hubris-watch

2006-11-22T10:10:00.000-08:00

Letter from Code Pink
As we gather with our families and friends this Thanksgiving, let us take a moment to acknowledge how much we truly have to be thankful for. Love, health, an abundance of food on the table, a brand new Congress--all are worth cherishing and celebrating. At the same time, let's not forget how lucky we are to have our basic needs met--clean water, electricity, access to medicine and education. Let's remember that our sisters in Iraq are not always so fortunate.
In March, 2006, CODEPINK organized and sponsored a delegation of Iraqi women--women from all walks of life, from many of the religious and ethnic groups in that country--to come share their stories with the American public, to tell us what it's like to walk in their shoes. Dr. Rashad Zidan, a pharmacist and mother of four, was part of this delegation. Horrified by the devastation wrought by the war, Rashad founded the Knowledge for Iraqi Women Society to, in her words, "relieve the suffering of Iraqi women by providing financial, occupational, medical, and educational resources." K4IWS currently has 70 staff and more than 300 volunteers throughout Iraq.
In a recent note to CODEPINK's Gael Murphy, Rashad writes:
You know Gael, before the war I was having my simple life with my family. I was having just humble wishes to educate my children, to see them married, to see my grandchildren. I wanted to help poor people and to take care of my parents. You know all these things evaporated with this war.
I pray every day to God to keep my children alive. Education and marriage are now luxuries. And even when we do go to school or get married, it is colorless, as is everything in our lives. I am thinking day and night about those poor widows and orphans that were created by Bush's bringing his democracy to our country and I am doing my best to help them. (click to read the entire letter)Regards, Rashad
You can read learn more of her story in this interview, which includes these wise words: "In these last three years, the U. S. has just listened to its own voice, but I think it is time to listen to authentic Iraqi voices. If you listen to the people who are in the midst of the conflict, they will help you better understand how to end the violence and suffering because they have firsthand knowledge and experience."This Thanksgiving as we count our blessings, let's also remember to listen to Iraqi voices like Rashad's, and acknowledge the suffering of the Iraqi people under US occupation, a horrible repetition of the aggression and violence that marked the first Thanksgiving. Let's use this time of gratitude to pledge anew to work for peace. We will be sending funds raised by some of our locals to support Rashad's Knowledge for Iraqi Women Society; you can add to this by clicking here. If you contribute $100 or more, we will send you a copy of our new film, Iraqi Women Speak Out, co-produced with Deep Dish TV, featuring interviews with the Iraqi women's delegation. Thank you, wonderful CODEPINKers. We are grateful for your commitment to peace every single day.With love, peace, and endless thanks,Andrea, Anedra, Dana, Farida, Gael, Gayle, Jodie, Laura, Liz, Medea, Nancy, Patricia, Rae, Samantha, and Sonia

2006-11-19T16:40:00.000-08:00

Detective's obsession with murder case leads to remote Mexican village
By JULIANA BARBASSA, Associated Press Writer
Sunday, November 19, 2006 12:37 AM PST
MAMMOTH LAKES, -- At first, all Sgt. Paul Dostie had were handfuls of bones -- fragile, gnawed-on human bones.There was very little he could tell from the animal-ravaged remains found in a shallow grave in the Inyo National Forest in May 2003. Dostie only knew the victim was a petite woman who wasn't dressed for the rugged Sierra Nevada, judging by her size 5 shoes, lacy blouse and flimsy jacket.It appeared to be the third murder this ski resort town had seen in a quarter-century. But bones don't talk, and the 20-year police veteran realized that cracking this case would take more than old-fashioned detective work.Over the next 3 1/2 years, Dostie would comb the Internet for experts -- anthropologists, geneticists, linguists -- who would help him extract information from the remains. Won over by Dostie's dedication and aw-shucks good nature, they contributed their expertise, often for free.From the reports that trickled in, thick with jargon and footnoted references, Dostie slowly compiled intimate details of the victim's life story: where she was from, what she ate as a child, what she looked like, where she spent her last few months -- everything but her name.The search consumed him. He worked on it on days off; he spent hours scouring scientific papers and attending conferences of forensic experts in search of new technologies."I probably know more about her and how she lived and died than anyone else out there," he said.Dostie now believes he's weeks away from confirming the victim's identity. Only then will he be able to start the investigation he's waited years to pursue: the search for her killer.It began with a hiker walking his dog along the national forest's pine-edged trails. Something in the bushes grabbed the dog's interest.Curious, the hiker approached. It was a human skull defaced by scavenging animals.Police searched for other remains among the low-lying trails, but found nothing. A few days later, a hunch led a sheriff's deputy to clamber up a nearby hill -- a steep, dusty hummock with a view of Mammoth Lakes' main street.There, beneath the pines, Dostie was introduced to the victim who would come to define his career. Her cheap watch was still ticking, though it had spent the winter under snow. The skull had probably rolled downhill.The case got off to a good start: A week after police announced their find, an employee of the Mammoth Lakes Visitor Center came forward, saying she remembered a small woman who'd come in the previous fall. She had prominent cheekbones and straight black hair flowing past her shoulders.While her male companion was getting camping information, the woman took the employee aside and in her accented English said she was afraid of him -- a heavyset white man with a mustache and an abrasive manner.The employee handed the visitor a card from a local women's shelter, and the couple left.The medical examiner had said the victim might be Asian, but Dostie couldn't be sure it was the same person. Still, it was the only clue he had, and he pursued it.He asked about the couple at local hotels and campgrounds, distributed fliers with the woman's description, and placed ads in Asian-language newspapers as far away as Los Angeles."To me, if it's a homicide, you pull all the stops," he said.But it was a dead end. A year later, he was still empty-handed.Dostie was casting about for new ideas when he heard about DNAPrint Genomics, a Florida company that seemed to offer something new.DNA technology is typically used in criminal cases to match two samples -- connecting a suspect to evidence from a crime scene, for example. Instead of comparing two specimens, DNAPrint searches one person's DNA for clues about their racial makeup.Dostie decided to give it a try. Maybe he'd been looking for the wrong person.In May 2004, the detective sent the company a piece of skin. But it was tough and leathery after a rough winter at high altitude and couldn't be tested. So he sent a bone sample."It was striking," said Matt Thomas, the company's senior scientist. "It was 100 percent Native American. I don't see that many samples that are that clearly Native American."The finding still left a range of possibilities -- native peoples with similar genetic markers are found throughout the Americas, Thomas said. But it gave Dostie something to work with after so many discouraging months.He contacted a local band of Northern Paiutes and collected about 20 DNA samples from them. But no one had heard of the missing woman, and there were no genetic matches.He was also chasing another hunch."I took anthropology in college," he said. "I knew it was the key."So like anyone else with a question and Internet access, he turned to Google.He typed in "physical anthropology," and within minutes he was e-mailing Philip Walker, then president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists."Phil opened up a whole new world to me," he said. "His life's work is looking at bones."Walker's research concerned patterns of violence in ancient human populations, and he often found himself puzzling over the same questions vexing Dostie: Who is this person? How did they die? And what can we say about them when they were alive?Walker recruited colleagues -- an orthopedic surgeon, a forensic pathologist, an anthropologist with the Smithsonian Institution -- and gave Dostie a much clearer picture of the victim.She'd been repeatedly stabbed -- a fact that had escaped the medical examiner. She was likely a Native American from Mexico or Central America, between 30 and 35; and very small, no taller than 4-foot-9 and no more than 90 pounds.Scars along her pelvic bones showed that she'd delivered at least one child, and the poor state of her teeth told Walker she'd never seen a dentist. The reinforced connections between the bones and muscles in her shoulder girdle pointed to a life of hard physical labor."This is someone who normally would be forgotten," said Walker, explaining his motivation to work on the case for free. "This is clearly a disenfranchised person who was vulnerable. People think they can just kill someone like this with no chance of getting caught."To firm his hypothesis, Walker wanted to learn more about her diet and the water she drank -- clues to her ethnic background and geographical origin.They turned to Henry Schwarcz, a Canadian geologist who analyzes the chemical composition of ancient human remains to learn more about how people lived. He'd never been approached by law enforcement."It does seem like a natural fit," Schwarcz said. "You have a person who is unknown, and all you have to go on are the bones, teeth, maybe some hair. That's what I work with."Remains that were puzzling to Dostie spoke clearly to the Canadian professor."In her childhood, she had been living mostly on corn -- cornmeal, tortillas, up to a level that would be almost nutritionally unhealthy," Schwarcz said after analyzing the isotopes in her teeth.He also looked for oxygen atoms in her teeth. These are absorbed from the water a person drinks as a child, and since most drinking water comes from local rain, they can be a good indicator of a person's origin. In this case, she seemed to have been raised in southern Mexico, or even farther south.Schwarcz also looked at her bones and hair -- cells that regenerate over the years, incorporating new information throughout a person's life.These told a different story: In the last 18 months of her life, the woman still ate a lot of corn, but her protein intake was like that of a typical North American. There was also variation in the oxygen isotopes, suggesting she'd moved around as an adult -- possibly from the United States back to southern Mexico, before returning to California, where she died."She was hard to pin down," he said.Now that he knew what he was looking for, Dostie wanted to peer deeper into her genes.Walker had given him scientific papers on human leukocyte antigen genes, which can determine ethnicity. The detective called the co-author of one paper, Henry Erlich, head of the human genetics department at Roche Molecular Systems."I was struck by his commitment to the case," said Erlich, who also agreed to work for free. "This was one dedicated sergeant."His examination confirmed the victim's genotype is found more frequently in Mexico and Central America than anywhere else.Walker also recommended a look at the woman's mitochondrial DNA. This abundant form of genetic material holds information only about a person's maternal line, unlike most other DNA, which contains contributions by both parents.The sequence typed by Roche Molecular Systems was sent for comparison to two scientists who manage databanks mitochondrial DNA. One confirmed she could be from southern Mexico.The other had a hit.Among 3,000 specimens in his databank at the University of California, Davis, David Glenn Smith found a maternal relative of the victim: a Zapotec Indian living in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca."The mtDNA sequence which matched that of the Mammoth Lakes murder victim was collected in the village of San Mateo Macuilxochitl, in the district of Tlacolula," read the e-mail Smith sent to Dostie in March, nearly three years after the body had been found.With Smith's directions to the village in hand, his good wishes and his admonition -- "that's a heck of a long way to drive," he'd warned -- Dostie was ready to go.The only problem was that this small-town detective had never heard of Oaxaca, and didn't speak Spanish, much less Zapotec.Undaunted, Dostie set off for Los Angeles, home to a large Oaxacan immigrant community. Armed with his cheery goodwill and an armful of fliers bearing a reconstruction of the victim's face, he knocked on the door of Oaxacan restaurants, Catholic churches frequented by recent immigrants, and Spanish-language radio and TV stations.He also went back to the Internet."I'm not that smart myself," he said, "but I can find a lot of people who are."A UCLA linguist connected him to a Oaxacan graduate student, who introduced Dostie to the man who would guide him through the next phase of the investigation.Ray Morales, president of the Oaxacan Business Association, was the perfect link. He spoke English, Spanish and Zapotec, and ran a money-wiring business. Immigrants could bring cash to Morales' LA storefronts, and the company would deliver them to homes in Oaxaca -- even off-the-grid villages like San Mateo.Morales was intrigued by Dostie's perseverance."This is a guy who doesn't know Oaxaca, who doesn't speak the language, taking a case he could have easily filed away," Morales said. "He's brought the case so far. We're not going to stop now. No way."So in May 2006 Morales went to San Mateo."Oaxaca can feel pretty small, the communities are pretty tight knit," said Morales. "I thought it would be pretty easy."He spread word of the missing woman through the local media. He carried fliers with her picture, and made a big splash in the surrounding villages.Morales quickly found the DNA donor, but was surprised when the woman claimed she didn't know the victim. An mtDNA match shows a family connection, but it can be a very distant one. And no one in the village seemed to know of a missing woman who matched the description.By now, Morales felt a sense of responsibility -- to the woman, who seemed to have no one else, and to the detective who had brought the case this far."Why is science pointing to this town, but no one is filing a missing person report?" he asked.Morales went back to Oaxaca.This time, he went quietly. He spent time in the village, got to know the residents, had coffee with them. Slowly, rumors and implications began to weave together, forming a picture of a woman who might be their victim.Her mother had died when she was young, and she'd left the village for a nearby town with her father and stepmother. She'd married, but didn't fit the mold of the traditional, socially conservative women of the region."She made one bad choice after another," Morales said. "Married in another town, separated, remarried, had kids, tried to give them up. That's a real no-no in these areas."She'd returned to the village about 10 years ago, then made a scandalous exit to the United States with help from a married man in La Habra, in Southern California.Certain he was onto something, Morales collected DNA samples from an uncle and a half brother. But the results were inconclusive.He needed to collect DNA from a maternal relative. The woman's sister lived in another part of Mexico, and one of the victim's own children was said to be living in another Oaxacan village. Morales began to plan another trip.Then violence erupted in Oaxaca. A teachers' strike soon evolved into mass protests involving leftists, Indian groups and students all calling for the governor's resignation.He waited out the unrest, which lasted six months. He now has a ticket to return to the village on Dec. 20 -- just in time for the annual celebration of its patron saint, San Mateo, when immigrants return for a weeklong celebration. He's spread word in town that he's looking for the woman's sister.Dostie is excited at the prospect, but he's also patient."We've been in this over three years, just trying to get to day one -- to the day we can start figuring out who knew the victim, who could have killed her," he said. "We'll get there."

2006-11-08T10:32:00.000-08:00

AMERICA HAS SPOKEN!!!
Martin Kettle
November 8, 2006 05:18 AM
America has spoken, George Bush told the nation this morning two years ago, and it had given him its trust and his confidence. He would continue his policies at home and abroad, buoyed by the public's endorsement. Now, two years further on, America has spoken again - but this time in a very different tone and with the opposite conclusion, issuing a direct warning to the leader it re-elected 24 months ago to change his policy in Iraq. The cheering can be heard not just in America itself but around the planet.
So the big question this morning and over the coming weeks and months is this: which George Bush will respond to the American voters' verdict in the 2006 midterms? Will it be the same apparently humble and responsive president who said he heard the popular verdict in 2004 and would act on it? Or will it be a defiant president, who opts to spend his final two years in office in conflict with the new legislature that Americans have chosen to represent them?
If Vice-President Dick Cheney is any guide, these will be two years of defiance. Speaking in Colorado Springs last Saturday, Cheney announced that the administration would continue "full steam ahead" with its policy in Iraq, irrespective of the results of yesterday's elections. "It may not be popular with the public," he told ABC News. "It doesn't matter, in the sense that we have to continue what he think is right. That's exactly what we're doing. We're not running for office. We're doing what we think is right."
Not a good start. But the Bush administration has never had to practice either humility or compromise before. For the past six years, it has had a Republican Congress on its side. But not any longer. Now it has to adapt or die. Last night, largely because of Iraq, the Democrats finally brought an end to the most partisan period of Republican legislative rule in modern American history. The tide of the Gingrich revolution which swept in in 1994 was swept back out yesterday, 12 years later. It is far too early to say whether this represents the final eclipse of the moral, fiscal and ideological conservatism of the last dozen years. But that often brutal conservatism has at last been pushed back at the federal level. This is therefore a historic moment in American domestic politics.
The loss of the House of Representatives was a decisive one, towards the upper end of Democratic expectations signalled by recent polls. The Republican House seats tumbled as predicted in many states - Indiana, Kentucky, Connecticut, New York, Florida and Colorado among them. The likely failure, at the time of writing, to recapture the Senate was of a piece with that result. The Democrats did very well there nevertheless, capturing Senate seats in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, edging close to victory in Montana and Virginia, and fighting off serious challenges in Maryland and New Jersey. But with Republicans battling hard to hold on in Missouri and Tennessee, the distant prospect of a Democratic double victory looked to be just out of reach.
Many conservatives will be in denial about these results this morning. They will be as angry in defeat as they have so often been angry in victory. They will try to dismiss them as a poor performance, falling short of Democratic expectations and thus in some bizarre way a vindication of the administration. But these elections have been a decisive rebuff not just to the president but also to the arrogance that has increasingly been the hallmark of both the Bush administration and the Republican congressional leadership.
Ugly triumphalism has been a central feature of the past dozen years. Too many Republicans have too often spoken and behaved as though their earlier electoral victories entitled them to ride roughshod over the very idea that large numbers of Americans passionately disagreed with their approach. The redistricting on which these elections have been fought was a case in point - a blatant gerrymander designed to prevent ethnic minorities and liberals from being properly represented in Washington. Rightly or wrongly, the new Democratic masters on Congress will be looking for some payback here.
As the results of the 2006 midterms begin to settle in, American politics will seamlessly move on to the next contest. The 2008 presidential stakes will get under way before Christmas, with John McCain announcing his bid for the Republican nomination and a clutch of other Republicans - Mitt Romney, Chuck Hagel, Bill Frist and Rudi Giuliani among them - all preparing to challenge him. On the Democratic side the big questions concern Hillary Clinton's real determination to stand (her husband has been telling friends that a run is by no means certain) and whether Barack Obama will try to translate his current wave of popularity into a White House run which many believe would be premature. This is not a revolutionary moment. Many of the Democrats who ousted Republicans in the House yesterday are strong moderates. Do not expect any important Democrat to stray very far from the centre-ground for the next two years.
In the final analysis this was, by common consent, an electoral defeat for George Bush and for his Iraq war. Nothing matters more to the world than for America to find and follow a new path in its relations with the nations with which it shares the planet. A planned withdrawal from Iraq is central to that necessary project and has been made likelier by these elections. Yet no one should delude themselves into imagining that the change of direction will be sudden, decisive or easy. Bush is a lame-duck president presiding over an unpopular war - yet it remains to be seen whether he will either wish or be forced into a reversal of the Iraq policy. Perhaps Donald Rumsfeld will ask to step down -- as the gossip in Washington has it that he will. America has indeed spoken. A new direction, the Democrats' cliche du jour, is the clear message. Bush would be mad not to listen. But the Iraq agony is not going to end any time soon.

THE TORTURE ELECTION

2006-10-28T16:46:00.000-07:00

from The Nation
[from theNovember 13, 2006 issue]
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061113/schell

by JONATHAN SCHELL
The Congressional campaign of 2006 slouches toward election day through a grotesque landscape of torture and excuses for torture, scabrous messages from a Congressman to young boys, a Congressional cover-up of the same, murder and countermurder every day in Iraq (a heart-stopping 655,000 Iraqis have died since the invasion, according to a Johns Hopkins study), and nuclear fallout from North Korea (of the political if not the literal kind).
The stakes, as President Bush likes to say--and on this point he is correct--could scarcely be higher. But they include one stake he never mentions: the future of constitutional government in the United States, which his presidency and his party have put in serious jeopardy. The old (lower case) republican system of checks and balances and popular liberties, you might say, is in danger of replacement by a new (upper case) Republican system of arbitrary one-party rule organized around an all-powerful presidency. That many-sided danger, of course, is the subject of this series of articles. It is simply impossible to know in advance when, in a great constitutional crisis, the decisive turning point--the irrevocable capsizing--might come. We are left wondering whether we are witnessing just one more swing of the familiar old American political "pendulum," bound by its own weight to swing back in the opposite direction, or whether this time the pendulum is about to fly off its hinge and land us with a crash in territory that we have never visited before. There are strong arguments on both sides of the question. Yet there can be little doubt that the election on November 7 will be an event of the first importance in the story. If, by handing one or both houses of Congress to the Democrats--something that current polls say is likely--the public breaks the Republican Party's current monopoly on government power, an important beachhead of resistance will have been gained. But if the public assents to the status quo--confirming and deepening the ratification of Republican one-party rule already conferred in 2002 and 2004 (we cannot count the election of 2000, since Vice President Al Gore won the popular vote that year), it will be hard to see where the path away from the precipice lies.
As the decision has neared, every important institution of the republican system--the Supreme Court, the presidency, the Congress, the press--has been swept into the crisis. Also critical is the President's bid to achieve global military dominance by the United States, presented to the public as a kind of colossal footnote to the war on terror. The interplay, enacted on the electoral stage, between the attempt at dominance abroad and one-party rule at home is probably the most important specific mechanism of the crisis. Its evolution so far has had many surprising twists, turns, sudden spurts forward and reversals; and some recent events, though each perhaps familiar in itself, reveal a striking new pattern. Of special note is a remarkable yearlong, step-by-step process of trial and error in which the Administration, far from concealing its abuses of power, including the torture of prisoners, wound up giving them top billing in its electoral strategy.
A Political Problem
For some time, the Republican Party has been aware that it has a political problem. All year, Bush has gotten unfavorable marks in the opinion polls on every issue but one--dealing with the terrorist threat. (In the most recent polls, even this measure has turned negative.) On everything else--for example, the state of the economy, healthcare, the environment, even "trust"--a majority or plurality of the public has consistently rated the Democrats higher. In such a situation the standard counsel of today's political technicians, whose unalloyed cynicism few scarcely bother even to notice anymore, is to attempt to "elevate" the single issue favorable to one's party at the expense of the other issues, thus "framing the election," or "controlling the agenda," as it is variously put. The aim is not to persuade the public that your party is right on any particular issue but to choose among many issues the one on which the election will turn. The technique is available mainly to the party in charge of the White House, possessor of a PR megaphone that all but drowns out opposition voices, leaving them to sputter in impotence or waste their energies battling on tilted rhetorical battlefields of the Administration's choosing.
As early as January White House chief strategist Karl Rove issued the template for the campaign to come in a speech to the Republican National Committee. "The United States," he said, "faces a ruthless enemy--and we need a Commander in Chief and a Congress who understand the nature of the threat and the gravity of the moment.... Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for many Democrats." (He should have said "fortunately," for he planned to use his accusation--amplified and distorted--to renew the Republicans' lease on power in the fall elections.) As evidence of the President's successes, he cited the Iraq War. He stated, "This past year, we have seen three successful elections in Iraq. The Iraqi Security Forces are increasing in size and capability. Iraq's economy is growing.... In the words of the Commander of the Multinational Corps in Iraq: '2005 has been a historic year in Iraq, and it marks the rebirth of an ancient nation.'" He added, "To retreat before victory has been won would be a reckless act--and this President will not allow it." And the Democrats? "We now hear a loud chorus of Democrats who want us to cut and run in Iraq." It was not the last time we would hear this expression.
The tactic was hardly new. As Rove noted in his speech, it had led to success in 2002 and 2004. But a new problem arose and grew more acute during the year. The public turned, slowly but decisively, against the Iraq War. In January, when Rove spoke, polls showed on average that some 50 percent thought the war was a "mistake." By midsummer the number was up to 54. The words of the Commander of the "Multinational" Corps in Iraq had not been persuasive to the American electorate. Civil war was breaking out in the country, and the "rebirth of an ancient nation" was drowning in blood. (In the most recent round of polls, approval of the war has sunk to 40 percent.) Nevertheless, as the campaign season began, the public's support for Bush's handling of terror generally was still at 55 percent. This was the political gold that had to be refined from the slag heaps of low poll numbers on other issues.
Fighting the Caliphate
Clearly, a tactical if not a strategic shift in the election plan was needed. The political riddle that now needed an answer was how to exploit the war on terror when its alleged main front, the war in Iraq, was rejected by the public as a mistake.
A first answer to the riddle was found: Define the general, global war on terror so sweepingly that the specific war in Iraq dwindled to just one front on the epic battlefield. Around Labor Day the Administration rolled out its new political line.
The centerpiece of the campaign was a series of speeches by Bush. Billed as stock-taking on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, they were in fact campaign speeches. The most eye-popping one was given to the Military Officers Association September 5, the day after Labor Day, the traditional beginning of election campaigns. Too strange to be captured in soundbites (although many of these, too, were supplied and recycled in the media), much of the substance of the speech curiously eluded coverage. For one thing, Bush couldn't stop citing Osama bin Laden, devoting four paragraphs to direct quotations from him and another dozen to paraphrases and citations of his words. The result for listeners was a queer impression that one had stumbled into an Al Qaeda videotape statement that somehow was being read out by the President. One almost expected to see Ayman Al Zawahiri sitting cross-legged beside him. (And, in fact, a recently released GOP ad actually does show bin Laden making his threats.)
In effect, Bush took Osama's evaluation of his own powers at face value. In his words, "America and our coalition partners have made our choice. We're taking the words of the enemy seriously." Bin Laden was aiming, Bush said in his own voice, at a "radical empire," a "totalitarian nightmare." Then, quoting bin Laden, he intoned, "'The whole world is an open field for us.'" If the United States didn't stop them, the President said, again speaking in his own, concurring voice, Sunni extremists would "remake the entire Muslim world in their radical image." They would do it in four stages. First, they would "expel the Americans from Iraq"; second, "establish an Islamic authority...and support it until it achieves the level of caliphate"; third, "extend the jihad wave to the secular countries neighboring Iraq"; and, fourth, initiate "the clash with Israel." And that was not all: "This caliphate would be a totalitarian Islamic empire encompassing all current and former Muslim lands, stretching from Europe to North Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia."
But the Shiites were busy, too, in the President's portrait. The leader of Hezbollah, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, made a cameo appearance with an anti-American speech, also amply quoted by Bush. Iran and its nuclear program were brought into the ranks of America's Shiite enemies by this route.
But could Al Qaeda and/or Hezbollah actually accomplish all--or even any--of this? There are a multitude of evils that might befall Iraq if American troops withdraw (and an equal or greater number if they stay), but no reputable Middle East scholar thinks the conquest of the country by Al Qaeda is one of them. Experts assess the current fighting strength of Al Qaeda at several thousand at most. The serious contenders for power in non-Kurdish Iraq are the Shiite majority and the Sunni minority. As for an Al Qaeda-led totalitarian caliphate stretching from Baghdad to Jakarta, the idea was so outlandish that for days after the speech it went almost undiscussed, pro or con. What is more, the Shiites and the Sunnis, blurred into one menace by the President, are historic rivals and, in Iraq right now, mortal enemies (with the United States weirdly fighting on the Shiite side). Would a globe-spanning Sunni "caliphate" have the bomb? Or would it be the rival, Shiite, Iranian empire? Or maybe both?
Bush supplied no factual material for answering these questions. Instead, he summoned the ghosts of Hitler and Lenin back onto the historical stage. Hadn't the world "ignored Hitler's words" and wound up with "millions in the gas chambers" and a "world aflame"? And hadn't the world overlooked the pronouncements of Lenin in Zurich, and let him "establish an empire" that "killed tens of millions and brought the world to the brink of thermonuclear war"? So it would be with Osama, who now implicitly was menacing the world not only with a multinational totalitarian empire, genocide and world war but also with a thermonuclear holocaust.
With these stakes on the table, who would bother to take notice of the deaths of a few thousand American soldiers or even some few hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed in Iraq? Shortly, indeed, in a phrase that summed up the new strategy, Bush described that war as "just a comma" in history's grand sweep.
Such was the fare that the Bush Administration was offering as the election season began in September. The strategy had a historical pedigree that certainly was much on the minds of both parties. In 1972 Senator George McGovern had run against Richard Nixon on an anti-Vietnam War platform. At that time, too, a constitutional crisis was brewing--the one that turned into Watergate and Nixon's resignation of the presidency. The public agreed with McGovern about the war, yet returned Nixon to office in a landslide. It seemed that even as voters understood that the war at hand was a disaster, they didn't want to apply any lessons from the war to foreign policy as a whole. And so McGovern was successfully labeled "weak" and "soft"--a stain that the Democratic Party has tried to rub off for the past thirty-four years and still has not adequately dealt with. Indeed, calling Democrats weak and soft on this, that or the other thing became the stock in trade of Republicans for this entire period, including, of course, the 2002 and 2004 elections, and arguably was the chief reason for their successes.
Searching for a Rallying Point
Still, the unpopularity of the war in Iraq had left a gap in the formula that needed to be filled. For electoral purposes, the President's "caliphate" speech (he returned to the bizarre theme a few times in later statements, then dropped it) amounted to a framework without a content, a kind of splendid platter with no food on it. ("Stop the caliphate!" would make a bewildering bumper sticker.) Some specific rallying point for the campaign was needed, some concrete proposal related to the war on terror, but not to Iraq, on which Republicans would vote yea, the Democrats nay and the voters would side with the Republicans. Two candidates were found. One was the disclosure by the New York Times of the warrantless wiretapping of calls between Americans and foreigners, a program Bush had ordered in secret. This was in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, passed by Congress in 1978, which set up a system requiring warrants for all such taps. Before the order's disclosure, Bush had flatly lied to the public about its existence. In April 2004 he had said, "Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires--a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution." But when his new program was revealed and he was caught out in his lie, Bush, instead of expressing contrition, went on the offensive, asserting that it was not his act but the Times's decision to reveal it that was "shameful" and announcing that he had not only ordered the warrantless wiretapping program but renewed the order some thirty times. The Administration's political calculation was that any public concern about his lying and secret lawbreaking would be trumped by its fear of terrorism. Karl Rove duly included a defense of the warrantless wiretapping in his election-year blueprint in January.
A pattern had been established. Actions taken in pursuit of the war on terror but in violation of the law would be exploited for political advantage.
The second and more significant candidate concerned the handling of detainees, including their abuse and torture. In the unfolding constitutional struggle, the Supreme Court, though containing a majority of Republican-appointed Justices, had struck out on an independent course in a series of decisions. In the case of Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the Court ruled that the President had no right to designate someone an "enemy combatant" on his own authority but must accept the participation of courts in the matter. It was this decision that produced Sandra Day O'Connor's memorable declaration that "a state of war is not a blank check for the President." In Rasul v. Bush, the Court ruled that detainees at Guantánamo must be granted habeas corpus rights. Finally, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the most important and sweeping of the decisions, the Court ruled that military tribunals that Bush had set up on his own, self-granted authority were unconstitutional. In arriving at this decision, the Court set forth a wholesale rejection of Bush's aggrandizement of his own powers. The Bush order had placed the detainees outside any existing framework of law, domestic or international. Now the Court ruled that he had no authority to set up the tribunals independent of Congress--thus restoring a traditional check on executive power. Second, it declared that, contrary to Administration claims, the rules for treatment of detainees contained in the Geneva Conventions applied to detainees in the war on terror. In other words, international law applied. Third, it ruled that "the Executive is bound to comply with the Rule of Law that prevails in this jurisdiction," including the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which forbids torture as well as "cruel and unusual punishments." So domestic law applied too. It was by now well-known that in a program ordered by Bush, the CIA had used waterboarding and other tortures and abuses, all of which, though not mentioned specifically by the Court, now had presumably been forbidden by its decision.
When the Hamdan decision came down, many liberal hats were thrown in the air. But where liberals saw judicial rout, the White House again saw political opportunity. (Others, including David Brooks of the New York Times, agreed that the abuse issue could be used by the Republicans to gain advantage.) Now an extraordinary chapter in American politics began to unfold. According to the Supreme Court, the President had committed grossly unconstitutional acts. If anyone cared to notice, he had almost certainly committed impeachable offenses as well.
Constitutional rulings, not impeachments, are the business of the Supreme Court, but in the wake of its rulings, it was clear that the case that the President, even if judged by the strictest standards, has committed impeachable offenses was greatly strengthened. Articles of impeachment were drawn up against President Richard Nixon for illegal wiretapping and for lying to the public. Ordering torture and other abuses in secret, with self-given authority, would appear to fall even more clearly into the category of impeachable "high crimes and misdemeanors." The legality of a war based on false evidence of danger, though not addressed by the Court, must be considered another prime candidate. But impeachment is a political process par excellence, and the fact is that a will to impeach President Bush, though increasing among the public, is still very weak in Congress, where impeachment must take place. Certainly one of the prime reasons for this is that the less drastic remedy for abuses, an election, is at hand. And one of the peculiarities of the present moment is that abuses for which impeachment of the President is the logical response are now to be faced by the oblique method of an election of members of Congress.
Yet once again, Bush, rather than expressing regret, or even defending himself, went on the attack. In obedience to the strategy of drawing a distinction between Republicans and Democrats on a non-Iraq issue relating to terrorism, he sought to make just these abuses, including the practice of torture, the core of his party's appeal in the Congressional election. If successful, it would be as if when President Nixon had been accused of illegal wiretapping, lying and obstruction of justice, he had, instead of being subjected to articles of impeachment and thrown out of office, beaten the charge by muscling Congress into legislative complicity with his high crimes and then gone on to lead his party to victory in the next Congressional elections. (In actuality, of course, the Democrats won in a landslide in 1974.)
Torture as Politics
Bush placed the detainee issue, with its de facto defense of torture, at the center of his attack. The White House hastened to send a bill to Congress before its adjournment so that the necessary distinction between the parties' votes could be dramatized in the campaign. In a press conference, the President pinpointed the heart of the issue. Whatever Congress did, it must protect "the program." The program was the CIA program he had ordered in which forms of torture, such as waterboarding, had been practiced. ("Unfortunately," he said, "the recent Supreme Court decision put the future of this program in question. That's another reason I went to Congress. We need this legislation to save it.")
If anyone doubted that Bush was standing up for the practice of torture (though of course without embracing the word "torture"), those doubts should have been put to rest by the following infamous exchange between him and NBC journalist Matt Lauer.
Lauer: But it's been reported that with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, he was what they call waterboarded.Bush: Um, I'm not going to talk about techniques that we use on people. One reason why is because we don't want the enemy to adjust. The American people need to know we are using techniques within the law to protect 'em.
The President of the United States, given a chance to repudiate the practice of a form of torture, refused to comment. Apparently, the need to keep suspects confused regarding the degradations that awaited them was more important than the American people's right to know what outrages were being committed in their name.
But were the White House political strategists right? Would de facto advocacy of torture be an election-year winner? A debate followed. A phalanx of retired military leaders came out in favor of continued observance of the Geneva Conventions and against the abuses. So did Colin Powell. Unexpectedly, a trio of gallant-seeming Republican senators--Lindsey Graham, John Warner and John McCain--put up a fight against the White House. That resistance temporarily spoiled the political strategy, for a wedge between Republicans and Democrats had been wanted, not a wedge between two Republican camps. But as all the world knows, the trio folded, and the bills that passed in Congress, with the support of a sizable minority of Democrats in both houses (apparently fearful that Rove's electoral strategy would succeed), gave the White House almost all it wanted. Habeas corpus was denied to detainees; no appeal by prisoners to federal courts would be allowed. (Senator Arlen Specter said the denial of habeas corpus set back the rule of law "900 years," to the time before the signing of the Magna Carta. Then he voted for the bill.) No citation of the Geneva Conventions as a defense against abuses would be permitted. Violations of the law committed by officials, including the President, would be forgiven retroactively.
No sooner had this torture-baited electoral trap been set by the Congressional vote than it was sprung. The Republican Party stood up as one to accuse the Democrats of being soft on terrorists. Speaker of the House Denny Hastert charged that the Democrats were "in favor of more rights for terrorists," whom they wanted "coddled." (What the Democrats who voted for the bill were really soft on, really coddling, was the Bush Administration.) Republican House majority leader John Boehner found it "outrageous" that the Democrats "continue to oppose giving President Bush the tools he needs to protect our country." Soon Bush joined the chorus, charging that "five years after 9/11, Democrats offer nothing but criticism and obstruction and endless second-guessing." Then he once again sounded the familiar refrain that the Democrats were the "party of cut and run."
Acampaign fought out on this ground would at least have had the virtue of revolving around the questions that are actually the most important this year. For the torture question really does, in addition to its immense intrinsic importance, roll into one package many or most of the key features of the crisis of the Republic. There is the establishment of a globe-spanning system of secret offshore concentration camps, including those in "the program," serviced by CIA Gulfstream jets ferrying sedated, hogtied abductees from one place to another--say, from Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan to Guantánamo, or, as in one case, from Stockholm to Cairo. There was also the concentration of power in the executive, already mentioned. There was the abdication by Congress of its checking and balancing in obedience to Republican Party fiat, leaving the executive to do what it wanted unhampered or, when Congress was called on to act by the Supreme Court, passing compliant legislation. There was the many-sided assault on the rule of law, domestic and international. There was the assault on basic rights and the separation of powers in the name of the war on terror. There was the brutalization and the flouting of ordinary human decency by the highest officials, exemplified by the torture itself--and, to give just one other example, by the President's comments on the Geneva Conventions' prohibition on "outrages upon personal dignity." "It's very vague," he said in a mocking tone. "What does that mean, 'outrages upon human [sic] dignity'?"
In the form of the Congressional detainee bill, the crisis of the Republic thus did in fact move, just it should have, to the center of the election of 2006. But the opposition, still cowed by Rove's strategy, had scarcely dared to raise the issue. The malefactors had done so.
As it happened, however, at just the moment that this crucial debate was about to be joined (or might have been joined if the Democrats had been ready to take a stand), the media kaleidoscope twirled, and an item that Rove never wanted to see anywhere near the "agenda" flooded the media. This of course was the story of Congressman Mark Foley's salacious messages to House pages and the House Republican leadership's history of failure to stop the abuse. And then the kaleidoscope twirled again, and in a replacement of the trivial with the apocalyptic, North Korea's atomic test eclipsed Foley's follies. Everyone started saying that the President's voice had grown inaudible. For the time being, events had jostled the big megaphone from his hands.
By now, what is uppermost in the minds of the voters--as distinct from the news media--or what will be uppermost by election day, is hard to say. But let the record show that as the election season began, the leaders of the Republican Party, in charge of both the presidency and Congress, were trying to turn the election into a referendum on torture, which they favored. And let voters remember that record on November 7, when by pulling the right lever in the voting booth they can throw this party out of office.

