from: http://www.Commondreams.org
A close reading of the new health care legislation, which will conveniently take effect in 2014 after the next presidential election, is deeply depressing. The legislation not only mocks the lofty promises made by President Barack Obama, exposing most as lies, but sadly reconfirms that our nation is hostage to unchecked corporate greed and abuse. The simple truth, that single-payer nonprofit health care for all Americans would dramatically reduce costs and save lives, that the for-profit health care system is the problem and must be destroyed, is censored out of the public debate by a media that relies on these corporations as major advertisers and sponsors, as well as a morally bankrupt Democratic Party that is as bought off by corporations as the Republicans.
The 2,000-page piece of legislation, according to figures compiled by Physicians for a National Health Plan (PNHP), will leave at least 23 million people without insurance, a figure that translates into an estimated 23,000 unnecessary deaths a year among people who cannot afford care. It will permit prices to climb so that many of us will soon be paying close to 10 percent of our annual income to buy commercial health insurance, although this coverage will only pay for about 70 percent of our medical expenses. Those who become seriously ill, lose their incomes and cannot pay skyrocketing premiums will be denied coverage. And at least $447 billion in taxpayer subsidies will now be handed to insurance firms. We will be forced by law to buy their defective products. There is no check in the new legislation to halt rising health care costs. The elderly can be charged three times the rates provided to the young. Companies with predominantly female work forces can be charged higher gender-based rates. The dizzying array of technical loopholes in the bill-written in by armies of insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists-means that these companies, which profit off human sickness, suffering and death, can continue their grim game of trading away human life for money.
"They named this legislation the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and as the tradition of this nation goes, any words they put into the name of a piece of legislation means the opposite," said single-payer activist Dr. Margaret Flowers when I heard her and Helen Redmond dissect the legislation in Chicago at the Socialism 2010 Conference last month. "It neither protects patients nor leads to affordable care."
"This legislation moves us further in the direction of the commodification of health care," Flowers went on. "It requires people to purchase health insurance. It takes public dollars to subsidize the purchase of that private insurance. It not only forces people to purchase this private product, but uses public dollars and gives them directly to these corporations. In return, there are no caps on premiums. Insurance companies can continue to raise premiums. We estimate that because they are required to cover people with pre-existing conditions, although we will see if this happens, they will argue that they will have to raise premiums."
The legislation included a few tiny improvements that have been used as bait to sell it to the public. The bill promises, for example, to expand community health centers and increase access to primary-care doctors. It allows children to stay on their parent's plan until they turn 26. It will include those with pre-existing conditions in insurance plans, although Flowers warns that many technicalities and loopholes make it easy for insurance companies to drop patients. Most of the more than 30 million people currently without insurance, and the 45,000 who die each year because they lack medical care, essentially remain left out in the cold, and things will not get better for the rest of us.
"We are still a nation full of health care hostages," Redmond said. "We live in fear of losing our health care. Millions of people have lost their health care. We fear bankruptcy. The inability to pay medical bills is the No. 1 cause of bankruptcy. We fear not being able to afford medications. Millions of people skip medications. They skip these medications to the detriment of their health. We are not free. And we won't be free until health care is a human right, until health care is not tied to a job, because we still have an employment-based system, and until health care has nothing to do with immigration status. We don't care if you are documented or undocumented. It should not matter what your health care status is, if you have a disease or you don't. It should not matter how much money you have or don't, because many of our programs are based on income eligibility rules. Until we abolish the private, for-profit health insurance industry in this county we are not free. Until we take the profit motive out of health care we cannot live in the way we want to live. This legislation doesn't do any of that. It doesn't change those basic facts of our health care system."
Redmond held up a syringe.
"I take a medication that costs $1,700 every single month," she said. "I inject this medication. It costs $425 a week for 50 milligrams of medication. I would do almost anything to get this medication because without it I don't have much of a life. The pharmaceutical industry knows this. They price these drugs accordingly to the level of desperation that people feel. Billy Tauzin, the former CEO of [the trade organization of] Big Pharma, negotiated a secret deal with President Obama to extend the patents of biologics, this new revolutionary class of drugs, for 12 years. And Obama also promised in this deal that he would not negotiate drug prices for Medicare."
Obama's numerous betrayals-from his failure to implement serious environmental reform at Copenhagen, to his expansion of the current wars, to his refusal to create jobs for our desperate class of unemployed and underemployed, to his gutting of public education, to his callous disregard for the rights of workers and funneling of trillions in taxpayer money to banks-is a shameful list. Passing universal, single-payer nonprofit health care for all Americans might have delivered to Obama, who may well be a one-term president, at least one worthwhile achievement. Single-payer nonprofit health care has widespread popular support, with nearly two-thirds of the public behind it. It is backed by 59 percent of doctors. And it would have helped roll back, at least a bit, the corporate assault on the citizenry.
Medical bills lead to 62 percent of personal bankruptcies, and nearly 80 percent of these people had insurance. The U.S. spends twice as much as other industrialized nations on health care, $8,160 per capita. Private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consume 31 percent of every health care dollar. Streamlining payment through a single nonprofit payer would save more than $400 billion per year-enough, PNHP estimates, to provide comprehensive, high-quality coverage for all Americans.
Candidate Obama promised to protect women's rights under Roe. v. Wade, something this legislation does not do. He told voters he would create a public option and then refused to consider it. The health care reform bill, to quote a statement released by PNHP, has instead "saddled Americans with an expensive package of onerous individual mandates, new taxes on workers' health plans, countless sweetheart deals with the insurers and Big Pharma, and a perpetuation of the fragmented, dysfunctional, and unsustainable system that is taking such a heavy toll on our health and economy today."
"Obama said he was going to have everybody at the table," Redmond said, "but that was a lie. Our voice was not allowed to be there. There was a blackout on our movement. We did not get media attention. We did actions all over the country but we could not get coverage. We had the 'Mad as Hell Doctors' go across the country in a caravan, and they had rallies and meetings. If that had been a bunch of AMA Republican doctors, Cooper Anderson would have been on the caravan reporting live. NPR would have done a series. Instead, they did not get much coverage. And neither did the sit-ins and arrests at insurance companies, although we have never seen that level of activity. They turned us into a fringe movement, although poll after poll shows that the majority of people want some kind of single-payer system."
Our for-profit health system is driven by insurance companies whose goal is to avoid covering the elderly and the sick. These groups, most in need of medical care, diminish profits. Medicare, paid for by the government, removes responsibility for many of the old. Medicaid, also paid for by the government, removes the poor people, who have a greater tendency to have chronic health problems. Hefty premiums, which those who are seriously ill and lose their jobs often cannot pay, remove the very sick. If you are healthy and employed, which means you are less likely to need expensive or complex treatment, the insurance companies swoop down like birds of prey. These corporations need to control our perceptions of health care. Patients must be viewed as consumers. Doctors, identified as "health care providers," must be seen as salespeople.
Insurance companies, which will soon be able to use billions in taxpayer dollars to bolster their lobbying efforts and campaign contributions, know that single-payer nonprofit insurance means their extinction. And they will employ considerable resources to make sure single-payer nonprofit coverage is denied to the public. They correctly see this as a battle for their lives. And if human beings have to die so they can survive, they are willing to make us pay this price.
The for-profit health care industry, along with the Democratic Party, consciously set out to confuse the public debate. It created Health Care for America NOW! in 2008 and provided it with tens of millions of dollars to supposedly build a public campaign for a public option. But the organization had no intention of permitting a public option. The organization was, as Dr. Flowers said, "a very clever way to distract members of the single-payer movement and co-op some of them. They told them that the public option would become single payer, that it was a back door to single payer, although there was no evidence that was true."
Physicians for a National Health Plan attempted to fight back. It worked with a number of organizations under a coalition called the Leadership Conference for Guaranteed Health Care. The group, which included the National Nurse's Union and Health Care Now, sought meetings with members of Congress. Flowers and other advocates asked Congress members to include them in committee debates about the health care bill. But when the first debate on the health care reform took place in the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Sen. Max Baucus, a politician who gets over 80 percent of his campaign contributions from outside his home state of Montana, they were locked out. Baucus invited 41 people to testify. None backed single payer.
The Leadership Conference, which represents more than 20 million people, again requested that one of their members testify. Baucus again refused. When the second committee meeting took place, Flowers and seven other activists stood one by one in the room and asked why the voices of the patients and the health care providers were not being heard. The eight were arrested and removed from the committee hearing.
Single-payer advocates were eventually heard on a few of the House and Senate committees. But the hearings were a charade, part of Washington's cynical political theater. It was the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists who were in charge. They dominated the public debate. They wrote the legislation. They determined who received lavish campaign contributions and who did not. And they won.
"We are talking about life and death, about the difference between living your life and dying," Redmond said. "And once again it came down to the Democratic Party trumping the needs of the people."
from: http://www.Commondreams.org
Earl Shaffer, adrift after serving in the South Pacific in World War II and struggling with the loss of his childhood friend Walter Winemiller during the assault on Iwo Jima, made his way to Mount Oglethorpe in Georgia in 1947. He headed north toward Mount Katahdin in Maine and for the next 124 days, averaging 16.5 miles a day, beat back the demons of war. His goal, he said, was to ''walk the Army out of my system.'' He was the first person to hike the full length of the Appalachian Trail.
The beauty and tranquility of the old-growth forests, the vistas that stretch for miles over unbroken treetops, the waterfalls and rivers, the severance from the noise and electronic hallucinations of modern existence, becomes, if you stay out long enough, a balm to wounds. It is in solitude, contemplation and a connection with nature that we transcend the frenzied and desperate existence imposed upon us by the distortions of a commodity culture.
The mountains that loom on the northern part of the trail in New Hampshire and Maine, most of them in the White Mountain National Forest, are also forbidding, even in summer, when winds can routinely reach 60 or 70 miles per hour accompanied by lashing rain. The highest surface wind speed recorded on the planet, 231 miles per hour, was measured on April 12, 1934, at the Mount Washington Observatory. Boulders and steep inclines become slippery and treacherous when wet and shrouded in dense fog. Thunderstorms, racing across treeless ridge lines with the speed of a freight train, turn the razor-backed peaks into lightning rods. The Penacooks, one of two Native American tribes that dominated the area, called Mount Washington, the highest peak in the Northeast, Agiochook or "place of the Great Spirit."
The Penacooks, fearing the power of Agiochook to inflict death, did not climb to its summit. The fury you bring into the mountains is overpowered by the fury of nature itself. Nature always extracts justice. Defy nature and it obliterates the human species. The more we divorce ourselves from nature, the more we permit the natural world to be exploited and polluted by corporations for profit, the more estranged we become from the essence of life. Corporate systems, which grow our food and ship it across country in trucks, which drill deep into the ocean to extract diminishing fossil fuels and send container ships to bring us piles of electronics and cloths from China, have created fragile, unsustainable man-made infrastructures that will collapse. Corporations have, at the same time, destroyed sustainable local communities. We do not know how to grow our own food. We do not know how to make our own clothes. We are helpless appendages of the corporate state. We are fooled by virtual mirages into mistaking the busy, corporate hives of human activity and the salacious images and gossip that clog our minds as real. The natural world, the real world, on which our life depends, is walled off from view as it is systematically slaughtered. The oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico is one assault. There are thousands more, including the coal-burning power plants dumping gases into our atmosphere that are largely unseen. Left unchecked, this arrogant defiance of nature will kill us.
"We have reached a point at which we must either consciously desire and choose and determine the future of the Earth or submit to such an involvement in our destructiveness that the Earth, and ourselves with it, must certainly be destroyed," writer-poet Wendell Berry warns. "And we have come to this at a time when it is hard, if not impossible, to foresee a future that is not terrifying."
Year after year I returned to these forbidding peaks from conflicts in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. I had a house in Maine on an 800-foot hill with no television, cell phone or Internet service. The phone number was unlisted. It rarely rang. I refused to give the number to my employer, The New York Times. I brought with me the stench of death, the cries of the wounded, the bloated bodies on the side of the road, the fear, the paranoia, the alienation, the insomnia, the anger and the despair and threw it at these mountains. I strapped my pack on in the pounding rain at trailheads and drove myself, and later my son, up mountains. I rarely stopped. Once, in a bitter rain, I crested the peak of Mount Madison in August and was immediately thrown backward by howling winds whipping across the ridge and pelting hailstones. It was impossible to reach the summit. On a hike in the remote Pemigewasset Wilderness I made a wrong turn and, fearing hypothermia, walked all night. By the time the sun rose my blisters had turned to open sores. I wrung the blood out of my socks. I go to the mountains to at once spend this fury and seek renewal, to be reminded of my tiny, insignificant place in the universe and to confront mystery. Berry writes in "The Peace of Wild Things":
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
I climbed my first mountain in the White Mountain National Forest when I was 7. It was Mount Chocorua. The mountain, capped with a rocky dome and perhaps the most beautiful in the park, is named for a legendary Pequawket chief who refused to flee with his tribe to Canada and was supposedly pursued to its summit by white settlers, where he leapt to his death. It is a climb I have repeated nearly every year, now with my children. I guided trips in the mountains in college. I would lie, years later, awake in San Salvador, Gaza, Juba or Sarajevo and try to recall the sound of the wind, the smell of the pine forests and the cacophony of bird song. To know the forests and mountains were there, to know that I would return to them, gave me a psychological and physical refuge. And as my two older children grew to adulthood I dragged them up one peak after another, pushing them perhaps too hard. My college-age son is deeply connected to the mountains. He works in the summer as a guide and has spent upward of seven weeks at a time backpacking on the Appalachian Trail. My teenage daughter, perhaps reflecting her sanity, is reticent to enter the mountains with the two of us.
I stood a few days ago in a parking lot at Crawford Notch with Rick Sullivan, an Army captain and Afghanistan war veteran. It was the end of our weeklong hike in the White Mountains. Sullivan noticed a man with a T-shirt that read "Operation Iraqi Freedom." The shirt had Arabic and English script warning motorists not to come too close or risk being shot. The man, an Iraqi veteran, was putting on a pack and told us that he was the caretaker of a camp site. He said he left the Army a year ago, drifted, drank too much and worked at a bar as a bouncer. His life was unraveling. He then answered an ad for a park caretaker. The clouds hovering on the peaks above us were an ominous gray. The caretaker said he planned to beat the rain back to the tent site. I thought of Earl Shaffer.
"You try and forget the war but you carry pieces of it with you anyway," the caretaker said. "In the mountains, at least, I can finally sleep."
from: http://www.Commondreams.org
The long-term effect of shutting down schools, going to a 4-day school week, and cramming 40 students in a classroom is too unpleasant to imagine. But easy to ignore if you can afford enough acreage to block the view.
Everyone's feeling the pain, they say. Really? Consider these facts:
(1) In 1980 the richest 1% of America took one of every fifteen income dollars. Now they take THREE of every fifteen income dollars. They've TRIPLED their cut of America's income pie. That's a TRILLION extra dollars a year. That's 1/7 of the whole pie, in addition to what they had before.
(2) One man (hedge fund manager David Tepper) made $4 billion last year, enough money to pay the salaries of every public school teacher in New York City. Based on income figures, he is 50,000 times more valuable than the police officer or firefighter who comes rushing to your house in an emergency.
(3) If the bottom 90% of America had shared in our country's prosperity at a level consistent with 1980 incomes, the average family would be making $45,000 a year instead of $35,000.
These are well-documented facts, taken from the Internal Revenue Service, the Census Bureau, and the Congressional Budget Office.
Our children will be paying the price of a free-market philosophy that doesn't have the sense to regulate greed. Plenty of studies show the adverse effects of inequality on the stability and health of a society. And our children don't have to wait to feel the effects. Many of them come to school on Monday mornings anxious for their first full meal in three days.
And it's not just the schools. Essential police and firefighting forces are being reduced. Low-income people traveling to their jobs on off-hours take the brunt of transit cutbacks. We're seeing cutbacks in after-school programs in low-income areas and reductions in library hours and park services. Plus, of course, increases in state income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, gas taxes, cigarette taxes, utility costs, license fees, parking meter rates.
The usual response is that the wealthy deserve what they earn. But while they tripled their cut of the pie, they didn't work three times harder than everyone else. They benefited from financial deregulation and tax cuts, opportunities way beyond the lives of the families with kids in public school.
Supporters also say the rich will re-invest in industry, providing benefits for all. They said this in 1980. The current level of inequality is equivalent to that of the Great Depression.
Or they say the "wealth tax" and the "death tax" is unfairly targeting the rich. The new tax proving for health care is a relative slap on the wrist. The estate tax affects about 5,000 previously untaxed estates, owned by the richest 1/100 of 1% of American families.
Or they say the rich are suffering, too. But a 2010 Merrill Lynch-Capgemini world wealth report states that the rich (millionaires and above) in North America increased their wealth 18 percent to $10.7 trillion.
We're letting this happen to our society because people don't know the truth. Many of those arguing against government regulation are poor themselves. In many ways, big government IS a problem. And capitalism may be the best economic system. But we've failed to find a compromise. Extreme inequality shows that.
Several states have implemented more progressive tax systems. Oregon recently passed Measures 66 and 67, which impose modest income tax increases on the wealthiest residents and raise the corporate minimum tax for the first time in 80 years. A 2008 study by Princeton University determined that "the 'half-millionaire tax,' at least in New Jersey, appears to be an effective and efficient revenue-generation mechanism, having little impact on migration patterns among half-millionaire households." Similarly, little adverse effect of higher taxes was found in Maryland or Oregon. And a study by the California Budget Project revealed that the number of high-income households actually grew during periods of higher income tax rates for top earners.
Progressive taxes worked from the 1950s through the 1970s. And a fair approach now would mean that 90% of us should not be taxed. We just need to get back our piece of the pie. Paul Buchheit is a faculty member in the School for New Learning at DePaul University.
from: http://www.Commondreams.org
Dan La Botz knows with certainty that President Barack Obama is no socialist.
He's sure because he's one himself, and finds little in common with the politics of the 44th president of the United States.
"I don't support Obama. If I did, I would be a Democrat," La Botz said. "I find it astonishing that people would think he's a socialist. He's given trillions of dollars to bankers, billions to General Motors, created a health care system that supports the health insurance companies ... his foreign policy is consistent with Bush's foreign policy."
La Botz, of Clifton, is running for a seat in the U.S. Senate this year on the Socialist ticket.
Since President Obama was elected, "socialism" is a word on the lips of many conservative politicians, tea party supporters and political pundits. A CBS News/New York Times poll in April showed 92 percent of tea party supporters believe Obama is moving the country toward socialism - while 52 percent of all Americans held the same belief.
Socialists shake their heads - but they don't really mind the attention.
"If folks like Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh make their careers off of using the word socialism as a slur, how bad could it be?" asks 35-year-old Shane Johnson of Corryville, a union electrician who helped revive Cincinnati's International Socialist Organization chapter this year, which has about a dozen members.
"We should be fighting for full employment. End wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan," La Botz said. "We should immediately take over BP. What they own is too valuable and too powerful to be in private hands."
Socialism 101
The core concept of this political and economic theory is that people should control the means of production and allocation of resources in society.
Socialists believe in equality for all - hence their devotion to civil rights - and a fair distribution of wealth. They see capitalism as a system that exploits workers in its aspiration for greater profit, therefore broadening the gap between rich and poor.
There are two basic socialist ideas, says Billy Wharton, co-chair of the Socialist Party USA, headquartered in New York City.
"We believe in a society that values human needs over the needs of corporations," Wharton said. "We think that the economy can be run in a democratic way, (allowing) people more decision-making power in the things that affect their everyday lives."He believes businesses, even big ones, could be run more like the Alvarado Street Bakery in California. Opened in 1979, the business is run and owned by its 119 employees.
"The people who work in the bakery make decisions on how much wages are, how hard they work, what they produce, larger economic decisions about how much they want to expand," Wharton said.
Miami University economics professor James Brock isn't sure socialism would produce the results its supporters want.
"I don't know whether - if you turn it over to the workers - it would make any big difference in the scheme of things," said Brock, who has taught economics for 31 years. "The great challenge is how do you create the maximum amount of creativity and opportunity and not be smothered by bureaucracy and excess. I think labor unions can be as bureaucratic as corporations."
Back from hiatus
At a recent Cincinnati ISO meeting, held at the University of Cincinnati on Wednesday evenings, eight participants discuss Marxist theory. The conversation hinges for about 10 minutes on how profits might be spent by large corporations, if the U.S. economy was based on socialism instead of capitalism.
Maybe medical research or advances in technology, a younger member opines.
"People from this generation are going to be the first to have a lower standard of living than their parents," Johnson says later. "They're going to work longer, for less pay, and their wages will get them less. They may not be able to retire and may file bankruptcy - or already have - due to illness without health care."The ISO chapter had been on a one-year hiatus when it again began meeting weekly in April.
Since then the group has organized and championed several local events,including the March for Immigration Reform attended by hundreds of people Downtown on June 5, demonstrating ISO's strong believe in equal rights.
A handful of the group's members are at the Socialism 2010 conference in Chicago this past weekend.
Third party politics
For the first time in his life, Johnson had the option to choose a Socialist ballot in May's primary election. Recent court rulings and an order by Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner gave third parties easier access to the ballot.The result: Johnson ended up one of 46 people in Hamilton County who voted for La Botz, compared to roughly 50,000 votes for Republican candidate Rob Portman.
