Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee: a political ecology of change

The policies that guide our government are researched and outlined within a network of brain trusts housed in political institutes, policy think tanks, academic institutions, corporate departments, business associations, intelligence agencies, specialized publications and private strategy centers. Their role is to define policy goals, develop the "framing" with which to secure public support and develop candidates to fill top and mid-level government jobs. These broad policy outlines become the parameters of the "accepted wisdom" in the corporate media.

Henry Kissinger's career provides a window into this world and its operation. His trajectory carried through many top corporate and quasi-governmental institutes including The Psychological Strategy Board, the Harvard Center for International Affairs, the Operations Coordinating Board of the National Security Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Rand Corporation and the Trilateral Commission. He was a protà ©gà © of oil magnates David and Nelson Rockefeller whose patronage landed him in the inner circles of government. (Many of Obama's first and second tier appointees are drawn from these groups.)

By 1974, as Secretary of State, Kissinger had concluded that US allies were a greater threat to its world dominance than were its enemies. The growing clout of Europe and East Asia marked their emergence as worrisome rivals. Kissinger's doctrine called for establishing undisputed dominance of the world oil and gas supplies on which these economies would depend for growth. This policy became integrated into the elite consensus and remains in place today. This fact makes sense of US policies toward West Asia and the Middle East. It explains its behavior in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq: each time Iraq sought to appease US demands the United States declared that the effort was too little, too late, increased its demands and insisted on escalated international reprisals. The Kissinger policy framework of seeking direct control of the oil fields could not be consummated with a diplomatic resolution. The Obama administration is reading from the same script in relation to Iran. Inevitably we will see a ratcheting up of efforts to bring the vast oil and gas reserves of Venezuela and Bolivia back into the corporate fold. The groundwork is being laid with the construction of a half dozen US bases in Colombia.

Attention to the invisible world does more than illuminate the workings of the power elitel: it reveals sources of popular power as well. In 1969 the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party established an alliance with the Puerto Rican Young Lords Organization and the white Young Patriots. They called it the "Rainbow Coalition," a name later appropriated by Jesse Jackson for his 1984 presidential campaign. The Patriots were the kids of recent immigrants from southern, mostly Appalachian, states. They wore confederate flags on their jackets and had family members back home in the Klan. Brining them into alliance with communities of color around common class issues required deliberate and persistent courtship on the part of the Panthers. It meant attending their court hearings, shooting pool in their bars, sleeping on their couches and talking late into the night about police harassment and substandard housing. In the end, as Panther organizer Bobby Lee put it, they would have "stopped a bullet for me."

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