Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing

AMY GOODMAN: Sy Hersh, I wanted to switch gears for the last question, and this has to do with it not just being Republicans who are sounding a drumbeat for war. The three leading Democratic presidential candidates — Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards — have all declared no options off the table. This is a clip from last week’s Democratic debate. It was the day the Senate approved a controversial resolution calling on the State Department to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization. At the debate, Democratic presidential hopeful Mike Gravel bitterly criticized Hillary Clinton for voting in favor.

MIKE GRAVEL: This is fantasy land. We’re talking about ending the war. My god, we’re just starting a war right today. There was a vote in the Senate today. Joe Lieberman, who authored the Iraq resolution, has authored another resolution, and it is essentially a fig leaf to let George Bush go to war with Iran. And I want to congratulate Biden for voting against it, Dodd for voting against it, and I’m ashamed of you, Hillary, for voting for it. You’re not going to get another shot at this, because what’s happened, if this war ensues, we invade, and they’re looking for an excuse to do it. And Obama was not even there to vote.

TIM RUSSERT: Senator Clinton, I want to give you a chance to respond.

SEN. HILLARY CLINTON: [laughter]

AMY GOODMAN: That was Hillary Clinton laughing. Fifteen seconds, Seymour Hersh. Your response?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Money. A lot of the Jewish money from New York. Come on, let’s not kid about it. A significant percentage of Jewish money, and many leading American Jews support the Israeli position that Iran is an existential threat. And I think it’s as simple as that. When you’re from New York and from New York City, you take the view of — right now, when you’re running a campaign, you follow that line. And there’s no other explanation for it, because she’s smart enough to know the downside.

AMY GOODMAN: And Obama and Edwards?

SEYMOUR HERSH: I — you know, it’s shocking. It’s really surprising and shocking, but there we are. That’s American politics circa 2007.

Mining the same theme as Wolves, the NYT wrote on Friday:

If you were one of the Americans waiting for Congress, under Democratic control, to show leadership on the war in Iraq, the message from the Senate is clear: “Nevermind.” The same goes for those waiting for lawmakers to fix the damage done to civil liberties by six years of President Bush and a rubber-stamp Republican Congress.

The Democrats don’t have, or can’t summon, the political strength to make sure Congress does what it is supposed to do: debate profound issues like these and take a stand. The Republicans are simply not interested in a serious discussion and certainly not a vote on anything beyond Mr. Bush’s increasingly narrow agenda.

[…]

Democrats and Republicans who oppose the war have a duty to outline alternatives. Those who call for staying in Iraq have a duty to explain what victory means and how they plan to achieve it. Both sides are shirking an obligation to deal with issues that must be resolved right now, like the crisis involving asylum for Iraqis who helped the American occupation.

Congress is the first place for this kind of work. Right now, it seems like the last place it will happen.

This is another excerpt, appropriate I think, considering all the talk about victimization and terrorism. [Footnotes in brackets.]

Two months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, I sat in a dark Manhattan theater listening to a woman sob quietly in the seat next to mine. She wasn’t crying over the rubbled skyscrapers that used to stand just 20 blocks from here. Instead, it was the words of a Jamaican dairy farmer that had so deeply affected her. On the screen in front of us, Stephanie Black’s documentary Life and Debt told the story of Jamaica’s economic devastation under the policies of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). The film is a powerful and eloquently made exposition of the kind of globalization that is excluded from Thomas Friedman’s Flat World thesis. In Life and Debt, we see the inner workings of a supposedly independent system of advisory and banking bodies which prey on weak developing nations in order to further the goals of their First World backers.

Perhaps the most strikingly unfair and tragic part of the film comes during an explanation of trade liberalization rules imposed on Jamaican dairy farmers during the Clinton era. While farmers in the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and the European Union were allowed to continue heavily subsidizing their milk industry, the Jamaicans were forced to eliminate their own subsidies and reduce tariffs on foreign milk products. The result was that imports of powdered milk cost less than the Jamaican fresh milk supply. In a poor country where people can barely afford to feed their families, the powdered milk captured the market, forcing the Jamaican farmers to slaughter their cows and dump millions of dollars of unpasteurized milk.

When Life and Debt shows Stanley Fischer, Deputy Director of the IMF, being asked why Jamaica was forced to abandon it’s own trade barriers, he replies: “The reason is that Jamaica is a very small country. It’s not a country that could thrive by producing only for itself. We believe very firmly that countries are going to grow better if they’re integrated into the world economy and that means reducing tariffs. It needed to allow its importers and its people, access to goods from around the world rather than have them rely on this little,” Fisher holds back a laugh, “little economy.”

In the end it’s the Jamaican farmers, standing in their fields and factories, who sound the most honest. One man, speaking in the familiar island accent of Bob Marley, explains, “they told us you have to compete with us on a level playing field. Well, that is all double talk. In certain areas, the Americans subsidize their exported milk powder by 137%. Now nobody can compete with that.”

