Dear Citizen, I have been reconsidering my and your descriptions all night, and I do hope I understand the evidence and the emotions that lead to your position.
Nevertheless, I still feel you are under-estimating the many complexities of a global situation in which nearly all believe they are acting for their own, and others' best interest. If the elected Democrats were as shrewd as you say, they would have been defending their own institutional interests more closely. Also, consider the evidence that the most cynical forces of corporate greed and state oppression may not always know or be able to act in their own long-term best interests -- perhaps Gamal Mubarak now wishes he had been a somewhat more enlightened would-be despot? While many elected Democrats do defend corporate & statist interests, are these corporate and state interests truly being served by, for example, the Koch brothers and the tea partiers going off on extremist tangents that are probably not in the long-term interests of corporate-owned stability?
Again, there is some evidence to support your conclusions, yet I really hope that you are doing something to organize your fellow nihilist/cynics for some better future ... I find it important to insist that there do remain opportunities for taking advantage of the paper liberties and privileges that remain to us, for Americans of positive purpose to do something more with our ideals than just buy Groupon coupons to be more efficient consumers.
By and large, the unorganized yet fairly-clear-thinking majority of the American people have given their support to the Egyptian people. And would probably like to give more support, if they knew how.
But in today's American democracy, that doesn't really count with the American government power structure, the weak and cowardly elected officials of the Democratic Party, the Pentagon and intelligence officials who shipped off suspected Islamist radicals to be tortured by Suleiman's security police, the power structures of the elite media, the business interests that gain from crony capitalism here and abroad, or anyone else who "counts" with the small groups in Washington DC and New York City who are allowed to be the acceptable face & voice of American society.
You understand, don't you, that they are a property of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (US headquarters at 1211 Ave of the Americas, New York NY 10036).
Mr. Murdoch is a second generation publishing magnate, his father actually had the brilliant idea of capturing both the id and the ego of the lower classes (of Australia, where he started) by publishing daily shots of women's breasts combined with semi-rabid conservative political allegiance and slant in both News and editorial presentation. Indeed they made it clear (in action, if not in words) that news presentation was part of editorial presentation. Rupert has successfully transferred the formula to the United Kingdom and now to the United States. Ironically, although the Fox broadcasting and cable-casting television cannot use the direct presentation of women's breasts that the newspaper properties in Australia and the UK use to this day -- though check the babes and their stylings of the young Fox presentations -- in their video entertainment presentations, they are even more willing to use any kind of sex, drugs, terror, evil businessman stories, alternative and/or alternative reality presentation that contradicts and undermines the conservative political ideology that is religiously spouted in their "news" presentations.
It is a form of alternative reality, or subculture creation by sheer force of manipulative corporate ideology and financial resources. The stuff does sell, however it has become much more extreme in the American political spectrum in the last 3 years. It doesn't look like ending well.
I've dropped off the intensive study of the Middle East (in English sources) that I had going on 30 years ago, however, Saudi Arabia is probably one of the Arab nations least likely to experience a popular revolt.
Demographics is the first reason, there are 80 million Egyptians, all in a narrow river valley, and Egypt has been a center of commerce for millenia. There were only 8 million Saudis when I had piles of fresh Saudi planning documents all over my apartment, it must have grown since but they are scattered all over and the Saudis don't like to record the number of guest workers, who now may be equal or greater than the actual Saudis?
Second, the nature of economic and social change in the two nations. Egypt has benefited from the general growth of the last half-century, but is essentially on the familiar model of huge poor mass, a smaller commercial & professional class, and tiny elite. Saudi Arabia's oil wealth essentially allowed them to pension off all the actual Saudis, with actual or notional jobs, or direct handouts to family elders, (and true princely status for all the scores of true princely families), so all Saudi citizens should be economically significantly above 90 or 95% of Egyptians.
As someone who has been selling at retail at events around the country, I do believe that Americans are at least 50% progressive IN THE CULTURAL SENSE. This does not necessarily translate to politics, but I do believe in my brain and heart that there are at least 15 million, and perhaps 30-40 million or more adult Americans who are smart enough to know why we need progressive politics.
I have a long (by today's internet standards) article at my website on the problems of organizing this amorphous population, see "Presidential Politics Are a Distraction for Progressives," it was published at FireDogLake and ThomHartman.com around Dec. 16, and I was pleasantly surprised by the very positive comments and lack of negative comments.