FROM BLONDIE'S MAILBOX

2006-10-27T10:58:00.000-07:00

(CAVEAT: THE BELOW POST CONTAINS EXPRESSIVE EXPLETIVES AND GRAPHIC LANGUAGE...IF YOU ARE OFFENDED, PLEASE IGNORE THIS POST! ---Blondie

But...This is just way too good not to share witheveryone...
This is a re-post from Ralph Nader's myspase bulletin:
"If you think the worst thing Congress doesn't protectyoung people from is Mark Foley, wake up and smell theburning planet. The ice caps are cracking, the coralreefs are bleaching, and we're losing two species anhour. The birds have bird flu, the cows have mad cow,and our poisoned groundwater has turned spinach into aside dish of mass destruction. Our schools areshooting galleries, our beaches are cancer wards, andunder George W. Bush -- for the first time in 45 years-- our country's infant mortality rate actually wentup.Read the labels on your food. It turns out thehealthiest thing you can put in your body is MarkFoley's penis. He was probably the first fruit thosepages ever came into contact with that wasn't drenchedin pesticide.But that's America for you -- a red herring culture,always scared of the wrong things. The fact is, thereare a lot of creepy middle-aged men out there lustingfor your kids. They work for MTV, the pharmaceuticalindustry, McDonald's, Marlboro and K Street. Andrecently, there's been a rash of strangers makingtheir way onto school campuses and targeting ourchildren for death. They're called militaryrecruiters.More young Americans were crippled in Iraq last monththan in any month in the past three years. And thescandal is that Mark Foley wants to show them a goodtime before they go? When will our closeted gaycongressmen learn? Our boys aren't for pleasure.They're for cannon fodder. They shouldn't be anothernotch on your bedpost. They should be a comma inBush's war. If I hear a zipper, it had better be on abody bag.Why aren't Democrats and the media hammering awayevery day about who we're supposed to be fighting forover there and what the plan is. Yes, Mark Foley waswrong to ask teenagers how long their penises were --but at least someone on Capitol Hill was askingquestions. We're the predators. Because we have anentire economy built on asking young people what theywant, making the cheapest, sleaziest form of itthey'll accept, and selling it to them until theychoke on it and die.You know who's grabbing your kids at too young an age?Merck, Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, by convincing youthey're depressed, hyperactive or suffering fromattention-deficit disorder and so they must all getmedicated. The drug dealers hooking your kids aren'tin South America, they're in the halls of Congresshanding out campaign donations to your congressmen.Mark Foley says he never slept with those kids, and Ibelieve him, because American children are so hoppedup on pills I doubt any of them could get it up.From 1995 to 2002, the number of children prescribedantipsychotic drugs increased by over 400 percent.Either our children are going insane -- which we mightlook on as a problem -- or, more likely, we have, forprofit, created a nation of little junkies. So stopalready with the righteous moral indignation aboutpredators -- this whole country is trying to getinside your kid's pants because that's where he keepsthe money Daddy gave him to stay out of his hair.I don't care if Mark Foley had been asking boys todescribe their penises because I have some sad newsfor you: Your kid is so larded out on Cheetos andYoo-hoo, he can't even see his penis. We live in acountry where the ultimate consumer is an obese16-year-old hooked up at one end to a Big Gulp and atthe other to a PlayStation. So many of our kids todayare fat drug addicts, it's almost as if Rush Limbaughhad had puppies.In conclusion, we can pretend that the biggest threatto "our children" is some creep on the Internet, or wecan admit it's Mom and Dad. When your son can't findFrance on a map, or touch his toes with his hands, orunderstand that the ads on TV are lying -- includingthe one in which the Marine turns into Lancelot --then the person fucking him is you."

2006-10-22T17:15:00.000-07:00

Anti-Genocide Activists,
Tonight, CBS’ “60 Minutes” will air a report by journalist Scott Pelley about the continuing genocide in Darfur — along with the remarkable story of a boy’s schoolbooks found in the ashes of his burned home.
Pelley, denied a visa by Sudan, sneaks across the border from Chad in search of the boy, swept into the heart of the first genocide of the twenty-first century.
Watch a preview of the report.
The episode will air tonight at 7:00 PM Eastern/Pacific. For more information, check the CBS website.
A Call to Action
We hope that this report inspires you to continue advocating for the people of Darfur. On Tuesday, you’ll have an excellent opportunity, as we join with Africa Action, American Jewish World Service and the Darfur Rehabilitation Project in a national call-in day for Darfur.
On Tuesday, help us tie up all 1,000 White House phone lines for one hour to show our dedication to an effective UN peacekeeping force in Darfur. Please reserve just a few minutes between 12 noon and 1:00 PM Eastern (9:00 and 10:00 AM Pacific) on Tuesday and call (202) 456-1414.
We’ll remind you again on Tuesday — but please mark your calendar!
—Sam Bell, Director of Advocacy, Genocide Intervention Network

CURRENT NEWS ON DARFUR

2006-10-22T12:11:00.000-07:00

From Genocide intervention Network
Violence continues in North Darfur where government aircrafts dropped bombs killing an eight-year-old child. In El Fasher, Janjaweed fighters clashed with members of the former rebel Sudanese Liberation Movement. Clashes crossed the border into Chad, where at least 10 villages have been attacked in the last two weeks. Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir, unyielding to international pressure, renewed his refusal of the employment of a UN peacekeeping force during US Special Envoy Andrew Natsios' visit to Sudan. Members of the rebel National Redemption Front say they are prepared to begin new peace talks, in hopes of gaining autonomy for the Darfur region.

The crisis in Darfur continues in North Darfur where, the United Nations reports, a government aircraft dropped bombs killing an eight-year-old boy. Further trouble occurred in El Fasher where Janjaweed fighters and members of Mini Minawi's rebel Sudanese Liberation Movement clashed.

Such recent violence has left refugees in Darfur requesting greater protection. Additional protection from the Janjaweed is also needed for civilians in eastern Chad, says Amnesty International. In the past two weeks at least 10 villages of Chad have been attacked leaving over 100 dead and 3,000 displaced, say UN officials.

An UN report states that malnutrition levels have largely stabilized in Sudan, warning nevertheless, that increased insecurity has dramatically reduced the number of families who can reach food aid centres. Aid flow and aid workers themselves are still facing insecurity threats evidenced by the arrest of two aid workers in southern Sudan as well as an armed attempt to break into an NGO compound in West Darfur.

Jan Pronk, Special Representative of the Secretary General of the United Nations, reports that the government of Sudan has lost two recent battles against National Rebel Front (NRF) rebels in the towns of Umm Sidir and Karakaya. The Sudanese government is reportedly responding military defeats and low soldier morale by mobilizing additional armed forces.

FROM GENOCIDE INTERVENTION NETWORK

2006-10-22T12:03:00.000-07:00

Tuesday: National Call-In Day for Darfur
Call President Bush on United Nations Day for Darfur
— Tuesday, Oct. 24!
Help us tie up all 1,000 lines at the White House for a whole hour. Call (202) 456-1414. If you have trouble getting through to the switchboard, help us fill up the White House voicemail by calling the comment line at (202) 456-1111.
Script:
"President Bush, Today, on United Nations Day, we are calling for you to put Darfur at the top of the U.S.'s agenda at the Security Council. The U.S. has the power to protect. Move beyond words to take action to stop genocide in Darfur by implementing UN Resolution 1706."
Sign a Companion Petition on Darfur from Africa Action

THE ANTI-EMPIRE REPORT

2006-10-20T16:32:00.000-07:00

Some Things You Need to Know Before the World Ends

Thursday, 19 October 2006
by William Blum

The jingo bells are ringing"Who really poses the greatest danger to world peace: Iraq, North Korea or the United States?" asked Time magazine in an online poll in early 2003, shortly before the US invasion of Iraq. The final results were: North Korea 6.7%, Iraq 6.3%, the United States 86.9%; 706,842 total votes cast.[1] Imagine that following North Korea's recent underground nuclear test neither the United States nor any other government cried out that the sky was falling. No threat to world peace and security was declared by the White House or any other house. It was thus not the lead story on every radio and TV broadcast and newspaper page one. The UN Security Council did not unanimously condemn it. Nor did NATO. "What should we do about him?" was not America Online's plaintive all-day headline alongside a photo of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. Who would have known about the explosion, even if it wasn't baby-sized? Who would have cared? But because all this fear mongering did in fact take place, www.vote.com was able to pose the question -- "North Korea's Nuclear Threat: Is It Time For An International Economic Blockade To Make Them Stop?" -- and hence compile a 93% "yes" vote. It doesn't actually take too much to win hearts and mindless. Media pundit Ben Bagdikian once wrote: "While it is impossible for the media to tell the population what to think, they do tell the public what to think about."

So sometime in the future, the world might, or might not, have nine states possessing nuclear weapons instead of eight. So what? Do you know of all the scary warnings the United States issued about a nuclear-armed Soviet Union? A nuclear-armed China? And the non-warnings about a nuclear-armed Israel? There were no scary warnings or threats against ally Pakistan for the nuclear-development aid it gave to North Korea a few years ago, and Washington has been busy this year enhancing the nuclear arsenal of India, events which the world has paid little attention to, because the United States did not mount a campaign to tell the world to worry. There's still only one country that's used nuclear weapons on other people, but we're not given any warnings about them. In 2005, Secretary of War Rumsfeld, commenting about large Chinese military expenditures, said: "Since no nation threatens China, one wonders: Why this growing investment?"[2] The following year, when asked if he believed the Venezuelans' contention that their large weapons buildup was strictly for defense, Rumsfeld replied: "I don't know of anyone threatening Venezuela - anyone in this hemisphere."[3] Presumably, the honorable secretary, if asked, would say that no one threatens North Korea either. Or Iran. Or Syria. Or Cuba. He may even believe this. However, beginning with the Soviet Union, as one country after another joined the nuclear club, Washington's ability to threaten them or coerce them declined, which is of course North Korea's overriding reason for trying to become a nuclear power; or Iran's if it goes that route. Undoubtedly there are some in the Bush administration who are not unhappy about the North Korean test. A nuclear North Korea with a "crazy" leader serves as a rationale for policies the White House is pursuing anyway, like anti-missile systems, military bases all over the map, ever-higher military spending, and all the other nice things a respectable empire bent on world domination needs. And of course, important elections are imminent and getting real tough with looney commies always sells well.Did I miss something or is there an international law prohibiting only North Korea from testing nuclear weapons? And just what is the danger? North Korea, even if it had nuclear weapons and delivery systems, and there's no evidence that it does, is of course no threat to attack anyone with them. Like Iraq under Saddam Hussein, North Korea is not suicidal.And just for the record, contrary to what we've been told a million times, there's no objective evidence that North Korea invaded South Korea on that famous day of June 25, 1950. The accusations came only from the South Korean and US governments, neither being a witness to the event, neither with the least amount of credible impartiality. No, the United Nations observers did not observe the invasion. Even more important, it doesn't really matter much which side was the first to fire a shot or cross the border on that day because whatever happened was just the latest incident in an already-ongoing war of several years.[4]

Operation Because We Can. Captain Ahab had his Moby Dick. Inspector Javert had his Jean Valjean. The United States has its Fidel Castro. Washington also has its Daniel Ortega. For 27 years, the most powerful nation in the world has found it impossible to share the Western Hemisphere with one of its poorest and weakest neighbors, Nicaragua, if the country's leader was not in love with capitalism. From the moment the Sandinista revolutionaries overthrew the US-supported Somoza dictatorship in 1979, Washington was concerned about the rising up of that long-dreaded beast -- "another Cuba". This was war. On the battlefield and in the voting booths. For almost 10 years, the American proxy army, the Contras, carried out a particularly brutal insurgency against the Sandinista government and its supporters. In 1984, Washington tried its best to sabotage the elections, but failed to keep Sandinista leader Ortega from becoming president. And the war continued. In 1990, Washington's electoral tactic was to hammer home the simple and clear message to the people of Nicaragua: If you re-elect Ortega all the horrors of the civil war and America's economic hostility will continue. Just two months before the election, in December 1989, the United States invaded Panama for no apparent reason acceptable to international law, morality, or common sense (The United States naturally called it "Operation Just Cause"); one likely reason it was carried out was to send a clear message to the people of Nicaragua that this is what they could expect, that the US/Contra war would continue and even escalate, if they re-elected the Sandinistas.It worked; one cannot overestimate the power of fear, of murder, rape, and your house being burned down. Ortega lost, and Nicaragua returned to the rule of the free market, striving to roll back the progressive social and economic programs that had been undertaken by the Sandinistas. Within a few years widespread malnutrition, wholly inadequate access to health care and education, and other social ills, had once again become a widespread daily fact of life for the people of Nicaragua.Each presidential election since then has pitted perennial candidate Ortega against Washington's interference in the process in shamelessly blatant ways. Pressure has been regularly exerted on certain political parties to withdraw their candidates so as to avoid splitting the conservative vote against the Sandinistas. US ambassadors and visiting State Department officials publicly and explicitly campaign for anti-Sandinista candidates, threatening all kinds of economic and diplomatic punishment if Ortega wins, including difficulties with exports, visas, and vital family remittances by Nicaraguans living in the United States. In the 2001 election, shortly after the September 11 attacks, American officials tried their best to tie Ortega to terrorism, placing a full-page ad in the leading newspaper which declared, among other things, that: "Ortega has a relationship of more than thirty years with states and individuals who shelter and condone international terrorism."[5] That same year a senior analyst in Nicaragua for the international pollsters Gallup was moved to declare: "Never in my whole life have I seen a sitting ambassador get publicly involved in a sovereign country's electoral process, nor have I ever heard of it."[6] Additionally, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) -- which would like the world to believe that it's a private non-governmental organization, when it's actually a creation and an agency of the US government -- regularly furnishes large amounts of money and other aid to organizations in Nicaragua which are opposed to the Sandinistas. The International Republican Institute (IRI), a long-time wing of NED, whose chairman is Arizona Senator John McCain, has also been active in Nicaragua creating the Movement for Nicaragua, which has helped organize marches against the Sandinistas. An IRI official in Nicaragua, speaking to a visiting American delegation in June of this year, equated the relationship between Nicaragua and the United States to that of a son to a father. "Children should not argue with their parents." she said.With the 2006 presidential election in mind, one senior US official wrote in a Nicaraguan newspaper last year that should Ortega be elected, "Nicaragua would sink like a stone". In March, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, the US Ambassador to the UN under Reagan and a prime supporter of the Contras, came to visit. She met with members of all the major Sandinista opposition parties and declared her belief that democracy in Nicaragua "is in danger" but that she had no doubt that the "Sandinista dictatorship" would not return to power. The following month, the American ambassador in Managua, Paul Trivelli, who openly speaks of his disapproval of Ortega and the Sandinista party, sent a letter to the presidential candidates of conservative parties offering financial and technical help to unite them for the general election of November 5. The ambassador stated that he was responding to requests by Nicaraguan "democratic parties" for US support in their mission to keep Daniel Ortega from a presidential victory. The visiting American delegation reported: "In a somewhat opaque statement Trivelli said that if Ortega were to win, the concept of governments recognizing governments wouldn't exist anymore and it was a 19th century concept anyway. The relationship would depend on what his government put in place." One of the fears of the ambassador likely has to do with Ortega talking of renegotiating CAFTA, the trade agreement between the US and Central America, so dear to the hearts of corporate globalizationists.Then, in June, US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick said it was necessary for the Organization of American States (OAS) to send a mission of Electoral Observation to Nicaragua "as soon as possible" so as to "prevent the old leaders of corruption and communism from attempting to remain in power" (though the Sandinistas have not occupied the presidency, only lower offices, since 1990). The explicit or implicit message of American pronouncements concerning Nicaragua is often the warning that if the Sandinistas come back to power, the horrible war, so fresh in the memory of Nicaraguans, will return. The London Independent reported in September that "One of the Ortega billboards in Nicaragua was spray-painted 'We don't want another war'. What it was saying was that if you vote for Ortega you are voting for a possible war with the US."[7] Per capita income in Nicaragua is $900 a year; some 70% of the people live in poverty. It is worth noting that Nicaragua and Haiti are the two nations in the Western Hemisphere that the United States has intervened in the most, from the 19th century to the 21st, including long periods of occupation. And they are today the two poorest in the hemisphere, wretchedly so.

Don't look back. The cartoon awfulness of the Bush crime syndicate's foreign policy is enough to make Americans nostalgic for almost anything that came before. And as Bill Clinton parades around the country and the world associating himself with "good" causes, it's enough to evoke yearnings in many people on the left who should know better. So here's a little reminder of what Clinton's foreign policy was composed of. Hold on to it in case Lady Macbeth runs in 2008 and tries to capitalize on lover boy's record.

Yugoslavia: The United States played the principal role during the 1990s in the destruction of this nation, republic by republic, the low point of which was 78 consecutive days of terrible bombing of the population in 1999. No, it was not an act of "humanitarianism". It was pure imperialism, corporate globalization, getting rid of "the last communist government in Europe", keeping NATO alive by giving it a function after the end of the Cold War. There was no moral issue behind US policy. The ousted Yugoslav leader, Slobodan Milosevic, is routinely labeled "authoritarian" (Compared to whom? To the Busheviks?), but that had nothing to do with it. The great exodus of the people of Kosovo resulted from the bombing, not Serbian "ethnic cleansing"; and while saving Kosovars the Clinton administration was servicing Turkish ethnic cleansing of Kurds. NATO admitted (sic) to repeatedly and deliberately targeting civilians; amongst other war crimes.[8] Somalia: The 1993 intervention was presented as a mission to help feed the starving masses. But the US soon started taking sides in the clan-based civil war and tried to rearrange the country's political map by eliminating the dominant warlord, Mohamed Aidid, and his power base. On many occasions, US helicopters strafed groups of Aidid's supporters or fired missiles at them; missiles were fired into a hospital because of the belief that Aidid's forces had taken refuge there; also a private home, where members of Aidid's political movement were holding a meeting; finally, an attempt by American forces to kidnap two leaders of Aidid's clan resulted in a horrendous bloody battle. This last action alone cost the lives of more than a thousand Somalis, with many more wounded.It's questionable that getting food to hungry people was as important as the fact that four American oil giants held exploratory rights to large areas of Somali land and were hoping that US troops would put an end to the prevailing chaos which threatened their highly expensive investments.[9]Ecuador: In 2000, downtrodden Indian peasants rose up once again against the hardships of US/IMF globalization policies, such as privatization. The Indians were joined by labor unions and some junior military officers and their coalition forced the president to resign. Washington was alarmed. American officials in Quito and Washington unleashed a blitz of threats against Ecuadorian government and military officials. And that was the end of the Ecuadorian revolution.[10] Sudan: The US deliberately bombed and destroyed a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum in 1998 in the stated belief that it was a plant for making chemical weapons for terrorists. In actuality, the plant produced about 90 percent of the drugs used to treat the most deadly illnesses in that desperately poor country; it was reportedly one of the biggest and best of its kind in Africa. And had no connection to chemical weapons.[11] Sierra Leone: In 1998, Clinton sent Jesse Jackson as his special envoy to Liberia and Sierra Leone, the latter being in the midst of one of the great horrors of the 20th century -- an army of mostly young boys, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), going around raping and chopping off people's arms and legs. African and world opinion was enraged against the RUF, which was committed to protecting the diamond mines they controlled. Liberian president Charles Taylor was an indispensable ally and supporter of the RUF and Jackson was an old friend of his. Jesse was not sent to the region to try to curtail the RUF's atrocities, nor to hound Taylor about his widespread human rights violations, but instead, in June 1999, Jackson and other American officials drafted entire sections of an accord that made RUF leader, Foday Sankoh, the vice president of Sierra Leone, and gave him official control over the diamond mines, the country's major source of wealth.[12] Iraq: Eight more years of the economic sanctions which Clinton's National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, called "the most pervasive sanctions every imposed on a nation in the history of mankind",[13] absolutely devastating every aspect of the lives of the Iraqi people, particularly their health; truly a weapon of mass destruction.Cuba: Eight more years of economic sanctions, political hostility, and giving haven to anti-Castro terrorists in Florida. In 1999, Cuba filed a suit against the United States for $181.1 billion in compensation for economic losses and loss of life during the first forty years of this aggression. The suit holds Washington responsible for the death of 3,478 Cubans and the wounding and disabling of 2,099 others. Only the imperialist powers have the ability to enforce sanctions and are therefore always exempt from them.As to Clinton's domestic policies, keep in mind those two beauties: The "Effective death penalty Act" and the "Welfare Reform Act". And let's not forget the massacre at Waco, Texas.

Three billion years from amoebas to Homeland Security. The Department of Homeland Security would like to remind passengers that you may not take any liquids onto the plane. This includes ice cream, as the ice cream will melt and turn into a liquid."This was actually heard by one of my readers at the Atlanta Airport recently; he laughed out loud. He informs me that he didn't know what was more bizarre, that such an announcement was made or that he was the only person that he could see who reacted to its absurdity.[14] This is the way it is with societies of people. Like with the proverbial frog who submits to being boiled to death in a pot of water if the water is heated very gradually, people submit to one heightened absurdity and indignation after another if they're subjected to them at a gradual enough rate. That's one of the most common threads one finds in the personal stories of Germans living in the Third Reich. This airport story is actually an example of an absurdity within an absurdity. Since the "bomb made from liquids and gels" story was foisted upon the public, several chemists and other experts have pointed out the technical near-impossibility of manufacturing such a bomb in a moving airplane, if for no other reason than the necessity of spending at least an hour or two in the airplane bathroom.
NOTES
[1] Time European edition online: http://www.time.com/time/europe/gdml/peace2003.html
[2] Washington Post, June 4, 2005
[3] Associated Press, October 3, 2006
[4] William Blum, Killing Hop: US Military & CIA Interventions Since World War II (2004), chapter 5
[5] Nicaragua Network (Washington, DC), October 29, 2001 -- www.nicanet.org/pubs/hotline1029_2001.html and New York Times, November 4, 2001, p.3
[6] Miami Herald, October 29, 2001
[7] The remainder of the section on Nicaragua is derived primarily from The Independent (London), September 6, 2006, and "2006 Nicaraguan Elections and the US Government Role. Report of the Nicaragua Network delegation to investigate US intervention in the Nicaraguan elections of November 2006" -- www.nicanet.org/pdf/Delegation%20Report.pdfSee also: "List of interventions by the United States government in Nicaragua's democratic process." -- www.nicanet.org/list_of_interventionist_statments.php
[8] Michael Parenti, "To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia" (2000)Diana Johnstone, "Fool's Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions" (2002) William Blum, "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower" (2005), see "Yugoslavia" in index.
[9]Rogue State, pp. 204-5
[10] Ibid., pp. 212-3
[11] William Blum, "Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire", chapter 7
[12] Ryan Lizza, "Where angels fear to tread", New Republic, July 24, 2000
[13] White House press briefing, November 14, 1997, US Newswire transcript
[14] Story related to me by Jack Muir

2006-10-19T15:37:00.000-07:00

Olbermann Addresses the Military Commissions Act in a Special Comment
by Keith Olbermann

We have lived as if in a trance.
We have lived as people in fear.
And now—our rights and our freedoms in peril—we slowly awake to learn that we have been afraid of the wrong thing.
Therefore, tonight have we truly become the inheritors of our American legacy.
For, on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering:
A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.
We have been here before—and we have been here before led here—by men better and wiser and nobler than George W. Bush.
We have been here when President John Adams insisted that the Alien and Sedition Acts were necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use those acts to jail newspaper editors.
American newspaper editors, in American jails, for things they wrote about America.
We have been here when President Woodrow Wilson insisted that the Espionage Act was necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use that Act to prosecute 2,000 Americans, especially those he disparaged as “Hyphenated Americans,” most of whom were guilty only of advocating peace in a time of war.
American public speakers, in American jails, for things they said about America.
And we have been here when President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that Executive Order 9066 was necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use that order to imprison and pauperize 110,000 Americans while his man in charge, General DeWitt, told Congress: “It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen—he is still a Japanese.”
American citizens, in American camps, for something they neither wrote nor said nor did, but for the choices they or their ancestors had made about coming to America.
Each of these actions was undertaken for the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And each was a betrayal of that for which the president who advocated them claimed to be fighting.
Adams and his party were swept from office, and the Alien and Sedition Acts erased.
Many of the very people Wilson silenced survived him, and one of them even ran to succeed him, and got 900,000 votes, though his presidential campaign was conducted entirely from his jail cell.
And Roosevelt’s internment of the Japanese was not merely the worst blight on his record, but it would necessitate a formal apology from the government of the United States to the citizens of the United States whose lives it ruined.
The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
In times of fright, we have been only human.
We have let Roosevelt’s “fear of fear itself” overtake us.
We have listened to the little voice inside that has said, “the wolf is at the door; this will be temporary; this will be precise; this too shall pass.”
We have accepted that the only way to stop the terrorists is to let the government become just a little bit like the terrorists.
Just the way we once accepted that the only way to stop the Soviets was to let the government become just a little bit like the Soviets.
Or substitute the Japanese.
Or the Germans.
Or the Socialists.
Or the Anarchists.
Or the Immigrants.
Or the British.
Or the Aliens.
The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And, always, always wrong.
“With the distance of history, the questions will be narrowed and few: Did this generation of Americans take the threat seriously, and did we do what it takes to defeat that threat?”
Wise words.
And ironic ones, Mr. Bush.
Your own, of course, yesterday, in signing the Military Commissions Act.
You spoke so much more than you know, Sir.
Sadly—of course—the distance of history will recognize that the threat this generation of Americans needed to take seriously was you.
We have a long and painful history of ignoring the prophecy attributed to Benjamin Franklin that “those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
But even within this history we have not before codified the poisoning of habeas corpus, that wellspring of protection from which all essential liberties flow.
You, sir, have now befouled that spring.
You, sir, have now given us chaos and called it order.
You, sir, have now imposed subjugation and called it freedom.
For the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And — again, Mr. Bush — all of them, wrong.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has said it is unacceptable to compare anything this country has ever done to anything the terrorists have ever done.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has insisted again that “the United States does not torture. It’s against our laws and it’s against our values” and who has said it with a straight face while the pictures from Abu Ghraib Prison and the stories of Waterboarding figuratively fade in and out, around him.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who may now, if he so decides, declare not merely any non-American citizens “unlawful enemy combatants” and ship them somewhere—anywhere -- but may now, if he so decides, declare you an “unlawful enemy combatant” and ship you somewhere - anywhere.
And if you think this hyperbole or hysteria, ask the newspaper editors when John Adams was president or the pacifists when Woodrow Wilson was president or the Japanese at Manzanar when Franklin Roosevelt was president.
And if you somehow think habeas corpus has not been suspended for American citizens but only for everybody else, ask yourself this: If you are pulled off the street tomorrow, and they call you an alien or an undocumented immigrant or an “unlawful enemy combatant”—exactly how are you going to convince them to give you a court hearing to prove you are not? Do you think this attorney general is going to help you?
This President now has his blank check.
He lied to get it.
He lied as he received it.
Is there any reason to even hope he has not lied about how he intends to use it nor who he intends to use it against?
“These military commissions will provide a fair trial,” you told us yesterday, Mr. Bush, “in which the accused are presumed innocent, have access to an attorney and can hear all the evidence against them.”
"Presumed innocent," Mr. Bush?
The very piece of paper you signed as you said that, allows for the detainees to be abused up to the point just before they sustain “serious mental and physical trauma” in the hope of getting them to incriminate themselves, and may no longer even invoke The Geneva Conventions in their own defense.
"Access to an attorney," Mr. Bush?
Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift said on this program, Sir, and to the Supreme Court, that he was only granted access to his detainee defendant on the promise that the detainee would plead guilty.
"Hearing all the evidence," Mr. Bush?
The Military Commissions Act specifically permits the introduction of classified evidence not made available to the defense.
Your words are lies, Sir.
They are lies that imperil us all.
“One of the terrorists believed to have planned the 9/11 attacks,” you told us yesterday, “said he hoped the attacks would be the beginning of the end of America.”
That terrorist, sir, could only hope.
Not his actions, nor the actions of a ceaseless line of terrorists (real or imagined), could measure up to what you have wrought.
Habeas corpus? Gone.
The Geneva Conventions? Optional.
The moral force we shined outwards to the world as an eternal beacon, and inwards at ourselves as an eternal protection? Snuffed out.
These things you have done, Mr. Bush, they would be “the beginning of the end of America.”
And did it even occur to you once, sir — somewhere in amidst those eight separate, gruesome, intentional, terroristic invocations of the horrors of 9/11 -- that with only a little further shift in this world we now know—just a touch more repudiation of all of that for which our patriots died --- did it ever occur to you once that in just 27 months and two days from now when you leave office, some irresponsible future president and a “competent tribunal” of lackeys would be entitled, by the actions of your own hand, to declare the status of “unlawful enemy combatant” for -- and convene a Military Commission to try -- not John Walker Lindh, but George Walker Bush?
For the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And doubtless, Sir, all of them—as always—wrong.

2006-10-19T15:01:00.000-07:00

On Sept. 25, California announced that it would ban state investments in Sudan. At a ceremony attended by actors George Clooney and Don Cheadle, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill adopting a targeted divestment from Sudan for California's public pension funds. This came in large part as a result of intensive activism by the Sudan Divestment Task Force, a close partner of GI-Net.
Schwarzenegger also wrote to President Bush, urging him to sign the Darfur Peace and Accountabilty Act, which Bush did on Oct. 13. The Act endorses a more comprehensive mandate and logistical support for the African Union peacekeepers in Darfur, directs the United States to aid the International Criminal Court in its investigations of war crimes in Darfur, and specifies economic sanctions for members of the Sudanese government known to have committed war crimes.
Passing the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act was a major success for the anti-genocide movement and a testament to activists' hard work over these past months. However, as GI-Net Executive Director Mark Hanis said after the bill's passage, the DPAA “has the potential to seriously curtail the genocidal activities of the government of Sudan, but only if its provisions are seriously enforced.” We in the anti-genocide movement must remain vigilant that these provisions are enforced if genocide is truly to come to an end in Darfur. We must continue to ratchet up the pressure!
—Colin, Ivan and the rest of the GI-Net team

BOOK REVIEW

2006-10-17T13:20:00.000-07:00

Noam Chomsky's Failed States

Book Review
by Charles Marowitz

Chomsky, Noam: Failed States, Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Co., New York, ISBN 0-8050-7912-8

(Swans - October 9, 2006) Noam Chomsky began his career as a semanticist; that is, a person who diligently searches out language in order to better reveal its meaning. It is a short distance from there to becoming a political pundit, as anyone who obfuscates or demeans language is immediately fair game to the serious linguist. Today, when language is constantly being used to conceal meaning and mangle truth, the semanticist is in the front rank of society's defenders. In Chomsky's latest book Failed States, the writer demonstrates how language itself has been taken prisoner.

The picture Chomsky paints of this "failed state" is of a nation dominated by grasping and malevolent "private interests," ruled by corporate powers that work hand in hand with government to enlarge their own profits and suppress the needs and desires of a majority of the American people who are methodically duped by glittering generalities about "democracy" and "freedom" while being economically down-trodden and politically neutered. If only one quarter of the offences contained in Noam Chomsky's book are true, the outlook for American democracy is more than bleak; it is utterly hopeless.

The linguistic-philosopher is blunt about Israel's transgressions in the Holy Land and the cynical union between the U.S. and its marauding client state. He demonstrates that America's call for democracy in Europe and the Middle East is nakedly predicated on self-interest. He impugns the corporization of the universities where unbridled freedom of expression has given way to censorship disguised as "speech codes"; dissent is interpreted as treason; and departments, allegedly devoted to research and development, are in cahoots with private companies embroiled in commerce and industry. Chomsky believes the rot has got in everywhere and one would be inclined to view him as a dotty alarmist if his evidence wasn't so convincing and his facts so incontrovertible.

The book is fastidiously documented and studded with dozens of citations bearing out the author's various contentions; if anything, more than are required to prove their validity. It would have strengthened the work's polemic if Chomsky's voice was not constantly diverted with corroborations but relied more on the cumulative force of his own argument.
Failed States is a disturbingly persuasive indictment of shortcomings that have corroded the fabric of American society to the point where it is threadbare. It tears off the masks of malevolent politicians and scheming corporate pirates whose primary motivation is only greater profitability. It also tends to confirm the suspicions that have been percolating in people's minds as the country has lurched from one scandal to another. Chomsky contends that the trappings of democracy -- free elections, freedom of the press, equal justice, equality of opportunity -- are shibboleths that have been tossed like a deflated football from one administration to the other (both Republican and Democratic) and that manipulative rhetoric has usurped the popular will and hoodwinked the masses. Chomsky's charges are the fodder out of which revolutionary upheaval could grow if the country were not permanently incapable of developing an insurrectionary temperament.

The deeply-embedded corruptions which nullify the nation's politics, warp its religious beliefs, motivate its commercial enterprises, and dehumanize the day-to-day traffic between individuals who look no further than the preservation of their own comfort and well being have de-democratized a nation presumably rooted in democracy. The fact that we condone what the U.S. has become under the present leadership suggests that we are more than a "failed state," we are a damaged human species. That is why we cannot field upright candidates or engage in debates on moral issues without resorting to rancor and bitterness. That is why we draw ourselves into cozy enclaves, insulating our lives from the horrors of the outside world. If the reverence with which we honor our fallen dead in Iraq could be converted into protest against those political evils which persuadeus to sacrifice the lives of our sons, daughters, and husbands, there might be a way to clamber out of the quagmire. Refusing to do so makes us complicit in the crimes being carried out in our name, although without our consent.

