A MORMON FOREIGN POLICY WOULD BE GOOD FOR AMERICA AND GREAT FOR THE WORLD, BUT IT WON’T HAPPEN….

A MORMON FOREIGN POLICY WOULD BE GOOD FOR AMERICA AND GREAT FOR THE WORLD, BUT IT WON’T HAPPEN….

As the world prepares to face another US presidential election, thoughts turn to the likely foreign and national security policies of America’s first ‘Mormon’ White House under Mitt Romney. Widely derided as either weird or a cult, a foreign policy ‘true’ to Mormon beliefs would likely see radical shifts – a massive rollback of American military forces from Afghanistan, reduction of the threatening attitude to Iran, a reversal of blanket support and aid to Israel, and slashed military spending. America would ‘come home’ and experience a real peace dividend that so patently failed to materialise after the end of the Cold War.

But there’s a difference between authentic Mormon beliefs and ex-Bishop Willard Mitt Romney, the Church of Latter Day Saints’ establishment and, it must be noted, the majority of American Mormons. So ‘Americanised’ are Romney, the LDS establishment, and lay Mormons that a Romney White House would differ little in practice from previous administrations – including JFK’s ‘Roman Catholic’ and Obama’s ‘African-American’ ones. And that is testimony to the almost overweening assimilating powers of the American Way of Life – the subordination, or hollowing out, of any beliefs that challenge free enterprise, limited government, American exceptionalism, and US proactive global leadership.  

A variety of dissenting voices – socialist, conservative, and others - are heard in the Mormon community which, at 14 million strong worldwide, is the fourth largest denomination in the United States. ‘Mormons for Ron Paul’ – a libertarian Republican contender for the GOP’s nomination who may have as much as 20% of all delegates at the upcoming national convention in Tampa, Florida - argue that Romney, the LDS hierarchy and fellow Christians have forgotten the fundamentals of Christian beliefs in peace, diplomacy and negotiation. But when Ron Paul, a congressman from Texas, rejected US military intervention as a ‘silver bullet’ for global problems, he was met with derision from fellow Republicans and Christians. LDS ‘Liberty’ members, who also backed Ron Paul, suggested that US foreign policy be run according to the Bible’s ‘Golden Rule’ – the principle that “forbids interference by one with the rights of another. It is equally binding upon nations, associations, and individuals…” “Love your enemies,” they suggest, while deriding as “death and destruction” large swathes of American foreign and national security policy.

Meanwhile, the ‘Latter Day Conservatives’ website further underlines Mormons’ authentic belief in Christian values. They argue that Christians should ever lift “a standard of peace” rather than fight wars or exact “vengeance” even for the terror attacks on 9-11, rejecting “pre-emptive war” on Iraq, or a future war on Iran, as Romney threatens, if elected. Projecting back into American history to trace the rise of an interventionist mindset, LDS Conservatives criticise President Woodrow Wilson’s alleged support for a  “world safe for democracy” during World War I, suggesting that “There is one and only one legitimate goal of US foreign policy…: the preservation of our national independence. Nothing in the Constitution grants that the President shall have the privilege of offering himself as a world leader…. [nor] to influence the life of other countries, to ‘uplift’ their cultures, to bolster their economies….”

Yet, so reputedly integrated into the American Way are Mormons that the FBI and CIA regard mere LDS membership as de facto patriotic loyalty tests. And there is a logical reason: Mormons believe the American Constitution to be a sacred document received direct from God – not the work of mere mortals. They also believe fundamentally in America’s exceptional character and mission. And this aligns perfectly with the missionary character of Mormonism itself. Indeed, the teetotal Mitt Romney spent years in France – and in French bars – trying to win converts to the cause.

There are Mormons, however, who lament the uncritical acceptance among their community of the word from the White House in regard to the dangers to the republic from “monsters abroad”. To some, the broad mass of Mormons appear to be only faintly familiar with the Book of Mormon, the LDS’ earliest and most holy scripture, making them prey to “scheming leaders”. They reject the claims of the LDS establishment, which backed the preventive war on Iraq in 2003, on the basis that it was a war, in the words of LDS President, Gordon B. Hinckley, “not… for… power but… for [Americans’] homes and their liberties, their wives and their children, and their all, yea, for their rites of worship and their church.”

