Consumer demand, not business tax cuts, creates jobs

Consumer purchases can be boosted by tax cuts, livable wage laws and higher wages for workers in general. The last thing you would want to do is give consumers indirect tax increases by lowering business taxes (the revenue loss must be made up by higher taxes for those not included in the incentive) or by taking consumer tax monies and literally handing them over to businesses to do with as they please. In addition, consumer financed subsidies for businesses interfere with the free market by artificially supporting weak businesses rather than letting the marketplace determine which ones produce a desirable good or service.

Each dollar spent by consumers requires someone to invent, manufacture, package, ship, advertise and display the item purchased. For services, each dollar spent has the ripple effect of supporting technical or professional training, office space for the rendering of the service, and all the jobs associated with the maintenance of both the services supplied and the personnel that work in the offices. All this economic activity creates jobs.

So, the next time you hear a politician or businessman announce a new business tax incentive, realize that they have just increased your taxes (to make up the loss in revenue). If we were to instead increase household spending by increasing household income, business would gladly and enthusiastically supply the goods and services consumers desire. Increasing supply does not increase economic activity; it is demand that creates jobs.

More at ALL BUSINESS

Stronger Working Class = Stronger Economy

To start off, I’m not an economist, nor have I ever claimed to be one. Right now in our history we are at a crossroad. There are people out there that will tell you the model our economy has been running on for the last thirty years or so is just fine…I call Bullshit! Whatever you want to call it, be it trickle-down, supply-side, voodoo or the ever popular reaganomics, they are all the same thing. Giving to the wealthy, be it through tax breaks or incentives, allowing outsourcing, and dereg­u­lation to just name a few. The theory is that with all this extra or freed up capital wealthy individuals or businesses would reinvest by creating more jobs and oppor­tunity. This has been proven time and time again that it just doesn’t work. As my father used to say, “Trickle-down economics doesn’t trickle down to us.” What most people don’t realize is that one of the ways the rich stay rich is by being incredibly cheap and stingy. So, if they get a huge tax break do you really think they’re going to put it into a business? In most cases, no.

There is also another economic policy that has been practiced in this country tradi­tionally known as “Laissez-faire”, which translates into “Let it be”. Meaning, let industry be free from government inter­vention of any kind. This is a “Hands-Off” system that has failed time and time again, most recently in 2008 with our economic meltdown, which we are still feeling today…at least I know I am. We can not trust that industry will do the right thing, ethics in business is dead. It is up to the american people and our government to become the stewards of our economy through regulation. Because, if it was up to “Big Business” we’d all be in chains, working 16 hour shifts, for pennies a day.

Now, there is another way of thinking, I’m not exactly sure what it is classified as, but I like to call it “common sense.” Think of a house, for a house to be able to stand the test of time there must be a strong foundation, if you build your house on the sand, it will surely sink and fall. Our economy is like a house, the working class is its foundation, if you have a poorly treated and meagerly paid working class it is just like building your house on sand…the economy will sink and fall. If you look back in history, our economy is strongest when the working class has strong Union repre­sen­tation. When people make a higher wage they are more likely to buy back into our economy, meaning spend money on goods and services, hence creating a stronger economy. And the rich will still make lots and lots of money…

There are other factors to consider as well, our manufac­turing sector has been decimated by the hands-off policies and free trade agreements of the past. 2.4 million jobs lost to China since the year 2000, that is unacceptable. And some of it has to do with China lowering the worth of its currency, which makes our American goods very expensive and Chinese goods very cheap. Our government has been trying to convince the Chinese to stop this practice to make things fair again. I doubt China will change the way it does business. What may have to happen for things to balance out is the government should impose heavy tariffs on Chinese imports to equalize the pricing with american goods. There by making it a level playing field for American manufac­turers to compete in the market. This could quite possibly create a boom for the american manufac­turing industry, and we may get many of our jobs back that we lost.

Some people take the loss of our manufac­turing sector way too lightly. There are the obvious effects of hurting working families and local economies. But, there is another very damaging effect of losing manufac­turing in this country. Our country is becoming a nation of consumers, we buy this, we buy that…but what do we make? If we are ever caught in an economic blockade or embargo, we would be, for lack of a better term…SCREWED.

So, we’re at a crossroad in our economic history. Do we keep running things as we have been, or do we choose to create something better for those we leave behind?

The Beer Party

The Individual Mandate Backlash And Conservative Hysteria

Starting in the early 1980s, up through well into 2009, the individual mandate was an eminently respectable Republican position, embraced by conservative policy wonks and leading Republicans. Since then, virtually the whole of the conservative movement has coalesced around the position that the individual mandate is not merely misguided but actually unconstitutional, a fact conservatives somehow overlooked during the previous three decades.

Indeed, conservatives now believe that the policy they once embraced (or at least tolerated) would amount to an abrogation of the very principle of limited government. The conservative argument, reflected in Republican judge Henry Hudson’s ruling against the individual mandate, is that purchasing health insurance is the ultimate individual decision, and that abridging this liberty would, in Hudson’s words, “invite unbridled exercise of federal police powers.” If the individual mandate is permissible, writes George Will, then “Congress can doanything - eat your broccoli, or else - and America no longer has a limited government.” Megan McArdle echoes, “On a reading of the commerce clause that allows the government to force you to buy insurance from a private company, what can't the government force you to do?”

This is the intellectual rationale for the hysterical conservative response to the pasaage of health care reform. By this line of reasoning, the individual mandate springs from a paternalistic desire to compel individuals to engage in behavior that affects nobody but themselves.

But of course, the decision not to purchase health insurance is the very opposite. Those who forego health insurance are forcing the rest of us to cover their costs if they exercise their right to be treated in an emergency room. They are also forcing the rest of us to pay higher insurance rates, now that insurance companies can no longer exclude those with preexisting conditions. That, of course, is exactly why conservatives supported it for so long.

Conservatism's sudden lurch from supporting (or tolerating) the individual mandate to opposing it as a dagger in the heart of freedom is a phenomenon that merits not intellectual analysis but psychoanalysis. This is simply how conservatives respond in the face of every liberal advance. At such moments the nation is always teetering on the precipice between freedom and socialism. The danger never comes to pass, yet no lesson is ever learned. We simply progress intermittently from hysterical episode to hysterical episode.


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Are We On The Cusp Of A New Age Of Rage?