Another brings it all down to the bottom line. “The end of day result will be that we will have no national food security and that when milk powder finds its real cost, where there are no subsidies in Europe and North America, it will be more expensive than the milk we currently produce. What do we do in the meanwhile? We go out of business.”

Of course it wasn’t just the milk industry that was targeted. The same fate has come to local potato, onion, ginger, and carrot farmer, many of whom, after generations of working their land, have had to find new jobs. Suddenly, Samir Amin’s radical hypothesis of 3 billion subsistence farmers being forced to abandon their crops and head to the cities for work doesn’t sound so hypothetical. The only thing standing between these forces of globalization – which are not part of the Flat World – and small developing nations are the leaders who govern them. And even when they are not the corrupt, larcenous types that the World Bank has historically been happy to deal with, so often there is simply no other choice for a government that sees its economy failing.

Michael Manley, the former Prime Minister of Jamaica, was faced with exactly this situation when the 1973 world oil crisis nearly crashed his national economy. Despite having campaigned on an anti-IMF platform in 1976, one year later he was forced to sign an IMF deal, an act he describes as “one of the bitter, traumatic experiences of my public life.”

[At one point, Manley remembers, he attempted to bolster his failing agricultural sector by giving farmers loans at 10 per cent interest. But the IMF would not allow it. Manley traveled twice to Washington to protest the policy, saying “it is wrong economic policy, it is wrong socially! It is wrong to say that we must force the farmers to pay that rate of interest or you won’t lend us the money. And I remember saying, ‘which of you will face an American farmer and tell him that to borrow something for his farm, he’d have to pay 23 per cent? I said they’d run you out of the White House and out of Congress.’ Oh, they said, ‘that’s their business, we’re dealing with your business.’”]

Today, Jamaica is still saddled with debt, one half of every tax dollar goes to pay off the interest on their loans. The cities are plagued with crime and the security industry is one of the fastest growing sectors. Near the end of the film, a confidential World Bank memorandum evaluating the success of the reforms confirms that after twenty-five years, “these loans achieved neither growth nor poverty reduction.”

Walking out of the theater I heard one man say to his female companion, “if it doesn’t break your heart, then you don’t have one.” But all I could think about was that if some of those Jamaicans had access to the kind of money that Islamic militants do, they would have been just as driven to fly 747’s into any building called the World Trade Center. It is precisely this side of “world trade” – which remains beyond the understanding of average Americans – that provides the foundation for the alternate vision of globalization presented by “radicals” like Samir Amin. It is precisely these austere programs of “structural adjustment” imposed on nations like Jamaica that not only pushed them further from financial autonomy by crippling them with unmanageable debt, but also placed them in a new kind of dependence that reeked of the same kind of racism as that which dominated the colonial era.

As Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity remarked in Eugene Jarecki’s award-winning film Why We Fight, “It’s basically economic colonialism. No one uses the colonialism word, but instead of just taking over the countries, we have a better way. We just go in and have free markets. Whether we are trying to sell our products to their citizens or mine their resources, we need to be in that country for some reason and therefore we’re going to talk about free markets and free trade. But what’s really going on is we want our countries to get rich in your country.”

[Another quote from Charles Lewis in Why We Fight : “we have a process that has a seamlessness, where the corporate interests that stand to benefit are so intertwined and interwoven with the political forces that the financial elites and the political elites have become the same people.”]

check it out on rabble

The net’s been abuzz with commentary on the NYT’s pro-war op-ed from “liberals” O’Hanlon and Pollack, ‘A War We Just Might Win?’ As Salon’s Glen Greewald writes:

The Op-Ed is an exercise in rank deceit from the start. To lavish themselves with credibility — as though they are war skeptics whom you can trust — they identify themselves at the beginning “as two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq.” In reality, they were not only among the biggest cheerleaders for the war, but repeatedly praised the Pentagon’s strategy in Iraq and continuously assured Americans things were going well. They are among the primary authors and principal deceivers responsible for this disaster.

Then there was the notable absence of any focused anti-war events at the Yearly Kos conference which gave the Dem presidential candidates mostly a free pass on Iraq. It was left to John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton of the Center for Media and Democracy to organize Coffee with the Troops, a peripheral event unheralded by Kos organizers, that brought Garett Reppenhagen, Aaron Hughes and other soldiers who are the backbone of Iraq Veterans Against the War, IVAW, to meet up with the Kossacks. This from Stauber’s press release for the event:

With the Democratic Party’s Congressional victories in November 2006, the gates have been officially trampled. Many of the blogger barbarians are now comfortably ensconced in the castle, a power within the mainstream Democratic Party establishment. Nevertheless, the US debacle in Iraq drags on unabated. The Democratic Congress has funded the war with no strings attached, and Hillary Clinton who is seen by many as the Democratic presidential candidate for the 2008 has told the New York Times that “when” she is president she will keep US forces in Iraq but run a better managed, smarter war. How different is her position from the current Bush policy in Iraq enunciated in the Joint Campaign Plan that calls for US forces to impose “sustainable security” on all of Iraq over the next two years?

