TRANSCRIPTS OF
DEAN LeBARON’S
DAILY VIDEO COMMENTARIES
The Big Lies Video Series
(September 2006)
Intro: The Big Lies Video Series
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Big Lies Series: War on Terror |
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Big Lies Series: Reform and Democracy |
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Big Lies Series: Defense Spending Equals Support For Our Brave Troops |
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Big Lies Series: Human Rights |
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Big Lies Series: One Person, One Vote |
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Big Lies Series: Rule of Law |
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Big Lies Series: Stay The Course |
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Big Lies Series: Democracies Don't Make War |
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Big Lies Series: Compassionate Conservative |
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Big Lies Series: Bring To Justice |
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Big Lies Series: Sacrifice |
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Big Lies Series Ends: Impact on the Liar |
A Series: The Big Lies
The difference between perception and reality is critical. If we are making decisions on the basis of the wrong reality, outcomes will by intent or luck be worse than they otherwise could have been. There are a number of misconceptions, big lies, that exist in the air today and it’s worth commenting on them one by one.
Let me take one that is particularly important and I’m surprised that it has gone undetected for so long. We hear discussions about your money, what you should do with your money and what government should do to see that you have more of it. There have been essentially three basic ways of giving you more of your money. One was to reduce taxes three times, mostly at the top end to be sure, and I should be thankful. But on the other hand the money isn’t really mine since the average debt level of an American citizen is $135,000; the money that is labeled “my money” really comes from a peasant in China, a working person on a manufacturing assembly line in Japan, or a software engineer working hard and saving in India. Yes, it is these countries that are giving us the money that we call “our money” since we are in debt … 100% of every dollar that we receive is essentially attributed to paying off the debt.
The second element we hear about our money is in Social Security. We know that Social Security is likely to be broke or so we hear. Well, that’s because Social Security is run on the Enron accounting principle whereby we can use the money but not have to account for it. Since Social Security is largely a program—although separately accounted for—backed by the full faith and credit of the country, it is a debt. And when we move money from one part of Social Security that is obligatory to another that is contributory, we’re actually planning to borrow money to make up the difference. Again, from these same helpful people, a worker in China, a software engineer in India, and so forth, it is their money that we’re using not ours.
And of course, when we’re told to buy more mortgages to increase spending, take the equity out of our houses, as we were told three or four years ago, and thereby increase borrowing, we are taking cash that is provided by these same people in other countries, emerging countries, developing countries, and usually from poor people there, and they’re supporting the rich people here. Yes, it’s their money and not ours.
The notion that you have money, that government may allot or withdraw, is wrong. You don’t have money, you owe money and this is merely an in-transfer payment of an increase in debt. Yes, one of the big lies is that there is such a thing as “your money.”
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Lies Series: War on Terror
Every time I hear the expression “war on terror,” I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. The laughing comes because one person’s terrorist is another person’s patriot. And “terrorists” have been used to disparage people who are generally fighting from a weakened position but employing tactics that are disapproved of by the accepted majority. To George III, the Green Mountain Boys fighting for the American independence were terrorists because they didn’t wear acceptable red coats to be easily seen; they didn’t stand up to be shot at, rather hid behind trees; and they were not part of an established state. So they were terrorists and they engaged in terror. I suspect that they didn’t take very many prisoners, because I’ve never heard of a revolutionary war prison run by our patriots.
Terrorism isn’t really a thing; it’s a practice. It reminds me of the difference between sneezing and colds: you can have a war on sneezing instead of a war on colds. The notion that you have to describe anything you’re against as a “war” is also to the extreme. You can attempt to deter terrorism. You can attempt to de-fang it, defuse it. You can attempt to mollify the influences of terrorism, but you don’t have to fight it in the sense of killing people. But rather when you say “war,” that establishes a principle of war powers, and war powers are easier under which to govern than those procedures without war powers. So that’s the reason we use the reference to war when it really isn’t a war.
Instead, terrorism as a tactic has been disabused by treaties: the treaties against gassing as a war tactic, that says we don’t do it; the non-proliferation treaty, which the United States has just disparaged with its arrangement with India, was an attempt to take terror out of wartime practice; and it is pretty clear to most people that the activities against the Jews of the Holocaust period was a terror tactic by Hitler. But similarly, the tactics used by Israel against civilian populations in Lebanon, cluster bombs and the like, is just as much a terror tactic as those perpetrated against the Israelis in an earlier time.
