Michael K. Smith
A pious Sunday
school teacher confessing to lust in his heart but swearing never to lie, he
came to Washington to reestablish public faith in government just when popular
disgust at monstrous U.S. crimes in Indochina had reached unprecedented
heights. The big business agenda during his term in office (1977-1981) was to
roll back the welfare state, break the power of unions, fan the flames of the
Cold War to increase military spending, engineer tax breaks for wealthy
corporate interests, and repeal government regulation of business. While
portraying himself as a peanut-farming populist, Carter delivered the goods for
Wall Street.
Having run as a
Washington “outsider,” he immediately filled his administration with Trilateral
Commission members, hoping that a coterie of Rockefeller internationalists
could resurrect the confidence of American leaders and enrich business
relations between Japan and the United States.
His Secretary of
State was Cyrus Vance, a Wall Street lawyer and former planner of the Vietnam
slaughter. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown was Lyndon Johnson’s Air Force
Secretary and a leading proponent of saturation bombing in Vietnam. Secretary
of the Treasury Michael Blumenthal was the standard rich corporation president.
Attorney General Griffen Bell was a segregationist judge who disclosed that he
would request “inactive” status as a member of Atlanta clubs closed to blacks
and Jews [Carter himself stated that housing should be segregated]. Energy
coordinator James Schlesinger was a proponent of winnable nuclear war.
Transportation Secretary Brock Adams was a staunch proponent of Lockheed’s
supersonic transport. National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was an
anti-Soviet fanatic who said in an interview with the New Yorker that it was
“egocentric” to worry that a nuclear war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. would
entail “the end of the human race.” Since it was unlikely that every last human
being would perish in such event, Brzezinski recommended that critics of U.S.
nuclear policy abstain from narcissistic concern for the mere hundreds of
millions of people who would.
In what William
Greider, author of Secrets of the Temple (a study of the Federal Reserve Bank),
called his most important appointment, Carter named Paul Volcker to chair the
Federal Reserve Bank. Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s assistant for domestic affairs
said that, “Volcker was selected because he was the candidate of Wall Street.”
The Wall Street agenda became clear when Volcker contracted the money supply
and declared, “the standard of living of the average American has to decline.”
Wealth was
funneled upward and wages and production declined. Unemployment and bankruptcy
rose, unions shriveled and disappeared, Pentagon spending soared. For the first
time ever American white collar families couldn’t save money. With urban
housing costs zooming, workers fled to remote suburbs, but the increased
commute expenses tended to cancel out cheaper mortgages. Moonlighting and
overtime work increased, but added income disappeared in eating out, second
commutes, and hired child care. As the cost of necessities outpaced wage gains,
only credit cards could fill the widening gap. Hamburger stands and nursing
homes proliferated while well-paid manufacturing jobs fled to the Third World.
The workforce of the future was said to be a generation of superefficient
robots.
Carter’s
populist assurances simply whetted the public appetite for this kind of dismal
anticlimax. While making a few listless gestures towards blacks and the poor,
he spent the bulk of his energy promoting corporate profits and building up a
huge military machine that drained away public wealth in defense of a far-flung
network of repressive “friends” of American business.
The heaviest
applause line in his Inaugural Address was his promise “to move this year a
step towards our ultimate goal – the elimination of all nuclear weapons from
this Earth.” But after his beguiling rhetoric faded away, he embarked on a
program of building two to three nuclear bombs every day. Although he had
promised to cut military spending by $5 to $7 billion, he decided to increase
it after just six months in office, and his 5% proposed spending increases in
each of his last two years in office were identical to those first proposed by
Ronald Reagan. Furthermore, having pledged to reduce foreign arms sales, he
ended up raising them to new highs, and after speaking of helping the needy, he
proposed cutbacks in summer youth jobs, child nutrition programs, and other
popular projects serving important social needs. Similarly, though he had
campaigned as a friend of labor, he refused a request to increase the minimum
wage and opposed most of organized labor’s legislative agenda while handing out
huge subsidies to big business. He made much ado about “human rights,” but
returned Haiti’s fleeing boat people to the tender care of “Baby Doc” Duvalier,
and when a member of the American delegation to the U.N. Human Rights
Commission spoke of his “profoundest regrets” for the C.I.A.’s role in General
Pinochet’s bloodbath in Chile, Carter scolded him, insisting that the C.I.A.’s
actions were “not illegal or improper.”
Carter came to
Washington proclaiming his desire for a comprehensive Middle East peace,
including a solution to the Palestinian question “in all its aspects.” Yet at
Camp David he failed to grasp the root of the problem, let alone propose a
mature way of dealing with it. He assumed that Palestinians were anonymous
refugees whose nationalist aspirations could be safely ignored. He supposed a
peace treaty could be signed in the absence of the PLO, world recognized as the
Palestinians’ “sole legitimate representative.” He offered no apologies for
negotiating an agreement that failed even to mention Jewish settlements in the
West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights. He did not protest Prime
Minister Menachem Begin’s presentation of the Accords before the Israeli
Knesset as a “deal,” one much more favorable to Israel than to “the Arabs.” He
pretended not to notice that corralling Palestinians into Bantustans was not
simply a tactic of war, but constituted Israel’s boasted final product of
“peace”! Finally, his much praised Camp David accords were the death warrant
for Lebanon, as Israel, its southern border secure with the removal of Egypt
from the Arab military alliance, was freed to concentrate undivided attention
on a long-planned invasion across its northern border. It was this invasion
(June 1982) that convinced Osama bin Laden that only mass murder of Americans
could ever change U.S. foreign policy.
