Press Room

As horrible as that 17 month period during the Reagan administration was for the indigenous people of Guatemala it was only a brief moment of horror in the macabre drama of U.S.-Guatemala relations.  For many in the world there is no doubt that U.S. support, encouragement and guidance made it culpable in the genocidal policies of its’ client State during that 17-month period. The history of U.S. and Guatemalan relations since the U.S. inspired coup of 1954 that overthrew Guatemala’s reformist President Jacobo Arbenz has been a sordid history of criminal collusion against the people of Guatemala.

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For those of us who lived through the 1980s and opposed the genocidal policies in Guatemala, we celebrate the small sliver of justice that the conviction of Rios Montt represents.  But our moment of satisfaction is tempered by the awful memories of what occurred in that country, our knowledge of the role that the U.S. played in those horrors and the possibility that the hegemonic puppeteer might once again escape accountability if we don’t act.

PHYLLIS BENNIS: I think inside Syria [the video] is going to be one of the most antagonizing, provocative things one can imagine . . . But I think it also . . . is going to make it even harder for those in the U.S. . . . who are pressuring the Obama administration to take a more direct military role in this war . . . to say "there's a good opposition, yeah we know there's bad guys in the opposition, but there's a good opposition." Because apparently, from what we know, if it is true, the person who did this is from the Free Syrian Army, not from the Al-Nusra Front, not from the Al-Qaeda side. 

. . . HOST: Is it too late for peace talks that start when, not just talking about the Syrian opposition, which as you've already pointed out, is all over the place, and the government -- but you're also talking about a region that's exploding.

PHYLLIS BENNIS: Absolutely. It's never too late. 

When there's a war going on, what you need is to de-escalate; and you need negotiations, you need diplomacy. There's not going to be a military solution here. All there will be from the military is more dead Syrians.

So there needs to be negotiations, and this move between the US and Russia is a good first step. It will only have merit, it will only work if it is matched by an agreement by both sides, which means the US and Russia, yes, but also Qatar and Iran, for instance, the major backers militarily of each side; if they agree to stop sending additional weapons, then we may see some possibility for this new diplomacy. If the weapons continue to flow into both sides, and if the war continues, then the diplomacy won't matter.   

BENNIS: The difference here is that this civil war in Syria has already spilled over, and threatens to do so on a much larger scale throughout the region, because there are in fact at least five separate wars being fought in Syria right now in the context of the Syrian civil war, and only one of those five is the war between the Syrian regime and its armed opponents on the ground. You have a regional power struggle being fought in Syria between, largely, Saudi Arabia and Iran; you have a Sunni-Shia sectarian struggle; you have a global struggle between the U.S. and Russia in terms of naval bases and that sort of thing; and you have the ongoing fight between the U.S. and Israel on the one hand and Iran on the other hand over nuclear issues and other issues; all being fought to the last Syrian. So the notion that we can just sort of let this go, let them fight it out, and it won't have any impact, it's already having a huge impact.

BENNIS: But there is no question that the pain of the boycott will be felt by individual Israelis. And the theory is--and this is, again, where it comes very close to the models that we saw during the South African era anti-apartheid movement--when South African, ordinary South African whites were affected by the sports boycott, they began to finally reconsider the cost to them of apartheid. In the Israeli instance, it means that Israelis who see Israeli culture and science and technology, the great accomplishments of Israeli society and what they're most proud of, perhaps, in their society, that when that starts to be affected by this global boycott, when you have instances of people like Stephen Hawking saying, I will not participate in an official institutional Israeli [incompr.] because there is a boycott designed to force Israel to stop its violations of international law and human rights, that's a huge reality.

Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff don’t make smash records. They write learned economic papers that make champions of austerity happy — and help smash the life prospects of average working families.

. . . These politicians . . . need "evidence" they can use . . . to show the general public that "austerity serves the general good and not just the rich."

Three years ago, Harvard’s Reinhart and Rogoff supplied that "evidence," via an academic paper that purported to show a grave danger whenever government debt hits 90 percent of Gross Domestic Product.

. . . We have still another indication that inequality corrupts every corner of contemporary societies, even our ivory towers.

SARAH ANDERSON: It creates this perverse incentive. What it means is, the more these corporations pay their CEOs, the lower their tax burden, and that just contributes to our national debt.

Under the U.S. tax code, you're only supposed to be able to deduct from corporate income taxes $1 million per executive, for executive pay. Beyond that, it's considered not a reasonable business expense. The problem is, there's this huge loophole, and that is, you can deduct unlimited amounts, as long as the pay is performance-based, and when they made that tax reform, it opened the door for massive payouts of stock options and performance bonuses, anything they could call "performance-based", then was fully deductibe.

And it's really part of the reason why we've seen this explosion of CEO pay in the past couple of decades . . . And so, it is outrageous and . . . these guys are out there telling the rest of us that we need to tighten our belts, we really need to cut back on earned benefit programs like Social Security and Medicare . . . and yet they haven't taken a lot at the many ways that these corporations that they're running have been contributing to the deficit by taking advantage of these outrageous loopholes.

SCOTT HARRIS: What kinds of Congressional action would be necessary to prevent these companies from having taxpayers subsidize what many would label as obscene CEO pay by some of these major corporations?

SARAH ANDERSON: It's a very simple fix. As I mentioned, there is a cap on the deductability of payments that companies make for executive compensation: it's set at a million dollars -- except there's this huge loophole for performance pay. And so if we got rid of that loophole, that would at least be one step towards ensuring that ordinary taxpayers are not subsdizing this runaway CEO pay.