Terror is complicated. It need not be a war. It need not be identified with particular people. But rather it needs to be understood carefully, thoughtfully, and dealt with in a methodical fashion. Instead, we’re lashing out and we’re confusing terror with other things. But the element of the lie is that it makes it easier to govern, and that provides the excuse for all of these misrepresentations as to what the implications of terror are. We shouldn’t fall for it.
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Lies Series: Reform and Democracy
Mantras of the day suggest that the US is rabidly in favor of reform and democracy – and that they go together. I wonder if that’s really true. Think of the widespread movement in Latin America towards more left-wing governments: the election of Chavez in Venezuela, good buddies with the ailing Fidel Castro; Bolivia’s turn to the left and also towards more autocratic behavior; the election of Lopez in Brazil, a distinctly socialist-oriented government, democratically elected. The same thing is happening at a slightly slower pace in Argentina. Of course the economies are also improving but that’s perhaps largely because these are resource-based economies so we can’t attribute an economic improvement to left versus right movement. But democratic process in Latin America is bringing a movement to the left, not to the right as we might hope.
And the United States-sent Israel instantly cut off the democratic government in Palestine when Hamas, which was the only respected authority to the Palestinian citizens lacking in corruption (which the Fatah did), was elected. What did we do? We immediately suggested that it was impotent by cutting off money going to it. Rather than welcoming Hamas, even with its anti-Israeli plank in its constitution, we should have welcomed it into the political fold. We pushed it back into the realm of violence.
No, as far as the world is concerned we don’t like democracies and we certainly don’t like democracies when they produce results that seem to be alien to us. As far as reform is concerned, yes, we mean reform only in our direction. We have been in favor of the United Nations reform because it is a bloated international civil service as most of the organizations that grew out of the end of World War II—WTO, the United Nations, and the World Bank—have an upper echelon of very well-cared-for civil servants who are holding on to their jobs and they refuse to reform their structure.
The reform in the United Nations on the other hand is not so much to just get rid of the employees but rather to challenge the continuation of veto power by the five superpowers. It’s rather clear that India should have a vote as a vetoing member, as well as perhaps Brazil in Latin America, as the United States, China, Russia, France and England do now. Certainly France and England do not seem, as world powers, to warrant the vote when the others do not. So the voting structure of the United Nations needs to be reformed but we won’t touch that third rail, will we? Instead, we’re merely tackling the struggling but well-minded Kofi Annan as he tries to make modest changes in the UN.
The reform that takes place around the world seems strange in the sense that most of our friends in the world are not necessarily democracies but rather they are – if you look at the guest lists at the White House, places like Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and the like – run by autocrats. A picture of George Bush with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia holding hands is typical of the relationships that we have, the comfortable relationship that we have with dictators as a practical matter. The relationships that we have with publicly, popularly-elected democratic governments, especially when they are populist, is far more tenuous. And even those, in Eastern Europe and Russia when they were elected, tended to slip back into more autocratic paths. No the United States continues to espouse reform and democracy in our speeches but in our practice, we say we don’t believe in it.
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Lie Series: Defense Spending Equals Support For Our Brave Troops
Well over half of the US budget, we really don’t know the exact amount – it’s something on the order of $500 billion or so – is related to defense spending. The US spends more money than any other country in the world, or even more remarkably, more than the rest of the world put together. Yes, we have a very large killing machine, although it’s bogged down now and our old principle of being able to carry on two operations at once has been blown out of the water. We know we can only carry on one, which is Iraq. And when we rattle the saber against Iran, Iran is smart enough to know that we are indeed, a paper tiger.
Now, for a politician, defense spending is sacrosanct. Anything that is said against defense spending is considered to be a third rail: touch it and you lose because you’re not supporting our troops in battle. Furthermore, support for defense spending means support for employment as most districts have defense of some kind. Boston has Raytheon and the like. New London in Connecticut of course has Electric Boat, which makes advanced submarines. California is loaded – it makes almost everything. Remember that General Eisenhower, no shrinking violet, warned upon leaving office that America might become subject to its military defense establishment, not the other way around, that they would be subject to the United States.
