Thursday 25 November 2010
Chalmers Johnson Dies at 79; Criticized U.S. Role in World
Chalmers Johnson, an Asian studies scholar who stirred controversy with books contending that the United States was trying to create a global empire and was paying a stiff price for it, died Saturday at his home in Cardiff-by-the Sea, Calif. He was 79.
The cause was complications of rheumatoid arthritis, his wife, Sheila, said.
Dr. Johnson, who considered himself a longtime cold warrior, was a consultant to the Central Intelligence Agency for many years. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union he became concerned that the United States was increasingly using its military presence to gain power over the global economy.
In “Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire” (Metropolitan Books, 2000), Dr. Johnson wondered why America’s military spending continued to rise after the cold war had ended. He concluded that through a network of more than 700 strategic bases around the world, the United States was committed to creating global hegemony. And he worried about the consequences for American democracy.
It was a theme he expanded upon in three subsequent books, “The Sorrows of Empire” (2004), “Nemesis” (2006) and “Dismantling the Empire” (2010).
Summarizing the series in “Dismantling the Empire,” Dr. Johnson said that “blowback” means more than a negative, sometimes violent reaction to United States policy. “It refers to retaliation for the numerous illegal operations we have carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public,” he wrote.
“This means that when the retaliation comes, as it did so spectacularly on Sept. 11, 2001, the American public is unable to put the events in context. So they tend to support acts intended to lash out against the perpetrators, thereby most commonly preparing the ground for yet another cycle of blowback.”
To maintain its empire, he said, the United States “will inevitably undercut domestic democracy.”
In a review of “The Sorrows of Empire” in The New York Times, Ronald Asmus, a deputy assistant secretary of state under President Bill Clinton, wrote that the book was “a cry from the heart of an intelligent person who fears that the basic values of our republic are in danger.” He added that it “conveys a sense of impending doom rooted in a belief that the United States has entered a perpetual state of war that will drain our economy and destroy our constitutional freedoms.”
E. B. Keehn, past president of the Japan Society of Southern California and a former lecturer at Cambridge University, said in an interview on Monday that Dr. Johnson “did not go into his work with an agenda.”
“If the data pointed to a conclusion that made people uncomfortable, including himself,” Dr. Keehn said, “he would never shy away from it.”
That was true not only of the “blowback” series, Dr. Keehn said, but of Dr. Johnson’s studies of Chinese Communism and of the role Japan’s government played in its economy.
His 1982 book, “MITI and the Japanese Miracle” (MITI stands for the Ministry of International Trade and Industry), challenged conventional wisdom with its premise that Japan was a “capitalist developmental state” that combined government industrial strategy with free-market forces. His ideas contradicted those of economists who insisted that Japan’s economic rise was almost entirely based on the free market.
The heavily state-influenced economic model that Dr. Johnson elucidated can now be seen in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and China. “This,” Dr. Keehn said, “is how you can have a contradiction that the world’s last remaining powerful Communist country is also the world’s greatest rising capitalist success.”
Born in Phoenix on Aug. 6, 1931, Chalmers Ashby Johnson was one of two children of Katherine and David Johnson Jr. After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1953, with a degree in economics, he served in the Navy in the Korean War; it was the start of his fascination with Asia. “His assault boat landing craft was constantly being repaired in Yokohama,” his wife said, “so he started to study Japanese.”
After receiving his master’s degree in 1957 and his doctorate in 1961, both from Berkeley, he joined the university’s political science faculty. He headed the China Center at Berkeley from 1967 to 1972 and was chairman of the political science department from 1976 to 1980. In 1988 he moved to the University of California, San Diego, to teach at its new School of International Relations and Pacific Studies. He retired in 1992.
Besides his wife, the former Sheila Knipscheer, he is survived by his sister, Barbara Johnson.
Dennis Hevesi @'NY Times'
I thoroughly recommend 'Blowback'
Burn Baby Burn
Tens of thousands of students and school pupils walked out of class, marched, and occupied buildings around the country in the second day of mass action within a fortnight to protest at education cuts and higher tuition fees.
Amid more than a dozen protests, estimated by some to involve up to 130,000 students, the only significant violence came in central London. Late in the evening a crowd rampaged near Trafalgar Square, smashing windows on buses, shops and offices, including the Treasury.
