The Chris Moeller Archives

Americans to the rescue

The United States has put itself in a fine mess in regards to its blustering, ineffective, and ever-imperial foreign policy. Our collective view of ourselves—a failure to acknowledge our lost footing in global influence and respect—is widely distorted now for a very good reason: One is not capable of seeing things as they actually are if the facts of the case violate the basic mythology of one’s self. I witnessed this on the smallest scale this week. Not paying close attention, I noticed a headline flash during a local TV newscast in Des Moines on Wednesday. It was a story about doctors and aid workers from the U.S. going to the Philippines to assist in the hurricane relief. The headline on the screen was “Americans to the rescue.” This is routinely how Americans flatter themselves—as the world’s savior, instead of, more accurately, an increasing source of sponsored crimes and atrocities. It’s incredibly silly. And dishonest. And increasingly dangerous.

Obviously, it’s great that these volunteers are traveling to the Philippines. If you think that’s my criticism, then you aren’t getting the point. Our nation’s focus now is on salvaging empire. If the shattered lives of the storm-ravaged Philippines are able to be improved in the coming months, it will have only a tiny bit more than jack shit to do with America.

---

Two separate justice systems are exposed again. Corporate eavesdropping giant Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor) spies on and harasses political activists and alleged victims of corporate crimes and there’s no punishment to be had. Hacktivist Jeremy Hammond exposes their crimes and he gets sentenced this week to the maximum ten years incarceration. The judge in Hammond's case is married to a man whose private information was incidentally exposed as a result of the hacking, yet she refuses to recuse herself from the case and then levees the largest punishment against him that's allowed to her.

Thanks to Hammond’s leak though, we know that the Department of Homeland Security paid Stratfor to spy on members of Occupy Wall Street, Coca-Cola paid them to spy on PETA activists, and Dow Chemical used them to harass victims of the Bhopal gas leak in India, the world’s worst environmental disaster to date. Hammond enters the pantheon of civil liberty heroes, which is adding icons now almost by the month, and it would seem a good bet that we haven’t heard the last from him. With a brilliant, organized, principled whistle blower on the inside, the prison-for-profit industry may have just signed up for more than it bargained for.

---

Quote of the day: Harry Belafonte, in 2008, as recaptured in print this week by the New Yorker. Then-Senator Obama, being lacerated by Belafonte publicly, pleaded with the man, "When are you going to cut me some slack?" Belafonte's response, "What makes you think that's not what I've been doing?"

posted by CM @ 2:59 PM