And it is interesting to see what are the defense connections in the United States. Carlyle Corporation, a large venture capital firm noted for its political connections largely with the Republican party, with the original President Bush on its advisory board and many other politicians, is perhaps the largest owner of defense stocks in the country, and continues to add to that portfolio. Our vice president, Cheney, is quite well documented in terms of his association with Halliburton, which has more than quadrupled in the last six years, the time of this administration, and Cheney continues to receive compensation as a former, pensioned, CEO of Halliburton which has received a number of suspicious no-bid contracts from the military, almost anywhere in the world. But that’s not the point.
The point is that we’ve reached the stage where any question raised about defense spending in order to save money is considered to be a black mark against a politician because it means he’s not supporting the troops. Far better to build submarines in New London to guard against a super adversary, which we don’t have, when adversaries come with shoe bombs rather than cruise missiles. And we must remember also that attached to defense spending bills are a plethora of earmarks, local pork … these pork projects have the approval of somebody who’s continued survival as a politician locally depends upon that project. So on a double basis defense spending means jobs in the defense industry; it means pork for the local industry; oh, even more than that of course it means that if you are not identified with defense spending you’re not supporting our troops who are bravely acting as targets in Iraq and elsewhere.
Yes, this is one of the big lies … the lie that all defense spending equals something that should not be touched. Defense spending should be looked at as critically, maybe even more than anything else.
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Lie Series: Human Rights
Human rights. Of course we’re in favor of human rights—I’ve commented on this recently—going back to the original addition of human rights to the United Nations plank at the insistence of Eleanor Roosevelt in 1946. And I’ve also commented on the most recent restructuring of the United Nations Council on Human Rights, numbering 47 members; the United States did not receive enough votes for election to that because of our bad human rights position. Yet, we still repeat in speeches that we’re in favor of human rights. We forget that the world thinks of us as being the custodians of Guantánamo Bay prison. And Abu Ghraib, with the vivid pictures of abuse that have not been repudiated by the American administration, stripped away any credibility that we have on the issue of human rights. The US is one of the few countries that did not join the International Court of Justice. Why? Because we were afraid we would be prosecuted. And it does appear from the events that have occurred most recently that there’s some risk that we would be prosecuted under the provisions of that international court. So human rights is a very, very frail thing.
The US used to dominate as one of the pillars of soft power, the moral position that the US had around the world. And now we don’t have it. We’ve lost the soft power. In fact our hard power, military and the like, is bogged down and is essentially impotent. As one Swiss said to me recently, referring to human rights and other things that America used to have as a high moral ground: “When will you give us back the America that we admired; we knew we could no longer attain the position of America but we thought that was our model to strive to be. When will it come back?” I don’t know. But in the case of human rights, we repeat the mantra and think we are good, but that’s because many of our violations of human rights are hidden, not open.
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Lie Series: One Person, One Vote
The United States espouses democracy and stands as the bulwark in demonstrating that democracy works. Doesn’t it? After all, we have one of the highest standards of living in the world, and we talk about the merits of democracy with the same fervor that the Soviet Communists used to speak about the merits of their system through the Comintern when they were trying to spread state Communism throughout the world. The hallmark of democracy, as understood by almost everyone, is the principle of one person, one vote. The single individual is no more important than any other single individual. Everybody has a single vote to cast regardless of money, education, status or whatever. However, is that true in the United States? I have a hard time explaining how the US could have elected a president who receives 500,000 votes less than his challenger. And yet he did. I explained the Electoral College and how that works and why it was designed in a civil war period to protect the interests of the agrarian states. In fact before that it was even part of the compromise that led to the introduction of slavery in some states and not in others. And we are still saddled with that whereby a vote in Montana or Wyoming is more important than a vote cast in the state of New York or California. Furthermore, votes on a national basis, even for the Senate, are apportioned according to states, not to population.
And we can see the impact of that when the apportionment of funds to protect against another terrorist attack is based not on the prospect of a terrorist attack but on the voting power of individual states which may be quite different. Therefore Nebraska may not have too much of a threat for a terrorist attack but is receiving proportionally even more funds for antiterrorist activities than New York City. One person, one vote is important. Does it work in the midst of lobbying when lobbying funds may be allocated according to commercial interests? The person who controls corporate funds and has an intense corporate interest may have more influence than a single vote. Yes, there are flaws in our system. We know they’re there, and we allow them to exist. They explain things like farming subsidies for things like corn, which we want to use for ethanol; they explain so many things and we don’t do anything to change it. Are we really acting as a demonstration of democracy and the principle of one person, one vote? Most people in the world don’t think so.