Earlier a small group of young protesters, many of school age, tried to break through police lines. Others seized on an unattended police van, smashing windows and scrawling graffiti along its side.
The coalition government condemned the protests, saying they were being hijacked by extremist groups. The education secretary, Michael Gove, gave a notably combative response, urging the media not to give the violent minority "the oxygen of publicity", a resonant phrase associated closely with Margaret Thatcher's efforts in the 1980s to deny the IRA television coverage.
Gove said the government would not waver, adding: "I respond to arguments, I do not respond to violence."
In contrast Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, whose pre-election pledge to oppose increased tuition fees has made him the focus of student anger, spoke of his "massive regret" in having to rescind the promise.
"I regret of course that I can't keep the promise that I made because – just as in life – sometimes you are not fully in control of all the things you need to deliver those pledges," he told one of several angry callers to BBC Radio 2's Jeremy Vine Show. "Of course I massively regret finding myself in this situation."
But said that the fact the Liberal Democrats had been forced into a coalition, and that the country's finances were worse than they had anticipated, meant they had to accept "compromise".
Asked about his reaction to footage, earlier in the week of students, hanging him in effigy, Clegg said: "I'm developing a thick skin."
In a further sign of the developing pressure on the government's cuts programme, Len McCluskey, the new leader of Unite, Britain's biggest trade union, put himself and his union at the forefront of "an alliance of resistance". In an interview in the Guardian, McCluskey says: "There is an anger building up the likes of which we have not seen in our country since the poll tax."
The biggest single protest was in London, where an estimated 5,000 people – many of them noticeably younger than those who took part in the previous mass protest on 10 November – spent hours "kettled" in Whitehall as officers sought to prevent a repeat of the chaotic scenes when protesters burst through police lines to storm the Conservative party headquarters. Thousands more marched elsewhere around the country while others staged sit-ins at university buildings.
About 3,000 higher education students and school pupils gathered to protest in central Manchester, where there were four arrests, and a similar number gathered in Liverpool. A crowd, estimated at 2,000 people, protested in Sheffield, with about 1,000 doing so in Leeds and 3,000 in Brighton. There were scuffles in Cambridge as crowds climbed over railings in an apparent attempt to storm the university's Senate House.
But the scenes endlessly replayed on TV news channels came from central London. Two officers were injured, one suffering a broken arm, with 11 other people hurt. Police said 32 people had been arrested. As with the violence a fortnight ago, it was carried out by a minority of the crowd as many others shouted their disapproval.
One 19-year-old art student was pictured trying to stop masked marchers attacking the van. "We're going to be portrayed badly in the media," she shouted at them. "We're just wrecking a police van."
After being forced to apologise for the mayhem two weeks ago when fewer than 250 police were unable to marshal a crowd of more than 50,000, Scotland Yard sent almost four times as many officers onto the streets and quickly penned marchers into a section of streets.
Late last night some parents arrived at the police cordon pleading for their children to be released. The worst violence erupted after 6pm as officers let the marchers leave.
Steve Jobs and Apple Cut Deal with Murdoch, Showing Contempt for Core Users' Liberal Orientation
It's enough to launch an Apple boycott by progressives: Steve Jobs, master innovator of those hipster devices of choice, just delivered a kick in the teeth to Apple's most ardent fans with news of his deal with Rupert Murdoch for an iPad-only newspaper to be known as The Daily, to be made available through Apple's App Store. Subscriptions will go for 99 cents per week.
The New York Times’ David Carr reports that other, unspecified publishers have sought the kind of deal that Murdoch struck with Jobs -- a subscription-based newspaper app -- only to be rebuffed. He hints at a possible quid pro quo in Murdoch's decision, as CEO of News Corporation (the parent company of the FOX Broadcasting Company), to allow Apple to sell certain Fox shows on iTunes for 99 cents an episode -- against the wishes of other Fox executives.
Go to any coffeehouse frequented by progressives, and you'll enter a world that looks like a grubby version of an Apple Store: MacBooks, iPhones and iPads abound amid the tables splashed with java and banana loaf crumbs.