We aren't getting out of here without a heck of a lot of work.
In general, the amazing level of defensiveness on the part of all the right-wing commentators & pundits is the opposite of persuasive to anyone who has had to deal with a small child having a tantrum.
They are now leading themselves to the insane, anti-historical argument that no one's words have any effect on any other human being! Simply from the necessity of finding any line of argument to claim that their own repeated intemperate, deliberately inflammatory language has not been an influence on America's latest assassin!
Not to mention that this inflammatory language of theirs has included numerous completely false statements (such as Barak Obama being a socialist, or that most American liberals actively desire a larger, more expensive government structure) that these right-wing pundits must be either complete knowingly-lying hypocrites, or absolute ignoramuses to utter these statements.
Thus does hundreds of millions of dollars of donations to Heritage Institutes and American Enterprise institiutes and the various Likudist think-tanks dissolve in a mist of absurdities and unpersuasive pettifoggery ...
Thank you very much, Professor Cole, for this comprehensive summary of diplomatic realities in the region. Your words demonstrate the balanced and realist viewpoint of on-the-ground realities and policy options that others claim.
American radicals and progressives like myself need to develop and/or maintain a similar realism. Right now progressive emotions seem to be on a wave of anti-Obama sentiment, most which he richly deserves. Nevertheless American progressives are too disparate and disorganized to have any great political influence at this time. Maybe when we have 10 or 20 million voters in a minimal form of organization we can talk about primary challenges to Obama. In the meantime we desperately also need to be challenging both Republican and Democratic Congresspersons, and the media and the oil industries and the advertising industries and many others, just to get a modicum of realistic discussion (of the kind of problems Juan so ably summarizes here) into the American mainstream.
American democracy has been "withering on the vine" already for decades, arguably now with Republican Congresspersons, insane Fox-led media, and our corrupt Supreme Court unleashing a tidal wave of the irresponsible attack ads, American democracy is under heavy attack from elements of the American elite. If the many millions of Americans who do understand more complex views of the world situation cannot get organized and make our voices heard -- basic first steps to any greater achievement -- the future is indeed bleak, and the idealistic fractiousness of American progressives will deserve a share of the blame.
Does anyone else remember how, back in the 1950's, we used to call these things "puppet governments?" The assumption in the US was that all the governments in the Soviet bloc were mere "puppets" of the Politburo in Moscow.
Now look at the situation of America, the incompetent hegemon. Governments in Baghdad and Kabul are clearly "puppets" of American imperial power -- yet just as clearly, they go their own way in many if not most spheres of governmental activity. These governments could never have been established without the blessing of the American military shield, and the government in Kabul almost certainly could not survive for more than a few weeks without continued American support.
The government in Baghdad seems slightly more robust, it is difficult to picture any immediate alternative government pushing them out, yet as al-Khoei shows, the danger is a descent into a civil war of at least 3 factions (Shia, Sunni, and Kurd) and perhaps more (warring political parties could conceivably emerge in all three major groupings).
Thus we have empire in the age of mendacious media: it matters not what the facts may be on the ground, it matters not how the local populations may suffer, it matters not what travesties of democratic ideals we may be supporting, it matters not what travesties of the "ideals" of even competent-yet-authoritarian government we may be supporting.
As long as the politicians and the TV networks in America can point at some sort of government structure, and as long as a dazzlingly-decorated General can be dragged out to testify that victory over the insurgents is "just around the corner," the punditocracy in DC can pretend that all is well and they don't have raise a hue and cry over the "loss of American power." Ironically, when these hues and cries over the "loss of American power" do arise, whatever debate exists is only over how many more hundreds of billions must be thrown into incompetent military machine -- we Americans are not allowed to have a debate over what we should be doing in the world, or over what types of actions our expensive, incompetent military machine is taking in any particular case.
If America's elite politicians and media cannot permit honest and frank discussions over our imperial role and the hash we made of our imperial pretensions -- and look at how they operate, they certainly cannot permit such discussions today -- then we cannot reform. If we cannot reform, a collapse of American power becomes more and more likely, and sooner rather than later.
