The article below is from a recent issue of the New York Times. It's significant because it tells a story of heroism on the part of one white man and his family's fight against racism in both the US north and south. We normally only recall southern racial segregation in the 1950s and 1960s; Lee's battles show that the north also had its share of racist institutional practices.
The other interesting aspect of this story is the role of Metropolitan Life, an insurance corporation that sat at the heart of the US establishment that claimed, during the cold war and especially in the 1950s and 1960s, that it stood for freedom, anti-colonialism and anti-racism. MetLife and its many chairmen and directors played significant roles in American national life and other significant organisations, such as the Council on Foreign Relations. Prominent among them was John J. McCloy, asst secretary of war during WWII, US High Commisoner for Germany after the war, the man responsible for organising the internment of japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor, adviser to US presidents from then to Reagan: all the while claiming to stand with the most progressive forces in the world. And while the east coast establishment did belatedly discover anti-racism, its efforts stopped after the most superficial elements of American apartheid had been dismantled while the deeper institutional sources of racism remained largely intact.
Finally, it's interesting how Lee was cold-shouldered by black reformists and historically-black colleges that wanted to ingratiate themselves with that very establishment because Lee had communist sympathies.
He stood and sacrificed his life, which could have been very comfortable and outwardly successful, for his principle of the equality of people regardless of race and colour. Lee Lorch was, then, in his battle against segregation taking on a corporate and political establishment and should be saluted.
Lee
Lorch, a soft-spoken mathematician whose leadership in the campaign to
desegregate Stuyvesant Town, the gargantuan housing development on the
east side of Manhattan, helped make housing discrimination illegal
nationwide, died on Friday at a hospital in Toronto. He was 98.
His
daughter, Alice Lorch Bartels, confirmed the death. Mr. Lorch had
taught at York University in Toronto, and had lived in Toronto since
1968.
By
helping to organize tenants in a newly-built housing complex — and then
inviting a black family to live in his own apartment — Mr. Lorch played
a crucial role in forcing the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company,
which owned the development, to abandon its whites-only admissions
policy. His campaign anticipated the sit-ins and other civil rights
protests to come.
The US military-industrial complex, the Pentagon system, call it what you will, marches inexorably on. Yet, the foreign policy and military establishments have been screaming about the impact of budgetary cuts on America's security -- from whom it is not always clear. America spends as much on its military forces as do the next 10 countries; this is equivalent to 40% of the world's total military spending.
Below is an article that reveals the sleight of hand that has been used to deceive the American public at a time when cuts to the budgets for education, healthcare, unemployment and welfare have been slashed with unrelenting determination and recklessness.
That military-industrial complex that Presdident Eisenhower both warned about, built, and declared essential, back in his 1961 Farewell Address, is alive and well, telling its own truths - from the White House down to Congress and its myriad of media, academic, corporate, foundation, think tank, and political organisations - an entire apparatus of intellectual and ideological institutions against which the general public stands almost naked.
Yet, there are a few voices still able to tell a different story, interrogate the obscure accounting categories that hide vast military budgets, and provide a chance for critical reflection on the character of American democracy today.
Washington
is pushing the panic button, claiming austerity is hollowing out our armed
forces and our national security is at risk. That was the message Secretary of
Defense Chuck Hagel delivered last week when he announced that the Army would
shrink to levels not seen since before World War II. Headlines about this crisis followed in papers
like the New York Times and members of Congress issued statements
swearing that they would never allow our security to be held hostage to the
budget-cutting process.
Yet a
careful look at budget figures for the U.S. military -- a bureaucratic
juggernaut accounting for 57% of the federal discretionary budget and
nearly 40% of all military spending on this planet --
shows that such claims have been largely fictional. Despite cries of doom since the across-the-board cuts known as
sequestration surfaced in Washington in 2011, the Pentagon has seen few actual
reductions, and there is no indication that will change any time soon.
This
piece of potentially explosive news has, however, gone missing in action -- and
the “news” that replaced it could prove to be one of the great bait-and-switch
stories of our time.
The
Pentagon Cries Wolf, Round One
As
sequestration first approached, the Pentagon issued deafening cries of despair.
Looming cuts would “inflict lasting damage on our national defense and hurt the
very men and women who protect this country,” said Secretary Hagel in December 2012.
Sequestration went into effect in
March 2013 and was slated to slice $54.6
billion from the Pentagon’s $550
billion larger-than-the-economy-of-Sweden budget. But Congress
didn’t have the stomach for it, so lawmakers knocked the cuts down to $37 billion. (Domestic programs like Head Start
and cancer research received no such special dispensation.)