From the Left, The Mormon Worker website not only rejects Romney’s foreign policies on Israel and the Palestinians, among others, but also lambasts President Obama’s strategy - before and during the Arab spring – of supplying American arms to some of the most repressive and backward regimes in the region to put down popular revolts.

But these are relatively isolated voices in the Mormon community, while Romney swims with the tide. Romney has drawn his foreign policy advisors from among re-organised and renewed neoconservatives who backed the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and other militaristic organisations – like Elliott Cohen, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, John Bolton- that called for an American war on Iraq as early as 1997. Not for Romney, a foreign affairs novice, the counsel of old time Republican internationalists like Brent Scowcroft or Richard Armitage, or Reagan-Bush I era former secretaries of state, James Baker III or George P. Shultz – who were aggressive enough in the pursuit of American power. Consequently, Romney has veered towards bellicose declarations – no negotiations with the Taliban (instead the US should “go anywhere they are and… kill them”), greater military and economic pressure on Iran, more arms to Taiwan, and declared Russia America’s main geopolitical enemy.

Romney has dozens of foreign and national security policy advisors but his inner circle are reputed to be similar to Bush’s ‘vulcans’ – neoconservative hardliners who appear to think that the Iraq War was a great American victory and that the military budget should be increased by $200 billion by 2016 ( the Obama administration had increased military spending by $200 billion over that of President Bush in 2008; Romney’s plans project spending to increase 38% higher than Obama’s current plans), including an increase of 100,000 soldiers in the military, from five to nine navy ships built annually, stationing two aircraft carriers off Iran’s coast (Obama has ramped up such pressure on Iran too), and installing a missile defence system in Europe. At the same time, Romney advocates cutting taxes by 20%; in 2010, Obama, it may be recalled, retained President Bush’s planned tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans. The Obama administration’s militarism has pushed Romney to even greater, politically less credible, extremes.

A truly Mormon White House? If only….

Military Security Replaces Democracy As US Objective in Afghanistan

A glance at the White House document below on the post-2014 US commitment to Afghanistan is revealing: it is some way down the page that 'democracy' makes an appearance, long after 'security' and 'sovereignty' and 'stability'. It is unsurprising in some ways as security is a condition of a functioning democracy. However, democracy is also a source of security and stability, and by downgrading the significance of democracy, even the lip service level that is the usual fate for 'democracy promotion' in third world countries, the US reveals the utter failure of their mission in Afghanistan: defeating the Taliban and its allies, promoting democratic rights, and creating security. The Karzai regime is corrupt and mired in warlordism; its 'security' forces are among the most significant sources of violence against the Afghan people, and the US has just agreed to sell arms to Afghanistan after 2014, as well as to retain troops there for training and other purposes.

 