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Lie Series: Rule of Law
One important mantra of the United States is “rule of law.” I can remember when I was a member of financial delegations going to China and Russia, before I became commercially involved there, that the American government always used “rule of law” as one of it opening remarks on the superiority of the American system in commenting to Chinese and Russians. In the case of rule of law, yes, it means predictability. It means that for business transactions you know in advance what the rules of the game will be and you accommodate yourself to that. It means that the rule has gone though a process of rationalization to serve the greatest good for the greatest number of people. It also means that it’s written down somewhere so it can be understood, studied, and criticized. That’s very fine.
However, the United States recently has abrogated the rule of law upon so many occasions that when we use the term outside the United States it is considered hypocritical. Certainly, holding people without habeas corpus, whether they be suspected terrorists or not, is not considered to be part of the rule of law in the United States. Certainly, the way in which votes may be bought through lobbying efforts and PACs is not perceived to be part of the rule of law. And, as explained by our president, the rule of law with respect to international treaties can be broken at the sole discretion of the United States whenever that law is inconvenient for the United States. And so we did recently in the case of granting special favors to India although it had violated provisions of the nuclear nonproliferation agreement. Our activities with the World Trade Organization emphasize bilateral negotiations rather than multilateral negotiations. That’s not the rule of law. And the number of cases that we wink at even in this now widely publicized immigration affairs where it is well known that something in excess of five percent of our population is here under other than the rule of law. The principle is that we have great flexibility in the rule of law. And of course, most recently the discussion on torture, or what now the president calls “alternative interrogation procedures” is a violation of what we normally used to consider the rule of law.
Rule of law, in other words, is flexible. It tends to be based upon who’s saying it, and how much latitude they are giving it. So long as the rule of law is separate from the administration, is separate from a single corporation, is separate from Congress, then that’s fine. But when they can be combined, and when through 800 signing statements a president can say “well, this law that’s just been passed by Congress; I’m not going to act on it,” that’s a violation of the rule of law and it should show us up as hypocrites.
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Lie Series: Stay The Course
For most of the five years of the Iraq war, the mantra of the administration has been the merits of “stay the course:” continue on in the same methods, processes, direction, as at the beginning and an outcome will be successful, in fact assured. This swept away any argument about accountability for mistakes at the beginning and was intended to enlist the combined support and patriotism of everybody toward a single successful long-term outcome. Of course, “long-term” was never carefully defined and could be well into the next administration according to our president. Staying the course is a valuable practice when the course is correct and this durability and stability is rewarded by patience such as exhibited frequently by Orientals. However, stay the course is not necessarily a Western tradition, which tends to try things that will work, or not, and adjust, usually adjusting people along the way when the outcomes seem to have been as universally poor as the war in Iraq has been both from its initiation, except for the first sweep, as well as in the adjustment of the Western thought mentality where the Arab process and adjustment, so that the United States has gone from being a liberator, if it ever was that, to being a universally hated occupier.
And the terrorist movement has spread from what the president said were a few interlopers in the beginning to now a widespread global influence that sweeps through more than 50 countries in the world; roughly 25% of all countries are considered to have a major terror movement present within their borders. That was not the case five years ago. The US has been the best recruiting agent for Al Qaeda, which may not be a training place but is a highly motivational factor. And whereas two years ago our president thought so little of bin Laden he hardly mentioned the name and said, well, he’s not worth catching anyway, hiding out in the Stylus machine and the Tora Bora Mountains of Afghanistan, to just most recently mentioning his name 18 times in a 40-minute speech. He even remembers that bin Laden’s words are worth repeating although he would not even remotely consider meeting with him, but he reads his words though he did not repeat what bin Laden said two years ago that his goal was not so much to kill Americans as it was to bankrupt America; and he could do so because we spend so much money defending against him and he spends so little money offensively against us.
That line was not repeated by President Bush but was repeated on a recent news program by Andrea Mitchell. I was glad to see that it was brought up again and maybe it’s not surprising that it would be mentioned by the wife of the most immediate former Federal Reserve chairman, that our risk was not in being killed, but in being bankrupted. The notion of staying the course when it is wrong may satisfy the existing administration because, as the expression goes, it kicks the can down the street. The next move that is made, it could be said, will produce an outcome that is unfavorable. All outcomes are unfavorable in Iraq. Most outcomes, at least in the immediate and intermediate term for the war on terror, are unfavorable. And if we tie down the next move to one of these unfavorable outcomes, whoever does it will seemingly be blamed for it. That implies that there are any favorable outcomes. In fact, there are none. All outcomes are unfavorable, some less unfavorable than others. Our job is to pick among a series of poor choices.