Carter was
effusive in his praise and blind support of the Shah of Iran, who was deeply
unpopular in his country due to policies of supermilitarization, forced
modernization, and systematic torture. By the time Carter arrived in the White
House the Shah’s throne sat atop a veritable powder keg. Iranian cities were
hideously unlivable with fifteen percent of the entire country crowded around
Teheran in shanty dwellings lacking sewage or other water facilities. The
nation’s incalculable oil wealth reached few hands and a restless student
generation had no prospects. The country’s bloated bureaucracy was totally
corrupt. While Shiite leaders rallied popular support, the Shah’s secret police
threw tens of thousands of Iranians into jail, the economy gagged on billions
of dollars of Western arms imports (mostly from Washington), and Amnesty
International speculated that Iran had achieved the worst human rights record
on the planet. Meanwhile, Carter declared that “human rights is the soul of our
foreign policy,” though he added the following day that he thought the Shah
might not survive in power, a strange expectation if indeed the U.S. stood for
human rights around the world.
After the Shah
was overthrown, Carter could not conceive of U.S. responsibility for the
actions of enraged Iranian students who seized 66 Americans and held them
hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, demanding the return of “the criminal
Shah.” (He had admitted the Shah to the U.S. for emergency medical treatment
for cancer, thus precipitating the “hostage crisis.”) To Carter, Americans were
by definition innocent, outside history, and he dismissed Iranian grievances
against the U.S. as ancient history, refusing to discuss them. In his distorted
mind, Iranians were terrorists by nature, and Iran had always been a
potentially terrorist nation, regardless of what they had suffered at U.S.
hands. In short, without the Shah, Carter regarded Iran as a land of swarthy
and crazed medievalists, what Washington today calls a “rogue state.”
Having “lost”
Iran, a key U.S. ally in the Middle East, along with military outposts and
electronic eavesdropping stations used against the Soviet Union, the Carter
administration began supporting Afghan Islamic fundamentalists, not making an
issue of their having kidnapped the American ambassador in Kabul that year
(1979), which resulted in his death in a rescue attempt. While U.S. officials
condemned Islamic militants in Iran as terrorists, they praised them as freedom
fighters in Afghanistan, though both groups drew inspiration from the Ayatollah
Khomeini, who was, in the eyes of official Washington, the Devil incarnate. In
a 1998 interview Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski
admitted that the U.S. had begun giving military assistance to the Islamic
fundamentalist moujahedeen in Afghanistan six months before the U.S.S.R.
invaded the country, even though he was convinced – as he told Carter – that
“this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.” Among the
consequences of that policy were a decade-and-a-half of war that claimed the
lives of a million Afghans, moujahedeen torture that U.S. government officials
called “indescribable horror,” half the Afghan population either dead,
crippled, or homeless, and the creation of thousands of Islamic fundamentalist
warriors dedicated to unleashing spectacularly violent attacks in countries
throughout the world.
The list of
disastrous policies can go on. For example, Carter continued the Ford
Administration’s policy of backing Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor, which
killed tens of thousands of Timorese during Carter’s years in office, and
roughly a third of the Timorese population overall between 1975 and 1979. In
1977-1978 while Indonesia engaged in wholesale destruction in the form of
massive bombardment, wiping out of villages and crops, and relocation of
populations to concentration camps, the Carter Administration extended the
military and diplomatic support necessary to make it all possible. In late 1977
Washington replenished Indonesia’s depleted supplies with a sharp increase in
the flow of military equipment (Jakarta used U.S.-supplied OV-10 Broncos, planes
designed for counterinsurgency operations) encouraging the ferocious attacks
that reduced East Timor to the level of Pol Pot’s Cambodia. In a 1979 interview
with the New York Times Father Leoneto Vieira do Rego, a Portuguese priest who
spent three years in the mountains of East Timor between 1976 and 1979, said
that “the genocide and starvation was the result of the full-scale incendiary
bombing . . . I personally witnessed – while running to protected areas, going
from tribe to tribe – the great massacre from bombardment and people dying from
starvation.” In May 1980 Brian Eads reported for the London Observer that
“malnutrition and disease are still more widespread than in ravaged Cambodia.”
Relating the comments of an official recently back from a visit to Cambodia,
Eads added that “by the criteria of distended bellies, intestinal disease and
brachial parameter – the measurement of the upper arm – the East Timorese are
in a worse state than the Khmers.” Another stellar achievement of the “Human
Rights” administration.