For a while now, I have been commenting how America is ruled by a wealthy elite. The top 5% or so of Americans are watching their wealth increase while everyone else suffers job loss, home repossession, and a declining lifestyle. 

This decline in the fortunes of the vast majority of Americans obviously has a very, very bad effect upon the lives of Americans. Crime, suicides, family violence, homelessness...... all increase as the American Dream vanishes.

I agree with Paul Watson that we are beginning to see a new age of rage due to the dominance of the wealthy elite over the rest of us.

As Gerald Celente has often warned, when Americans lose everything, they will start to lose it, and nowhere was that more apparent than in the case of Clay Duke, the 56-year-old gunman who opened fire on school board members in protest against his wife being fired and his unemployment benefits running out.

Duke spray-painted a V for Vendetta sign on the wall before brandishing a gun and telling everyone apart from the school board members to leave the room.

The response to this tragic series of events from both the establishment left and the establishment right will undoubtedly be to try and portray Duke as a nutcase conspiracy theorist whose views are an example of why free speech on the Internet needs to be curtailed, despite the fact that both on his Facebook page and another website he recommended, Duke promoted websites from across the political spectrum, including Media Matters, who are usually the first to exploit tragic events like these to sling mud at their political adversaries.

The fact that no one was injured and that Duke ultimately claimed his own life has contributed to him becoming a martyr in the Michael Douglas Falling Down mould rather than being considered a deranged lunatic, and Facebook pages in his honor are already attracting members. Duke was stopped when shots from a security guard wounded him, before he took his own life. Despite the fact that it was a gun that stopped the rampage, Time Magazine and others are already blaming the tragedy on the Second Amendment.

In a de-facto online suicide note posted on Facebook, Duke railed against the financial terrorists that prompted him to take such a drastic course of action.

“I was just born poor in a country where the Wealthy manipulate, use, abuse, and economically enslave 95% of the population. Rich Republicans, Rich Democrats… same-same… rich… they take turns fleecing us… our few dollars… pyramiding the wealth for themselves,” he wrote. “The 95%… the us, in US of A, are the neo slaves of the Global South. Our Masters, the Wealthy, do, as they like to us…”

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The American Empire Is Collapsing, And Americans Will Be The Last to Know

50 years from now historians will probably be writing about the fall of the American empire. But history is writing itself furiously in the present, accelerated by the revolution of global freedom of information. What would have taken years to unlikely gather is accessible to anyone with a few strokes on a computer keyboard. So never mind the historians of the future, and let's see how reality is shaping up today.

The crumbling period of the United States empire started on September 11th. Since then, a chain of events so dire occurred that it would seem the empire defeated itself by a series of catastrophic mistakes. After 9/11,  Americans wanted revenge, and the war in Afghanistan became a very easy sale for the Bush administration. But then the neo-cons seized the opportunity to push their agenda  of the New American Century project, and it was precisely the Achille’s heel  of the empire.

Attacking Iraq: The Biggest Geopolitical Blunder In History

When the Bush administration attacked Iraq in 2003, a critical element escaped their understanding of the regional and demographic parameters: By toppling the Sunni regime of Saddam Hussein, they would give the upper hand to the oppressed Shia Iraqi majority allied with Iran.

In a word, the US troops who fought and died in the conflict did it ultimately for the regional benefit of the Iranian Islamic Republic. The blunders did not stop with geopolitics, but were compounded by a catastrophic financial burden.

The Cost Of Wars in Iraq And Afghanistan Is Bankrupting The US Economy

If the Pentagon was a corporation, it would be the largest in the world. The curiously called, Department Of Defense, costs the  American taxpayers, since the ill advised attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, around $700 billion a year. Of course, if you add up health care for wounded veterans, and  layers of new “security” administration such as the Department of Homeland Security,   the numbers keep adding up to top $1 trillion a year. Overall more than 25 percent of the federal budget gets swallowed in the financial black hole that is the Pentagon.

If Americans could do the math, they would quickly understand that the bill for the two wars is now creeping up to $10 trillion. In order to achieve the chimeric goals of the neocons of an ever lasting global American empire money had to be borrowed. Currently, for every dollar spent by the federal government 40 cents is borrowed. America used to borrow mainly from Japan and Europe. but now does its main borrowing from China. In a striking reversal of fortune, the “poor man of Asia” has now become the country in the world with the most liquid assets.

Empires Always Have An Expiration Date

Americans have a delusional  sense of historic exceptionalism which they share with most previous empires. After all America’s ascension to a leading role on the world scene is very recent. The deal was sealed in Yalta in 1945 between Stalin and Roosevelt, with Churchill present but already taking the back seat. In a matter of 5 years, and about 60 million deaths, two news empires had emerged from the ruin of three: the United States and the Soviet Union. On the losing side of history was, of course, Japan, the empire of the sun, but also Britain and France.

The old imperial powers of Britain and France were slow to fully understand the nature of the new game. It took the loss of India for the United Kingdom, in 1948,  and the one of Indochina for France in 1951 to make them understand that they would have from now on an ever shrinking role on the world stage. However, it took 9 years for Britain and France to fully digest the consequences of Yalta. In 1956, France and Britain took their very last joint imperialist venture by attacking Egypt over the ownership of the Suez Canal. The decaying empires were told to back off by the United States and the USSR.

A Repressive Capitalist Globalization Or The Revolution Of Global Freedom Of Information ?

The Cold War was a fairly predictable era. Beside a few crisis such as the flash point of  the Cuba missile crisis, the two super-powers fought to augment their respective turfs thought proxy wars. But Afghanistan came along for the Soviets, and the long war made the USSR collapsed. Naturally the United States started acting as the only super-power left, and for this reason as the master of the universe.

The narrative of Ronald Reagan is peppered by such elements, and so is the one of all of his successors including Barack Obama. But all empires had the same distorted visions of themselves, the Romans imposed the Pax Romana on their vassals for a long time, so did Charlemagne, and Napoleon for a much shorter time. In any sense, power is cyclical and never lasts.

Thanks to WikiLeaks and the courage of his founder Julian Assange and the one of  Pentagon’s whistleblower Bradley Manning, it has become rather obvious that while President Obama has changed the official tone of Washington from the Bush administration, the overall goals of US foreign policies have remained  the same: Ensure and expend  US power and authority on vassal states. This push to establish a new world order under exclusive US authority has been prevalent in all of the US administrations since Ronald Reagan and the end of the cold war.