La Botz pulled in 369 statewide votes, far behind Portman, Democrats Jennifer Brunner and Lee Fisher, and also trailing Eric W. Deaton of the Constitution Party, who got 1,737 votes.
La Botz, who teaches Spanish at a local private school, remains optimistic.
"I expect to win many more votes in the general election," La Botz said. "I also think the votes are only one measure of success of the campaign. You want to use the campaign trail as an opportunity to organize people or inspire people to do what they ought to do; to fight for jobs for everyone, to defend women's right to choose, to defend gay and lesbian rights and immigrant rights."
Xavier University political science professor Mack Mariani believes Americans are frustrated with government leaders and skeptical of big business, but he's not convinced socialist thought is spreading.
"I haven't seen anything that would seem the Socialist Party is having a resurgence," Mariani said. "Even though I think capitalism as a concept has taken a hit in terms of public approval ... it wouldn't translate into support for the Socialist Party."
Still, local socialists march on.
"I think we are at a very critical moment in our history," La Botz said. "People are looking for new ideas and the answers to the problems of American society. Our goal is to offer a different point of view."
from: http://www.Commondreams.org
The termination of Helen Thomas' 62-year long career as a pioneering, no-nonsense newswoman was swift and intriguingly merciless.
The event leading to her termination began when she was sitting on a White House bench under oppressive summer heat. The 89-year-old hero of honest journalism and women's rights, the scourge of dissembling presidents and White House press secretaries, answered a passing visitor's question about Israel with a snappish comment worded in a way she didn't mean; she promptly apologized in writing. Recorded without permission on a hand video, the brief exchange, that included a defense of dispossessed Palestinians, went internet viral on Friday, June 4.
By Monday, Helen Thomas was considered finished, even though she embodied a steadfast belief, in the praiseworthy words of Washington Post columnist, Dana Milbank, "that anybody standing on that podium [in the White House] should be regarded with skepticism."
Over the weekend, her lecture agent dropped her. Her column syndicator, the Hearst company, pressed her to quit "effective immediately," and, it was believed that the White House Correspondents Association, of which she was the first female president, was about to take away her coveted front row seat in the White House press room.
Then, Helen Thomas announced her retirement on Monday, June 10. No doubt she's had her fill of ethnic, sexist and ageist epithets hurled her way over the years -- the very decades she was broadly challenging racism, sexism and, more recently, ageism.
Although the behind the scenes story has yet to come out, the evisceration was launched by two pro-Israeli war hawks, Ari Fleischer and Lanny Davis. Fleischer was George W. Bush's press secretary who bridled under Helen Thomas' questioning regarding the horrors of the Bush-Cheney war crimes and illegal torture. His job was not to answer this uppity woman but to deflect, avoid and cover up for his bosses.
Davis was the designated defender whenever Clinton got into hot water. As journalist Paul Jay pointed out, he is now a Washington lobbyist whose clients include the cruel corporate junta that overthrew the elected president of Honduras. Both men rustled up the baying pack of Thomas-haters during the weekend and filled the unanswered narrative on Fox and other facilitating media.
Then, belatedly, something remarkable occurred. People reacted against this grossly disproportionate punishment. Ellen Ratner, a Fox News contributor, wrote -- "I'm Jewish and a supporter of Israel. Let's face it: we all have said things -- or thought things -- about other' groups of people, things that we wouldn't want to see in print or on video. Anyone who denies it is a liar. Giver her [Helen] a break."
Apparently, many people agree. In an internet poll by the Washington Post, 92% of respondents said she should not be removed from the White House press room. As an NPR listener, R. Carey, e-mailed: "D.C. would be void of journalists if they all were to quit, get fired or retire after making potentially offensive comments."
Listen to Michael Freedman, former managing editor for United Press International: "After seven decades of setting standards for quality journalism and demolishing barriers for women in the workplace, Helen Thomas has now shown that most dreaded of vulnerabilities -- she is human.... Who among us does not have strong feelings about the endless warfare in the Middle East? Who among us has said something we have come to regret?.... Let's not destroy Ms. Thomas now."
Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation, wrote: "Thomas was the only accredited White House correspondent with the guts to ask Bush the tough questions that define a free press.... Her remarks were offensive, but considering her journalistic moxie and courage over many decades -- a sharp contrast to the despicable deeds committed by so many littering the Washington political scene -- isn't there room for someone who made a mistake, apologized for it and wants to continue speaking truth to power and asking tough questions?"
Last week, in front of the White House, people calling themselves "Jews for Helen Thomas" gathered in a small demonstration. Medea Benajmin -- cofounder of Global Exchange, declared that "We are clear what Helen Thomas meant to say, which is that Israel should cease its occupation of Palestine and we agree with that." While another demonstrator, Zool Zulkowitz, asserted that "by discrediting Helen Thomas, those who believe that Israel can do no wrong shift attention from the public relations debacle of the Gaza Flotilla killings, and intimidate journalists who would ask hard questions about the Israeli occupation of Palestine and American foreign policy."
Helen Thomas, who grew up in Detroit, is an American of Arab descent. She is understandably alert to the one-sided U.S. military and foreign policy in that region. Her questions reflect concerns about U.S. policy in the Middle East by many Americans, including unmuzzled retired military, diplomatic and intelligence officials.
In 2006 when George W. Bush finally called on her, she started her questioning by saying "Your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of Americans and Iraqis. Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true." Or when she challenged President Obama last month, asking "When are you going to get out of Afghanistan? Why are we continuing to kill and die there? What is the real excuse?"
Asking the "why" questions was a Thomas trademark. Many self-censoring journalists avoid controversial "why" questions, thereby allowing evasion, dissembling and just plain B.S. to dominate the White House press room. She rejected words that sugarcoated or camouflaged the grim deeds. She started with the grim deeds to expose the doubletalk and officialdom's chronic illegalities.
What appalled Thomas most is the way the media rolls over and fails to hold officials accountable. (British reporters believe they are tougher on their Prime Ministers.) This is a subject about which she has written books and articles -- not exactly the way to endear herself to those reporters who go AWOL and look the other way, so that they cancontinue to be called upon or to be promoted by their superiors.
The abysmal record of the New York Times and the Washington Post in the months preceding the Iraq invasion filled with Bush-Cheney lies, deception, and cover-ups is a case in point. As usual, she was proven right, not the celebrated reporters and columnists deprecating her work, including the Post's press critic, Howard Kurtz.
Thomas practiced her profession with a deep regard for the people's right to know. To her, as Aldous Huxley noted long ago, "facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
Lastly, there is the double standard. One off-hand "ill-conceived remark," as NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard stated, in praising Ms. Thomas, ended a groundbreaking career. While enhanced careers and fat lecture fees are the reward for ultra-right wing radio and cable ranters, and others like columnist Ann Coulter, who regularly urge wars, mayhem and dragnets based on bigotry, stereotypes and falsehoods directed wholesale against Muslims, including a blatant anti-semitism against Arabs.
Ms. Thomas' desk at the Hearst office remains unattended a week after her eviction. One day she will return to pack up her materials. She can take with her the satisfaction of joining all those in our history who were cashiered ostensibly for a gaffe, but really for being too right, too early, too often.
Her many admirers hope that she continues to write, speak and motivate a generation of young journalists in the spirit of Joseph Pulitzer's advice to his reporters a century ago -- that their job was to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."
Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His most recent book - and first novel - is, Only The Super Wealthy Can Save Us. His most recent work of non-fiction is The Seventeen Traditions.
from: http://www.Commondreams.org
Let's face it: Large corporations have our country, and us, in a death grip. Some of their bad behavior makes big headlines: the BP oil disaster, Goldman Sachs' financial shenanigans, Enron's book-cooking. However, equally dangerous corporate activity happens every day, far from public view.
Corporations have seeped almost invisibly into nearly every government agency and too many congressional offices. And they're as poisonous as carbon monoxide. In the last 20 years, protective legislation and regulation, carefully constructed from the days of President Coolidge and vastly strengthened due to the Depression, have seriously deteriorated.
There's nothing inherently evil, or even bad, about corporations. Indeed, the combination of capital and management under one roof is efficient and essential in a global, competitive world. So much of our standard of living and our worldwide leadership are directly traceable to our corporate and entrepreneurial culture. But even good things, when they get out of control, turn destructive. Cancer, after all, is just growth gone wild.
There has always been tension between good government and free enterprise. It hurts the bottom line to scrub emissions from coal-burning power generators, ensure meat is sanitary, clean up toxic waste, and disclose the full risks of financial products. But once corporations realized that instead of fighting government they could actually buy it through lobbying and political contributions, the base of our democracy eroded. Their "invisible power" got a grip. The stealthy hunt for corporate profits metastasized from the marketplace and entered the halls of Congress and the executive branch.
The fight over reforming Wall Street is just the latest example. The need for regulation is hardly theoretical here. We're still reeling from a crisis caused by the absence of it. Congress doesn't even need to reinvent the wheel, a favorite task. There were laws and regulations that had worked for so long, such as those to keep banks and investment brokers separate; require diligent lending; prohibit betting against your own borrowers; require full disclosure to borrowers; and, above all, keep the risk with the lenders to insure they make prudent loans.
So why has the debate on reform dragged on for nearly a year? The public wants Wall Street reined in. So why would any legislator, much less an entire political party, get in the way of financial reform? It can't just be a coincidence that the financial sector happens to be the biggest contributor to 2010 congressional campaigns, with more than $129 million doled out already. Financial firms have also spent well over a half a billion dollars on lobbying since early 2009.
To reverse this situation we must change who gets elected to Congress. And that is the one thing we can do, and perhaps the only thing, to neutralize corporate control of our government. Only real people have the vote; corporations don't.
To regain our democracy, we must:
Identify and make public those elected representatives who owe their jobs to corporate largesse and cast their votes accordingly.
Insulate the election process from corporate funding. Bills in both the Senate and House that would forbid campaign spending by contractors who receive more than $50,000 in taxpayer funds would be a good start. Prohibit lawmakers and lobbyists from interacting with each other, except to exchange ideas on legislation, and require them to publish a record of their contacts.
It may take several election cycles to scrub corporate influence and control from our political system, but once it starts it will gain momentum. And once we've accomplished this feat, appropriate regulation and control will follow. The horse will be before the cart, and the driver will be a human person.
from: http://www.Commondreams.org
Nearly a week after the event, Thailand is still stunned by the military assault on the Red Shirt encampment in the tourist center of the capital city of Bangkok on May 19. The Thai government is treating captured Red Shirt leaders and militants like they're from an occupied country. No doubt about it: A state of civil war exists in this country, and civil wars are never pretty.
The last few weeks have hardened the Bangkok middle class in its view that the Red Shirts are "terrorists" in the pocket of ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. At the same time, they have convinced the lower classes that their electoral majority counts for nothing. "Pro-Thaksin" versus "Anti-Thaksin": This simplified discourse actually veils what is to borrow Mao's words a class war with Thai characteristics.
Epic Tragedy
No doubt there will be stories told about the eight weeks of the "Bangkok Commune." As in all epic tragedies, truth will be entangled with myth. But one thing will be clear: The government's decision to order the Thai military against civilian protesters can never be justified.
The casualties are still being counted. Government sources say some 52 people were killed in the week ending on May 19. Bodies are, however, still turning up, including about nine that rescue workers discovered on Friday at the massive Central World shopping mall at the Rajprasong Intersection, which was torched by protesters. The final count is likely to be much higher. One soldier, for instance, claims to have counted 25 dead bodies on May 20, as he went with his unit on a room-to-room operation to flush out suspected Red Shirt protesters in the Siam Square area.
Red Shirt sympathizers accuse the military of indiscriminate shooting. They point to six people, including two medical personnel, shot by high-powered rifles outside the temple Wat Pathum Wanaram, where thousands of Red-Shirt supporters took refuge. A report by Thai academic Pipob Udomittipong documented in painstaking detail a military unit's unprovoked firing at a medic's van near the Red-Shirt stronghold at Lumpini Park, a few days before the May 19 assault.
While the Red Shirts count their dead, the Bangkok middle classes dwell on the 39 establishments and buildings that were burned down on May 19. The anti-Red Shirt Bangkok Post editorialized: "City residents will rebuild and prove that the collective good is a force greater than the terrorists who laid waste to our homes and businesses."
Class War
The local and domestic media have portrayed the Red Shirts as a lower-class peasant rabble invading Bangkok from the country's impoverished northeast. This is a distortion. Some Red Shirts estimate that the masses that made up the Red Shirt demonstrators and sympathizers during the two-month-long mobilization were 70 percent from Bangkok and surrounding provinces, and 30 percent from the northeast, north, and other rural areas. Those who resisted the armed assaults at key Red Shirt fortifications and refused the Red Shirt leadership's advice to disperse peacefully before the military operation were mainly young people from Bangkok's lower-class districts, such as Klong Toey.
There is a strong class element in the struggle between the Red Shirts and the Yellow Shirts, which together form the government's mass base. Taxi drivers are mainly a Red Shirt lot, and in the aftermath of May 19 they're eager to blast the government and the Bangkok rich and middle classes to anyone willing to listen. Given the way that the Red Shirts and hundreds of their lower-class sympathizers not only in Bangkok but throughout Thailand have been attacked, arrested, and imprisoned in the last week, there is no reason to doubt the words of one driver that, "when the curfew is lifted, Thailand will witness deeds that have not been seen before in this country."
Who Ordered Whom?
Prime Minister Abhisit Vejajeva ordered the assault. But the question is: Who gave Abhisit, who responds to powerful figures within the Thai elite, the green light? The army command apparently didn't favor an assault on civilians and neither did the police, who largely favored the Red Shirts. General Prem Tinsulanonda, known as "Prem" to many Red Shirt partisans, is the most influential figure in the Royal Privy Council. Some Red Shirts may well believe that Prem, whom they see as a master of intrigue, is the villain of the piece. But what other Red Shirts mean by "Prem" includes others in positions of great authority.
Any suggestion that the King Bhumibol Adulyadej had something to do with the crackdown would be vehemently disputed by highly respected politician Anand Panyarachun. Anand said that, in his experience as prime minister, King Bhumibol always observed the constitutional rules of the game. He only provided advice "on request" and left it up to the political players to decide what to do. 'This is what happened in May 1992, when he brought Chamlong and Suchinda [the warring leaders] together and said it would be desirable for them to do what was in the best interest of the people," Anand says. "He never specifies what is to be done."
Whatever the role of the king in the recent tragedy if indeed he had any role at all the Thai public is now engaged in a more explicit discussion of the role of the monarchy, something that used to be shrouded with vague allusions.
Democracy and its Discontents
How did Thailand get to this point? Perhaps the place to begin is May 1992, when the dictatorship of General Suchinda Kraprayoon gave way to a new era of democratic governance. Between 1992 and 1997, elections produced three coalitions. But these coalitions were parliamentary formations dominated by traditional party bosses and elites who delivered command votes, particularly in the rural areas, through their control of economic and bureaucratic sources of wealth. Little was done to address the social grievances of the urban and rural poor.
As parliamentary democracy lost its luster the economy barreled along, with the Bangkok metropolitan area rapidly integrated into the global economy, via financial and production networks. The 10 percent GDP growth rate between 1985 and 1995 the highest in the world, according to the World Bank seemed impressive. But it masked deepening inequalities: between Bangkok and the rest of the country, between the city and the countryside, among social classes. Between 1988 and 1994 the height of the boom that made Thailand Asia's "fifth tiger" the portion of household income going to the top 20 percent of the population rose from 54 percent to 57.5 percent, while that going to the lowest 20 percent fell from 4.6 percent to 4 percent. In the 1960s, the income of the agricultural worker was one-sixth that of workers in other sectors; by the early 1990s, it was down to one-twelfth. Poverty became, as one economist said, "almost entirely a rural phenomenon."
When the bottom fell off the Thai economy during the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, the rural poor were suddenly joined in the ranks of the marginalized by almost one million Thais, a great many of them members of the urban working classes. And as globalization went awry, parliamentary democracy fell into severe disrepute as Thai governments seemed powerless to protect the people they were elected to serve from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In return for providing a $72 billion fund to pay off the country's foreign creditors, the IMF imposed a very severe "reform" program that consisted of radically cutting expenditures, decreeing many corporations bankrupt, liberalizing foreign investment laws, and privatizing state enterprises.
When the government of Chaovalit Yongchaiyudh hesitated to adopt these measures, the IMF pressed for a change in government. The second Chuan Leekpai government complied fully with the Fund, and for the next three years Thailand had a government accountable not to the people but to a foreign institution. Not surprisingly, the government lost much of its credibility as the IMF's demand-reducing measures plunged the country into recession and stagnation.
The Two Faces of Thaksin
It was at in these straitened circumstances that Thaksin Shinawatra, a talented manager, adept political entrepreneur, and extremely effective communicator, achieved ascendancy. As a businessman, Thaksin had benefited from globalization owing to his firms' monopolistic position in private telecommunications, one of the economy's most globalized sectors. Yet he sensed that the financial crisis catalyzed popular fears about free-market globalization, smoldering resentment at the urban and rural elites that seemed to be cornering the country's wealth, and anger at the international financial institutions. On becoming prime minister in 2001, Thaksin made a number of dazzling moves. He paid off the country's IMF loan and kicked the Fund out of Thailand, initiated a universal health care system that allowed people to be treated for the equivalent of a dollar, imposed a moratorium on the payment of farmers' debts, and created a one- million-baht fund for each village that villagers could invest however they wanted.
This side of Thaksin won him a mass following among the country's poor, marginalized, and economically precarious sectors. But there was another side to Thaksin, the side that most of his urban and rural poor followers chose to ignore. Thaksin literally bought his political allies, constructing in the process a potent but subservient parliamentary coalition. He used his office to enhance his wealth and that of his cronies. He failed to distinguish public interest from private gain.
Thaksin appeared to have created the formula for a long stay in power supported by an electoral majority. But then he overreached. In January 2006, his family sold its controlling stake in telecom conglomerate Shin Corporation for $1.87 billion to a Singapore government front called Temasek Holdings. Before the sale, Thaksin had made sure the Revenue Department would interpret or modify the rules to exempt him from paying taxes. This brought the enraged Bangkok middle class into the streets to demand his ouster. Feeling mortally threatened by Thaksin's effort to redraw the landscape of Thai politics, the Thai establishment jumped onto the anti-corruption bandwagon. Unable to break Thaksin's parliamentary majority or to achieve a critical mass on the streets to sweep him from power, the establishment pushed the military to oust Thaksin in September 2006.
Coup and Continuing Crisis
The military was unable to restabilize the country, partly because of its own mistakes and partly because of Thaksin's recalcitrant mass base. The generals thus soured on direct rule. When the post-coup military-sponsored regime exited, elections brought two pro-Thaksin parliamentary coalitions to power. Frustrated at the polls, the elite middle- class alliance resorted to direct action, the most infamous of which was the anti-Thaksin Yellow Shirts' seizure of the new Suvanaphumi International Airport in December 2008. At the same time, the courts intervened to dissolve the dominant pro-Thaksin party, and Yellow Shirt politicians used coercion to detach some pro-Thaksin members and force them to join a new coalition centered around the minority Democrats, headed by Abhisit.
At that point, Thaksin's followers realized that only by mounting a show of force on the streets like the Yellow Shirts could they restore their political position as the country's majority power. Street warfare in spring 2009, which resulted in the cancellation of the ASEAN Summit in Pattaya, failed to dislodge Abhisit. But it proved to be a valuable dress rehearsal for the massive Red Shirt push that began in the middle of March this year.
Within an Inch of Victory?
To many observers, the Red Shirts were within an inch of victory two weeks ago, when they managed to elicit a five-point reconciliation plan from Abhisit that included dissolving parliament in September and elections in November. The government says hardliners among the Red Shirts sabotaged the agreement by demanding new conditions, aimed at making key government leaders accountable for the 20-plus deaths in an earlier clash that took place on April 10. The Red Shirt leadership, on the other hand, claimed that the haste with which the government took back its offer and ended negotiations showed it had been merely using the negotiations to buy time for the military crackdown, which came on May 19.
The surrender of the Red Shirt leadership and the repatriation of thousands of rural folk to their provinces will certainly not end the Red Shirt challenge. According to one pro- Red Shirt academic, the disaffected military, police, and government personnel that played a prominent role in the recent mobilizations will create a potent underground network that will provide leadership for the next phase of the struggle.
But the main push will come from the people themselves. Thailand, it is clear, will never be the same again. A taxi driver summed up where things stand at this point: "The Bangkok rich think we are stupid people, who can't be trusted with democratic choice. We know what we're doing. So yes, they say Thaksin is corrupt. But he's for us and he's proven it. The Bangkok rich and middle classes see us as their enemy. If they think we're finished, they should think again. This is not the end but the end of the beginning."
FPIF columnist Walden Bello is a member of the House of Representatives of the Philippines and author of A Siamese Tragedy: Development and Disintegration in Modern Thailand (London: Zed, 1998).
from: http://www.Commondreams.org
Even as BP's blown well a mile beneath the surface in the Gulf of Mexico continues to gush forth an estimated 70,000 barrels of oil a day into the sea, and the fragile wetlands along the Gulf begin to get coated with crude, which is also headed into the Gulf Stream for a trip past the Everglades and on up the East Coast, the company is demanding that Canada lift its tight rules for drilling in the icy Beaufort Sea portion of the Arctic Ocean.