By law,
the cuts were to be applied across the board. But that, too, didn’t go as
planned. The Pentagon was able to do something hardly recognizable as a cut at
all. Having the luxury ofunspent funds from previous budgets -- known
obscurely as “prior year unobligated balances” -- officials reallocated some of
the cuts to those funds instead.
In the
end, the Pentagon shaved about 5.7%, or $31 billion, from its 2013 budget. And
just how painful did that turn out to be? Frank Kendall, who serves as the
Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, has acknowledged that the Pentagon “cried wolf.”
Those cuts caused no substantial damage, he admitted.
And
that’s not where the story ends -- it’s where it begins.
Sequestration,
the Phony Budget War, Round Two
A $54.6
billion slice was supposed to come out of the Pentagon budget in 2014. If that
had actually happened, it would have amounted to around
10% of its budget. But after the hubbub over the supposedly
devastating cuts of 2013, lawmakers set about softening the blow.
And this
time they did a much better job.
In
December 2013, a budget deal was brokered by Republican
Congressman Paul Ryan and Democratic Senator Patty Murray. In it they
agreed to reduce sequestration. Cuts for the Pentagon soon shrank to $34 billion
for 2014.
And that
was just a start.
All the
cuts discussed so far pertain to what’s called the Pentagon’s “base” budget --
its regular peacetime budget. That, however, doesn’t represent all of its
funding. It gets a whole different budget for making war, and for
the 13th year, the U.S. is making war in Afghanistan. For that part of the
budget, which falls into the Washington category of “Overseas Contingency
Operations” (OCO), the Pentagon is getting an additional $85 billion in 2014.
And this
is where something funny happens.
That war
funding isn’t subject to caps or cuts or any restrictions at all. So imagine
for a moment that you’re an official at the Pentagon -- or the White House --
and you’re committed to sparing the military from downsizing. Your budget has
two parts: one that’s subject to caps and cuts, and one that isn’t. What do you
do? When you hit a ceiling in the former, you stuff extra cash into the latter.
It takes
a fine-toothed comb to discover how this is done. Todd Harrison, senior fellow
for defense studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments,
found that the Pentagon was stashing an estimated extra $20 billion worth of non-war
funding in the “operation and maintenance” accounts of its proposed 2014 war budget. And since all federal agencies work
in concert with the White House to craft their budget proposals, it’s safe to
say that the Obama administration was in on the game.
Add the
December budget deal to this $20 billion switcheroo and the sequester cuts for
2014 were now down to $14 billion, hardly a devastating sum given the roughly $550
billion in previously projected funding.
And the
story’s still not over.
When it
was time to write the Pentagon budget into law, appropriators in Congress wanted
in on the fun. As Winslow Wheeler of the Project on Government Oversight discovered, lawmakers added a $10.8 billion slush
fund to the war budget.
All told,
that leaves $3.4 billion -- a cut of less than 1% from Pentagon funding this
year. It’s hard to imagine that anyone in the sprawling bureaucracy
of the Defense Department will even notice. Nonetheless, last week Secretary
Hagel insisted that “[s]equestration requires cuts so
deep, so abrupt, so quickly that... the only way to implement [them] is to
sharply reduce spending on our readiness and modernization, which would almost
certainly result in a hollow force.”
Yet this
less than 1% cut comes from a budget that, at last count, was the size of the next 10 largest military budgets
on the planet combined. If you can find a threat to our national security in
this story, your sleuthing powers are greater than mine. Meanwhile, in the
non-military part of the budget, sequestration has brought cuts that actually matter to everything from
public education to the justice system.
Cashing
in on the “Cuts,” Round Three and Beyond
After two
years of uproar over mostly phantom cuts, 2015 isn’t likely to bring austerity
to the Pentagon either. Last December’s budget deal already reduced the cuts
projected for 2015, and President Obama is now asking for something he’s calling the
“Opportunity, Growth, and Security Initiative.” It would deliver an extra $26 billion to the Pentagon next year. And that
still leaves the war budget for officials to use as a cash cow.
And the
president is proposing significant growth in military spending further down the
road. In his 2015 budget plan, he’s asking Congress to approve an additional $115 billion in extra Pentagon funds for the
years 2016-2019.
My guess
is he’ll claim that our national security requires it after the years of
austerity.