President Obama, despite what could be his personal convictions is a prisoner of this imperial system. Obama is trapped by a complex nexus of inter-locking institutions such as the Pentagon, the CIA, the State Department etc, and by powerful interest groups profiting from endless wars. The very same institutions and interest groups have been at the core of every post-1945 imperial presidency. As early as 1946, president Harry Truman said: “From Darius’ Persia, Alexander’s Greece, Hadrian’s Rome, Victoria’s Britain; no nation or group of nations has had our responsibilities.”

However, most analysts and foreign policy experts currently assume that the present century will not be American. In this tectonic  power shift, under the push of China and India, the emerging new world order will be plural and decentralized. But the main question is: How Americans will adapt to this new paradigm where the United States loses its status of uncontested leadership?

AlterNet

Republican Admits Bush Tax Cut Extensions Are More Of A Priority Than 9/11 Workers’ Health

On Fox Business Network this morning, Don Imus aggressively questioned Senator — and possible presidential hopeful — John Thune (R-SD) about Republican obstruction of the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2010, which would provide desperately needed health care to those who volunteered to help at Ground Zero in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. Imus raised Daily Show host Jon Stewart’s recent point about Republicans who frequently invoke 9/11 imagery, but refuse to help the workers, and asked Thune how he could defend this refusal. Thune explained that preserving the Bush tax cuts was more of a priority:

IMUS: It seems to me and it seems to others that if we’re going to help anybody, we would certainly help these Americans who were the first responders to 9/11.

THUNE: The difference I think with the tax bill is there is a deadline, Jan. 1, we have to get this done, taxes go up on Jan. 1, that’s a matter of law. We need to get the issue addressed for the firefighters and the 9/11 victims and we will. But again there’s a right way and a wrong way to do this, and there’s a way in which you can pay for these things, and try and get this thing to where it doesn’t cost quite as much, where it doesn’t provide as much exposure, as much liability – there are some things in this bill that we think can be improved upon. We need an opportunity to do that.They want to rush through all these things at the end of the year, without debate, without amdendments, with the opportunity to go through a normal process. And I think we can do that, we can do many of these last-minute initiatives they’re trying to push through, we can do them next year.

IMUS: I know there’s a deadline on the tax situation, but there’s also a deadline on the health of these firemen and these police officers.

Thune’s admission that tax cuts are a higher priority is stunning, as are his admonitions against “rushing” the Zadroga bill. As Imus correctly notes, there’s a very real deadline on the health of 9/11 volunteers who are desperately awaiting health care assistance from the country they served over nine years ago. For example, just this fall, Joe Picurro, a 9/11 volunteer who was central to the push for health care assistance — and who himself suffered for years with little or no health care — passed away. As the New York Daily Newsreported:

Joe Picurro volunteered to cut steel at Ground Zero more than nine years ago. It cost him his life Friday morning. [...]

“He fought up until the day he went,” said wife Laura Picurro. “I’m going to miss him, like unbelievable.”

Because Picurro volunteered, he had to fight for years to get any aid after 9/11 charities closed.

Even as his lungs deteriorated and late-night rushes to the emergency rooms grew all too familiar, he and Laura still had to fight bureaucrats who refused to recognize the source of his problems. When he finally got workers’ compensation in 2006, he was down to his last nickel.

Laura had to scrimp, scrape and borrow to make ends meet, care for Joe – and stave off eviction. “I don’t know how we made it, still in this house, the lights still on,” she said, her voice cracking.

But Picurro’s tale made him one of the symbols of how the heroes of 9/11 were being forgotten. He joined the push on Congress to pass the James Zadroga Health and Compensation Act. His death was a blow to a community that has seen all too much tragedy, with hundreds of 9/11 responders having died over the years.

As the report notes, Picurro and other volunteers have been waiting for years for assistance from the federal government. Thune’s whining that Democrats are “rushing” the Zadroga bill through is patently ridiculous. The bill, or very similar versions, were first introduced in the House over four years ago, and have suffered repeated Republican obstruction ever since. Nevertheless, Thune apparently finds the preservation of low tax rates for the wealthy to be a more pressing matter.

Why WikiLeaks Matters

Leading US human rights lawyers Leonard Weinglass and Michael Ratner have joined the defense team for Julian Assange and Wikileaks. US officials are employing cyber-warfare and prosecutorial steps to deny any safe haven for the Wikileaks operation with a fervor comparable to their drone attacks on Al Qaeda havens in Pakistan and Yemen. WikiLeaks' Julian Assange was placed on Interpol's "most wanted" list as US authorities intensified efforts to suppress the whistleblower organization's deluge of classified US diplomatic cables. Assange's location was not immediately known. His choices are to turn himself in or be tracked down by local police. If outside of Sweden, he could face extradition on charges to stand trial there. Or the US could seek his extradiction on charges of espionage or theft of classified documents.

Two cyber-attacks have been reported against WikiLeaks servers this week. The Justice Department is seeking indictments on espionage charges from a grand jury quietly impaneled this week in arch-conservative Alexandria, Virginia. Assange is in London, facing rape and sexual harrassment charges in Sweden, which he denies. Extradition could be sought by the United States at any time from either venue.

Why is this drama important? Not because of "life-threatening" leaks, as claimed by the establishment, but because the closed doors of power need to be open to public review. We live increasingly in an Age of Secrecy, as described by Garry Wills inBomb Power, among recent books. It has become the American Way of War, and increasingly draws the curtains over American democracy itself. The wars in Pakistan and Yemen are secret wars. The war in Afghanistan is dominated by secret US Special Operations raids and killings. The CIA has its own secret army in Afghanistan. Gen. Stanley McChrystal's entire record in Iraq was classified. And so on, ad nauseam.

The Nation.

Aww, Poor Baby... John Boehner: Obama disrespectful to me

John Boehner thinks President Barack Obama is "engaging" and "smart" — but the speaker-elect is also still smarting over the president's claim that he took taxpayers hostage to secure a tax break for the rich.

In an interview with Leslie Stahl of “60 Minutes” for broadcast Sunday night on CBS, Boehner said Obama showed him “disrespect” by calling him a hostage-taker.