Key Facts on U.S.-Afghanistan Strategic Partnership Agreement

01 May 2012

THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
May 1, 2012
Fact Sheet: The U.S.-Afghanistan Strategic Partnership Agreement
In May 2010, in Washington, DC, President Obama and President Karzai committed our two countries to negotiate and conclude a strategic partnership that would provide a framework for our future relationship.  On May 1, 2012, President Obama and President Karzai signed the Enduring Strategic Partnership Agreement between the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the United States of America.
The Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA) is a legally binding executive agreement, undertaken between two sovereign nations.  The President’s goal in negotiating such an agreement has been to define with the Afghan Government what's on the other side of Transition and the completed drawdown of U.S. forces. The agreement the President signed today will detail how the partnership between the United States and Afghanistan will be normalized as we look beyond a responsible end to the war. Through this Agreement, we seek to cement an enduring partnership with Afghanistan that strengthens Afghan sovereignty, stability and prosperity, and that contributes to our shared goal of defeating Al Qaeda and its extremist affiliates.
The Agreement signed today affirms that cooperation between Afghanistan and the United States is based on mutual respect and shared interests.  In this Agreement, we commit ourselves to the sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity and national unity of Afghanistan.  The Agreement is not only a signal of the United States’ long-term commitment to Afghanistan, but it enshrines our commitments to one another and a common vision for our relationship and Afghanistan’s future.  U.S. commitments to support Afghanistan’s social and economic development, security, institutions and regional cooperation are matched by Afghan commitments to strengthen accountability, transparency, oversight, and to protect the human rights of all Afghans – men and women.
In addition to recognizing the progress that has been made together over the past 10 years, the Strategic Partnership Agreement includes mutual commitments in the areas of:
• Protecting and Promoting Shared Democratic Values
• Advancing Long-Term Security
• Reinforcing Regional Security and Cooperation
• Social and Economic Development
• Strengthening Afghan Institutions and Governance
When it comes to an enduring U.S. presence, President Obama has been clear:  we do not seek permanent military bases in Afghanistan.  Instead, the Strategic Partnership Agreement commits Afghanistan to provide U.S. personnel access to and use of Afghan facilities through 2014 and beyond.   The Agreement provides for the possibility of U.S. forces in Afghanistan after 2014, for the purposes of training Afghan Forces and targeting the remnants of al-Qaeda, and commits the United States and Afghanistan to initiate negotiations on a Bilateral Security Agreement to supersede our current Status of Forces Agreement.  The United States will also designate Afghanistan a “Major Non-NATO Ally” to provide a long-term framework for security and defense cooperation.
To be clear, the Strategic Partnership Agreement itself does not commit the United States to any specific troop levels or levels of funding in the future, as those are decisions will be made in consultation with the U.S. Congress.  It does, however, commit the United States to seek funding from Congress on an annual basis to support the training, equipping, advising and sustaining of Afghan National Security Forces, as well as for social and economic assistance.
Finally, the Strategic Partnership establishes implementing arrangements and mechanisms to ensure that we are effectively carrying out the commitments we’ve made to one another. To ensure the Strategic Partnership is effectively implemented, the Afghanistan-United States Bilateral Commission will be established, chaired by Foreign Ministers or their designees.

Imperial Civilising Mission Ended with Censorship

The article below belies the claim that British de-colonisation was a peaceful process by a civilised British empire, in contrast to other empires, especially the French.

The article by Harvard historian Caroline Elkins shows that British-imperial myth-construction was integral not only to empire's functioning but its formal end as well. 

The reasons for censorship are clear enough at the very end of empire. Imperial servants would not want, in the wake of victory over racist Nazi torturers and muderers, any of their own brutalities to 'muddy' the waters.

What's more interesting is the continuing reticence to release all the official papers from the colonial period. This is more puzzling, at first sight. However, a clue may lie in the resurgence of imperial thinking over the past twenty years or so. It's summed up in the phrase Tony Blair wanted to use but was advised against at the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, in 1997, just a few miles up the road: "I'm proud of the British Empire". 

The Empire was, as he and many other British and American leaders noted around that time, and especially after 9-11,  an 'empire of liberty' so not really an empire at all, more like one big happy family of nations enjoying the protections and privileges of imperial rule. As a key foreign policy advisor of Blair's, Robert Cooper, noted around 1998, within the empire, peace and civilisation and order; beyond it, savagery and the laws of the jungle. At least that was the mythology being re-constructed to rationalise and justify a doctrine of post-Cold War global interventionism. Cooper urged the Anglo-Americans to lie and deceive in dealings with what he arrogantly called "pre-modern" states - i.e., those which defied the West - because they lived by the laws of the jungle. The corrollary of lying abroad, however, was deception on a mass scale at home, as Bush and Blair mis-sold the war on Iraq on the basis of an imminent military threat.

All those anti-colonial revolts, all those brutalities and counter-insurgency wars, therefore, needed to "go away", disappear. The new "empire of liberty" being constructed by the lone superpower and its chief help-mate could do without untimely and inconvenient reminders of the true character of imperial rule: in the end, empires are based less on consent than co-optation of collaborationist minorities, and principally on force for anyone who dared seriously challenge the empire.

