between 4,800 and 8,000. Colombian think tank Nuevo Arco Iris reports that the Bacrim have condensed from thirty-three groups in 2006 to just six in 2012 and have expanded their presence to 337 of Colombia’s 1,119 municipalities.

The US State Department has made it illegal for US corporations to associate with the Bacrim, not that the terror tag has stopped them in the past. In 2007, US company Chiquita Brands International was fined $25 million in a plea agreement with the US Justice Department after it admitted paying the AUC, a designated terror group, $1.7 million from 1997 to 2004. The company, then represented by current US Attorney General Eric Holder, claimed extortion, but documents in a current civil lawsuit allege that Chiquita also transported 3,000 Kalashnikov rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition for use by the death squads. 

This past December, the Colombian attorney general reopened a criminal investigation into the relationship between the banana giant and the AUC. Other US corporations have been accused of paying death squads to—among other alleged charges—kill trade unionists. Lawsuits against Coca-Cola Bottlers and Dole Food Company were dismissed, but proceedings against Alabama-based Drummond Coal on behalf of victims’ relatives are ongoing.

“It’s really sick,” says Robert Scott, director of trade and manufacturing policy at the Economic Policy Institute, a strong critic of the CTPA. “US multinationals have been associated with helping to fund some of these paramilitary death squads that are operating in Colombia. You have to understand, the motivation for negotiating these trade agreements on the part of multinational businesses is to drive down their cost of production, take advantage of low wages and take advantage of a totally de-unionized labor environment.”

SNIP

Congressman Hank Johnson, a Democrat from Georgia, voted against the CTPA and is a member of the Congressional Monitoring Group on Labor Rights in Colombia. He has hosted delegations from affected communities. “They are so courageous, they will even come to America and meet with congressional representatives,” he says. “They know that when they go back, the people who are hurting them know that they have been here.”

The CTPA, he insists, is another nail in their coffin. “It’s economic exploitation. To understand that our government has helped to foster the businesses that exploit people is not something that I am comfortable with at all. That’s why I must continue to speak out.”

Wallach, who has been studying such agreements for twenty years with Global Trade Watch, says she has never seen the merging of a trade agreement with terror like this. Not on this scale. “It’s obscene,” she says. “Colombia is unique. It is above and beyond. I have seen lots of bad things, but Colombia is in a totally different category. We are giving away all potential economic leverage in our relationship with a country that has [a history of] horrific human rights violations.”

Covering Up Mitt's Stupidity

Digby wonders what repugs are really trying to do by pimping this Benghazi non-story:

Pat Buchanan responded to Eleanor Clift's similar question by saying they all lied to protect Obama's reputation as a terrorist killer. That's the best explanation I've heard for why the right is pimping this so-called scandal, but it's mighty thin in my opinion. Most of the country doesn't even know where Benghazi is and don't consider a "terrorist attack" there to be particularly relevant to their lives. To think they would vote for Romney on this basis strikes me as a reach.

On the other hand, it is a perfectly magnificent example of their ongoing power to invoke "the smell test" with the political press and create a controversy out of confusion. It's always telling when they can't really tell you what it is they suspect is happening, but it just "looks bad."

SNIP

Clearly, the deaths were a tragedy and an investigation should take place. Americans have a right to know exactly what's going on in Libya. But obsessing over what the administration said in the first days after the attack is the stupidest right-wing manufactured pseudo-scandal I've come across in quite some time. And it's pathetic that the mainstream press is still so willing to chase after these shiny objects.

Isn't it obvious? Attacking what President Obama said about the attacks that killed four Americans is a distraction from Mitt Romney's stupid, ridiculous and un-American remarks attacking American diplomats in Libya.

When Ambassador Stevens died,  Romney was the object of near-universal opprobrium for criticizing our diplomats while they were under attack. He was revealed as dangerously unprepared to be president - until the repug lie machine geared up and turned the attention to what President Obama said.

Romney's near-treason fell off the media radar and hasn't been heard from since.

Mission accomplished.

Rallying 'Round That Ni**er in the White House

I am the last person to underestimate the power of racism - and voter suppression - to hand the presidency to RMoney.

 

But I think it's possible that RMoney's stunningly stupid response to the assassination of the American ambassador to Libya has buried his campaign.

 

Here's why: his attack on President Obama in the middle of a foreign policy crisis - a time when Americans reflexively rally around the president, regardless of party - has done what a billion dollars of Democratic Party advertising could not do: turn Barack Hussein Obama into "our president" for millions of doubting Americans.

 

Not the hardcore Kenyan Usurper nuts, of course, but the sometime voters who never felt comfortable with a president who looks so different from the ones we grew up with. The sometime voters who are now sitting up and paying attention because of foreign policy. 

 

The foundation for this was laid by the death of Osama bin Laden, of course. Nothing gets a president bipartisan love like a righteous blow to a despised enemy. Ordering the execution of bin Laden opened the door for the doubters to start thinking of Barack Obama as a "real" president.