Yes, it will be seen, if the United States leaves Iraq in a state of virulent civil war and I guess that may well be the case now, that it is cutting and running. Well, is that worse than being bogged down, unable to assert military authority anywhere else in the world, given the fact that we spend more money for our military than all the rest of the nations of the world put together? Which is worse, being stuck in a quagmire, or cutting and running and resuming the flexibility to do something again? In military history the idea, under all circumstances, is to save the army, even if it is necessary to retreat. Don’t just stay to be annihilated. Staying the course is fine so long as we are dealing with a steady enemy. But as the recent propaganda expressions reflect from the administration, we’re dealing with a flexible enemy, an enemy who has learned how to change and adapt. Should we not change and adapt as well? And one of those adaptations may well be to consider all options including leaving.
As we love to say, all options are on the table. I wonder if the option of leaving Iraq when we can do no good there is one of those. Staying the course doesn’t mean anything by itself. A fresh process of thinking about outcomes is very good. Bush is the doctrinaire person who has a sense of destiny; Cheney is the tactician. We should be talking to Cheney about outcomes because he understands more about change and adaptation than does somebody who is doctrinaire and may be tarred with it through history. There is much to be learned about what it means to stay the course.
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Lie Series: Democracies Don't Make War
Like most Westerners, democracy appeals to me more than other forms of government. But in most parts of the world, the parts without clean water, electricity, shelter, medical care and education, these other things come first. In the case of China for example, it was far more important to deliver basic services to the population of 1.2, 1.3 billion people, than it was to worry about the political process. And in the case of Russia in the transition, there was concern about the political process first, and then services later. And low and behold in the case of Russia, it fell back to something other than democracy, and it appears to be an autocracy run by the oligarchs for business purposes. I don’t think we can presume that most of the world has a favoritism for democracy as we do, and I’m not even sure for that matter that it is true for Westerners. It may be changing, for example, in Latin America. But furthermore, the presumption that democracies do not make war may be incorrect.
After all, the most recent example of a discretionary war is the United States, certainly in Iraq, and many people would consider that our invasion of Afghanistan was discretionary because it wasn’t necessarily Afghanistan who destroyed property and lives in the United States but rather a resident within the state, being Al Qaeda, or at least Al Qaeda-inspired if not Al Qaeda-operational. And that distinction still is a little bit on the fuzzy side. But we made war on a discretionary basis, certainly in the case of Iraq, and we are a democracy. In fact we are the model democracy for the world or have been until quite recently. Other cases we have to remember: when Germany started to swallow up land in Europe, Lebensraum, it was a democracy. It freely elected the Führer as Chancellor, and it was the Reichstag which gave him full powers following the burning of the Reichstag, which was perhaps comparable to our World Trade Center bombing … although in the case of the Reichstag it later came out there was some suspicion as to whether it was really set by the Bolsheviks and the gays or whether by the government itself in order to provide an excuse to generate fear and an excuse to clamp down on the population. But no matter. It was a democracy at the time Germany decided to go on the march and swallow up Europe; it became a dictatorship in the process.
Well, individuals were willing to give up their free rights as individuals for collective security. Sound similar to the United States? Yes it does. Even in the case of Japan. Although Japan was ruled by the military under the theocratic protection of the emperor, it did have a Diet, which exercised political power and when it went to war against the United States. The political structure was in favor of it because Japan needed raw materials which the United States starved Japan of in response to its attacks in China. And throughout history there have been a number of cases where democracies went to war – Argentina going after the Falkland Islands and generating the anger of the UK which to their surprise was willing to come into this. Democracies had not been immune to going out to war that perhaps may be seen after the fact as being a motive for generating popular support for an unpopular democratic government.
What is the function of a democracy? It’s not to impose the will of the majority after the majority has asserted itself politically but rather it is to protect the rights of the minorities. Government has to stand against the majorities to protect individuals and minority rights. We misunderstand that today in America. We think that when we hold an election and we elect the majority, if the majority happens to be Shia we may not like it because they’re associated with Iranians; if the majority happens to be Hamas in Palestine we may not like it because they are associated with getting rid of Israel. But in the majority of cases we think that if you hold an election that is a democratic process, we should go along with the will of the majority.