British transparency is a cultivated myth

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Professor of history Caroline Elkins, who has worked on historic Kenya files released by the British government, analyses its record of scrubbing and concealing embarrassing information.

For decades, the British government has crafted and affirmed its own fictions of colonial benevolence. Its officials — both at home and in far-flung colonies — intensely managed a system of document culling, destruction, and removal in the waning days of imperial rule. Anything that might “embarrass” HMG was largely scrubbed, or sequestered, from the record. A colonial archive eventually made its way to Kew in south-west London. Devoid of countless incriminating documents, it offers a particular reality about Britain's past, a past that was carefully tended long before the sun set on Britain's empire.

Today there is hope for some degree of transparency. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) has just released more than 1,200 records from 12 former colonial territories. These documents are but a portion of the some 10,000 files that Britain removed from 37 of its colonies on the eve of decolonisation and recently “discovered” in Hanslope Park, the government communications centre. The Foreign Secretary, William Hague, has declared that the government will speedily make all of the files accessible to the public.

Some members of the media have heralded this as a watershed moment.

The Mau Mau veterans

For certain we will learn much from these new documents. However, to celebrate their release as a historic moment is to miss the underside of the story. Recent events, placed in their historical context, suggest the FCO is hardly forthcoming.

These documents came to light in the context of an ongoing legal case. In the High Court in London, five elderly claimants are suing the British government. The FCO is the state's defendant. These Mau Mau veterans seek to prove that state violence in the detention camps of late colonial Kenya was systematic, calculated and approved at the highest levels of government. This case is the first of its kind. If successful, it could open the door to multiple other claims from colonised populations.

In the Mau Mau case, two years of countless document requests were met with FCO stonewalling. It was only through legal means that the FCO finally yielded in early 2011. The result was more than 1,500 files — all removed from Kenya at the time of decolonisation, and some of which the FCO has incrementally released to the Mau Mau claimants and their experts. A few months later, the FCO confessed that it had likewise found more than 8,800 files removed from another 36 former territories on the eve of colonial retreat. Thirteen boxes of “top secret” Kenya files are still missing.

Nine month review

As expert witness, I have had privileged access to the Kenya files. Together with a research team at Harvard, I have spent nine months reviewing the contents. This process has been anything but straightforward. Despite the legal context, the FCO has culled files, requiring multiple requests for full disclosure, and still files have not been forthcoming. At least two of our findings have particular importance for today's “migrated archive” release. First, there is extensive evidence chronicling the process of document destruction and removal in Kenya. The Colonial Office orchestrated a highly bureaucratised effort that required massive administrative manpower on the ground. In total, officials in Kenya estimated that some 3/ tons of documents were marked for destruction. Incineration times were calculated in case “emergency destruction” was needed. Thousands more documents were to be transferred to Britain. Second, the files released in the Mau Mau case tell us a great deal more about previously documented events and individuals in Kenya.

The current release excludes territories such as Palestine and Rhodesia. The Cyprus files exclude the period of the emergency. The Malaya files cover very little of the contested emergency years. The Kenya documents are a meagre subset of the files released (though culled) in the context of the Mau Mau case. Warning bells should be going off. The government went to extraordinary lengths to fashion its colonial archive. The first release of the “migrated archives” is, at first glance, lacking in substantive files, particularly for former colonies like Cyprus and Malaya where future lawsuits potentially loom.

Until the FCO offers a full and unredacted release of all files found at Hanslope Park, a healthy dose of scepticism is crucial. If not, we run the risk of overly applauding today's document release and reinforcing the FCO's myth of new-found transparency. (Caroline Elkins is professor of history at Harvard University and Pulitzer-prizewinning author of Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya.)

American Power Safe in Obama's Hands

President Barack Obama is making American national security an election issue with his most likley Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, because he has out-Bushed Bush and the GOP in general on the matter. Despite loud claims to be the "change" candidate in November 2008, and being swept to victory, President Obama has in all essentials continued the policies of his predecessor, the reviled George W. Bush.