In an incredible display of corporate arrogance, BP is claiming that a current safety requirement that undersea wells drilled during the newly ice-free summer must also include a side relief well, so as to have a preventive measure in place that could shut down a blown well, is "too expensive" and should be eliminated.
Yet clearly, if the US had had such a provision in place, the Deepwater Horizon blowout could have been shut down right almost immediately after it blew out, just by turning of a valve or two, and then sealing off the blown wellhead.
A relief well is "too expensive"?
The current Gulf blowout has already cost BP over half a billion dollars, according to the company's own information. That doesn't count the cost of mobilizing the Coast Guard, the Navy, and untold state and county resources, and it sure doesn't count the cost of the damage to the Gulf Coast economy, or the cost of restoration of damaged wetlands. We're talking at least $10s of billions, and maybe eventually $100s of billions. Weigh that against the cost of drilling a relief well, which BP claims will run about $100 million. The cost of such a well in the Arctic, where the sea is much shallower, would likely be a good deal less.
Such is the calculus of corruption. BP has paid $1.8 billion for drilling rights in Canada's sector of the Beaufort Sea, about 150 miles north of the Northwest Territories coastline, an area which global warming has freed of ice in summer months. and it wants to drill there as cheaply as possible. The problem is that a blowout like the one that struck the Deepwater Horizon, if it occurred near the middle or end of summer, would mean it would be impossible for the oil company to drill a relief well until the following summer, because the return of ice floes would make drilling impossible all winter. That would mean an undersea wild well would be left to spew its contents out under the ice for perhaps eight or nine months, where its ecological havoc would be incalculable.
BP and other oil companies like Exxon/Mobil and Shell, which also have leases in Arctic Waters off Canada and the US, are actually trying to claim that the environmental risks of a spill in Arctic waters are less than in places like the Gulf of Mexico or the Eastern Seaboard, because the ice would "contain" any leaking oil, allowing it to be cleared away. The argument is laughable. This is not like pouring a can of 10W-40 oil into an ice-fishing hole on a solidly frozen pond, where you could scoop it out again without its going anywhere. Unlike the surface of a frozen pond, Arctic sea ice is in constant motion, cracking and drifting in response to winds, tides and currents. Moreover, the blowout in the Gulf has taught us that much of the oil leaked into the sea doesn't even rise to the surface at all. It is cracked and emulsified by contact with the cold waters and stays submerged in the lower currents, wreaking its damage far from wellhead and recovery efforts. Finally, as difficult a time as BP has had rounding up the necessary containment equipment and personnel in the current blowout 50 miles from the oil industry mecca of Texas and Louisiana, the same task would be far harder to accomplish in the remote reaches of the Beaufort, far above the Arctic Circle, where there aren't any roads, much less rail lines or airports.
In fact, it was the remoteness of the Arctic staging area, and the lack of infrastructure, that has been the oil industry's main argument against a mandatory simultaneous relief well drilling requirement for offshore Arctic drilling. The industry claims it would be "too difficult" to drill two wells simultaneously, as this would require bring in and supplying double the personnel, and two separate drilling rigs.
In a hearing in Canada's Parliament last week, Ann Drinkwater, president of BP Canada, told stunned and incredulous members of Parliament that she had never compared US and Canadian drilling regulations. In fact, whether by design or appalling ignorance, she had precious little in the way of information to offer them about anything to do with drilling rules, effects of spills, or containment strategems. All she wanted was relief from "expensive" regulation, so BP could go about its business of putting yet another region of the earth and its seas at risk in the pursuit of profits.
Asked if BP knew how it would clean up oil spilling out under the winter ice in a blowout, Drinkwater told the parliamentary hearing, "I'm not an expert in oil-spill techniques in an Arctic environment, so I would have to defer to other experts on that."
"You'd think coming to a hearing like this that British Petroleum would have as many answers as possible to assure the Canadian public. We got nothing today from them," groused Nathan Cullen of the left- leaning New Democrats, after hearing from the ironically named Drinkwater.
The fundamental problem in the US is that politicians purchased by campaign contributions are unwilling to look at the real risks of offshore drilling, whether on the two coasts or up in the Arctic region. With luck, maybe at least the Canadian government will conclude that such drilling in their northern seas makes no economic or environmental sense. In both countries, the amount of oil provided from offshore drilling would, over the next decade, be less than could be saved by simply making automobile mileage standards stricter.
All this is even more true when the drilling in question is in the fragile ecological environs of the Arctic Ocean.
If you liked this piece you can check out more and similar pieces by Lindorff and other writers at the recently renovated news collective ThisCan'tBeHappening.net. Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. He is author of Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For-Profit Hospital Chains (BantamBooks, 1992), and his latest book "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). All his work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
from: http://www.Commondreams.org
Maybe we can finally have a serious discussion in this country about the lunacies of libertarianism.
I doubt it. This is, after all, America. I doubt we'd know an intelligent political discourse if it whacked us upside the haid.
But now we have Rand Paul, son of Ron, marching toward the United States Senate, with a mission to "take back our government". Oh boy.
I might be able to get a little bit excited about that if it really was his goal. The truth is that the American government exists almost entirely to serve the interests of the American plutocracy. If libertarians want to break that evil connection, well, then, definitely give me a shout. I'll be glad to pitch in.
But, of course, you pretty much never hear them talk about that part as they rant about the evils of government.
What do libertarians actually want, Herr Doktor? It's not entirely clear to me that they know themselves. They're pretty good with the shibboleths, but always seem to have trouble beyond that. That's because it is precisely on the other side of the sappy slogans where the contradictions of libertarianism come glaringly into focus. This is the place where naive but kindly people would say "Wot, I signed up for that?", and that's exactly why libertarians don't want to go there.
Such avoidance of reality is not only rarely a problem in American political discourse, it's nearly a national religion. In this sense, the discussion Rand Paul had with Rachel Maddow the other night was doubly instructive. First, because Paul - the national savior on horseback du jour - was reduced to repeated instances of the most basic, and base, political maneuvering in order to come to grips with the implications of his own ideology.
And, second, because Maddow gave us a partial reminder of what good journalism would actually look like in America. She didn't actually get quite all the way to where she should have gone, but her polite, thoughtful and semi-relentless questioning of her guest was as foreign to what passes for journalism in this country today as would be six-headed fourteen-dimensional gaseous creatures from a distant galaxy. Maddow is fast becoming a national treasure, which says a lot about her, but, regrettably, a lot more about her colleagues in the 'news' business.
There are several key explanations for the rise of the insane right over the last three decades, but surely one of them has been the compliance of the mainstream media. Politicians have been able to make the most absurdly ridiculous and hypocritical statements without fear of being called on them. And if they ever were, they need only repeat the same line in some slightly different variation, and that's the end of the affair - media lapdogs are well trained to cease and desist. One of Maddow's great virtues - which ought to be a sine qua non for anyone calling themselves a journalist - is her doggedness.
To see what I mean, check out this paraphrased approximation (not too far from verbatim, actually) of her conversation with Rand Paul the other night:
MADDOW: Congratulations on your big victory last night. Do you believe that private business people should be able to not serve black people or gays or any other minority group?
PAUL: I don't believe in racism. I don't think there should be any governmental or institutional racism. Now I'm going to go into a long diversionary soliloquy about William Lloyd Garrison, an early nineteenth century abolitionist, and also about when 'desegregation' [actually anti-discrimination] legislation was passed into law in Boston...
MADDOW: Yes, okay, that was pretty weird. But what about private businesses who might want to not serve blacks or gays? Should they have the legal right to do so?
PAUL: We had incredible problems with racism in the 1950s concerning voting, schools and public housing. This is what civil rights addressed and what I largely agree with.
MADDOW: But what about private businesses? I don't want to be badgering you on this, but I do want an answer.
PAUL: I'm not in favor of any discrimination of any form, I would never belong to any club that excluded anybody for race. What's important here is to not get into any sort of "gotcha" on the question of race, but to ask the question, "What about freedom of speech?" Should we limit speech from people we find abhorrent?
MADDOW: The Civil Rights Act was created to take away the right of individual business owners to discriminate, taking away their right to make that decision. Which side of that debate are you on?
PAUL: In the totality of it, I'm in favor of the federal government being involved in civil rights, which is mostly what the Civil Rights Act was about. I'm opposed to any form of governmental racism or discrimination or segregation.
MADDOW: The reason that this is something I'm not letting go of this is because it effects real people's lives. This question involves the matter of private discrimination in public accommodations. Should that be allowed?
PAUL: The debate involves a lot of court cases with regard to the commerce clause. Many states are now saying that they have a right to force restaurant owners to allow people to enter with guns even if the owners don't want them to. So you see how this issue can cut both ways, against liberals too.
MADDOW: What if the owner of a restaurant or a swimming pool or a bowling alley wanted to segregate their facility? Should they be allowed to do so under your world view?
PAUL: We did some very important things in the 1960s that I'm all in favor of. That was desegregating schools, public transportation, water fountains.
MADDOW: How about lunch counters?
PAUL: Well, if you do that, then can the owner of the restaurant keep out guns? Does the owner of a restaurant own his restaurant or does the government own his restaurant?
MADDOW: Should Woolworths lunch counters have been left to be segregated? Sir, just yes or no?
PAUL: I don't believe in any discrimination. If you believe in regulating private ownership, you have to decide on whether you also want to force guns in restaurants when the owner doesn't want them. This is a red herring being used by my political opponents. It's an abstract, obscure conversation from 1964 that you want to bring up. Every fiber of my being doesn't believe in discrimination, doesn't believe that we should have that in our society, and to imply otherwise is just dishonest.
MADDOW: I couldn't disagree with you more on this issue, but I thank you for coming on the show and having this civilized discussion about it...
So, by my count, Maddow asks Paul the core question here no fewer than eight times in a row. This is precisely what she should have been doing, and in doing so she provides a huge service to American society. If I were to fault her anywhere, it would be only for not identifying Paul's diversionary tactics for what they were, calling them out, and thereby pushing them off the table. I would have liked to have seen her say, "With respect, sir, we're not talking about that. Or that, or that, or that. We're talking about this."
And she would have needed to do that several times over, because Paul's game here is to shift the discussion to domains where he is more comfortable, and where the problems with his ideology don't show up so readily. Maddow says let's talk about discrimination in privately-held public accommodations, and he says let's talk about my lack of prejudice. She tries again and he wants to discuss governmental discrimination. She repeats the question and he says let's talk about nineteenth century history. She asks once more and he starts talking about censorship and the First Amendment. She tries yet again and he changes the topic to guns, which involves legislating behavior, rather than race, which concerns who you are. She asks still another time and he cries foul, claiming that this is some obscure red herring being used by his opponents for purposes of political assassination.
All of these are diversionary lies, meant to avoid the unpleasant realities of what libertarianism would actually look like in action. But the last lie is the most egregious. The entire reason for Rand Paul's existence right now - which is also almost literally true, given that he has the unfortunate burden of being named for Ayn Rand, a twisted soul if ever there was - is his premise of reclaiming American government in the name of liberty for the American people. That's who he is. That's what he represents himself to be. That's his political shtick, his raison d'être. What the Maddow interview reveals, however, is that he's really just another politician trying to win office, not a crusader at all. And what it also reveals is just how bankrupt are those libertarian notions if you look at them at all closely.
The ideology has some nice bumper-sticker like appeal, especially for the more simplistic among us. I mean, who, after all, could be against more freedom? And, indeed, when it comes to social issues, the libertarians have it exactly right. The government shouldn't be in the business of controlling women's bodies, or telling people what substances they can imbibe, or who they can sleep with or marry, or whether they can end their own lives should they choose to. But you don't need to be a libertarian to get to those places. These are also progressive ideas as well.
Where libertarianism breaks down is in assuming that we can all just do what we want and it will work out great. And in assuming that all private actors are essentially well intentioned. Neither of these is true, and a libertarian society would leave each of us at the mercy of these twin fallacies. And that's an ugly place to be, let me tell you.
Suppose you bought a house and had a fat mortgage outstanding on it. Now the guy who owns the plot next door decides to build an abattoir on his land. You can't live in your house anymore because of the nauseating, permeating, stink. You also can't sell it, because no one else wants to live there either. And you're still stuck paying the mortgage, probably plunging you into bankruptcy since you're now also paying rent to live somewhere else. Why did all this happen? Because you voted for that libertarian city council, and they threw out all the zoning laws on the books, preferring maximum freedom for use of private property instead. Aren't you thrilled about how that worked out?
So you pack all your belongings in your car and decide to drive away. But you turn around after going just a couple of miles, because everybody drives on any side of the road they want to, whenever they want to, and it's scary dangerous out there. Why? Because the libertarian state government you elected - true to its principles - eliminated all such driving laws as the restrictions on personal freedom they truly are.
So maybe you'll fly instead, eh? Oops. Sorry. That's just as frightening. The new libertarian federal government eliminated the FAA and all its restrictions on private carriers as an invasion of their corporate liberties. No red tape here anymore! No onerous regulations! Now each carrier can hire whomever it wants, at whatever salary, to do whatever amount of safety inspection it deems appropriate. Or none at all. No reason to worry, though. I'm sure a corporation would never cut corners in order to maximize profits, right?
Well, actually, never mind - the flying off to a better place idea is moot anyhow. You see, there's no airport in your town. No private actors had either the resources or the motivation to build one. And since government is evil, they never did the job either. Which is also why you're about to lose you job, as well. With no ports, trains, highways, internet or other mass infrastructure, the US is about to become an economic actor more or less on the scale of Togo. Congratulations on that bright move, my libertarian friend! How does the freedom of chronic unemployment taste? Yummy, eh?
But, really, what do you care, anyhow? Your water is polluted because anyone can dump anything into it they want. Ditto with your filthy air. And global warming is about to take out all the living things on the planet, anyhow. We will be quite free to die, thanks to libertarianism.
Well, all is not lost. At least you can walk down to your local dining establishment and have a nice meal without having to fear the presence of darkies or queers in the same room with you. That pretty much makes it all worth it, no?
We could go on and on from here, but why bother? The point is made. The problem with libertarianism is that it is a child's candy store fantasy. Lots of sugar, no nutritional value. It's the Mel Gibson ("Freeeee- dom!!") of political ideologies. The ugly truth is that we hominids are social animals, not atomistic asteroids, each flying through space in our own little orbit. At the end of the day, the simultaneous great delight and awful curse of our humanness is, ultimately, each other.
That is not to say that individual liberty is not important. It is, and I no more favor libertarianism's opposite number, totalitarianism, than I do the lunacy of Ayn Rand, who spent her life (vastly over-)reacting to the Stalinism of her youth. I don't want to live in either of those worlds. It's just that it's naive and juvenile to believe that what is required here is anything other than some sort of difficult balance between the needs of the individual and those of society. That's the only solution that works.
One would think we might have learned this lesson of late. We've just come through an era of wholesale foolish deregulation in the name of setting free Americans and their productive capacities. The whole of our ethos of political economy these last three decades could easily be boiled down to a single bumper- sticker: "Government Bad, Industry Good". So now we might wanna ask ourselves, as Sarah Palin would put it (assuming she had a brain larger than a centipede's), "How's that whole deregulatey depressiony thing working out for you?"
Sorry, Mr. Paul. Just when we've seen precisely what happens when greedy individuals with all the morality of mafia hit men are allowed to do whatever they want by a government that is completely coopted by them on a good day, and utterly AWOL the rest of the time, you come talking to me about more 'freedom' from government intrusion?!?! Are you joking?
Government, as imperfect and downright lethal as it can be when in the hands of those who use it for the wrong purposes, is the instrument and expression of the public will. It is the tool through which society conveys its values and seeks to achieve our mutual goals. And it is meant to be triumphant over private actors because societal needs (which, by the way, can, should and often do include government protecting individual liberties - see, for example, "Rights, Bill of") are broadly more important than those of the individual.
It would be a mark of our (return to) political maturity if we could acknowledge that.
If that's too much to ask, though, I wonder if my libertarian friends would at least be willing to take ownership of the real implications of their own ideology.
I mean, if you guys are just going to practice deceit and hypocrisy, why bother taking over the Republican Party?
Those guys are already experts.
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (mailto:dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.
from: http://www.Commondreams.org
Imagine, if you can, an alternate universe.
Imagine that in this alternate universe, a foreign military power begins flying remote-controlled warplanes over your town, using onboard missiles to kill hundreds of your innocent neighbors.
Now imagine that when you read the newspaper about this ongoing bloodbath, you learn that the foreign nation's top general is nonchalantly telling reporters that his troops are also killing "an amazing number" of your cultural brethren in an adjacent country. Imagine further learning that this foreign power is expanding the drone attacks on your community despite the attacks' well-known record of killing innocents. And finally, imagine that when you turn on your television, you see the perpetrator nation's tuxedo-clad leader cracking stand-up comedy jokes about drone strikes-jokes that prompt guffaws from an audience of that nation's elite.
Ask yourself: How would you and your fellow citizens respond? Would you call homegrown militias mounting a defense "patriots" or would you call them "terrorists"? Would you agree with your leaders when they angrily tell reporters that violent defiance should be expected?
Fortunately, most Americans don't have to worry about these queries in their own lives. But how we answer them in a hypothetical thought experiment provides us insight into how Pakistanis are likely to be feeling right now. Why? Because thanks to our continued drone assaults on their country, Pakistanis now confront these issues every day. And if they answer these questions as many of us undoubtedly would in a similar situation-well, that should trouble every American in this age of asymmetrical warfare.
Though we don't like to call it mass murder, the U.S. government's undeclared drone war in Pakistan is devolving into just that. As noted by a former counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus and a former Army officer in Afghanistan, the operation has become a haphazard massacre.
"Press reports suggest that over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders," David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum wrote in 2009. "But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed."
Making matters worse, Gen. Stanley McChrystal has, indeed, told journalists that in Afghanistan, U.S. troops have "shot an amazing number of people" and "none has proven to have been a real threat." Meanwhile, President Barack Obama used his internationally televised speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner to jest about drone warfare-and the assembled Washington glitterati did, in fact, reward him with approving laughs.
By eerie coincidence, that latter display of monstrous insouciance occurred on the same night as the failed effort to raze Times Square. Though America reacted to that despicable terrorism attempt with its routine spasms of cartoonish shock (why do they hate us?!), the assailant's motive was anything but baffling. As law enforcement officials soon reported, the accused bomber was probably trained and inspired by Pakistani groups seeking revenge for U.S. drone strikes.
"This is a blowback," said Pakistan's foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi. "This is a reaction. And you could expect that ... let's not be naive."
Obviously, regardless of rationale, a "reaction" that involves trying to incinerate civilians in Manhattan is abhorrent and unacceptable. But so is Obama's move to intensify drone assaults that we know are regularly incinerating innocent civilians in Pakistan. And while Qureshi's statement about "expecting" blowback seems radical, he's merely echoing the CIA's reminder that "possibilities of blowback" arise when we conduct martial operations abroad.
We might remember that somehow-forgotten warning come the next terrorist assault. No matter how surprised we may feel after that inevitable (and inevitably deplorable) attack, the fact remains that until we halt our own indiscriminately violent actions, we ought to expect equally indiscriminate and equally violent reactions. © 2010 Creators.com
David Sirota is a bestselling author whose newest book is "The Uprising." He is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network--both nonpartisan organizations. Sirota was once US Senator Bernie Sanders' spokesperson. His blog is at www.credoaction.com/sirota.
from: http://www.Commondreams.org
The White House opposes three important financial reforms that have drawn bi- partisan support in the Senate. It should reverse course.
1. Require the Fed to disclose the entities it lends to. There's no reason the public should be kept in the dark about who benefits when the Fed departs from its traditional interest-setting role and chooses to provide credit (or in Fed parlance, "open its discount window") to particular companies or entities. To the contrary, a well- functioning capital market and a well-functioning democracy depend on full disclosure about who the Fed picks for such special treatment and why.
Senator Bernard Sanders, Independent of Vermont, pushed an amendment requiring that the Fed be subject to a public audit that reveals which specific companies and entities the Fed is supporting with extra loans. The measure drew support on both sides of the aisle, including conservative Republicans like David Vitter of Louisiana. But Sanders's amendment met stiff opposition from the White House and the Fed. Both argued that it would undermine the Fed's independence. That's a red herring. Fed's independence is important when it comes to basic decisions about monetary policy and short-term interest rates, but not about which companies and entities get special treatment.
Bowing to the pressure, Sanders has agreed to alter his proposal. He says his new amendment would still force the Fed to disclose many of its steps to bail out banks. But what why shouldn't all of the Fed's special machinations be disclosed? And why limit disclosure only to the banks that the Fed supports and not other firms or entities? Sanders shouldn't retreat on this.
2. Require big banks to spin off their derivative businesses. Derivatives got us into the mess and Wall Street's biggest banks are still wielding them like giant poker games. That's because they're enormously lucrative for the banks. But they're also dangerous to the economy because bad bets can lead to meltdowns, especially if they're backed only by flimsy promises to pay up rather than real capital. The credit default swap business continues to be out of control. To this date, no one knows how big it is, where it is, and who has promised what.
Senator Blanche Lincoln, Democrat of Arkansas, has pushed an amendment that would force big banks to spin off most of their derivative businesses -- bringing derivatives into the open and insulating them from the kind of proprietary trading that can cause so much havoc. But the Administration thinks Lincoln is going too far and has instructed its allies in the Senate not to go along. Lincoln should stick to her guns.