 

The murders in Libya by themselves might not have tipped them over into outright defense of Obama, but a public, partisan attack on the presidency while the bodies of murdered Americans were still warm is too much.

 

Sitting here in Nobama country, I swear I could hear a low roar of outraged patriotism: "How DARE you attack the president when we are under attack!" 

American Greatness Liberalism

As Washington conservatives - both republican and democrat - prepare to destroy the economy that has made America the envy of the world for more than a century, here's a reminder from February 2010 of just how critical American economic strength is to American global leadership.

Steve Benen:

AMERICAN GREATNESS LIBERALISM.... One of the more robust applause lines in the State of the Union address came when President Obama said, "I do not accept second place for the United States of America."

E.J. Dionne Jr. chatted with Vice President Biden yesterday, and brought up the line. Biden "replied emphatically" on the subject, rejecting the notion that "we just can't make this transition in the 21st century."

Dionne explained quite well why a "hidden political issue of the 2010 elections" is actually the "larger debate over how to maintain American preeminence."

Beneath the predictable back-and-forth between Obama and his Republican adversaries over government spending lies a substantively important difference over how the United States can maintain its global leadership.

For Republicans, American power is rooted largely in military might and showing a tough and resolute face to the world. They would rely on tax cuts as the one and only spur to economic growth.

Obama, Biden and the Democrats, on the other hand, believe that American power depends ultimately on the American economy, and that government has an essential role to play in fostering the next generation of growth.

Notice that when Obama spoke about keeping America in first place, he said not a word about the military. He referred instead to the efforts of our competitors in the public sphere of the economy, and of our past complacency.

"Washington has been telling us to wait for decades, even as the problems have grown worse," Obama said [in the State of the Union]. "Meanwhile, China is not waiting to revamp its economy. Germany is not waiting. India is not waiting. These nations aren't standing still. These nations aren't playing for second place. They're putting more emphasis on math and science. They're rebuilding their infrastructure. They're making serious investments in clean energy because they want those jobs."

Suddenly, Obama's approach is not about old-fashioned Democratic spending. It's about patriotism, competing successfully, investing to maintain American economic leadership.

Republicans may prefer to avoid this argument, but it's reasonable to think just about every policy dispute on the American landscape can, and probably should, be reframed to answer the question: how does this position the United States for global competition in the 21st century?

Every major power on the planet offers universal health care to its citizens -- except us. This puts America at a competitive disadvantage, undermines wages, creates job lock, and stunts entrepreneurship. Republicans are satisfied with this, because their goal is to prevent "big government," not position the United States for a competitive future. Are Americans OK with that?

Countries like China intend to create the world strongest system of higher education. Are Americans prepared to let that happen? A variety of rivals are preparing to dominate the next phase of the energy revolution. Will the United States deliberately skip the race and fall behind?

To keep America on top, the government is going to have to make real investments and establish a new foundation for growth. Republicans are staunchly opposed to making those investments and don't see the need for such a foundation.

So, let's have the debate, and take it out of the left-right dynamic and put it the global-competition dynamic. Why not make it the centerpiece of the 2010 elections?
I've long believed it creates an opportunity for American Greatness Liberalism -- progressive ideas, investments, and priorities needed to keep the U.S. on top for the long haul.

Obama/Biden have a plan to maintain American preeminence in the 21st century; Republicans don't. Voters can decide whether to look forward or backward.

Everything good and worthwhile in this nation was created by liberals. Doubt it? Read The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, by Mike Lux, for details.

How American Corporations Sabotage National Security

Of course they do that in many ways, not least by shipping jobs overseas and evading billions of dollars in U.S. taxes, thus undermining the U.S. economy. Of course there are relatively infrequent but horrific environmental crimes like Union Carbide's murder of more than 3,000 people in Bhopal, India in 1985. Five hundred years from now, people in Bhopal will not have forgotten.

Then there are the corporate attacks on U.S. national security that are less obvious but far more damaging in the long term.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

This kind of behind the scenes power I’d argue causes, at least in aggregate, as much resentment toward the American government as giant screw ups like the Iraq War, the drone bombing of Afghani and Pakistani civilians, or awkward attempts to overthrow Hugo Chavez. But how this all goes down rarely comes to light.

Here’s an example in Haiti that came out in a Wikileaks cable. In 2009, the Haitian government passed an increase in the minimum wage, from 24 cents an hour to 61 cents an hour. US apparel companies flipped their lids. Many apparel companies have factories in Haiti and pay them nearly slave wages. These companies, including Haines and Levi-Strauss pressured the State Department. After the U.S. Ambassador to Haiti went and talked to the president, the Haitian government created an exception for American textile companies of a $3 a day minimum wage, which for an 8 hour day works out to something like 37 cents an hour.

