- Feb 20, 2006
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I just happened to get to the part in the book this afternoon dealing with Carter's presidency, and I thought of ProfJohn's comments about his declining defense spending, and about the left's tendency to idolize Carter as a pure champion of their (my) ideals. I'm quite surprised to find that the masses on both the right and left are egregiously misguided when it comes to the facts of his presidency. I thought I would print the following exerpts from Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the US":
"A financial writer wrote, not long after Carter's election: "So far, Mr. Carter's actions, commentary, and particularly his Cabinet appointments, have been highly rassuring to the business community.""
"When Congressman Herman Badillo introduced in Congress a proposal that required the US representatives to the World Bank and other internatinoal financial institutions to vote against loans to countires that systematically violated essential rights, by the use of torture or imprisonment without trial, Carter sent a personal letter to every Congressman urging the defeat of this amendment. It won a voice vote in the House, but lost in the Senate."
"Under Carter, the US continued to support, all over the world, regimes that engaged in imprisonment of dissenters, torture, and mass murder: in the Phillippines, in Iran, in Nicaragua, and in Indonesia, where the inhabitants of East Timor were being annihilated in a campaign bordering on genocide."
"His appeal was populist - that is, he appealed to various elements of American society who saw themselves beleaguered by the powerful and wealthy. Although he himsself was a millionaire peanut grower, he presented himself as an ordinary American farmer. Although he had been a supporter of the Vietnam war until its end, he presented himself as a sympathizer with those who had been against the war, and he appealed to many of the young rebels of the sixties by his promise to cut the military budget."
"When Carter ran for election, he told the Democratic Platform Commitee: "Without endangering the defense of our nation or commitments to our allies, we can reduce present defense expenditures by about 5 to 7 billion dollars annually." But his first budget proposed not a decrase but an increase of $10 billion for the military. Indeed, he proposed that the US spend a trillion dollars in the next five years on its military forces."
"Carter approved tax "reforms" which benefited mainly the corporations. Economist Robert Lekachman, writing in The Nation, noted the sharp increase in corporat profits (44 percent) in the last quarter of 1978 over the previous year's last quarter. He wrote: "Perhaps the President's most outrageous act occurred last November when he signed into law an $18 billion tax reduction, the bulk of whose benefits accrue to affluent individuals and corporations."
"Carter made some efforts to hold onto social programs, but this was undermined by his very large military budgets. Presumably, this was to guard against the Soviet Union, but when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Carter could take only symbolic actions, like reinstituting the draft, or calling for a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics.
On the other hand, American weaponry was used to support dictatorial regimes battling left-wing rebels abroad. A report by the Carter administration to Congress in 1977 was blunt, saying that "a number of countries with deplorable records of human rights observance are also countires where we have important security and foreign policy interests.
Thus, Carter asked Congress in the spring of 1980 for $5.7 million in credits for the military junta fighting off a peasant rebellion in El Salvador. In the Philippines, after the 1978 National Assembly elections, President Ferdinand Marcos imprisoned ten of the twenty-one losing opposition candidates; many prisoners were tortured, many civilians were killed. Still, Carter urged Congress to give Marcos $300 million in military aid for the next five years."
[Similar paragraphs talking of supporting Somoza in Nicaragua and the Shah in Iran ommitted because my fingers are getting tired- you get the point]
[Finally, in reference to the 52 American hostages captured due to the US policy of support towards the brutal regime of the Shah and allowing him to seek refuge in the US from a popular uprising]
"It was a rare journalist bold enough to point out, as Alan Richman of the Boston Globe did when the fifty-two hostages were released alive and apparently well, that there was a certain lack of proportion in American reactions to this and other violations of human rights: "There were 52 of them, a number easy to comprehend. It wasn't like 15,000 innocent people permanently disappaering in Argentina.... They [the American hostages] spoke our language. There were 3000 people summarily shot in Guatemala last year who did not."
How are the democrats different than the republicans again? The whole game is about gauging the national mood and getting elected, and then its just business as goddamn usual. Is Obama really going to be any different? Is McCain? Paul? We know that Clinton won't be. Does anyone even really care?
Why do republicans dislike Carter at all? His policies in reality consisted of supporting brutal dictatorships through financial and military aid, suppressing popular communist uprisings in those countries, skyrocketing military budget, tax breaks for the rich, his attorney general handing out slaps on the wrist to serious fraud crimes commited by big oil (didn't type that part out), ignoring the poor for the most part except in his speeches, etc and so on. In other words, pro big business at home and abroad no matter what the cost. Establishment all the way.
I've read through about 500 years of American history now, and it's all pretty much the same, over and over, no matter who was in power. JFK was as morally irresponsible in his domestic and foreign policy as Reagan ever was. Pick your hero, and he's got something(s) on his record that leaves us all sick to our stomachs, no matter which party we tend to side with.