3. Cap the size of the biggest banks. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand that the best way to reduce financial risks that could (and almost did in the fall of 2008) bring down the entire economy is to spread risk-taking over thousands of small banks rather than centralize it in four or five giant ones. The giants already account for a large percentage of the entire GDP. Because traders and investors know they're too big to fail, these banks have a huge competitive advantage over smaller banks. This advantage will make them even bigger in coming years, and make the economy even more vulnerable to them.
That's why Senators Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Ted Kaufman of Delaware have proposed breaking up the nation's biggest banks by imposing caps on the deposits they can hold and put limits on their liabilities. The proposal has drawn support from Republican Senators Tom Coburn (Okla.), John Ensign (Nev.) and Richard Shelby (Ala.).
But the White House has let Senate Dems know it's against the proposal, and the Senate this past week voted it down, 33-61. Twenty-seven Democrats opposed this common-sense measure. Brown and Kaufman should do everything they can to make sure the public understands what they're trying to do, and reintroduce their amendment.
The White House dismisses all three of these three measures "populist," as if that adjective is the equivalent of "irresponsible." But in fact, these amendments are necessary in order to restore trust in our financial system. They would reduce Wall Street's tendency to take huge risks, pocket the wins, and fob off the losses on the public.
Wall Street's lobbyists have been fighting these amendments tooth and nail. The Street is willing to accept the Dodd bill that emerged from the Banking Committee, but no more. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein told Congress last week he is "generally supportive" of the Dodd bill -- which should be evidence enough of how weak it really is. The bi-partisan amendments just introduced would give it the backbone it needs. The White House should reverse course and support them. Senate Dems (and Republicans) who want to be remembered for reining in rather than pandering to Wall Street should, too.
from: http://www.Commondreams.org
Just days after the worst U.S. coal mine disaster in a quarter-century, the World Bank approved a $3.75 billion loan to South Africa to build one of the world's largest coal-fired electric power plants. Though both South African and U.S. environmentalists had urged the U.S. to vote no, abstention was the best they could achieve.
Coal plays an outsized role in our politics. Just how and with what consequences are questions that must be addressed if we are to enjoy sustainable growth.
Coal's advocates argue that it provides the cheap electricity that can lift the poor both here and abroad out of poverty. Coal, however, is far less cheap than its advocates suggest once a full accounting of its social costs is included.
Over the last century, mine accidents have killed more than 100,000 miners. Since miners' compensation seldom reflects the job's risk, miners and their families in effect subsidize our cheap energy. The effects of coal mining, however, do not stop with death from mine disasters.
A family friend, Sarah Vekasi, an ecochaplain in West Virginia, put the case eloquently after the tragedy: "Imagine if the national press came in and camped out at our local elementary school every time we reported that 30 men in our community were diagnosed with Black Lung and 30 children have missed an inordinate amount of days of school due to unidentifiable illnesses caused by drinking polluted water and breathing toxic air? This is a national emergency and the issues reach further back than just how this particularly horrible mine explosion happened to how a single industry has dominated this region and what we, as a national and regional community are going to do to change that."
Economic domination and environmental degradation may worsen as jobs in coal country become scarcer. Mining corporations resort to job blackmail and routinely buy political influence. Coal mining today reflects and is part of a transformation in U.S. capitalism from a system of regulated and countervailing powers to what economist James Galbraith labels predatory capitalism.
In the wake of President Ronald Reagan's assault on the air traffic controllers, Massey Energy joined the growing group of U.S. corporations that used every technique, legal or illegal, to bust its unions. Neither regulations nor unions were to limit profits. The strategy paid off, giving Massey mines liberty to slash wages and flout safety rules.
Massey CEO Don Blankenship is right out of Vince Lombardi's playbook where "winning isn't everything; it is the only thing." Lives rather than football games, however, are at stake here. Blankenship's notorious memo instructing mine superintendents to put coal production ahead of all other co nsiderations encouraged cutting corners on worker safety at every turn.
Unionized mines are safer because miners who spot and seek to address safety concerns cannot be arbitrarily fired. Preventing future disasters and addressing coal's environmental impact depends on activism on several fronts and across several national and ideological boundaries. Even with a sensible energy policy, some mining will continue. It is imperative that the right of miners to unionize be protected. Mine standards must be strengthened and enforced.
Environmentalists should support these efforts for at lest three reasons: 1) Social justice requires it; 2) empowered and fairly compensated workers will force coal's price to better reflect its social cost; and 3) occupational risks to miners, such as fine particulates in the air or mercury residue are also often precursors or indicators of broader dangers to the community.
For both environmental and technological reasons coal mining is unlikely to be a long-term job creator. Nonetheless, miners dependent on those jobs now are more likely to resist broader environmental goals until they see real employment prospects. In Yes Magazine, Brooke Jarvis points to a West Virginia initiative to compare Massey Energy's proposed mountaintop-removal surface coal mine with an alternative 328-megawatt wind farm. The study found that wind would bring the county government far more revenue while costing $600 million less in health expenses and lost resources.
Nonetheless, as a recent study by the Pew Charitable Trust indicates, the U.S. spends less of its GDP on alternative energy than even such coalaholics as China. Our priorities are economically and ecologically shortsighted.
from: http://www.Commondreams.org
Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed fraud charges against Goldman Sachs and underscored what most Americans have believed for some time: Wall Street has rigged the economy in its own favor, and will stop at nothing-not even outright theft-to boost its profits. What's worse, Goldman's scam could have been completely prevented by better regulations and law enforcement.
Goldman's heist
Let's be clear. "Financial fraud" means "theft." Goldman Sachs sold investors securities that were stocked with subprime mortgages and had been cherry-picked by a hedge fund manager named John Paulson. Paulson believed these mortgages were about to go bust, so he helped Goldman Sachs concoct the securities so that he could bet against them himself.
Goldman Sachs, like Paulson, also bet against the securities. But when Goldman sold the securities to investors, it didn't tell them that Paulson had devised the securities, or that he was betting on their failure. By withholding crucial information from investors, Goldman directly profited from the scam at the expense of its own clients. If ordinary citizens did what the SEC's alleges Goldman did, we'd call it stealing.
As Nick Baumann [1] emphasizes for Mother Jones, the SEC's suit against Goldman is just the tip of the iceberg. During the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s, literally thousands of bankers were jailed for financial fraud. Today's crisis was much larger in scope, yet the Goldman allegations are among the first serious charges of legal wrongdoing to emerge (other complaints have been filed against Regions Bank and former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo). If the SEC or the FBI are doing their jobs, we should see many more of these cases.
Bust 'em up.
How do banks get away with these kinds of shenanigans and still secure epic taxpayer bailouts? It's all about their political clout, as Robert Reich [2] notes for The American Prospect. So long as banks are so enormous that they can ruin the economy with their collapse, the institutions will always carry tremendous political clout.
Even in the case of Goldman Sachs, which is too-big-to-fail by any reasonable standard, the SEC's fraud case is being filed three years after the company's alleged offense. That's well after the company rode to safety on the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the AIG bailout and billions more in other indirect assistance-and only after multiple journalists made Goldman's offensive transactions general public knowledge.
If we don't break up the big banks, politically connected Wall Street titans will make sure they get bailed out when the next crisis hits, regardless of whatever laws we have on the books.
Fix the derivatives casino
If Congress doesn't soon pass a bill to break up behemoth banks, it will be neglecting the gravest problem in our financial system today. But several other reforms are needed if Wall Street is ever going to serve a useful economic function again.
As Nomi Prins [3] emphasizes for AlterNet, much of the Wall Street profit machine has been divorced from the economy that the rest of us live in. These days, banks make most of their money from securities trades and derivatives deals. Their actual lending business is taking a beating. That means big banks have very little incentive to promote economic well-being for every day citizens. We need to create these incentives by banning economically essential banks from engaging in securities trades, and make sure all derivatives transactions are conducted on open, transparent exchanges, just like ordinary stocks and bonds.
Better derivatives regulations could help protect against fraud. If Goldman Sachs' sketchy subprime deal had been subject to market scrutiny on an exchange, it's very unlikely that any investor would have bought into it. Goldman Sachs almost got away with it because the deal was secretive and beyond the scope of most regulatory oversight.
Protect whistleblowers
The Goldman case also raises significant questions about the government's enforcement of existing financial fraud laws. Bradley Birkenfeld, a banker for Swiss financial giant UBS, helped the Department of Justice bring the largest tax fraud case in history against his company, which was helping rich Americans hide money from the IRS in offshore bank accounts.
For his cooperation, Birkenfeld was rewarded with a four-year prison sentence, even though nobody else at UBS-nobody-has been sentenced to prison over the scam. As Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman [4] emphasize for Democracy Now! , Birkenfeld's imprisonment could have something to with who exactly is hiding money with UBS.
Gonzalez discusses an interview with Birkenfeld, in which the former banker notes that the bank had a special office to handle the accounts of "politically exposed persons"- American politicians. Moreover, the top brass at UBS includes key advisors to top politicians in both parties. This is exactly the kind of influence smuggling that breaking up the banks would help fix. UBS is a multi-trillion-dollar institution with no less than 27 U.S. subsidiaries.
But protecting Birkenfeld would accomplish still more-by jailing him, the Justice Department is actively discouraging others from coming forward, and making it more difficult for regulators to enforce the law.
Greenspan's failure
It's abundantly clear that almost every major regulatory agency charged with curtailing financial excess failed to prevent the Crash of 2008. But that failure doesn't mean that effective regulation is impossible-it only shows that the regulators in power failed. The top bank regulator in the U.S., John Dugan, was a former bank lobbyist.
As Christopher Hayes [5] demonstrates for The Nation, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has never had any interest in regulation whatsoever. After the crash, Greenspan insisted that nobody could have seen it coming. But as Hayes notes, many people did-Greenspan simply didn't listen to them. These days, Greenspan is revising his story, claiming that he did in fact see the crisis coming, but that nobody could have prevented it. That is simply not credible.
Hayes draws a useful parallel Hurricane Katrina, a problem sparked by a natural event that became a catastrophe when regulators failed to take the necessary precautions. The lesson from both Katrina and the financial crash is not that government always screws up-we have plenty of examples of government preventing floods and economic calamity. The lesson we should learn is that people who don't believe in government will never do a good job governing. As Hayes notes:
If Greenspan couldn't figure things out, that doesn't mean others can't. In fact, developing systems for doing just that is called-quite simply-progress, and Alan Greenspan continues to be one of its enemies.
That is exactly the task that now presents itself before Congress: Developing a system to prevent and constrain economic destruction wielded by Wall Street. The U.S. had a system that did exactly this for more than fifty years. For the last thrity years, it has been systematically dismantled. How well Congress lives up to that challenge will define much of our economic future for decades to come.
from: http://www.Commondreams.org
On April 9, 2003, exactly seven years ago, Baghdad fell under the US-led occupation. Baghdad did not fall in 21 days, though; it fell after 13 years of wars, bombings and economic sanctions. Millions of Iraqis, including myself, watched our country die slowly before our eyes in those 13 years. So, when the invasion started in March of 2003, everyone knew it was the straw that would break the camel's back.
I still remember the day of the fall of Baghdad very clearly, as if it happened yesterday. My family and I had fled to my uncle's home in southern Baghdad because our neighborhood, located near Baghdad's airport, was bombarded by US airplanes in the days before. I remember the first US tank rolling down the street with a US soldier, wearing black gloves, waving his hand and some people waving back. That was one of the sadist day of my life, not only because Baghdad fell under a foreign occupation, but also because I knew it would be the beginning of another disastrous chapter in Iraq's history. Now, when I look back at all that happened under the occupation, I find that I was, unfortunately, right.
In the last seven years, one million Iraqis have been killed and millions more injured and displaced from their homes. The country's infrastructure was destroyed and Iraq's civil society has been severely damaged. A video posted this week by WikiLeaks [1]is not an exception to how the US occupation operated in Iraq all along, but rather an example of it. While the video is shocking and disturbing to the US public, from an Iraqi perspective it just tells a story of an average day under the occupation. But even from the Pentagon's perspective, that attack was nothing exceptional. Reuters demanded an investigation into this particular attack because two of its employees were killed in it, and the Pentagon has already conducted an investigation that cleared all soldiers who took part of the attack of any wrongdoing. The video does not show an operation that went wrong, or where "rules of engagement" were not followed. It is simply how the US military has been doing business in Iraq for seven years now.
What is equally disturbing is the mainstream media coverage of the event. For example, in a piece published the day of the attack, The New York Times reported [2]that two Iraqi Journalists were killed "as US forces clash with Militias." The New York Times' piece confirmed "American forces battled insurgents in the area" and covered the following statement from the US military:
The American military said in a statement late Thursday that 11 people had been killed: nine insurgents and two civilians. According to the statement, American troops were conducting a raid when they were hit by small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. The American troops called in reinforcements and attack helicopters. In the ensuing fight, the statement said, the two Reuters employees and nine insurgents were killed. ''There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force,'' said Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, a spokesman for the multinational forces in Baghdad.
Now, after the video was leaked, we know that none of this is true. Iraqis killed in the attack were not "insurgents." US troops were not "hit by small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades," the attack helicopters were not "called in" in response to hostilities and there was no "ensuing fight" that caused the massacre. In fact, after watching the video, there is no question that the US forces were clearly NOT engaged in combat operations against a hostile force. In addition to making the entire story up, the Pentagon has very conveniently omitted the part about the two children being injured.
This story is similar to hundreds of other stories printed by The New York Times and other mainstream media during the last seven years. Imagine how many tens of thousands of Iraqis who were labeled as "insurgents" and "militias" were killed and injured the same way. Imagine how many Iraqi children were killed and injured without a mention by the Pentagon or mainstream media. A number of international organizations, including Amnesty International, are now calling for an independent and impartial investigation into the July 12, 2007, helicopter attack [3]shown in the leaked video. But I think this leaked video tells a bigger story than the attack itself. It tells a story of systemic, cold-blooded murder, and the shameful cover up by mainstream media and silence by international organizations.
Remembering the last seven years and conducting investigations is important, but what is more important and urgent is to end this occupation. This month marks both the seventh year of occupation and the beginning of the combat forces withdrawal in accordance with President Obama's plan. The current plan for US withdrawal is based on two sets of time-based deadlines. Obama's own plan to withdraw combat forces between April and August 31, 2010, and the bilateral security agreement's deadline for the withdrawal of all troops and contractors and shutting down all US bases by December 31, 2011.
While the Bush administration adopted a conditions-based withdrawal plan based on the mantra "as Iraqis stand up, we will stand down," the withdrawal doctrine under Obama has been time-based, not linked to conditions on the ground. The main problem with a condition-based withdrawal plans is that it creates an equation where deteriorating conditions lead to an extension of the military occupation. Unfortunately, many groups would like to see the US occupation of Iraq continue. Some groups, such as the Iraqi rulingparties or the military industrial complex in the United States, believe the occupation is in their self-interest. Others, such as al-Qaeda, hope to cripple the United States by keeping it engaged in a conflict that is taking an enormous toll on human lives, money and global reputation. And still others, such as Iran and other regional players, fear the re-emergence of a strong independent and united Iraq that would change the power balance in the Middle East.
The conditions on the ground are rapidly deteriorating in Iraq. After last month's general election, there is a dramatic spike in violence and growing threats to the security and political stability of the country. This week alone, hundreds of Iraqis were killed and injured because of car bombs, assassinations, and other armed attacks. Meanwhile, the Iraqi political establishment is struggling to form the new government. The US war machine is already trying to use this deterioration as an excuse to delay or cancel the withdrawal plan, or at least link it to conditions on the ground.
Going back to a condition-based plan will cost the US hundreds of billions more, will result in the deaths of countless more US soldiers and Iraqi civilians and, most importantly, will not bring Iraq closer to being a stable and prosperous country. The US occupation has never been a part of the solution and it will never be. Delaying or canceling the US withdrawal will only diminish what's left of US credibility and will add another layer of complications to the war-torn country. Many national US organizations, including Peace Action, are calling for a national day of action today [4]to ask Congress and the White House to stick to the time-based withdrawal plan and bring the US combat forces as promised before the end of August.
The US has been engaged in military hostilities with Iraq and Iraqis since 1991. Even when Obama abides by the security agreement and ends the occupation next year, the US responsibility to compensate and help Iraqis help themselves will not be over. Our responsibility starts by ending the 20-year war, but it doesn't end there.
from: http://www.Commondreams.org
In 1999, when I packed for a month in the Middle East, I made a point of bringing my Huron-made, deerskin fringed jacket.
Nothing, I thought, screamed "I am not one of you" like that jacket, which was mostly too hot and too heavy for a month-long trip clambering over the desert rocks and ruins. Although I am not much into jewellery, I also wore a red maple leaf stick pin.
I was a proud Canadian, smug and self-confident that my country was all mountains, moose, maple syrup and peacemaker in the valley.
Boy, was that ever wrong.
And it's even more wrong now.
It took a distinguished diplomat such as Robert Fowler, who made news last year after his kidnapping by Al Qaeda in Niger, to slap not only the Liberal Party last weekend at its Canada 150 conference, but also the Conservative government and those Canadians who, still, cling to that Trudeau-era belief that we are the Dudley Do-Right of nations.
He attacked Canada for all but abandoning Africa, where war, starvation, disease, overpopulation, Islamofascism and other plagues are mixing together to make a toxic soup of terrorism that will spill across the continent, while we waste blood and treasure on the lost cause of Afghanistan.
Pointing to those who support the war, Fowler said: "Look, they say, at the number of little girls we have put in school - at a cost of 146 Canadian lives, thousands of Afghan lives, and, according to the Government website, an incremental cost, since 2001, of $11.3 billion, including $1.7 billion in development assistance from CIDA's budget.
"My... think of the number of girls we could put in school throughout the Third World - particularly in Africa - with that kind of money! And we could do so without having to kill and be killed to get that worthy job done."
It's not just Afghanistan.
Over the past few years, Canada has been shifting its foreign aid priorities away from Africa to Latin America, where new free trade deals will protect Canada's business interests in, among other sectors, the mining industry.
Canada's hands are not clean there are either, as human rights activists insist. They're documenting how workers and the environment are being exploited and devastated.
It gets worse.
Canada is also heavily into the weapons trade, an industry we hardly ever see covered in the business pages.
According to the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade, between 2003 and 2006, Canadian military exports totaled at least $7.4 billion, mostly to the U.S.ô, where it went into the weapons used everywhere from Iraq to Gaza.
Fowler, who kicked open a can of foreign policy worms that, I hope, will crawl into Canadian's consciousness and consciences, made it very clear that this country has lost its way. To simplify his message, there's too much politicking, not enough policy.
But there's no business like the war business, as the U.S. has demonstrated time after bloody time.
According to the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, in 2008, world "defense spending" hit $1.55 trillion (U.S.) - and that doesn't count countries where the bombs are homemade.
Imagine how much misery that kind of money could eliminate.
Imagine how many terrorists would not be created as a result.
Fowler's can of worms must not be put back under the rock where too many people in Canada would prefer to hide it.
But, if some initial reactions on Twitter and elsewhere are any indication, it's only a matter of time before he gets slimed.
from: http://www.Commondreams.org
Howard Zinn was above all a gentleman of unflagging grace, humility and compassion. No American historian has left a more lasting positive legacy on our understanding of the true nature of our country, mainly because his books reflect a soul possessed of limitless depth. Howard's People's History of the United States will not be surpassed. As time goes on new chapters will be written in its spirit to extend its reach. But his timeless masterpiece broke astonishing new ground both in its point of view and its comprehensive nature. The very idea of presenting the American story from the point of view of the common citizen was itself revolutionary. That he pulled it off with such apparent ease and readability borders on the miraculous. That at least a million Americans have bought and read it means that its ongoing influence is immense. It is truly a history book that has and will continue to change history for the better.
But that doesn't begin to account for Howard's personal influence. He was a warm, unfailingly friendly compadre. He shared a beautiful partnership with his wonderful wife, Roz, a brilliant, thoroughly committed social worker about whom he once said: "You and I just talk about changing the world. She actually does it."
But Howard was no ivory tower academic. His lectures were engaging, exciting and inspirational. But they took on an added dimension because he was personally engaged, committed and effective. He chose to write books and articles in ways that could impact the world in which they were published. He showed up when he was needed, and always had a sixth sense about exactly what to say, and how.
Perhaps the most meaningful tribute to pay this amazing man is to say how he affected us directly. Here are two stories I know intimately: In 1974, my organic commune-mate Sam Lovejoy toppled a weather tower as a protest against the coming of a nuclear power plant. When Sam needed someone to testify on how this act of civil disobedience fit into the fabric of our nation's history, Howard did not hesitate. His testimony in that Springfield, Massachusetts courtroom (see "Lovejoy's Nuclear War" via www.gmpfilms.com) remains a classic discourse on the sanctity of non-violent direct action and its place in our national soul. (Sam was acquitted, and we stopped that nuke!)
Three years earlier I sent Howard a rambling 300-page manuscript under the absurdly presumptuous title A People's History of the United States, 1860-1920. Written in a drafty communal garage in the Massachusetts hills by a long-haired 20-something graduate school dropout, the manuscript had been rejected by virtually every publisher in America, often accompanied with nasty notes to the tune of: "NEVER send us anything like this again."