More pananche than the Texan, perhaps, but essentially the same policies and concepts. He can now do what no other Democratic incumbent or candidate has been able to do for some time - go on the offensive against Republicans who normally claim Democrats are 'weak' on national security (despite the fact that Democrats 'did' all the big wars in the 20th century, and overwhelmingly backed the war on Iraq in 2003).

The US foreign policy establishment, which backed the war on Iraq, merely found what old time hardliner, Zbigniew Brzezinski, called the "new face of American power". Obama has successfuly ridden the waves of global revulsion - and the growth of considerable domestic 'isolationism' (which in truth was closer to a rejection at home of American global 'hegemony' - see the University of Maryand opinion surveys of 2006, featured on USBlog sometime ago).

Why does Obama feel he can go on the offensive against Romney? Because he has followed a hardline miliarist programme that any Republican chief executive would be proud of.

'He' killed Osama bin Laden; he launched more drone attacks, i.e. targetted assasinations, than Bush; he's retained rendition, i.e, kidnapping, as a practice; prevented the US Supreme Court from extending constitutional protections to Bagram inmates; retained the Guantanamo Bay torture facility; extended anti-terror surveillance on a massive scale to the 'homeland'; ordered and maintained the military surge in Afghanistan; continued to defend and finance and arm Israel's aggressions against Palestinians; ramped up the rhetoric of inevitable military strikes against Iran; ordered coercive regime change in Libya; maintained US support for corrupt and bankrupt regimes in the Arab world; and so on.

A criticism of President George W. Bush was that he ignored China and the rise of Asia. Obama has not. He's stationing thousands of US troops in Australia, making military treaties with China's border states, securing cooperation - cultural, military and other between India, Japan and Australia: from Beijing, this could look a bit like encirclement.

I am hesitant to say that Obama has not followed a 'proper' or 'authentic' Democratic foreign and national security policy - because he has: who launched the military offensive in Korea in 1950? Who escalated warfare in Vietnam in 1965? Never mind who was in office in 1917 and 1941. Democrats 'do' wars, just as Tony Blair 'did' wars and paid the 'blood price'. Democrats do wars; Obama is in a long line of Democratic war-makers.

Who said this? "Our country today faces a bewildering array of threats and opportunities. As president, ...I will safeguard America and secure our country’s interests and most cherished ideals. The unifying thread of his national security strategy is American strength. When America is strong, the world is safer. It is only American power—conceived in the broadest terms—that can provide the foundation for an international system that ensures the security and prosperity of the United States and our friends and allies.

"A XXXX foreign policy will proceed with clarity and resolve. Our friends and allies will not have doubts about where we stand and what we will do to safeguard our interests and theirs. Neither will our rivals, competitors, and adversaries. The best ally world peace has ever known is a strong America. The “last best hope of earth” was what Abraham Lincoln called our country. XXXX believes in fulfilling the promise of Lincoln’s words and will defend America abroad in word and in deed."

Tweak it just a bit by adding something about the universalism of American ideals and you could hear Obama's dulcet tones uttering those very words. But the quote is from Mitt Romney's website.

In the end, the differences between Democrats and Republicans are minimal in practice: they are parties of the Establishment that are completely united in their fundamental faith in American power.

When asked what changes he would introduce should he gain the White House, Obama responded in 2007-8: "I am the change". And he was absolutely true to his word: the face, the veneer, of US power is all that really changed.

There are those, disappointed supporters and 'neutrals', who say that Obama inherited a veritable mess that no one could have done much about. And they have a point.

But I would ask is this: if Obama could do little about his inheritance, what did he do about those things that were in his control, issues that arose within his own tenure - like the uprisings in Egypt, the intervention in Libya, Bagram, and the Wikileaks revelations - remember them, and Bradley Manning's incarceration in military prison? Amnesty and the UN investigated Manning's treatment as examples of the use of torture, lest we forget.