Why are the so-called Netroots slipping into the same kind of passivity that many liberals exhibit when it comes to the war issue? As Armando Llorens at TalkLeft explains, its not that they are against war resistance… they are simply too far up the ass of the Democratic Congress to allow Yearly Kos to be a platform to criticize them.

On the weekend of Yearly Kos, the Dem Congress is in the process of caving in on FISA.The tug in the Netroots is palpable. They do not want their big weekend ruined with this type of controversy. There is no real spark in their fight.

I think the core issue here is that people in the Dem establishment understand that America needs to secure Iraq. They won’t speak in Kissengerian terms in front of the electorate, but anyone who is involved in planning US foreign policy - or at least strategizing it - knows that what is happening right now is a global game of RISK. And in that context, it’s critical to get as many game pieces into the region, to be positioned for the next 50 years. At least, that’s how broad (bipartisan) thinkers like Zbigniew Brzezinski frame it. And that’s the point of my book. When it comes to securing America’s future, partisanship ends at the water’s edge (to quote Woodrow Wilson).

If the progressive blogosphere is going to play a meaningful role in the future of American democracy, it is going to have to wean itself from celebrity nipple of the Democratic party. If that doesn’t happen then we are going to zoom into 08 with the most influential leftist bloc on the net acting as a de facto adjunct of the establishment Democrats. In that capacity, MoveOn and DailyKos will simply limit the parameters of the debate and push for the most winnable candidates in a game of lesser evils that can only drive us further into the war-torn destiny of a declining empire.

The book tour is over, here are a few highlights.

One of the more complex phenomena of the modern American political scene is that while the ideological divide between presidential candidates seems to be ever diminishing, the partisan mudslinging and animosity between the two parties is increasingly hateful. It’s a weird paradox. But it’s not uncommon to hear critics of the two-party system decry a choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee just as the highest rated television news programs are driven by raucous debate between right and left.

For Daily Show host John Stewart, it isn’t a paradox at all. There is no disconnect between the professional politicians and the activists that drive those debates. In fact, it’s exactly the way they want it. Because a polarized public, focused on hot-button issues like abortion, tax cuts and school prayer, keeps their focus off the fact that the two parties have essentially become the servants of one very important class of voters, the corporations.

So when we see representatives of the left and right go at it on Hardball or Hannity and Colmes, it’s just a big act to sustain the illusion that there is authentic debate between the two parties. These shows, Stewart has said, “are emblematic of the decay of the American political system.” They provide uncritical platforms for the politicians to manipulate and divide the nation, rendering the American public impotent in the face of the great problems confronting their country.

This was precisely the message that Stewart brought to CNN’s Crossfire in October 2004. Ostensibly there to promote his new book, America: A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction, Stewart had bigger things in mind. He came to make a direct criticism of the faux debate genre and to take Crossfire’s two hosts – liberal Paul Begala and conservative Tucker Carlson – to task for perpetuating it. The result, as we all know, was one of the most memorable bitch slaps in television history. Three months after Stewart reduced Carlson to a sniveling brat whose last stab at self-respect was to call his opponent an anally-receptive liberal partisan, C.N.N. announced that it would cancel Crossfire and drop Carlson from its roster. When Klein was asked why he axed one of CNN’s oldest and most successful programs, he said, “”I guess I come down more firmly in the Jon Stewart camp.”

He wasn’t alone. Over three million people tuned in to watch the Jon Stewart/Crossfire appearance. Unfortunately for CNN and their advertisers, three quarters of them did it online. Wired reported that it was one of the most downloaded video clips ever.

Whether people were more drawn by the spectacle of such a high-profile bitch-slapping or the inherent message of Stewart’s critique, we’ll never know. But clearly, his words had a resonance that captured an element of the political zeitgeist: people are fed up with the manipulative and divisive tactics of the two parties and the media that serves them. Instead of engaging in rational debate that brings the nation to a consensus on critical issues, party leaders have allowed the political process to degenerate into bitter partisan rivalries. And just as that has driven the ratings of news shows that let them go at each other, it has also served to activate the electorate into funneling money into their respective party machines.

For journalist and political strategist John Avlon, these tactics are not only cynical and disingenuous, they also pose a very real threat to American civil society. Because while the small, interchangeable group of partisan agitators cynically program the national discussion from Washington, D.C., they have no control over what can be unleashed in the small towns of red and blue state America.