N. Korea Threatens S.Korea With Nucular War

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - North Korea warned Monday that U.S.-South Korean cooperation could bring a nuclear war to the region, as the South began artillery drills amid lingering tension nearly three weeks after the North's deadly shelling of a South Korean island.

The South's naval live-fire drills are scheduled to run Monday through Friday at 27 sites. The regularly scheduled exercises are getting special attention following a North Korean artillery attack on front-line Yeonpyeong Island that killed two South Korean marines and two civilians.

The Nov. 23 artillery barrage, the North's first assault to target a civilian area since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War, began after the North said South Korea first fired artillery toward its territorial waters. South Korea says it fired shells southward, not toward North Korea, as part of routine exercises.

After the attack, South Korea staged joint military drills with the United States and also pushed ahead with more artillery exercises, despite the North's warning that they would aggravate tension.

A South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff officer tried to play down the significance of this week's drills, saying they are part of routine military exercises and would not occur near the disputed western Korean sea border where last month's attack took place. The officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of office policy, gave no further details.

North Korea, however, lashed out at Seoul, accusing South Korea of collaborating with the United States and Japan to ratchet up pressure on Pyongyang.

That cooperation "is nothing but treachery escalating the tension between the North and the South and bringing the dark clouds of a nuclear war to hang over the Korean peninsula," Pyongyang's main Rodong Sinmun newspaper said in a commentary carried by the North's official Korean Central News Agency.

North Korea has often issued similar threats during standoffs.

The Korean Powder Keg III: The Roots of Conflict

Dec. 12, 2010.The Korean crisis remains a tinderbox. For me, recent South Korean threats of air strikes against North Korea and the extension of U.S./ South Korean live-fire war games along the 38^th Parallel revive eerie memories of June 1950, when similar provocative skirmishes led to the outbreak of a full-scale military conflagration which, sixty years later, still remains unresolved. I happen to have grown up in a ‘progressive’ (pro-Soviet) household during the dark days of the bloody Korean conflict, and I first became politically conscious during the hysterical (‘McCarthyite’) anti-Communist crusade that was its domestic counterpart. Here is my testimony.

The Hidden History of the Korean War

 My kid’s-eye view of the world had been formed during the War against Hitler, when the Russians were our brave allies. Then came the Korea, and suddenly my patriotic, suburban N.Y. Jewish family became the ‘bad guys’ on the ‘wrong side’ of the new American war. I had just completing building a really neat Russian MIG-15 for a model airplane contest, but thought better of submitting it. Meanwhile a distant cousin, a WII pilot who had just managed to settle into civilian life and start a family, got called back and sent to Korea. I felt as confused as the legendary half-Jewish/half Japanese boy who on the anniversary of December 7, 1941 ‘attacked Pearl Schwartz.

 As I grew up, my understanding was deepened by the Left wing independent journalist I.F.  Stone, one of my boyhood heroes and a family friend, whose book The Hidden History of the Korean War first cast doubt on the Cold War myth of ‘unprovoked Communist aggression.’ Later, as a member of the Young Peoples’ Socialist League in solidarity with the pro-democracy Korean students, my eyes were further opened by an obscure mimeographed YPSL pamphlet called something like ‘Behind the Korean Revolt’[1] which recounted the tragic history of an aborted anti-colonial democratic revolution, a still-simmering civil war, and a failed ideology-driven U.S. policy.

 Today, thanks to Wikipedia and thirty years of revisionist scholarship, the ‘hidden’ history of the Korean tragedy is a secret only to the mainstream media and politicians who chose to cling to Cold War myths in order to justify U.S. imperialism’s current provocations. Free and available to young and old alike, the Wikipedia article on ‘The Korean War’ (with its links to more detailed articles on everything from specific battles to human rights violations) is scrupulously documented with references to public documents, official military histories, commission reports and mainstream specialist historians.

 These sources document a tragic story which we old New Leftists more or less understood during the Cold War -- insights which enabled us escape from the US vs. USSR mindset, to anticipate Vietnam,  and to sympathize with our contemporary South Korean comrades, the students and union members who, then as now, were fighting for democracy against U.S. imperialism and its right-wing South Korean allies. Here is their story, or what I know of it.

 The Korean Conflict broke out in June 1950 under circumstances strikingly similar to those pertaining today. As far as the media and official statements were concerned, the North Korean invasion of the South appeared like a bolt out of the blue, a shameless act of pure aggression. In fact, both Korean armies had been continually harassing each other with skirmishes and staging raids across the 38th parallel border. Under the guise of counter-attacking a South Korean provocation raid, the KPA crossed the 38th parallel behind artillery fire at dawn on Sunday 25 June 1950 in a well-prepared mass attack.

 The response of President Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson was immediate: all out war on North Korea. The N. Korean offensive was presented as a clear case of ‘unprovoked aggression’ caused by Communist Russia’s ravenous appetite for conquest. If the Korean domino were allowed to fall, all of Asia would be ‘lost.’ Korea equaled ‘Munich,’ and ‘Appeasement’ was out of the question. So was consulting the American people, who were still licking their wounds from WWII and had never heard of a place called Korea. Truman and Acheson considered the Americans ‘backward,’ sunk into pre-WWII isolationism, unconscious of the momentous task of ruling a global empire, the manifest destiny which had fallen to their lot. So the elite needed to decide for them, behind their backs, in their own best interests.

The U.N. Figleaf

 So there was no public debate, and U.S. troops were engaged in the Korean conflict by executive order. Two days after the June 25 N. Korean border-crossing, Truman went to the U.N. to obtain a legal fig-leaf to cover U.S. counter-intervention. In the absence of Russia (who had veto power but apparently assumed that no resolution could be binding without her vote). On the other hand, the Russians may have secretly relished a test of strength. In any case, a rump Security Council passed Resolution 83 authorizing member states to help the South Vietnamese militarily, ignoring the fact that officially the Korean conflict was classified, correctly, as a ‘civil war,’ barring outside intervention.

 In any case, that contested Resolution 83 was all Truman needed, and on June 27, before the ink was dry, he ordered the U.S. Air force into combat. Truman thus presented the public with a fait accompli and, to avoid debate, didn’t even bother to request formal approval from Congress. This shut the mouths of the rabid Republicans, who in any case would only have clamored for a more aggressive anti-Communist stand. It also shut the mouths of progressive unionists, civil rights and peace activists, whose previous pro-Soviet sympathies now were proof of ‘treason.’ Truman also introduced compulsory Loyalty oaths and prosecuted U.S. Communist leaders, while Congressional committees hounded subversives everywhere.

