Stability in Corruption

STABILITY IN CORRUPTION
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
May 25, 2011
There’s a whole lot of talk these days about how stable “economies” are for stranger/foreign investment. There’s also a whole lot of resistance to “corruption.” Here I suggest that the quest for economic stability is a global delusion—that interpersonal economic security rests instead on what we call corruption.
I get an image of the Buddha laughing at the idea of stability meaning that strangers can make corporate investments on the assumption that economic circumstances in any “market” will not change. Change is inevitable. Some of us may get by in our lifetimes getting rich without losing the wealth we accumulate, but no corporation, nation or empire lasts forever.
While I’m alive on this planet, the safest investment I can find in my future and of those I most personally care about, like my partner, our parents, children and grandchildren, is inherently corrupt. I was taught this lesson twenty years ago in Tanzania by an occasional roommate who for 3 days was acting prime minister, who stayed with extended family and hence with me when he was in Dar es Salaam. He lived as modestly and honestly as any major public worker I have ever met. As we discussed corruption, he told me of the duty he felt to take care of his extended family, including public employment..
Who among us who enjoys any amount of economic security is not corrupt? In academia, I have survived in part by personal ties to journal or book editors. Colleagues of mine publish by citing the right people. Just to take one example politically, how did the present mayor of Chicago get to be the chief of staff of a Chicago-established US president without being chosen to be inner political family? What member of the US Congress is independent of lobbyists who contribute to his or her re-election? (Well, actually, I can name a couple of members of the US house and one late senator who tried.)
Recovering criminologist that I am, I cannot pretend to be morally superior to my corrupt human fellows. Indeed, I believe that my social, professional and economic security depends most heavily on my putting my commitments to families of choice ahead of all else. While the human world is corrupt, I am of it. Let’s own up; we’re all corrupt. In my case, I figure corruption with people I know is more stable than investing for profit in the lives of people to whom my commitment, in legalese, is “limited.” Honestly, openly done, it turns out that stability IS corrupt. Love and peace--hal

the fallacy of taking out "leaders"

Al Qaeda never had a leader
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
May 2, 2011
I believe al Qaeda never had a leader, and for that matter, when the US has a president who can be led to support a war in Afghanistan while campaigning for office and to proceed at an obviously orchestrated and timed event that our president approved with probably negligible historical sense of why there should be a May Day assassination of a mythical “leader” whose whereabouts President Obama had allegedly known for half a year, I think it mythical that any US president since Eisenhower’s warning about the military industrial complex has been leading rather than being led by forces he has no sense of control over either. Militarism is a force that knows no personal leadership, anywhere, anymore. Organized violence is a headless force, over which no head incarnate has control in the US, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Iran, in Israel, in Egypt, in Bahrain, in Syria…getting personal and beheading “leaders” is a global delusion. Love and peace--hal

Death of Bin Laden

Death of Bin Laden
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
May 2, 2011
Osama bin Laden was constructed as terrorist/enemy number one in public media in the mid-nineties even before attacks on US embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi in 1998. As a foundation for eternal US military/corporate adventurism, Bin Laden was touted as the leader of a form of guerrilla organized resistance to US/Israeli military occupation he called “al Qaeda,” which in plain English means the base. As in the Algerian war against French occupation, the base meant that guerrilla resistance would consist of independent cells. The US govt responded by trying to reduce this military resistance to one of its primary funders. In the one surreptitious video clip of Bin Laden talking about 9/11, he spoke with approval of what “the brothers” had done, whoever they might all have been. Like J Edgar Hoover of FBI legend, Bin Laden was socially constructed to be identified as US public enemy number one long before workers for global capitalism from 88 nations were killed in the WORLD Trade Center. How we people in the US succumb to self-centered martyrdom and over-simplification of this crime problem.
There is a lot of mis/disinformation going on as I write. We hear conflicting breaking news in conflicting reports. Was Bin Laden killed by US “assets,” “special forces” or “Navy Seals”? Were there two helicopters, or four with one gone down and “destroyed”? How on earth did the US attack happen virtually on the grounds of the Pakistani military academy with supposedly no advance notice to the Pakistani government. There’s a whole lot of spin going on.
To me in the US who doesn’t want to live in fear of terrorist violence at home, the saddest part of this assassination is that young people even at my local university broke into flag-waving celebration: USA, USA! And all that. For anyone with grievances about US imperialism, invasion, and occupation, that is salt in the wounds who might seek revenge. We celebrate at our peril, and I’m sorry Mr. President, “justice” is not “done.” We are just lucky that unlike President Carter’s attempt to send helicopters to rescue hostages at the US embassy in Teheran in 1979, this military mission “succeeded.” I’m glad casualties were minimized, but I find nothing to celebrate. Love and peace--hal