President Barack Obama has presided over a national security strategy that differs so little from that pursued by his predecessor that he feels he has stolen his opponent's garb.

That's why he can make national security an election issue. This may play well at the hustings; it augurs ill for the rest of the world.

Israeli Foreign Policy Cannot be Immune to Criticism

Why should Israel's overseas policies be immune from criticism? What's so special about Israel that any critique is immediately condemned? Is Israel always right in what it does? Does it not behave like other states today and historically - and carry out aggressions against threats, real or imagined?

The German Nobel laureate, Gunter Grass, is the latest to be condemned as an anti-semite for daring to suggest that Israel is an aggressive state that has frequently violated international law, defied the United Nations, presided over or committed war crimes and is currently threatening military aggression against Iran's nuclear programmes.

A few years back, two leading American scholars, John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt, of Chicago and Harvard universities, respectively, faced the most vituperative treatment from Israel and her friends, for writing a book that, problematically in my view, suggested that an Israel lobby that extended from US Jewish organisations to Christian Zionists - dominated American foreign policy. For that, they were condemned as anti-semites. It was only their relative seniority that kept them in their posts - they were candid enough to admit that themselves. And they predicted in very precise terms the treatment they would receive once their ideas were published.

Another state that brooks no criticism of its foreign policy from non-nationals is the United States; its home-grown critics are condemned as un-Americans, foreign critics as anti-Americans. By launching so much flak at critics, however, both Israel and its chief military and financial sponsor, the US, seek to deflect attention from their actual deeds, dismissing critics as racists (which is not to deny that there are also racists who operate under the cover of honest critique). But by tarring all critics with the same brush, both America and Israel seek to continue with their policies of aggression against other states or peoples.

Some facts:
According to Amnesty International: "Israel's military blockade of Gaza... left more than 1.4 million Palestinian men, women and children trapped in the Gaza Strip, an area of land just 40 kilometres long and 9.5 kilometres wide.

"Mass unemployment, extreme poverty and food price rises caused by shortages have left four in five Gazans dependent on humanitarian aid. As a form of collective punishment, Israel’s... blockade of Gaza is a flagrant violation of international law."

During its 2008/9 war on Gaza, "The Israeli army used white phosphorus, a weapon with a highly incendiary effect, in densely populated civilian residential areas of Gaza City, according to indisputable evidence found by an Amnesty International fact-finding team...

"When white phosphorus lands on skin it burns deeply through muscle and into the bone, continuing to burn until deprived of oxygen." The white phosphorous was supplied by US arms firms.

White phosphorous is not illegal under international law but was condemned when deployed by Saddam Hussein against the Kurds in 1991; but was then used in 2004, bu US troops in Fallujah, Iraq.

Illegal Settlements: No foreign government, including the US, recognises Israel's settlements in Sinai, the West Bank or the Golan Heights, nor in East Jerusalem. Yet, Israel continues to defy the International Court of Justice, the UN and the Oslo Accords.
Iran is accused of a determination to "wipe Israel off the face of the earth", an intention normally attributed to President Ahmadinejad, who is rightly condemend by all right-minded observers, including large sections of Iranian society. Yet, in practice, it is Israel which is busy denying life and human rights to Palestinians.

Nuclear weapons:
Despite the attention to Iran's nuclear programmes, Israel has long possessed nuclear weapons and long range intercontinental ballistic missiles. It also has refused to sign the nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty, citing "national security".

Why would Iranian nuclear weapons be qualitatively different from those possessed by Israel, Pakistan and India and, indeed, by North Korea, Britain, and the United States?

Has North Korea, the only other official US/Israel 'enemy' state, used its nuclear weapons? Behaved in a manner unlike any other state might? The lesson of North Korea, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and of Colonel Gaddafi's Libya, is that nuclear weapons provide the ultimate security against American or Israeli attacks and aggressions.

And that's why Iran's attempts - however undeveloped they might be - to build a nuclear arms capacity are so threatening - they would provide an ultimate line in the sand against external aggression. They cannot cite 'national security', however, to legitimise their policies, even though they have witnessed forcible regime change in their next door neighbour, Iraq, and in Libya, neither of which possessed the ultimate security guarantee.