If we do screw things up that badly -- and I have no doubt we can do that if our American "conservatives" continue as stupidly as they have been, and our American "progressives" continue as lazy and disorganized as we have been -- then it's not just the tigers who will be gone.
It'll be us and our so-called civilization as well.
From my perspective, the obvious comment is in a reply to Bob Carlson about "persuading large numbers of people of the need for a radical change in our economic philosophy."
In all human history, people's ideas of what exactly constitutes economic value, and how to achieve that in daily life, are the essential determinant of the outcomes of economic history -- what people have done, over thousands of years, to bring themselves food, shelter, comfort and luxury. These ideas can often be static for generations within a particular culture, that is relatively sustainable. However people on the margins, people "in the crosshairs" of historical change, and nearly efvery one in the fast-changing economic situations of the last century or so, do have more experience with changing their economic philosophies as life circumstances change.
Please see the 7200-word article which discusses this process of economic philosophy formation in the context of a comprehensive vision of human history and how human action creates what we call the major social sciences such as economics, at my website http://philosophical-ron.com/philosophical-ron-explains-youre-in-the-omelet/ , to begin the further elucidation and discussion of this topic at the advanced level -- as we so desperately need.
It's not that she shallowly tried out various fundamentalisms that condemns her so much in my eyes, it's the determined (and successful) effort to get her face on the TV screen, no matter what she had to say, no matter what she had to do. That is the true religion of this mish-mosh culture of America in the early 21st Century: an arguably hot babe on the tube. For her to continue to get the calls from Bill Maher's people in the late 90's was the Holy Grail for her, the piece of the true cross, the personal blessing from the Pope.
American television is most certainly about making the people stupider, so that corporations can manipulate them more easily. Pert, glib dumb blondes are an essential tool in the corporate toolbox for this purpose. People think that they are choosing shows to watch on TV; but at the top of the broadcaster's food chain, they understand very well that they are offering "traps" or "lures" to catch YOU, to hypnotize you into not turning the channel, so that you can be packaged up and sold to advertisers.
Until Americans get smart enough to turn off the idiot box, and/or demand much more intelligent offerings, it's hard to see any good endings for our children and grandchildren.
Dear Citizen, I have been reconsidering my and your descriptions all night, and I do hope I understand the evidence and the emotions that lead to your position.
Nevertheless, I still feel you are under-estimating the many complexities of a global situation in which nearly all believe they are acting for their own, and others' best interest. If the elected Democrats were as shrewd as you say, they would have been defending their own institutional interests more closely. Also, consider the evidence that the most cynical forces of corporate greed and state oppression may not always know or be able to act in their own long-term best interests -- perhaps Gamal Mubarak now wishes he had been a somewhat more enlightened would-be despot? While many elected Democrats do defend corporate & statist interests, are these corporate and state interests truly being served by, for example, the Koch brothers and the tea partiers going off on extremist tangents that are probably not in the long-term interests of corporate-owned stability?
Again, there is some evidence to support your conclusions, yet I really hope that you are doing something to organize your fellow nihilist/cynics for some better future ... I find it important to insist that there do remain opportunities for taking advantage of the paper liberties and privileges that remain to us, for Americans of positive purpose to do something more with our ideals than just buy Groupon coupons to be more efficient consumers.
By and large, the unorganized yet fairly-clear-thinking majority of the American people have given their support to the Egyptian people. And would probably like to give more support, if they knew how.
But in today's American democracy, that doesn't really count with the American government power structure, the weak and cowardly elected officials of the Democratic Party, the Pentagon and intelligence officials who shipped off suspected Islamist radicals to be tortured by Suleiman's security police, the power structures of the elite media, the business interests that gain from crony capitalism here and abroad, or anyone else who "counts" with the small groups in Washington DC and New York City who are allowed to be the acceptable face & voice of American society.
You understand, don't you, that they are a property of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (US headquarters at 1211 Ave of the Americas, New York NY 10036).