I am merely reverberating here the indictments contained in Chomsky's work and doing so because a perfunctory survey of the issues raised there would demean the conventional parameters of book reviewing. It is mildly insulting merely to evaluate the literary aspects of a polemical tract which concerns itself with life-and-death issues that throttle our daily lives forcing us to collude in acts of terror grown in our own native soil. One reads Failed States as one would a Doomsday Book. The difference is it stimulates the will to survive rather than despair.
It is mordantly ironic that Chomsky's earlier book Hegemony of Survival: America's Quest For Global Dominance, which Hugo Chávez brandished before the United Nations General Assembly on September 20, 2006, suddenly became a best seller. It would appear that nothing intrudes into reality if it doesn't first detour onto that freeway which wends its way through the media. I doubt that Chávez is a particular hero of Chomsky's but they are umbilically connected in their contempt for the spread of veiled imperialism. If Chávez's testimonial increases Chomsky's readership, it is a boost every liberal American should applaud. And if it leads them on to Failed States, even better.

· · · · · ·

from Rantings of a Crazy Liberal

2006-10-16T17:09:00.000-07:00

REPUBLICAN LOGIC

Huge tax breaks for people who already have more money than they can spend in their entire lifetime will stimulate the economy, because now they’ll have more money to spend.
Buying cheap goods from China is good for the American economy, because the people who have had their jobs outsourced to China can only afford to buy cheap goods.
A president who lies to the nation about a sexual liaison with a fellow consenting adult should be impeached. A president who lies to the nation about going to war should be re-elected.
When Jerry Falwell uses his pulpit to shill for the Republicans, he’s an influential party spokesperson. When the IRS knocks on his door, he’s a tax-exempt man-of-the-cloth.
If you joined the military, you were in Iraq to protect your country. But if you return home and run for elected office as a Democrat, you were in Iraq to "pad your resume".
If you fight for America, you are protecting freedoms like the First Amendment. But if you exercise your First Amendment rights, you are anti-American.
When a panel of judges stops votes from being counted in Florida and installs a man in the White House, they are upholding the Constitution. When a panel of judges in Florida upholds the law and decide against Terry Schiavo’s parents, they are activists.
According to Rumsfeld, keeping Gitmo detainees standing for hours is "uncomfortable". Rumsfeld developing writer’s cramp from personally signing letters to the families of fallen soldiers constitutes "torture".
When children see Janet Jackson’s breast for two seconds on TV, they are learning wanton, sinful behaviour. When children hear Pat Robertson calling for the murder of duly-elected leader, they are learning good Christian values.
According to our military analysts, the soldiers currently serving in Iraq are not targets for the insurgents; they are securing the country. According to those same analysts, we can’t send any more soldiers to Iraq to secure the country, because we’d just be sending more targets.
We can’t announce when we’ll be withdrawing from Iraq, because the insurgents may decrease their attacks and simply wait out the clock. But we can’t train Iraqi troops so that ours can withdraw, because of the constant attacks by the insurgents.
The terrorists hate us because of our freedoms. Unless we allow those freedoms to be taken away by our own government, the terrorists have won.
When thousands of scientific experts declare global warming a reality, we need more study before we can act.
When we get information about supposed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq from a single source named Curveball, we must take action before it’s too late.
It makes perfect sense for the IRS to spend millions of dollars tracking down citizens who cheated the government by fifty bucks on their tax return. Investigating where millions of taxpayers' dollars have disappeared to in the 'fog of war' is absolute foolishness.
When warned that Social Security will be in trouble within the next four decades, the best course of action is to totally gut it immediately. When warned that Bin Laden plans an attack on US soil, the best course of action is to adopt a wait-and-see attitude.
When Americans see billions of their tax dollars going to Haliburton, they are appreciating the enormous cost it takes to wage a war. When they ask how that money is being spent, they are nit-picking.
Ann Coulter is an outspoken woman of style and charm. Hillary Clinton is a mouthy bitch.
Al Franken is a crackpot who is using the airwaves to mislead the American people. Rush Limbaugh is the calm voice of reason.
When Dick Cheney told someone to fuck off on the Senate floor, he was, as promised, bringing dignity back to Washington politics. When TV journalists show videos of administration members saying something they deny having said twenty-four hours later, those journalists are engaging in ‘revisionist history’.
When millions of Americans march in anti-war demonstrations, they are a ‘handful of people’. When a handful of people support an anti-gay marriage Constitutional amendment, they are an ‘overwhelming number of Americans’.

2006-10-16T12:44:00.000-07:00

Bush's Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq's Oil
By Joshua Holland, AlterNetPosted on October 16, 2006, Printed on October 16, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/43045/

Editor's note: this is the first of a two-part series.

Iraq is sitting on a mother lode of some of the lightest, sweetest, most profitable crude oil on earth, and the rules that will determine who will control it and on what terms are about to be set.

The Iraqi government faces a December deadline, imposed by the world's wealthiest countries, to complete its final Oil Law. Industry analysts expect that the result will be a radical departure from the laws governing the country's oil-rich neighbors, giving foreign multinationals a much higher rate of return than with other major oil producers, and locking in their control over what George Bush called Iraq's "patrimony" for decades, regardless of what kind of policies future elected governments might want to pursue.
Iraq's energy reserves are an incredibly rich prize; according to the US Department of Energy, "Iraq contains 112 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, the second largest in the world (behind Saudi Arabia) along with roughly 220 billion barrels of probable and possible resources. Iraq's true potential may be far greater than this, however, as the country is relatively unexplored due to years of war and sanctions." For perspective, the Saudis have 260 billion barrels of proven reserves.

Iraqi oil is close to the surface and easy to extract, making it all the more profitable. James Paul, Executive Director of the Global Policy Forum, points out that oil companies "can produce a barrel of Iraqi oil for less than $1.50 and possibly as little as $1, including all exploration, oilfield development and production costs." Contrast that with other areas where oil is considered cheap to produce at $5 per barrel, or the North Sea where production costs are $12-16 per barrel.

And Iraq's oil sector is largely undeveloped. Former Iraqi Oil Minister Issam Chalabi (no relation to the neocons' favorite exile, Ahmed Chalabi) told the Associated Press that "Iraq has more oil fields that have been discovered, but not developed, than any other country in the world." British-based analyst Mohammad Al-Gallani told the Canadian Press that of 526 prospective drilling sites, just 125 have been opened.
But the real gem -- what one oil consultant called the "Holy Grail" of the industry -- lies in Iraq's vast Western desert. It's one of the last "virgin" fields on the planet, and it has the potential to catapult Iraq to number one in the world in oil reserves. Sparsely populated, the Western fields are less prone to sabotage than the country's current centers of production in the North, near Kirkuk, and in the South near Basra. The Nation's Aram Roston predicts Iraq's Western desert will yield "untold riches."

Iraq also may have large natural gas deposits that so far remain virtually unexplored.
But even "untold riches" don't tell the whole story. Depending on how Iraq's petroleum law shakes out, the country's enormous reserves could break the back of OPEC, a wet dream in Western capitals for three decades. James Paul predicted that "even before Iraq had reached its full production potential of 8 million barrels or more per day, the companies would gain huge leverage over the international oil system. OPEC would be weakened by the withdrawal of one of its key producers from the OPEC quota system." Depending on how things shape up in the next few months, Western oil companies could end up controlling the country's output levels, or the government, heavily influenced by the U.S., could even pull out of the cartel entirely.
Both independent analysts and officials within Iraq's Oil ministry anticipate that when all is said and done, the big winners in Iraq will be the Big Four -- the American firms Exxon-Mobile and Chevron-Texaco, and the British BP-Amoco and Royal Dutch-Shell -- that dominate the world oil market. Ibrahim Mohammed, an industry consultant with close contacts in the Iraqi Oil Ministry, told the Associated Press that there's a universal belief among ministry staff that the major U.S. companies will win the lion's share of contracts. "The feeling is that the new government is going to be influenced by the United States," he said.
During the twelve-year sanction period, the Big Four were forced to sit on the sidelines while the government of Saddam Hussein cut deals with the Chinese, French, Russians and others (despite the sanctions, the U.S. ultimately received 37 percent of Iraq's oil during the period, according to the independent committee that investigated the Oil-for-food program, but almost all of it arrived through foreign firms). In a 1999 speech, Dick Cheney, then CEO of the oil services company Halliburton, told a London audience that the Middle East was where the West would find the additional fifty million barrels of oil per day that he predicted it would need by 2010, but, he lamented, "while even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow."

Chafing at the idea that the Chinese and Russians might end up with what is arguably the world's greatest energy prize, industry leaders lobbied hard for regime change throughout the 1990s. With the election of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in 2000 -- the first time in U.S. history that two veterans of the oil industry had ever occupied the nation's top two jobs -- they would finally get the "greater access" to the region's oil wealth after which they had long lusted.
If the U.S. invasion of Iraq had occurred during the colonial era a hundred years earlier, the oil giants, backed by U.S. forces, would have simply seized Iraq's oil fields. Much has changed since then in terms of international custom and law (when then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz did in fact suggest seizing Iraq's Southern oil fields in 2002, Colin Powell dismissed the idea as "lunacy").

Understanding how Big Oil came to this point, poised to take effective control of the bulk of the country's reserves while they remain, technically, in the hands of the Iraqi government -- a government with all the trappings of sovereignty -- is to grasp the sometimes intricate dance that is modern neocolonialism. The Iraq oil-grab is a classic case study.
It's clear that the U.S.-led invasion had little to do with national security or the events of September 11. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill revealed that just 11 days after Bush's inauguration in early 2001, regime change in Iraq was "Topic A" among the administration's national security staff, and former Terrorism Tsar Richard Clarke told 60 minutes that the day after the attacks in New York and Washington occurred, "[Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq." He added: "We all said … no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan."

On March 7, 2003, two weeks before the U.S. attacked Iraq, the UN's chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, told the UN Security Council that Saddam Hussein's cooperation with the inspections protocol had improved to the point where it was "active or even proactive," and that the inspectors would be able to certify that Iraq was free of prohibited weapons within a few months' time. That same day, IAEA head Mohammed ElBaradei reported that there was no evidence of a current nuclear program in Iraq and flatly refuted the administration's claim that the infamous aluminum tubes cited by Colin Powell in making his case for war before the Security Council were part of a reconstituted nuclear program.

But serious planning for the war had begun in February of 2002, as Bob Woodward revealed in his book, Plan of Attack. Planning for the future of Iraq's oil wealth had been under way for longer still.
In February of 2001, just weeks after Bush was sworn in, the same energy executives that had been lobbying for Saddam's ouster gathered at the White House to participate in Dick Cheney's now infamous Energy Taskforce. Although Cheney would go all the way to the Supreme Court to keep what happened at those meetings a secret, we do know a few things thanks to documents obtained by the conservative legal group JudicialWatch. As Mark Levine wrote in The Nation($$):
… a map of Iraq and an accompanying list of "Iraq oil foreign suitors" were the center of discussion. The map erased all features of the country save the location of its main oil deposits, divided into nine exploration blocks. The accompanying list of suitors revealed that dozens of companies from thirty countries--but not the United States--were either in discussions over or in direct negotiations for rights to some of the best remaining oilfields on earth.
Levine wrote, "It's not hard to surmise how the participants in these meetings felt about this situation."

According to The New Yorker, at the same time, a top-secret National Security Council memo directed NSC staff to "cooperate fully with the Energy Taskforce as it considered melding two seemingly unrelated areas of policy." The administration's national security team was to join "the review of operational policies towards rogue states such as Iraq, and actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields."

At the State Department, planning was also underway. Under the auspices of the "Future of Iraq Project," an "Oil and Energy Working Group" was established. The full membership of the group -- described by the Financial Times as "Iraqi oil experts, international consultants" and State Department staffers -- remains classified, but among them, according to Antonia Juhasz's The Bush Agenda, was Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum, who would serve in Iyad Allawi's cabinet during the period of the Iraqi Governing Council, and later as Iraq's Oil Minister in 2005. The group concluded that Iraq's oil "should be opened to international oil companies as quickly as possible after the war."

But the execs from Big Oil didn't just want access to Iraq's oil; they wanted access on terms that would be inconceivable unless negotiated at the barrel of a gun. Specifically, they wanted an Iraqi government that would enter into Production Service Agreements (PSAs) for the extraction of Iraq's oil.
PSAs, developed in the 1960s, are a tool of today's kinder, gentler neocolonialism; they allow countries to retain technical ownership over energy reserves but, in actuality, lock in multinationals' control and extremely high profit margins -- up to thirteen times oil companies' minimum target, according to an analysis by the British-based oil watchdog Platform (PDF).
As Greg Muttit, an analyst with the group, notes:
Such contracts are often used in countries with small or difficult oilfields, or where high-risk exploration is required. They are not generally used in countries like Iraq, where there are large fields which are already known and which are cheap to extract. For example, they are not used in Iran, Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, all of which maintain state control of oil.
In fact, Muttit adds, of the seven leading oil producing countries, only Russia has entered into PSAs, and those were signed during its own economic "shock therapy" in the early 1990s. A number of Iraq's oil-rich neighbors have constitutions that specifically prohibit foreign control over their energy reserves.

PSAs often have long terms -- up to 40 years -- and contain "stabilization clauses" that protect them from future legislative changes. As Muttit points out, future governments "could be constrained in their ability to pass new laws or policies." That means, for example, that if a future elected Iraqi government "wanted to pass a human rights law, or wanted to introduce a minimum wage [and it] affected the company's profits, either the law would not apply to the company's operations, or the government would have to compensate the company for any reduction in profits." It's Sovereignty Lite.

The deals are so onerous that they govern only 12 percent of the world's oil reserves, according to the International Energy Agency. Nonetheless, PSAs would become the Future of Iraq Project's recommendation for the fledgling Iraqi government. According to the Financial Times, "many in the group" fought for the contract structure; a Kurdish delegate told the FT, "everybody keeps coming back to PSAs."

Of course, the plans for Iraq's legal framework for oil have to be viewed in the context of the overall transformation of the Iraqi economy. Clearly, the idea was to pursue a radical corporatist agenda during the period of the Coalition Provisional Authority when the U.S. occupation forces were a de facto dictatorship. And that's just what happened; under L. Paul Bremer, the CPA head, corporate taxes were slashed, a flat-tax on income was established, rules allowing multinationals to pull all of their profits from the country and a series of other provisions were enacted. These were then integrated into the Iraqi Constitution and remain in effect today.
Among the provisions in the Constitution, unlike those of most oil producers, is a requirement that the government "develop oil and gas wealth … relying on the most modern techniques of market principles and encouraging investment." The provision mandates that foreign companies would receive a major stake in Iraq's oil for the first time in the thirty years since the sector was nationalized in 1975.

Herbert Docena, a researcher with the NGO Focus on the Global South, wrote that an early draft of the Constitution negotiated by Iraqis envisioned a "Scandinavian-style welfare system in the Arabian desert, with Iraq's vast oil wealth to be spent upholding every Iraqi's right to education, health care, housing, and other social services." "Social justice," the draft declared, "is the basis of building society."

What happened between that earlier draft and the Constitution that Iraqis would eventually ratify? According to Docena:
While [U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay] Khalilzad and his team of US and British diplomats were all over the scene, some members of Iraq's constitutional committee were reduced to bystanders. One Shiite member grumbled, 'We haven't played much of a role in drafting the constitution. We feel that we have been neglected.' A Sunni negotiator concluded: 'This constitution was cooked up in an American kitchen not an Iraqi one.'
With a Constitution cooked up in DC, the stage was set for foreign multinationals to assume effective control of as much as 87 percent of Iraq's oil, according to projections by the Oil Ministry. If PSAs become the law of the land -- and there are other contractual arrangements that would allow private companies to invest in the sector without giving them the same degree of control or such usurious profits -- the war-torn country stands to lose up to $194 billion vitally important dollars in revenues on just the first 12 fields developed, according to a conservative estimate by Platform (the estimate assumes oil at $40 per barrel; at this writing it stands at more than $59). That's more than six times the country's annual budget.
To complete the rip-off, the occupying coalition would have to crush Iraqi resistance, make sure it had friendly people in the right places in Iraq's emerging elite and lock the new Iraqi government onto a path that would lead to the Big Four's desired outcome.
See part two tomorrow.
Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.

2006-10-14T19:22:00.000-07:00

Darfur News Brief: Oct. 13, 2006
Genocide Intervention NetworkHave a Hand in Stopping Genocide
Hundreds were wounded or captured when violence between rebels and the government of Sudan erupted on Oct. 7 near the border with Chad. Meanwhile, international organizations and leaders of Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt, France, Germany and others are increasing pressure on Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir with appeals to allow a UN peacekeeping force into the Darfur region. The International Criminal Court is continuing its investigations in Darfur with considerable difficulty due to instability, while the African Union announced a new dialogue initiative to improve the Darfur Peace Agreement.

Situation on the Ground
Intense fighting between the National Redemption Front rebel group, which has not signed the Darfur Peace Agreement, and the government of Sudan began on Saturday near Sudan's border with Chad, wounding or capturing hundreds of rebel and government troops. Both sides blame each other for initiating the clash.
UNHCR spokesperson Jennifer Pagonis said the agency was concerned about the close vicinity of the fighting to the Oure Cassoni refugee camp, located in Chad, five kilometers from the border. UNHCR will be surveying new sites available for an "urgent" relocation of the two camps.
Analysts warn that the continued violence near the border between Sudan and Chad threatens to destablize the entire region as well as relations between the two countries who only recently re-opened their borders.
On Monday, the fighting begun on Saturday spilled over into eastern Chad. The Sudanese government says 103 Sudanese soldiers were taken by the government of Chad after crossing the border, a charge Chad denies. Sudan subsequently accused Chad of providing support to National Redemption Front rebels.
Khartoum's troops have suffered heavy casualties in recent weeks, driven back in some areas despite the arrival of 20,000 additional soldiers into Darfur.
Two Darfurian refugees, girls aged 12 and 15, fought back against an attempted rape near a refugee camp in Ardamada. A dozen masked and armed men attacked four Médecins Sans Frontières aid workers in Darfur on Sept. 11. Three workers were beaten and given death threats and one female staff member was sexually harassed. UN agencies condemned increased attacks on women and girls in Darfur and reminded the Sudanese government of its obligation to investigate and prosecute these crimes.
The United Nation Children's Fund estimates that right now, 80 children under age 5 die each day due to malnutrition, disease, and poor living conditions in Darfur.
The World Food Programme said the number of people not reached by food aid has dropped from 470,000 in July to 224,000 in September. Among this number are 139,000, "who have gone without food aid for four months." Insecurity has been a major problem for the WFP. A spokesperson said WFP drivers "are being harassed, sometimes dragged out, beaten up" because "food convoys represent a lot of money to some of those armed groups." An initiative in South Darfur, "Food for Seed Protection" will aid 200,000 farmers in surviving the coming "hunger season."
Jan Egeland, the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, briefed journalists on the situation in Darfur, Sudan stating that violence and insecurity are escalating. Because Sudanese militias are now better armed and equipped, "they are much better armed, they are more brutal than ever and their potential to do bad is bigger than ever," said Egeland.
The "Sudan Humanitarian Overview," a report released by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, reported an increase in attacks on aid workers and an "atmosphere of fear and insecurity" in camps for internally displaced peoples. A report by the UN Security Council documented violations of the arms embargo by all parties in Darfur, including the Sudanese government. Insurgents from Chad too have broken the agreement while reportedly joining forces with the Sudanese government.
The UN human rights agency has urged the government of Sudan to launch an investigation of August militia attacks targeting 45 villages in South Darfur. The UN human rights chief said "several hundred" civilians may have died in these late-August militia attacks, a much higher number than originally estimated.

The Proposed UN Transfer
In a joint UN-AU letter to Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir, UN support of AU forces in Darfur was assessed at about 200 UN military and civilian staff. The AU is waiting for a formal response from Sudan on when this UN support team will be permitted to deploy to the Darfur region.
Stating its "grave concern" over Sudan's continued refusal of UN peacekeepers, the Security Council extended the timeline for the mission through the end of next April. The African Union has extended its own mission in Darfur until the end of 2006.
The government of Sudan staunchly refuses the UN force. In an interview, the deputy leader of the ruling National Congress Party, Ibrahim Omar, stated that if the SPLM, the only rebel group to sign May's peace agreement, accepts "invading" UN forces, "there will be no national unity government and the Naivasha agreements will cease to exist." Beshir has himself warned that he would lead a jihad against any UN troops in Darfur.
Abdul Rahman Khalil Ahmad, Sudan's charge d'affairs, said "the US and UK are after controlling our country," and that Sudan would continue to resist a UN force, even in the face of sanctions. Beshir has also rejected the Arab League's initial proposal offering to dispatch a UN force made up entirely of Arab and Muslim soldiers.
US Special Envoy to Sudan Andrew Natsios left on Thursday for Khartoum, where he will press Beshir to accept a UN peacekeeping mission in Darfur. He is planned to visit Khartoum, the Darfur region and the southern city of Juba, despite recently announced restrictions on US travel within Sudan.
Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, in an address at the headquarters of the AU in Addis Ababa on Tuesday, acknowledged that genocide might be occurring in Darfur, and urged the international community to act. "It is not in the interest of Sudan nor in the interest of Africa, nor indeed in the interest of the world, for us all to stand by, fold our hands and see genocide in Darfur," Obasanjo said. Nigerian Minister of Foreign Affairs Joy Ogwu was in Khartoum for two days this week to discuss the situation in Darfur.
Obasanjo and the presidents of Gabon and Senegal hope to persuade Beshir to accept an international peacekeeping force when they travel to Khartoum on Oct. 17 for a summit on Darfur. The governments of South Africa, France and Germany have also made statements urging the Sudanese government to accept UN peacekeepers.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmend Abul Ghiet called on the government of Sudan and the United Nations to reach a mutual understanding regarding the situation in Darfur. He also called for a special meeting of leaders of the UN Security Council, the Arab League, and the African Union in order to convince Sudan to accept UN troops in Darfur.
A group of Chadian rebels said that they oppose a UN peacekeeping force to the Darfur border region because it could obstruct their campaign to overthrow Chadian President Idriss Deby.
After being nominated by the UN Security Council on Monday, South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-Moon is expected to be formally elected as secretary-general later this month. The following excerpts trace references to Ban Ki-Moon's support of the "Responsibility to Protect" principle, which was agreed upon by UN leader's during last year's summit:
"Ban Ki-moon has expressed strong support for things like the responsibility to protect the International Criminal Court," reported UN correspondent Ian Williams on Oct. 8.
"Ban also vowed to speak out in favor of the 'responsibility to protect' – a vow of collective action made by world leaders last year to stop 'genocide, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity,'" reported Agence-France Presse on Sept. 27.
"When a country is not able to protect its own people from crimes against humanity and genocide and prevents the international community from intervening on the excuse of sovereignty, the international community has a responsibility to protect those people from genocide," said Ban Ki-Moon in an interview with AFP on Oct. 3.

2006-10-14T08:55:00.000-07:00

Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank founder wins Nobel Peace Prize
PTI
Dhaka, Oct 13:
Bangladeshi economist, Mr Mohammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank founded by him were today awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their work in helping millions, especially women, in the country overcome poverty through a system of small-scale loans.
The 66-year-old Mr Yunus, the first Bangladeshi to win a Nobel prize, said, “I think this is a wonderful recognition of our efforts at Grameen Bank, and for all the women who work for us and who have made Grameen Bank a success.
“I am proud for the whole country,” a beaming Mr Yunus told reporters at his home here. The award will “inspire him to complete his future plans”, said the economist whose Grameen Bank was honoured with India’s Gandhi Peace Prize in 2000.
Announcing the award, the Nobel committee in Oslo said it was given for efforts by Mr Yunus and the bank to “create economic and social development from below”.
“Across cultures and civilisations, Yunus and Grameen Bank have shown that even the poorest of the poor can work to bring about their own development,” the Nobel commitee said in its citation.
Mr Yunus first learnt about winning the prize from a Norwegian TV station, which called him to say he might get the award and then told him to hold the telephone line. Soon after, a voice from the other end confirmed he had won the Nobel Peace Prize.
His home was thronged by friends, colleagues and well-wishers as news of his winning the award spread across Dhaka. The Prime Minister, Mr Khaleda Zia congratulated him and said his achievement would boost Bangladesh’s image. She wished him many successful years ahead.
Asked why the Nobel Foundation had given him the peace prize and not the one for economics, Mr Yunus said, “Economics and peace is directly linked. Unrest in many parts of the world is linked to economics.”
Grameen Bank was created in 1976 and became a formal bank in 1983 under a special law passed by the government for its creation. Its website says it has 6.61 million borrowers, 97 per cent of whom are women.
The Nobel committee, in its citation, said, “Economic growth and political democracy cannot achieve their full potential unless the female half of humanity participates on an equal footing with the male.”
The bank pioneered the concept of micro-credit, or extending small loans without collateral to borrowers too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans.
Since its inception, Grameen Bank has extended loans worth a total of $5.72 billion and $5.07 billion has been repaid. Over the past 12 months, it has given out loans worth $58.87 million a month, its website said.
Others who crowded the Grameen Bank office here said Bangladesh had got a new and positive identity with Mr Yunus winning the honour.
The winner of many international awards, including the Magsaysay Award in 1984, Mr Yunus was rumoured to be in the running for the Nobel prize in economics for the past three years.
Grameen Bank today has over 2,200 branches in more than 71,000 villages and its concept has been copied in many other countries.
Besides the bank, Mr Yunus has created several other companies like Grameen Phone (a mobile phoen company) and Grameen Communications (a rural Internet service provider).
Mr Yunus, who beat 191 other candidates including India’s Sri Sri Ravishanker, the founder of the Art of Living movement, said he was looking forward to making the trip to Oslo on December 10 to receive the award.
Candidates are never identified by the five-member awards committee, but it was widely believed that Ravi Shanker, human rights activists like Ms Lida Yusupova in Chechnya and Ms Rebiya Kadee of northwest China and peace brokers like Mr Maarti Ahtisaar were on its list.
The prize includes 10 million Swedish kronor (US $1.4 million).
Mr Yunus said he would invest the cash into his financing offers for the poor.
The peace prize is the sixth and last Nobel prize announced this year.

from Thepeacealliance.org Press Release

2006-10-13T11:19:00.000-07:00

October 12, 2006; East Rutherford, NJ–
The more than 300,000 fans expected to attend the Red Hot Chili Peppers' U.S. tour this fall will find something more than the band's signature blend of funk, rap and rock-n-roll; they'll find a call for civic activism.

"I want to share with all of our fans my enthusiasm for the work of The Peace Alliance and the campaign to establish a U.S. Department of Peace," said bass-player Flea in explaining why the band invited The Peace Alliance to be the only organization tabling at its shows this year.
"In our homes, in our schools, in our communities and in worldwide affairs, violence is an increasingly serious problem," Flea continued. "There's nothing more important we can do than to work to change the direction of our culture towards more practical peaceful solutions and, as a nation, to invest more fully in these solutions. I hope everyone at our shows joins the campaign and urges their members of Congress to support the Department of Peace legislation."

New York - New Jersey area volunteers with the national grassroots Department of Peace Campaign will be tabling at The Red Hot Chili Peppers show on Tuesday, October 17 and Wednesday, October 18, 2006 at the Continental Airlines Arena. The legislation currently has two co-sponsors in the Senate and 75 in the House, including from New Jersey: Robert E. Andrews, Rush D. Holt, Donald Payne and Steven Rothman and from New York: Carolyn Maloney, Gregory Meeks, Jerrold Nadler, Major Owens, Charles Rangel, Jose Serrano, Edolphus Towns, and Nydia Velazquez.

New Jersey Senators Frank Lautenberg and Robert Menendez do not yet co-sponsor the Senate version, S.1756, nor do New York Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Chuck Schumer.
The primary purpose of the Department of Peace would be to research, articulate and facilitate nonviolent solutions to domestic and international conflict. It would be led by a Cabinet-level Secretary of Peace, and would also create a Peace Academy on par with the nation's current military service academies.

The Peace Alliance is a 501(c)4 nonpartisan citizen action organization advocating for legislation that supports a culture of peace. It works to foster positive, proactive change toward the creation of a more nonviolent and peaceful world. The Peace Alliance is spearheading the national campaign to establish a United States Department of Peace (H.R. 3760 and S.1756), with citizen organizers active in all 50 states. For more information about The Peace Alliance and the Department of Peace Campaign, visit www.thepeacealliance.org . For more information about local activities, contact Kevin Fagan kfagan1@nyc.rr.com or 917 865-4763 and go to www.nyc-dop.com or www.sjdopcampaign.com for more details.

2006-10-13T10:51:00.001-07:00

A Subtle kind of Fascism
By John Chuckman
Online Journal, 12 Oct 2006

The word fascism is used a lot, often pejoratively. The image that immediately comes to mind is Mussolini in a steel helmet, hands on hips, head tipped back, jaw thrust out. It is an image that influenced other fascists. Young Hitler was a great admirer.
It is always helpful for any discussion to define the subject carefully, a seemingly obvious principle often ignored. What exactly is fascism? Can fascism coexist to any extent with democratic institutions?

Fascism certainly is not the same thing as communism, although both these systems are represented by strongmen or tyrants and the state apparatus needed to support them. Those who like the nomenclature of the French Revolution might say that the two political extremes, right and left, almost meet somewhere in a bend of political space.

Private enterprise, of course, has been regarded as incompatible with communism, although contemporary China with its New Economic Zone begins to confuse the issue. Things have always been quite different with fascism. Fascist governments are favorable to the interests of enterprise, at least the interests of large-scale enterprises. Great private combines existed and were encouraged under Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini. Fascism represents, if you will, a kind of large-scale, public-private partnership.

Fascism, much like the mental image of Mussolini, tends to be about power, generally a raw display of political and military power. These two things are welded together in a fascist state. Flags, banners, strutting, and marching feature prominently, with political occasions sometimes difficult to distinguish from military ones.
Fascism's strutting-peacock displays serve several purposes. One, with their rise to power, fascist parties brag about getting things done (the reality of entrenched fascism proves another matter altogether), as opposed to the mundane, boring inefficiency of ordinary deliberations. This kind of promise appeals to the frustrations of many people who yearn for decisive change. Their yearnings may concern anything from building public projects to imposing moral rules.
There likely is a built-in component in human beings which finds authority attractive, at least over certain limits. Society mimics the show of power in many institutions from popes to presidents.

The display of power also intimidates enemies. Political opponents are not a common feature of fascist states, which always feature secret police, secret prisons, and heavy domestic spying, although they are sometimes allowed to exist in a neutered form for show or internal political purposes.

Aggression is closely associated with fascism. Partly the aggression is simply the result of having large standing armies and all the state and corporate apparatus associated with them. Large standing armies simply tend to get used -- historians have offered this as one of the important explanations for the First World War -- and the impulse to use them is undoubtedly increased by the psychology of fascism.

The psychology of fascist states tends to include penis-fixation -- big guns, big flags, and big monuments. Aggression is a direct outgrowth of all the strutting, bragging, and marching.
Aggression also grows out of the fascist tendency to regard the nation as somehow specially blessed or endowed or entitled. There follows an assumed inherent right or even obligation to rule over others or at least to direct their destinies.

When you consider these characteristics, every one of them is an intrinsic part of contemporary American society. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that America is a kind of fascist state, certainly a softer-appearing one than some in the past, but then America excels at marketing, perhaps its one original intellectual gift to the world.

America does cling to ideals of human rights, something which it never fails to remind the world at international gatherings, but the truth is international gatherings are only regarded as useful for just such announcements. Despite clinging to human-rights ideals, at the very same time, America refuses to deal with others on the basis of these rights, and it often fails even to enforce the rights of selected categories of its own citizens.

This ambiguity about human rights is not so odd if you consider the many American Christians who enshrine Jesus' great commandment and the Ten Commandments and yet stand ready at a moment's notice to kill others in meaningless wars.

Genuine respect for human rights is surely more a matter of prevailing day-to-day attitudes in a society than words written on old pieces of paper.But America is a democracy, isn't it? It certainly has many of the forms of a democracy, but when you closely examine the details, as I've written previously, American democracy resembles a badly worn wood veneer. The ugly structural stuff underneath sticks out the way elbows do in a threadbare coat.
Copyright © 1998-2006 Online Journal

It's About Time, ya think???

2006-10-12T11:15:00.000-07:00

5 Scandals that Could Put Republicans in Jail
James Ridgeway, Mother Jones
The Foley cover-up is just the tip of the iceberg. If the Democrats succeed in retaking Congress this fall, here are five investigations they should get started on right away.