But I sent a copy to Howard, whom I had never met. He replied with a cordial note typed on a single sheet of yellow paper, which I still treasure. I showed it to Hugh Van Dusen at Harper & Row, who basically said Harper had no idea why anyone would ever read such a book, but that if Howard Zinn would write an introduction, they'd publish it (though under a more appropriate title).
He did, and they did...and my life was changed forever.
Thankfully, Hugh then had the good sense to ask Howard to write a real people's history by someone--the only one--who could handle the job. He did....and all our lives have been changed forever.
Howard labored long and hard on his masterpiece, always retaining that astonishing mixture of humor and humility that made him such a unique and irreplaceable treasure. No one ever wrote or spoke with a greater instinct for the True and Vital. His unfailing instinct for what is just and important never failed him--or us. The gentle, lilting sound of his voice put it all to unforgettable music that will resonate through the ages.
A few days ago I wrote Howard asking if he'd consider working on a film about the great Socialist labor leader Eugene V. Debs, whose story Howard's books have uniquely illuminated.
Eugene V. Debs was beloved by millions of Americans who treasured not only his clarity of a shared vision for this nation, but his unshakeable honesty and unquestioned integrity.
Debs ran five times for president. He conducted his last campaign from a federal prison cell in Atlanta, where he was locked up by Woodrow Wilson.
He got a million votes (that we know of). "While there is a soul in prison," he said, unforgettably, "I am not free."
Debs had deeply shaken Wilson with his brilliant, immeasurably powerful opposition to America's foolish and unjust entry into World War I, and his demands for a society in which all fairly shared. In the course of his magnificent decades as our pre-eminent labor leader, Debs established a clear vision of where this nation could and should go for a just, sustainable future. Enshrined in Howard's histories, it remains a shining beacon of what remains to be done.
Through his decades as our pre-eminent people's historian, through his activism, his clarity and his warm genius, Howard Zinn was also an American Mahatma, a truly great soul, capable of affecting us all.
Like Eugene V. Debs, it is no cliché to say that Howard Zinn truly lives uniquely on at the core of our national soul. His People's History and the gift of his being just who he was, remains an immeasurable, irreplaceable treasure.
Thanks, Howard, for more than we can begin to say.
from: http://www.Commondreams.org
Why does the US owe Haiti Billions? Colin Powell, former US Secretary of State, stated his foreign policy view as the "Pottery Barn rule." That is - "if you break it, you own it."
The US has worked to break Haiti for over 200 years. We owe Haiti. Not charity. We owe Haiti as a matter of justice. Reparations. And not the $100 million promised by President Obama either - that is Powerball money. The US owes Haiti Billions - with a big B.
The US has worked for centuries to break Haiti. The US has used Haiti like a plantation. The US helped bleed the country economically since it freed itself, repeatedly invaded the country militarily, supported dictators who abused the people, used the country as a dumping ground for our own economic advantage, ruined their roads and agriculture, and toppled popularly elected officials. The US has even used Haiti like the old plantation owner and slipped over there repeatedly for sexual recreation.
Here is the briefest history of some of the major US efforts to break Haiti.
In 1804, when Haiti achieved its freedom from France in the world's first successful slave revolution, the United States refused to recognize the country. The US continued to refuse recognition to Haiti for 60 more years. Why? Because the US continued to enslave millions of its own citizens and feared recognizing Haiti would encourage slave revolution in the US.
After the 1804 revolution, Haiti was the subject of a crippling economic embargo by France and the US. US sanctions lasted until 1863. France ultimately used its military power to force Haiti to pay reparations for the slaves who were freed. The reparations were 150 million francs. (France sold the entire Louisiana territory to the US for 80 million francs!)
Haiti was forced to borrow money from banks in France and the US to pay reparations to France. A major loan from the US to pay off the French was finally paid off in 1947. The current value of the money Haiti was forced to pay to French and US banks? Over $20 Billion - with a big B.
The US occupied and ruled Haiti by force from 1915 to 1934. President Woodrow Wilson sent troops to invade in 1915. Revolts by Haitians were put down by US military - killing over 2000 in one skirmish alone. For the next nineteen years, the US controlled customs in Haiti, collected taxes, and ran many governmental institutions. How many billions were siphoned off by the US during these 19 years?
From 1957 to 1986 Haiti was forced to live under US backed dictators "Papa Doc" and "Baby Doc" Duvlaier. The US supported these dictators economically and militarily because they did what the US wanted and were politically "anti-communist" - now translatable as against human rights for their people. Duvalier stole millions from Haiti and ran up hundreds of millions in debt that Haiti still owes. Ten thousand Haitians lost their lives. Estimates say that Haiti owes $1.3 billion in external debt and that 40% of that debt was run up by the US-backed Duvaliers.
Thirty years ago Haiti imported no rice. Today Haiti imports nearly all its rice. Though Haiti was the sugar growing capital of the Caribbean, it now imports sugar as well. Why? The US and the US dominated world financial institutions - the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank - forced Haiti to open its markets to the world. Then the US dumped millions of tons of US subsidized rice and sugar into Haiti - undercutting their farmers and ruining Haitian agriculture. By ruining Haitian agriculture, the US has forced Haiti into becoming the third largest world market for US rice. Good for US farmers, bad for Haiti.
In 2002, the US stopped hundreds of millions of dollars in loans to Haiti which were to be used for, among other public projects like education, roads. These are the same roads which relief teams are having so much trouble navigating now!
In 2004, the US again destroyed democracy in Haiti when they supported the coup against Haiti's elected President Aristide.
Haiti is even used for sexual recreation just like the old time plantations. Check the news carefully and you will find numerous stories of abuse of minors by missionaries, soldiers and charity workers. Plus there are the frequent sexual vacations taken to Haiti by people from the US and elsewhere. What is owed for that? What value would you put on it if it was your sisters and brothers?
US based corporations have for years been teaming up with Haitian elite to run sweatshops teeming with tens of thousands of Haitians who earn less than $2 a day.
The Haitian people have resisted the economic and military power of the US and others ever since their independence. Like all of us, Haitians made their own mistakes as well. But US power has forced Haitians to pay great prices - deaths, debt and abuse.
It is time for the people of the US to join with Haitians and reverse the course of US-Haitian relations.
This brief history shows why the US owes Haiti Billions - with a big B. This is not charity. This is justice. This is reparations. The current crisis is an opportunity for people in the US to own up to our country's history of dominating Haiti and to make a truly just response
from: http://www.TruthDig.com
The media have been swamped with reports about the attempt to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day. When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, now dubbed the "underwear bomber," failed in his alleged attack, close to 300 people were spared what would have been, most likely, a horrible, violent end. Since that airborne incident, the debates about terrorism and how best to protect the American people have been reignited.
Meanwhile, a killer that has stalked the U.S. public, claiming, by recent estimates, 45,000 lives annually-one dead American about every 10 minutes-goes unchecked. That's 3,750 people dead-more than the 9/11 attacks-every month who could be saved with the stroke of a pen.
This killer is the lack of adequate health care in the United States. Researchers from Harvard Medical School found in late 2009 that 45,000 people die unnecessarily every year due to lack of health insurance. Researchers also uncovered another stunning fact: In 2008, four times as many U.S. Army veterans died because they lacked health insurance than the total number of U.S. soldiers who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in the same period. That's right: 2,266 veterans under the age of 65 died because they were uninsured.
On Tuesday, President Barack Obama was fiery when he made his public statement after meeting with his national security team about the airline breach: In seeking to thwart plans to kill Americans "we face a challenge of the utmost urgency," he said. He talked about reviewing systemic failures and declared we must "save innocent lives, not just most of the time, but all of the time."
This is all very admirable. Imagine if this same urgency was applied to a broken system that causes 45,000 unnecessary deaths per year. Since stimulus funds will now be directed to supply more scanning equipment at airports, what about spending money to ensure mammograms and prostate exams at community health centers?
And then there's the investigation of who is responsible for the attempted Christmas Day attack and getting "actionable intelligence" from the alleged bomber to prevent future attacks. All good.
We actually have "actionable intelligence" on why people die due to lack of health care, and how insurance companies actively deny people coverage to increase their profits, but what has been done about it?
The day before the underwear bomb incident, Christmas Eve, the U.S. Senate passed The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act by a vote of 60 to 39. Obama described the bill as "the most important piece of social legislation since the Social Security Act passed in the 1930s." Yet in order to get to that magic number of 60 Senate votes, the already weak Senate bill had to be brought to its knees by the likes of Sen. Joe Lieberman, from the health insurance state of Connecticut, and conservative Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska. The Senate and House versions of health insurance reform now have to be reconciled in conference committee.
The conference committee process is one that is little understood in the U.S. In it major changes to legislation are often imposed, with little or no notice. That's why C-SPAN CEO Brian Lamb sent a letter to congressional leaders Dec. 30 requesting access to televise the process. He wrote, "[W]e respectfully request that you allow the public full access, through television, to legislation that will affect the lives of every single American." Rather than simply grant access, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asserted that "there has never been a more open process."
Yet Pelosi and the Democrats are now saying that the bills won't even go through a formal conference committee, but rather through informal, closed-door sessions with key committee chairs. While this would circumvent Republican opportunities to filibuster, it would also grant a very few individuals enormous power to cut deals in much the same way that Sens. Nelson and Lieberman did. Since the health insurance, medical equipment and pharmaceutical industries spent close to $1.4 million per day to influence the health care debate, we have to ask: Who will have access to those few legislators behind those closed doors?
Wendell Potter, the former CIGNA insurance spokesperson turned whistle-blower, says he knows "where the bodies are buried." Let's be consistent. If we care about saving American lives, let's take action now.
from: http://www.TruthDig.com
Syed Fahad Hashmi can tell you about the dark heart of America. He knows that our First Amendment rights have become a joke, that habeas corpus no longer exists and that we torture, not only in black sites such as those at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan or at Guantánamo Bay, but also at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Lower Manhattan. Hashmi is a U.S. citizen of Muslim descent imprisoned on two counts of providing and conspiring to provide material support and two counts of making and conspiring to make a contribution of goods or services to al-Qaida. As his case prepares for trial, his plight illustrates that the gravest threat we face is not from Islamic extremists, but the codification of draconian procedures that deny Americans basic civil liberties and due process. Hashmi would be a better person to tell you this, but he is not allowed to speak.
This corruption of our legal system, if history is any guide, will not be reserved by the state for suspected terrorists, or even Muslim Americans. In the coming turmoil and economic collapse, it will be used to silence all who are branded as disruptive or subversive. Hashmi endures what many others, who are not Muslim, will endure later. Radical activists in the environmental, globalization, anti-nuclear, sustainable agriculture and anarchist movements- who are already being placed by the state in special detention facilities with Muslims charged with terrorism-have discovered that his fate is their fate. Courageous groups have organized protests, including vigils outside the Manhattan detention facility. They can be found at www.educatorsforcivilliberties.org [1] or www.freefahad.com [2]. On Martin Luther King Day, this Jan. 18 at 6 p.m. EST, protesters will hold a large vigil in front of the MCC on 150 Park Row in Lower Manhattan to call for a return of our constitutional rights. Join them if you can.
The case against Hashmi, like most of the terrorist cases launched by the Bush administration, is appallingly weak and built on flimsy circumstantial evidence. This may be the reason the state has set up parallel legal and penal codes to railroad those it charges with links to terrorism. If it were a matter of evidence, activists like Hashmi, who is accused of facilitating the delivery of socks to al-Qaida, would probably never be brought to trial.
Hashmi, who if convicted could face up to 70 years in prison, has been held in solitary confinement for more than 21/2 years. Special administrative measures, known as SAMs, have been imposed by the attorney general to prevent or severely restrict communication with other prisoners, attorneys, family, the media and people outside the jail. He also is denied access to the news and other reading material. Hashmi is not allowed to attend group prayer. He is subject to 24-hour electronic monitoring and 23-hour lockdown. He must shower and go to the bathroom on camera. He can write one letter a week to a single member of his family, but he cannot use more than three pieces of paper. He has no access to fresh air and must take his one hour of daily recreation in a cage. His "proclivity for violence" is cited as the reason for these measures although he has never been charged or convicted with committing an act of violence.
"My brother was an activist," Hashmi's brother, Faisal, told me by phone from his home in Queens. "He spoke out on Muslim issues, especially those dealing with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His arrest and torture have nothing to do with providing ponchos and socks to al-Qaida, as has been charged, but the manipulation of the law to suppress activists and scare the Muslim American community. My brother is an example. His treatment is meant to show Muslims what will happen to them if they speak about the plight of Muslims. We have lost every single motion to preserve my brother's humanity and remove the special administrative measures. These measures are designed solely to break the psyche of prisoners and terrorize the Muslim community. These measures exemplify the malice towards Muslims at home and the malice towards the millions of Muslims who are considered as non-humans in Iraq and Afghanistan."
The extreme sensory deprivation used on Hashmi is a form of psychological torture, far more effective in breaking and disorienting detainees. It is torture as science. In Germany, the Gestapo broke bones while its successor, the communist East German Stasi, broke souls. We are like the Stasi. We have refined the art of psychological disintegration and drag bewildered suspects into secretive courts when they no longer have the mental and psychological capability to defend themselves.
"Hashmi's right to a fair trial has been abridged," said Michael Ratner, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights [3]. "Much of the evidence in the case has been classified under CIPA [4], and thus Hashmi has not been allowed to review it. The prosecution only recently turned over a significant portion of evidence to the defense. Hashmi may not communicate with the news media, either directly or through his attorneys. The conditions of his detention have impacted his mental state and ability to participate in his own defense.
"The prosecution's case against Hashmi, an outspoken activist within the Muslim community, abridges his First Amendment rights and threatens the First Amendment rights of others," Ratner added. "While Hashmi's political and religious beliefs, speech and associations are constitutionally protected, the government has been given wide latitude by the court to use them as evidence of his frame of mind and, by extension, intent. The material support charges against him depend on criminalization of association. This could have a chilling effect on the First Amendment rights of others, particularly in activist and Muslim communities."
Constitutionally protected statements, beliefs and associations can now become a crime. Dissidents, even those who break no laws, can be stripped of their rights and imprisoned without due process. It is the legal equivalent of preemptive war. The state can detain and prosecute people not for what they have done, or even for what they are planning to do, but for holding religious or political beliefs that the state deems seditious. The first of those targeted have been observant Muslims, but they will not be the last.
"Most of the evidence is classified," Jeanne Theoharis, an associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College who taught Hashmi, told me, "but Hashmi is not allowed to see it. He is an American citizen. But in America you can now go to trial and all the evidence collected against you cannot be reviewed. You can spend 21/2 years in solitary confinement before you are convicted of anything. There has been attention paid to extraordinary rendition, Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib with this false idea that if people are tried in the United States things will be fair. But what allowed Guantánamo to happen was the devolution of the rule of law here at home, and this is not only happening to Hashmi."
Hashmi was, like so many of those arrested during the Bush years, briefly a poster child in the "war on terror." He was apprehended in Britain on June 6, 2006, on a U.S. warrant. His arrest was the top story on the CBS and NBC nightly news programs, which used graphics that read "Terror Trail" and "Web of Terror." He was held for 11 months at Belmarsh Prison in London and then became the first U.S. citizen to be extradited by Britain. The year before his arrest, Hashmi, a graduate of Brooklyn College, had completed his master's degree in international relations at London Metropolitan University. His case has no more substance than the one against the seven men arrested on suspicion of plotting to blow up the Sears Tower, a case where, even though there were five convictions after two mistrials, an FBI deputy director acknowledged that the plan was more "aspirational rather than operational." And it mirrors the older case of the Palestinian activist Sami Al-Arian, now under house arrest in Virginia, who has been hounded by the Justice Department although he should legally have been freed. Judge Leonie Brinkema, currently handling the Al-Arian case, in early March, questioned the U.S. attorney's actions in Al-Arian's plea agreement saying curtly: "I think there's something more important here, and that's the integrity of the Justice Department."
The case against Hashmi revolves around the testimony of Junaid Babar, also an American citizen. Babar, in early 2004, stayed with Hashmi at his London apartment for two weeks. In his luggage, the government alleges, Babar had raincoats, ponchos and waterproof socks, which Babar later delivered to a member of al-Qaida in south Waziristan, Pakistan. It was alleged that Hashmi allowed Babar to use his cell phone to call conspirators in other terror plots.
"Hashmi grew up here, was well known here, was very outspoken, very charismatic and very political," said Theoharis. "This is really a message being sent to American Muslims about the cost of being politically active. It is not about delivering alleged socks and ponchos and rain gear. Do you think al- Qaida can't get socks and ponchos in Pakistan? The government is planning to introduce tapes of Hashmi's political talks while he was at Brooklyn College at the trial. Why are we willing to let this happen? Is it because they are Muslims, and we think it will not affect us? People who care about First Amendment rights should be terrified. This is one of the crucial civil rights issues of our time. We ignore this at our own peril."
Babar, who was arrested in 2004 and has pleaded guilty to five counts of material support for al-Qaida, also faces up to 70 years in prison. But he has agreed to serve as a government witness and has already testified for the government in terror trials in Britain and Canada. Babar will receive a reduced sentence for his services, and many speculate he will be set free after the Hashmi trial. Since there is very little evidence to link Hashmi to terrorist activity, the government will rely on Babar to prove intent. This intent will revolve around alleged conversations and statements Hashmi made in Babar's presence. Hashmi, who was a member of the New York political group Al Muhajiroun as a student at Brooklyn College, has made provocative statements, including calling America "the biggest terrorist in the world," but Al Muhajiroun is not defined by the government as a terrorist organization. Membership in the group is not illegal. And our complicity in acts of state terror is a historical fact.
There will be more Hashmis, and the Justice Department, planning for future detentions, set up in 2006 a segregated facility, the Communication Management Unit, at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind. Nearly all the inmates transferred to Terre Haute are Muslims. A second facility has been set up at Marion, Ill., where the inmates again are mostly Muslim but also include a sprinkling of animal rights and environmental activists, among them Daniel McGowan, who was charged with two arsons at logging operations in Oregon. His sentence was given "terrorism enhancements" under the Patriot Act. Amnesty International has called the Marion prison facility "inhumane." All calls and mail-although communication customarily is off-limits to prison officials- are monitored in these two Communication Management Units. Communication among prisoners is required to be only in English. The highest-level terrorists are housed at the Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility, known as Supermax, in Florence, Colo., where prisoners have almost no human interaction, physical exercise or mental stimulation, replicating the conditions for most of those held at Guantánamo. If detainees are transferred from Guantánamo to the prison in Thomson, Ill. [5], they will find little change. They will endure Guantánamo-like conditions in colder weather.
Our descent is the familiar disease of decaying empires. The tyranny we impose on others we finally impose on ourselves. The influx of non-Muslim American activists into these facilities is another ominous development. It presages the continued dismantling of the rule of law, the widening of a system where prisoners are psychologically broken by sensory deprivation, extreme isolation and secretive kangaroo courts where suspects are sentenced on rumors and innuendo and denied the right to view the evidence against them. Dissent is no longer the duty of the engaged citizen but is becoming an act of terrorism.
from: http://www.commondreams.org
"If we take this trade of Malacca away from them, Cairo and Mecca will be entirely ruined..." --Afonso de Albuquerque
When President Barack Obama personally issued the order for U.S. air strikes against Yemeni rebels, which killed numerous civilians, including women and children, it was not the first time a foreign power has tried to politically and militarily subdue and dominate the Arabian Peninsula. During the early 16th century, and fueled with dreams of expanding its Christian kingdom and amassing great power and riches, Portuguese naval commander Afonso de Albuquerque was determined to defeat the Muslim rulers who controlled the profitable Indian Ocean spice trade.
But in order to build a Portuguese trading empire and to make the Indian Ocean a "Portuguese Lake," as Afonso de Albuquerque claimed, he had to first conquer the Arabian Peninsula and its surrounding waterways. From the Horn of Africa to the Red Sea and Arabian Peninsula, Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz, and India and the Strait of Malacca, the Portuguese took cities, killing their inhabitants and seizing their goods. When the Portuguese built forts on or beside razed cities, including mosques, the people realized the invaders and looters were going to try and stay permanently.
Even though Afonso de Albuquerque was successful in crushing Arab fleets, the burned coastal towns along the Arabian Peninsula exacted a horrible price. When the Portuguese massacred the Muslim inhabitants of Aden, entrance to the Red Sea, and Ormuz, gateway to the Persian Gulf, it made the Europeans hated and feared. Portuguese missionaries who were intolerant, the Inquisition, and Portuguese warships that destroyed Muslim pilgrim ships on their way to Mecca caused even deeper resentment and loathing for Westerners.
Portugal soon found itself outmatched and overstretched. They did not have the military power, or human and material resources, to conquer such vast regions and to supply and maintain their forts and trading posts. New found (exploited) goods, riches, and power pouring into Portugal soon caused bitter infighting and conflicts. Portugal's empire also faced challenges from other European powers and from Persia, China, Russia, and India. The race to monopolize the Spice Trade, became the race to prevent the collapse of Portuguese society and its religious traditions.
In recent times, and after World War I, Britain made Yemen into a crown colony and took control of its valuable port. The Port of Aden became a major international trading and fueling station for naval and commerce ships passing through the Suez Canal. The rise of Arab nationalism, combined with severe urban and economic problems, caused British opponents to launch a campaign of bombings, sabotage, and armed resistance. When Britain withdrew from the Yemen Arab Republic in 1968, domestic and international competition over the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula and Port of Aden increased. Although post-civil war Yemen held its first democratic election in 1993, it is still hampered by political, social, cultural, religious, and tribal divisions.