Mr. Murdoch is a second generation publishing magnate, his father actually had the brilliant idea of capturing both the id and the ego of the lower classes (of Australia, where he started) by publishing daily shots of women's breasts combined with semi-rabid conservative political allegiance and slant in both News and editorial presentation. Indeed they made it clear (in action, if not in words) that news presentation was part of editorial presentation. Rupert has successfully transferred the formula to the United Kingdom and now to the United States. Ironically, although the Fox broadcasting and cable-casting television cannot use the direct presentation of women's breasts that the newspaper properties in Australia and the UK use to this day -- though check the babes and their stylings of the young Fox presentations -- in their video entertainment presentations, they are even more willing to use any kind of sex, drugs, terror, evil businessman stories, alternative and/or alternative reality presentation that contradicts and undermines the conservative political ideology that is religiously spouted in their "news" presentations.
It is a form of alternative reality, or subculture creation by sheer force of manipulative corporate ideology and financial resources. The stuff does sell, however it has become much more extreme in the American political spectrum in the last 3 years. It doesn't look like ending well.
I've dropped off the intensive study of the Middle East (in English sources) that I had going on 30 years ago, however, Saudi Arabia is probably one of the Arab nations least likely to experience a popular revolt.
Demographics is the first reason, there are 80 million Egyptians, all in a narrow river valley, and Egypt has been a center of commerce for millenia. There were only 8 million Saudis when I had piles of fresh Saudi planning documents all over my apartment, it must have grown since but they are scattered all over and the Saudis don't like to record the number of guest workers, who now may be equal or greater than the actual Saudis?
Second, the nature of economic and social change in the two nations. Egypt has benefited from the general growth of the last half-century, but is essentially on the familiar model of huge poor mass, a smaller commercial & professional class, and tiny elite. Saudi Arabia's oil wealth essentially allowed them to pension off all the actual Saudis, with actual or notional jobs, or direct handouts to family elders, (and true princely status for all the scores of true princely families), so all Saudi citizens should be economically significantly above 90 or 95% of Egyptians.
As someone who has been selling at retail at events around the country, I do believe that Americans are at least 50% progressive IN THE CULTURAL SENSE. This does not necessarily translate to politics, but I do believe in my brain and heart that there are at least 15 million, and perhaps 30-40 million or more adult Americans who are smart enough to know why we need progressive politics.
I have a long (by today's internet standards) article at my website on the problems of organizing this amorphous population, see "Presidential Politics Are a Distraction for Progressives," it was published at FireDogLake and ThomHartman.com around Dec. 16, and I was pleasantly surprised by the very positive comments and lack of negative comments.
We aren't getting out of here without a heck of a lot of work.
In general, the amazing level of defensiveness on the part of all the right-wing commentators & pundits is the opposite of persuasive to anyone who has had to deal with a small child having a tantrum.
They are now leading themselves to the insane, anti-historical argument that no one's words have any effect on any other human being! Simply from the necessity of finding any line of argument to claim that their own repeated intemperate, deliberately inflammatory language has not been an influence on America's latest assassin!
Not to mention that this inflammatory language of theirs has included numerous completely false statements (such as Barak Obama being a socialist, or that most American liberals actively desire a larger, more expensive government structure) that these right-wing pundits must be either complete knowingly-lying hypocrites, or absolute ignoramuses to utter these statements.
Thus does hundreds of millions of dollars of donations to Heritage Institutes and American Enterprise institiutes and the various Likudist think-tanks dissolve in a mist of absurdities and unpersuasive pettifoggery ...
Thank you very much, Professor Cole, for this comprehensive summary of diplomatic realities in the region. Your words demonstrate the balanced and realist viewpoint of on-the-ground realities and policy options that others claim.
American radicals and progressives like myself need to develop and/or maintain a similar realism. Right now progressive emotions seem to be on a wave of anti-Obama sentiment, most which he richly deserves. Nevertheless American progressives are too disparate and disorganized to have any great political influence at this time. Maybe when we have 10 or 20 million voters in a minimal form of organization we can talk about primary challenges to Obama. In the meantime we desperately also need to be challenging both Republican and Democratic Congresspersons, and the media and the oil industries and the advertising industries and many others, just to get a modicum of realistic discussion (of the kind of problems Juan so ably summarizes here) into the American mainstream.
American democracy has been "withering on the vine" already for decades, arguably now with Republican Congresspersons, insane Fox-led media, and our corrupt Supreme Court unleashing a tidal wave of the irresponsible attack ads, American democracy is under heavy attack from elements of the American elite. If the many millions of Americans who do understand more complex views of the world situation cannot get organized and make our voices heard -- basic first steps to any greater achievement -- the future is indeed bleak, and the idealistic fractiousness of American progressives will deserve a share of the blame.