Sitting in a quiet bar in Manhattan’s trendy West Village, Avlon explains, “One of the dangers I see in American politics today is that we’re courting a season of violence. Using hate as a recruiting tool increases the polarization of American politics. And I think that is the root of our problems.”

Fast-talking and wildly articulate, Avlon speaks the language of a political insider without any of the D.C. Beltway attitude. Perhaps that’s because he has no interest in being mistaken for a member of the establishment. Instead, Avlon’s mission is to reform the American political system by engineering a realignment of the two party system. This can only happen, he argues, through the earnest pursuit of a centrist political philosophy.

In his book, Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics, Avlon writes, “Centrism is the most effective means for achieving the classic mission of politics: the peaceful reconciliation of competing interests.” He describes the nation’s left and right extremes as an “illusion.” Far from being representative of the country’s political spectrum, he writes, “they are ultimately the same thing.”

But this doesn’t quite square with the vicious antipathy we saw during the George W. Bush’s two controversial electoral victories. “The people were deeply divided,” I say.

“No,” Avlon shakes his head. “The American people, in both foreign and domestic policy, are not deeply divided, they are closely divided. And the two parties profit when they exacerbate differences. They profit when they play to their extremes. It’s a divide-and-conquer strategy which employs wedge issues quite intentionally to give people false choices that they have to choose between.”

Just like Crossfire. John Stewart is a big fan of Avlon’s Independent Nation and centrist philosophy. So, a few months after Bush’s 2004 victory over John Kerry, Avlon appeared on the Daily Show. The two hit it off like old college buddies.

Holding up the book, Stewart beamed, “This is my raison d’etre,” and then asked why centrists have not had more impact on the political process.

“Well, you know, we’re living in an incredibly polarized time,” Avlon responded. “But the thing is, this isn’t normal. The center is under attack right now which is why it’s important that we fight back, which is what I think your show is doing.”

“We’re for the center, baby,” Stewart clowned. “The problem with the center is, the center doesn’t give as much of a shit as the crazies.”

Watching Avlon on the Daily Show felt like I was seeing the future of American politics. Clean-cut without the geek factor, he exudes an aura of confidence and idealism that is rarely seen today. More, his earnest indictment of the partisan system and call for moderation and compromise is woefully lacking in the older political set. Jon Stewart was so impressed that he asked if Avlon was “reading from cards or something, because you’re very good at this.”

But I was suspicious. Here he was on national television, talking about centrists like a rare and endangered species of bureaucratic wildlife. What about Bill Clinton? John Kerry? Al Gore? They’re hardly extremist Democrats. Neither, for that matter, was George Bush running too far from the center when he took the presidency in 2000. Sure, we have seen some really ugly political battles in recent years – the humiliating drama of the comatose Terri Schiavo comes to mind – but, if anything, centrists are the status quo in American politics.

“Aren’t they?” I ask him.

“No,” Avlon answers firmly. “What I’m arguing is absolutely the opposite of the status quo. What I’m arguing – the centrist position – is rebellious. It’s a direct contradiction of what passes as conventional wisdom in politics today.”

“Which is what?”

“You go behind closed doors of any party, it’s all about ideological conformity. It’s all about playing to the base. It’s all about fealty to special interests. I mean, Grover Norquist says ‘bipartisanship in another word for date rape.’ That is an ethos you hear both parties articulate in different proportions.”

The bar is starting to fill up and Avlon has to speak over the din of the crowd. He leans in and continues his defense.

“After [the 2004] election I had a Republican strategist say to me, only half in sadness, ‘this election proves there’s no such thing as too divisive.’ That’s the ethos of American politics that’s accepted as conventional wisdom. Don’t mistake that, that’s the establishment here. What we’re articulating is a principled rebellion against the status quo. It’s not an articulation of the status quo, at all.”

With that, Avlon looks down at the martini sitting in front of him and takes a sip. It’s the first time he’s touched the drink since the waitress brought it twenty minutes ago. He scans for the room for a moment, taking in the beautiful crowd. If I didn’t know him, I would think he was one of them, another smart young thing in a thousand dollar suit. But to hear him speak, it’s clear that John Avlon wants me to know he’s on the outside looking in. And that it’s all going to change.

His goal in Independent Nation, he tells me, is to show centrists that “they don’t have to feel politically homeless.” So, beginning with the 1901-1909 presidency of progressive Republican Teddy Roosevelt, Avlon traces the legacy of America’s “vital center” over the course of a century, right up to the New York City mayoralty of Rudy Giuliani. It’s a natural place for him to end since he served as a Giuliani’s chief speechwriter during the height of his political dynasty in 2000-2001.