If Apple were a political party, progressives would be its base. Before Apple was a multi-gajilliion-earning company, progressives embraced its products as an antidote to the cumbersome operating systems and meglomaniacal reach of Microsoft. Without the stalwart, almost cult-like support of progressives, Apple wouldn't have survived its catastrophic decision in its early years to offer its operating system only to consumers who purchased its hardware, while Microsoft earned great profits by offering its operating system as a stand-alone product. The early Apples were quirky, often clunky machines with tiny monitors, but progressives loved the vision that created them. For their loyalty, progressives are about to see Murdoch get the first crack at developing a "news" product specifically for the spectacularly successful Apple iPad tablet.
I have to put "news" in quotes, of course, because Murdoch's primary aim has little to do with the delivery of news: it's all about propaganda. Even legitimate news products, such as the newsroom content of the Wall Street Journal, also owned by Murdoch's News Corp., simply exists as a legitimizing delivery device for the paper's editorial-page content, some of it created by two of Murdoch's own community organizers: columnist John Fund and editorial board member Stephen Moore, both of whom shill, as AlterNet reported, for the programs of David Koch's Americans for Prosperity Foundation. But I digress. Kind of...
Adele M. Stan @'AlterNet'
Wednesday 24 November 2010
Tuesday 23 November 2010
Sunday 21 November 2010
Russia wonders why U.S. would turn away from treaty
Russians are mystified. They can't quite believe that the U.S. Senate might fail to ratify the nuclear arms treaty, and they see no good from such an outcome.
The list of possible harmful effects they cite encompasses a minefield of global concerns: no more cooperation on Iran, a setback for progressive tendencies in Russia, new hurdles for Russian membership in the World Trade Organization, a terrible example for nuclear countries such as China and India, dim prospects for better NATO relations. And to top it off, the United States and its president would look ridiculous.
"The result will by no means be nuclear catastrophe," said Igor S. Ivanov, a former foreign minister, searching for a bright note, "but there will undoubtedly be negative results, and not just for U.S.-Russian relations."
If the two great nuclear powers cannot come to terms, he said, nonproliferation efforts worldwide would be seriously damaged. And for what? "It's a well-thought-out and balanced document," good for both countries' security, Ivanov said Thursday...
Continue reading
Kathy Lally @'Washington Post'
Field Commander Cohen I salute you
The 6-million-year-old rock formation and natural amphitheatre has been a home to Wurundjeri initiation rites, horse races and a haunting film credited with launching Australian cinema.
It's even served as a lookout for notorious bushranger, Dan ''Mad Dog'' Morgan.
Last night, though, Hanging Rock was transformed into that most modern of facilities, an outdoor concert venue, as the surrounding hills echoed to the soulful bass voice of Leonard Cohen.
The sun set behind the rock and the moon rose behind the crowd, Cohen's inspiring brand of melancholy warming a crowd braced against a chill spring night.
''I was born with the gift of a golden voice,'' the 76-year-old Canadian sang in Tower of Song, to cheers of approval from the crowd.
Clare Bowditch, Dan Sultan and Paul Kelly primed the 12,000-strong soldout crowd that had descended on Woodend for its first big concert, fulfilling a long-time dream of Melbourne music promoter, Svengali and local resident, Michael Gudinski, to turn the bowl into a major venue, in the spirit of the famous Red Rocks in Colorado.
Gudinski has permission for a number of concerts, as long as they are wrapped up before the April nesting season of the powerful owl.
A ring road and fencing had been constructed around the rock, as well as mood lighting for when the sun went down.
A logjam of traffic was inching into the car park as Paul Kelly, who also supported Cohen last year, delighted the crowd with a string of favourites including Deeper Water, To Her Door and How to Make Gravy. Vika Bull helped out on Kelly's Sweet Guy.
Gudinski said Cohen jumped at the chance to play Hanging Rock, remembering the eerie atmosphere of Peter Weir's film, but as the crowd settled in for an evening of fine music, the prehistoric lava formation towering up behind the stage was a reassuring presence.
In contrast with the brightly regaled audience, the singer-poet cut a dapper figure in grey as he opened the set with Dance Me to the End of Love.
''Thanks so much friends,'' he greeted his fans. ''Thanks for inviting us to this sacred place. It's a great honour. I promise we'll give you everything we've got tonight.''
Cohen's concerts are usually described in reverential tones; for this one night the setting was almost as memorable as the performance.
John Mangan @'The Age'
John Mangan @'The Age'
Photos: TimN
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