[Peace-discuss] Imperial mentality and drug wars (corrected)

[C. G. Estabrook]

[This article pulls together some apparently disparate elements of USG 
policy. The State Department official responsible for the criminal "war 
on drugs" in Colombia was a childhood friend of mine, Rand Beers, 
celebrated as a liberal when he and Richard Clarke resigned from the 
White House at the time of invasion of Iraq.  In fact, they simply 
advocated more murderous tactics in pursuit of the general US policy in 
the Mideast. He is now "Under Secretary for the National Protection and 
Programs Directorate" at the Department of Homeland Security. The 
article gives a good idea of the sort of program he's administered. --CGE]

The justification offered for the new military bases in Colombia is the 
"war on drugs." The fact that the justification is even offered is 
remarkable. Suppose, for example, that Colombia, or China, or many 
others claimed the right to establish military bases in Mexico to 
implement their programs to eradicate tobacco in the U.S., by fumigation 
in North Carolina and Kentucky, interdiction by sea and air forces, and 
dispatch of inspectors to the U.S. to ensure it was eradicating this 
poison -- which is, in fact, far more lethal even than alcohol, which in 
turn is far more lethal than cocaine or heroin, incomparably more than 
cannabis. The toll of tobacco use is truly fearsome, including "passive 
smokers" who are seriously affected though they do not use tobacco 
themselves. The death toll overwhelms the lethal effects of other 
dangerous substances.

The idea that outsiders should interfere with U.S. production and 
distribution of these murderous poisons is plainly unthinkable. 
Nevertheless, the U.S. justification for carrying out such policies in 
South America is accepted as plausible. The fact that it is even 
regarded as worthy of discussion is yet another illustration of the 
depth of the imperial mentality, and the abiding truth of the doctrine 
of Thucydides that the strong do as they wish and the weak suffer as 
they must -- while the intellectual classes spin tales about the 
nobility of power. Leading themes of history, to the present day.

Despite the outlandish assumptions, let us agree to adopt the imperial 
mentality that reigns in the West -- virtually unchallenged, in fact, 
not even noticed. Even after this extreme concession, it requires real 
effort to take the "war on drugs" pretext seriously. The war has been 
waged for close to 40 years and intensively for a decade in Colombia. 
There has been no notable impact on drug use or even street prices. The 
reasons are reasonably well understood. Studies by official and 
quasi-official governmental organizations provide good evidence that 
prevention and treatment are far more effective than forceful measures 
in reducing drug abuse: one major study finds prevention and treatment 
to have been 10 times as effective as drug interdiction and 23 times as 
effective as "supply-side" out-of-country operations, such as fumigation 
in Colombia, more accurately described as chemical warfare. The 
historical record supports these conclusions. There is ample evidence 
that changes in cultural attitudes and perceptions have been very 
effective in curtailing harmful practices. Nevertheless, despite what is 
known, policy is overwhelmingly directed to the least effective 
measures, with the support of the doctrinal institutions.

These and other facts leave us with only two credible hypotheses: either 
U.S. leaders have been systematically insane for the past 40 years; or 
the purpose of the drug war is quite different from what is proclaimed. 
We can exclude the possibility of collective insanity. To determine the 
real reasons we can follow the model of the legal system, which takes 
predictable outcome to be evidence of intent, particularly when 
practices persist over a long period and in the face of constant failure 
to approach the announced objectives. In this case, the predictable 
outcome is not obscure, both abroad and at home.

Abroad, the "supply-side approach" has been the basis for U.S.-backed 
counterinsurgency strategy in Colombia and elsewhere, with a fearful 
toll among victims of chemical warfare and militarization of conflicts, 
but enormous profits for domestic and foreign elites. Colombia has a 
shocking record of human rights violations, by far the worst in the 
hemisphere since the end of Reagan's Central American terror wars in the 
1980s, and also the second-largest internal displacement of populations 
in the world, after Sudan. Meanwhile, domestic elites and multinationals 
profit from the forced displacement of peasants and indigenous people, 
which clears land for mining, agribusiness production and ranching, 
infrastructure development for industry, and much else. There is a great 
deal more to say about this, but I will put it aside.