Iran's nuclear programmes are part of the blowback that the USA and Israel reap for past aggressions in the Middle East.

Trayvon Martin and Barack Obama: Racial and Post-Racial Face to Face

The Trayvon Martin shooting in Sanford, Florida, highlights a long-term trend in US politics stretching back into the 1960s and the civil rights and black liberation movements: that the position and status of blacks has shifted considerably at one level - as Obama's elevation to the White House most starkly indicates - but remained almost unchanged at another level: as the shooting of Martin denotes. Obama represents the tip of an iceberg that America most wants to promote - of a land of opportunity in which anyone, even a black person, can 'make it' to the very highest rungs of the ladder.

Trayvon Martin's killing - while running away from an armed white man - and the fact that the victim's family were not informed for three days of his killing, the failure on the part of the police to arrest and charge his assailant or to question witnesses but rather to begin invetigating the victim - exposes to full view the larger, submerged part of the iceberg: that black Americans remain at the bottom of the American heap on all key indicators - wealth, income, health, quality of life, longevity, educational attainment, and the like. At every stage of the criminal justice process blacks suffer discrimination: more likely to be a suspect, if suspected to be arrested, if arrested to be charged, if charged to be prosecuted, if prosecuted to be sentenced to a custodial sentence, and if imprisoned to be impisoned for longer than a white suspect for the same offence.

On the other hand, Obama represents something very real too: the new black politics of incorporation that took hold after the civil rights and black liberation movements had ebbed away - a politics not of the street but of city hall and US congress, insider politics within a system that certainly delivers better outcomes for some blacks than prevailed before 1965, but also betrays the same levels of corruption and patronage and pork-barrel for which US machine politics has long been known.

The politics of incorporation comes at its own price and creates a black political elite of which Obama is the most significant member and poster boy: a Waspified black American - socialised and trained in America's elite private schools - Occidental, Columbia, Harvard - on foundation scholarships, to be trained to think and act in particular ways, to shed the psychology of the past and embrace a future of opportunity, within a Wasp dominated power structure - whether in the corporation, law firm, bank, or executive office.

As G William Domhoff and Richard Zweigenhaft show in a series of studies of 'outsiders' who made it into the US power elite - Jews, women, Latinos, Asians, Blacks - the upper echelons of American power have become more 'diverse' in response to protest and/or self-interest but remain dominated by White Anglo-Saxon Protestant males and their culture and mindsets. Diversity yes, but not in terms of politics, ideology, or attitude to what constitutes American identity and power - at home and abroad.

But of all groups Domhoff and Zweigenhaft studied, blacks remain exceptional: the pschological and social marks of 150 years of enslavement followed by a century of violently-enforced racial segregation remain seared into the body politic and social fabric.

The blacks who do best in the United States are most frequently those who are lighter-skinned or voluntary immigrants, rather than the desendants of a subjugated and humiliated involuntary minority. Barack Obama - the son of a white mother and an African student - stands outside the core of the deadly racial matrix of the United States.

The politics of incorporation - in the cases of Obama and Martin - have yielded their predictable harvest: a black man in the White House side by side with continued and increasing racial inequality for the broad mass of black Americans for whom America's first black president has done little.

Foundations of the American Century

FOUNDATIONS OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY

“Switzerland Exposed,” screamed the title of a book I happened to see recently, drawing a wry smile—and a feeling of “you can’t be serious!” And that’s the usual response when people hear about my new research on American philanthropic foundations, which argues that they are not so “cuddly” a bunch as their image suggests. Although they do contribute to society in positive ways, my research over the past decade and a half, revealed in Foundations of the American Century (Columbia University Press, 2012), shows that the big U.S. foundations—Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie—made fundamental contributions to America’s rise to global leadership, a global imperium sometimes more benignly promoted as the “American century.” This includes some of the darkest chapters in American foreign policy—hubristically guiding economic-development policies that exacerbated problems in the newly independent Nigeria and played a role in its slide into civil war; sponsoring and guiding opponents of the leftist Sukharno administration in Indonesia and contributing to the bloodshed that accompanied the rise of the right-wing militarist Suharto regime; and funding and training right-wing economists as well as their centrist and even leftist opponents in Chile as it careened into the bloody military coup of 1973.