5 Scandals that Could Put Republicans in Jail

2006-10-11T14:45:00.000-07:00

The stately Russell Senate Office Building stands at one corner of a domestic Green Zone, just northeast of the Capitol building at the intersection of Delaware and Constitution avenues. In the past few years a maze of blockades has sprouted along the shaded avenues and curving drives of the Capitol complex. Checkpoints are patrolled by heavily armed police; guards watch for suspicious characters and prohibited items (which now include food and beverages; cans, bottles, and sprays; and bags larger than 13 by 14 inches). At the Russell Building, visitors encounter another set of barriers and metal detectors before being granted admittance to the elegant structure. Then, at the top of a sweeping staircase, they'll find a room walled in white marble, draped in deep red, overhung by a gilded ceiling, and fronted, altarlike, with a raised dais.
Here in the humbly named Caucus Room, the U.S. Congress has held some of its most famous public hearings, beginning with a 1912 investigation into the fate of the Titanic. The Watergate hearings unfolded here in the early '70s, beneath the ever-watchful gaze of Senator Sam Ervin (D-N.C.). It was here that Rep. Barbara Jordan (D-Texas), the first Southern black woman elected to Congress, declared: "My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution."
But in the past six years, congressional investigations of such bold, searching nature have disappeared. In a post-9/11 environment of silence and fear, the mood inside Congress has mirrored the bunkers and barriers outside: No one dares question the military or the intelligence services too closely, or to push the president too far. The Caucus Room continues to be used for party meetings and social events, and every so often there is a potted inquiry, as in the case of the 2003 hearings on the space shuttle. But on issues of war and peace, of corruption and graft, of civil rights, civil liberties, and constitutional breaches, meek questions are the rule, answered by dull assurances from the White House.
If the Democrats win back control of Congress (or even one of its chambers), if they can come up with the requisite moxie, and if they can muster the political will to reach out to their own base as well as to disaffected Republicans, they will have an opportunity to begin to change all that. They will need to overcome the myriad obstacles the Bush administration has created to keep lawmakers from obtaining and releasing critical information, such as its resistance to briefing congressional committees on intelligence issues, or its heavy hand in redacting congressional reports. When explosive information has leaked out -- the fact that documents offering "proof" of Saddam Hussein's intent to buy uranium from Niger had been forged, or that the United States is operating a network of secret prisons in other countries -- the administration's response has focused on condemning critics for politicizing national security -- a charge before which the Democrats usually crumble.
Still, there is a chance that some of the gutsier Dems, with the support of an increasingly fed-up public, could make progress toward exposing the truth.
But if lawmakers of either party do not begin to reclaim their constitutional powers -- by asking questions such as those listed below -- it's not hard to envision a time when visitors may come to the venerable Caucus Room as if to a museum, to learn about a bygone era when congressional investigations still served as a check on the imperial presidency.
1. Who lost Iraq?
It goes without saying that a congressional investigation -- a joint inquiry by both houses, given the gravity of the matter -- should address the causes, conduct, and effects of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, going back to the days immediately after Bush's election when the plans for invading Iraq were laid (see "A War Foretold," Page 61). But beyond that, the conduct of the war on terror has raised myriad vital questions that, at another time, would have been subjects of full-fledged inquiries on their own: the Pentagon's failure to adequately equip troops with armor, ammunition, radios, and the like; the use of mercenary forces; the contracting process; and the government's efforts to manipulate the press through outside PR agencies. Also worthy of scrutiny is the role of oil and gas, including the work of the secret Cheney energy task force, which points to prewar discussions with the ceos of major companies about Iraqi oil.
A congressional investigation into the Iraq war must make full use of subpoena power and must be prepared to forward findings of illegal acts to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution. Just as important, public hearings could provide an opportunity -- and protection -- for would-be whistleblowers: Recall that Daniel Ellsberg didn't take his trove of documents, showing the Defense Department's true assessment of the war in Vietnam, to the New York Times until after he had been rebuffed by congressional Democrats. Somewhere inside the Defense Department and the intelligence agencies today's Pentagon Papers are waiting.
2. Who blew 9/11?
It's high time to follow up on the startling discoveries of the Senate and House's joint inquiry, back in December 2002, on pre-9/11 intelligence. In reconstructing the hijackers' trail, the inquiry's staff discovered that the FBI had failed to report, and had later balked at making public, information showing that it knew that a bureau informant in the San Diego Muslim community had socialized with two of the hijackers, and that another man who had been investigated by the FBI had rented an apartment to one of them. Both of the future hijackers had been closely followed by the CIA as they made their way from the Middle East to Malaysia; the agents lost track of the men before they boarded a plane to California, where they then lived openly, with driver's licenses and a phone book listing in their own names. So far, no one has been able to discover how they escaped detection by the FBI -- and why the bureau refused to let Congress find out what happened.
The joint inquiry also discovered a Saudi spy operating in California -- the same man who had rented an apartment to one of the hijackers -- along with suggestions of a larger network, according to former Senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.). The spy nominally worked for a Saudi government contractor, and the committee followed a money trail going back to the royal family and the Saudi government, according to Graham. This was a tantalizing find. Congressional sources have suggested that Saudi spooks may have been sent to California to keep tabs on Saudi students who might be tempted by democratic ideas; it has also been speculated that some of these undercover agents could have become enmeshed with Al Qaeda. In any event, the White House has adamantly refused to declassify 28 pages of the final committee report that dealt with Saudi Arabia. When Congress later set up an independent commission to look into 9/11, it pointedly ordered the panel to "build upon the investigations of other entities" such as the joint inquiry. Yet the commission's report glossed over many questions involving Saudi Arabia. A new select committee could pick up where other probes left off.
3. How wide is the domestic surveillance net?
In the mid-1970s, the Church Committee, named after Idaho Democratic senator Frank Church, put out 14 separate reports that exposed the intelligence agencies' abuses of law. The Pike Committee, named after Rep. Otis Pike (D-N.Y.), conducted a parallel inquiry in the House, focusing mostly on the CIA. Among other things, the investigations discovered the notorious COINTELPRO operation to spy on and disrupt left-wing groups. Thirty years later urgent questions are once again piling up: Just what is the extent of the agencies' spying inside the United States? What are the true motivations and outcomes of this surveillance? How much money is going into spying programs? There is much evidence that domestic intelligence gathering is not limited to the infamous NSA surveillance project. The ACLU, for one, has obtained numerous files describing FBI cooperation with local police in joint terrorism task forces that have targeted groups such as Greenpeace, United for Peace and Justice, Code Pink, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and the Muslim Public Affairs Council.
4. Is Big Oil pulling an Enron?
The last serious investigation of the oil industry concluded in 1952 with the Federal Trade Commission's staff report on the International Petroleum Cartel, published by the monopoly subcommittee of the Senate. That study laid out a now-familiar pattern: A major concern of the oil industry has always been the threat of surpluses driving down prices. To prevent surpluses, oil and gas companies have employed means such as instituting quota systems, closing off reserves from market, and setting up cartels, or agreements among producers.
Today, while many experts believe oil will soon run out, there is no actual shortage that could be blamed for driving up gas prices. The hurricanes of 2005 did not put the supply in any serious jeopardy, nor was lack of refinery capacity a real factor. (According to the U.S. Department of Energy, refineries along the Gulf Coast and elsewhere frequently run below capacity, meaning that there was some slack in the system.)
There is, however, evidence to suggest practices reminiscent of Enron's market rigging: Last year, the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, a California-based consumer group, released a series of internal memos from Chevron, Texaco, and Mobil that laid out the industry's thinking. A Texaco memo, for example, warned that "supply significantly exceeds demand year-round. This results in very poor refinery margins and very poor refinery financial results. Significant events need to occur to assist in reducing supplies and/or increasing the demand for gasoline." An investigation would subpoena internal company documents and take testimony from oil executives under oath -- not just in an "unsworn" chitchat like the sideshow put on by the Senate commerce and energy committees last year -- to discover whether the companies conspired to rig prices or manipulate supply.
5. Who's making money off your retirement?
It's been predicted that at least 1 in 10 retirees in 2020 will teeter on the edge of financial collapse or plunge into outright poverty. Social Security is just a small bit of the problem. The potentially much bigger challenge is the disappearance of pensions, most of which have been replaced with 401(k)-type accounts dependent wholly on the securities market. This is an enormous shift: Corporations have succeeded, with amazingly little protest from labor, in transferring the cost -- and the risk -- of retirement from employer to employee. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. provides some backup when a company with a standard pension plan goes under (think United Airlines). With 401(k)s, there is no insurance. The Securities and Exchange Commission is supposed to regulate mutual funds, which handle most 401(k) money; the sec has nowhere near the resources to keep tabs on the $9 trillion business, so policing is largely left up to the funds themselves.
Before this crisis grows greater, Congress ought to launch a serious investigation into the retirement system. We've got to know all the ways companies are bailing on their pension plans -- by converting them into 401(k)s, by filing for bankruptcy, or simply by quietly not paying into (or "underfunding") them for years at a time. We need to understand who controls the money in 401(k)s, what the hidden costs are, and to what extent these accounts are threatened by Wall Street conflicts of interest. For example, thanks to deregulation laws passed during the Clinton administration, commercial banks can now sell the mutual funds that their investment-banking arms manage, but investors have no recourse if their 401(k)s lose value because of bad management. With Social Security privatization refusing to die, and Wall Street eager to get its hands on that money, Congress should do some due diligence.
BONUS: Grounds for impeachment?
Congressional investigators digging into the aforementioned questions cannot ignore the possibility of impeachment proceedings against Vice President Cheney, who figures prominently in almost every one of the scandals engulfing the administration. It was Cheney who ran the government's response to the 9/11 attacks without constitutional authority, at one point ordering shoot-downs of commercial planes and what would turn out to be a medevac helicopter; who led the secret meetings of administration officials and oilmen to set energy policy; who allowed Ahmed Chalabi to play the U.S. government like a violin; who very well may be the origin of the whisper campaign that culminated in the Plame leak; and, of course, it was Cheney's former employer (and source of continuing deferred compensation paychecks) that benefited enormously from no-bid contracts in Iraq. Judicial Watch, the conservative legal outfit in Washington, has unearthed an email dated March 5, 2003, sent by an Army Corps of Engineers official whose name had been blacked out, that said of a pending deal under which Halliburton would rebuild the Iraqi oil industry, "We anticipate no issue since the action has been coordinated w VP's office." There's plenty more where that came from; whether any of Cheney's actions constitute "high crimes and misdemeanors" is for Congress, and the nation, to debate.

Read about additional questions the Democrats should be asking at MotherJones.com.
James Ridgeway is Mother Jones' Washington bureau chief.

2006-10-11T14:36:00.000-07:00

The Terror of Hiroshima Has Come Full Circle
Are We Doomed to Wait for a Second Nuclear Holocaust to Arouse Our Moral and Political Imaginations?
by Richard Falk, The Nation
It seems ironic that the last serious engagement with the challenge of ridding the world of nuclear weapons occurred twenty years ago, when Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met at Reykjavik, and seemed close--at least for a moment--to agreeing to the goal of zero nuclear weapons within ten years. It is probable that even Reagan lacked the political clout to pull off such a deal, given the depth of American attachment to the weaponry. This speculation was not tested because the two leaders could not find a way to compromise on the issue of a defensive program dear to Reagan's heart, called "Star Wars" by its critics and "Strategic Defense Initiative" by its supporters. This flirtation with nuclear disarmament in Iceland produced wildly different assessments, ranging from "near miss" to "outright failure."
From the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima until the end of the cold war, leaders of both superpowers were consistently in favor of the goal of nuclear disarmament, at least in public. Proposals were made at various times during the twenty years following World War II, but none came close to achieving a meeting of relevant minds in Washington and Moscow. The dividing line between sincere advocacy and peace propaganda was never clear, arousing worries on the side of those who believed that nuclear weapons were necessary for American security that disarmament moves might indeed be genuine and suspicions among peace activists that governmental endorsement of disarmament moves was never more than window-dressing. Richard Barnet wrote an insightful short book titled Who Wants Disarmament? in 1960 that reached the predictable answer to his question: "neither side."
At first glance, the failure to seek nuclear disarmament in the early 1990s seems puzzling. After all, the main rationale for keeping the weapons was to deter the Soviet Union, and vice versa. With the cold war over, there was a wide-open window of opportunity, yet there was no movement to take advantage of it. In fact, American diplomacy encouraged the Yeltsin government to keep its arsenal of nuclear weapons intact. How can we explain this posture? It discloses two of the reasons nuclear disarmament has proved to be such a non-starter (as compared with efforts to curb biological and chemical weapons): first, the nuclear-weapons establishment is very powerful; and second, for the United States and other nuclear weapons states, despite arguments to the contrary, influential leaders in government and the military believe the possession of these weapons confers strategic advantages.
Almost as puzzling as the diplomatic lack of interest is the failure of the peace movement to sustain the focus on nuclear weapons issues that had been so intense during the 1980s. It was then that the great nuclear freeze movement excited many people in America, while the European Nuclear Disarmament Movement mobilized millions in Europe. In retrospect, it would seem that the issue surfaced so strongly at that time because there was real fear that a war with nuclear weapons might actually be fought in Europe. That fear stemmed in part from the talk of a new strategic doctrine that actually envisioned exchanges of so-called tactical nuclear weapons in Europe without the devastation of the United States. With the end of the cold war, given the extent to which the danger of nuclear war had been so strongly associated with a breakdown of deterrence, the public sense of danger vanished overnight.
There was at the same time a convergent development that drew popular attention to a new cause. With the emergence of Gorbachev's leadership in the Soviet Union and the great popular movements in Eastern Europe directed at overcoming the oppressive cold war regimes, as well as the growing international attention given to the antiapartheid movement, there was a shift of idealistic energies from war/peace issues to human rights. This dynamic has continued. Idealistic young people today seem far more interested in human rights than they do in the pursuit of a cause that seems as futile and abstract as nuclear disarmament.
This is not to say that nothing constructive has happened since Reykjavik. The World Court in 1996 issued a historic Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons that lent strong support to two conclusions: The use of nuclear weapons could be legal, if ever, only in circumstances where the survival of a state was at severe risk; and that the Non-Proliferation Treaty imposed a firm obligation on the nuclear weapons states to pursue in good faith nuclear disarmament. As might have been expected, the US government did its best to prevent the court from ever dealing with these issues, and when that failed, used major pressure to get the media to ignore the results.
In the meantime, of course, there have been some very serious adverse developments. India and Pakistan both openly crossed the nuclear threshold in 1998, and North Korea seems to have developed a few weapons of its own. The United States, especially after 9/11, has adopted "counterproliferation" as a defining doctrine of its foreign policy. The alleged threat of Iraq to develop nuclear weapons served as a pretext for aggressive war. A similar diplomatic confrontation with Iran is shaping up over whether Tehran's determination to possess a complete fuel cycle, including uranium enrichment facilities, represents an unacceptable move to develop nuclear weapons. Beyond these problems, the United States seems to be moving toward a new strategic doctrine that greatly expands the military role of nuclear weapons, treating them as potentially available even against non-nuclear adversaries. In an important sense, the terror of Hiroshima has come full circle--to be linked not only to the terror of 9/11 but also to the bravado of preventive war waged against essentially civilian societies. The report produced this year by the UN Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction, headed by former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, is revealingly titled Weapons of Terror.
As the Blix report made clear, serious dangers of a nuclear catastrophe form part of today's geopolitical landscape. At the same time, there are no legitimate roles for these weapons of mass terror and thus no legitimate reason for governments to maintain their current nuclear postures. Yet the challenge remains of how to translate the immorality and illegality of this weaponry into a viable antinuclear political project. In the end, fear was not enough, even at the height of cold war anxieties. Are we up against an apocalyptic dead end in the human experience? Are we doomed to wait for a second Hiroshima to arouse our moral and political imaginations? We should realize, at least, that consoling illusions will not move us back from the current nuclear precipice!

2005-09-22T11:39:00.000-07:00

Wisconsinites to Board 14 Buses for Washington Anti-War Rally
ROBERT IMRIE, Associated Press

WAUSAU, Wis. - Some 700 people are signed up to ride buses from Wisconsin to Washington, D.C. for an anti-war rally Saturday to support bringing U.S. troops home from Iraq, organizers said Thursday.
Mike Miles, a peace activist from Luck, said the rally is attracting people of all ages and is expected to draw one of the largest crowds ever to oppose a war. "There are some people who want the troops out immediately. There are some who are going to be calling for an exit strategy that might take a matter of months."
Peace Action Wisconsin has organized 14 buses that will leave Friday from Eau Claire, Madison, Milwaukee, Kenosha, Ashland, Wausau and Duluth, Minn., Miles said.
Pearla Moler, a 54-year-old artist from Waukesha, said she has never attended a rally in the nation's capital before but felt it was time to be courageous enough to lend her voice to the anti-war movement.
"We can stop this," she said. "We were misled into a war and the war was supposed to be over and it's not. We are spending billions of dollars in this war and we are not even safe at home."
Organizers hope the rally will attract at least 100,000 people, including Cindy Sheehan, the California mother who drew thousands to a protest she began outside President Bush's Texas ranch in August after her son was killed in Iraq last year.
Sheehan has been on a 25-state bus tour scheduled to end at the Washington march and concert featuring folk singer Joan Baez. She says she wants Bush to more fully justify the war and say what steps he will take to end it.
Rallies against the anti-war activists are also set for this weekend in Washington.
Miles and Moler said they expected news about Hurricane Rita, which was forecast to make landfall between Galveston, Texas and western Louisiana by early Saturday, to overshadow the peace march.
But they said another natural disaster will also focus people's thinking on America's priorities.
"Hurricane Katrina has shown just how wrong our nation's priorities are," Miles said. "Resources that could have been used to save lives are instead tied up in a war that continues to kill Iraqis and U.S. servicepeople."

2005-09-22T10:54:00.000-07:00

Is the Peace Movement Dying?
Local Anti-war Advocates Struggle to Build their Ranks and Energize the Faithful.
by Melissa Scott Sinclair, September 21, 2005

Standing by the steps of the federal courthouse is the closest Larry Syverson can get to the top. Not to the top of the steps; they are low, and lead only to the glass doors of the courthouse on Main Street. Behind the glass stand the stone-faced guards, who are there to make sure Syverson and the rest of the 25 or so protesters here today don’t stand on the steps. They are supposed to stay on the sidewalk. They are not supposed to block the passage of the many business-suited lunchers who hurry back and forth.
The justice Syverson is looking for is not the sort federal judges can provide. It can only come from the Top, the president of the United States himself. Yet he stands here Friday noon, in the rain and in the sun, nearly every week. The downtown courthouse is not exactly the front door of the White House (where Syverson has protested 11 times). But in Richmond, this is the closest he gets. When he first came out here two-and-a-half years ago his sign said, “Iraqi oil isn’t worth my sons’ blood.” Now it says, “Don’t send my son back to Iraq.” Sometimes Syverson has company, most often from John Gallini, a longtime local peace activist. Some days, he is alone. Today, however, is a special day. An exhortation from the Virginia Anti-War Network, coupled with the excitement generated by Cindy Sheehan protesting in Crawford, Texas, has brought a small crowd to stand here with Syverson and Gallini. TV cameras and scribbling reporters have appeared. Diane Farmer, wearing red capris and a star-covered shirt, is here for her son. Robert Farmer Jr. is a second lieutenant in the Army. He joined ROTC at Virginia Tech in 1999. “I talked him into it,” she says. She thought the discipline would be good for him. Robert later enlisted in the Army. At the time, she says, “we weren’t at war.”On Sept. 19, he’ll be promoted to first lieutenant, Farmer says. On Sept. 20, he’ll be sent to Iraq. He’s worried about taking care of the young men in his platoon, she says. They’re only 18 and 19; Robert is 23. “To me,” she says, “he’s just so young.”Brent Newton, a tall man in a Green Party T-shirt, is here to help maintain the peace movement’s momentum. He recalls the big peace march in Richmond in March 2003, about a week after the United States dropped the first bombs on Iraq. About 4,000 people strode through the streets. The march that preceded the war in November 2002 was impressive too, he recalls, with about 1,000 people attending. On this August afternoon, 25 seems a crowd. “It’s disheartening,” Newton says. “Because this is a really, really conservative place.”A man drives by the protesters, jabbing his middle finger and shouting something inaudible and angry. A bumper sticker on the back of his white SUV says “Jesus Loves You.” “Jesus loves you too!” chorus the protesters, delighted with the irony. “Look at this stupid idiot,” Newton mutters. “That’s what we’re dealing with.”Gil Lake, longhaired and sandaled, is here because he wants to be seen. “I didn’t have anything better to do,” he says, “and I thought, ‘Somebody has got to do it.’”Lake just moved here from western Michigan, he says, and he heard about the protest from independent radio station WRIR. The government’s reasoning for Iraq is incomprehensible, Lake says, and he’s been against the war from the beginning — so he wanted to “stand up and be counted.”Who will do the counting is unclear. Will Lake’s presence suddenly spur one of these lunchtime commuters to question United States involvement in Iraq? “No,” he says after a moment of thought. “I think pretty much everybody has their mind made up already.”Therein lies the paradox of the peace movement. Activists generally agree it’s essential to demonstrate, to march, to be vocal in opposing continued involvement in Iraq. That’s what worked in the Vietnam era, right? That’s what peace advocates are supposed to do. But will standing on a Richmond street corner change the course of events in Iraq? No, they guess not.“It’s mainly about energizing the faithful,” Gallini says of protests. “It’s not the main purpose of all of them, but it’s the main effect of all of them.”In Richmond, the faithful, defined as those who take an active role in anti-war activities, are few. The number of silent supporters, however, seems to be growing. While the courthouse each Friday rarely sees more protesters than Syverson and Gallini, those two report a steep increase in the number of smiles they receive and a precipitous drop in middle fingers. “Things are kind of exciting all of a sudden,” Syverson says.One recent vigil for Cindy Sheehan, publicized by www.moveon.org, recently drew about 75 people to stand on the Boulevard. “That’s very unusual,” says Wendy Northup, board chair of the Richmond Peace Education Center, “I mean, we don’t do that in Richmond, Virginia.”What do we do? The local anti-war landscape is a hilly one, with organizations of all sorts affiliated with the recently formed Virginia Anti-War Network. These include the Defenders for Freedom, Justice & Equality; Pax Christi; Food Not Bombs; the Richmond Independent Media Center; the Richmond Reproductive Freedom Project; and United Parents Against Lead National Inc. There’s also Women in Black, a group that carries out silent vigils. The Richmond Peace Education Center is arguably the city’s most enduring and prominent nonviolence organization. But even so, it’s hardly a household name.Thus, the center is trying to figure out how to energize the peace-minded community. When the first television cameras captured anti-war mom Cindy Sheehan sitting in the Crawford dust, waiting to speak to the president this summer, local peace activists recognized a golden opportunity to get people to talk about the war. “Cindy Sheehan has been a real catalyst,” Northup says, “by galvanizing those who are already opposed to the Iraq war and encouraging the uncertain to question political rhetoric.” But Sheehan’s not in the news anymore. Nor, really, is the war, having recently been washed away by coverage of Hurricane Katrina and hearings for a chief justice nominee. Many people feel ambivalent about the proper course of action in Iraq, and their desire for peace is tempered by the fact that America itself has come under attack.Members of the Richmond Peace Education Center now must figure out how to move forward, how to tip those who question over to their side. They’re also trying to shift their focus from the Middle East to the streets, seeking to bring peace to the city and the world. That’s a tall order for a group with $50,000 and a newsletter. But for 25 years they’ve been trying. And they haven’t quit yet.In 1980, fear drove the peace movement.President Jimmy Carter had reinstated mandatory registration for the draft and no one knew what the Soviets were scheming. People wondered whose bombs would go off first. “And I think people were starting to be very frightened about it,” Northup says.A handful of Richmonders who had worked together on a local Conference on the Arms Race in 1979 decided the city needed a permanent organization that would focus local energy on peace. The Richmond Peace Education Center, directed by seminary student Steve Hodges, was born. “Well, I think it grew pretty fast,” says Gallini, a member from the beginning. “I don’t think it was that hard to do.”At the center, a big, bright room with worn wooden floors, two boxes perched on bookcases illuminate the reasons for the center’s founding. One is labeled “draft counseling materials,” the other “Nuclear War: What’s in it for you? slide show.” Northup, a small, sunny woman who today wears yellow, was one of the members who taught workshops on the arms race. “I used to be able to tell you [about] things like ICBMs,” Northup says. “I can’t do that anymore.”The threat of nuclear annihilation sparked movements all over the country. But it “never mobilized as many people as the Vietnam conflict,” says Murray Milner, a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Virginia, “because the threat was much more remote in the sense that your son and daughter weren’t being sacrificed or in harm’s way. We all were, in a more remote and difficult-to-calculate sense.” In 1985, Gallini says, peace centers with paid staff existed in most major metropolitan areas of Virginia: Roanoke, Charlottesville, Harrisonburg, Northern Virginia and Richmond. Of those, Gallini says, only Richmond has kept its alive. “So in one sense,” he says, “Richmond has surprisingly, I will say, maintained an active peace center/movement through all this time. In part, because we changed as the issues changed.”As fears of a draft or nuclear war faded, the peace center shifted its focus to other issues: the United States’ intervention in Central America, the death penalty, racism and nonviolent conflict resolution.The latter may seem like an odd direction, but the peace center was the first place in Richmond to begin teaching it. That’s the real reason the center has survived all this time, Northup says. “It’s very difficult to get people to think on a global level all the time,” she says. “It’s much more pragmatic to think about what’s happening here.”The center has kept that focus on local peace, especially in schools and prisons. It’s also sponsored programs on the Middle East, panel discussions with legislators and interracial dialogues. The center’s resources are few. Its annual budget hovers around $47,000. Fund-raising efforts are modest: a spring concert, annual dinner and auction, and recently, collecting used ink-jet cartridges, for which the group receives $2 each. “We’re always right on the edge,” Gallini says. “We spend everything we get.” Not long ago, RPEC nearly flickered out of existence. Membership and funding first ebbed in the late 1990s. Donations further declined after 9/11 as they did for most nonprofits. And in early 2004, the center’s leaders faced the possibility of having to let the staff go and close the center’s doors.First, however, they made a last-ditch effort to raise money by calling longtime members and explaining their plight. Most gave something. And the center heaved another breath. Since then, RPEC has remained in “a bit of a holding pattern,” Northup says. The number of volunteers and active members (meaning those who do more than read the newsletter) has decreased. But the board recently hired a new executive director, after searching for one since June. With help from member Noah Scalin, founder of socially conscious graphic design firm ALR, the group has updated its logo and Web site to, it hopes, attract more attention. “Now we really need to be back into building,” Northup says.How do you get people into peace? Protests just don’t do it anymore.“If that’s the only thing that people do, I find that people get really burned out,” Scalin says. He has participated in scores of demonstrations himself, ever since he was a child accompanying his mother to marches for equal rights. “I’ve done that,” he says, “and I don’t see the change.”“You can devote a lot of energy to protesting and saying this current situation is bad,” Scalin continues. “For this current situation to not occur, we need fundamental changes to occur.” And that can only happen through education, he says, and a focus on the streets of Richmond before the streets of Iraq.Richmond has long remained near the top of national rankings of homicide rates. Former peace center director Ken Willis quoted an observation by former Richmond Police Chief André Parker: “What we have in Richmond is a large number of people who don’t know how to resolve conflict peacefully.” Thus the center aims to change the idea that violence can solve problems, wherever they may be. No easy task.The peace center’s board members met recently to decide where to focus their energy and modest resources. Priority one, they agreed, was not challenging U.S. involvement in Iraq. It was supporting the Richmond Youth Peace Project (RYPP), an anti-violence initiative begun by Ram Bhagat, who teaches chemistry, anatomy and yoga at Open High School. The project is an offshoot of Bhagat’s program Drums No Guns, a creative performing group for Richmond students founded in 1994 after seven people were shot and five killed, including three children, in Gilpin Court. The peace project seeks to teach young people techniques of conflict resolution and peer mediation.Supporting RYPP made sense for the peace center because it fit in with members’ goals of educating and working with young people. Members tend to be graying. “Inevitably,” Scalin says, “they’re going to have a hard time speaking to people, to younger people who are coming at it from a different perspective.”Bhagat’s students don’t spend too much time thinking about the war in Iraq, though. They’ve got enough on their minds with the war in their neighborhoods. “I think they are more practical than idealists, like me. ... I know for a fact a lot of kids have to live in fear,” he says.Bhagat, in his yoga course, tries to teach the concept of ahimsa, or not-harming, and students have a hard time with the idea of a nonviolent reaction to a perceived slight. “What frustrates me is the disregard for life,” he says. “You know, you see a moth you want to kill it, when you could just open the window and let it fly out.” He hopes his students will become activists, will organize and speak out for peace in their city. “I don’t know if it’s going to happen,” he says.Today’s peace movement is more complicated than its predecessors, UVa.’s Professor Milner says, in part because many local peace groups, like the peace center, focus their energies on a multitude of concerns: the environment, fair wages, conflict resolution, handgun violence. For someone who opposes the war but is not sure how they feel about these other matters, the mixture can be “difficult to disentangle,” he says. “The more different issues that you take on, the more difficult it is to maintain a broad base.” But the Richmond Peace Education Center’s members see their many concerns as linked on a single continuum — the violence of poverty, the violence of anger, violence against the earth. It’s only natural to attack them all, they say, even with their small resources. Even Syverson, the father of the four military sons, agrees with this thinking. “It’s been around for so many more years than Iraq,” he says of the group. “And even Iraq will go away and the Richmond Peace Education Center will still be there.”Adria Scharf, the center’s freshly appointed executive director, who starts Oct. 5, applauds the education efforts but hopes to refocus some of RPEC’s energies on Iraq. She envisions a “large-scale public effort” of forums and Op-Ed pieces to bring the issues of war once again into the local consciousness. “I think we need to wake up Richmond to the true cause of this war,” she says, with “conversation that includes not just self-identified activists but really reaches a broad cross-section of the community.”Scharf wants to better connect the various state and local peace groups, and make the center known on college campuses. Demonstrations are an important part of building the peace center’s public image, as well as showing the world that some Richmonders, too, oppose American foreign policy. Demonstrations, on a large scale, do make a difference, says Milner, especially when they become broad enough to encompass different groups and when they happen on a regular basis. “That’s not to say they’re going to change their policy” because of protests, he says of the administration, but “they certainly are not oblivious to them.”Scharf, 33, was until recently a Boston resident and editor for economic justice magazine Dollars and Sense. But she knows Richmond sure ain’t Boston. “It’s so easy there,” she says. “I think it takes more courage to stand up here.” Boston boasts a plethora of anti-war protests, lectures and workshops, at least one major event every week. Richmond has Larry and John. Each week John Gallini updates his sign, smudged and taped, with the number of American dead: 1,896 as of last Thursday. Iraqi civilian dead: 24,712. And money spent: $200 billion, give or take a few million. You could solve a lot of the world’s problems with that sum, Gallini notes glumly. “That’s a lot of money.”Gallini is a near-lifelong advocate of nonviolence and a member of the Catholic group Pax Christi. He sees nonviolence as a spiritual cause, to be supported quietly and steadily, with prayer. The man he stands with in front of the federal courthouse, who is perhaps the Richmond peace movement’s most galvanizing figure, is loud and no peacenik at all. “I’m not a pacifist,” Larry Syverson says. He’s proud that all four of his sons entered the military. Brian, 29, worked aboard Navy submarines until he received a medical discharge for claustrophobia. Brent, 31, is a petty officer first class aboard the USS Camden. Branden, 33, is a sergeant first class, teaching at the master gunner school at Fort Knox. Bryce, 27, is a staff sergeant with the 1st Armored Division. Until recently, he was at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder.Syverson did not protest when Bryce was sent to Bosnia in 1998. He did not carry a sign when Bryce was readying himself to be part of the invasion force in Kosovo in 1999 (he never had to go). But he stood up against the war in Iraq.“This was a war of choice,” he says, “for oil and for revenge — the Bush family wanted to settle a score.” His first protest took place in Washington, D.C., March 15, 2003 — but first he called his Army sons, Branden and Bryce. “Is it OK if I put your picture on my sign?” he asked.“Branden said, ‘You know, go ahead. It won’t make any difference,’” he says. “Bryce was like, ‘This is great, maybe it’ll keep the war from happening.’” Wednesday, March 19, he marched in downtown Richmond with five friends and ended up at the federal courthouse. “And that night,” he says, “the war started.” The next day, Syverson says, between 70 and 100 people showed up at the courthouse. He came again Friday. “I’m in this for the long run,” he told people. He didn’t know how long the run would be.Syverson stood by the courthouse for an hour each weekday until mid-April. He stood there Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays until July 2004, when Bryce left Iraq. Branden had left in March. He’s been standing there nearly every Friday since then, a total of 192 times. As time has passed, fewer and fewer people join Syverson. Most days there are just him and Gallini. But as the crowd of protesters thinned, he says, support for his cause seems to have amplified.“Before the war, before the actual invasion, my sense was there was a lot of support,” Gallini says. When the war began, people stopped smiling at him. Older people and African-Americans, more than anyone else, showed signs of support. As for the rest: “Minivans, construction workers, no. SUVs, no. Anything with the flag on it, no.”Horns assaulted him. “When I looked over, they’d shoot the finger, shake their fist, all kinds of foul words. … It was very demoralizing.” He felt a knot gather in his stomach each day as he prepared to walk to the courthouse from his downtown office. “My sons are in a desert dodging bullets,” he said to himself. “The least I can do is stand on a street corner for an hour.”In April, he made a sign that said Honk for Peace. “By doing that, I confiscated their honks,” he says. In May 2003, when Bush declared major combat operations in Iraq had ended, Syverson hit a low point. “Go home!” people yelled. “Haven’t you read the newspaper? The war’s over.” But his sons weren’t home.As Syverson stood on the sidewalk Nov. 3, 2003, the day after 16 soldiers died when their helicopter was shot down, “everybody’s honking. And that’s when the tide started turning.” Since then, he says, angry reactions have been few. Although the anti-war movement as a whole suffered after Bush’s re-election, it’s once again gathering steam, he says. “People are moving to our side.” And he’ll stay there until all the troops are home, he says.As Gallini and Syverson stand by the courthouse, they don’t much discuss foreign policy or the virtues of nonviolence. They simply stand together with their signs and chat. “Most of the time we talk about Branden and Bryce, and what I’ve heard from them and what’s going on,” Syverson says. “It’s really lifted my spirits so much.”Bryce, now back in Germany, seems to be doing a lot better, Syverson says. It’s hard for him to go to restaurants or travel on the Metro in Washington. Crowds pressing around him make him nervous. When he came home on weekends, he and his parents played a lot of Trivial Pursuit. Now he plans to talk to his chaplain about his self-doubt. “He says he’s completely lost his confidence and he doesn’t think he can lead soldiers anymore,” Syverson says.Branden, now teaching at the master gunner school, has trouble sleeping. “That’s all he’ll say,” Syverson says. He doesn’t talk much about the war. He did tell his father about being a sharpshooter on the front lines, picking off enemies 600 meters away.Syverson had trouble picturing a distance of 600 meters. Was it one football field? Two? Well, he said to his son, at that distance, at least, you don’t really know when you hit people. “Dad,” Branden said. “You know when you do.”

SBuses arranged by the Virginia Anti-War Network will be taking Richmonders to Washington, D.C., Sept. 24 to join an anti-war rally. A seat costs $20 per person, or $10 for students and people on limited incomes. Buses will be leaving from the James River Bus Lines parking lot in downtown Richmond Saturday morning and will return that evening. Contact Garrie Rouse at 804-512-2063 for information.

