The upper hand
Reading these comments by the GOP leadership regarding fiscal cliff negotiations is a hoot. Maybe even more hilarious than Chris Elliott’s new book “The Guy Under the Sheets” (a strong stocking-stuffer option for that comedy fan or funny person in your life). Orrin Hatch called Obama’s very sensible plan to hike taxes on the nation’s top 2% of earners “stunning and irresponsible.” Really? “Stunning and irresponsible?”Obama has the bully pulpit, and for once, seemingly the stomach, to fight for something. Polls show the American people are strongly behind the liberals' idea to increase taxes on the wealthiest of Americans; and just as importantly, they also show that Americans would overwhelmingly blame Republicans if the federal government goes “over the cliff” early next year.
It’s not a golden time to be a House Republican. In the melee, they’re starting to kick at each other. It’s time for Obama to double-down. He should schedule a televised national address, to be delivered from behind his desk in the Oval Office, as close to Christmas as possible, to push this already-very-popular idea of taxing the rich that’s supported by the most basic tenants of the Christian gospels. Grover Norquist’s ruinous no-tax pledge is losing signatories now, almost by the day. Don't give in on tax cuts, and push back even harder now in support of entitlements. It’s time to hit these fuckers right in the jaw. Politically speaking.
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The anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is a reminder for Americans to keep careful watch over the telling and re-telling of the nation’s history, though I’m not sure the famous military strike in 1941 has been gradually losing its historical context in quite the way that’s being described this week by newspaper editorial boards. The story has really never been told properly.
While the ultimate goal of the Japanese imperial government in ‘41 was extended military dominion over the islands of the South Pacific, a policy of violent aggression and war, Americans seem to have a hard time understanding that we were the standing imperial power in the region at the time of the attack—and therefore, hardly an innocent player in the game. The U.S. had acquired both Hawaii and the Philippines in the South Pacific for overwhelmingly commercial purposes in 1898 as it also claimed Cuba and Puerto Rico after war with Spain.
Hawaii was a U.S. territory in 1941 because of this annexation, and it had long served as a linchpin base of military strength in that part of the world. It’s incorrect to call the Japanese Pearl Harbor attack an act of terrorism, a befuddled argument I now hear and read being made in some circles. (Then and now, the U.S. routinely has a difficult time identifying and labeling acts of state-sponsored terrorism and being capable of recognizing examples of its own.) Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor was not an attack upon civilians, it was an attack upon a competing military installation. It was an attack upon the military and economic interests of the United States. The formal war that it precipitated in the South Pacific was basically one fought over turf between two competing gangster states. The U.S.’s moral upper hand in the conflict boils down to an argument of “we were there first.”
The conflict was basically a repeat of the Battle of Manila, fought at the Philippines a generation earlier, with Japanese pilots now taking on the role of the United States Marines, and the occupying United States forces now in the role of the Spanish. Yet if you polled Americans today, you would not find this to be the conventional wisdom, not by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, you would probably find that an alarming number of Americans believe that Hawaii was a state when the Japanese attack took place.
The attack on human life was devastating, tragic, and immoral in the Pearl Harbor assault, but we need to keep several of these points in perspective because they still resonate today in regards to America's global empire. According to the Pentagon’s 2010 Base Structure Report, the U.S. military maintains 662 foreign sites in 38 different countries around the world, and every federal office seems to report a wildly-different number, lending credence to the accusation that the numbers are being kept purposefully covert. That same Pentagon report, for example, makes no reference to a single U.S. military base in the “blacked-out” area of Afghanistan, even though there could be more than 400 there.
How many countries on Earth have military outposts located within the United States? I'll let you look that one up yourself.
posted by CM @ 6:36 PM
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