At home, the drug war coincided with the initiation of neoliberal 
programs, the financialization of the economy, and the attack on 
government social welfare systems, real, even though limited by 
international standards. One immediate consequence of the war on drugs 
has been the extraordinary growth in scale and severity of incarceration 
in the past 30 years, placing the U.S. far in the lead worldwide. The 
victims are overwhelmingly African-American males and other minorities, 
a great many of them sentenced on victimless drug charges. Drug use is 
about the same as in privileged white sectors, which are mostly immune.

In short, while abroad the war on drugs is a thin cover for 
counterinsurgency, at home it functions as a civilized counterpart to 
Latin America limpieza social cleansing, removing a population that has 
become superfluous with the dismantling of the domestic productive 
system in the course of the neo-liberal financialization of the economy. 
A secondary gain is that like the "war on crime," the "war on drugs" 
serves to frighten the population into obedience as domestic policies 
are implemented to benefit extreme wealth at the expense of the large 
majority, leading to staggering inequality that is breaking historical 
records, and stagnation of real wages for the majority while benefits 
decline and working hours increase.

These processes conform well to the history of prohibition, which has 
been well studied by legal scholars. I cannot go into the very 
interesting details here, but quite generally, prohibition has been 
aimed at control of what are called "the dangerous classes" -- those who 
threaten the rights and well-being of the privileged dominant 
minorities. These observations hold worldwide, where the topics have 
been studied. They have special meaning in the U.S. in the context of 
the history of African-Americans, much of which remains generally 
unknown. It is, of course, known that slaves were formally freed during 
the American Civil War, and that after ten years of relative freedom, 
the gains were mostly obliterated by 1877 as Reconstruction was brought 
to an end.

But the horrifying story is only now being researched seriously, most 
recently in a study called "Slavery by another name" by Wall Street 
Journal editor Douglas Blackmon. His work fills out the bare bones with 
shocking detail, showing how after Reconstruction African-American life 
was effectively criminalized, so that black males virtually became a 
permanent slave labor force. Conditions, however, were far worse than 
under slavery, for good capitalist reasons. Slaves were property, a 
capital investment, and were therefore cared for by their masters. Those 
criminalized for merely existing are similar to wage laborers, in that 
the masters have no responsibility for them, except to make sure that 
enough are available. That was, in fact, one of the arguments used by 
slave owners to claim that they were more moral than those who hired 
labor. The argument was understood well enough by northern workers, who 
regarded wage labor as preferable to literal slavery only in that it was 
temporary, a position shared by Abraham Lincoln among others.

Criminalized black slavery provided much of the basis for the American 
industrial revolution of the late 19th and early 20th century. It 
continued until World War II, when free labor was needed for war 
industry. During the postwar boom, which relied substantially on the 
dynamic state sector that had been established under the highly 
successful semi-command economy of World War II, African-American 
workers gained a certain degree of freedom for the first time since 
post-Civil War Reconstruction. But since the 1970s that process is being 
reversed, thanks in no small measure to the "war on drugs," which in 
some respects is a contemporary analogue to the criminalization of black 
life after the Civil War -- and also provides a fine disciplined labor 
force, often in private prisons, in gross violation of international 
labor regulations.

For such reasons as these, we can expect that the "war on drugs" will 
continue until popular understanding and activism reach a point where 
the fundamental driving factors can be discerned and seriously addressed.

Last February, the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy 
issued its analysis of the U.S. "war on drugs" in the past decades. The 
Commission, led by former Latin American presidents Cardoso, Zedillo, 
and Gav’ria, concluded that the drug war had been a complete failure and 
urged a drastic change of policy, away from criminalization and 
"supply-side" operations and towards much less costly and more effective 
measures of education, prevention, and treatment. Their report had no 
detectable impact, just as earlier studies and the historical record 
have had none. That again reinforces the natural conclusion that the 
"drug war" -- like the "war on crime" and "the war on terror" -- has 
quite sensible goals, which are being achieved, and therefore continue 
in the face of a costly failure of announced goals.