We forget things like the Bill of Rights and the understanding of our own Constitution where the role of government was not to express the will of the majority which really didn’t need much help anyway but rather was to protect those with a minor voice or no voice at all. That is what a democracy is all about whether we like it or not.
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Lie Series: Compassionate Conservative
Do you remember “compassionate conservative”? This was a mantra from the first Bush administration, the electioneering that ran up to the election and beginning of the first term. It was an invention of Karen Hughes and Karl Rove and it was a good one. It combined two seemingly opposing forces. After all compassionate is supposed to be generous, and conservative lets people stay on their own; it’s not associated with government largesse. Yes, the compassionate is sort of out of date following the vivid images of Katrina, the images of torture and our associations with the brutal bombing by our ally Israel in the Middle East. It doesn’t seem very compassionate. We can also think in the more statistical terms of the steady widening of the income brackets, with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Not very compassionate. And conservative, that’s good; most of us are conservative – I border on the libertarian side – and think that government should be called upon to do, you know, as little as possible.
But that means small government and our government budget has swollen, of course due to the so-called war on terror, and war is a good catchall in which to throw a bunch of things. But even in terms of social services and everything else, it has swollen. I don’t think there’s been an earmarked pork project that has been turned down in the past several years. So government has grown; we have reorganized. Following 9/11 we created the Homeland Security Department, which didn’t accomplish a whole lot. We still can’t have first responders communicate with each other despite the fact that they are under the same cabinet office. It really didn’t accomplish a hell of a lot except it removed the civil service from the 170,000 employees in the Homeland Security Department.
Yes, “compassionate conservative” was one of those marvelous, winning phrases that had the right sound but the wrong meaning. It just didn’t fit the facts. And when it didn’t fit the facts it just had to wither away. It couldn’t stand up to the test that even big lies can get away with. “Compassionate conservative” is something for the history books.
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Lie Series: Bring To Justice
We’ve heard, thousands of times, members of the US administration say how successful we have been at bringing terrorists to justice. We say that when we kill them, as in the sons of Saddam Hussein, or Chalawi (?), or we say it when we lock them up and throw the key away in Guantánamo Bay or the former secret sites which look an awful lot like they were indeed in Poland, Romania and maybe more recently, Libya. Of the more recent people we have incarcerated, not a single one has been brought to justice in the traditional sense of having a trial. The American justice system is based upon protagonists. The prosecutor and the defense attorneys argue in front of a jury or a panel of judges or whatnot in the case of a military tribunal, and out of that argument, which is based on common law of the British variety, comes a decision.
Napoleonic code establishes the decision pretty much ahead of time on the basis of law, with prescribed punishments that tend to go along from the top down. But that’s not our system. Our system has an argument and it is a fair argument with equal rules set up ahead of time of the introduction of evidence and what is considered to be necessary in order to come out with the right decision. Justice is not part of an arbitrary thing of just an arrest. Nor is it part of revenge as in having the people who are from 9/11 or the like around to gloat over the plight of people who have been locked up for five years with no recourse. No. In our system revenge has no part of it. Feel good has no part of it. But rather it is an attempt to establish a system whereby other perpetrators of similar crimes would think twice, more than twice, about committing the same crime. It is done for prevention, not revenge. Yes, punishment because it keeps bad guys or bad women off the streets so they don’t do it again, but mostly as a way of prevention.
It’s pretty clear that this system of bringing people to justice that we’ve done recently hasn’t deterred too many terrorists. There are more terrorists around now than there were a year ago, more then than the year before that, and so on. Whatever it is that we’re doing seems to be breeding terrorists rather than inhibiting them. Yes, we keep repeating the mantra: “bring to justice.” But what kind of justice is it? Is it justice for the government that justifies the actions that seemingly are producing bad results? That could be. Is it justice for the perpetrator? No, because we don’t really know who’s there. For example, the now famous Ahmed, (?) bodyguard of bin Laden, was up to be executed. Probably he’s not a very important figure and most of the people who seemingly may have been picked up on the battlefield or otherwise in Pakistan or Afghanistan because there was a $10,000 bounty by the CIA. Is justice the information that is extracted with extraordinary interrogation techniques? Or is it just because people will say anything when they’re being waterboarded? We don’t know. Eventually we’re going to find out.