2005-09-19T09:22:00.000-07:00

Published on Thursday, September 15, 2005 by the Wiscasset Newspaper (Maine)
Sugar for Sugar, Salt For Salt. Go Down In The Flood Gonna Be Your Own Fault
by Christopher Cooper

This won't take long. And it won't be much fun. But duty and decency demand that we do it.
Sometimes you buy a cantaloupe because it looks good and you have enjoyed some fine ripe cantaloupes in your time, even though a buck and a half for a little melon that went three for a dollar within living memory seems pretty pricey. And you leave it on the kitchen counter for a few days, because it's a little green, but it softens and gets a better color so you slice it open, but it's mushy and rotten and smells like feet and tastes like vomit and you remember other, similar, corporate grocery chain cantaloupe experiences and vow as you heave the mess into the compost not to get fooled again.
Maybe you've bought a car. Reasonable mileage, no rust, convincing salesman who chatted you up about your hobbies, agreed with your prejudices, and made you feel you were a pretty clever guy for choosing this vehicle from his selection. But you couldn't keep it aligned, it ate tires, the brakes, exhaust system and radiator didn't survive the life of the payment book, and when you tried to sell it three years later every seventeen-year-old who looked at it was astute enough to reference the oil blown past the rear main seals as his reason for declining your “Best Offer Over $500 Dollars” prayer.
Some of you lady readers married men whose virtues are now no more apparent to you than they were pre-nuptually to your mothers, friends or even relatives of the groom himself. True, he was a successful inseminator but, sadly, the children look disturbingly like him. Of you, people say, “She could have done so much better.” What were you thinking? What can you do?
Or let's say a whole country was riding a foaming crest of good times, new cars, low interest rates, affordable gas, electronic gadgets and a We're Number One world view that was maybe weak on history, geography and empathy, but sure did by God show the big stick to the heathen foreigners. Such a people might toss a coin in a contest between a dorky, dull Democrat and an insipid dry drunk Texas fratboy Republican whose every and many failures had been rendered moot by family money and connections. They might not be paying much attention.
Then, let's say, some really nasty guys from a country larded up with ugly, corrupt fat cats blew a great big hole in a part of that country. Suppose the new president “rose to the occasion” by starting a war with another country in the same part of the world as the one where the bad guys came from, but which, for political and personal reasons and reasons having very much indeed to do with very valuable mineral resources and very profitable corporations and some other complicated considerations having to do with weapons sales, it was not convenient to invade because those particular rich foreigners were personal friends and business partners of that new chief executive.
And further (stay with me; I know it's a weird trip), imagine that just as it was made startlingly clear that pretty much everything this president had advanced as a reason for that war was a fabrication, a misdirection, a deliberate under- or over-statement (well, hell, yes, I guess just a pile of tremendous lies, really, if we need to use such an ugly word), imagine that he got re-elected despite his manifest incompetence and venality and smugness because the same Democrats who had advanced the very dull, unappealing candidate four years previously selected this time a cipher who ran against his own finest, most decent history and tried to seem more and more like the dull incumbent until, finally, some voters stuck with the dummy they knew, and some voted against the sad-sack they'd come to not respect, and the rigged Republican voting machines in two critical states made up the shortfall.
Now what if the best-studied, most carefully-observed, best-tracked, most predictable-coursed hurricane ever seen, and one of the biggest, wiped out a major coastal city that, had the president in question not been so intent upon “drowning government in a bathtub” and reducing the unwelcome sting of taxation upon the richest people and corporations he knew (outside of his friends in Saudi Arabia, I mean), might have received enough money to fortify its dikes and seawalls in the true spirit of “Homeland Security”, and maybe every old lady trying to board an airplane could have been spared the burden of taking off her shoes. (OK, I know it doesn't cost much to humiliate old ladies, and I know the money saved wouldn't have been diverted to New Orleans, but great craziness must be recognized and ridiculed and, when it is public policy, repudiated, and that's what they pay me to do here.)
You've seen the pictures. Twenty per cent of the residents of New Orleans lacked the resources, the vehicles, the health, the money to evacuate ahead of the storm. Too old, too sick, too poor to save themselves, and mostly, given America's great secret still, all these years after we thought we'd equalized these things, even after the token Scalia wannabe on the Supreme Court and the sad yes-man who abandoned the Secretary of State job after the lies he told finally began to curdle on his lips, mostly black. Poor blacks. Indeed.
You've seen the Superdome, the convention center footage. You've heard the first-person accounts of scores of hurting, hungry homeless (poor, black) persons trying to cross a bridge to dry ground but ordered back by white officials with guns. You've seen the misery, the neglect, the abuse. So has the rest of the world. We're Number One! Say it loud.
Is it time yet? Can we all just admit we made a stupid mistake? We weren't paying attention? We heard what we wanted to hear? We succumbed to slick advertising? The fruit was rotten; the car was a lemon; that bum was just piss-poor husband and father material and your momma was right. Stay the course? What course? Our country, its citizens, its principles have been reduced, abused, worked-over, bled-out, violated and humiliated. Not by terrorists or foreign enemies or tsunamis or tornadoes or an angry god. We have rotted from within.
Blame the Republicans? Nah, they're just “protecting their base.” Like helping like. It is the party of wealth and privilege. Blame the Democrats? Sure, if you can distinguish 'em from the Republicans. It sure ain't the party of FDR any more. Or even Jack Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson or Jimmy Carter. I'll see your Tom DeLay and your Bill Frist and raise you a Joe Biden and a Joe Lieberman. Blame the press for avoiding or killing any story that wasn't a press release from the Pentagon, the White House or the American Association of Yellow Ribbon Manufacturers. Blame our stars. Blame ourselves; we weren't paying attention; we didn't do the work democracy demands.
Do I exaggerate our desperate straits? The man at the top in his own words and by his own actions. Add the smirk and swagger yourself; you've seen it often enough.
First response? Fly over on Air Force One; go play golf. Condi Rice shopped shoe boutiques. Dick Cheney bought a three million dollar vacation home.
While you and I watched the Superdome and convention center fiascoes? Lunch with Al Greenspan. “Hurricane Katrina will represent a temporary setback for the U.S. Economy and the energy sector.”
As WalMart water trucks, Red Cross workers, TV reporters and Canadian Mounted Police forces tended the stricken city while FEMA and the National Guard waited for orders that didn't come? “Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job.”
Days after we'd all heard testimony from the engineers and planners who'd repeatedly sounded the alarm about Category Five storms and Cat. Three levees: “I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.”
With hundred of thousands homeless, uncounted dead, the poorest among us hit the hardest: “Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- the guy lost his entire house -- there's going to be fantastic house. I look forward to sitting on the porch.” [Yes, rubbles, plural. I know it sounds stupid, but I got it right off the White House website. He's proud of it, for Christ's sake!]
There's more. You've seen it, heard it, been repulsed by it. But did you get this from his mom, the husband of one bad president, the mother of the worst one yet, a woman who you'll remember said she couldn't find the time to trouble her “beautiful mind” about Iraqi civilians we'd bombed to death by the tens of thousands? Of those who'd lost all they owned, including, in many cases, loved ones, to the flood and were now enjoying the hospitality of Texas shelters: "And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this [chuckle] is working very well for them."
Oh, those lucky, lucky homeless, sick people! What happy niggras we have here on our grand plantation. It makes a person feel dirty and disgusted and sick to his stomach. Don't you suppose a couple billion other people all over the world heard that chortle, you bloated, ignorant, overprivileged mother of a moron?
Hey, folks, things have gotten so bad that even the press is beginning to pay attention. Presidential Press Secretary Scott McClellan said at least fourteen times during two press briefings last week that now is not the time to “play the blame game.” I say it's an excellent time, while the dead are still floating on the polluted tides and we are not yet distracted by the World's Series or the run-up to Christmas or another newly-discovered “Axis Of Terror” triumvirate.
Now, for pure, wholesome, refreshing local idiocy we have the Maine Republicans' brilliant plan to make us forget the screwing we're getting from Exxon by canceling the state gasoline tax for a few months and (this is really too perfect for me to have made up) forgiving the sales tax on home heating oil (struggling, low wage, two-job homeowners get ready for this!) for business use.
OK. I'm done. Gotta go wax the yacht and wind my Rolex. Jesus, I wish I could be homeless and eat some donated food in Texas while my wife rots in a drainage canal and my dogs starve to death on the balcony of our ruined home
Chris Cooper writes an editorial page column, Fixtures And Forces And Friends for the Wiscasset [Maine] Newspaper. He lives in Alna, Maine; contact him at ckc2@prexar.com.
© 2005 Wiscasset Newspaper

ONE VERY BRAVE BOY

2005-09-09T17:17:00.000-07:00

BATON ROUGE, La. -- In the chaos that was Causeway Boulevard, this group of refugees stood out: a 6-year-old boy walking down the road, holding a 5-month-old, surrounded by five toddlers who followed him around as if he were their leader.They were holding hands. Three of the children were about 2 years old, and one was wearing only diapers. A 3-year-old girl, who wore colorful barrettes on the ends of her braids, had her 14-month-old brother in tow. The 6-year-old spoke for all of them, and he told rescuers his name was Deamonte Love.Thousands of human stories have flown past relief workers in the last week, but few have touched them as much as the seven children who were found wandering together Thursday at an evacuation point in downtown New Orleans. In the Baton Rouge headquarters of the rescue operation, paramedics tried to coax their names out of them; nurses who examined them stayed up that night, brooding.Transporting the children alone was "the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, knowing that their parents are either dead" or that they had been abandoned, said Pat Coveney, a Houston emergency medical technician who put them into the back of his ambulance and drove them out of New Orleans."It goes back to the same thing," he said. "How did a 6-year-old end up being in charge of six babies?"So far, parents displaced by flooding have reported 220 children missing, but that number is expected to rise, said Mike Kenner of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which will help reunite families. With crowds churning at evacuation points, many children were parted from their parents accidentally; one woman handed her baby up onto a bus, turned around to pick up her suitcase and turned back to find that the bus had left."When my kids were little I used to lose them in Target, so it's not hard for me to believe," said Nanette White, press secretary for Louisiana's Department of Social Services. "Sometimes little kids just wander off. They're there one second and you blink and they're gone."At the rescue headquarters, a cool tile-floored building swarming with firefighters and paramedics, the children ate cafeteria food and fell into a deep sleep. Deamonte volunteered his vital statistics. He said his father was tall and his mother was short. He gave his address, his phone number and the name of his elementary school.He said that the 5-month-old was his brother, Darynael, and that two others were his cousins, Tyreek and Zoria. The other three lived in his apartment building.The children were clean and healthy -- downright plump in the case of the infant, said Joyce Miller, a nurse who examined them. It was clear, she said, that "time had been taken with those kids." The baby was "fat and happy."All evening Thursday as strike teams came and went to the flooded city, volunteer Ron Haynes carried one of the 2-year-old girls back and forth, playing with her until she was calm enough to eat dinner."This baby child was terrified," he said. "After she relaxed, it was gobble, gobble, gobble."As grim dispatches came in from the field, one woman in the office burst into tears at the thought that the children had been abandoned in New Orleans, said Sharon Howard, assistant secretary of the office of public health.Late the same night, they got an encouraging report: A woman in a shelter in Thibodeaux was searching for seven children. People in the building started clapping at the news. But when they got the mother on the phone, it became clear that she was looking for a different group of seven children, Howard said."What that made me understand was that this was happening across the state," she said. "That kind of frightened me."The children were transferred to a shelter operated by the Department of Social Services, rooms full of toys and cribs where mentors from the Big Buddy Program were on hand day and night. For the next two days, the staff did detective work.One of the 2-year-olds steadfastly refused to say her name until a worker took her picture with a digital camera and showed it to her. The little girl pointed at it and cried out, "Gabby!" One of the boys -- with a halo of curly hair -- had a G printed on his T-shirt when he arrived; when volunteers started calling him G, they noticed that he responded.Deamonte began to give more details to Derrick Robertson, a 27-year-old Big Buddy mentor: How he saw his mother cry when he was loaded onto the helicopter. How he promised her he'd take care of his little brother.Late Saturday night, they found Deamonte's mother, who was in a shelter in San Antonio along with the four mothers of the other five children. Catrina Williams, 26, saw her children's pictures on a website set up over the weekend by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. By Sunday, a private plane from Angel Flight was waiting to take the children to Texas.In a phone interview, Williams said she is the kind of mother who doesn't let her children out of her sight. What happened the Thursday after the hurricane, she said, was that her family, trapped in an apartment building on the 3200 block of Third Street in New Orleans, began to feel desperate.The water wasn't going down and they had been living without light, food or air conditioning for four days. The baby needed milk and the milk was gone. So she decided they would evacuate by helicopter. When a helicopter arrived to pick them up, they were told to send the children first and that the helicopter would be back in 25 minutes. She and her neighbors had to make a quick decision.It was a wrenching moment. Williams' father, Adrian Love, told her to send the children ahead."I told them to go ahead and give them up, because me, I would give my life for my kids. They should feel the same way," said Love, 48. "They were shedding tears. I said, 'Let the babies go.' "His daughter and her friends followed his advice."We did what we had to do for our kids, because we love them," Williams said.The helicopter didn't come back. While the children were transported to Baton Rouge, their parents wound up in Texas, and although Williams was reassured that they would be reunited, days passed without any contact. On Sunday, she was elated."All I know is I just want to see my kids," she said. "Everything else will just fall into place."At 3 p.m. Sunday, DSS workers said goodbye to seven children who now had names: Deamonte Love; Darynael Love; Zoria Love and her brother Tyreek. The girl who cried "Gabby!" was Gabrielle Janae Alexander. The girl they called Peanut was Degahney Carter. And the boy whom they called G was actually Lee -- Leewood Moore Jr.The children were strapped into car seats and driven to an airport, where they were flown to San Antonio to rejoin their parents. As they were loaded into the van, the shelter workers looked in the windows.The baby gaped with delight in the front seat. Deamonte was hanging onto Robertson's neck so desperately that Robertson decided, at the last minute, to ride with him as far as Lafayette.Shelter worker Kori Thomas held Zoria, 3, who reached out to smooth her eyebrows. Tyreek put a single fat finger on the van window by way of goodbye.Robertson said he doubted the children would remember much of the helicopter evacuation, the Causeway, the sweltering heat or the smell of the flooded city."I think what's going to stick with them is that they survived Hurricane Katrina," he said. "And that they were loved."
Copyright © 2005, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

2005-09-08T16:07:00.000-07:00

Hurricane Reality vs. Right-Wing Ideology
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet

Posted on September 8, 2005,
Printed on September 8, 2005
Hurricane Katrina blew away not only roofs, levees and lives, but also some of the right's most cherished -- and well-funded -- beliefs. The depth of the disconnect between the right's narrative of what American society should look like and the facts on the ground was almost unspinnable. Reality was hard to stave off in the aftermath of such a disaster.
Some tried. The Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger took the opportunity to argue that "poorly incentivized" public bureaucracies "are going to get us killed" and call for outsourcing emergency response functions.
The National Review's Kate O'Beirne wrote that the contrast between Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco and Mississippi's Haley Barbour should leave Hillary Clinton supporters "dismayed at the latest example of why voters might be leery of women chief executives."
Further on the fringe, blogger Michael Calderon at David Horowitz's Frontpage Magazine saw in Katrina the potential for a civil war following a major terror attack in the U.S. and envisioned a Hobbesian war of all against all, predicting -- with just a bit too much enthusiasm -- this apocalyptic scenario:
Expect heavily armed and infuriated conservatives to launch a cleansing war against the traitors. The armed will mow down the mostly unarmed segments, especially those elements that devoted 40-plus years to anti-American hatred to destroy this country. Should the likes of Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, Michael Moore, Ward Churchill, Dennis Raimondo [sic], et al. act out their sedition ... expect their bodies to be found shot full of holes ... Leftist professors will be strung up. It will be every man, woman, and child for themselves.
And, also predictably, other nutters saw the storm as part of God's wrath for New Orleans' sinful ways (ignoring that some of the staunchest Bible-belt counties in the South were also devastated).
The first ideological victim of the hurricane on the right was the notion of a classless, race-blind society in which we all share the same opportunity to thrive. A media that routinely deletes any reference to race and class was forced to openly confront the desperate and almost purely monochromatic reality of the hurricane's survivors.
The notion -- briefly floated by some conservatives -- that Katrina's victims have some personal responsibility for not leaving when the evacuation orders came down was swiftly deflated. The Washington Post noted that "living paycheck to paycheck made leaving impossible":
To those who wonder why so many stayed behind when push came to water's mighty shove here, those who were trapped have a simple explanation: Their nickels and dimes and dollar bills simply didn't add up to stage a quick evacuation mission.
The New York Times' David Brooks -- who seemed especially shaken by the images coming out of the Gulf Coast -- lamented that Katrina represented a confidence-shattering rip in our social fabric as "the rich escaped while the poor were abandoned," a move he called "the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield."
On the question of class, the storm landed at an inopportune moment for conservatives. Katrina hit smack in the middle of a year-long public debate about the United States' growing inequality (in just about every way one can measure it).
The back and forth started in May, when both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal [$$] (followed by others) began a series on the growing wealth gap in America. The right responded with the usual charge that a liberal agenda was cooking the books -- despite Alan Greenspan weighing in that there was, indeed, a potential problem -- and, alternatively, that what matters isn't what class we belong to but what class we believe we belong to, an argument voiced by, among others, Bruce Bartlett in the National Review.
While Katrina didn't have any direct impact on the debate, images are more visceral than statistics. It's hard to sit in a comfortable, dry place watching the abandoned poor fight for their lives, and argue that the growing class divide in this country is a figment of the left's imagination, or that our current socio-economic arrangements are the best we can do.
Directly related to class is the idea of social cohesion. "United we stand" is a central tenet of the American narrative. Whatever your background, your status, your ideology, we pull together when the chips are down. But in New Orleans it became clear just how transparent that fiction is. Our sense of community -- if the ideal ever truly existed -- has now deteriorated to such a degree that only the threat of deadly violence holds the whole show together.
The scenes of a powder keg with its lid blown off rattled many on the right, despite the fact that in many ways it accords with the conservative view of human nature. Peggy Noonan wrote, "a bad turn in human behavior frays and tears all the ties that truly bind human beings -- trust, confidence, mutual regard" and hoped that "the looters are shot."
The Wall Street Journal editorialized that a "battle" was underway in New Orleans, and called the disorder "the most disturbing part" of the tragedy. National Review Editor Rich Lowry urged readers to buy guns, and wondered whether the current crop of Republican leaders had read Thomas Hobbes, or "does he not make the 'compassionate conservative' reading list?"
Compassionate conservatism, and President Bush's image as a strong and engaged leader -- so carefully groomed -- took a major, perhaps unrecoverable, hit. That aspect has been discussed ad nauseum, so I won't dwell on it, except to say that you would be very hard-pressed to script a more damaging set of images than the President ordering his jet to descend to a low altitude so he could "review the damage" from his window, and his subsequent arrival at the White House with a cute little puppy. Many conservatives expressed deep shock at the administration's utter disconnect, even more so than at its inaction.
Katrina will also play an important role in future debates about the roles of the public and private sectors. The storm came ashore during a year in which it was officially announced that FEMA would lose its disaster preparedness function. The Bush administration has taken heat. As a local emergency management director wrote in the Washington Post, "The advent of the Bush administration in January 2001 signaled the beginning of the end for FEMA. The newly appointed leadership of the agency showed little interest in its work ... Soon FEMA was being absorbed into the 'homeland security borg.'"
The Houston Chronicle editorialized that the fact that "our first-world nation has demonstrated a shockingly third-world capability to care for its citizens" essentially "smashed the myth" that obsessively cutting taxes doesn't carry a cost.
There will be more such criticism to come. How much impact it will have remains to be seen, but it's clear that the problem with New Orleans' disaster preparedness was not too much government, but too little, too late. That simple fact, at its heart, was what rattled so many conservatives so deeply.
Joshua Holland is a fair-trade activist, a freelance writer and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer blog.
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

From Blondie's Mailbox

2005-09-06T12:26:00.000-07:00

Another Point of View From Toni

Casualties of War: Camp Casey and New Orleans
By Starhawk

When Katrina hit, I was at Camp Casey in Crawford, Texas, where I had gone to support Cindy Sheehan, the Gold Star mother who encamped outside of Bushs ranch to demand a meeting so she could ask him one simple question, What noble cause did my son die for? Cindy is a formidable woman, a fearless woman because she has already lost what she most loved. Loss and grief are powerful forces. Camp Casey was full of those who had suffered the real losses of the Bush administrations war on Iraq, the families of soldiers, returning veterans, Gold Star Mothers who had lost a child in Iraq. Along the roadside stood a vast field of crosses to represent the dead. Across the road, a small encampment of pro-war counter-demonstrators would gather each day. They didnt stay overnight. On our side, we camped in a ditch, in the hundred and five degree heat, itching from sweat and chigger bites. The counter-protestors shouted slogans and drove up and down the road in cars decorated with signs proclaiming their love for Bush, honking. David, my partner, a veteran of the civil rights movement and a draft resistor in Vietnam, thought they needed some lessons in taunting. Hes been taunted by better in his timethe outfront racists, the fanatic anti-communists. The worst our counter demonstrators mustered was a sign saying, The Sixties are overwhy dont you go home! Someone on our side countered with a sign reading, The Fifties are overwhy dont YOU go home? Bush and his allies are experts at manufacturing emotion, whipping up fear, exploiting the dead. But here the air was permeated by real and personal loss. You have to understand, the woman said to me. My mother does not go out. She doesnt leave the house. Her mother, standing next to her, nodded in agreement. We were outside the big tent where the rally was being held, at Camp Casey Two, up the road from our campsite. But I told her, you have to come. You have to see this. The woman was blond, late thirties, conservatively dressed, in a big sunhat . She spoke with a Texas accent, and she and her mother looked like archetypal Republicans. Nothing looks prettier than a young man in a uniform, she said, smiling sadly but when you look at whats underneath, its not so pretty. Her brother had come back from the first Gulf War, mentally and emotionally shattered, and had never recovered. And thats what drew her mother out, to gather with others who had also lost real children, real lives. I told her about Billy, the son of my best friend from junior high school. Mary and I played with paper dolls and screamed for the Beatles and went wild together in the Sixties. She was the first of my friends to get pregnant, when we were nineteen, and I helped her through the stress of telling her ultraconservative family, her hasty marriage and messy divorce. Then we lost touch for many years. I remember Billy as a sweet two-year-old with angelic curls. He grew up to be the second soldier across the line in the first Gulf War. I reconnected with Mary shortly after he took a gun to the beach and shot himself, one of the thousands of uncounted casualties, suicides, chronically ill, lefovers from that adventure. The homeless shelters and the cold streets are still filled with men of my own generation, the living ghosts of Vietnam. Meanwhile veterans services are being cut back, hospitals closed. My aunt and uncle from the communist side of the family worked all their lives for the VA, proudly, because as my aunt said it was the closest thing to socialism in this country. They enjoyed providing free treatment for people. Perhaps that is why the same warmongers, so eager to create new casualties, refuse to adequately fund their ongoing care. The people at Camp Casey talked about being on someone elses mission, about chains of command and getting orders from above, which they agreeably followed. This place is run like the military, one of my friends remarked. We are the military, was the answer. They were indeed the military, the people in this country most directly affected by the reality of war, Gold Star Mothers who had lost a child in Iraq, returning veterans, Veterans for Peace, military families. They wore cowboy hats and spoke in real Texas accents: Bushs natural base, in rebellion not at the concept of authority but at his misuse and abuse of the authority entrusted to him. Most people there were from Texas, many of them surprised and delighted to meet other Texans who opposed the war. A whole contingent was from Louisiana, and New Orleans. And so on Sunday night when the news reports were tracking Katrinas progress and predicting the disaster of New Orleans, the mood at the camp was grim. I was over at Camp Casey Two, where a big tent was set up for meetings and rallies. I was trying to be helpful by making a list of all the stuff needed for the caravans which would be setting out when the camp closed on a speaking tour, mobilizing people for the September 24 march on Washington. On the screen a video was playing detailing the effects of depleted uranium, showing pictures of the deformed babies born in Iraq, cyclops babies with only one eye in the center of the forhead, babies with heads like tumors, babies that are nothing but undifferentiated lumps of flesh. And at my feet, a man from New Orleans was crying and raging. The bridges were closed, and no one could get out any longer. The news was predicting that thousands might die. The petrochemical industry and the developers have long ruled in the Gulf, with free reign to destroy the wetlands that are natures buffer against storms. A huge proportion of the Louisiana National Guard, which is supposed to take charge during natural disasters, was in Iraq. The rest were apparently in Florida, moving military equipment out of the path of the storm. The funds for flood control and reinforcing the levees had been systematically cut by the Bush administration in order to fund our attacks on Baghdad and Fallujah. Hurricanes are fueled by the warmth of the ocean, and the Gulf is abnormally hot due to global warming, which Bush and his allies will not admit is happening. Global warming may not have caused Hurrican Katrina, but it undoubtedly amplified its power and fury. New Orleans, like Casey Sheehan, is a casualty of war. And I imagine Cindy joined in her vigil by a mother from New Orleans, perhaps one whose baby died in her arms of dehydration at the Superdome, to ask, Why did my child die? And Bush, if he were honest would have to say to her, Your child died of incompetence and callousness justified by a set of false assumptions: That the current economy and technology, fueled by cheap oil and gas, can and should continue in its current form. That the profits of those who benefit from the current system are of paramount importance, and should be protected at all costs. That war is good for business. That environmental impacts dont need to be counted as part of the cost of doing business and so dont count. That technology has transcended nature. That global warming has no real consequences. That government owes nothing in the way of care and support to its citizens. That the lives of the poor arent worth much, anyway, especially if they happen to be black. That the way to respond to uncomfortable questions is to sneer at and smear the questioner. That a good media spin can redefine and outweigh reality. But reality has a way of being, well, real, and catching up with you. Real loss, real grief are the real results of the Bush administrations policies. His neocon friends maintain their power by manufacturing fear, exploiting the dead. But now the real dead are coming back to haunt them. And so I imagine Cindy and the mother from New Orleans joined by a legion of mothers from Iraq. I envision the roads of Crawford lined with the corpses of Baghdad and Fallujah, with the one-eyed monstrous stillbirths, the children blown to pieces, caked with flesh, soaked with blood. I hear a chorus of voices asking, Why? What noble cause? What great gift are you bringing us? What is this democracy that abandons the poor to drown? I see them laying the bodies at the gates of power. I see us joining them, to turn the to a wind of justice, a wind of change. Hurricane season has just begun.
* * *
Some places to send aid: Families and Friends of Louisianas Incarcerated Children are doing intense work among the shelters and prisons with displaced youth, mostly African American. Believe me, the Red Cross and the Christian charities wont be pouring out relief to this group! They can also use some volunteers (especially African American) and many gifts in kind. Send a check to the FFLIC Hurricane Relief Fund to 920 PlattStreet, Sulphur, Louisiana, 70663.awakenprogress@yahoo.comkd.higgs@yahoo.com The Veterans for Peace bus that was at Camp Casey in Crawford, TX has now gone down to Covington, Louisiana to do relief work. They also need donations of money and computer equipment.Make a donation to Veterans For Peace Chapter 116 http://www.vfproadtrips.orgTax deductible cash donations can be send to:Contact: Veterans For Peace Chapter 11628500 Sherwood RdWillits CA 95490pjtate@sonic.netCell PH 707-536-3001 Food Not Bombs will be providing food for refugees. They can use volunteers to prepare and serve food, and, of course, donations.www.foodnotbombs.net. You can make a financial donation on line or mail checks to Food Not Bombs, P.O. Box 744, Tucson, AZ 85702. Please call (1-800-884-1136) or email (katrina@foodnotbombs.net ) us if you can join them on the bus or help with gas money. Starhawkwww.starhawk.org Feel free to post, forward, and reprint this article for non-commercial purposes. All other rights reserved. Starhawk is an activist, organizer, and author of The Earth Path, Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising, The Fifth SacredThing and other books on feminism, politics and earth-based spirituality. She teaches Earth Activist Trainings that combine permaculture design and activist skills, www.earthactivisttraining.org and works with the RANT trainers collective, www.rantcollective.net that offers training and support for mobilizations around global justice and peace issues. Donations to help support Starhawks trainings and work can be sent to:ACT1405 Hillmount St. Austin, Texas 78704 U.S.A. To get her periodic posts of her writings, email Starhawk-subscribe@lists.riseup.net and put subscribe in the subject heading. If youre on that list and dont want any more of these writings, email Starhawk-unsubscribe@lists.riseup.net and put unsubscribe in the subject heading.

FROM RAGEJAX FOUNDATION

2005-09-02T12:50:00.000-07:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - Ojai, California – September 1, 2005
Project Coordinators: Cally Houck - Al Westcott
Through the eyes of the smallest of us we see the impact of the destruction and devastation that has taken over the Gulf Coast cities of New Orleans, Louisiana; Biloxi, Mississippi and Delta cities and towns whose names we have never heard before.
Through the eyes of the children we see hurricane Katrina’s impact on every city, every home and every person along the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico.
Federal, state and local emergency and relief organizations are coping with the tens of thousands of American refugees who have lost everything. Everything except their lives and their determination to survive and rebuild.
We all want to help and we can. Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Home Depot and other major retailers are helping with money, food, water and other essential supplies.
The RageJax Foundation has made a cash donation to the Salvation Army Disaster Relief for immediate assistance and a donation to Habitat For Humanity to help in the long term costs of rebuilding homes. In addition, the RageJax Foundation has made a donation of coloring books, crayons, puzzles and activity toys to be sent directly to the Astrodome in Houston and the other relief centers throughout Texas and wherever else they are needed.
We encourage everyone to get involved in rebuilding, but before we can rebuild homes we must rebuild hearts. As millions of Americans come together with money for immediate assistance, the RageJax Foundation will help the smallest victims, the children. As America comes together, the RageJax Foundation will continue to provide books, toys, and other “diversion” items for the children. This letter simply asks you to help “Katrina’s Kids”, please send your tax-deductible contribution to RageJax Foundation and write “Katrina’s Kids” in the memo line of your check. Worldwide Express, partnered with DHL Express, will deliver the items from Ojai, California directly to Texas without charge this means that all donations will go directly to
purchasing things for the children of this disaster. Our first delivery to the children is scheduled to leave Ojai on Tuesday, September 6th so time is of the essence.
Please mail your check to RageJax Foundation, Box 582, Ojai, California 93024.
The children will not know that it was you that helped them, but you will.
Please help. Even just a dollar. Please.

From a Doctor on the Front Lines of New Orleans

2005-09-02T12:49:00.000-07:00

DISPATCH FROM NEW ORLEANS - September 1, 2005

"Personally, my family and I are fine. My family is safe in Jackson, Miss., and I am now a temporary resident of the Ritz Carleton Hotel in New Orleans. I figured if it was my time to go, I wanted to go in a place with a good wine list. In addition, this hotel is in a very old building on Canal Street that could and did sustain little damage. Many of the other hotels sustained significant loss of windows, and we expect that many of the guests may be evacuated here.Things were obviously bad yesterday, but they are much worse today.Overnight the water arrived. Now Canal Street (true to its origins) isindeed a canal. The first floor of all downtown buildings is underwater. I have heard that Charity Hospital and Tulane are limited in their ability to care for patients because of water. Ochsner is the only hospital that remains fully functional. However, I spoke with them today and theytoo are on generator and losing food and water fast.The city now has no clean water, no sewerage system, no electricity, and no real communications. Bodies are still being recovered floating in the floods. We are worried about a cholera epidemic. Even the police are without effective communications. We have a group of armed police here with usat the hotel that is admirably trying to exert some local law enforcement.This is tough because looting is now rampant. Most of it is not malicious looting. These are poor and desperate people with no housing and no medical care and no food or water trying to take care of themselves and theirfamilies. Unfortunately, the people are armed and dangerous. We heargunshots frequently. Most of Canal street is occupied by armed looters who have a low threshold for discharging their weapons. We hear gunshotsfrequently. The looters are using makeshift boats made of pieces ofstyrofoam to access. We are still waiting for a significant national guard presence.The health care situation here has dramatically worsened overnight. Many people in the hotel are elderly and small children. Many other guests have unusual diseases. ... There are (Infectious Disease) physicians in at this hotel attending an HIV convention. We have commandeered the world famous French Quarter Bar to turn into an makeshift clinic. There is a team ofabout seven doctors and PAs and pharmacists. We anticipate that thiswill be the major medical facility in the central business district andFrench Quarter.Our biggest adventure today was raiding the Walgreens on Canal under police escort. The pharmacy was dark and full of water. We basically scooped the entire drug sets into garbage bags and removed them. All under policeescort. The looters had to be held back at gunpoint. After a dose ofprophylactic Cipro I hope to be fine.In all we are faring well. We have set up a hospital in the French Quarter bar in the hotel, and will start admitting patients today. Many will befrom the hotel, but many will not. We are anticipating dealing withmultiple medical problems, medications and and acute injuries. Infection and perhaps even cholera are anticipated major problems. Food and watershortages are imminent.The biggest question to all of us is where is the National Guard? We hear jet fighters and helicopters, but no real armed presence, and hence therampant looting. There is no Red Cross and no Salvation Army.In a sort of cliché way, this is an edifying experience. One is rapidlyfocused away from the transient and material to the bare necessities oflife. It has been challenging to me to learn how to be a primary carephysician. We are under martial law so return to our homes is impossible.
I don't know how long it will be and this is my greatest fear. Despite it all, this is a soul-edifying experience. The greatest pain is to think about the loss. And how long the rebuild will take. And the horror of so many dead people.Hopefully their collective prayers will be answered. By the way, suturepacks, sterile gloves and stethoscopes will be needed as the Ritz turnsinto a MASH."

2005-08-25T10:05:00.000-07:00

World Festival Declaration:"For Peace and Solidarity, We Struggle Against Imperialism and War!"
By FINAL DECLARATION: 16th World Festival of Youth and Students (WFYS)
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By: FINAL DECLARATION: 16th World Festival of Youth and Students (WFYS)
Published: 08/24/2005 11:21

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8-24-05,11:24am

The 16th World Festival of Youth and Students (WFYS) was successfully held in Caracas, Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, from 7 to 15 August 2005, continuing with the Festivals movement and reinforcing it as the largest and the most significant political, cultural, anti-imperialist event organized by world progressive and democratic youth and student forces.