Returning to the UNASUR meeting, a dose of realism, and skepticism about 
propaganda, would be helpful in evaluating the pretexts offered for the 
establishment of U.S. military bases in Colombia, retention of the base 
in Honduras, and the accompanying steps towards militarization. It is 
very much to be hoped that South America will bar moves towards 
militarization and intervention, and will devote its energies to the 
programs of integration in both their external and internal aspects -- 
establishing effective political and economic organizations, overcoming 
the terrible internal problems of deprivation and suffering, and 
strengthening varied links to the outside world.

But Latin America's problems go far beyond. The countries cannot hope to 
progress without overcoming their reliance on primary product exports, 
including crucially oil, but also minerals and food products. And all 
these problems, challenging enough in themselves, are overshadowed by a 
critical global concern: the looming environmental crisis.

Current warnings by the best-informed investigators rely on the British 
Stern report, which is very highly regarded by leading scientists and 
numerous Nobel laureates in economics. On this basis, some have 
concluded, realistically, that "2009 may well turn out to be the 
decisive year in the human relationship with our home planet."

In December, a conference in Copenhagen is "to sign a new global accord 
on global warming," which will tell us "whether or not our political 
systems are up to the unprecedented challenge that climate change 
represents." I am quoting Bill McKibben, one of the most knowledgeable 
researchers. He is mildly hopeful, but that may be optimistic unless 
there are really large-scale public campaigns to overcome the insistence 
of the managers of the state-corporate sector on privileging short-term 
gain for the few over the hope that their grandchildren will have a 
decent future.

At least some of the barriers are beginning to crumble, in part, because 
the business world perceives new opportunities for profit in alternative 
energy. Even the Wall Street Journal, one of the most stalwart deniers, 
has recently published a supplement with dire warnings about "climate 
disaster," urging that none of the options being considered may be 
sufficient and that it may be necessary to undertake more radical 
measures of geoengineering, "cooling the planet" in some manner.

Meanwhile, however, the energy industries are vigorously pursuing their 
own agenda. They are organizing major propaganda campaigns to defeat 
even the mild proposals being considered in Congress. They are quite 
openly following the script of the corporate campaigns that have 
virtually destroyed the very limited health care reforms proposed by the 
Obama administration so effectively that the business press now exults 
that the insurance companies have won -- and everyone else will suffer.

The picture might be much grimmer even than what the Stern report 
predicts. A group of MIT scientists have just released the results of 
what they describe as, "The most comprehensive modeling yet carried out 
on the likelihood of how much hotter the Earth's climate will get in 
this century, [showing] that without rapid and massive action, the 
problem will be about twice as severe as previously estimated six years 
ago -- and could be even worse than that [because the model] does not 
fully incorporate other positive feedbacks that can occur, for example, 
if increased temperatures caused a large-scale melting of permafrost in 
arctic regions and subsequent release of large quantities of methane." 
The leader of the project, a prominent earth scientist, says that, 
"There's no way the world can or should take these risks," and that, 
"The least-cost option to lower the risk is to start now and steadily 
transform the global energy system over the coming decades to low or 
zero greenhouse gas-emitting technologies." There is little sign of that.

While new technologies are essential, the problems go far beyond. It 
will be necessary to reverse the huge state-corporate social engineering 
projects of the post-World War II period, or at least severely 
ameliorate their harmful effects. These projects quite purposefully 
promoted an energy-wasting and environmentally destructive fossil 
fuel-based economy. The state-corporate programs, which included massive 
projects of suburbanization along with destruction and then 
gentrification of inner cities, began with a conspiracy by manufacturing 
and energy industries to buy up and destroy efficient electric public 
transportation systems in Los Angeles and dozens of other cities; they 
were convicted of criminal conspiracy and given a light tap on the 
wrist. The Federal government then joined in, relocating infrastructure 
and capital stock to suburban areas and creating the interstate highway 
system, under the usual pretext of "defense." Railroads were displaced 
by government-subsidized motor and air transport.