It was only a matter of time for the U.S. to once again become involved in Yemen's internal political and cultural affairs. Not only did the U.S. wrestle for control of Yemen during the Cold War, but it is the birthplace of Osama bin Laden's father, and it is where the USS Cole was severely damaged. Yemen is also home to several ultra-conservative Islamic movements, movements with ties to Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Egypt and that in President Obama's view, threatens U.S. national security and interests in the region. Behind the air strikes against al Qaeda targets and hideouts in Yemen, is the desire to monopolize and control the resources (especially oil), economies, peoples, and religions of the region.
In the end, the Global War on Terror is really a ruse for a centuries old dream by Western Powers to dominate the Arabian Peninsula. The thousands of Yemenis that demonstrated in southern Yemen denouncing the uncivilized and barbaric military campaign, ordered by President Obama, understand this. Is Yemen becoming a reserve base for al Qaeda, as a U.S. military official claimed, or is it becoming another military and trading outpost for the American Empire? Even though naval commander Afonso de Albuquerque claimed he and Portugal came in peace, when the city resisted, a witness described the bombardment: "The cannonballs came like rain, and the noise of the cannon was as the noise of thunder in the heavens and the flashes of fire of their guns were like flashes of lightning in the sky."
The 175,000 Yemeni refugees, and those who just lost family members, can attest to this.
from: http://www.commondreams.org
It is already a 30-year war begun by one Democratic president, and thanks to the political opportunism of the current commander in chief the Afghanistan war is still without end or logical purpose. President Barack Obama's own top national security adviser has stated that there are fewer than 100 al-Qaida members in Afghanistan and that they are not capable of launching attacks. What superheroes they must be, then, to require 100,000 U.S. troops to contain them.
The president handled that absurdity by conflating al-Qaida, which he admitted is holed up in Pakistan, with the Taliban and denying the McChrystal report's basic assumption that the enemy in Afghanistan is local in both origin and focus. Obama stated Tuesday in a speech announcing a major escalation of the war, "It's important to recall why America and our allies were compelled to fight a war in Afghanistan in the first place." But he then cut off any serious consideration of that question with the bald assertion that "we did not ask for this fight."
Of course we did. The Islamic fanatics who seized power in Afghanistan were previously backed by the U.S. as "freedom fighters" in what was once marketed as a bold adventure in Cold War one-upmanship against the Soviets. It was President Jimmy Carter, aided by a young liberal hawk named Richard Holbrooke, now Obama's civilian point man on Afghanistan, who decided to support Muslim fanatics there. Holbrooke began his government service as one of the "Best and the Brightest" in Vietnam and was involved with the rural pacification and Phoenix assassination program in that country, and he is now a big advocate of the counterinsurgency program proposed by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal to once again win the hearts and minds of locals who want none of it.
The current president's military point man, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, served in Carter's National Security Council and knows that Obama is speaking falsely when he asserts it was the Soviet occupation that gave rise to the Muslim insurgency that we abetted. Gates wrote a memoir in 1996 which, as his publisher proclaimed, exposed "Carter's never-before-revealed covert support to Afghan mujahedeen-six months before the Soviets invaded."
Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was asked in a 1998 interview with the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur if he regretted "having given arms and advice to future terrorists," and he answered, "What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?" Brzezinski made that statement three years before the 9/11 attack by those "stirred-up Muslims."
So here we go again, selling firewater to the natives and calling it salvation. We have decided to prop up a hopelessly corrupt Afghan government because, as Obama argued in one of the more disgraceful passages of Tuesday's West Point speech, "although it was marred by fraud, [the recent] election produced a government that is consistent with Afghanistan's laws and constitution."
To suggest that the Afghan government will be in seriously better shape 18 months after 30,000 additional U.S. and perhaps 5,000 more NATO troops are dispatched is bizarrely out of touch with the strategy of the McChrystal report, which calls for American troops to restructure life down to the level of the most forlorn village. Surely the civilian and military supporters of that approach who are cheering Obama on have been giving assurances that he will not be held to such an unrealistically short timeline. Evidence of this was offered in the president's speech when he said of the planned withdrawal of some forces by July of 2011: "Just as we have done in Iraq, we will execute this transition responsibly, taking into account conditions on the ground. We'll continue to advise and assist Afghanistan's security forces to ensure that they can succeed over the long haul."
A very long haul indeed, if one checks the experience of Matthew Hoh, the former Marine captain who was credited with being as successful as anyone in implementing the counterinsurgency strategy now in vogue. In his letter of resignation as a foreign service officer in charge of one of the most hotly contested areas, Hoh wrote: "In the course of my five months of service in Afghanistan ... I have lost understanding and confidence in the strategic purpose of the United States' presence in Afghanistan. ... I have observed that the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban, but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul."
Maybe they should have given Capt. Hoh the Noble Peace Prize.
from: http://www.commondreams.org
"We have been led to believe that we must make our health care choices only within the current structure of a predatory, for-profit insurance system which makes money not providing health care. We cannot fault the insurance companies for being what they are. But we can fault legislation in which the government incentivizes the perpetuation, indeed the strengthening, of the for-profit health insurance industry, the very source of the problem. When health insurance companies deny care or raise premiums, co-pays and deductibles they are simply trying to make a profit. That is our system."
"Clearly, the insurance companies are the problem, not the solution. They are driving up the cost of health care. Because their massive bureaucracy avoids paying bills so effectively, they force hospitals and doctors to hire their own bureaucracy to fight the insurance companies to avoid getting stuck with an unfair share of the bills. The result is that since 1970, the number of physicians has increased by less than 200% while the number of administrators has increased by 3000%. It is no wonder that 31 cents of every health care dollar goes to administrative costs, not toward providing care. Even those with insurance are at risk. The single biggest cause of bankruptcies in the U.S. is health insurance policies that do not cover you when you get sick."
"But instead of working toward the elimination of for-profit insurance, H.R. 3962 would put the government in the role of accelerating the privatization of health care. In H.R. 3962, the government is requiring at least 21 million Americans to buy private health insurance from the very industry that causes costs to be so high, which will result in at least $70 billion in new annual revenue, much of which is coming from taxpayers. This inevitably will lead to even more costs, more subsidies, and higher profits for insurance companies - a bailout under a blue cross."
"By incurring only a new requirement to cover pre-existing conditions, a weakened public option, and a few other important but limited concessions, the health insurance companies are getting quite a deal. The Center for American Progress' blog, Think Progress, states, 'since the President signaled that he is backing away from the public option, health insurance stocks have been on the rise.' Similarly, healthcare stocks rallied when Senator Max Baucus introduced a bill without a public option. Bloomberg reports that Curtis Lane, a prominent health industry investor, predicted a few weeks ago that 'money will start flowing in again' to health insurance stocks after passage of the legislation. Investors.com last month reported that pharmacy benefit managers share prices are hitting all-time highs, with the only industry worry that the Administration would reverse its decision not to negotiate Medicare Part D drug prices, leaving in place a Bush Administration policy."
"During the debate, when the interests of insurance companies would have been effectively challenged, that challenge was turned back. The 'robust public option' which would have offered a modicum of competition to a monopolistic industry was whittled down from an initial potential enrollment of 129 million Americans to 6 million. An amendment which would have protected the rights of states to pursue single-payer health care was stripped from the bill at the request of the Administration. Looking ahead, we cringe at the prospect of even greater favors for insurance companies."
"Recent rises in unemployment indicate a widening separation between the finance economy and the real economy. The finance economy considers the health of Wall Street, rising corporate profits, and banks' hoarding of cash, much of it from taxpayers, as sign of an economic recovery. However in the real economy - in which most Americans live - the recession is not over. Rising unemployment, business failures, bankruptcies and foreclosures are still hammering Main Street."
"This health care bill continues the redistribution of wealth to Wall Street at the expense of America's manufacturing and service economies which suffer from costs other countries do not have to bear, especially the cost of health care. America continues to stand out among all industrialized nations for its privatized health care system. As a result, we are less competitive in steel, automotive, aerospace and shipping while other countries subsidize their exports in these areas through socializing the cost of health care."
"Notwithstanding the fate of H.R. 3962, America will someday come to recognize the broad social and economic benefits of a not-for- profit, single-payer health care system, which is good for the American people and good for America's businesses, with of course the notable exceptions being insurance and pharmaceuticals."
from: http://www.commondreams.org
I have a few confessions to make: After almost eight years of off-and-on war in Afghanistan and after more than six years of mayhem and death since "Mission Accomplished" [1]was declared in Operation Iraqi Freedom, I'm tired of seeing simpleminded magnetic ribbons on vehicles telling me, a 20-year military veteran, to support or pray for our troops. As a Christian, I find it presumptuous to see ribbons shaped like fish, with an American flag as a tail, informing me that God blesses our troops. I'm underwhelmed by gigantic American flags -- up to 100 feet by 300 feet -- repeatedly being unfurled in our sports arenas, as if our love of country is greater when our flags are bigger. I'm disturbed by nuclear-strike bombers soaring over stadiums filled with children, as one did in July just as the National Anthem ended during this year'sMajor League Baseball All Star game. Instead of oohing and aahing at our destructive might, I was quietly horrified at its looming presence during a family event.
We've recently come through the steroid era [2]in baseball with all those muscled up players and jacked up stats. Now that players are tested randomly, home runs are down and muscles don't stretch uniforms quite as tightly. Yet while ending the steroid era in baseball proved reasonably straightforward once the will to act was present, we as a country have yet to face, no less curtail, our ongoing steroidal celebrations of pumped-up patriotism.
It's high time we ended the post-Vietnam obsession with Rambo's rippling pecs as well as the jaw-dropping technological firepower of the recent cinematic version of G.I. Joe and return to the resolute, undemonstrative strength that Gary Cooper showed in movies like High Noon [3].
In the HBO series The Sopranos, Tony (played by James Gandolfini) struggles with his own vulnerability -- panic attacks caused by stress that his Mafia rivals would interpret as fatal signs of weakness. Lamenting his emotional frailty, Tony asks, "Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?" Whatever happened, in other words, to quiet, unemotive Americans who went about their business without fanfare, without swagger, but with firmness and no lack of controlled anger at the right time?
Tony's question is a good one, but I'd like to spin it differently: Why did we allow lanky American citizen-soldiers and true heroes like World War I Sergeant Alvin York [4] (played, at York's insistence, by Gary Cooper) and World War II Sergeant (later, first lieutenant) Audie Murphy [5] (played in the film To Hell and Back, famously, by himself) to be replaced by all those post-Vietnam pumped up Hollywood "warriors," with Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger-style abs and egos to match?
And far more important than how we got here, how can we end our enduring fascination with a puffed up, comic-book-style militarism that seems to have stepped directly out of screen fantasy and into our all-too-real lives?
A Seven-Step Recovery Program
As a society, we've become so addicted to militarism that we don't even notice the way it surrounds us or the spasms of societal 'roid rage that go with it. The fact is, we need a detox program. At the risk of incurring some of that 'roid rage myself, let me suggest a seven-step program that could help return us to the saner days of Gary Cooper:
1. Baseball players on steroids swing for the fences. So does a steroidal country. When you have an immense military establishment, your answer to trouble is likely to be overwhelming force, including sending troops into harm's way. To rein in our steroidal version of militarism, we should stop bulking up [6]our military ranks, as is now happening, and shrink them instead. Our military needs not more muscle supplements (or the budgetary version of the same), but far fewer.
2. It's time to stop deferring to our generals, and even to their commander-in-chief. They're ours, after all; we're not theirs. When President Obama says Afghanistan is not a war of choice [7]but of necessity, we shouldn't hesitate to point out that the emperor has no clothes. Yet when it comes to tough questioning of the president's generals, Congress now seems eternally supine. Senators and representatives are invariably too busy falling all over themselves praising our troops and their commanders, too worried that "tough" questioning will appear unpatriotic to the folks back home, or too connected to military contractors in their districts, or some combination of the three.
Here's something we should all keep in mind: generals have no monopoly on military insight. What they have a monopoly on is a no-lose situation. If things go well, they get credit; if they go badly, we do. Retired five-star general Omar Bradley was typical when he visited Vietnam in 1967 and declared: "I am convinced that this is a war at the right place, at the right time and with the right enemy -- the Communists." North Vietnam's only hope for victory, he insisted, was "to hang on in the expectation that the American public, inadequately informed about the true situation and sickened by the loss in lives and money, will force the United States to give up and pull out."
There we have it: A classic statement of the belief [8]that when our military loses a war, it's always the fault of "we the people." Paradoxically, such insidious myths gain credibility not because we the people are too forceful in our criticism of the military, but because we are too deferential.
3. It's time to redefine what "support our troops" really means. We console ourselves with the belief that all our troops are volunteers, who freely signed on for repeated tours of duty in forever wars. But are our troops truly volunteers? Didn't we recruit them using multi-million dollar ad campaigns and lures of every sort? Are we not, in effect, running a poverty and recession draft? Isolated in middle- or upper-class comfort, detached from our wars and their burdens, have we not, in a sense, recruited a "foreign legion" [9] to do our bidding?
If you're looking for a clear sign of a militarized society -- which few Americans are -- a good place to start is with troop veneration. The cult of the soldier often covers up a variety of sins. It helps, among other things, hide the true costs of, and often the futility of, the wars being fought. At an extreme, as the war began to turn dramatically against Nazi Germany in 1943, Germans who attempted to protest Hitler's failed strategy and the catastrophic costs of his war were accused of (and usually executed for) betraying the troops at the front.
The United States is not a totalitarian state, so surely we can hazard criticisms of our wars and even occasionally of the behavior of some of our troops, without facing charges of stabbing our troops in the back and aiding the enemy. Or can we?
4. Let's see the military for what it is: a blunt instrument of force. It's neither surgical nor precise nor predictable. What Shakespeare wrote 400 years ago remains true: when wars start, havoc is unleashed, and the dogs of war run wild -- in our case, not just the professional but the "mercenary" dogs of war, those private contractors to the Pentagon that thrive [10]on the rich spoils of modern warfare in distant lands. It's time to recognize that we rely ever more massively to prosecute our wars on companies that profit ever more handsomely the longer they last.
5. Let's not blindly venerate the serving soldier, while forgetting our veterans when they doff their spiffy uniforms for the last time. It's easy to celebrate our clean-cut men and women in uniform when they're thousands of miles from home, far tougher to lend a hand to scruffier, embittered veterans suffering from the physical and emotional trauma of the battle zones to which they were consigned, usually for multiple tours of duty.
6. I like air shows, but how about -- as a first tiny step toward demilitarizing civilian life -- banning all flyovers of sporting events by modern combat aircraft? War is not a sport, and it shouldn't be a thrill.
7. I love our flag. I keep my father's casket flag in a special display case next to the very desk on which I'm writing this piece. It reminds me of his decades of service as a soldier and firefighter. But I don't need humongous stadium flags or, for that matter, tiny flag lapel pins to prove my patriotism -- and neither should you. In fact, doesn't the endless post-9/11 public proliferation of flags in every size imaginable suggest a certain fanaticism bordering on desperation? If we saw such displays in other countries, our descriptions wouldn't be kindly.
Of course, none of this is likely to be easy as long as this country garrisons the planet and fights open-ended wars on its global frontiers. The largest step, the eighth one, would be to begin seriously downsizing that mission. In the meantime, we shouldn't need reminding that this country was originally founded as a civilian society, not a militarized one. Indeed, the revolt of the 13 colonies against the King of England was sparked, in part, by the perceived tyranny of forced quartering of British troops in colonial homes, the heavy hand of an "occupation" army, and taxation that we were told went for our own defense, whether we wanted to be defended or not.
If Americans are going to continue to hold so-called tea parties, shouldn't some of them be directed against the militarization of our country and an enormous tax burden fed in part by our wasteful, trillion-dollar wars?
Modest as it may seem, my seven-step recovery program won't be easy for many of us to follow. After all, let's face it, we've come to enjoy our peculiar brand of muscular patriotism and the macho militarism that goes with it. In fact, we revel in it. Outwardly, the result is quite an impressive show. We look confident and ripped and strong. But it's increasingly clear that our outward swagger conceals an inner desperation. If we're so strong, one might ask, why do we need so muchsteroidal piety, so many in-your-face patriotic props, and so much parade-ground conformity?
Forget Rambo and action-picture G.I. Joes: Give me the steady hand, the undemonstrative strength, and the quiet humility of Alvin York, Audie Murphy -- and Gary Cooper.
from: http://www.commondreams.org
While Whole Foods CEO John Mackey recently publicly inflamed the health care debate, behind the scenes Whole Foods has been quietly dismantling a key piece of legislation that would make it easier for workers who want to form a union to do so.
Whole Foods and Starbucks are backing a "compromise" to strip the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) of a key provision. The so-called "card-check" provision would require employers to recognize its employees' union once a majority has signed union authorization cards. Currently, employers often refuse to recognize new unions even if all their employees have signed up. New contracts often take years to negotiate, meanwhile workers are frequently subject to harassment and sometimes fired. The card-check provision is so central to this legislation, it has been called "the card-check bill."
Food industry giants from WalMart, to meatpacking titans Smithfield, and Hormel, to McDonalds have sent out an army of lobbyists to fight the pro-union bill. WalMart has spent $10.5 million in federal PAC spending since 2000, plus contributions to other corporate front groups lobbying against the bill.
However, unlike out-and-out opponents of the legislation, Starbucks and Whole Foods have built labor friendly images by supporting fair-trade and offering better wages than some other chains, despite being aggressively anti-union. Now it appears the retailers are cashing in on that image to modify the EFCA and remain, as Mackey says, "100% union-free."
The hypocrisy is not lost on Whole Foods' employees - one states, people need "to know just how false their [Whole Foods'] 'socially responsible' image is, especially with regards to their own workers."
This summer Whole Foods employees are voting on their new health benefits package - the "choices" amount to a significant cut from the previous years' packages. Reflecting employee discontent, a recent press release comments "It takes a truly unique culture to persuade people that submission is empowerment." They go on to allude to the need for unions to confront these cuts, saying that without "a method for organized, collective action workers can expect this promise from their employer, 'Whole Food Market reserves the right to change, revise or eliminate any of the policies and/or benefits at any time.'"
Several workers at a San Francisco Whole Foods store were fired this spring for incidents employees claim were related to their organizing efforts. An un-compromised Employee Free Choice Act would prevent that kind of retaliatory activity and provide the "method" to preserve health benefits that employees seek - but not if Whole Foods and other food giants strip the bill of it's teeth.
Though reporters have discussed the EFCA compromise as if it is a done-deal, AFL-CIO union leader Candace Lund reminds us, "reports of the death of card-check have been prematurely exaggerated . . . We don't have a compromise, just an article [referencing one NY Times story]."
Lund's support of the "card-check" provision is just one way unions are seeking better conditions for workers. Within the food system, organized labor has played a significant role in job quality. Research by the Institute for Women's Policy Research indicates that unionized workers in the retail food industry make 31 percent more than their non-union counterparts. The premium is even higher for part-timers (33 percent), non-supervisory workers (45 percent), and cashiers (52 percent). Union members are also more than twice as likely get part or all of their health insurance premiums paid through their job.
Yet, unionization rates have fallen from their post World War II peak of 35%, to 26% in 1975 and today only 12% of all workers and 8% of private sector workers are unionized. This drop in union representation has come with a significant drop in wages. For example, supermarket workers' real average earnings fell by 31% between 1978 and1996. Similarly, wages in the meatpacking sector have declined in real terms by 45% since the 1980's.
The fact that food industry giants have come out in force against the bill is indicative of something larger. Falling wages and health care coverage are trends that are recurring throughout the food system and public policy underwrites the decline - through selective enforcement of labor and anti-trust laws, but also through state welfare programs. As the food industry has become increasingly concentrated over the past two decades - cost-cutting measures have disproportionately shifted to workers whose poverty line wages are often supplemented by Medicaid, food stamps, child nutrition programs, direct government payments, and other government services.
The total estimated cost of state and federal payouts for Burger King employees alone is over $273 million a year. Multiply $273 million over all major fast food and low-wage retail food outlets, and the government is shelling out billions of dollars a year to subsidize the industry's bottom line. According to research done by the AFL-CIO, in the company's home state of Arkansas, Wal-Mart employees are the largest group of Medicaid recipients from any one company, accounting for 40% of the total state Medicaid budget.
One way to reverse this trend would be to make food sector jobs good jobs - by making it easier for workers who want to form a union to do so. This is why an intact Employee Free Choice Act (with majority sign-up) is crucial.
Whole Food's John Mackey is no fool - while he may have galvanized supporters of health care reform by speaking up, on the issue that will eat into his company's profit margin, he remains silently, yet powerfully active.
*********** EDITOR'S NOTE: Whole Foods sucks. JOIN THE BOYCOTT! **********
from: http://www.commondreams.org
John Mackey is a right wing libertarian.
He's a union buster.
He believes that corporations should not be criminally prosecuted for their crimes.
He has just launched a campaign to defeat a single payer national health insurance system.
And he's the CEO of Whole Foods.
Primo hangout of liberal Democratic yuppies.
"We are all responsible for our own lives and our own health," Mackey wrote yesterday [1] in the Wall Street Journal. "We should take that responsibility very seriously and use our freedom to make wise lifestyle choices that will protect our health. Doing so will enrich our lives and will help create a vibrant and sustainable American society."