Youth from the US delegation to the WFYS prepare to march in the opening ceremonies, August 8. This sixteenth Festival welcomed more than 17.000 delegates of local, national, regional and international organizations from 144 countries, representing millions of young people and students from all over the world. Youth gathered without differences of ages, ideological background, gender, ethnic and social origin participated in varied and numerous activities of the 16th WFYS. This Youth, in the previous months, during the preparatory process, realizing the necessities of the political moment, they managed to stimulate a great mobilization and ample spaces of debate in hundreds of different cities and countries, uniting wills under the slogan that brought us to Caracas: "For Peace and Solidarity, We Struggle against Imperialism and War!" Nowadays, four years after the fruitful 15th WFYS, held in Algeria, the world's imperialist forces, with the United States (US) government in the frontline, have undertaken an aggressive and despicable offensive, indiscriminately trying to remove all obstacles on their way to consolidate their global power. This Festival took place at a historical moment for mankind, in a continent that has made imperialism taste decisive defeats, in a country that blazes a path of hope, within the framework of the tradition of solidarity and struggle of the Festivals movement, reaffirming its firm position between the two main trends are confronting each other: on the one side, imperialism with its interventionist and war policies and, on the other, the peoples who struggle for their inalienable rights.
The events of September 11, 2001, have been used by the US government and its allies as a pretext to launch an escalation of its imperialist campaign of world domination, disguised as a supposed "war on terror" and "struggle for freedom" against a fictitious "axis of evil", through which it strives to impose its social, economical, cultural and ideological laws. Such events and their consequences have marked imperialist tactics during the past four years, serving the redoubling of expansionist policies, which are characterized by permanent contradictions and alliances among imperialist centers the US, European Union (EU) and Japan. This constantly intensifying imperialist aggressiveness has made use of all tried-and-true methods to achieve its goals: blockades, provocation of conflicts, threats of interventions, military intervention, wars and occupations, undertaken against countries and movements. This aggressiveness has also generated an escalation of the, attacks on people's rights and liberties. In order to justify all this, imperialism uses the media, the educational system, art, recreation and other mechanisms to unfold a sophisticated ideological offensive that provides the theoretical and moral basis for the above mentioned measures. What is especially alarming is that this offensive, waged on many fronts, affects - for the most part young people sometimes from the time of childhood. The insolent effort to present resistance as a form of violence and struggle as a form of terrorism is very old, but the peoples are not confused; in spite of the continuous distortion of reality and the howling provocations used to achieve this end, resistance movements have grown and have been strengthened. This aggressiveness is by no means accidental. It stems from imperialism's structural inability to come up with solutions to the needs of the vast majority of the world's population and at the same time to perpetuate its existence. This aggressiveness is expressed on different levels: At the economic level, it implies a strategic restructuring of its function (known as neo-liberal policies) in order to increase exploitation and competitiveness; At the military level, in order to secure control over markets and resources; At the political level, in order to secure its rule over the people; At the ideological level, in order to prevent dispute of its perpetuity. Imperialism is not invincible, as it presents itself; on the contrary its continuously deepening crisis is structural, and its aggressiveness has no way out but its complete overthrow by the peoples. Despite imperialism's ideological offensive, progressive and peace loving forces grow stronger and emerge again with more determination. We, conscious young people and students of the world, are aware of the historical role we play, and we have been gathering in the World Festivals of Youth and Students since 1947 to reaffirm the principles of our struggle, to exchange ideas and set down referential bases to guide our regional and international actions, for the liberation of humanity from all types of oppression, discrimination and imperialistic domination, to have justice and freedom prevail for all peoples. The organization, awareness and mobilization of world youth and students have been on the rise. Wherever imperialism has intervened, encroaching on liberties and rights of the peoples, it has met with worthy resistance. The more it tries to encroach upon peoples' independence, sovereignty and right to self-determination, the more forms of resistance the peoples find to oppose its interests. Thus, our first commitment has been and will always be with the people, with the young people and students that suffer the most as a result of imperialist policies.
Every day, the resistance against imperialism and capitalism gains more supporters before the evidence that this system is nonviable and in light of its inability to solve and meet the problems, necessities and interests of young people and students. Therefore, the local, national, regional and international, progressive, anti-neoliberal, anti-imperialist organizations, the youth in general, have increasingly mobilized themselves against warmongering machineries, against the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq; against imperialist plans to reorder the world and its attempts to change the geopolitical map to its own benefit; against imperialist meddling in the internal affairs of countries; against the alienating and interventionist policies of G-8, NATO, the IMF, the WB, the WTO, the EU, the FTA, the FTAA; against debts and militarism; against military bases and intervention plans, such as Guantanamo and "Plan Colombia"; against the systematic use of torture and the violation of human rights with impunity. This year, while commemorating the 60th anniversary of the criminal bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, imperialism continues showing its aggressive nature. But, it comforts us the fact that among the great experiences of the 20th century, we are also celebrating 60 years of the anti-fascist people's victory and the founding of the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY), two events that are intimately linked and which embody an unshakable commitment to peace and solidarity and honor the memory of the millions of lives who have upheld these principles over the years, events that marked the beginning of profound social transformations, the process of decolonization and changes in the world's balance of forces. As we invoke the glorious victory of the Vietnamese people over imperialism three decades ago, its subsequent economic and social achievements, our struggles and the experience we have accumulated, we are filled with hope and confidence that now, as at those times, we will overcome the difficulties and that the people shall emerge victorious. In various forms and throughout the world, young people fight against exploitation, blockades, embargos, sanctions, and all forms of discrimination and fundamentalism. We are committed to and struggle for a world of peace, free from nuclear weapons; for a different socio-economic system that holds the human being as a center and main maker, a system based on social justice, national sovereignty, independence, self-determination, democracy, security, international solidarity and cooperation. We demand respect for and call for the defense of human rights, women's rights, sexual and reproductive rights, sustainable development and the environment. We demand that everyone should have access to employment, labor rights, education, health care, sports, culture and technology. We are optimistic because there are reasons to be optimistic, because we defend and we fight for just causes, because we have managed to make progresses, because we face and surpass difficulties with the joyful spirit and the rebelliousness that characterizes young people. Imperialism is attempting to impose a unilateral and calculating view of human rights which benefits the interests of large corporations and transnational capital over the interests of the people, a system in which for example even US citizens themselves endure the repressive policies of a racist, exclusivist and alienating order, against which they are rebelling. Humanity's most fundamental right is the right to life and everything that sustains it, especially the right to freely decide the type of society it wants to live in, and its inalienable right to fight to build such a society. Imperialism denies peoples these rights in many ways, through international capitalist structures, subverting the role of the United Nations (UN) and, if need be, by waging wars of occupation as it did in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Imperialism wants to build a new world totalitarian order against the youth, the workers and the peoples. We demand the closing down of all foreign military bases, the abolition of all nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and nuclear tests. We demand the reduction of military budgets, which have been increasing, especially in the United States of America. Imperialist warmongering policies produce such harms as refugees, millions of people who are compelled to leave their homes, lands, jobs and families. Also the economic policies of hunger produce emigrants, the majority of them move to developed capitalist countries illegally and are treated as slaves something that is a shame for humanity. We must urgently mobilize the people to exert international pressure for a true democratization of the United Nations, opposing the US and its allies in their attempts to impose reforms that consolidate the use of this multilateral organization as an international tool to legitimize their interventionist actions, in stead of complying with its obligation to seek a real balance among the world's nations, giving them equal rights and duties, and empowering the General Assembly. Imperialism also undermines the conditions of education for the youth, encouraging the exclusion and desertion of formal education. Nowadays, 113 millions of children don't go to school and 130 millions of young people are illiterate. Against its commercialization, we demand full access to public, free and quality education. Scientific and technological breakthroughs that should be considered the property of humanity are retained and restricted in their use by capitalism. The Internet continues to be inaccessible to the vast majority. For example, Sub-Saharan Africa has a mere 0, 1% of the world's internet connections, while it consists of 10% of the world's population. We demand that science and technological breakthroughs be used to benefit of youth and peoples, instead of being used as one more way of profit. Access to basic services continues to be severely limited two billion people around the world don't have access to electricity. The development of the mass media and other information channels does not reflect a process of democratization with respect to access to and the production of information and culture. Most of the world's information centers are in the hands of transnational companies, and the content of this information is determined by the class interests of the dominant ideology and against the interests of young people and students. In this global battle, the people's counteroffensive cannot be waged exclusively on the economic field; it must also be fought at the ideological level, which is being used for the alienation and domination, especially of young people, mainly by creating false needs and promote individualism. Therefore, our educational and cultural efforts must be promoted by all possible means; these efforts have made much progress in recent years, and allow as reach more people day by day. Nowadays, capitalism and imperialism, in deep crisis, are eliminating the majority of labor rights, especially those of young workers who suffer more the effects of unemployment. We fight for the right to jobs with rights. We support the organized struggle of young workers for the defense of the interests of all of the people by strengthening the trade union movement, against all new forms of exploitation before the intention to create a new, dehumanized generation that is deprived of rights of any type. The peoples have an inalienable right to avail ourselves of the planet's wealth and resources and to use them - in a rational way which does not harm the environment in order to cover the urgent needs of the three quarters of the humanity. Imperialism uses wars, promotes internal conflicts and State terrorism as tools to seize our nations' wealth. Currently, 40% of the world's population does not have access to basic sanitary conditions. More than 1 billion people do not have access to reliable sources of drinkable water. Among them, five million people, mostly children, die each year as a result of diseases closely associated to this problem.
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Labor in the Era of Globalization The gap between the richest and poorest sectors of the population grows wider. More than one billion people in the world live on less than one US dollar per day. Every three and a half seconds, another person dies of starving; the large majority of these people are children. Capitalism's planetary scope also results in the uneven distribution of the world's economic power. The 24 richest countries held 85% of the world's riches. An unfair international division of work and the existence of "foreign debts" make countries in debt dependent on richer countries. The situation of so-called "underdeveloped countries" is the result of the relations of domination that capitalist centers impose on these nations. The perpetuation of these relations of dependency is vital to capitalism. South-South cooperation is a strategic need for our people that have already achieved positive results against the monopoly interests of great powers. We have to promote all possible ways for exchange, communication and coordinated action among youth and student organizations, and the people in general, in order to collectively assume the challenge of following the path of development, which responds to their own needs and objectives. Ten million young people live with AIDS, mostly in Africa and Asia. Every year, around 3 million people die of malaria. We demand free and universal access to health care for the youth and the peoples, as the only way of guaranteeing the human right to health. These alarming figures, published in the United Nations' World Youth Report 2005, attest even more that we must fight against the causes of these harms. By bringing closer the overthrow of imperialism and exploitation, we are saving human lives. We must strengthen links among different social sectors, especially among young people, in which young workers, women, students, farmers, indigenous people and popular movements pursue their specific objectives in an ever more concerted manner, taking in other sectors and working with the conviction that collective achievements and progress will benefit everyone because the national conquests contribute to the global struggle against imperialism. We must participate in and strengthen local, national, regional and international anti-neoliberal, anti-globalization, anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist joint spaces, aiming to gather the organizations and the vast masses of poor people, which are more directly impacted by the current international order, having common objectives, exchanging our experiences and increasing our social influence. We express our solidarity towards the people and youth of Iraq in their struggle and resistance against imperialist occupation forces. We demand the immediate withdrawal of these forces and the preservation of Iraqi sovereignty and unity. We denounce imperialism's and its agents' repressive policies in the region and demand the immediate release of all political prisoners. We denounce imperialist attempts at changing the geopolitical map through the "Great Middle East Project", which uses discretionary criteria to select the countries that, according to its interests, are proclaimed to be ruled by dictatorships and, therefore, require "democratic" change. To achieve its aims, US interventionist efforts rely on the servile support of Israel's Zionist government, which plays a destabilizing role in the region and acts as an agent which indiscriminately eliminates resistance movements in the region. We therefore express our solidarity with the Palestinian people and youth in their struggle for the right to have an independent State with Jerusalem as its capital city and their right to stand up to the forces of occupation; we demand the return of refugees as per relevant UN resolutions and call upon the international community to support the struggle for the immediate dismantling of the apartheid wall which Israel is constructing in occupied territories of Palestine. We express our solidarity with the Syrian youth and people in their struggle and right to stand up against Israeli occupation, and demand its urgently and immediately withdraw from the "Syrian Golan". We repudiate the US Congress' extraterritorial decisions against Syria. We condemn imperialism's meddling in Lebanese internal affairs and its attempts to provoke instability in the county and the region; we support the struggle of Lebanese youth and people that stand up and fight for the liberation of Lebanese "Cheeba Farms" occupied by Israel, and we demand the immediate withdrawal of these forces from the region. We express our solidarity with the people and youth of Morocco in their struggle for the liberation of Sebta y Melilla, occupied by Spain.

Marchers in the opening day parade of the World Festival of Youth and Students carry a banner depicting Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Cuban President Fidel Castro. The people and youth of Europe, affected by the growing hegemony of the European Union, have a day by day strongly feel in their lives its true imperialist character, which also affects all young people around the world. We express our solidarity: towards the peoples of the Balkans, who for years have endured the consequences of war and the constant intervention of NATO and the EU; towards Cypriots, Greeks and Turkish Cypriots, in their struggle for reunification and we underline the urgent need to end the Turkish occupation and find a peaceful, viable and functional solution to the Cyprus problem, based on International Law and all relevant UN resolutions, acceptable to both communities; towards the struggle of the Irish people for the withdrawal of the British army, and for a united, independent Ireland; towards the parties, movements and militants that are facing persecution and restrictions, especially in Eastern Europe; towards the children, youth and people of former socialist countries, who, in recent years, have endured an alarming situation characterized by hunger, misery, unemployment, illiteracy, drug abuse, lack of essential medical services and the absence of democratic rights, all as a result of capitalist restoration; towards the millions of refugees and immigrants living in European Fortress who are constantly overexploited, treated as lowlifes and used as a pretext for the implementation of reactionary measures, to the detriment of all people and youth; towards all the peoples and the youth in the continent that work and fight against imperialist domination and exploitation. We call upon the young people of the world to express their solidarity towards Korean youth for the reunification of its country under the principles of independence, peace, national unity and the June 15 North-South Joint Declaration, and denounce the presence of US troops under parallel 38 in addition to its permanent policy of destabilization in the region. We express our solidarity towards the people and youth of Nepal in their struggle for democracy and human rights. We demand the return of all Bhutanese refuges to their country with respect and dignity. We express our solidarity towards the struggle of student, youth, and democratic movements in Myanmar, for democracy and against the military junta and the repressive actions undertaken against its people. We express support for Sri Lanka's progressive movements struggle for national unity and against imperialist attempts at dividing the country and destabilizing the region. We salute the Vietnamese youth and people in their struggle for national independence and socialism, at a time when the 60th anniversary of the birth of their sovereign republic is celebrated, and we express our solidarity towards the Vietnamese victims of the US' Agent Orange / Dioxin in their struggle for justice. The main root cause of the problems of young people in Africa has been the imperialist forces that parade themselves as saviors and lovers of this continent but have in fact plunged Africa into never ending warfare and internal conflict in attempts at retaining its rich natural resources. We support the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) as a tool and plan that might contribute to promoting common understanding, peace, political stability and development among African nations and solve common problems faced by their peoples. We urge young people around the world to step up their fight against imperialism and neo-colonialism, placing special emphasis on respect for the sovereign States and their right to decide and straighten out on their internal issues. We denounce imperialist intervention in Zimbabwe, a sovereign State capable of addressing its own internal issues and demand the lifting of unjustified sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe and its people. We extend our solidarity towards and support for the people and youth of Western Sahara in their struggle for the right to freedom and self-determination of the Saharawi people, as per UN resolutions, and demand the release of Saharawi political prisoners. We have witnessed with great concern how our brothers and sisters in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Ivory Coast, and Benin have wrestled with internal conflicts and war. We denounce the dictatorship and autocratic monarchy in Swaziland and support its people and their right to choose the kind of government they want to live under. We must strengthen efforts for peace and human rights in Sudan and support the current peace process. We must continue to support initiatives which seek to fight and eradicate poverty and hunger in Africa. We highlight the need to provide relevant institutional and political support for the attainment of peace and development in the Horn of Africa (Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea). We congratulate the people of Angola for their efforts to establish and maintain peace in their country and call on people to make an active contribution to the reconstruction of Angola. We vigorously demand the total eradication and unconditional cancellation of the African debt. Winds of change and revolution are blowing in Latin America again, proving that there are true alternatives for the people and that the firmness of principles, the people's organization and the proper interpretation of this time of offensive can deal a harsh blow to imperialism and its lackeys. This is demonstrated by the defeat of US attempts at imposing the Free Trade Agreement for the Americas (FTAA) on Latin America and the powerful emergence of an alternative proposal for Latin American unity (ALBA), based on principles of political, economical, social and cultural integration. Similarly, we support initiatives like the Community of South American Nations. Cuba continues to be an example of resistance and the upholding of principles, where the blockade and acts of aggressions crash against a dignified people, with which the new generations of young people and students around the world close ranks, demanding also the release of the 5 Cubans unjustly imprisoned by the US government. The peoples of the countries that share the territory of Amazonia and the Andean mountain range rebel against poverty and injustices; indigenous people struggle for their right to self-determination and for respect of their cultures; Colombia demonstrates that it is not the name of a plan for imperialist domination but rather represents an essential road towards peace, to which young people and students are committed; Central America and the Caribbean endure the betrayal of corrupt governments, the implementation of neo-colonial policies and armed interventions, as Puerto Rico and Haiti have witnessed; in the South Cone, imperialism does not resign itself to the strides of peoples, who are seeking and finding their own paths based on the central participation of the masses, in spite of the exception of a few governments which bow to imperialism. The peoples and young people of the world express their solidarity towards all of them. In this context we have gathered for this Festival, full of joy and driven by a combative spirit, to express our unwavering solidarity towards the youth and people of Venezuela, with special reference to the Venezuelan delegates and volunteers, towards their Bolivarian Revolution, which welcomed us with open arms. We have seen what a united people can do when it decides commit itself fully freedom and to attaining national progress. We have also witnessed how Venezuela joins its brothers and sisters in their struggles across the continent and the world. Venezuela can count on the willingness of the young people and students of the world to step forward should imperialism attempt to thwart its efforts. The 16th WFYS broke through the censorship and lifted the blockade on information imposed by imperialism, which could not prevent us from sharing experiences, strengthening our bonds, reaching agreements, getting to know each other better, having a clearer and more global understanding of our problems and their causes, and assuming the collective commitment of uniting all of our efforts to eliminate those problems; defending and fighting for the rights of the people, youth and students wherever they are at risk, improving the organization and mobilization of the youth and student movement, and raising its political and social consciousness through concerted actions. We come to the end of a process which has spanned several months. Now we are in a better position to continue our struggle through our respective local, national, regional and international organizations and structures against our common enemies: imperialism, exploitation and war. In coming years, prior to next Festival, we will continue to struggle and to expand the scope of our actions on many occasions, with ever greater strength and determination. This is, more than anything, what guarantees the success of the 17th WFYS and the continuation of its glorious history in this century that begins and that shall become the century of the peoples and the youth, the century of the people's victory over imperialism. For Peace and Solidarity, We Struggle against Imperialism and War!

Delegates to the 16th World Festival of Youth and Students Caracas, Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, 15th August 2005.

The American Empire: Out of Step with the World

2005-08-22T12:07:00.000-07:00

“...freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved. ”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt

by Jack MacAndrew, August 22, 2005

I suppose it is highly unlikely that George W. Bush or any of his right-wing deep thinkers would give the time of day to anything said or thought by FDR, perhaps the greatest President of the United States in the 20th (or maybe any other) century. It is simply too much of a stretch for W. and the rest to accept and understand the wisdom underlying the great man's words.
(Indeed, one of Mr. Bush's current failed enterprises is his attempt to dismantle FDR's greatest legacy, the American Social Security system, which provides a minimal amount of subsistence to old folks in their declining years.)
The thinking in the White House these days is more akin to the parting shot of a fellow from the conservative think tank, American Enterprise Institute, ideologically in tune with the Bushites, who delivered the following homily on Meet the Press, Sunday last, that went something like this: The social advances of women have nothing to do with the creation of democracy. In 1900 we had a democracy in America, but women didn't have the vote. If we can succeed in establishing a 1900 style democracy in Iraq, we should be satisfied.
Ever since not finding a single Weapon of Mass Destruction, nor any sign of the development of nuclear weapons, nor any other saleable reason to declare war on Iraq, President Bush has been trying to convince the American people that the cause of freedom and the establishment of a democratic state in Iraq were reasons enough for the deaths of more than 1800 (and counting) young Americans.
This, and the nonsense about fighting terror in Iraq rather than on American shores, constituted the “noble cause” for which young Americans were expected to willingly put themselves in harm's way. This constituted the rationale for Mr. Bush's War.
For quite a spell it was enough for most Americans. But then, as the daily counting of American casualties began to mount, the realization began to seep through into Middle America, that Mr. Bush's War is a war without end; that there will be never be a surrender by America's enemies; that America, and the American Empire is out of step with the rest of the world.
And then came the lady in the ditch.
It is axiomatic in the communications business that people understand a story when they can mirror themselves in it — when they “feel” the story; when it touches basic emotions. That is why Cindy Sheehan became a media phenomenon.
There she was, a mother whose son had given his life in Mr. Bush's “noble cause.” Mrs. Sheehan was angry about that loss. She took her anger to the ditch alongside that dusty Texas road, literally living in the ditch, as she tried and tried to get an audience with her President.
And she became the flashpoint, rallying symbol, for all the uneasiness about Mr. Bush's War beginning to creep through the hinterland of Middle America.
George Bush and his advisers stumbled, and stumbled badly when the President refused to meet with Cindy Sheehan. The presidential PR strategy went off the road and into the ditch as well, except that the President became perceived as a cowardly and craven commander-in-chief, lacking the cojones or plain good manners to invite Cindy Sheehan for tea and sympathy.
Instead, they tried to “Swift Boat” her. That's a term invented after a group pf Vietnam veterans backing Bush in the last presidential election organized a campaign against John Kerry's reputation as a hero of that war.
As Cindy Sheehan began to attract national and then international attention to the point that her voice was cracking from the hundreds of interviews she gave, the Bushites began to plan their counter attack on the character of this woman who had lost a son in Mr. Bush's war.
The standard political tactic in such situations is to try and destroy the character of whoever it is that has become bothersome, and that is exactly what the Bush PR machine tried to do. This time there is every indication in the plummeting personal polls judging Mr. Bush's performance in office, that it just didn't work. Sixty-two percent of Americans in one poll expressed dissatisfaction with his handling of his war in Iraq.
New York Times journalist Frank Rich, a severe critic of all things Bush, put it this way: “...this White House no longer has any more control over the insurgency at home than it does over the one in Iraq.”
Ironic, is it not, that it should be a woman who can face down the Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful nation in the history of the world, by standing for the cause of truth in a dusty ditch near Crawford, Texas.
Ironic is it not, that it is an American woman who so profoundly exposes the vacuity of the “noble cause” for which Casey Sheehan and more than 1800 other young Americans have so far given their lives — one which would place women's rights at a level practiced in the United States over a century ago.
In case you've forgotten, women had few rights in them times, including the right to vote. In law, women were defined as the property of men. They still are, in the fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law, which could become the new law of Iraq, replacing the more secular approach of Saddam Hussein.
That is “freedom and democracy” by some other name, by some other political standard, by some other political definition — call it Bushocracy — where rich men are more free than anybody else, or perhaps it's simply more of the same old political shell game.
Mr. Bush is being pushed by demands that he bring the troops home. He refuses to set any timetable, except to make vague promises about some troops coming home sometime. In fact, the Americans won't be giving up their occupation of Iraq for some time to come; not while the CIA is building the largest station of spying in the world in Baghdad, and while 14 permanent military bases are being built in the country, and while the Pentagon aims to have at least 100,000 troops on the ground (138,000 are there now) in the year 2009.
Meanwhile Mr. Bush steps up the image-sanitizing campaign at home — making speeches that continue to tie his war to the 9/11 terrorists (even though that big lie has been desiccated many times); organizing a “Freedom Walk” for September 11 to further cement the lie in the American psyche; and bringing back a trusted adviser to construct and deliver a tissue of lies designed to repair the United States' tattered reputation around the globe.
One thing Mr. Bush will not contemplate, apparently, is any change in the policies that have caused the decline in American prestige at home and abroad.
And that means there is not a big enough can of turd polish in the world to tidy up the image of America emanating from the White House as long as the Bushites are in residence.

Jack MacAndrew writes from Prince Edward Island.

WHAT'S CONDUCIVE TO PEACE

2005-08-19T09:15:00.000-07:00

By Radzini Oledan, Slice of Life

"...peace building entails strengthening or creating democratic structures and processes that are fair and responsive to the needs of the entire population."

THE culture of peace must be taken by government, communities and individuals to heart and mind. While nothing less than a transformation of the status quo is required, the first step is enabling the children and youth to understand that security can no longer come from the barrel of a gun. Peace and security defined in terms of human and ecological needs must replace the prevailing definition based on armaments, violent conflict and war. However, it's true that peace building is not about the imposition of solutions but rather a creation of opportunities. The challenge is to identify and nurture the political, economic and social space, within which local communities can identify, develop and employ the resources necessary to build a peaceful, prosperous and just society. Ultimately, peace building entails strengthening or creating democratic structures and processes that are fair and responsive to the needs of the entire population-institutions which protect and advance the political rights and responsibilities of state and civil society, and which strengthen human security through the promotion of robust and sustainable economic, judicial and social practices. More than the simple advocacy of the avoidance of war, peace building should be based on human rights, tolerance and respect. This could be something more systematic and lasting from the bottom up. For the foundation of peace building and peace education goes beyond the science of conflict that preoccupies the current curricula and aims to create the knowledge, skills and attitudes that will allow people of all ages and levels to develop the behavioral changes needed to prevent the occurrence of conflict, to resolve it peacefully and to create the social conditions conducive to peace. Human rights, cooperation and toleration remain to be the main instruments for lasting peace and not power and subjugation to maintain order. Building the culture of peace then should also recognize the urgent need to correct social and political injustice. Mindanawons had enough of the war culture, which has destroyed so many lives and put the island in perpetual dependence to foreign development assistance for "development" to come in. The challenge then is to ensure that the vision and requirements for peace education are not sublimated by the daily grind of politics that perpetuates the culture of violence. The agenda for peace must transcend the daily market place of politics and confront the war mentality head-on. In teaching the children and youth "how" and not "what" to think we will open up the political process to include those it claims to encompass, move beyond the prevailing violence and cynicism and put peace on the agenda. After all, the most effective way to inspire peace activism and thus, change is through learning.

2005-08-16T10:51:00.000-07:00

The Success of the 'Grieving Mom'
By Jeffrey Feldman, Frameshop
Posted on August 16, 2005, Printed on August 16, 2005

http://www.alternet.org/story/24071/I
In broad terms, the success of the "grieving mom" phrase indicates that Americans are now thinking about the War in Iraq through the frame of the family, rather than thinking about Iraq through the frame of "terrorism" or "ideology."
If Democrats want to build on Cindy Sheehan's success, we must accept that last week's media storm was less about Cindy's demand to meet or her accusation against the President, than about her image as a "grieving mother."
Of the 122,000 pages that result from a Google search of grieving mom, almost all of them are stories about Cindy Sheehan. Clearly, "grieving mom" was the magic phrase at the heart Cindy Sheehan's success.
In fact, while many Democrats believe that Cindy Sheehan's protest has focused the nation's attention on the lies of the Bush White House, the reality is exactly the opposite.
Prior to the Cindy Sheehan story, the media was dividing its time between the "Memogate" story and the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court. Despite the staggering complexity of Memogate, the more the media focused on the sinister and criminal acts of the White House political team, the more Americans saw the President as dishonest.
When Memogate ruled the headlines, the country's attention was focused not just on the President's lies, but on the cloud of deception that surrounded the White House. Similarly, even though John Robert's seemed like a squeaky clean nomination to the Supreme Court, the more the media discussed him, the more Americans saw the President as untruthful. When John Roberts topped the headlines, America's attention was drawn, slowly but surely, to what the President was hiding (by refusing to release documents about Roberts' past to Congress).
Rather than extending America's focus on Presidential lies, the meteoric rise of Cindy Sheehan to the top of the headlines shifted our attention to a "grieving mother." Curiously, this shift seems to have happened despite the fact that Sheehan's personal writings and public statements tried to intensify the national focus on the President's lies and refusal to meet with her.
So what is the bottom line of the Sheehan protest? What did the Sheehan week achieve?
In broad terms, the success of the "grieving mom" phrase indicates that Americans are now thinking about the War in Iraq through the frame of the family, rather than thinking about Iraq through the frame of "terrorism" or "ideology."
The implications of this shift from "terrorism" to "family" in the country's thinking about Iraq are profound. Not only does this shift forewarn a political tidal wave soon to break on the President's foreign policy, but also of a much deeper, tectonic shift in the strategy beneath all the recent gains in the Republican party.
The great success of Cindy Sheehan's protest, therefore, is no less than the moral authority for the Democratic Party to speak for the American family.
In other words, there are now two very clear claims on the American family at the heart of politics, and the claim by the anti-war Democrats has so much momentum that it has already forced every single Republican candidate running for office to rethink their strategies for the next few years.
At the heart of the Republican claim to speak for the family is a very narrow idea of marriage, and a reactionary nervousness about "the culture" as a cause for social problems in America. For the Republicans, the key to translating this claim into political gains has been a broad scale effort to use state legislators to strip homosexuals of the full rights and privileges of American citizenship.
At the heart of the Democratic claim to speak for the family is a broad and powerful idea that the war in Iraq is killing America's children for no apparent reason, and a growing anger than unless American soldiers leave Iraq, America's hard-working and honest communities will be destroyed forever. For the Democrats, the track record for translating this claim into political gains has been very short -- so far only one Ohio candidate has applied this claim to political gains.
One need only think back a few months to see a Democratic party that was ripping out its hair to figure out how to stem the electoral bleeding caused by the Republican so-called "family values" debate. In two successive elections, Republicans made incredible gains telling people that they were the party of "family values," while the Democrats tried as hard as they could to say more than "We are, too."
But now, as a result of the incredible courage and endurance of one woman, the Democratic Party has a solid, tested strategy for speaking about the family in a way that draws Americans into the values and ideals of the Democratic Party.
At this point, it would seem that the main obstacle to turning Cindy Sheehan's achievements into real political gains would be the circle of overpaid and out-of-touch consultants that suffocate the potential and idealism of the Democrats' high-profile national candidates.
While Cindy Sheehan has lead America's families in an emotional and meaningful discussion, the consultants are still trying to distract voters into thinking that our potential Presidential candidates are the true voice of "staying the course" in Iraq. We can only hope that somebody with real influence in Washington -- and the ability to fire these consultants who leading our candidates astray -- has the same courage as Cindy Sheehan.
In the meantime, Democrats working at the grassroots level -- in the blogs and elsewhere -- would benefit from taking a minute to reflect on the real gains that we have made in the past weeks. Bringing President Bush's lies to light is important work and it must continue apace. But the Democratic Party has been searching for some time, now, to find a way to reclaim the moral authority to speak on behalf of American families. As a result of Cindy Sheehan's protest, that moral authority is now with us.
Let's hold tight and not let go.

2005-08-11T17:28:00.000-07:00

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2005-08-11T09:35:00.000-07:00

Rage Against the Killing of the Light
By Norman Solomon, AlterNet
Posted on August 10, 2005, Printed on August 11, 2005

Mid-August 2005 may be remembered as a moment in U.S. history when the president could no longer get away with the media trick of solemnly patting death on its head.
Unreality is a hallmark of media coverage for war. Yet -- most of all -- war is about death and suffering. War makers thrive on abstractions. Their media successes depend on evasion.
President Bush has tried to keep the loved ones of America's war dead at middle distance, bathed in soft fuzzy light: close enough to exploit for media purposes, distant enough to insulate the commander in chief's persona from the intrusion of wartime mourning in America.
What's going on this week, outside the perimeter of the ranch-style White House in Crawford, is some reclamation of reality in public life. Cindy Sheehan has disrupted the media-scripted shadow play of falsity. And some other relatives of the ultimately sacrificed have been en route to the vigil in the dry hot Texas ditches now being subjected to enormous media attention a few miles from the vacationing president's accommodations.
At this point, Bush's spinners are desperate to divert the media spotlight from Sheehan. But other bereft mothers arriving in Crawford will hardly be more compatible with war-making myths.
Consider the perspective of Celeste Zappala, whose oldest son Sherwood Baker was a sergeant in the Pennsylvania National Guard when he died 16 months ago in Baghdad. She is a co-founder of Gold Star Families for Peace, and what she has to say is gut-wrenching and infuriating: "George Bush talks about caring about the troops who get killed in Iraq. Sherwood was killed protecting the people looking for weapons of mass destruction on April 26, 2004. This was one month after Bush was joking [at the Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner, on March 24] about looking for weapons of mass destruction. And then my Sherwood is dead trying to protect people looking for them because Bush said it was so important to the safety of our country."
Disregarding the tacit conventions of jingoistic newspeak, Zappala adds: "I don't want anyone else to go through this, not an American, not an Iraqi, no one. As a person of faith, I firmly believe we have the ability to provide better answers on how to resolve conflict than what Bush is offering us. I've tried to meet with Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, I was turned away by armed guards. It's incumbent upon everybody to take responsibility about what is happening in our country. I have no recourse but to go to Crawford to do what I can to change the disastrous course we are currently on and to bear witness to the true costs of this war."
The true costs. Not the lies of omission.
War PR and war grief have collided at the Crawford crossroads at a time when the Bush administration is in the midst of launching its scam about supposed plans to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. On Tuesday, the Associated Press reported that a spokesman for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld "said he did not know how many extra troops might be needed during the referendum and election period" through the end of this year. The AP dispatch added: "Other officials have said that once the election period has passed and the troop total recedes to the 138,000 level, a further reduction in the range of 20,000 to 30,000 is possible next spring and summer. That could change, however, if the insurgency intensifies or an insufficient number of U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces prove themselves battle-ready."
When a mass killer is at the helm of the ship of state, taking a bow now and again while "Hail to the Chief" booms from big brass bands, a significant portion of the country's population feels revulsion. And often a sense of powerlessness -- a triumph for media manipulation. Passivity is the health of the manipulative media state.
Cindy Sheehan and Celeste Zappala have joined with others in Crawford to insist that death is not a message for more death -- that we can understand death as a profound reality check, imploring us to affirm and defend life.
"Rage, rage against the dying of the light," Dylan Thomas wrote. The unavoidable dying of life is bad enough. The killing is unacceptable.

Norman Solomon’s latest book, “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” was just published.

© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

2005-08-10T16:41:00.000-07:00

Subject: Tell your friends: Support Cindy Sheehan

MoveOn is taking out an ad in President Bush's local newspaper in support of Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq who is camped outside Bush's ranch in Texas asking for a meeting with the president. They'll publish the number of signers and the best comments in a full two-page spread in the newspaper nearest to Crawford (The Waco Tribune Herald) while Cindy holds her vigil.

Can you sign and spread the word before the 3:00 PM Friday print deadline?http://political.moveon.org/meetwithcindy/

2005-08-10T13:19:00.000-07:00

2005-08-09T09:14:00.000-07:00

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JAX...YOU ARE IN MY HEART FOREVER!
THANK YOU ALWAYS FOR BEING MY DAUGHTER.

2005-08-02T17:40:00.000-07:00

When News Isn’t News
By Molly Ivins
From the August 2005 Issue
I hope this is not too Inside Baseball for you, but I am truly hacked with what the bloggers call the MSM, or “mainstream media.” The New York Times and The Washington Post have both gone way out of their way to deny that the Downing Street Memos (it’s now plural) are news.
Let me tell you something. Like many of you, during the entire lead-up to the war with Iraq, I thought the whole thing was a terrible idea. I bring this up not to prove how smart we are, but to emphasize that I followed the debate closely and probably unconsciously searched for evidence that reinforced what I already thought. I read not only the American press but the European press as well. I think I read most of the leftwing publications in this country, as well as a good number on the right, and I read the Times, the Post, The Wall Street Journal, and several Texas papers every day. It’s my job. This is what I do for a living—try to stay well informed.
When I read the first Downing Street Memo, my eyes bugged out and my jaw fell open. It was news to me, and as I have tried to indicate, I’m no slouch at keeping up. I had to write a column that day, and there was no way I could let that pass without at least pointing out what it said.
Here are the aggravating factors. Tom Friedman, columnist for The New York Times, recently wrote that “liberals” no longer want to talk about the war because we were against it to start with and probably hope it ends in disaster. Jesus God Almighty, who does he think we are? Does this man who has a column for The New York Times, one of the most prestigious jobs in American journalism, actually think we are out here cheering every time another American is killed? Mr. Friedman, real, actual, honest-to-God American liberals are out here in the heartland and we know the kids who are dying in Iraq. They are from our hometowns. We know their parents. That’s why we hate this war. That’s why we tried to tell everybody else it was a ghastly idea. We are not sitting here gloating because it is the horrible FUBAR we said it would be. We are in agony because it is as bad as we said it would be. Cassandra took no joy in the fall of Troy. I have said from the beginning that if this thing worked out the way Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Cheney all said it would, I would be perfectly happy to get down on my knees and kiss George Bush’s feet. I do literally mean that.
The second aggravation is that the very prestigious papers that are now dismissing the Downing Street Memos have already themselves admitted that their pre-war coverage was—I don’t know, you pick the adjective: Slack? Inadequate? Less than rigorous? Wrong? And now they’re saying, “Oh hell, this isn’t news, we knew it all along”?
I don’t know if these memos represent an impeachable offense, but they strike me as a hell of lot worse than anything Richard Nixon ever contemplated. He used the government for petty political vindictiveness. Shit, I’d settle for that again over what we’re looking at now.
Michael Kinsley out at the Los Angeles Times, which has certainly done some commendable reporting on this war and taken the heat for it too, also dismisses the memos. I don’t get it. You suddenly find evidence that this Administration lied to all of us about war—and your reaction is not to go after the Administration but to dismiss the evidence? And to put down the people who are calling you screaming about why you haven’t bothered to mention it? What is wrong with this picture?
Yes, it seemed to me that the Administration had been planning the war for months before they ever began their PR campaign. But I was not the god damn head of British intelligence in the summer of 2002.
The irony of Deep Throat surfacing after all these years in the midst of this memo mess is almost too precious. Does The Washington Post have any hungry young reporters on Metro anymore?

2005-08-02T17:32:00.000-07:00

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2005-08-02T16:56:00.000-07:00

Quite Fitting, actually...

If only Rothbard could see things now!