Writing for Giuliani, Avlon learned how to fuse conservative values of social order and fiscal restraint with the liberal maxims of freedom of expression and civil rights. This alchemy of two seemingly antithetical platforms was critical to Giuliani’s two-term Republican mayoralty in a city that is 87 per cent registered Democrats. According to Avlon, Giuliani had to represent a political vision that transcended partisan ideology. But he also had to address the serious crisis that had enveloped the city. Between 1990 and 1993, New Yorkers lost 330,000 jobs. Racial tensions were driving an explosion of violent crime that, combined with an average of 2000 murders a year, made New York the crime capital of America.

“People had given up on New York,” Avlon remembers, “They called it the ungovernable city. That was a given: ‘the best you can do is manage the decline.’ But when you employ solutions that aren’t simply liberal or conservative in a doctrinaire way, there is room for evolution.” Rudy Giuliani may have been elected a Republican, but he governed, Avlon tells me, as a New Yorker.

He places Giuliani in a category of “Third Way” mayors – including L.A.’s Republican Richard Riordan and Cleveland’s Democratic Michael White – who emerged in the 1990’s. These politicians were successful, Avlon argues, because they shrugged off the “ideological straightjacket” placed on them by their parties and focused on practical solutions to the desperate problems faced by their cities.

“One way of understanding these mayors who brought urban America back from the brink is they were not doctrinaire liberals and they were certainly not doctrinaire conservatives. They were something different. They weren’t beholden to special interests on either side, therefore they were free to choose the best solutions. It’s about what works.”

And make it work he did. Rudy Giuliani became the first Republican reelected mayor of New York in sixty years. Looking back at the eight-year span (1994-2001) of his two terms, it was a remarkable feat. At the peak of Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan’s far right conservative domination of the national Republican party, Giuliani was establishing a liberal record on social issues such as gun control, gay marriage, immigration and abortion. And, in what might have been his most daring act of independence, during New York’s 1994 gubernatorial race, he backed the Democratic incumbent Mario Cuomo over his own party’s candidate, George Pataki. When Pataki won, Giuliani was essentially excommunicated by rank-and-file Republicans.

But that is not to say he was any more popular with liberals. Faced with a $2.3 billion budget deficit Giuliani slashed public spending, enacted “workfare” programs that forced welfare recipients to clean streets and parks, and beefed up the police force to 40,000 officers, its highest level ever. Advocating a program of “zero tolerance” for crime, Giuliani gave carte blanche support to the N.Y.P.D., which aggressively pursued its mandate and became embroiled in a series of controversial cases including shooting unarmed suspects and harassing minorities for everything from jaywalking to turnstile jumping in the subways. Finally, in an effort to clean up Times Square, Giuliani passed urban redevelopment laws which favored large corporations like Viacom and Disney while pushing low income residents out of the city.

And this was the key to Giuliani: he understood that being a successful mayor meant establishing an environment in which corporations could thrive. He had to make New York a magnet for investment. So while he was tolerant of gays and progressive on abortion, Giuliani’s true legacy was built on clearing out all of the unsightly and ill-mannered constituents of the nation’s biggest metropolis. As crime went down, businesses moved in and property values went up; benefiting that key electoral contingent of landowners – conservative and liberal. But for those homeless, ghetto-dwelling minorities who slipped through the ever-widening gaps of the social safety net, New York became an impossible city and they were forced to seek refuge elsewhere. And herein lies the real danger of a centrist reform movement.

Giuliani won by adopting the liberal values of individual freedom and social tolerance in combination with the conservative tactics for dealing with crime and poverty. In other words, it was an alchemy of those components of liberalism and conservatism which ultimately served and satisfied the middle and upper classes of the society. More importantly, it was just the kind of practical thinking that made New York a haven for corporate investment. By depoliticizing the public sphere, Giuliani was able to focus his government’s energies on solutions to a particular set of problems. Those of the wealthiest tiers of his city. And while no one can argue that New York is not a cleaner, safer and better managed city as a result of the Giuliani’s mayoralty, we must cannot forget those who were forced out to accommodate the dream.*

And this is what most worries me about the kind of centrism that strategists like John Avlon are advocating. Just like the corporate-driven neoliberalism of Thomas Friedman that has become the de facto program for American economic foreign policy, centrism provides the American elite with a vehicle that will create sanitized environments for business to thrive. And this will be achieved by effectively cutting out the dissenting wings of both the Republican and Democratic party. While I can’t say I’ll shed too many tears for the marginalizing of right wing Christians like Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson, we should all be concerned about the silencing of those Democrats – whom centrists call ‘extreme’ – who have traditionally championed America’s poor and politically disenfranchised. If political strategists like John Avlon have their way, the two-party system will be dominated by moderates who have agreed to disagree on their fundamental social differences in order to focus their priorities on fixing the problems as identified by their most influential patrons. Undoubtedly, they will fix one problem by defanging partisans who make a living on finding the cracks and fissures that divide the American people. But they could also create a situation in which the two parties finally, openly, turn into one.