Yes it will, John Mackey.
Yes it will.
I do take that responsibility very seriously.
I try to eat well.
And exercise regularly.
I also take my responsibility as a citizen seriously.
After all, Mr. Mackey, we are all responsible for our own civic lives and our own civic health.
We should take that responsibility very seriously and use our freedom and make wise civic and consumer choices that will protect our nation's health.
Doing so will enrich our civic lives and help create a vibrant and sustainable American society.
That's why, today, Single Payer Action is calling on all American citizens to boycott Whole Foods.
Why?
Because Mackey has launched a public campaign to defeat single payer national health insurance.
This despite the bottom line reality that single payer is the only way to both control health care costs and cover everyone.
As Dr. Marcia Angell says in today's New York Times [2], "if you keep health care in the hands of for-profit companies, you can increase coverage by putting more money into the system, or control costs by decreasing coverage. But you cannot do both unless you change the basic structure of the system."
Mackey leads his Wall Street Journal diatribe against national health insurance with a quote from one of his heroines - Margaret Thatcher: "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."
And the problem with Mackey's campaign is that it results in the deaths of 60 Americans every day due to lack of health insurance.
Mackey is responsible for these deaths as much as anyone.
And we are responsible for putting money into his Whole Food bank account so that he can continue his campaign without resistance.
I know that this boycott of Whole Foods will upset many liberal Democrats.
Where will they buy their organic wines?
And cheeses?
And tofu?
There are options.
Your local health food co-op.
Farmers' markets.
Community supported agriculture.
Other corporate chains like Trader Joe's.
So, please, join the Single Payer Action Boycott of Whole Foods.
Don't cross the picket lines.
Don't spend another penny at Whole Foods until John Mackey and his right wing friends are defeated.
And single payer is enacted.
Onward to single payer.
from: http://www.commondreams.org
Barack Obama and Democratic majorities in the House and Senate were swept into office on a promise they would deliver affordable and accessible health care for all Americans. But the corporate media journalism limits the national health care conversation to what insurance companies, drug companies, for-profit health care professionals, their executives, lobbyists and politicians of both parties and other hirelings have to say. So it isn't as easy as it ought to be to tell what the politicians are doing about accomplishing health care for everybody. Hence we offer these ten points. This is how you can tell whether your president and his party are fighting for the health care you deserve.
1. Their plan doesn't cover the uninsured till at least 2013.
2013 isn't "day one." It's not even after the midterm election. It's clear after the president's second term, if he gets one. Congress passed Medicare in 1965 and president Lyndon Johnson rolled out coverage for millions of seniors in eleven months, back in the days before they even had computers.
22,000 Americans now perish each year because they can't get or can't afford medical care, and this year three quarter million personal bankruptcies will be triggered by unpayable medical bills. Why this president and these Democrats are in such a hurry to pass health care now that doesn't take effect till two elections down the road doesn't make sense in any kind of good way.
2. Their "public option" isn't Medicare, won't bring costs down and will only cover about 10 million people.
The "public option" was sold to the American people as Medicare-scale plan open to anybody who wants in that would compete with the private insurers and drive their costs downward. But in their haste not to bite the hands that feed them millions in campaign contributions each hear, the president and his party have scaled the public option back from a Medicare-sized 130 million to a maximum of 10 million, too small to put cost pressure in private insurers [3]. Worse still, the president and his party are playing bait-and-witch, not telling the public they have reduced the public option, to nearly nothing.
This remnant of a public option is not Medicare, as Howard Dean insists, and it will not lead to the sort of everybody-in-nobody-out health care system that most Americans, whenever they are surveyed say they want.
Some Senate and House Democrats want to ditch even the pretense [4] of a "public option" in favor of something they're calling a private insurance "co-op [5]", which as near as anybody can tell has the same relationship to an actual cooperative that clean coal has to actual coal.
3. The president and his party have already caved in [6] to the drug companies on reimporting Canadian drugs, on negotiating drug prices downward and on generics.
This explains why Big Pharma, the same people who ran the devastatin g series of anti-reform "Harry and Louise" ads to spike the Clinton-era drive to fix health care are spending $100 million [7] to run Obama ads using the president's language about "bipartisan" solutions to health care reform.
4. The president and his party have received more money from private insurers and the for-profit health care industry than even Republicans, with the president alone taking $19 million in the 2008 election cycle alone, [8] more than all his Repubican, Democratic and independent rivals combined.
Democratic senator Max Bacaus got $1.1 million in 2008. Democratic senators Harkin, Landreau and Rockerfeller each got over half a million, and Senator Durbin got just under half a million. Other Democratic senators got a little less. Four Democrats in the House, Rangel, Dinglell, Udall and Hoyer got over half a million apiece in 2008, with other Democrats not far behind.
Is there any wonder that the insurance companies, like the drug companies are also running "bipartisan health care reform" commercials using the president's exact language?
5. The president's plan, and those of Republicans and Democratic blue dogs too, will require families to purchase health insurance policies from private insurers.
This is something the policy wonks call an 'individual mandate [9]", under which Individuals will be "mandated" to purchase affordable insurance, though companies would not be required to offer it. In Massachusetts, the prototype state for the Obama plan, a family with an income of $33,000 can be required to spend $9,000 in deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses before the insurance company is obligated to pay a dime. As in Massachusetts, public money is used to purchase private insurance for the very poorest citizens. With the revenues of insurance companies on the decline, individual mandate programs are a welcome bailout for the private insurance industry.
6. The president's plan, and those of Republicans and Democratic blue dogs too, could force you to buy junk insurance [10].
Think about an insurance policy that costs a lot, but is full of loopholes, exceptions and steep deductibles and co-payments. That's junk insurance, and for many it's the only insurance companies offer. Even more pernicious is the widespread practice among insurance companies of "recission" in which claimants are routinely investigated and disqualified in the event that they finally make a claim. Insurance companies admit they do this to half of one percent of policies per year. That means if you hold a health insurance policy twenty years, you don;t have insurance - you have a ninety percent chance of having insurance.
7. The president's plan, as well as those of Democratic "blue dogs" and Republicans, are to be funded in part with cuts in Medicare and Medicaid.
Private insurance companies have always hated Medicare because it is far more efficient than they are. Medicare's administrative expenses are under five percent, as compared with the one third of every health care dollar taken by the for-profit insurance companies for their advertising, bad investments, billing and denial machinery, executive salaries and bonuses. Private insurers have, over the years, purchased enough influence in Congress and previous White Houses to restrict Medicare's payment rates and partially privatize it. But president Obama's plan, perhaps the most friendly to Medicare and Medicaid, calls for over $300 billion in cuts [11]to the programs that now provide medical care to those with the fewest options, while failing to guarantee that care will come from elsewhere. In Massachusetts right now, hospitals are turning away poor people they used to be able to provide care for because funding that used to go to those institutions is now plowed into the state's "individual mandate" system.
8. The president, with the cooperation of corporate media and the Republicans is trying to make the argument about himself instead of a discussion on the merits of his policy.
The president and his critics are happy to talk about whether this will be "his Waterloo [12]", or his Dien Bien Phu, as if that matters more than the 22,000 Americans who die each year from lack of medical care, or the three quarter million who will go bankrupt because of unpayable medical bills. The concentration on whether the president looks good or bad takes up air, ink, and coverage time that might otherwise be spent explaining what is and isn't in the various proposals, and why.
If the president were not afraid of his own supporters publicly examining the merits and demerits of his proposals, he would mobilize those 13 million emails and phone numbers collected during the campaign. The reason he has not sone so already is that most of his own supporters favor a Medicare-For-All single payer health care system, HR 676.
9. The president and his party, and the corporate media [13] have spent more time and energy silencing [14]and excluded the advocates of single payer health care, mostly the president's own supporters, than they have fighting blue dogs and Republicans.
But no matter how diligently the spokespeople for single payer are excluded from media coverage and invitations [15] to Obama's policy forums and round tables, no matter how many times the White House cuts their questions [16]from transcripts and video of public events, the calls, emails and letters keep pouring into Congress and the White House demanding the creation of a publicly funded, everybody-in-nobody-out system, a Medicare-for-All kind of single payer health care plan.
10. Despite the president's own admission that only a single payer health care system will deliver what Americans want, he and the leaders of his party insist that Medicare For All, HR 676, us utterly off the table.
Before he became a presidential candidate, Barack Obama identified himself as a proponent of a single payer health care system. All we had to do, he told us, was elect a Democratic congress and senate, and a different president. Now that this has been done, he insists that "change" is just not possible, and we have to settle for less. The president continues to admit that only a single payer health care system will cover everybody, but insists that America just can't handle that much change.
The truth is that Barack Obama campaigned as the candidate of change, and a health care system that covers everybody from day one with no exceptions is what people imagined they voted for when they swept him and an overwhelming number of Democrats into office.
A single payer Medicare-For-All system will eliminate 500,000 insurance company jobs and replace them with 3.2 million new jobs in health care for a net gain of 2.6 million new jobs [17]according to a study by the National Nurses Organization. That's as many jobs as the US economy lost in all of 2007. Single payer will create hundreds of billions in annual wages and local and state tax revenues for cash strapped cities and towns. It will lift the shadow of bankruptcy for medical reasons from two thirds of a million American families yearly. It's what we deserve.
It's what we voted for, and we won't stop demanding it.
from: http://www.commondreams.org
Let's hope that the United States finally decides that it's going to do what its president said it would do for Central America. It should be a simple task, that of cutting off its support of the bad guys in Honduras [1]and starting to honour the commitment to democracy that Barack Obama clearly announced when he met the leaders of Latin America at the Summit of the Americas.
So far the administration's actions towards the gang of semi-educated ruffians who took over in Tegucigalpa [2]and who feel, for racial reasons, that the US leader is beneath their contempt, has been - to put it kindly - ragged. The almost universal cry of "foul" went up when the legally elected Manuel Zelaya was sent out of the country in his pyjamas by Roberto Micheletti, an obscure politician and businessman, who had seized power.
US secretary of state Hillary Clinton was first off the starting block when she condemned the impostor's action. Then Barack came along to say what she had chosen not to say: that the real president should be returned to the office [3] he rightfully exercised.
Now however the word from every involved agency in Washington is that Zelaya should be allowed back on the strict condition that he does not upset friends of the US, the Republican party and the telecommunication companies in DC with his state-owned corporation Hondutel [4]. This is ridiculous for two reasons. The first is to do with simple justice - Zelaya won a victory in clean elections. The second has to do with the US president's image in the western hemisphere. The last eight years in the Middle East and the unfolding debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan should have taught the US and the British governments that if they attempt the impossible - such as trying to invade and occupy countries on spurious grounds and with recourse to kidnapping and torture - they will get egg all over themselves. And egg stains never look good on presidential or prime ministerial lounge suits - much less on military uniforms, gold braid and medal ribbons.
Yet Obama is presiding over a group of politicians and civil servants who appear to think that they have it in their power to convince Latin Americans and the world that a Honduran coup d'etat is not a coup d'etat and that a dictatorship which imposes curfews and gags the media as part of a drive to help the interests of foreign businessmen is a democratic government.
The leaders of all the members of the Organisation of American States have condemned Micheletti, as have the UN and the EU. If Clinton and the survivors of the wilder rightwing fringes of the Bush administration to whom she is bizarrely allied have their way US reaction to the impostor will be ineffectual.
Instead of treating the impostor government with all the weapons that the US has used against successive Cuban governments and against the elected government of Venezuela, Micheletti has been asked to play along with president Oscar Arias of Costa Rica. Arias has treated him as an equal, which he isn't, rather than an aspiring Pinochet, which the deaths and injuries his police and troops on the border have inflicted on Zelaya's supporters demonstrate that he is.
And that - as Clinton knows better than anyone - will be very damaging for Obama. The claims made by Hugo Ch&aecute;vez of Venezuela and Fidel Castro of Cuba that nothing much has changed between the Bush era and the Obama era will have been vindicated. As Zelaya is denied his rights, the stronger Ch&aecute;vez and Castro become, along with President Lula of Brazil, the giant of South America. The Brazilian has said that anything short of Zelaya's restoration to office would be unthinkable.
Ch&aecute;vez meanwhile has sent his foreign minister Nicolas Maduro to accompany Zelaya to the Nicaraguan-Honduran border [5], thus clearly identifying himself with the good guy. The shots of Zelaya and Maduro at the sharp end of the conflict will have done much to counteract the careful campaign of slander and denigration of Ch&aecute;vez that the State Department has mounted - not without success in the US and even European media - since the failure of its own coup d'etat against the Venezuelan leader in 2002.
The longer the State Department continues to favour Micheletti over Honduras' rightful president, the more people will wonder why Obama needs enemies when he has friends like his secretary of state.
from: http://www.commondreams.org
Connect the dots: Goldman Sachs made $3.44 billion in profit this past quarter, while the U.S deficit topped $1 trillion for the first time in the nation's history and appeared to be headed toward doubling that figure before the budget year is out. Since most of the increase in the federal deficit is due to bailing out the banks and salvaging the greater economy they helped destroy, why is the top investment bank doing so well?
Well, because that was the plan, as devised by Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs. Remember that Lehman Brothers, Goldman's competitor, was allowed to go bankrupt. The Paulson crowd wouldn't let Lehman change its status to that of a bank holding company and thus qualify for federal funds; soon afterward, Goldman was granted just such a deal, worth a quick $10 billion. Much is now made of Goldman paying back part of its bailout money, but forgotten is the $12.9 billion that Goldman got as its cut of the $180 billion AIG payoff. That is money that will not be paid back.
Goldman is considered a very smart bank because it was early in reducing its exposure to the mortgage derivatives that in large part caused the meltdown. However, it had done much to expand the market and continued to sell suspect derivatives to unwary buyers as sound investments, even as Goldman divested. The firm still holds $1.85 billion in real estate and lost $499 million in the previous quarter on bad loans, but made up for it by playing the vulture role and issuing high-interest debt to governments and companies made desperate by the recession that the financial gimmicks of the banks brought on in the first place.
And Goldman was not just another bank. Before Paulson ran the Treasury Department, another former Goldman head, Robert Rubin, pushed through the repeal of the Glass-Steagall controls on banking activity. While some now play down the significance of this radical deregulation, not so Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd C. Blankfein--at least not back in June 2007, when the markets were still doing well. "If you take an historical perspective," Blankfein told The New York Times by way of explaining his company's spectacular success at the time, "we've come full circle, because that is exactly what the Rothschilds or J.P. Morgan the banker were doing in their heyday. What caused an aberration was the Glass-Steagall Act."
That 1933 act was repealed in a law signed by President Bill Clinton at Rubin's urging, and in the following eight years Goldman Sachs recorded a 265 percent growth in its balance sheet. "Back then," The Wall Street Journal reports, "Goldman was churning out profits by trading credit derivatives, speculating on currencies and oil and placing big bets [on] the roaring stock market."
Big bets made in a casino designed by Goldman, which now makes money off loans to the victims. High on the list of victims are state governments that have to turn to Goldman for money because the federal government that saved the banks won't do the same for the states, which have watched their tax bases shrink because of the banking meltdown. As the WSJ noted, "issuing debt to ailing governments" is now a growth industry for Goldman.
Why didn't the federal government just lend the money to the states? Why was all the money thrown at Wall Street instead of needy homeowners or struggling school systems? Because the federal government works for Goldman and not for us. Indeed, when it comes to the banking bailout, Goldman Sachs is the government.
So much so that last fall The New York Times ran a story, headlined "The Guys From `Government Sachs,' " that stated: "Goldman's presence in the [Treasury] department and around the federal response to the financial bailout is so ubiquitous that other bankers and competitors have given the star-studded firm a new nickname: Government Sachs."
One of those stars was Stephen Friedman, another former head of Goldman. Friedman was both a director of the company and chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank when he helped work out the details of the Wall Street bailout. The president of the N.Y. Fed at the time, Timothy Geithner, now secretary of the treasury, requested a conflict-of-interest waiver that allowed Friedman to buy more Goldman Sachs stock, and Friedman ended up with 98,600 shares. At market close on Tuesday that was worth $14,756,476. That's nothing -- three years ago, the 50 top Goldman execs made $20 million each, and this year could be better.
from: http://www.commondreams.org
"We hunger for communities of meaning that can transcend the individualism and selfishness that we see around us and that will provide an ethical and spiritual framework that gives our lives some higher purpose." -- Michael Lerner, The Politics of Meaning
If progressives, whether in unions, activist groups or political parties, don't soon begin doing politics differently -- radically differently -- they will fail to show that "a better world is possible."
And the price of failure will be catastrophic.
We have known for years that our consumer culture is out of control and our obsession with having more and more stuff has reached the status of a virus. Our consumer-driven global economy is a lethal threat to the planet and every one of its eco-systems.
The lock that consumerism has on Western so-called civilization is formidable -- a virtual death-grip on our culture and our future as a species. It is a kind of madness but one which we can apparently adapt to. This manufactured addiction to more and more stuff undermines community, threatens the planet and doesn't even make us happy. Consumerism, driven by the most sophisticated and manipulative psychology the advertising industry can buy, has had the effect of atomizing us. We are defined more and more by what we have, less and less by our relationships to family, friends, colleagues and community.
One anecdote has stuck in my mind for over 20 years. A friend attending an international peace conference in Edmonton accompanied a group of Filipino women -- all from rural areas of the Philippines -- to the West Edmonton Mall as a "tourist" outing for the visitors. Twenty minutes into the tour the women burst into tears and pleaded with their hosts to get them out. The insanity, the grotesque over-stimulation of the place, no longer obvious to the Canadian women who had grown up with these monstrosities, was grimly apparent to the village activists.
They were right. We should all burst into tears after 20 minutes in a giant mall -- it would be a test of our mental and spiritual health.
Secular fundamentalism and its limits
It's not as if we don't know what the Filipinas knew. It's just that we have adapted to it -- like we might adapt to some physical disability. Yet if we all know this, why is it that we are unable to incorporate our understanding of this all-important cultural disability into our progressive politics -- into the ways in which we try to engage people in the struggle for a better, sustainable, world?
American rabbi and radical Michael Lerner blames what he calls "secular fundamentalism" -- the tendency amongst mainstream activists to stick rigidly to a rationalist and technocratic interpretation of both politics and culture. He calls for a politics of meaning [1] which "posits a new bottom line. An institution or social practice is to be considered efficient or productive to the extent that it fosters ethically, spiritually, ecologically, and psychologically sensitive and caring human beings who can maintain long-term, loving personal and social relationships. While this new definition of productivity does not reject the importance of material well-being, it subsumes that concern within an expanded view of 'the good life': one that insists on the primacy of spiritual harmony, loving relationships, mutual recognition, and work that contributes to the common good."
Secular fundamentalists find talk of spiritualism intensely uncomfortable, probably because they draw immediate connections to either organized 'God' religion and its patriarchal authoritarianism or vaguely to some mushy "self-improvement" sub-culture. Spiritualism seems to fly in the face of the kind of rationalism that has been at the core of socialist and social democratic theory for nearly two centuries.
But organizers for social change face a critical problem. Trying to mobilize people strictly on a rational basis, and in particular with uncritical acceptance of the assumptions of a consumer driven economy, is proving increasingly difficult. On paper it should be working. Intensive values surveys of Canadians consistently reveal that they are progressive in their views about the role of government and the value of community. On the basis of such surveys, over 60 per cent of Canadians could be described politically as social democratic. And yet we see two neo-liberal federal leaders and their parties garnering two thirds of Canadians' voting intentions. Something is very wrong here.
What makes people identify?
It raises the question of why people get engaged. Why is that tens of millions get into an emotional frenzy over the death of a pop star or identify their lives with a professional sports team but can't be convinced to fight for social programs that would increase the quality of life of their communities? Why do further millions identify with right-wing evangelical religion rather than the call for secular social justice?
According to Lerner, they are in a search for meaning and in the context of the destruction of community of the past 30 years, they find in sports and Michael Jackson's fandom pseudo-communities they can identify with. In their quest for community they pass by the door that says left-wing politics. Why? You need not search much further than the typical political meeting -- overly earnest, boring, economistic, gloom and doom and, except on rare occasions, distinctly unwelcoming to the newcomers who have braved their first tentative outing.
And after the meeting? Nothing. No nurturing. No ongoing connection. No community.
While the U.S. example does not apply as clearly here, Lerner's analysis of why the Christian right in the U.S. has been so successful has lessons for Canadian activists.
"We find thousands of Americans -- from every walk of life, ethnic and religious background, political persuasion and lifestyle -- with lives of pain and self-blame, and turning to the political Right because the Right speaks about the collapse of families, the difficulty of teaching good values to children, the fear of crime, and the absence of spirituality in their lives. The Right seems to understand their hunger for community and connection." Lerner clearly acknowledges the destructive and often vicious politics of the right but argues most people vote for the Christian right because they feel understood and cared for by it, not because of its policies.
Nothing exciting here, move on
The left, on the other hand, fears that the people it is trying to persuade and mobilize aren't capable of imagining or accepting a truly radical vision of the future. So the NDP, instead of developing and presenting such a vision (assuming it is still capable of imagining it) that addresses people's need for a broader meaning, reduces that vision to a package of disconnected, minor reforms that doesn't offend the media power brokers. Of course, it doesn't inspire anyone either, as evidenced by its inability to get beyond 20 per cent support. Social movement organizations are in some ways even more trapped in the single issue incrementalism that fails to inspire all but a relative handful of politically conscious followers.