2005-07-31T11:42:00.000-07:00

How the American Right became an enemy of peace and freedom (1964)
Saturday 30th July 2005

The Transformation of the American Right
by Murray N. Rothbard
First published in Continuum, Summer 1964, pp. 220-231.
In the spate of recent books and articles on the burgeoning conservative movement, little has been said of its governing ideas and its intellectual leadership. Instead, attention has been centered on the mass phenomena of the Right-wing: The Billy James Hargises, the Birchers, the various crusaders for God and country. And yet, the neglect of the ruling ideas of the Right-wing has obscured its true nature, and has hidden an enormous and significant change in the very nature of the Right that has taken place since World War II. In fact, due to the total absence of dialogue between various parts of the political spectrum in this country, both Right and Left are largely conducting their argument in what used to be called a severe "cultural lag"; both sides still mistakenly believe that the categories of the debate are the same as they were immediately after the war. In particular, under cover of a certain continuity of rhetoric, the intellectual content and goals of the Right-wing have been radically transformed in the last decade and a half, and this transformation has gone virtually unnoticed on either Right or Left.
The modern American Right began, in the 1930’s and 1940’s, as a reaction against the New Deal and the Roosevelt Revolution, and specifically as an opposition to the critical increase of statism and state intervention at home, and to war and state intervention abroad. The guiding motif of what we might call the "old American Right" was a deep and passionate commitment to individual liberty, and to the belief that this liberty, in the personal and the economic spheres, was gravely menaced by the growth and power of the Leviathan state, at home and abroad. As individuals and libertarians, the old Right felt that the growth of statism at home and abroad were corollaries: New Deal coercion, on behalf of an illusory domestic security, was matched by the ultimate coercion of war in pursuit of the illusion of "collective security" abroad; and both forms of intervention brought with them a swelling of state power over society and over the individual. At home, the Supreme Court was looked to for a "strict construction" of the Constitution to check governmental depredation of the liberty of the individual, and conscription was denounced as a return to an unconstitutional form of involuntary servitude.
As the force of the New Deal reached its heights, both foreign and domestic, during World War II, a beleaguered and tiny libertarian opposition began to emerge and to formulate its total critique of prevailing trends in America. Unfortunately, the Left, almost totally committed to the cause of World War II as well as to extensions of the domestic New Deal, saw in the opposition not a principled and reasoned stand for liberty, but a mere blind "isolationism" at best, and, at worst, a conscious or unconscious "parroting of the Goebbels line." It should not be forgotten that the Left, not so long ago, was not above engaging in its own form of plot-hunting and guilt-by-association. If the Right had its McCarthys and Dillings, the Left had its John Roy Carlsons.
Now it is certainly true that much of this nascent and emerging libertarian Right was tainted with blind chauvinism, with scorn of "foreigners," etc., and that even then an unfortunate bent for plot-hunting was becoming evident. But still the prevailing trend, certainly among the intellectuals of the Right, was a principled and trenchant opposition to war and to its concomitant destruction of life and liberty, and of human values. The Beardian ideal of abstention from European wars was essentially not a chauvinist scorn of the stranger, but a call for America to harken to its ancient aim of serving the world as a beacon-light of peace and liberty, rather than as master of a house of correction to set everyone in the world aright by force of bayonet. If the "isolationists" were not themselves libertarian, they were at least moving in that direction, and their ideas needed only refinement and systematization to arrive at that goal. In the devotion to peace, in the anxiety to limit and confine state military interventions and consequent wars, there was little difference between the Right-wing principle of neutrality of a generation ago, and the Left-wing principle of neutralism today. When we realize this, the essential obsolescence of the old categories of "Right" and "Left" begins to become clear.
The intellectual leaders of this old Right of World War II and the immediate aftermath were then and remain today almost unknown among the larger body of American intellectuals: Albert Jay Nock, Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, Frank Chodorov, Garet Garrett. It almost takes a great effort of the will to recall the principles and Objectives of the old Right, so different is the current Right-wing today. The stress, as we have noted, was on individual liberty in all its aspects as against state power: on freedom of speech and action, on economic liberty, on voluntary relations as opposed to coercion, on a peaceful foreign policy. The great threat to that liberty was state power, in its invasion of personal freedom and private property and in its burgeoning military despotism. Philosophically, the major emphasis was on the natural rights of man, arrived at by an investigation through reason of the laws of man’s nature. Historically, the intellectual heroes of the old Right were such libertarians as John Locke, the Levellers, Jefferson, Paine, Thoreau, Cobden, Spencer, and Bastiat.
In short, this libertarian Right based itself on eighteenth and nineteenth century liberalism, and began systematically to extend that doctrine even further. The contemporary canon of the Right consisted of Nock’s Our Enemy the State and Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, Paterson’s The God of the Machine (the chapter, "Our Japanized Educational System," virtually launched the postwar reaction against progressive education), and H. L. Mencken’s A Mencken Chrestomathy. Its organ of opinion was the now-forgotten monthly broadsheet analysis, edited by Nock’s leading disciple, Frank Chodorov. The political thought of this group was well summarized by Chodorov:
"...the state is an anti-social organization, originating in conquest and concerned only with confiscating production.... There are two ways of making a living, Nock explained. One is the economic means, the other the political means. The first consists of the application of human effort to raw materials so as to bring into being things that people want; the second is the confiscation of the rightful property of others....
"The state is that group of people, who having got hold of the machinery of compulsion, legally or otherwise, use it to better their circumstances; that is the political means." Nock would hasten to explain that the state consists not only of politicians, but also those who make use of the politicians for their own ends; that would include those we call pressure groups, lobbyists and all who wangle special privileges out of the politicians. All the injustices that plague "advanced" societies, he maintained, are traceable to the workings of the state organizations that attach themselves to these societies.
When the cold war so swiftly succeeded World War II, the old Right was not bemused - let alone did it lead the war-cry. It is difficult to conceive now that the main political opposition to the cold war was led, not by the Left, then being brought into the war-camp by the ADA, but by the "extreme-Right-wing Republicans" of that era: by the Howard Buffetts and the Frederick C. Smiths. It was this group that opposed the Truman Doctrine, NATO, conscription and American entry into the Korean War - with little grateful acknowledgement by Left-wing peace groups then or now. In attacking the Truman Doctrine on the floor of Congress, Rep. Buffett, who was to be Taft’s Midwestern campaign manager in 1952, declared:
"Even if it were desirable, America is not strong enough to police the world by military force. If that attempt is made, the blessings of liberty will be replaced by coercion and tyranny at home. Our Christian ideals cannot be exported to other lands by dollars and guns. Persuasion and example are the methods taught by the Carpenter of Nazareth, and if we believe in Christianity we should try to advance our ideals by his methods. We cannot practice might and force abroad and retain freedom at home. We cannot talk world cooperation and practice power politics."
Among the intellectual leadership of the old Right, Frank Chodorov vigorously set forth the libertarian position on both the cold war and the suppression of communists at home. The latter was summed up in the aphorism, "The way to get rid of communists in government jobs is to abolish the jobs." Or, more extensively:
"And now we come to the spy-hunt - which is, in reality, a heresy trial. What is it that perturbs the inquisitors? They do not ask the suspects: Do you believe in Power? Do you adhere to the idea that the individual exists for the glory of the state? . . . Are you against taxes, or would you raise them until they absorbed the entire output of the country? . . . Are you opposed to the principle of conscription? Do you favor more ‘social gains’ under the aegis of an enlarged bureaucracy? . . . Such questions might prove embarrassing to the investigators. The answers might bring out a similarity between their ideas and purposes and those of the suspected. They too worship Power. Under the circumstances, they limit themselves to one question: Are you a member of the Communist Party? And this turns out to mean, have you aligned yourselves with the Moscow branch of the church?
"Power-worship is presently sectarianized along nationalistic lines . . . each nation guards its orthodoxy. . . . Where Power is attainable, the contest between rival sects is unavoidable. If, as seems likely, the American and Russian cults come into violent conflict, apostasy will disappear. . . . War is the apotheosis of Power, the ultimate expression of the faith and solidification of its achievement. . . .
". . .The case against the communists involves a principle of freedom that is of transcending importance. It is the right to be wrong. Heterodoxy is a necessary condition of a free society. . . . The right to make a choice . . . is important to me, for the freedom of selection is necessary to my sense of personality; it is important to society, because only from the juxtaposition of ideas can we hope to approach the ideal of truth.
"Whenever I choose an idea or label it ‘right,’ I imply the prerogative of another to reject that idea and label it ‘wrong.’ To invalidate his right is to invalidate mine. . . .If men are punished for espousing communism, shall we stop there? Once we deny the right to be wrong we put a vise on the human mind and put the temptation to turn the handle into the hands of ruthlessness."
And, in May 1949, Chodorov, praising a pamphlet on The Militarization of America issued by The National Council Against Conscription, wrote that "The state cannot intervene in the economic affairs of society without building up its coercive machinery, and that, after all, is militarism. Power is the correlative of politics."
The old Right reached its full flower in devotion to peace during the Korean War, which provoked several trenchant efforts during the early 1950’s. The Foundation for Economic Education, generally concerned with free-market economics, devoted several studies to the problem. Thus, Leonard E. Read wrote in Conscience on the Battlefield (1951):
"It is strange that war, the most brutal of man’s activities, requires the utmost delicacy in discussion . . . .War is liberty’s greatest enemy, and the deadly foe of economic progress . . . . To fight evil with evil is only to make evil general."
In the same year, Dr. F. A. Harper published an FEE pamphlet, In Search of Peace, in which he wrote:
"Charges of pacifism are likely to be hurled at anyone who in troubled times raises any question about the race into war. If pacifism means embracing the objective of peace, I am willing to accept the charge. If it means opposing all aggression against others, I am willing to accept the charge also. It is now urgent in the interest of liberty that many persons become ‘peacemongers’.
"So the nation goes to war, and while war is going on, the real enemy [the idea of slavery] - long ago forgotten and camouflaged by the processes of war - rides on to victory in both camps. . . . Further evidence that in war the attack is not leveled at the real enemy is the fact that we seem never to know what to do with ‘victory.’
" . . . Are the ‘liberated’ peoples to be shot, or all put in prison camps, or what? Is the national boundary to be moved? Is there to be further destruction of the property of the defeated. Or what? . . . False ideas can be attacked only with counter-ideas, facts, and logic. . . . Nor can the ideas of [Karl Marx] be destroyed today by murder or suicide of their leading exponent, or of any thousands or millions of the devotees. . . . Least of all can the ideas of Karl Marx be destroyed by murdering innocent victims of the form of slavery he advocated, whether they be conscripts in armies or victims caught in the path of battle."
Ideas must be met by ideas, on the battlefield of belief. And, as late as May 1955, Dean Russell wrote, in FEE’s The Conscription Idea:
"Those who advocate the ‘temporary loss’ of our freedom in order to preserve it permanently are advocating only one thing: the abolition of liberty. . . . However good their intentions may be, those people are enemies of your freedom and my freedom; and I fear them far more than I fear any potential Russian threat to my liberty. These sincere but highly emotional patriots are clear and present threats to freedom; the Russians are still thousands of miles away. . . .
The Russians would only attack us for either of two reasons: fear of our intentions or retaliation to our acts. . . . As long as we keep troops in countries on Russia’s borders, the Russians can be expected to act somewhat as we would act if Russia were to station troops in Guatemala or Mexico. . . .
"I can see no more logic in fighting Russia over Korea or Outer Mongolia, than in fighting England over Cyprus, or France over Morocco. . . . The historical facts of imperialism . . . are not sufficient reasons to justify the destruction of freedom within the United States by turning ourselves into a permanent garrison state. . . . We are rapidly becoming a caricature of the thing we profess to hate."
There is no need to multiply examples. Frank Chodorov consistently worked against the war drive in analysis and later, in 1954, as editor of the Freeman. The Right-wing libertarian journal Faith and Freedom featured, in April, 1954, an all-peace issue, with contributions by Garet Garrett, Robert LeFevre, the industrialist Ernest T. Weir, and the present writer. We might elaborate here on two neglected contributions in that period. One was an essay by Garrett ("The Rise of Empire," 1952, reprinted in The People’s Pottage, 1953) which pin-pointed the main issue of our time as the rise of a deplorable American imperialism: "We have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire." The other was a relatively unnoticed book by Louis Bromfield, A New Pattern for a Tired World (1954), which decried statism, war, conscription, and imperialism. Bromfield wrote with conviction of imperialism and of the revolution of the undeveloped countries:
"One of the great failures of our foreign policy throughout the world arises from the fact that we have permitted ourselves to be identified everywhere with the old, doomed, and rotting colonial-imperialist small European nations which once imposed upon so much of the world the pattern of exploitation and economic and political domination. . . . None of these rebellious, awakening peoples will . . . trust us or cooperate in any way so long as we remain identified with the economic colonial system of Europe, which represents, even in its capitalistic pattern, the last remnants of feudalism. . . . We leave these awakening peoples with no choice but to turn to Russian and communist comfort and promise of Utopia."
And on American cold-war policy, Bromfield charged:
"Our warmongers and the military apparently believe . . . that all other nations are unimportant and can be trampled under foot the moment either Russia or the U.S. sees fit to precipitate a war. . . . To this faction [the warmongers and the military] it seems of small concern that the nations lying between us and Russia would be the most terrible sufferers. . . . The growing ‘neutralism’ of the European nations is merely a reasonable, sensible, and civilized reaction, legitimate in every respect when all the factors from Russia’s inherent weaknesses to our own meddling and aggressiveness are taken into consideration. . . . The Korean situation . . . will not be settled until we withdraw entirely from an area in which we have no right to be and leave the peoples of that area to work out their own problems. . . ."
These quotations give the flavor of an era that is so remote as to make it seem incredible that such views should have dominated the American Right-wing. To the current Right-wing, which has virtually obliterated its own former position from its memory, such views today would be branded, at the very least, as "soft on communism." The radical transformation of the Right-wing can even be seen in the fate of something like the Bricker Amendment. Only a decade ago, the Bricker Amendment was the number-one foreign-policy plank of the Right-wing, dear to all the "little old ladies in tennis shoes" that used to form its mass base. And the reason the resurgent conservative movement, and its political embodiment in the Goldwater movement, have entirely buried the Bricker Amendment is because that Amendment, while defining not the most important or the most idealistic foreign-policy stance, was an expression of the "isolationism," or the fear of the effects of big government upon the individual, that bears no relation to today’s new Right.
Much of the Left, however, still writes as if the main trouble with today’s Right is its "isolationism," its wish to withdraw from foreign aid or international commitments. Others on the Left claim that the Right’s anticommunism is a mere cloak for laissez-faire economic views. There could not be a more mistaken analysis of the essence of the current position of the American Right, For that position is virtually the reverse: today’s Right-wing is directed, with passion, dedication, and even fanaticism to one overriding goal, to which all other possible goals are totally subordinate. And that goal is the nuclear annihilation of the Soviet Union. Here is the essence of the new Right, the gauge of the totality of its transformation. As one of its major theoreticians likes to put it: "I have a vision, a great vision of the future - a totally devastated Soviet Union." Here, in brief, is the vision that animates the conservative revival.
For the blight that destroyed the libertarianism of the Right-wing and effected its transformation was nothing less than hysterical anticommunism. It began with this kind of reasoning: there are two "threats" to liberty: the "internal" threat of domestic socialism, and the "external" threat of Soviet Russia. The external threat is the most important. Therefore, all energies must now be directed to battling and destroying that "threat." In the course of this shift of focus from statism to communism as the "enemy," the Right-wing somehow failed to see that the real "external" threat was not Soviet Russia, but a warlike foreign policy of global intervention, and especially the nuclear weapons of mass destruction used to back up such a policy. And they failed to see that the main architect in organizing a foreign policy of global nuclear intervention was the United States. In short, they failed to see that both the "external" and "internal" threats of statism to liberty were essentially domestic.
Under pressure of anticommunist hysteria, the Right-wing, despite its fondness for quasi-theological or moral cant, has imitated the communists themselves in virtually abandoning all moral principles except one: in this case, the destruction of all opposition, foreign and domestic. For the immorality of communism is not uniquely diabolic; it stems from the fact that for communists, all other moral principles are expendable before the overriding end of the maintenance and advance of the communist system. But, the Right-wing has similarly erected as its sole, overriding end the destruction of communists and communist countries, and all other considerations are scrapped to attain that end. There seems now to be one crucial difference, however; the communists are more convinced than ever that nuclear weapons of annihilation make imperative peaceful coexistence between states, and that social change must come about through internal changes within each state, where conflict would be relatively small-scale and confined. But the Right-wing has not only failed to learn this lesson; on the contrary, the more terrible modern weaponry has become, the more fanatically determined upon total war has the Right-wing grown. This seems to be a lunatic position, and undoubtedly it is, but it is important that non-Rightists realize that this is precisely the position of the present-day Right.
Now, of course, no one has ever wanted war per se; Hitler would not have attacked Soviet Russia, for example, if Russia had agreed to surrender unconditionally without war. And neither would the Right-wing launch an H-bomb attack on Russia if Khrushchev and his government were to resign and turn over the Soviet Union to, let us say, an American army of occupation. But that is the point: that nothing short of unconditional surrender would satisfy the Right-wing, or would deflect it from nuclear attack. How does the Right-wing justify a position that is prima facie monstrous and even crazed? The essential justification is, curiously enough, theological and Christian. It is even Catholic, for while the mass base of the Right-wing, apart from the Eastern cities, is fundamentalist-Protestant, the intellectual leaders are almost all either Catholic or "proto-Catholic." The justification is a willingness to destroy the world, and the human race along with it, for matters of high principle. The highest principle, as we have seen above, is the destruction of communists, who are, at least implicitly and sometimes explicitly, identified with the devil and his agents upon earth. And, after all, what does the destruction of the world matter when men’s immortal souls will continue in eternal life? As the leading publicist of the new Right has said: "If I had to ’push the button,’ I would push it unswervingly, in the firm knowledge that I am in the right." Those who may balk at this blithe attitude toward world destruction are accused of being cowards, and atheistic cowards at that, for only atheists would cling so adamantly to "mere biological life" when great principle is at stake. (Not being a Catholic, I will have to leave the theological refutation of this position to others; I am surprised, however, to hear that mass suicide and mass murder are looked upon approvingly by the Church.)
Another curious justification is the famous "red or dead" dichotomy. But in fact the stark choice of "red or dead" is just as unrealistic an alternative for America as the old "communist or fascist" choice posed by many of the Left in the 1930’s. There is at least one other choice: peaceful coexistence and joint nuclear disarmament. Moreover, choosing death over redness is suicide, and one would have thought that suicide was a grave sin for Christians. And finally this dichotomy allows no reference to the fact that approximately one billion people, now living in communist countries throughout the world, are choosing redness every day, by not committing suicide. Is there no lesson here? Does it make any sense, furthermore, to destroy these people, and untold Americans along with them, thus to "liberate" those who have made their own personal choice for redness over death? Is it moral, or Christian, to change their choice from life to death by force? In short, is it moral, or Christian, for American conservatives to annihilate millions of Russians, Poles, etc., to "liberate" through murder those who have already made their choice for life?
Also implicit in the Right-wing thesis is the view that the devil is omnipotent; that once communism "takes over," a country, it is doomed, and its population might as well be written off to the eternal abyss. That this is a starkly pessimistic view of mankind is obvious; and this is all the more curious in the light of the demonstrations by libertarian economists that socialism cannot provide a viable economic system for an industrial society. It also studiously ignores the enormous changes that have taken place within communist countries since World War II, the considerable liberalization and even increased emphasis on private enterprise in Russia and many of the countries of eastern Europe. Communist China’s recent expression of concern as to whether Yugoslavia is a socialist country is evidence enough of the alarm felt by communist fundamentalists at the unwilling but headlong retreat from socialism in that communist land. It is also significant that not one Right-wing economist or strategist has taken the trouble to consider the surely important question of how one would de-communize Russia if it should surrender to the American army - now or at any other time? I believe that de-communization could be achieved, and in a way similar to, though much more thoroughgoing than, the path of Yugoslavia; but the point is that the indifference to this problem on the Right is another indication of its central concern: nuclear war. De-communization is to come about, not through a change in the ideas and actions of the Russian and other peoples, but, according to the Right, through their liquidation.
Evidence of the Right-wing subordination of all its other goals and principles to nuclear war against communists is overwhelming, and at every hand. It lies at the root of the obscene eagerness with which the Right hurries to embrace every dictator no matter how fascistic or blood-stained, who affirms his "anti-communism." William F. Buckley’s "libertarian" apologia for the fascist regime of South Africa in the pages of National Review is a case in point. So is the enormous enthusiasm for Chiang-kai-Shek, for Franco, for Syngman Rhee, and - most recently - for Mme. Nhu. It is not simply that these dictators are welcomed reluctantly, for expediency’s sake in the "war against communism." The Right has proceeded, in its war hysteria, far beyond that point. For now these dictators are better, since their policy is evidently far "harder" on communists and suspected communists than the policy of the democracies. Mme. Nhu, as a Catholic as well as a totalitarian, has touched the heart of every Right-wing publicist. There can be nothing "harder" on one’s subjects than repressing a religious majority and herding the peasants of the country into concentration camps in order to stave off "communism." The fact that this is hardly a better policy than communism itself makes no imprint whatever on a Right-wing which often likes to boast of itself as a "conservative libertarian" movement. It is tragically ironic and almost incredible that a movement which began, not too many years ago, in a passionate commitment to human liberty, should end as the cheering squad for a Mme. Nhu. Is it really too impolite to wonder how the Right-wing would now regard the man who was, in his day, the "hardest" and the "toughest" anticommunist of them all: Adolf Hitler?
In domestic affairs, the free-market rhetoric has become simply that: after-dinner talk carrying no enthusiasm or true conviction. Indeed, the promise of laissez-faire now performs the same function for the new American Right as the promise of unlimited abundance under communism did for Stalin. While enslaving and exploiting the Soviet people, Stalin held out a splendid future of utopian abundance that would make current sacrifices worthwhile. The present-day Right holds out the eventual promise of freedom and the free-market after communists shall have been exterminated. If there are any survivors emerging from their civil-defense shelters after the holocaust, they will presumably be allowed to engage in free-market activities, provided, of course, that some other "enemy" shall not have raised its head in the meanwhile.
This total subordination of all concerns to anticommunism accounts for all the otherwise inexplicable reversals on the Right. Thus, the Supreme Court is now bitterly attacked for the opposite reasons as in the 1930’s: because it prevents infringements of the state on the liberties of the person. Justice Frankfurter, once assailed as a virtual advocate of tyranny, is now hailed by the Right for his sound, pragmatic conservatism in not interfering with anticommunist persecutions - the fruits, of course, of the selfsame juridical philosophy. Social Democrats and New Dealers, such as the New Leader, Sidney Hook, Senator Dodd, George Meany, and others are embraced for their "hard anticommunism." The New Leader’s collaboration with the Right-wing in publishing a pro-Chiang propaganda article is indicative of this change in atmosphere, a change that alters all the old categories of "right" and "left" that are still unthinkingly used in political discourse.
It is instructive, finally, to consider the political concerns of Americans for Freedom, virtually the political action arm of National Review. To my knowledge, not one political action drive of YAF has been directed to an increase of individual liberty or of the free-market; stressed instead have been such items as perpetuating and strengthening HUAC, calls for blockade - and more - of Cuba, opposition to the test-ban treaty, restoring prayer to the public school, and advocacy of local ordinances and "card-parties" coercively interfering with the right of stores to sell goods from communist countries - hardly a contribution to a free market. I believe there is only one exception to this generalization: an eager enthusiasm for the Mitchell program to reduce relief payments in Newburgh, New York, an enthusiasm that may not have been unrelated to the racial issue involved.
Coterminous with the political transformation of the American Right has come a philosophical transformation, and I do not believe that the two are unconnected. The latter greatly bolsters and perpetuates the former. The positive positions of the various conservative thinkers vary greatly; but they all unite in determined opposition to human reason, to individual liberty, to separation of church and state, to all the things that characterized the classical liberal position and its modern extension. There is, unfortunately, no space here for a full discussion of the current conservative position: but basically it is a return to the essential principles of early nineteenth century conservatism. We must realize that the great fact of modem history was the classical liberal revolution against the old order, a "revolution" that expressed itself in many forms: laissez-faire economics, individual liberty, separation of church-and-state, free trade and international peace, opposition to statism and militarism. Its great embodiments were the three great revolutions of the late eighteenth century: the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, and the: French Revolution. Each, in its way, was part of the general classical liberal revolution against the old order.
Conservatism emerged, in France, Britain, and elsewhere in Europe, as a conscious reactionary attempt to smash this revolution and to restore the old order even more systematically than it had been installed before. The essence of that order may be summed up in the famous phrase "Throne-and-Altar." In short, the old order consisted of a ruling oligarchy of despotic king and royal bureaucracy, aided by feudal landlords and a state church, Anglican or Gallican. It was an order, as explicated by conservatives, that stressed the over-riding importance of "community" - as embodied in the state, of theocratic union of church and state, of the virtues of nationalism and war, of coerced "morality" and of the denigration of the individual subject. And philosophically, reason was derided in behalf of pure faith in ruling tradition.
At first it might seem that this old conservatism is irrelevant to American conservatism today, but I do not believe this to be true. It is true that an American conservative has difficulty finding a legitimate monarch in America. But he does the best he can; the current American Right-wing is, for one thing, highly enamoured of European monarchy, and there is much enthusiasm for restoration of the Hapsburgs. One leading proto-Catholic conservative still toasts "the King over the water," and Frederick Wilhelmsen apparently regards the Crown of St. Stephen as the summit of Western civilization. Russell Kirk, in turn, seems to prefer the Tory squirearchy of Anglican England. At every hand, Metternich, the Stuarts, and the later Burke have replaced libertarians as historical heroes. But a king for the United States is, of course, a bit difficult, and conservatives have had to content themselves with makeshifts: with the restoration to historiographical favor, for example, of such statists as Alexander Hamilton, and of solicitude for the peculiar institution of slavery in the South. Willmoore Kendall has found in Congress the apotheosis of conservatism, and asserts not only the right, but the duty of the Greek community to preserve itself from the irritating probing of Socrates. Everywhere on the Right the "open society" is condemned, and a coerced morality affirmed. God is supposed to be put back into government. Free speech is treated with suspicion and distrust, and the military are hailed as the greatest patriots, and conscription strongly upheld. Western imperialism is trumpeted as the proper way to deal with backward peoples, and pilgrimages are made to Franco’s Spain for inspiration in governmental forms. And, at every side, reason is denigrated, and faith in tradition and custom held up as the proper path for man.
It is true that most modem conservatives do not, like their forebears, wish to destroy the industrial system and revert to small farms and happy handicraftsmen - although there is a strong strain of even this idea in contemporary conservatism. But, basically, the current conservatives are supremely indifferent to a free-market economy; they do not blanch at the vast economic distortions imposed by arms contracts or at crippling restrictions on foreign trade, and they could not tolerate a budget cut that would reduce America’s military posture in the world. In fact, such leading conservatives as Ernest van den Haag and Willmoore Kendall have been frankly Keynesian in economics. In the end, all must be subordinated to the state; as William F. Buckley has affirmed: "Where reconciliation of an individual’s and the government’s interests cannot be achieved, the interests of the government shall be given exclusive consideration." One observer of the conservative movement has commented, "How’s that for laissez-faire?" Indeed. Above all, the modern conservative program reduces to dragooning the American people, under the control of the current American version of Throne-and-Altar, into lockstep uniformity and a closed society dedicated to the overriding end of destroying communism, even at the expense of nuclear annihilation.
What of the old libertarian segment of the Right? Largely they have been submerged in the transformation of the Right-wing, generally because they have not had articulate spokesmen explaining to them the nature and magnitude of what has taken place. They have largely been bemused by the pervasive idea that there is, in some strong sense, a joint "conservative-libertarian movement," and that no matter how much conservatives may diverge from liberty, they are the libertarian’s natural allies - at the same end of the spectrum, and at the polar opposite from socialism. But this idea suffers from the "cultural lag" that we have observed. The old Right may have been the natural ally of the laissez- faire libertarian, but this is not at all true of the new.
The libertarian needs, perhaps most of all, to be informed by history, and to realize that conservatism was always the polar opposite of classical liberalism. Socialism, in contrast, was not the polar opposite of either, but rather, in my view, a muddled and irrationally contradictory mixture of both liberalism and conservatism. For socialism was essentially a movement to come to terms with the industrial revolution, to try to achieve liberal ends by the use of collectivistic, conservative means. It tried to achieve the ideals of peace, freedom, and a progressing standard of living by using the collectivist, organicist, hierarchical means of conservatism as adapted to industrial society. As a middle-of-the-road doctrine, it is easy for socialism, once it abandoned the liberal ideals of peace and freedom, to shift completely to the conservative pole in the many varying forms of "national socialism."
Mr. Frank S. Meyer, the leading proponent of a fused "conservative-libertarian movement," has called upon us to ignore the nineteenth century, "heir to the disruption of the French Revolution," and to go back beyond "the parochial disputes of the nineteenth century." Such a course would indeed be convenient for Meyer’s thesis, as it would sweep away the whole meaning of the liberal and conservative movements. For the point is that both liberalism and conservatism (and socialism as well) found their form and their doctrine precisely in the nineteenth century, as a result of the struggles between the old order and the new. It is precisely by focussing on the history of the nineteenth century that we learn of the true origins of the various "isms" of our day, as well as the illogical and mythical nature of the attempted "conservative-libertarian" fusion.
There are some signs, indeed, that from various sides, thinkers are beginning to apprehend the dissolution of the old forms, the obsolescence of the old "left" and "right" stereotypes in American politics, and the invalidity of a fusion of libertarians with an old conservatism redivivus. Libertarians are beginning to protest; in the pages of New Individualist Review, the outstanding student journal of the Right, Ronald Hamowy, one of its editors-in-chief, has, in a well-known article, bitterly attacked the conservative philosophy and politics of Buckley and National Review. Dean Benjamin Rogge of Wabash College has contributed a thoughtful critique of the new conservatism, and Howard Buffett has called for an end to conscription. But New Individualist Review was basically founded in commitment to the conservative-libertarian mythos, and it clearly suffers from being mired in this inner contradiction. Robert LeFevre, head of the libertarian Freedom School, in a trenchant leaflet, Those Who Protest, has pointed out and attacked the transformation of the Right-wing. And from a different direction, the noted critic Edmund Wilson has now raised his powerful voice to protest both The Cold War and the Income Tax. Perhaps indeed, the country is ripe for a fundamental ideological realignment.

Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) was the author of Man, Economy, and State, Conceived in Liberty, What Has Government Done to Our Money, The Case Against the Fed, and many other books and articles. He was also the editor - with Lew Rockwell - of The Rothbard-Rockwell Report.
Copyright © 2002 Ludwig von Mises Institute All rights reserved.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard13.html

unbelievable...

2005-07-25T17:24:00.000-07:00

CHP should get a citation for policing itself
By K. Lloyd Billingsley, Guest columnist
The California Highway Patrol performs good work, in difficult and often dangerous conditions, but a recent development provides new evidence that the CHP could do a better job of policing itself.

On July 1, Deputy Chief Gary Dominguez became commander of the Southern Division, including Los Angeles County, with a population of nearly 10 million. Early last year, Dominguez was on medical leave from the CHP, though his medical problem did not keep him away from the Montebello Golf Course.
He drove 13 miles from there and was arrested in Pasadena with a blood-alcohol level of 0.10 percent, well over the 0.08 legal limit for driving. That should have been enough for a drunk-driving charge, but local officials opted to charge him with failing to obey a peace officer -- officers had to forcibly remove Dominguez from his car.
The charge of failing to obey was later dropped, however, because the main witness proved unable to testify. But the DMV still suspended Dominguez's driver's license.
State Sen. Gloria Romero, a Los Angeles Democrat, told reporters that she was "outraged at (Dominguez's) appointment" -- an outrage compounded by the fact that the CHP's job is to keep the public safe from drunk drivers.
The force's response to reporters has proved revealing. "The bottom line is that Chief Dominguez is a deputy chief in the California Highway Patrol," a CHP spokesman said. The message was clear. Rank alone protects chiefs against the consequences of their actions.
That also seems to be the case in retirement. A Sacramento Bee investigation found that a full 80 percent of CHP chiefs have filed workers' compensation claims within two years of retiring. Some of the cases seem palpably obvious.
Deputy CHP Commissioner Ed Gomez claimed to be disabled by workplace stress and physical ailments. In 2000, the 57-year-old was awarded a $39,000 settlement, medical care for his injuries for life, and a state industrial disability pension of $106,968 a year, half of it free of taxes. Two years later Gomez became security director at San Francisco airport -- a stressful, difficult job.
Deputy Chief Kevin Mince sought a workers' compensation settlement as a result of stress from dealing with his supervisor. He was found to be 23 percent disabled as a result of headaches, shingles, chest pains and "injuries to his psyche." Mince took an industrial disability retirement of $109,259, half of it exempt from taxes. He also moved to Hawaii, where he functions well enough to work as a scuba-diving instructor.
CHP Capt. Larry Hollingsworth was found to be 61 percent disabled from knee injuries, ulcers, high blood pressure and hearing loss. He took a medical pension from the CHP, but is still apparently sound enough to become assistant sheriff of Yolo County.
Assistant CHP chief Denise Daeley was hurt in a private car returning from a weekend in Las Vegas. The trip was not work-authorized, but she claimed to have been recruiting for the force. Daeley got an annual payment of $57,396, half her salary, tax free, and decamped for Hawaii.
The author of the report that authorized Daeley's claim was Mike Brown, then a deputy chief and now CHP commissioner.
In response to the Bee report, the CHP created a workers' compensation fraud unit and promised to crack down, sparing nobody, whatever their rank. In more than half a year, however, its efforts have yet to touch a single chief. A lowly officer and dispatcher are the prime targets.
Workers' compensation was created to help those legitimately injured on the job, not to bankroll luxury retirement on dubious grounds. CHP benefits are generous, and it is possible for officers to retire at age 51 with 90 percent of their pay.
Despite its good work, the CHP should not be allowed to investigate itself. If current CHP leaders want to enhance the force's reputation, they should hand the pension fraud investigation to the Legislature, decline to give chiefs special treatment, and make key personnel moves free from even the appearance of scandal.
K. Lloyd Billingsley is editorial director of the Pacific Research Institute. Write to him by e-mail at lbillingsley@pacificresearch.org

2005-07-15T13:18:00.000-07:00

by DAVID BARSAMIAN
[from the April 24, 2000 issue]

Noam Chomsky is a longtime political activist, writer and professor of linguistics at MIT. His latest books are The Common Good and The New Military Humanism. He was interviewed for The Nation in late February by David Barsamian, director of Alternative Radio in Boulder, Colorado (www.alternativeradio.org). An edited version of that interview follows.

DB: Let's talk about what occurred in Seattle in late November/early December around the WTO ministerial meeting. What meaning do you derive from what happened there, and what are the lessons to be drawn?
Chomsky: I think it was a very significant event. It reflected a very broad opposition to the corporate-led globalization that's been imposed under primarily US leadership, but by the other major industrial countries, too. The participation was extremely broad and varied, including constituencies from the United States and internationally that have rarely interconnected in the past. That's the same kind of coalition of forces that blocked the Multilateral Agreement on Investment a year earlier and that strongly opposed other so-called agreements like NAFTA and the WTO.
One lesson from Seattle is that education and organizing over a long term, carefully done, can really pay off. Another is that a substantial part of the domestic and global population, I would guess probably a majority of those thinking about the issues, ranges from being disturbed by contemporary developments to being strongly opposed to them, primarily to the sharp attack on democratic rights, on the freedom to make your own decisions and on the general subordination of all concerns to the specific interests, to the primacy of maximizing profit and domination by a very small sector of the world's population.

Thomas Friedman, writing in the New York Times, called the demonstrators at Seattle "a Noah's ark of flat-earth advocates."
From his point of view that's probably correct. From the point of view of slave owners, people opposed to slavery probably looked that way. For the 1 percent of the population that he's thinking about and representing, the people who are opposing this are flat-earthers. Why should anyone oppose the developments that we've been describing?