The honeymoon is over, their outrage has been duly noted. Bono and Bob Geldof sounded off this weekend about the G8’s retreat from the lofty promises made back in 2005 when Live 8 put the world spotlight on African poverty. Geldof called them “creeps” and the meeting, which failed to secure tangible pledges to meet the promised £30 billion aid deal, “a total farce.” But all the talk about the G8’s predictable reneg obfuscates a far more illuminating aspect of this travesty. And that is the profound level of ignorance the rock stars showed in grasping the fundamental causes of poverty and how their considerable power could be used to eradicate them. Looking back at some of the critiques leveled by the proposed recipients of this aid, the Africans themselves, provides a valuable, if cautionary, lesson.

When Geldof announced the Live 8 concerts in 2005, declaring they were “dealing with the roots of that poverty,” critics assailed him for assembling a “hideously white” roster that only included two African-born performers. Many saw it as a ploy to raise the sagging profile of old, unfashionable rock stars like The Who, Paul McCartney and Duran Duran, while others charged that it was the rock stars who were being used by the G8 politicians.

Bono brushed off the latter criticism, saying “Is there some degree of being used here? Yes. But I am not a cheap date, and neither is Bob Geldof.” Which may have been true. As a result of the Live 8 and Make Poverty History campaigns, the G8 agreed to cancel the debt of the world’s eighteen poorest nations and double 2004 levels of aid to Africa from U.S.$25 to U.S.$50 billion by the year 2010. But when this failed to impress the very Africans Live 8 was created to benefit, neither Bono nor Geldof had any snappy comebacks.

“One should not be surprised,” wrote the African scholar Samir Amin in his The Liberal Virus, “that at the very moment when capitalism appears to be completely victorious, ‘the fight against poverty’ has become an unavoidable obligation of the rhetoric of the dominant groups.”

It’s something that the Western media missed entirely. Here we were, fifteen years after end of the Cold War, long after capitalism has been declared the world’s ideological victor, still focused on world poverty. And, with a situation in Africa no better than twenty years ago when the last world aid music event was held. Now, of course, many would say that it is not the fault of liberalism that African countries have not been able to institute sustainable fiscal policies. And that would be true if there wasn’t a long legacy of liberal economic intervention on the continent of Africa, much of it designed around the goal of relieving poverty. So what’s wrong with this picture?

Samir Amin claims that for representatives of the World Bank, IMF and rock stars like Bono and Bob Geldof, poverty is only ever seen as an empirical measurement, one that can be conquered through mathematical reasoning. Increase aid, remove the debt… problem solved. But this is just rock star economics. The reason nothing has changed for Africans since the last time Geldof and Bono beamed their message into hundreds of millions of homes worldwide is that they have been sucked into playing the game of the G8 leaders. They discuss poverty without challenging the methods and mechanisms that generate it.

Now, for Amin the Marxist, the foundations of African poverty are deep and advancement is a treacherous road, obstructed by the evils of capitalism. But it wasn’t just the far left that was questioning Live 8. Two weeks after the concerts, the New York Times published an op-ed by Cameroonian journalist Jean-Claude Shanda Tonme which essentially built on Amin’s criticism, but from a different perspective.

“Our anger is all the greater because,” Tonme wrote, “we didn’t hear anyone at Live 8 raise a cry for democracy in Africa. Africa’s real problem is the lack of freedom of expression, the usurpation of power, the brutal oppression… Don’t they understand that fighting poverty is fruitless if dictatorships remain in place?”

At a time when the armies of America and Britain are supposedly fighting anti-democratic insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, these words should have stung the eyes of pro-war liberals who applauded the debt relief program as a crucial step toward ending poverty.

“Neither debt relief nor huge amounts of food aid nor an invasion of experts will change anything,” wrote Tonme in the Times. “Those will merely prop up the continent’s dictators… We would have preferred for the musicians in Philadelphia and London to have marched and sung for political revolution.”

But revolution is hardly the kind of thing that Geldof’s government-friendly spectacle was designed to inspire. The closest anyone got was a Versace-clad Madonna singing “Music makes the people come together. Music makes the bourgeoisie and the rebels come together.” And there’s good reason for that. Because revolution in countries like Cameroon, Chad and Togo would demand overthrowing leaders who have a long relationship with the IMF and World Bank. Leaders who, according to John Perkins, the “Economic Hit Man” turned best-selling author, are given huge sums of money that are never expected to be repaid “because the nonpayment is what gives us our leverage, our pound of flesh.”