Convinced that "ordinary" people are incapable of radical change, says Lerner, too many left activists themselves retreat into a middle-class, consumer existence that they know deep down is not only unsustainable but deeply unsatisfying. We fight the good fight -- and then drive home, turn on the TV and watch the news report on a world that does not acknowledge our existence.
'These are radical needs'
Lerner's call for a politics of meaning is truly revolutionary given the extent to which consumerism is embedded in our lives and our culture, and the failure of our organizations to address the coming catastrophe. Who will be amongst the first revolutionaries to challenge the system? We will -- the activists who are now exhausted, demoralized and convinced there is nothing new they can do to make change.
Says Lerner, "Having been burnt by past failures, these former activists will not quickly jump into new political movements. Yet, as a meaning-oriented movement gains momentum many of them will feel a homecoming that reconnects to their deepest hopes. They will become the transformative agents who move these ideas into the mainstream... These people respond out of a real inner need, not from a commitment to an abstract idea, nor out of a sense that someone else ought to be treated differently..."
"These are radical needs," writes Lerner. "Unlike needs for economic well-being or political rights, these cannot be fulfilled inside our society as it currently is constructed."
It's time for reconstruction. The economic and climate change crises can serve as an enforced breathing space: an obligatory opportunity to get off the consumer/wealth accumulation/hyper-individualism tread mill for long enough to realize it was taking us over a cliff.
from: http://www.commondreams.org
The president has set a limit on the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. For now.
That's how escalation works. Ceilings become floors. Gradually.
A few times since last fall, the Obama team has floated rising numbers for how many additional U.S. soldiers will be sent to Afghanistan. Now, deployment of 21,000 more is a done deal, with a new total cap of 68,000 U.S. troops in that country.
But "escalation" isn't mere jargon. And it doesn't just refer to what's happening outside the United States.
"Escalation" is a word for a methodical process of acclimating people at home to the idea of more military intervention abroad -- nothing too sudden, just a step-by-step process of turning even more war into media wallpaper -- nothing too abrupt or jarring, while thousands more soldiers and billions more dollars funnel into what Martin Luther King Jr. called a "demonic suction tube," complete with massive violence, mayhem, terror and killing on a grander scale than ever.
As war policies unfold, the news accounts and dominant media discourse rarely disrupt the trajectory of events. From high places, the authorized extent of candor is a matter of timing.
Lots of recent spin from Washington has promoted the assumption that President Obama wants to stick with the current limit on deployments to Afghanistan. Soon after pushing supplemental war funds through Congress, he's hardly eager to proclaim that 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan may not be enough after all.
But no amount of spin can change the fact that the U.S. military situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate. It would be astonishing if plans for add-on deployments weren't already far along at the Pentagon.
Meanwhile, the White House is reenacting a macabre ritual -- a repetition compulsion of the warfare state -- carefully timing and titrating each dose of public information to ease the process of escalation. The basic technique is far from new.
In the spring and early summer of 1965, President Lyndon Johnson decided to send 100,000 additional U.S. troops to Vietnam, more than doubling the number there. But at a July 28 news conference, he announced that he'd decided to send an additional 50,000 soldiers.
Why did President Johnson say 50,000 instead of 100,000? Because he was heeding the advice from something called a "Special National Security Estimate" -- a secret document, issued days earlier about the already-approved new deployment, urging that "in order to mitigate somewhat the crisis atmosphere that would result from this major U.S. action . . . announcements about it be made piecemeal with no more high-level emphasis than necessary."
Forty-four years later, something similar is underway with deployments of U.S. troops to Afghanistan.
Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Tuesday [1] that no limit has been set. Speaking to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, he sounded an open-ended note: "There is not a ceiling on troop levels in Afghanistan."
Mullen's comment was scarcely reported in U.S. media outlets. It has become old news without ever being news in the first place.
The war planners in Washington are bound to proceed carefully on the home front. News of further escalation will come "piecemeal" -- "with no more high-level emphasis than necessary."
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| The AMA Does Not Represent Us
by Dr. Margaret Flowers & Dr. Carol Paris - Issue #353 As the American Medical Association begins its annual convention in Chicago, we want to take this opportunity to make it clear to the American public, to the media, and to the president and members of Congress, that the AMA does not represent us. It is a common misconception that this organization speaks on behalf of most American physicians but that is a misconception with very serious consequences at such a critical time in the health care reform debate. So long as the public, the media and our elected officials lump all physicians together as "the AMA," then we are guilty by association of a failure of our Hippocratic oath to "first, do no harm." In fact, the AMA represents less than one-third of America's physicians, and half of those are retired. In fact, the American Medical Student Association endorses universal health care reform. The AMA's longstanding opposition to every effort to change health care financing, including Medicare in the 1960s, has resulted in decades of needless and countless morbidity and mortality. Sixty people die every day in this country simply for lack of access to health care. And instead of being an advocate for the only solution that accomplishes the goals of universal coverage and fiscal viability, the single-payer option, the AMA continues to be primarily a trade association looking out for the financial interests of its members. But who, then, is looking out for the interests of patients? Certainly not Congress and the president. If that were so, the United States would long ago have relieved itself of the dubious distinction of being the only developed country in the world that does not have a universal system of health care. No, the evidence is clear that our Congress and our president are looking out for themselves and continuing the tradition of pay-to-play politics. How else would a reasonable person explain the fact that our elected officials, Democrats and Republicans combined, have accepted $12 million in campaign contributions since 1998 from the American Medical Association? We would suggest that the American people, the media, President Obama, and the members of Congress need look no further than PNHP, Physicians for a National Health Program, if they want to consult an organization that represents the interests of patients and has been doing so for 22 years. We are proud members of PNHP. We're waiting and eager to be consulted. And our physicians are willing and able to continue to engage in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience. Health care reform is the civil rights issue of the decade. The AMA does not represent us. |
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| A Singular Solution for Healthcare
by Judy Norsigian & Jennifer Potter - Issue #352 A single-payer healthcare system would more effectively control costs than any other plan that Congress is considering as it moves toward a reform bill. And by controlling costs, existing resources could be allocated more equitably, especially for the benefit of women. First, single-payer plans eliminate the $300 billion to $400 billion that insurance companies spend annually in administrative overhead and waste. Second, single-payer plans are best positioned to take on the enormous challenge of reducing or eliminating the financial incentives that have led to so much overtreatment and undertreatment. Maternity care illustrates this phenomenon: We spend far more per capita than any other industrialized country and yet do worse on most birth outcome measures than most of these other countries. So-called best practices - medical practices already demonstrated to improve outcomes - are well described in the medical literature, but they are not widely implemented, even though doing so would lower costs and improve the health of mothers and babies. For example, nearly one-third of all US women deliver their babies by caesarean section, a rate that is far higher than medically necessary. One of the reasons is that most obstetricians and hospitals are paid far more for a surgical delivery than for a vaginal birth. Such incentives not only raise costs, but ironically often produce worse health outcomes. By reducing the ability of for-profit companies to siphon off huge sums of money for private gain, a single payer system is better able to expand best practices. Why? Because the motivations to over-treat those who are well-insured and to undertreat those with limited or no insurance coverage will no longer be built into the medical care system. Women in particular have much to gain from single-payer healthcare. Our country has an excess of medical specialists, and is in desperate need of more primary caregivers - such as general internists, family practice physicians, nurse practitioners, and licensed midwives - who are often more aptly trained than specialists to provide the comprehensive services women need. A single payer plan would eliminate the financial incentives that have been obstacles to training more primary care professionals. It would also eliminate the need for so many medical malpractice lawsuits, as people would not have to worry about paying for medical care whenever they experienced bad outcomes. The only national plan for healthcare reform that explicitly includes women's reproductive health services, including abortion, is one sponsored by Representative Barbara Lee, a California Democrat. Other sponsors of single-payer plans are also amenable to including women's reproductive health services. Coverage with a single-payer plan is independent from employment. Because women are more likely to be self-employed, to work part time, and to move in and out of employment outside the home, they are now more likely either to lack coverage through work or to lose insurance when changing jobs. Medical debt is an enormous concern for many women, and single-payer plans effectively address the cost issues that send women into debt and even bankruptcy. A 2009 Commonwealth Fund study found that 45 percent of women accrued medical debt or reported problems with medical bills in 2007 compared with 36 percent of men. Under Rep. John Conyers' single-payer bill, a family of four making the median income of $56,200 would pay about $2,700 in payroll tax for all health care costs - with no deductibles or copays or concerns about catastrophic costs. Since a single-payer plan may be the only approach that will successfully contain costs, it was a good sign that Congress finally held hearings on a single-payer system last week. Although many progressive members of Congress now support a proposal that includes a "public insurance option" as an alternative to private insurance industry plans, numerous critiques demonstrate how this approach could fail. Unless designed to mirror the effective Medicare system - by automatically enrolling the majority of the population and using Medicare's cost control levers - the public option will not be affordable for all. When polled, a majority of physicians as well as the public support a single-payer plan. For example, a 2007 AP-Yahoo poll asked respondents whether they agreed with this statement: "The United States should adopt a universal health insurance program in which everyone is covered under a program like Medicare that is run by the government and financed by taxpayers." A whopping 65 percent said yes to that question. By political standards, this is a landslide. It is time for Congress to pay attention to the voters, not the well-funded lobbyists. |
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| Should the US also Suppress Evidence of Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan? by Glenn Greenwald - Issue #351 Something that has happened repeatedly in Afghanistan over the last eight years happened yet again this week [1]: After U.S. Strike, Dispute Over Afghan Deaths "KABUL, Afghanistan - Sharply conflicting reports on an American airstrike this week continued to trickle out Friday from American military and Afghan officials as to whether the attack killed civilians. The airstrike in Ghor Province in western Afghanistan Tuesday had targeted a local Taliban militant, Mullah Mustafa, but instead killed 10 civilians and 12 insurgents, according to Sayed Iqbal Munib, the governor of Ghor Province. But American officials Friday said the strike killed up to 16 militants and no civilians." I obviously don't know what the truth is about this latest incident, but let's assume just for the sake of argument that -- as has been true so many times before [2]-- it is the claim of local Afghan officials, rather than the U.S. military, that is accurate, and Afghan civilians, once again, really were killed by our airstrike. Using the standard that is now so accepted across the political spectrum in Washington -- information that will inflame anti-American sentiment should be suppressed rather than disclosed so at to not endanger our troops -- isn't it better if we just cover-up, rather than learn the truth about, the civilian deaths we caused in Afghanistan? After all, news reports of dead Afghan women and children at the hands of American bombs obviously inflame anti-American sentiment and Endanger Our Troops at least as much as the disclosure of some additional torture photos would. By the prevailing reasoning of Washington, shouldn't we want our government to hide the truth about what we did -- lest anti-American anger and the risk of attack on Our Troops increase? Isn't that the noble anti-transparency principle we're now endorsing? The people who are killed by the airstrikes are just as dead. Thus, there's no value in transparency for its own sake. What's the point of our knowing as citizens the truth about what happened and learning the evidence that proves it? All that would do is put our Troops in danger. Here's one argument [3]in favor of releasing the torture photos that the President yesterday vowed he would keep suppressed using every means at his disposal -- even if he loses in court for a third time, this time in the Supreme Court: Amrit Singh, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union said the photos portrayed abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq in places other than Abu Ghraib prison, the Iraq jail made infamous in 2004 by photographs of abuse there, and would therefore show that abuse was "not aberrational but systemic." The Bush-defending Right continues to insist, and huge numbers of American continue to believe, that the brutal abuses of Abu Ghraib were isolated and aberrational, the rogue crimes of a few low-level soldiers who were punished. These photos would prove that to be a lie. But no matter. For exactly that reason -- because they would expose the horrible truth of what we actually did -- these photos must be suppressed in the name of containing anti-American anger. Why should that reasoning be confined to suppression of the photos? Shouldn't it extend to information that is far more likely to inflame anti-American hatred, such as what we are really doing in Afghanistan? Isn't it best if the truth is just kept from us and the government suppresses it all so that we don't look bad in the eyes of the world? Isn't that obviously where this mentality leads -- and is already leading [4]? Along those lines, I'd like to ask you to subject yourself to six minutes of video -- embedded below -- from Bill O'Reilly's show last night, in which O'Reilly, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham jointly praise Barack Obama for suppressing these torture photos, and viciously attack House Democratic leaders as Far Leftist radicals who don't care about the lives of the troops. On one level, it's worth watching for the pure spectacle of seeing these individuals self-righteously parade around as defenders of the lives of The Troops who desperately want to avoid inflaming anti-American sentiment -- when these are the very same people who sent more than 4,000 American troops to their deaths in Iraq for a completely unnecessary war and, even more so, cheered on policies -- from torture to Guantanamo to the invasion itself -- that, as even General Petraeus [5], John McCain [6] and numerous other military officials [7] point out, sent anti-American sentiment to the highest levels ever. Now, suddenly, these very same people pretend to be so concerned about the lives of Troops and not doing anything to increase anger towards the U.S. |
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| The Cure for Layoffs: Fire the Boss! by Naomi Klein & Avi Lewis - Issue #350 In 2004, we made a documentary called The Take [1] about Argentina's movement of worker-run businesses. In the wake of the country's dramatic economic collapse in 2001, thousands of workers walked into their shuttered factories and put them back into production as worker cooperatives. Abandoned by bosses and politicians, they regained unpaid wages and severance while re-claiming their jobs in the process. As we toured Europe and North America with the film, every Q&A ended up with the question, "that's all very well in Argentina, but could that ever happen here?" Well, with the world economy now looking remarkably like Argentina's in 2001 (and for many of the same reasons) there is a new wave of direct action among workers in rich countries. Co-ops are once again emerging as a practical alternative to more lay-offs. Workers in the U.S. and Europe are beginning to ask the same questions as their Latin American counterparts: Why do we have to get fired? Why can't we fire the boss? Why is the bank allowed to drive our company under while getting billions of dollars of our money? Tomorrow night (May 15) at Cooper Union in New York City, we're taking part in a panel that looks at this phenomenon, called Fire the Boss: The Worker Control Solution from Buenos Aires to Chicago [2]. We'll be joined by people from the movement in Argentina as well as workers from the famous Republic Windows and Doors struggle in Chicago. It's a great way to hear directly from those who are trying to rebuild the economy from the ground up, and who need meaningful support from the public, as well as policy makers at all levels of government. For those who can't make it out to Cooper Union, here's a quick round up of recent developments in the world of worker control. Argentina In Argentina, the direct inspiration for many current worker actions, there have been more takeovers in the last 4 months than the previous 4 years. One example: - Arrufat, a chocolate maker with a 50 year history, was abruptly closed late last year. 30 employees occupied the plant, and despite a huge utility debt left by the former owners, have been producing chocolates by the light of day, using generators. With a loan of less than $5,000 from the The Working World [3], a capital fund/NGO started by a fan of The Take, they were able to produce 17,000 Easter eggs for their biggest weekend of the year. They made a profit of $75,000, taking home $1,000 each and saving the rest for future production. UK - Visteon is an auto parts manufacturer that was spun off from Ford in 2000. Hundreds of workers were given 6 minutes notice that their workplaces were closing. 200 workers in Belfast staged a sit-in on the roof of their factory, another 200 in Enfield followed suit the next day. Over the next few weeks, Visteon increased the severance package to up to 10 times their initial offer, but the company is refusing to put the money in the workers' bank accounts until they leave the plants, and they are refusing to leave until they see the money. Ireland - A factory where workers make legendary Waterford Crystal was occupied for 7 weeks earlier this year when parent company Waterford Wedgewood went into receivership after being taken over by a US private equity firm. The US company has now put 10 million Euros in a severance fund, and negotiations are ongoing to keep some of the jobs. Canada As the Big Three automakers collapse, there have been 4 occupations by Canadian Auto Workers so far this year. In each case, factories were closing and workers were not getting compensation that was owed to them. They occupied the factories to stop the machines from being removed, using that as leverage to force the companies back to the table - precisely the same dynamic that worker takeovers in Argentina have followed. France In France, there's been a new wave of "Bossnappings" this year, in which angry employees have detained their bosses in factories that are facing closure. Companies targeted so far include Caterpillar, 3M, Sony, and Hewlett Packard. The 3M executive was brought a meal of moules et frites during his overnight ordeal. A comedy hit in France this spring was a movie called "Louise-Michel," in which a group of women workers hires a hitman to kill their boss after he shuts down their factory with no warning. A French union official said in March, "those who sow misery reap fury. The violence is done by those who cut jobs, not by those who try to defend them." And this week, 1,000 Steelworkers disrupted the annual shareholders meeting of ArcelorMittal, the world's largest steel company. They stormed the company's headquarters in Luxembourg, smashing gates, breaking windows, and fighting with police. Poland Also this week, in Southern Poland, at the largest coal coking producer in Europe, thousands of workers bricked up the entrance to the company's headquarters, protesting wage cuts. US And then there's the famous Republic Windows and Doors story: 260 workers occupied their plant for 6 world-shaking days in Chicago last December. With a savvy campaign against the company's biggest creditor, Bank of America ("You got bailed out, we got sold out!") and massive international solidarity, they won the severance they were owed. And more - the plant is re-opening under new ownership, making energy-efficient windows with all the workers hired back at their old wages. And this week, Chicago is making it a trend. Hartmarx is 122-year old company that makes business suits, including the navy blue number that Barack Obama wore on election night, and his inaugural tuxedo and topcoat. The business is in bankruptcy. Its biggest creditor is Wells Fargo, recipient of 25 billion public dollars in bailout money. While there are 2 offers on the table to buy the company and keep it operating, Wells Fargo wants to liquidate it. On Monday, 650 workers voted to occupy their Chicago factory if the bank goes ahead with liquidation. To be continued... Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and syndicated columnist and the author of the international and New York Times bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism [4], now out in paperback. Her earlier books include the international best-seller, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies [5]; and the collection Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate [6] (2002). To read all her latest writing visit www.naomiklein.org [7]. Avi Lewis Avi is a filmmaker, journalist, and the host of Fault Lines [8] on Al Jazeera English. |
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| Don't Pooh-Pooh Populism by David Sirota - Issue #349 In 2006, journalist Christopher Hayes wrote a little-noticed article for In These Times magazine about a proposal in Oregon to crack down on predatory lending. The initiative had become so popular that conservative legislators supported it fearing that if it were put on the state's ballot, the resulting gusher of grass-roots support would not only ratify the measure, but depose the bank-allied Republican Party, too. Hayes' piece was titled "Economic Populism Proves Popular [1]," the headline a sarcastic middle finger flashed at a political and media Establishment that portrays policies "supporting the rights and power of the people" -- i.e., the dictionary definition of "populism" -- as somehow anathema to the people. That depiction, of course, continues today. But now, populism isn't just popular in America; it is becoming the dominant paradigm, and that has the Establishment frightened. For years, the country watched its populist desire for healthcare, tax, trade and financial reform run into the reality of elite politicians handing out trillions of dollars' worth of corporate welfare and bank bailouts as the economy collapsed. Not surprisingly, a new Rasmussen poll on attitudes toward government and corporations shows 75 percent of the country "can be classified on the populist or Mainstream side of the divide" while just 14 percent "side with the political class." As if to confirm the chasm, this "political class" -- consultants, politicians, lobbyists and commentators -- has been denigrating populism as too overwrought to be taken seriously. Listen to a typical pundit defending AIG's bonuses or criticizing demands for a new trade policy, and you will inevitably hear the word "populist" accompanied by the word "rage" and/or "dangerous," followed by tributes to the status quo. This elite propaganda, says Georgetown University's Michael Kazin, dismissively implies "that anger from ordinary people is emotional, coming from people who don't understand how the economy works and are just lashing out at their social betters." The caricaturing cribs from Richard Nixon's playbook. Whereas the 36th president got himself reelected by steering the country's anger at the Vietnam War into anger at countercultural war protestors, today's political class portrays the public's outrage as the nation's biggest problem, rather than what the public is justifiably outraged at. Today, though, Tricky Dick's tactics aren't working, and not just because 2009's economy is far worse than 1972's. This is the era when "You" are Time magazine's person of the year -- an era whose information and interactivity revolution now has us looking to ourselves for direction, not officialdom's gatekeepers. Additionally, America has lately been taught to expect results from democracy. TV viewers get to decide "American Idol" winners, Facebookers get to change their site's bylaws, and voters get to autonomously use Obama campaign resources to win elections -- and we get to do all this from outside the press clubs and smoke-filled rooms. This profound rewiring of instincts and expectations is why the vilification of "populist rage" has failed as a political barbiturate, why the country still seethes, and why both parties are suddenly listening to "the people" instead of the Establishment. This is why, for instance, Republicans are staging "Tea Party" protests against federal spending and why Democrats are pushing bills to expand healthcare, reregulate Wall Street and cap executive pay -- because they know the political class, however offended, can no longer stop a voter backlash. Admittedly, contradiction is everywhere: Republican rallies bewail deficits the GOP manufactured, and Democrats lament deregulatory schemes they originally crafted. But no matter how hypocritical the response is, it is a response, and that represents change from decades of aloof government. It suggests a democratic renewal whereby populism -- i.e., advocating what the public wants -- isn't merely one popular brand of politics, but is politics itself. |
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