 The fighting in Korea was horrific, on the scale of WWII. There were even ‘thrilling’ (from a 13 year-olds point of  view) dogfights between Russian MIGs and U.S. Saberjets in ‘MIG Alley’ on the Yalu River. There were amphibious D-day-type landings, rapid offensives and blitzkrieg counter-offensives, and major battles prolonged by two years of stalemated WWI type trench-warfare.[2] Sixty years later, the military situation has remained frozen like a fly in amber, despite S. Korea’s ‘economic miracle’ and N. Korea’s isolation as the last existing Stalinist state. There is nothing to prevent it flaring up again in 2010. Indeed, by the time you read these lines N. Korean missiles may well be winging their way toward Tokyo and Seoul.

 An Unfinished Asian Revolution

 The roots of today’s crisis go back beyond the still-unfinished Korean Conflict of the 1950s, indeed back further, to the half-century Japanese imperialist occupation of the Korean peninsula (1890s-1945), to the century-old longing of the Korean people for national unity, to the anti-Japanese resistance and the anti-colonial Revolution of 1945, to the short-lived and long-forgotten united, democratic Korean Republic, to its subsequent dismemberment by the U.S. and Russian superpowers, and finally to the outbreak of the Cold War, of which the Korean Conflict was the prototype.

 Although the Korean Conflict it is usually seen as a proxy-war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. (which is how U.S. policy makers saw it), the North Korean Communists were at no time pawns of the Russians, nor for that matter of the Chinese Communists, whom they had helped to power in 1949. Indeed, Kim Il Sung, the North Korean Party chief was a veteran Communist infighter, whose Juche (go it alone) faction was able to outmaneuver and purge both the Stalinist and Maoist Party factions, while extracting aid from both Russia and China.

 The Asian roots of the Korean conflict lie in the unfinished nature of Korea’s national independence revolution, aborted at the time of its victory over Japanese imperialism by the arbitrary decision by the US/USSR to occupy the liberated Korean peninsula and then divide it in half, without consulting any Korean representatives. Korea is an ancient nation-civilization, thought by some to be at the root (through trade and immigration) of modern Japanese culture, whose origins are more recent. However in the 1890s neighboring Japan emerged as a military and industrial capitalist power with imperial ambitions in Manchuria (where the Japanese defeated the Russian Empire in 1905) and Korea, which they formally annexed in 1910. The Japanese conquerors, who considered themselves racial superior, forced the Koreans to change their names to Japanese names, attempted to eradicate their language (like the British in Ireland) and reduced them to colonial semi-slavery (including sex-slavery during WWII).  Koreans were also imported to work in Japan, where their descendants remain racial pariahs.

 The Korean independence movement emerged in 1919 with demonstrations inspired by Wilson’s ‘right to self-determination.’ It fought the Japanese occupation from exile and through the underground until on Aug. 15, 1945 the Japanese Governor General turned power over to democrat Yuh Woon-Hyung’s moderately left Korean Provisional Government. As in France at the time of the Liberation, there was an euphoric unity among straight nationalists, democrats and Communists, themselves organized into a variety of independent resistance groups.[3] On September 6, 1945, a congress of representatives was convened in Seoul, founding a modern, democratic Korean state just three weeks after Japan's capitulation.

 The Brutal U.S. Occupation

 Then, as now, U.S. imperialism acted out its knee-jerk hostility to democracy. On Sept. 8, the day after Korea’s declaration of independence, the U.S. military forces under General MacArthur’s orders landed at Incheon, placed southern Korea under a U.S. military occupation regime and, lacking troops to enforce it, put the Japanese garrison back in power to maintain order. The Americans refused to meet with Yuh Woon-Hyung’s Provisional Government and treated all indigenous attempts at self-government as communist insurgency. As the population rose up, the U.S. banned strikes outlawed the Provisional Government and the PRK People's Committees.[4] The arrests and massacres of the independence demonstrator were carried out by the collaborationist Korean Police, who had served as enforcers for Japanese imperialists and now served the U.S. Occupiers.

 As a sop to Korean nationalist sentiment, the U.S. set up a puppet state under Syngman Rhee, a right-wing anti-Communist who had spent most of his life in exile in the U.S. Rhee imposed a brutal dictatorship, based on ex-collaborators, in order to crush the democratic effervescence of the Liberation, persecute his political opponents and carry out military campaigns against strikers, students and left-wing insurgents who were forced to take up arms against the government. Between 30,000 and 100,000 people would lose their lives during Rhee’s war against the left-wing insurgents.[5]

 While the U.S. Command looked on, Rhee’s military police and right-wing paramilitary(civilian) armies executed thousands of left-wing and communist political prisoners at Daejeon Prison and in the Jeju Uprising(1948–49). U.S. diplomat Gregory Henderson, then in Korea, calculates some 100,000 pro-North political prisoners were killed and buried in mass graves. The South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commissionhas compiled reports of hundreds of thousands of civilian killings before and during the war.[6] Thus Rhee’s ferocious anti-Communist repression pushed the mass of patriots and democrats into the ranks of the Communists, who numbered among the millions, spread about equally in both the South and the North.

The North Korean Communists Consolidate

 Meanwhile, in August 1950 the northern half of the Korean peninsula was being occupied by Soviet troops, who had recently joined the anti-Japanese war at U.S. request and had quickly liberated all of Manchuria through massive broad-front attacks. (Some Leftists believed that Truman dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki as a signal to the Russians, whose rapid land advances in Asia were daily encroaching on U.S. spheres of influence). At a hasty Moscow meeting from which the Koreans were excluded, the newly liberated Korean nation was divided in two, with U.S. and Russia as occupiers.

 Unlike the Americans, the Russian occupiers chose to recognize the popular Korean Independence Committees, mostly led by Communist resistance-fighters, and allowed them to proceed to self-government, while centralizing the independent groups and placing Communists in key posts. As in the South, the northern Communists were divided into factions, and although Kim il Sung, who was eventually to dominate the Party, spent part of the War in Manchuria under the Russians, he was not a Russian stooge (unlike his East German counterparts).