Working for the international consulting firm of Chas T. Main, Perkins’ job was to create optimistic financial projections for developing countries that would justify huge IMF and World Bank loans. Though the money was supposedly lent to recipient nations for infrastructural development, much of it never left the United States since it went directly to Main or other U.S. construction and engineering companies like Bechtel or Halliburton which were contracted to do the work. More importantly, Perkins writes in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, he would bring in such high loans that it would drive the countries bankrupt and they would be “forever beholden to their creditors, and… would present easy targets when they needed favors, including military bases, U.N. votes, or access to oil and other natural resources.”

“It’s a sham, it’s a subterfuge,” he says solemnly.

Perkins views the recent pledges by the G8 to Make Poverty History as the latest chapter in this legacy of economic entrapment.

“This program to forgive debt in eighteen nations, with another twenty-two on the back burner, that’s an amazing tool of economic hit men. I believe totally in debt forgiveness, but this is not about debt forgiveness. Every one of those countries is being asked to allow American corporations or international corporations to privatize their electric and water systems and many of their other resources. They are asked to accept the trade barriers we have in the United States and the other G8 countries and yet not keep their own trade barriers to protect their markets from our products. So we are using this debt forgiveness ploy as a way to get them more entrenched in the empire. It’s a very, very subtle and effective economic hit man tool and yet, most people don’t seem to realize that.”

Just one month after the G8 leaders made their highly publicized vow to cancel debt for the poorest eighteen countries, a document leaked from the World Bank severely undermined the credibility of their promise. Penned by Geoff Lamb, the bank’s vice president for concessional finance, the document explained that “most countries receiving 100 per cent debt cancellation would be classified as ‘green light’ and therefore become eligible for new borrowing.” Even more damning is Lamb’s reference to a G8 document instructing that those nations receiving debt relief should be “eased into new borrowing.” According to Perkins, this borrowing will then funnel right back into projects earmarked for Western companies.

Commenting on the leak, Dave Timms of the World Development Movement (WDM) said the World Bank was essentially “asking the executive directors how quickly they can get the countries that receive debt relief back into patterns of borrowing and back into debt.” A World Bank spokesman dismissed the controversy, describing the document as “an informal and preliminary presentation.”

But what about Perkins’ assertion that, as a condition of the debt relief, these countries would be forced into privatizing their resources and lowering trade barriers? A quick glance at the Blair Commission report, the U.K. government’s analysis of African poverty that formed the basis for Bob Geldof’s partnership with Tony Blair in Live 8, is telling. Its opening line states that, “for its part, Africa must accelerate reform.” Reform, of course, is a code word for privatize. Clearly, despite all the nice talk, this is still the modus operandi for the neoliberal forces of globalization. In September 2005, a report published by WDM showed that of the IMF and World Bank’s official poverty reduction strategies (P.R.S.P.’s), which enforce conditions for debt relief, loans and aid on a country-to-country basis, “90 per cent contain privatisation measures… and over 70 per cent include trade liberalisation.” Trade liberalization is another euphemism for lowering of trade barriers.

A report from Council on Hemispheric Affairs explained the G8 “debt relief” scheme this way: “Candidates seeking debt relief are caught in a classic Catch-22 dilemma: in order to relieve poverty they must institutionalize the circumstances that created it in the first place. This compromise does not end when external debts are finally relieved. Rather, countries must continue to conform to IMF/World Bank expectations in order to win the good credit ratings that are the password for attracting foreign investments.”

Finally, I decided to do a random check on one African country that was scheduled for debt relief – the New York Times op-ed writer Jean-Claude Shanda Tonme’s beloved Cameroon. In October 2005, just four months after Live 8, Cameroon announced that it “plans to privatise its state airline, water utility and telecommunications company as part of an IMF-backed economic reform programme aimed at obtaining debt relief.”

In its report on the fallout between Bono/Geldof and the G8, the Sunday Telegraph gushed that the rock stars “have a real grasp of African development issues.” If that was true then they would focus their outrage on the use of debt to pillage Africa. Instead they have played into the old trap of follow the leader. And once again, the ball has rolled off the field.

The Guardian published my response blog to Zoe Williams and UK-based writer Sam Urquhart wrote this extensive review of the book for GNN.

Back from Hay, which was inspiring as usual. Especially considering the masses of people who lined up for events in the face of a near-Biblical stormfront. I got to see a panel on whether “Islam is compatible with democracy” that featured the most amazing display of internecine Palestinian warfare. The conversation was pretty uneventful until Samir al-Youssef told Hamas representative Ghazi Hamad that he was an atheist. “But you’d probably kill me for that, right?” he asked. Hamad just looked over at him and shrugged. It was classic.

Also worth mention, Nigerian writer and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka talked about the “wall of silence,” that maintains the West’s inaction in Darfur. The color of the ink on this wall, he told us, “is red.” Later, talking about the evils of fundamentalism, he said something that I believe can also be applied to liberals and their own self-identification with just war. Smiling under his bush of white hair, Soyinka remarked, “the pathetic passion to play God to other human beings brings truth to its knees.”