The peoples of this country, since it's European discovery to the present, have endured and survived not because of leadership and progress, but in spite of it.
"A financial writer wrote, not long after Carter's election: "So far, Mr. Carter's actions, commentary, and particularly his Cabinet appointments, have been highly rassuring to the business community.""
"When Congressman Herman Badillo introduced in Congress a proposal that required the US representatives to the World Bank and other internatinoal financial institutions to vote against loans to countires that systematically violated essential rights, by the use of torture or imprisonment without trial, Carter sent a personal letter to every Congressman urging the defeat of this amendment. It won a voice vote in the House, but lost in the Senate."
"Under Carter, the US continued to support, all over the world, regimes that engaged in imprisonment of dissenters, torture, and mass murder: in the Phillippines, in Iran, in Nicaragua, and in Indonesia, where the inhabitants of East Timor were being annihilated in a campaign bordering on genocide."
"His appeal was populist - that is, he appealed to various elements of American society who saw themselves beleaguered by the powerful and wealthy. Although he himsself was a millionaire peanut grower, he presented himself as an ordinary American farmer. Although he had been a supporter of the Vietnam war until its end, he presented himself as a sympathizer with those who had been against the war, and he appealed to many of the young rebels of the sixties by his promise to cut the military budget."
"When Carter ran for election, he told the Democratic Platform Commitee: "Without endangering the defense of our nation or commitments to our allies, we can reduce present defense expenditures by about 5 to 7 billion dollars annually." But his first budget proposed not a decrase but an increase of $10 billion for the military. Indeed, he proposed that the US spend a trillion dollars in the next five years on its military forces."
"Carter approved tax "reforms" which benefited mainly the corporations. Economist Robert Lekachman, writing in The Nation, noted the sharp increase in corporat profits (44 percent) in the last quarter of 1978 over the previous year's last quarter. He wrote: "Perhaps the President's most outrageous act occurred last November when he signed into law an $18 billion tax reduction, the bulk of whose benefits accrue to affluent individuals and corporations."
"Carter made some efforts to hold onto social programs, but this was undermined by his very large military budgets. Presumably, this was to guard against the Soviet Union, but when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Carter could take only symbolic actions, like reinstituting the draft, or calling for a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics.
On the other hand, American weaponry was used to support dictatorial regimes battling left-wing rebels abroad. A report by the Carter administration to Congress in 1977 was blunt, saying that "a number of countries with deplorable records of human rights observance are also countires where we have important security and foreign policy interests.
Thus, Carter asked Congress in the spring of 1980 for $5.7 million in credits for the military junta fighting off a peasant rebellion in El Salvador. In the Philippines, after the 1978 National Assembly elections, President Ferdinand Marcos imprisoned ten of the twenty-one losing opposition candidates; many prisoners were tortured, many civilians were killed. Still, Carter urged Congress to give Marcos $300 million in military aid for the next five years."
[Similar paragraphs talking of supporting Somoza in Nicaragua and the Shah in Iran ommitted because my fingers are getting tired- you get the point]
[Finally, in reference to the 52 American hostages captured due to the US policy of support towards the brutal regime of the Shah and allowing him to seek refuge in the US from a popular uprising]
"It was a rare journalist bold enough to point out, as Alan Richman of the Boston Globe did when the fifty-two hostages were released alive and apparently well, that there was a certain lack of proportion in American reactions to this and other violations of human rights: "There were 52 of them, a number easy to comprehend. It wasn't like 15,000 innocent people permanently disappaering in Argentina.... They [the American hostages] spoke our language. There were 3000 people summarily shot in Guatemala last year who did not."
How are the democrats different than the republicans again? The whole game is about gauging the national mood and getting elected, and then its just business as goddamn usual. Is Obama really going to be any different? Is McCain? Paul? We know that Clinton won't be. Does anyone even really care?
Why do republicans dislike Carter at all? His policies in reality consisted of supporting brutal dictatorships through financial and military aid, suppressing popular communist uprisings in those countries, skyrocketing military budget, tax breaks for the rich, his attorney general handing out slaps on the wrist to serious fraud crimes commited by big oil (didn't type that part out), ignoring the poor for the most part except in his speeches, etc and so on. In other words, pro big business at home and abroad no matter what the cost. Establishment all the way.
I've read through about 500 years of American history now, and it's all pretty much the same, over and over, no matter who was in power. JFK was as morally irresponsible in his domestic and foreign policy as Reagan ever was. Pick your hero, and he's got something(s) on his record that leaves us all sick to our stomachs, no matter which party we tend to side with.
The peoples of this country, since it's European discovery to the present, have endured and survived not because of leadership and progress, but in spite of it.
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