 Kim based his popularity on the countryside, where the Party carried out a relatively successful land reform, without excessive violence such as occurred in China. Kim also sent N. Korean volunteer troops to China to help Mao Tse-tung’s Red Army defeat the reactionary U.S.-backed regime of Chang Kai-Shek in 1949. The Chinese returned the complement in 1950 when the U.S. invaded North Korea, but Kim prevented the pro-Chinese faction from dominating the Korean Party, and his regime remains independent to this day, probably to China’s great chagrin.

The Corruption of the Party

 In this fluid situation, the multi-tendency Korean Communist Party retained some of the qualities of a genuine revolutionary mass-based socialist movement. Alas, during the War the North Korean Party-state became totally bureaucratized, with Kim Il-Sung purging all independent tendencies, fabricating his increasingly outlandish. personality cult, and consolidating his own Stalinist-style totalitarian military state, forced to live in impoverished autarchy by sixty years of U.S. war and sanctions.

 The brittle gerontocracy that rules the DPRK Party-state today knows its days are numbered, one way or another. With little to lose, those old men would have little hesitation deploying their nukes if their regime is seriously threatened. Their goal is to finish their lives in luxury, like the victorious North Vietnamese Communist veterans now presiding over a state-controlled capitalist miracle. Obviously, victory is their only chance for survival, and attack has always been their military doctrine. What can Obama possibly hope to gain by stirring up this very nasty nuclear hornets nest?

 To return to 1945-1948, the arbitrary division of Korea was still considered merely a temporary measure in view of national elections and the re-unification of the country, desired by both sides. There was much movement back and forth, as a ‘north’ Korean may have been born in the south and vice-versa, so it was never clear who belonged where as refugees from both sides moved north and south. And so the bloody civil war between the Rhee dictatorship and the Communist-led resistance in the south of Korea spilled over into the north, and was inseparable from the Communist movement there and from the mass aspiration for reunification and national sovereignty.

 A similar situation obtained in Vietnam after 1954, when after France’s military humiliation and the Geneva Accords, Communist North Vietnam was ruled by Ho Chi Minh (a southerner) pending nationwide elections while in the South, the U.S. set up as puppet dictator an anti-Communist exile named Diem (a northerner). As later in Vietnam, the Americans reneged on the promise of national elections. In 1948, the U.S. set up dictator Syngman Rhee as the first President of the Republic ofSouth Korea(ROK). Curiously, the U.S. then withdrew its forces from the still-divided peninsula. With the Korean civil war still raging, this was practically an invitation to invasion from the North.

 The Smoldering Korean Civil War Bursts into Flame

 Full-scale fighting began on June 23 when the Peoples’ Army of North Korea crossed the 38^th Parallel in a massive, well-planned invasion and penetrated deep into the South, over-running the capital at Seoul and pushing the South Korean forces into a small enclave around Pusan on the SE coast. This brilliant initial military exploit compares with the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, both successful in the face of somewhat suspicious U.S. un-preparedness. (The U.S. military had ignored months of ROK warnings and requests for help).

 But the battle of June 1950 is best understood as an episode in the ongoing Korean civil war – a conflict between U.S.-imposed right-wing tyranny based a repressive police apparatus inherited from Korea’s Japanese overlords on the one hand and a popular, mass-based national liberation movement led by a dynamic multi-tendency Communist Party relatively independent of both Moscow and Peking. This explains why the feeble South Korean Army melted away in the face of the Northern advance, with half the ROK troops deserting north to join their Communist brothers and the others deserting South toward Pusan to save their skins.

 There were horrible massacres on both sides. The Rhee dictatorship, before evacuating Seoul, carried out the immediate mass liquidation of about one hundred thousand ‘Communists’ -- trade-unionists, students, liberals and Communists long held in camps or under surveillance. Mass graves of thousands of men, women and children murdered by Rhee have recently been uncovered and identified.  On the other side, during the period of Communist control of four fifths of the South, there were mass trials and executions of ‘criminals’ accused of collaborating with the Japanese and the Rhee dictatorship, similar to those held in France at the time of the Liberation, but on a vaster and more brutal scale.

 The U.S. Intervenes

 At the end of WWII, the U.S. had disarmed with amazing rapidity, abandoning or moth-balling huge stocks of military equipment. The humiliating defeat of U.S. ally South Korea was an ideal pretext for re-militarization. Meanwhile, there were still active-duty U.S. units in Japan, and Truman hurriedly ferried over planes and tanks to reinforce the besieged Pusan pocket before Rhee’s forces were driven into the sea.

 As supreme commander of U.S. forces in the Asia/Pacific, Truman had inherited WWII General Douglas MacArthur, an arrogant right-wing ego-maniac with political ambitions who, after abandoning his troops in Bataan in a cowardly manner 1941, had eventually defeated Japan through a costly series of spectacular amphibious invasions of heavily-defended islands like Iwo Jima. Against the advice of the Pentagon and his own subordinates, MacArthur hastily organized a spectacular amphibious invasion at Incheon 100 miles behind N. Korean lines (where last month Adm. Mullen carried out provocative live-fire amphibious invasion exercises). MacArthur’s plan included sending armored columns driving north toward the Chinese border on the Yalu River, capturing the DPRK capital at Pangyong, and liberating the Korean peninsula from the Communist enemy.

 In September 1950, MacArthur’s D-Day style landings and blitzkrieg armored drives to the north went off as planned, dramatically reversing the military situation and making him the hero of the day and likely 1952 Republican presidential candidate. Truman’s orders to MacArthur had been ambiguous. He had been authorized to cross the 38^th Parallel only if there was no evidence the Chinese would intervene. In October, the President requested a meeting with his Supreme Commander, which took place on Wake Island since MacArthur arrogantly refused to go to Washington. There he reassured Truman that there was little risk of Chinese intervention in Korea as UN forces pushed north to the Yalu. The troops would be home ‘by Xmas.’

 The Chinese Enter the Fray

 The Chinese Communists, who had taken power in Peking just a year before and were still fighting a civil war with Chiang Kai Chek’s Nationalist Army, protected by the U.S. 7^th Fleet Formosa, were naturally alarmed. The Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC) protested through the U.N. and private diplomatic channels making it clear that they would intervene if U.N. forces threatened their security -- communications which Truman dismissed as ‘a bald attempt to blackmail the UN.’[7](Sound familiar?)  Meanwhile, undetected, a huge army of Chinese ‘volunteers’ had been massing in Manchuria and infiltrating North Korea heavily camouflaged and under cover of darkness.