2 major points about this. First, why would the United States do this? I know that one role of the American government is to facilitate good international business conditions for American companies. But does such a move promote stability in the Caribbean for the long term? When the Haitian earthquake took place, Americans poured millions in donations into the country. For an international story in an impoverished nation, the earthquake story stayed in the media for quite a long time.

But if we want to help the Haitians, allow them to build a stable society, and bring them closer to something more than extreme poverty, why would the United States support decimating a 61 cent an hour minimum wage? Doesn’t that lead to more instability in the nation, more refugees fleeing to the United States and other nations, more international problems? Stupid, short-sighted, and immoral. Not that the apparel companies care about any of these things.

Second, even a lot of progressives seem to talk of globalization as this unstoppable trend with a self-powering propulsion engine pushing it forward ever faster. How can you put the genie back in the bottle, they say. There’s of course some truth to this. But neoliberal globalization is also a series of discrete decisions made by individuals, bureaucracies, organizations, and governments. The U.S. government could very easily tell the apparel companies that they will not use pressure to push down the minimum wage. It could enact policies to protect American workers. It could pressure corporations to enact decent labor and environmental policies when they do build a factory abroad. It could do any number of things to make the increasingly globalized world a better place.

Instead it forces Haitians into continued extreme poverty.

Next time a bunch of demonstrators in some third-world hell-hole burn an American flag, remember that it's probably not our freedoms they hate, or even our drones bombing their children, but rather the American corporation destroying their lives.

There's a Word for This

Rachel Maddow titled her segment on this last night "What's the Opposite of 'Country First?'"

Personally, I think because rethuglicans have spent so many years acting against this country's best interests - overturning the 2000 presidential election, supporting an illegal invasion, pissing away a $1 trillion surplus, demonizing political opponents, destroying the middle class, and finally openly working to undermine the nation's elected leaders - that they no longer grasp the concept of patriotism and its opposite.

I can't discuss this latest rethuglican act without using the word treason, but Steve Benen can:

THE FALLOUT OF KYL'S BETRAYAL.... The optimism hadn't been expressed publicly, but the White House really did think it finally had a deal in place for Senate ratification of the new arms control treaty with Russia, New START.

Republicans had made Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) their point man on the issue -- it's not clear why, since Kyl has no background or working knowledge of the issue -- and he made specific objections to the Obama administration clear. Officials, in response, gave Kyl what we asked for. The deal, they thought, was done.

Over many months of negotiations, the administration committed to spending $80 billion to do that over the next 10 years, and on Friday offered to chip in $4.1 billion more over the next five years. As a gesture of commitment, the White House had made sure extra money for modernization was included in the stopgap spending resolution now keeping the government operating, even though almost no other program received an increase in money.

All told, White House officials counted 29 meetings, phone calls, briefings or letters involving Mr. Kyl or his staff. They said they thought they had given him everything he wanted, and were optimistic about completing a deal this week, only to learn about his decision on Tuesday from reporters.

Kyl wouldn't even give the White House the courtesy of a phone call to let them know he was betraying them and the nation's national security needs. Worse, the dimwitted Kyl, with the future of American foreign policy in his hands, couldn't even give a coherent rationale for why he'd made the decision -- his office would only say "there doesn't appear to be enough time" in the lame-duck session.

This is what happens when serious officials try to negotiate in good faith with Republicans -- they refuse to take "yes" for an answer, they don't have intellectual capacity to explain why, and the entire country has to suffer the consequences.
The bulk of the Republican foreign policy apparatus enthusiastically supports this treaty, as does the entirety of America's military, diplomatic, and intelligence leadership. Matt Cooper noted late yesterday:

Indeed, Republicans will need to explain why they want to sit on a treaty that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has described this way: "I believe -- and the rest of the military leadership in this country believes -- that this treaty is essential to our future security. I believe it enhances and ensures that security. And I hope the Senate will ratify it quickly." [...]

There are risks for Republicans who follow Kyl and find themselves on the opposite side of the military and diplomatic community on ratification of the treaty.

There should be risks, but they don't really exist. Let me put this plainly: They. Don't. Care. They disregard the pleas of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and listen to the confused misjudgments of a buffoon from Arizona. They assume the public isn't paying attention, so there won't be political consequences. They expect this to hurt the foreign policy power of the United States, but they're fine with that since there's a Democratic president.

When it comes to Russia, inspection of the country's long-range nuclear bases will remain suspended indefinitely; the country's hard-liners will be emboldened; and Russia's willingness to cooperate with U.S. on Iran or on Afghanistan will likely disappear.

But in the bigger picture, countries around the globe will see this as a reminder that negotiating with the United States is pointless, since the country is burdened with a Republican Party that puts partisan hatred above the country's interests. It hurts American credibility in ways that are hard to even gauge.

Sleep well, Jon Kyl. Dream of the time when the United States had the respect and stature to lead the world.