But meanwhile the mantra bringing people to justice has to be questioned – justice of what kind and for whom and to what purpose? Thus far those are not asked and we certainly don’t have the answers.
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Lie Series: Sacrifice
I know the color’s a little funny (of the video) and that’s because I’m sitting outside overlooking the lake. There’s an airplane above me doing aerobatics, he’s just done an emblem and before that he rolled out at the top of his loop. You may hear him from time to time.
But I wanted to talk about sacrifice. Clearly I’m not sacrificing now. It’s a Sunday afternoon over the lake, and, like many Americans, I’m enjoying the weekend. But, isn’t it true that in wartime Americans are supposed to sacrifice? Yes, I have been drafted and served my time in the army; that was a sacrifice. I didn’t want to do it, but I did. And taxes are generally supposed to go up, but I’ve enjoyed three tax cuts in the last five years. So clearly that hasn’t been a sacrifice. But, is this wartime and I’m sacrificing? No, not yet. Why is that?
People in Iraq are sacrificing. They are out in the desert. Look at the way they’re dressed. They’re dressed like men from Mars. The Iraqis are walking around wearing white, rather than camouflage; the white reflects the sun, loose fitting. I know because I’ve been in Allain in the far sections of the United Arab Emirates and I wore white too, and loose fitting. I can’t imagine wearing the camouflage clothes that are being worn by the soldiers. And they’re getting killed, a couple of thousand of them, 2600 to be exact, more than 2600. About 19,000 of them were seriously wounded so their lives will be affected. Yes, they’re sacrificing and our future generations will sacrifice because the debt that has increased from $5 trillion to $7 trillion will have to be paid by future generations. They’ll sacrifice but I’m not sacrificing.
The lie is that in wartime you have to sacrifice. We’re demonstrating, the American people, that you don’t sacrifice, you don’t have to. You should when you have a national referendum and national support for a war effort; you should sacrifice. But I’m not, and nor are most Americans. We don’t like the war but we’re not sacrificing so it’s not a daily irritant. Oh my goodness, there goes that airplane into a spin. He’ll pull out nicely, over the lake. No, he’s not sacrificing either. He’s burning up fuel and that’s being used to send money to the insurgents and others in the Middle East who are being pests to us. It’s a nice Sunday afternoon here. There’s no sacrifice here. There should be.
Big
Lies Series Ends: Impact on the Liar
This video will end my series on the big lies. I really never thought the series would be this long and it could be twice or three times the size. I’m not running out of lies that are repeated and become part of our national established conversation. But I am embarrassing myself by finding so many of them. And so I’m bringing it to an end, by commenting not on a lie, but the worst effect of the lies. That is the effect the lies have not on us, the lied-to, but on the liars, the people who speak the lies themselves. Yes, they may start out speaking lies because they think that it’s important public relations and it’s part of their job to boost morale but as they repeat it over and over again it becomes part of their own mental set. They believe: you know what the expression is, “you’re in trouble when you believe your own beep beep,” I’ll let you fill in the blanks. Yes, this is true in government; it’s also true in business.
The problem becomes that the repeat of a public relations statement that is divorced from reality, takes the speaker away from reality and reduces the effectiveness of that speaker’s ability to make decisions. I’ve seen this happen in corporations where right up until the last minute and beyond the last minute they believed that their job was to motivate the existing employees, other managements, customers and the like. It’s possible that had something to do with what happened to Ken Lay at Enron. And managements who espouse the view publicly that they’re running the company in favor of shareholders and yet then go ahead and predate or postdate, as the case may be, stock options to give special deals to individual managements who say they’re running a company fairly on the basis of shareholders is just not true. And yet they probably believe it. They probably believe that cooking the books to enhance reported earnings per share, although it has the effect of increasing their bonuses, perhaps more than a survey of cash books would do, they may think that that’s for the good of the company. But in the long run, it’s not.
But they repeat it over and over when they run the cheerleader function, and leadership and a chief executive’s job become counterproductive. And it removes from them the ability to make decisions. So I worry not so much about us, the lied-to, in this climate where lies are so plentiful, but I worry about the effect on the liars. How can they perform for us if they learn that they are in a world of make-believe, make-believe of their own creation but after a while that creation becomes real. And the reality, as we said when we started, becomes the perception and that causes problems.