 In October, with UN mechanized forces stretched out over long supply lines in the impassable wilds of North Korean, the Chinese suddenly unleashed wave upon wave nighttime mass infantry attacks, stunning the unprepared Americans and over-running  their lines. In the celebrated Christmas 1950 battles around the Chosin Reservoir,  Chinese ‘volunteers’ surrounded and decimated a whole battalion of Marines. ‘Frozen Chosin’ was a bloody defeat, comparable to that of the French at Dien Bien Phu in Indochina four years later, except that the surviving Marines were able to fight their way to the cost in the longest retreat and largest evacuation in U.S. military history. In see-saw battles, combined N. Vietnamese/Chinese  again pushed the UN forces back far to the south.

 U.S. Defeat

 No GIs were sent ‘home for Xmas.’ Instead, thousands of defeated and humiliated U.S. soldiers and officers were taken prisoner and a sizable number became demoralized, since they had no idea where they had been sent to fight or why. Harshly treated and half-starved (like the N. Koreans themselves), some were persuaded under heavy Communist political pressure to make anti-US propaganda, giving rise to the myth of ‘brainwashing.’[8]

 MacArthur’s grandiose solution to this humiliating U.S. military defeat was to ‘finish the job,’ carrying the anti-Communist Crusade farther north, into China itself, and his proposed use of nuclear weapons was discusses seriously at the highest levels. But the arrogant Supreme American Commander was contemptuous of his civilian President, a former haberdasher whom everybody called ‘Harry.’ The right-wing Man on Horseback over-played his hand, addressing his warlike appeals  to the electorate and the Congress over Truman’s head, and Truman fired him.[9]

 General Ridgeway took over the UN Command, and a possible nuclear war with China was averted. Eventually, after years of heavy fighting (including savage battles like ‘Porkchop Hill’) and massive infusions of U.S. military might the two sides were reduced to a stalemate along the 38^th Parallel. All in all, it was a defeat for the U.S., South Korea, their U.N. allies. Unwilling to admit defeat, the imperialists were equally unable to defeat the North Koreans or to sustain a continued war of attrition. Armistice talks were opened and dragged on for months and years.  Sixty year later, nothing essential has changed on the ground. Only the stakes in the game have grown considerably higher. Obama faces the same dilemma as Truman and MacArthur, and North Korea remains an unpredictable wild card.

 The ‘Korea Syndrome’

 During the stalled talks Cold Warrior Truman kept up his anti-Communist rhetoric, while far-right Republican grandstanders like Joe McCarthy were accusing the hawkish Democrats of ’20 Years of Treason.’ Just like today’s rabid Republican attacks on our hawkish Obama, the rabid right served to reinforce the bi-partisan imperialist drive to war and lock the U.S. into an rigid stance. Nonetheless, after two years, despite witch-hunts and intensive anti-Communist propaganda, nearly half the electorate considered the decision to enter the war ‘a mistake.’[i] Truman and Acheson were correct in assuming the ‘backward’ American public would not support the burden of becoming the world’s imperialist policeman. Thus, the 1951 Republican nomination went not to the controversial warmongering MacArthur, but to a moderate WWII hero, General Eisenhower, who was swept in to office on the simple promise ‘I will go to Korea.’

 During the presidential campaign, I unwittingly embarrassed my parents in front of their Leftist friends, who were earnestly debating whether they should support the Democrat Stevenson or the Progressive candidate, one Vincent Hallinan. One progressive lady asked me for my opinion, and little Richard answered that he thought a general who knew how bad war was might make peace. He was right. Unlike Nixon, whose 1968 ‘secret plan’ to end the Vietnam War was a hoax, President Eisenhower immediately signed the Korean cease fire.

 Eisenhower also had the authority to silence Joseph McCarthy’s demagoguery and bring the country back to relative normality. Eisenhower cooled down the Cold War, refused to aid the French, who were bogged down in Vietnam and wanted him to use the A-bomb; Ike confined his imperialist adventures to CIA coups in Iran and Guatemala, and famously warned about the ‘military-industrial complex’ and the dangers of fighting ‘a land-war in Asia.’ At the time, no one spoke of a ‘Korea Syndrome’ infecting the American public with a salutary mistrust of foreign military interventions.

 The Truman Doctrine Revived

 It took the charisma of the Democrat Jack Kennedy to revive Truman’s Cold War and the Imperial Presidency. As opposed to Eisenhower-era complacency, Kennedy’s bold new American vision demanded ‘greatness’ and ‘sacrifice’ to conquer an international ‘New Frontier,’ roll back Communism and to set a moral example for the world by ‘standing tall’ à la John Wayne under all circumstances. A professional anti-Communist (his brother Bobby worked for McCarthy), Kennedy succeeded in out Red-baiting Tricky Dicky Nixon with accusations of a mythical ‘missile-gap’ (shades of Saddam’s WMDs) and ‘won’ the 1959 election by a hair, thanks to some timely ballot-stuffing by Chicago’s Boss Daley.

 During his brief presidency JFK, whose favorable posthumous reputation is based on the pathos of his untimely death, succeeded in dismissing Khrushchev’s ‘Peaceful Co-existence’ Policy as ‘Commie propaganda,’ invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, confronted the Russians eyeball-to-eyeball in Berlin, risked atomic war over Cuba, secretly took over the colonial role of the defeated French in the ongoing Vietnamese civil war and installed an exiled right-wing Catholic named Diem as his puppet dictator in the South (much as Truman had installed Rhee), setting the state for a new Korean-style U.S. defeat.

 Once Kennedy revived the Domino Theory, made Vietnam a ‘test of American will’ and proclaimed that backing down would cause the U.S. an unacceptable ‘loss of credibility,’ he transformed the conflict from a routine imperialist colony-grab to an ideology-driven crusade with no possible retreat, making loss of domestic support and ultimate humiliating military defeat inevitable. Neither Johnson, with his fake Bay of Tonkin Incident nor Nixon with his ‘secret plan’ were able either to rally public support or to abandon U.S. imperialism’s rigid, ideology-driven, moralistic posture. They were doomed to fight on, searching for that ever-elusive ‘light at the end of the tunnel,’ until the Americans were forced to evacuate the U.S. Embassy in Saigon by helicopter, leaving their Vietnamese collaborators to their fate and ironically completing their self-fulfilling prophecy about  destroying America’s ‘loss of credibility.’