Widely perceived as major sources of America’s power of attraction—its “soft power”—the foundations’ own records, open and broadly accessible to academic researchers, show in great detail that beneath a glossy, liberal, philanthropic exterior, the Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations had a far more sinister side, a fist in the velvet glove. As with Switzerland, when we get past the obvious images, these prove to be deeply political, ideological, and well-connected establishment organizations with links all the way up to the U.S. State Department, the CIA, and the National Security Council. Ford’s President McGeorge Bundy, for example, was formerly national security adviser to presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and a Vietnam War hawk. John Foster Dulles, President Eisenhower’s secretary of state, was a Rockefeller Foundation trustee and a Carnegie president, instrumental in overthrowing the Mossadegh administration in Iran in 1953. But this not really so surprising when we consider their founders and origins—steeped in the rise of U.S. corporate capitalism, violent antiunionism, and political corruption, particularly in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Their original founders were industrialists and manufacturers, linked to big banks and finance houses like JP Morgan and Chase Manhattan. Their boards of trustees were, and are, drawn from a relatively narrow section of society—lawyers, elite university administrators and presidents, corporate executives, media magnates, former public officials. Although globalization appears to have broadened the recruitment of trustees—there are now more women, people of color, and foreign nationals—they remain elitist, technocratic, and top-down, pro-American organizations.

In Chile, the Rockefeller Foundation, for example, consciously and deliberately joined U.S. government efforts to undermine and marginalize “dependency” theory, which animated the economic and financial policies of many South American states by holding foreign investments from the United States responsible for poverty and underdevelopment. This long-term program, later also supported by the Ford Foundation, helped fund the infamous “Chicago boys” from the private Catholic University in Santiago—Chilean economists trained at the University of Chicago under the tutelage of the ultimate free trader and monetarist Milton Friedman. In the long-run, U.S. foundations, in collaboration with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), built networks of power that led to General Pinochet’s coup against the democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, and the execution, arrest, torture, and exile of tens of thousands of Chileans.

Since the end of the Cold War, however, U.S. foundations have continued to affect U.S. foreign policy and the development and direction of globalization. Foundation networks were central, for example, in elevating and refining what has become the central rationale of U.S. national-security strategy since the collapse of the Soviet threat—democratic peace theory (that democracies do not fight one another), as embodied in the Bush doctrine as well as in the policies of the Obama administration.

There’s been a great expansion in the number of U.S. foundations, the variety of grant-making activities, and total philanthropic assets. Since 1987 the number of foundations in the United States has grown from 28,000 to about 50,000, and these new foundations hold some of the enormous recent growth in American wealth. Their assets have expanded from $115 billion in 1987 to over $300 billion today. Their international giving also topped $3 billion in 2002. Record increases in international philanthropic giving have been recorded since the mid-1990s, prompted by a strong world economy and the rise of new fortunes, especially Bill Gates’s Microsoft Corporation and his accompanying foundation. Indeed, the Gates Foundation, like the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations that it takes as its role models, has been accused of high-handed interventions in Africa in the name of treating disease. Bypassing local healthcare systems and governments, and frequently distributing drugs not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Gates stands accused of an overweening imperial attitude—summed up by the term “philanthro-capitalism”—which is about as ugly as it sounds.

Foundations of the American Century argues that the foundations’ global posture started before the water’s edge—at home, especially in America’s elite universities where area studies and international relations programs were pioneered—to spread “knowledge” about areas of strategic or economic value to the United States and as a first step in their incorporation into America’s expanding spheres of influence. American power is multilayered, complex and sophisticated; it is also highly adaptive, smart, and restless. And, like Switzerland, is in dire need of deconstruction.