First world war: an imperial bloodbath that's a
warning, not a noble cause
The Guardian's Seumas Milne published the column below a few weeks ago. It's excellent, interesting and well worth reading - I only just came across it.
Tory claims that 1914 was a fight
for freedom are absurd – but then history wars are about the future as much as
the past as the present
They were never going to be able to
contain themselves. For all the promises of a dignified commemoration, the Tory
right's standard bearers held back for less than 48 hours into the new year
before launching a full-throated defence of the "war to end all
wars". The killing fields of Gallipoli and the Somme had been drenched in
blood for a "noble cause", declared Michael Gove. The
slaughter unleashed in 1914 had been a "just war" for freedom.
Hostility to the war, the education
secretary complained, had been fostered by leftwingers and comedians who
denigrated patriotism and painted the conflict as a "misbegotten
shambles". Gove was backed by the prime minister, as talk of international
reconciliation was left to junior ministerial ranks.
Boris Johnson went further. The war was the fault of German expansionism and
aggression, London's mayor pronounced, and called for Labour's shadow education
secretary Tristram Hunt to be sacked forthwith if he doubted it. The
Conservative grandees were backed up by a retinue of more-or-less loyal
historians. Max Hastings reckoned it had been fought in defence of "international law"
and small nations, while Antony Beevor took aim at
"anti-militarists".
This is all preposterous nonsense.
Unlike the second world war, the bloodbath of 1914-18 was not a just war. It
was a savage industrial slaughter perpetrated by a gang of predatory imperial
powers, locked in a deadly struggle to capture and carve up territories,
markets and resources.
Germany was the rising industrial
power and colonial Johnny-come-lately of the time, seeking its place in the sun
from the British and French empires. The war erupted directly from the fight
for imperial dominance in the Balkans, as Austria-Hungary and Russia scrapped
for the pickings from the crumbling Ottoman empire. All the ruling elites of
Europe, tied together in a deathly quadrille of unstable alliances, shared the
blame for the murderous barbarism they oversaw. The idea that Britain and its
allies were defending liberal democracy, let alone international law or the
rights of small nations, is simply absurd.
It's not just that 40% of men and
all women in Britain were denied the vote in 1914 – unlike Germany, which already had full male suffrage – or
that the British empire was allied with the brutal autocracy of tsarist Russia.
Every single one of the main warring
states was involved in the violent suppression of the rights of nations
throughout the racist tyrannies that were their colonial empires. In the
decades before 1914, about 30 million people died from famine as colonial officials
enforced the export of food in British-ruled
India, slaughtered resisters in their
tens of thousands and set up concentration camps in South Africa.
Britain was supposed to have gone to
war to defend the neutrality of "plucky little Belgium" – which had
itself presided over the death of 10 million Congolese from forced labour and mass murder in the previous couple
of decades. German colonialists had carried out systematic genocide in what is
now Namibia in the same period.
As to international law, Britain's
disdain for it was demonstrated when Germany had asked by what right it claimed territory in Africa a
few years before. London refused to reply. The
answer was obvious: brute force. This was the "liberal" global order
for which, in the words of the war poet Wilfred Owen, the ruling classes
"slew half the seed of Europe, one by one".
In reality, it wasn't just the seed
of Europe they sacrificed, but hundreds of thousands of troops from their
colonies as well. And in case there were any doubt that all the main combatants
were in the land-grabbing expansion game, Britain and France then divvied up
the defeated German and Ottoman empires between them, from Palestine to
Cameroon, without a thought for small nations' rights, laying the ground for
future disasters in the process.
Gove and his fellow war apologists
worry that satirical shows such as Blackadder have sapped patriotism by
portraying the war as "a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an
out-of-touch elite". The incompetence and cynicism of generals and
politicians certainly had horrific results. But it was the nature of the war
itself that was most depraved.
Fortunately, the revisionists lost
the argument among the public long ago – just as Gove has largely lost his
battle to impose a tub-thumping imperial agenda on the school history
curriculum. They will keep trying though, because history wars are about the
future as much as the past – and so long as imperial conflict is discredited,
future foreign military interventions and occupations will
be difficult to sell.
For the rest of us, this year's
anniversary should be a reminder that empire in all its forms, militarism and
national chauvinism lead to bloodshed and disaster. It also contains a warning
about the threat from the rise and fall of great powers. China is no imperial
Germany, but the US – allied with Japan – is a declining global power in a region in which it is tightening its
military grip. It's not 1914, but the dangers are
clear.