The public played almost no role, apart from choice within the narrowly 
structured framework of options designed by state-corporate managers. 
One result is atomization of society and entrapment of isolated 
individuals with self-destructive ambitions and crushing debt. A central 
component of these processes is the vigorous campaign of the business 
world to "fabricate consumers," in the words of the distinguished 
political economist Thorstein Veblen, and to direct people "to the 
superficial things of life, like fashionable consumption" (in the words 
of the business press). The campaign grew out of the recognition a 
century ago that it was no longer as easy as before to discipline the 
population by force, and that it would therefore be necessary to resort 
to propaganda and indoctrination to curtail democratic achievements and 
to ensure that the "opulent minority" is protected from the "ignorant 
and meddlesome outsiders," the population. These are crucial features of 
really existing democracy under contemporary state capitalism, a 
"democratic deficit" that is at the root of many of today's crises.

While state-corporate power was promoting privatization of life and 
maximal waste of energy, it was also undermining the efficient choices 
that the market does not provide -- another destructive built-in market 
inefficiency. To put it simply, if I want to get home from work, the 
market offers me a choice between a Ford and a Toyota, but not between a 
car and a subway. That's a social decision and in a democratic society 
would be the decision of an organized public. But that's just what the 
dedicated elite attack on democracy seeks to undermine.

The consequences are right before our eyes, in ways that are sometimes 
surreal -- no less surreal than the huge resources being poured into 
militarization of the world while a billion people are going hungry and 
the rich countries are cutting back sharply on financing meager food 
aid. The business press recently reported that Obama's transportation 
secretary is in Europe seeking to contract with Spanish and other 
European manufacturers to build high-speed rail projects in the U.S., 
using federal funds that were authorized by Congress to stimulate the 
U.S. economy. Spain and other European countries are hoping to get U.S. 
taxpayer funding for the high-speed rail and related infrastructure that 
is badly needed in the U.S. At the same time, Washington is busy 
dismantling leading sectors of U.S. industry, ruining the lives of the 
workforce, families, and communities.

It is difficult to conjure up a more damning indictment of the economic 
system that has been constructed by state-corporate managers, 
particularly during the neoliberal era. Surely the auto industry could 
be reconstructed to produce what the country needs, using its highly 
skilled workforce -- and what the world needs -- and soon, if we are to 
have some hope of averting major catastrophe. It has been done before, 
after all. During World War II, the semi-command economy not only ended 
the Great Depression, but also initiated the most spectacular period of 
growth in economic history, virtually quadrupling industrial production 
in four years as the economy was retooled for war, and laying the basis 
for the "golden age" that followed.

But all such matters are off the agenda and will continue to be until 
the severe democratic deficit is overcome. In a sane world, workers and 
communities would take over the abandoned factories, convert them to 
socially useful production, and run the factories themselves. That has 
been tried, but was blocked in the courts. To succeed, such efforts 
would require a level of popular support and working class consciousness 
that is not manifest in recent years, but that could be reawakened and 
could have large-scale effects.

These issues should be very prominent right here in Venezuela, as in 
other oil-producing countries. They were discussed by President Chavez 
at the meeting of the UN General Assembly in September 2005. I will 
quote his words, which unfortunately were not reported, at least in the 
U.S. press: "Ladies and gentlemen, we are facing an unprecedented energy 
crisis in which an unstoppable increase of energy is perilously reaching 
record highs, as well as the incapacity of increased oil supply and the 
perspective of a decline in the proven reserves of fuel worldwide. ... 
It is unpractical and unethical to sacrifice the human race by appealing 
in an insane manner to the validity of a socioeconomic model that has a 
galloping destructive capacity. It would be suicidal to spread it and 
impose it as an infallible remedy for the evils which are caused 
precisely by them."

These words point in the right direction. To avoid the suicide of the 
species there must be coordinated efforts of producers and users, and 
radical changes in prevailing socioeconomic models and global 
organization. These are very large and urgent challenges. There can be 
no delay in recognizing and understanding them, and acting decisively to 
address them.

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/200910--.htm