And speaking of truth, after getting in from the airport last night, I found this review of my sold-out event at Hay. For the click-weary, Zoe Williams writes that I look like Rob Lowe and had basically nothing to contribute, except good looks, to the debate against pro-war lefty Nick Cohen. I have heard that Zoe Williams is slightly ridiculous but to reduce my entire argument to the ramblings of a tv-star lookalike is more than just bad journalism. It’s highly suspect. Especially when she is writing about someone who was opposing one of her cohorts at the Guardian. So I have asked to get some space to respond to her in the paper, but meanwhile, here is the response I posted on the site.

Somewhere along the way, I learned that it was bad form (not to mention, relatively useless) to respond to character assassination in the letters section of a paper. But in this case, I don’t know what’s worse. My desire to rebut Zoe’s reduction of my presentation at Hay to the ramblings of a brainless tv-star look-a-like or the Guardian’s printing of a disingenuous report that essentially obscures a well-made attack on one of their stalwart writers.

That said, I would obviously prefer to do this on equal footing - and with similar real estate - to Zoe’s mean article. And have requested that I be given space in the paper to respond. But in case that goes unrewarded, I will record the thrust of my opening remarks at Hay.

Zoe characterizes the substance of my case against pro-war leftists as “the truest thing I ever heard was from a 17-year old.” Of course this helpfully obscures the actual basis of my book, in which I find that “the truest thing I ever heard was from a tank commander on the front lines of the Iraq war.”

His name was Sgt. Hollis and after we had returned from a mission to engage enemy fighters on the streets of Samara, he told me that the goal of the war was “globalization. It’s about expansion of economies… We’re into the stage where we have to stabilize new and emerging markets in order to secure resources. Fifty years, hundred years, it’s not about what it can do us in the short term, it’s what it can do us in the long term.”

Of course, this was just one man’s opinion. But it echoed the beliefs of so many of us who could not accept the Bush administration’s WMD argument, nor the bleating on of leftists like Hitchens and Cohen that it was all for the good of democracy and standing up for the oppressed - indeed massacred - minority in Iraq. It almost seemed too good to be true… this bastard son of John Pilger strapped into an Abrams tank.

So I asked him why he believed this was the true function of the war. And he plainly told me that it was one thing for politicians to make the case to a weary public. Or for intellectuals to advocate intervention for the good of humanity. But for him, who was willing to risk his life, it had to be about something more than ideas.

“When Americans say ‘liberation,’ we mean, capitalism. It’s our way of life. And we believe in it. Can you tell mothers and daughters and sisters that your sons are dying for the American way of life? Can you say that they’re dying for capital goods, this and that? No you cannot. So you have to make sure that whenever you fight, you fight for moral and ethical reasons.”

And this is what begins the odyssey that is “Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing.” There are many ideas presented in the book, which is not a polemic like Nick Cohen’s “What’s Left.” Rather, it is a journey into the hearts and minds of a liberal elite who once fought against supposedly ideological, state-sponsored war. And one of the most revealing interviews is with Christopher Hitchens in the Green Room at Hay. [Read the excerpt from the book, here]

There, after a few glasses of “fizzy water and apple juice,” Hitch tells me where he initially found the desire to become a writer. It was in a library in Devonshire, reading an essay by Conor Cruise O’Brien, Irish diplomat and historian. In it, O’Brien refers to liberalism as “the word that makes the rich world yawn and the poor world sick.” Casting the Kennedy-era American UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson as the liberal voice par excellence, O’Brien describes how the liberal state’s benevolence looked to its recipients… as “the ingratiating moral mask which a toughly acquisitive society wears before the world it robs: ‘liberalism’ is the ideology of the rich, the elevation into universal values of the codes which favoured the emergence, and favour the continuance, of the capitalist society.”

And yet when I confronted Hitch about this vision of “liberalism” and the skepticism people have about the West’s desire to bomb nations into compliant “democracies,” he shrugged. American democracy, he admitted, has become indistinguishable from free market capitalism. “There’s obviously been a great trial that could’ve been about social democracy… And you see, that’s what people don’t believe anymore. That’s what made me give up. There is no… plausible theory of power; that capitalism could be challenged. There isn’t. For the first time in its history, capitalism doesn’t have an ideological enemy.”

Ironic, at best. Tragic, at worst. And herein lies the problem: people like Nick Cohen may have wonderful ideals but they have thrown their lot in with empire. They got their war and it has been a disaster. But instead of taking the time to question what kind of intervention we should have, and by whom, they just beat up anyone who questions it at all. And in this they have abandoned the great role they could play in defining a new era of leftism, in which we define what intervention means and what the actual goals of it will be.