Does anyone else remember how, back in the 1950's, we used to call these things "puppet governments?" The assumption in the US was that all the governments in the Soviet bloc were mere "puppets" of the Politburo in Moscow.
Now look at the situation of America, the incompetent hegemon. Governments in Baghdad and Kabul are clearly "puppets" of American imperial power -- yet just as clearly, they go their own way in many if not most spheres of governmental activity. These governments could never have been established without the blessing of the American military shield, and the government in Kabul almost certainly could not survive for more than a few weeks without continued American support.
The government in Baghdad seems slightly more robust, it is difficult to picture any immediate alternative government pushing them out, yet as al-Khoei shows, the danger is a descent into a civil war of at least 3 factions (Shia, Sunni, and Kurd) and perhaps more (warring political parties could conceivably emerge in all three major groupings).
Thus we have empire in the age of mendacious media: it matters not what the facts may be on the ground, it matters not how the local populations may suffer, it matters not what travesties of democratic ideals we may be supporting, it matters not what travesties of the "ideals" of even competent-yet-authoritarian government we may be supporting.
As long as the politicians and the TV networks in America can point at some sort of government structure, and as long as a dazzlingly-decorated General can be dragged out to testify that victory over the insurgents is "just around the corner," the punditocracy in DC can pretend that all is well and they don't have raise a hue and cry over the "loss of American power." Ironically, when these hues and cries over the "loss of American power" do arise, whatever debate exists is only over how many more hundreds of billions must be thrown into incompetent military machine -- we Americans are not allowed to have a debate over what we should be doing in the world, or over what types of actions our expensive, incompetent military machine is taking in any particular case.
If America's elite politicians and media cannot permit honest and frank discussions over our imperial role and the hash we made of our imperial pretensions -- and look at how they operate, they certainly cannot permit such discussions today -- then we cannot reform. If we cannot reform, a collapse of American power becomes more and more likely, and sooner rather than later.
Dear People,
If we do screw things up that badly -- and I have no doubt we can do that if our American "conservatives" continue as stupidly as they have been, and our American "progressives" continue as lazy and disorganized as we have been -- then it's not just the tigers who will be gone.
It'll be us and our so-called civilization as well.
From my perspective, the obvious comment is in a reply to Bob Carlson about "persuading large numbers of people of the need for a radical change in our economic philosophy."
In all human history, people's ideas of what exactly constitutes economic value, and how to achieve that in daily life, are the essential determinant of the outcomes of economic history -- what people have done, over thousands of years, to bring themselves food, shelter, comfort and luxury. These ideas can often be static for generations within a particular culture, that is relatively sustainable. However people on the margins, people "in the crosshairs" of historical change, and nearly efvery one in the fast-changing economic situations of the last century or so, do have more experience with changing their economic philosophies as life circumstances change.
Please see the 7200-word article which discusses this process of economic philosophy formation in the context of a comprehensive vision of human history and how human action creates what we call the major social sciences such as economics, at my website http://philosophical-ron.com/philosophical-ron-explains-youre-in-the-omelet/ , to begin the further elucidation and discussion of this topic at the advanced level -- as we so desperately need.
It's not that she shallowly tried out various fundamentalisms that condemns her so much in my eyes, it's the determined (and successful) effort to get her face on the TV screen, no matter what she had to say, no matter what she had to do. That is the true religion of this mish-mosh culture of America in the early 21st Century: an arguably hot babe on the tube. For her to continue to get the calls from Bill Maher's people in the late 90's was the Holy Grail for her, the piece of the true cross, the personal blessing from the Pope.
American television is most certainly about making the people stupider, so that corporations can manipulate them more easily. Pert, glib dumb blondes are an essential tool in the corporate toolbox for this purpose. People think that they are choosing shows to watch on TV; but at the top of the broadcaster's food chain, they understand very well that they are offering "traps" or "lures" to catch YOU, to hypnotize you into not turning the channel, so that you can be packaged up and sold to advertisers.
Until Americans get smart enough to turn off the idiot box, and/or demand much more intelligent offerings, it's hard to see any good endings for our children and grandchildren.