Furthermore,
during Carter’s brief reign he ordered production of the neutron bomb (which
his administration praised for “only” destroying people while leaving property
intact), endorsed “flexible response” and “limited” nuclear war, lobbied for
the radar-evading cruise missile, developed a rapid deployment force for
instant intervention anywhere, enacted selective service registration in
peacetime, and advocated the construction of first-strike MX missiles for use
in a nuclear shell game along an elaborate system of underground railroad
tracks proposed for the Utah desert. While lecturing the Soviets on human
rights, he escalated state terror in El Salvador, crushed democracy in South
Korea, gave full support to Indonesia’s near genocide in East Timor, and
maintained or increased funding for the Shah, Somoza, Marcos, Brazil’s neo-Nazi
Generals, and the dictatorships of Guatemala, Nicaragua, Indonesia, Bolivia,
and Zaire. He refused to heed Archbishop Romero’s desperate plea to cut off
U.S. aid to the blood drenched Salvadoran junta, and Romero was promptly
assassinated. Furthermore, he said nothing at all when the London Sunday Times
revealed that the torture of Arabs implicated “all of Israel’s security forces”
and was so “systematic that it cannot be dismissed as a handful of ‘rogue cops’
exceeding orders.” And though he presented himself as sympathetic to those who
had opposed the Vietnam war, he refused to pay reconstruction aid on the
grounds that during the devastating U.S. attack on the tiny country, “the
destruction was mutual.” (Try arguing that the Nazi invasion of Poland wasn’t a
crime because “destruction was mutual.”)
Carter turned
domestic policy over to Wall Street, refusing to increase the minimum wage and
telling his Cabinet that increasing social spending “is something we just can’t
do.” According to Peter Bourne, special assistant to the president in the
Carter White House, he “did not see health care as every citizen’s right,”
though every other industrial state in the world except apartheid South Africa
disagreed with him. He understood that liberals desired it, but, Bourne notes,
“he never really accepted it.” Instead, “he preferred to talk movingly of his
deep and genuine empathy for those who suffered for lack of health care, as
though the depth of his compassion could be a substitute for a major new and
expensive government solution for the problem.” In point of fact, money can be
saved under a government funded plan, but Carter was uninterested. He insisted
on controlling business costs rather than providing universal coverage,
neglecting to note that under Medicare – universal insurance for the elderly – administrative
costs were a fraction of those charged under private HMOs.
Carter simply
could not comprehend the vast unmet social needs that existed (and exist) in
the United States. He thought there was a way to maintain a global military
presence, balance the budget, and keep business costs low while adequately
meeting social welfare needs via reorganizing programs. When his Secretary of
Health, Education, and Welfare, Joe Califano informed him that without
increased funding many welfare recipients would be worse off after any
reorganization than before, Carter erupted: “Are you telling me that there is
no way to improve the present welfare system except by spending billions of
dollars? In that case, to hell with it!” In response to a comment that his
denial of federal funding for poor people’s abortions was unfair, Carter summed
up the political philosophy that rendered him hopelessly un-progressive: “Well,
as you know, there are many things in life that are not fair, that wealthy
people can afford and poor people cannot.”
Like political
candidates who do their bidding.
Sources:
Lawrence S.
Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart &
Winston, 1978)
Laurence H.
Shoup, The Carter Presidency and Beyond, (Ramparts, 1980)
Samuel Bowles et
al, After The Waste Land: A Democratic Economics For The Year 2000, (M.E.
Sharpe, 1990)
Peter G. Bourne,
Jimmy Carter – A Comprehensive Biography from Plains to Postpresidency,
(Scribner, 1997)
Doug Dowd, Blues
For America – A Critique, A Lament, And Some Memories, (Monthly Review, 1997)
William Blum,
Rogue State – A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, (Common Courage, 2000)
William Blum,
Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II,
(Common Courage, 1995)
Edward W. Said,
Covering Islam – How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of
the World, (Vintage, 1997)
Edward W. Said,
The Question of Palestine, (Vintage, 1979)
Robert Fisk, The
Great War For Civilisation – The Conquest of the Middle East, (Knopf, 2005)
Helen Caldicott,
Missile Envy: The Arms Race and Nuclear War, (Bantam, 1986)
Noam Chomsky,
Radical Priorities, (Black Rose, 1981)
Noam Chomsky,
The New Military Humanism – Lessons From Kosovo, (Common Courage, 1999)
Noam Chomsky,
Towards a New Cold War – Essays on the Current Crisis and How We Got There,
(Pantheon, 1973-82)
Howard Zinn, A
People’s History of the United States, (Harper, 1995)
Michael Parenti,
Land of Idols – Political Mythology in America, (St. Martin’s 1994)
Michael Parenti,
Democracy For the Few, Sixth Edition, (St. Martin’s, 1995)
Walter LaFeber,
The American Age – United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad since 1750,
(Norton, 1989)
William Mandel,
Saying No To Power – Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and Thinker,
(Creative Arts: 1999)
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