Would it be fair to say that in the actions in the streets in Seattle, mixed in with the tear gas was also a whiff of democracy?
I would take it to be. A functioning democracy is not supposed to happen in the streets. It's supposed to happen in decision-making. This is a reflection of the undermining of democracy and the popular reaction to it, not for the first time. There's been a long struggle, over centuries, in fact, to try to extend the realm of democratic freedoms, and it's won plenty of victories. A lot of them have been won exactly this way, not by gifts but by confrontation and struggle. If the popular reaction in this case takes a really organized, constructive form, it can undermine and reverse the highly undemocratic thrust of the international economic arrangements that are being foisted on the world. And they are very undemocratic. Naturally one thinks about the attack on domestic sovereignty, but most of the world is much worse. Over half the population of the world literally does not have even theoretical control over their own national economic policies. They're in receivership. Their economic policies are run by bureaucrats in Washington as a result of the so-called debt crisis, which is an ideological construction, not an economic one. That's over half the population of the world lacking even minimal sovereignty.

Why do you say the debt crisis is an ideological construction?
There is a debt, but who owes it and who's responsible for it is an ideological question, not an economic question. For example, there's a capitalist principle that nobody wants to pay any attention to, of course, which says that if I borrow money from you, it's my responsibility to pay it back, and if you're the lender, it's your risk if I don't pay it back. But nobody even conceives of that possibility. Suppose we were to follow that. Take, say, Indonesia, for example. Right now its economy is crushed by the fact that the debt is something like 140 percent of GDP. You trace that debt back, it turns out that the borrowers were something like 100 to 200 people around the military dictatorship that we supported, and their cronies. The lenders were international banks. A lot of that debt has been by now socialized through the IMF, which means Northern taxpayers are responsible. What happened to the money? They enriched themselves. There was some capital export and some development. But the people who borrowed the money aren't held responsible for it. It's the people of Indonesia who have to pay it off. And that means living under crushing austerity programs, severe poverty and suffering. In fact, it's a hopeless task to pay off the debt that they didn't borrow. What about the lenders? The lenders are protected from risk. That's one of the main functions of the IMF, to provide free risk insurance to people who lend and invest in risky loans. That's why they get high yields, because there's a lot of risk. They don't have to take the risk, because it's socialized. It's transferred in various ways to Northern taxpayers through the IMF and other devices, like Brady bonds. The whole system is one in which the borrowers are released from the responsibility. That's transferred to the impoverished mass of the population in their own countries. And the lenders are protected from risk. These are ideological choices, not economic ones.
In fact, it even goes beyond that. There's a principle of international law that was devised by the United States over a hundred years ago when it "liberated" Cuba, which means it conquered Cuba to prevent it from liberating itself from Spain in 1898. At that time, when the United States took over, it canceled Cuba's debt to Spain on the quite reasonable grounds that the debt was invalid since it had been imposed on the people of Cuba without their consent, by force, under a power relationship. That principle was later recognized in international law, again under US initiative, as the principle of what's called "odious debt." Debt is not valid if it's essentially imposed by force. The Third World debt is odious debt. That's even been recognized by the US representative at the IMF, Karen Lissaker, an international economist, who pointed out a couple of years ago that if we were to apply the principles of odious debt, most of the Third World debt would simply disappear.

Newsweek had a cover story on December 13 called "The Battle of Seattle." It devoted some pages to the anti-WTO protests. There was a sidebar in one of the articles called "The New Anarchism." The five figures the sidebar mentioned as being somehow representative of this new anarchism included Rage Against the Machine and Chumbawamba. I don't suppose you know who they are.
I know. I'm not that far out of it.
They're rock bands. The list continues with the writer John Zerzan and Theodore Kaczynski, the notorious Unabomber, and then MIT professor Noam Chomsky. How did you figure into that constellation? Did Newsweek contact you?
Sure. We had a long interview [chuckles].

You're pulling my leg.
You'd have to ask them. I can sort of conjure up something that might have been going on in their editorial offices, but your guess is as good as mine. The term "anarchist" has always had a very weird meaning in elite circles. For example, there was a headline in the Boston Globe today on a small article saying something like "Anarchists Plan Protests at IMF Meeting in April." Who are the anarchists who are planning the protest? Ralph Nader's Public Citizen, labor organizations and others. There will be some people around who will call themselves anarchists, whatever that means. But from the elite point of view, you want to focus on something that you can denounce in some fashion as irrational. That's the analogue to Thomas Friedman calling them flat-earthers.

Vivian Stromberg of Madre, the New York-based NGO, says there are lots of motions in the country but no movement.
I don't agree. For example, what happened in Seattle was certainly movement. Students have been arrested in protests over failure of universities to adopt strong antisweatshop conditions that many student organizations are proposing. There are lots of other things going on that look like movement to me. In many ways what happened in Montreal a few weeks ago [at the Biosafety Protocol meeting] is even more dramatic than Seattle.
It wasn't much discussed here, because the main protesters were European. The United States was joined by a couple of other countries that would also expect to profit from biotechnology exports. But primarily it was the United States against most of the world over the issue that's called the "precautionary principle." That means, is there a right for a country, for people, to say, I don't want to be a subject in some experiment you're carrying out? The United States is insisting on exactly that, internationally. In the negotiations in Montreal, the United States, which is the center of the big biotech industries, genetic engineering and so on, was demanding that the issue be determined under WTO rules. According to those rules, the experimental subjects have to provide scientific evidence that it's going to harm them, or else the transcendent value of corporate rights prevails. Europe and most of the rest of the world insisted [successfully] on the precautionary principle. That's a very clear indication of what's at stake: an attack on the rights of people to make their own decisions over things even as simple as whether you're going to be an experimental subject, let alone controlling your own resources or setting conditions on foreign investment or transferring your economy into the hands of foreign investment firms and banks. It's a major assault against popular sovereignty in favor of concentration of power in the hands of a kind of state-corporate nexus, a few mega-corporations and the few states that primarily cater to their interests. The issue in Montreal in many ways was sharper and clearer than it was in Seattle.

Do you think the food-safety issue might be one around which the left can reach a broader constituency?
I don't see it as a particularly left issue. In fact, left issues are just popular issues. If the left means anything, it means it's concerned with the needs, welfare and rights of the general population. So the left ought to be the overwhelming majority of the population, and in some respects I think it is. In that sense it could be a left issue that is a popular issue.
Talk more about the student antisweatshop movement. Is it different from earlier movements that you're familiar with?
It's different and similar. In some ways it's like the antiapartheid movement, except that in this case it's striking at the core of the relations of exploitation. It's another example of how different constituencies are working together. Much of this was initiated by Charlie Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee in New York and other groups within the labor movement. It's now become a significant student issue in many areas. Many student groups are pressing this very hard, so much so that the US government had to, in order to counter it, initiate a kind of code. They brought together labor and student leaders to form some kind of government-sponsored coalition, which many student groups are opposing because they think it doesn't go anywhere near far enough.
Students are not calling for a dismantling of the system of exploitation. Maybe they should be. What they're asking for is the kinds of labor rights that are theoretically guaranteed. If you look at the conventions of the International Labor Organization, the ILO, which is responsible for these things, they bar most of the practices, probably all of them, that the students are opposing. The United States does not adhere to those conventions. Last I looked, the United States had ratified very few of the ILO conventions. I think it had the worst record in the world outside of maybe Lithuania or El Salvador. Not that other countries live up to the conventions, but they have their name on them at least. The United States doesn't accept them on principle.

Tell me what's happening on your campus, at MIT. Is there any organizing around the sweatshop movement?
There are very active undergraduate social-justice groups doing things all the time, more so than in quite a few years. What accounts for it is the objective reality. It's the same feelings and understanding and perception that led people to the streets in Seattle. The United States is not suffering like the Third World. But although this is a period of reasonably good economic growth, most of the population is still left out. The international economic arrangements, the so-called free-trade agreements, are basically designed to maintain that.

Comment on an African proverb that perhaps intersects with what we're talking about: "The master's tools will never be used to dismantle the master's house."
If this is intended to mean, don't try to improve conditions for suffering people, I don't agree. It's true that centralized power, whether in a corporation or a government, is not going to willingly commit suicide. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't chip away at it, for many reasons. For one thing, it benefits suffering people. That's something that always should be done, no matter what broader considerations are. But even from the point of view of dismantling the master's house, if people can learn what power they have when they work together, and if they can see dramatically at just what point they're going to be stopped, by force, perhaps, that teaches very valuable lessons in how to go on. The alternative to that is to sit in academic seminars and talk about how awful the system is.

LET YOUR VOICE BE A LIVE AID

2005-07-12T15:07:00.000-07:00

Use your voice and your influence to Make Poverty History in 2005!
This Christmas saw the release of Band Aid 20, involving pop stars across music genres such as Chris Martin, Sugababes, Will Young, Jamelia, Busted, Joss Stone and Bono from U2.
The re-recording of the 20 year-old hit sold more than 72,000 copies on its first day of release, making it the highest selling single in 2004. This proves that when we use our passions and talents in our spheres of influence to speak out about injustice and poverty, we can really impact one another.
Bob Geldof addresses crowds in Trafalgar Square, 3 February 2005.
Bob Geldof, founder of Band Aid, is one of many pop stars who is supporting the Make Poverty History campaign: 'This is about firing the starting pistol to the year of 2005 when Britain is the chair of the G8 and the president of the EU. The reality is that only politics created this dilemma and only politics can resolve it.'

Bono, who is also fully supporting the Make Poverty History campaign, said 'We can make extreme poverty history, I really believe that. The kind of stupid poverty where kids are dying for the lack of an immunisation that costs 20 cents, or for lack of food in a world of plenty. Don’t we want to be the generation that says no to that?'
Bono, Geldof and other musicians are using their spheres of influence to raise public awareness of three key issues which are perpetuating poverty: trade, aid and debt. By joining the Make Poverty History campaign, they are challenging the UK government, specifically the Prime Minister, to use his influence at key events this year to Make Poverty History.
The influence of our government
Tony Blair has the opportunity to influence other leaders of powerful nations such as the US, France, Germany, Japan, Canada, Italy and Russia, who all have the power to end extreme poverty through the decisions they make as a group on trade, aid and debt.
Your influence
Every day you and I are hugely influenced by what we see on TV, read in the newspapers, pick up from the internet, learn from the Bible and talk about with one another. Our voices and opinions have influence, especially when we speak truth to one another.
Often the messages we receive from our surrounding culture day in and day out, are not true. When we stop to compare the words of our culture against God's word, they are completely different to one another.
This is especially evident when it comes to poverty. God hates poverty and He hates injustice. Proverbs 14:31 says 'He who oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honours God.' From God's perspective, when we ignore, oppress and perpetuate injustices against one another, we are actually treating God like that. We have all been made in his amazing image, and therefore to treat one another with less value than we would attribute to ourselves is wrong. This is big stuff and demands a response which is not a token gesture, but real.
In John 4:23, Jesus tells a Samaritan woman that God the Father is looking for people who will worship him in spirit and in truth. What does He mean? People who can sing in a holy way? No, people who have hearts that are sincere in their worship and pursuit of Him. People who will allow His Spirit to live in them and influence all areas of their lives. God wants us to let His Spirit influence how we treat one another and how we treat our world. It's easy to focus on our lives and not even notice the people who live next door, down the street, and in other countries. But thanks to TV and the internet we are transported into the lives of others and made aware of the injustices and poverty that others face.
God's challenge to us is to become true worshippers. This means speaking out in our spheres of influence to challenge poverty and injustice... are you up for it?
TAKE ACTION TODAY>>>

PRAY...

2005-07-12T14:50:00.000-07:00

Aim
To maintain and increase the position of prayer in opposing social injustice within the Speak Network. For anyone with a heart for getting into powerful, intercessory prayer for our generation and for God's world. We want to change the way we pray, by getting closer to God to allow Him to change our hearts and make us effective intercessors. We want to show how prayer is the response for Christians to situations that break their hearts, and we want to witness to non-Christian activists with a heart for the same people, but who don't know God as the answer to the same problems.
Responsibilities
Support and organisation of prayer in campaigning on issues of social injustice.Responsible for creative/innovative prayer ideas to facilitate prayerful campaigning. Responsible for committing everything done on behalf of SPEAK to God in prayer.

SPEAK

2005-07-12T14:01:00.000-07:00

The vision of SPEAK is to see a mass movement across the rising generation. We want to see this generation positioned and equipped to bring spiritual, social, economic, political and environmental transformation. We want to see God's Kingdom established in all its different facets. We want to see it in all our relationships, and in our lifestyle as a whole.
We believe that in order to do this we need to NETWORK and work in connecting and bringing people together with a similar heart. Networking means that are all connected and we can build unity in our actions and our prayers. In praying about situations of injustice and speaking out about the same things at the same time, we are able to make more noise.
Unity SPEAKs.
SPEAK is a NOT an organisation.
SPEAK is a network because we believe it takes all of us to recognise that we have a responsibility to those who are suffering as a result of global injustice. In the past we have spent long enough believing that an organisation will do it all for us, and that giving limited financial assistance to a charity is enough. However the problems are more deep rooted, and connected with unfair debt and unfair trade and many other issues. SPEAK is not another organisation existing to soothe our consciences. SPEAK exists to stir the conscience of everyone. It acts as a movement to stir people, especially the younger generation into action and see them released as a catalyst to motivate the church as a whole. It is not served up to you on a plate- it is up to you to take initiative.
SPEAK is an evolving ,dynamic movement of relationships. The relationships formed within the Network are constantly sparking off new initiatives within the Network. We believe that we are empowered and resourced in relationship with God and in relationship with each other, rather than just through an organisation.
It is difficult to box this movement, or to give a totally accurate neat description. It's about being a motivational catalyst in areas of Christian community. It's about lifestyle. It is about moving into action. It’s about getting things going, creating an infectious movement that seeks to change unfair power structures. It’s about following Jesus. It's about modelling something new, sharing our faith with people disillusioned by institutional models of church and Christian community. It is about reaching people who are searching spiritually.

2005-07-12T10:33:00.000-07:00

How To Stop Terrorism
by John Dear

Like many, I was upset about the horrific terrorist attacks on London on July 7th. I spent a few days in London just this past Christmas. I know my way around the Tube. It gave me flashbacks of my days working at Ground Zero right after the September 11th attacks, and the thousands of grieving people I met in the months afterwards as a Red Cross coordinator of chaplains at the New York Family Assistance Center.
However, I am equally upset by the ongoing U.S. terrorist attacks on Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and elsewhere. My heart breaks with every report of the hundreds of nameless people who die from our bombs, our weapons, our soldiers.
For me, then the question, “How to Stop Terrorism?” is easy. We stop terrorism first of all by stopping our own terrorism! We cannot fight terrorism by becoming terrorists. We cannot end terrorism by using the methods of terrorism to bomb and kill Iraqis, to occupy Iraq, to support the terrorist occupation of the Palestinians, and to hold the world hostage with our nuclear weapons. We must bring the troops home from Iraq, fund nonviolent democratic peacemakers in Iraq, send food and medicine to Iraq, support United Nations’ nonviolent peacemaking solutions, end world hunger immediately, cut all U.S. military aid everywhere, dismantle every one of our nuclear weapons, fund jobs, education and healthcare at home and abroad, clean up the environment and teach nonviolence to everyone around the world, beginning at home in every U.S. classroom.
As I watch the TV news reporters and commentators, I am amazed at their lack of understanding. Half the world considers the United States the leading terrorist in the world, by our public spokespeople remain clueless about what’s really going on. We are seen as terrorists by many around the world because we bombed and killed 100,000 people in Iraq in 2003, and because we have over 20,000 weapons of mass destruction, (many of them in my neighborhood in New Mexico), which we are willing to use on any nation that does not support “U.S. interests.” Our wars and bombing raids and hostility toward the world’s poor are turning the world against us. We are breeding thousands of new terrorists, desperate poor people who have nothing, whose backs are up against the wall, and who have learned from our total violence to adopt the lunacy of violence, even suicidal violence, to strike back, blow up trains and buses, and spend their lives spreading fear.
Violence in response to violence can only lead to further violence. Jesus taught us that as the soldiers were dragging him away to his death when he said, “Those who live by the sword, will die by the sword.” Gandhi taught us that when he said, “An eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind.”
Violence cannot stop violence. We have to break the cycle of violence, renounce violence, start practicing creative active nonviolence on a level that the world has never seen, and reach out and embrace the world’s poor by meeting their every need. Then, we will win over the world, and no one will ever want to hurt a Westerner again. On that new day, we will sow the seeds of love and peace and discover what a world without terrorism, war, poverty, and fear is like.
I remember with sadness meeting thousands of Iraqis in 1999 when I led a group of Nobel Peace Prize winners to Baghdad. We asked everyone the simple question, “What do you want us to do?” Everyone we met, from the Papal Nuncio to the Muslim Iman to the non-governmental organization leaders (including the late, great Margaret Hassan) to hundreds of high school children to the hundreds of mothers holding their dying children, said: “Don’t kill us!” That sounds so obvious, but they said it with tears. If you want to help us, don’t kill us! If you want us to live in peace, don’t kill us! If you want us to be friends with you, don’t kill us! If you want Iraq to create a new democracy, don’t kill us! Send us food and medicine instead, and fund nonviolent, democratic movements for peace. Then, we will live in peace with you.
I reject violence and espouse only nonviolence, but I know that most Americans support, even relish violence, anything for “God and country,” they say. If people really believe in violence and justified warfare, then why should they be upset when individuals, or hundreds, or thousands, or maybe someday millions of people turn against the United States, England, or other first world nations in acts of terrorism? What do they expect when we have shown only hostility to the world’s poor, when we have practiced genocide against people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Darfur, Haiti, and elsewhere? Why are people who espouse violence--including most Americans, most TV commentators, most government officials, even most church people--so upset about these terrorist attacks, when they themselves support terrorism upon sisters and brothers elsewhere on the planet?
I do not understand our love of violence. If you want other people to be nonviolent, you first have to be nonviolent. If you want to remove the speck from someone else’s eye, you have to remove the two by four from your own head. If you want other nations to hold you in high regard, you first have to hold other nations in high regard, and treat every human being on the planet as a sister and brother. As someone once said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” That is the answer to the nightmare of terrorism.
On August 6th, thousands of us across the country will remember that the United States vaporized 140,000 innocent, ordinary people sixty years ago in Hiroshima, Japan, in the ultimate terrorist attack. That morning, hundreds of us will converge on Los Alamos, New Mexico, the birthplace of the bomb, and citing the book of Jonah, we will put on sackcloth and ashes, repent for the sin of war and nuclear weapons, and beg the God of peace for the disarmament of the world. That afternoon, I will fly to Las Vegas, to join over five hundred people of faith in a three day interfaith peace conference, where I will speak and then we will drive out to the Nevada Test Site, where hundreds of us will commit civil disobedience by walking onto the Test Site and getting arrested in a peaceful demand that they close this U.S. nuclear terrorist training camp. I hope everyone everywhere will stand up in protest against nuclear terrorism on August 6th.
How do we stop terrorism? Renounce every trace of violence in your heart and your life. Adopt the wisdom and practice of active nonviolence, as Gandhi and Dr. King taught. Beg the God of peace for the gift of peace. Join your local peace and justice group. Stand up publicly for an end to war. Let your life be disrupted, and take a new, nonviolent risk for disarmament. Create new cells of active nonviolence. Embrace the religious roots of nonviolence. Study and teach the wisdom of nonviolence. Resist your local military and government violence. Stop business as usual, government as usual, media as usual, war as usual and demand peace, justice, and disarmament for the whole world, now. Announce the vision of a new nonviolent world, a disarmed world, a world without war, poverty, injustice or nuclear weapons. Explain how such a world is possible if we give our lives for it, demand it, insist on it, work for it, and begin to live it.
Rev. John Dear is a Catholic peace, peace activist, and coordinator of Pax Christi New Mexico, a Catholic peace group. He is the author/editor of 20 books on peace and nonviolence, including two books just published from Doubleday, “Living Peace” and “The Questions of Jesus”. For information, see: www.johndear.org

The One Campaign

2005-06-10T09:18:00.000-07:00

THE ONE DECLARATION

“WE BELIEVE that in the best American tradition of helping others help themselves, now is the time to join with other countries in a historic pact for compassion and justice to help the poorest people of the world overcome AIDS and extreme poverty. WE RECOGNIZE that a pact including such measures as fair trade, debt relief, fighting corruption and directing an additional one percent of the U.S. budget toward meeting basic needs – education, health, clean water, food, and care for orphans – would transform the futures and hopes of an entire generation in the poorest countries. WE COMMIT ourselves - one person, one voice, one vote at a time - to make a better, safer world for all.”

2005-06-08T16:17:00.000-07:00

http://www.ragejaxfoundation.org
http://www.ragejaxfoundation.com

2005-06-08T16:07:00.000-07:00

Is This a Great Country, or What?
Apparently, Being a National Hero isn't as Tough as it Seems

By Gene Weingarten
Washington Post

Sunday, May 29, 2005

Have you seen the list of 100 people nominated to be the greatest American of all time, as chosen in an online poll?

It's a hoot. It's going to be the basis of a month-long series on the Discovery Channel in June, featuring runoff elections where the public will finally choose a winner. I decided I owed it to history -- the history of American humor -- to phone a Discovery Channel spokesperson for comment.

Me: So, are you happy with the 100 nominees?

Elizabeth Hillman: Well, we were pleased at the number of people who voted. The results are not for us to judge. This is who America chose. This is the pulse of America.

Me: America seems to have a dangerously erratic pulse. For example, there seems to be a bit of a bias toward recent times, since more than half of the nominees are currently alive or were alive in the last five years. Does that trouble you? Or are you just relieved that Lincoln made the cut?

Elizabeth: Ha-ha. Well, I'm fascinated by the diversity of opinion!

Me: Not only are both George Bushes on the list, but Laura Bush and Barbara Bush, too! Whereas, say, James Madison is not. So, basically, Laura Bush and Barbara Bush are deemed to be greater Americans than the person who wrote the United States Constitution. What philosophical statement do you think the American public might be expressing by this decision? Do you think the statement might be, "We are as shallow as a loogie on the sidewalk?" Or, "We are self-involved, self-congratulatory, parochial-minded nitwits with a ludicrous ignorance of our own national history?" Which one?

Elizabeth: I just have to go back to the fact that this is the state of America at this moment in time. I'm not saying it's bad or good.

Me: I see Oprah is on the list, and Ellen DeGeneres, and Martha Stewart and Dr. Phil McGraw. They are apparently taking the place of people such as Whitman, Poe, Hopper, Gershwin and Melville, who many believe wrote the greatest American novel. So basically -- referencing the McGraw-Melville calculus -- Americans have picked The Ultimate Weight Solution over Moby Dick. Do you feel they are showing discerning literary judgment?

Elizabeth: We did notice that there were very few authors.

Me: Is America illiterate?

Elizabeth: I think we are showing who inspires us at this moment in time!

Me: I notice we seem to be inspired by those great Americans who espoused the Nazi ideology. On the list are Charles Lindbergh, who was a great fan of the Third Reich, and Henry Ford, who believed Jews were in a cabal with the devil, and Mel Gibson, whose beloved daddy is a famous Holocaust denier. My question is: The public actually missed George Lincoln Rockwell, the longtime head of the American Nazi party. Do you think that was an oversight?

Elizabeth: See, I think the list is working! We're having a dialogue, which is what this is all about. I hope the public is as interested as you are in discussing this list, so they all tune in and vote.

Me: You are very good.

Elizabeth: Thank you.

Me: I think YOU are a great American.

Elizabeth: Thank you.

Me: I also detect on the list a preference for absolute, raving lunatics . . .

Elizabeth: I didn't think it could get worse, after the last one.

Me: The list includes Michael Jackson, who is a Kabuki-faced deviant and notable skin-crawly weirdo of historic proportions, and Richard Nixon, a frothing-at-the-mouth political paranoiac, and Howard Hughes, who actually hoarded his own pee. Would you say Americans are making an interesting statement about the inevitable nexus of genius and madness, or are they just complete imbeciles?

Elizabeth: You know, people only had three votes.

Me: Really. That means that a lot of people must have chosen, like, Hugh Hefner over Thomas Jefferson or Albert Einstein!

Elizabeth: Well, yes.

Me: Do you suppose that when the final voting happens, it might come down to a vote between, say, Dr. Phil and Abraham Lincoln?

Elizabeth: It could, if they are paired in a runoff.

Me: Okay, we're done. Not too bad, right?

Elizabeth: It's made me want to go to the dentist, for relief.
________________________________________________________
Gene Weingarten's e-mail address is weingarten@washpost.com.

Blondie Says Read and Post Everywhere!

2005-01-28T09:43:00.000-08:00

DR. ROBIN MEYERS' SPEECH DURING THE 11/04/04 PEACE RALLY AT OKLAHOMA UNIVERSITY

As some of you know, I am minister of Mayflower Congregational Church inOklahoma City, an Open and Affirming, Peace and Justice church in northwestOklahoma City, and professor of Rhetoric at Oklahoma City University. But you wouldmost likely have encountered me on the pages of the Oklahoma Gazette, where Ihave been a columnist for six years, and hold the record for the most numberof angry letters to the editor.Tonight, I join ranks of those who are angry, because I have watched as thefaith I love has been taken over by fundamentalists who claim to speak forJesus, but whose actions are anything but Christian.We've heard a lot lately about so-called "moral values" as having swung theelection to President Bush. Well, I'm a great believer in moral values, but weneed to have a discussion, all over this country, about exactly whatconstitutes a moral value-- I mean what are we talking about? Because we don't get to make them up as we go along, especially not if we are people of faith. We have an inheritedtradition of what is right and wrong, and moral is as moral does.Let me give you just a few of the reasons why I take issue with those inpower who claim moral values are on their side:* When you start a war on false pretenses, and then act as if your deceptionsare justified because you are doing God's will, and that your critics areeither unpatriotic or lacking in faith, there are some of us who have given ourlives to teaching and preaching the faith who believe that this is not only notmoral, but immoral.* When you live in a country that has established international rules forwaging a just war, build the United Nations on your own soil to enforce them, andthen arrogantly break the very rules you set down for the rest of the world,you are doing something immoral.* When you claim that Jesus is the Lord of your life, and yet fail toacknowledge that your policies ignore his essential teaching, or turn them on theirhead (you know, Sermon on the Mount stuff like that we must never returnviolence for violence and that those who live by the sword will die by the sword),you are doing something immoral.* When you act as if the lives of Iraqi civilians are not as important as thelives of American soldiers, and refuse to even count them, you are doingsomething immoral.* When you find a way to avoid combat in Vietnam, and then question thepatriotism of someone who volunteered to fight, and came home a hero, you are doingsomething immoral.* When you ignore the fundamental teachings of the gospel, which says thatthe way the strong treat the weak is the ultimate ethical test, by giving taxbreaks to the wealthiest among us so the strong will get stronger and the weakwill get weaker, you are doing something immoral.* When you wink at the torture of prisoners, and deprive so-called "enemycombatants" of the rules of the Geneva convention, which your own country helpedto establish and insists that other countries follow, you are doing somethingimmoral.* When you claim that the world can be divided up into the good guys and theevil doers, slice up your own nation into those who are with you, or with theterrorists -- and then launch a war which enriches your own friends and seizescontrol of the oil to which we are addicted, instead of helping us to kickthe habit, you are doing something immoral.* When you fail to veto a single spending bill, but ask us to pay for a warwith no exit strategy and no end in sight, creating an enormous deficit thathangs like a great millstone around the necks of our children, you are doingsomething immoral.* When you cause most of the rest of the world to hate a country that wasonce the most loved country in the world, and act like it doesn't matter whatothers think of us, only what God thinks of you, you have done something immoral.* When you use hatred of homosexuals as a wedge issue to turn out recordnumbers of evangelical voters, and use the Constitution as a tool ofdiscrimination, you are doing something immoral.* When you favor the death penalty, and yet claim to be a follower of Jesus,who said an eye for an eye was the old way, not the way of the kingdom, youare doing something immoral.* When you dismantle countless environmental laws designed to protect theearth which is God's gift to us all, so that the corporations that bought you andpaid for your favors will make higher profits while our children breathedirty air and live in a toxic world, you have done something immoral. The earthbelongs to the Lord, not Halliburton.* When you claim that our God is bigger than their God, and that our killingis righteous, while theirs is evil, we have begun to resemble the enemy weclaim to be fighting, and that is immoral. We have met the enemy, and the enemyis us.* When you tell people that you intend to run and govern as a "compassionateconservative," using the word which is the essence of all religiousfaith-compassion, and then show no compassion for anyone who disagrees with you, and nopatience with those who cry to you for help, you are doing something immoral.* When you talk about Jesus constantly, who was a healer of the sick, but donothing to make sure that anyone who is sick can go to see a doctor, even ifshe doesn't have a penny in her pocket, you are doing something immoral.* When you put judges on the bench who are racist, and will set women back ahundred years, and when you surround yourself with preachers who say gaysought to be killed, you are doing something immoral.I'm tired of people thinking that because I'm a Christian, I must be asupporter of President Bush, or that because I favor civil rights and gay rights Imust not be a person of faith. I'm tired of people saying that I can't supportthe troops but oppose the war.I heard that when I was your age--when the Vietnam war was raging, we knewthat that war was wrong, and you know that this war is wrong--the only questionis how many people are going to die before these make-believe Christians areremoved from power?This country is bankrupt. The war is morally bankrupt. The claim of thisadministration to be Christian is bankrupt. And the only people who can turnthings around are people like you--young people who are just beginning to wake upto what is happening to them.~ It's your country to take back. It's your faithto take back. It's your future to take back.Don't be afraid to speak out. Don't back down when your friends begin to tellyou that the cause is righteous and that the flag should be wrapped aroundthe cross, while the rest of us keep our mouths shut. Real Christians takechances for peace. So do real Jews, and real Muslims, and real Hindus, and realBuddhists--so do all the faith traditions of the world as their heart believeone thing: life is precious.Every human being is precious. Arrogance is the opposite of faith. Greed isthe opposite of charity. And believing that one has never made a mistake is the mark of a deluded man, not a man of faith.And war -- war is the greatest failure of the human race -- and thus thegreatest failure of faith. There's an old rock and roll song, whose lyrics say itall: War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.And what is the dream of the prophets? That we should study war no more, thatwe should beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks.Who would Jesus bomb, indeed? How many wars does it take to know that too manypeople have died? What if they gave a war and nobody came? Maybe one day wewill find out.

PEACE

from the Heart of Blondie

2004-11-24T09:58:00.000-08:00

When Giving Thanks Comes Hard
by Robert Mabry Doss, Exaltation, 1987

When giving thanks comes hard for you
And things are grim
And hope runs thin,
Recall:
Despair's a door to pass on through,
And not a home for living in.
When thanksgiving fills your cup,
And those you love are all about,
Look at your blessings, count them up,
and give back something to the world without.
Go in Peace,
Go for Peace.
For all who see God,
May god go with you.
For all who embrace life,
May life return your affection.
For all who seek a right path,
May a way be found...
And the courage to take it
Step by step.
Amen.

The RageJax Foundation

2004-10-28T17:22:00.000-07:00

The RageJax Foundation

2004-10-27T15:17:00.000-07:00

Santa Cruz Memorial- Pleasure Point
Blondie

The Odyssey of Grief....

2004-10-26T13:40:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends:
The last 2-1/2 weeks has been a journey through valleys and mountains. The valleys are full of shadows that seek to pull me down into a pit of despair and hopelessness wherein I can escape the awful reality of my loss. You have to understand my relationship with my daughters. We were a triad, using the power of our collective to maintain the unique and creative bond which we relied on for our security. Suddenly, my safety net has been removed and I begin an arduous path. My odyssey to which I had no choice to take, will eventually lead me through to a new beginning that incorporates the strengths and courage of my girls into the person I will become without them. I mourn them every second of every day. I exhaust myself trying to reconcile and release all the frustrations that cause us to falter and perceive myopically. Without my Faith, I would not be able to know that this too shall pass, and the "why" and "if" will cease to have relevance to the integrated me.

2004-10-21T11:37:00.000-07:00

Blondie's Angels
Blondie

2004-10-21T11:22:00.000-07:00

To All the Friends and Family of Raechel and Jacqueline...
I want to thank everyone for the amazing and miraculous outpouring of support, consideration and companionship during the traumatic event that will forever change us all. As we have suffered and grieved together, I am so thankful for the comfort we could provide one another. I have heard often during the last two weeks, there are really no words to express the despair and sadness that are experienced by all who loved these beautiful sisters.I, too, lack the words to properly convey to you all, gratitude for the unconditional love and support you offered. I feel peace in the presence of you, individually and collectively, and thank God that I have been so blessed. Toward realizing the dreams and aspirations of my daughters, a non-profit organization, The RageJax Foundation has been established in their honor and memory. The purpose of this foundation is to create and construct children’s community centers, beginning first in Costa Rica, Jax’s planned destination with her soul mate, Kaleb Stevens. Emphasis will be on the arts and athletics. We hope to provide underprivileged children in the region a venue in which they may join together to learn peace through all media of art, including dance, performance, and music. A surf camp and skate bowl are one of the initially contemplated projects, eventually culminating in an enclosed center with classrooms and other facilities. To all of you, I wish in return, solace, Grace, comfort and unity. This is why we come together to honor the lives of Raechel and Jacqueline. In Peace, with eternal gratitude and appreciation,Cally,Rage and Jax’s MomI asked God for water, He gave me an OceanI asked God for a flower, He gave me a Garden,I asked God for a friend, and He Blessed Me with All of You,I asked God for an angel, He gave me two...Raechel and Jax, I love you with every chamber of my heart.

Please visit the blogspot of the RageJax Foundation at http://ragejaxfoundation.blogspot.com
email the foundation at ragejaxfoundation@yahoo.com

2004-10-14T13:57:00.000-07:00

To Anyone Who reads this blog...
Blondie's daughters were killed on October 7,2004 at approximately 5 pm while returning from a visit with their friends and family in Southern California...It is a profound loss, but it has magical meaning to all those who knew their beautiful hearts. If this blog continues, it will be in honor of them, and will include the amazing and remarkable stories of their lives.

In Memorium
Raechel Veronique Houck
Jacqueline Marie Houck

2004-10-07T13:08:00.000-07:00

WEAPONS REPORT REVEALS IMPEACHABLE OFFENSES
by Jason Leopold
published by The Progressive Trail
John Dean, the former counsel to President Richard Nixon, made a case last year for impeaching President George W. Bush if the president intentionally misled Congress and the public into backing a war with Iraq. "To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked," Dean wrote in a June 6, 2003 column for findlaw.com. "Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be "a high crime" under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony "to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose." On Wednesday, a 918-page report released by the Iraqi Survey Group, headed by former United Nations weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, said Iraq eliminated all of its illicit arms programs in the mid-1990s, shortly after the first Gulf War. In other words, Iraq wasn't a threat Bush's dire warning turned out to be misleading and, as we now know, factually wrong, and, even worse, lies. That's grounds for impeachment. "Presidential statements, particularly on matters of national security, are held to an expectation of the highest standard of truthfulness," Dean wrote in a June 6 column. "A president cannot stretch, twist or distort facts and get away with it. President Lyndon Johnson's distortions of the truth about Vietnam forced him to stand down from reelection. President Richard Nixon's false statements about Watergate forced his resignation." Some of Bush's most frightening statements about Iraq's non-existent weapons program: * "We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have." (Radio Address, October 5, 2002) "The Iraqi regime . . . possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons." "We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas." "We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVS for missions targeting the United States." "The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his "nuclear mujahideen" - his nuclear holy warriors. Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past. Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." (Cincinnati, Ohio Speech, October 7, 2002). "Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent." (State of the Union Address, January 28, 2003). Remember, this a government that impeached a president for accepting sexual favors in the oval office and lying about it. You would think that the punishment for taking a country to war on false pretenses would be worse.