 Realpolitik or Imperial Madness?

 To recapitulate: In 1950 in the crucible of the Korean War, Harry Truman forged today’s National Security State, anticipating today’ today’s USA PATRIOT ACT complete with FBI wiretaps, treason trials, and (never used) concentration camps in the South for folks like my folks. Truman was also the true Father of Presidential War, a dishonorable title that has been carelessly bestowed on fellow-liberals JFK and LBJ, on Republicans like Nixon and on pipsqueak Bush with his mythical WMDs. In retrospect, they were pigmies walking in the giant footsteps of this modest Missouri nonentity who earned his rightful place in history as the architect of the Cold War and Founder of the Imperial Presidency.

 The geo-political basis for Truman’s National Security State was apparently rational, if cynical: according to his liberal advisor George Kennan, if the U.S. wanted to continue to dominate the world’s resources with one 20^th of its population, it would have to do away such niceties as democracy and fairness. This meant intervening anywhere U.S. interests may be threatened by popular movements, supporting pro-US reactionary dictatorships wherever possible, and sustaining a high level of patriotic propaganda, repression and anti-Communist hysteria to limit criticism at home.

 The problem was that Truman’s rational neo-colonialist geo-political strategy became the prisoner of the rigid ideology designed to justify it to a basically isolationist electorate. Korea in 1950 was the first domino. It was then that U.S. policy became frozen into irrational stereotyped postures of inflexible strength and uncompromising moralistic rigidity which, despite American imperialism’s indisputable military might and endless economic resources, has led to a string of quagmires and humiliating defeats (plus two puny victories: the invasions of Granada and Panama).

 The March of Folly

 In the wake of America’s defeat in Vietnam, the historian Barbara Tuchman published The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, a meditation on the historical recurrence of governments pursuing policies evidently contrary to their own interests and persisting in that folly, despite the repeated evidence of past experience and the reasonable advice of critics and allies. Despite 60 years of stalemates, quagmires and humiliating defeats, U.S. imperialism is still trapped in the march of folly.  Whether the crusade be called ‘anti-Communism,’ the war on ‘drugs’ or the war on ‘terrorism,’ no Administration dares step out of rank, listen to reason, consider making peace.

 Like Truman, JFK, LBJ, Nixon-Kissinger and Bush before him, Obama is a prisoner of the ‘Frontier Myth’ of Americas manifest destiny to rule over ‘lesser peoples’ (beginning with the Indians) by ‘liberating’ them through what Richard Slotkin in his bookGunfighter Nation calls ‘redemptive violence.’ It is thus always ‘High Noon’ on America’s world-wide ‘New Frontier,’ and like a Hollywood sheriff with a fast-draw reputation to protect, the U.S. is under a perennial obligation to shoot it out with every young hothead with a six-gun who walks into the saloon and issues a challenge. Engaging in negotiation with an enemy defined as ‘Communist’ or ‘terrorist’ would be seen as shameful cowardice – if not by the U.S.’s democratic allies (who would in all likelihood feel relief) – then by America’s far-right noise-machine, which would holler ‘treason’ at the slightest show of flexibility. Hence Obama’s insane game of nuclear chicken with North Korea’s desperate diehard Stalinist regime.

Possible Solutions

 Is there a way out of this deadly Asian impasse? There can be no real solution short of a democratic, unified Korea. For a century the youth, intellectuals and organized workers of Korea have been struggling for democracy and national sovereignty, first in the anti-Japanese resistance and then against a string of U.S.-supported right-wing dictatorships. In 1960, demonstrations by the Korean student movement (with which we YPSL’s were allied) overthrew Syngman Rhee, but the promise of democracy was thwarted by military coup. General Park’s ruthless military dictatorship, under which the Korean economy prospered through state intervention, lasted until Park’s assassination in 1979. Alas, the revival of democracy was thwarted by General Chou’s 1980 military coup, provoking mass demonstrations, brutally repressed.

 Only in 1987, after revelations of the torture-death of a student, did uprisings by workers and students succeed in restoring the rule of law. Today, the Korean working class, allied with the students, is arguably the most militant, organized and politically conscious in the world. Popular demonstrations have succeeded in imposing the “Sunshine policy” (in favor of rapprochment with the North) of Presidents Kim and Roh (a former labor leader), put a stop to the 2003 flare-up of hostilities with the North, and forced the evacuation of the American garrison in Seoul, many of whose 37,000 U.S. soldiers routinely indulged in violent, drunken, racist and sexist off-base behavior. Surely they will have their say in the present crisis.[10]

 As for the American people, despite a naive patriotism exploited by 60 years of intensive government anti-Communist and anti-terrorist fear-mongering, the vast majority have always eventually rejected as ‘mistakes’ elite-imposed wars in Korea, Vietnam, and now Irak according to various polls. Indeed, under the illusion that Barack Obama would bring peace, as Dwight Eisenhower did in 1952, white Americans even overcame their racism and elected a Black President, for all the good it did us.

Don't mourn, internationalize!

 As we have seen, the imperialist National Security State was an invention of liberal Democrats (Truman, Acheson, Brennan) who, then as now, relied on the howlings of their rabid Republican critics to stifle anti-war critics and appear ‘reasonable.’ So anti-war folks beware: rather than acting as cheerleaders in the Corporation-sponsored quadrennial Donkeys versus Elephant Stuperbowl, we Americans need to revive our  independent anti-war movement, put Korea high on the agenda, and build links of solidarity with our counterparts among the Korean student, union and anti-war Koreans movements. Such an international U.S./Korean anti-war alliance is the surest way to break through the Cold War shibboleths designed to divide us and to build a powerful solidarity movement.

 To unite with our Korean comrades, we must first understand their situation, their history and our country’s role in their plight. I hope that this Cold War era New Left testimony/analysis of the Korean Tragedy will help that necessary understanding. I urge my friends and readers to share this information as widely as possible.

 Richard Greeman

Montpellier France, Dec. 11, 2010

 URGENT APPEAL: Korea remains a tinderbox which could blow up again at any minute. We must inform people and raise a protest, beginning with the peace movement and Left who seem clueless on this issue. Please contact http://www.endthekoreanwar.org/