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Follow @Uncle-Ernie Visit me on Face Book The Impeachment Of Lying Donald By Ernest Stewart "The heartbreaking loss of irreplaceable forests in Australia is a clear sign of a climate tipping point playing out before our eyes. Similar scenarios are apparent in forests around the world." ~~~ Michael Mann ~ Pennsylvania State University climate scientist "Ember's articles on Sanders (sometimes co-written with other Times reporters) often quote as neutral authorities individuals who are on the other side of a wide ideological divide, with longstanding antipathies to Sanders' left socioeconomic perspective." ~~~ Katie Halper ~ F.A.I.R.
Help me if you can, I'm feeling down
Nancy held off sending the articles of impeachment for as long as she could. During this time she could have added a long list of Lying Donald's presidential crimes but she knows the Senate trial will only be the treason that Moscow Mitch will insist on, ergo the "trial" should be over by noon, if it even lasts that long. Still, Nancy carried on the charade by appointing the House managers. The managers include House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who will be the lead manager and who directed much of the impeachment inquiry out of his committee, and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., whose panel drafted the articles of impeachment. Pelosi also tapped House Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y.; Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo.; Val Demings, D-Fla.; Sylvia Garcia, D-Texas; and Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif. The managers will walk down the hall, between the House and Senate, and will present them to Moscow Mitch who will begin the trial next Tuesday. Pelosi concluded: "This is a very serious matter and we take it to heart in a really solemn way, It's about the Constitution, it's about the republic if we can keep it and [senators] shouldn't be frivolous with the Constitution of the United States even though the president of the United States has. The president is not above the law. He will be held accountable. He already has been held accountable. He has been impeached and you can never erase that." I might add the two other presidents, Slick Willie and Andrew Johnson who have been impeached were both found not guilty and I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts Lying Donald will be found not guilty by Moscow Mitch too! Our last chance to stop this madness is November 3rd, may mighty Zeus help us if we don't! In Other News I see where some scientist say we've reach the point of no return. Most of those Australian forests that are burning won't return to forest but will change into grass lands. The same goes for America too! As extreme wildfires burn across large swaths of Australia, scientists say we're witnessing how global warming can push forest ecosystems past a point of no return. Some of those forests won't recover in today's warmer climate, scientists say. They expect the same in other regions scarred by flames in recent years; in semi-arid areas like parts of the American West, the Mediterranean Basin and Australia, some post-fire forest landscapes will shift to brush or grassland. More than 17 million acres have burned in Australia over the last three months amid record heat that has dried vegetation and pulled moisture from the land. Hundreds of millions, perhaps a billion animals, including a large number of koalas, are believed to have perished in the infernos. The survivors will face drastically changed habitats. Water flows and vegetation will change, and carbon emissions will rise as burning trees release carbon and fewer living trees are left to pull CO2 out of the air and store it. In many ways, it's the definition of a tipping point, as ecosystems transform from one type into another. The surge of large, destructive forest fires from the Arctic to the tropics just in the last few years has shocked even researchers who focus on forests and fires and who have warned of such tipping points for years. The projections were seen as remote, "something that would happen much farther in the future," said University of Arizona climate scientist David Breashers. "But it's happening now. Nobody saw it coming this soon, even though it was like a freight train. "It's likely the forests won't be coming back as we know them." "The link between global warming, forests and wildfires is multifaceted but very clear,"" said Nerilie Abram, a climate researcher at Australian National University. "Increasing temperatures dry out fuel and lead to more days of extreme fire weather. The poleward shift of the Southern Hemisphere westerly winds is drawing winter rainfall away from southern Australia, causing a long-term drying trend that makes the landscape more vulnerable to burning." "The cycle feeds itself, she explained: Drought and loss of forests cause higher temperatures over the land and a lower humidity, which, in turn, worsens wildfire conditions. And there's no reason to think that a gradual temperature rise will cause a similar gradual increase in fire risk," she explained, citing a recent study showing that incremental warming increases fire damage exponentially by drying out fuels. "Each degree of warming has a bigger effect on forest fire than did the previous degree of warming," that study's lead author, Park Williams of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, wrote on Twitter when the study was released. Meanwhile, back in America, dozens of tornadoes sprang up, killing a dozen folks a-way-down-yonder, tornadoes in January, imagine that! High temps in the 70s in New England. Here in my neighborhood we broke records for the most rain in a single days in January. And global warming is just getting started, America! Remember, once-upon-a-time herds of dinosaurs used to roam Alaska! And Finally I see where Politico has started a feud between Bernie and Elizabeth the two liberal front runners in hopes of handing the nomination to Wall Street Joe, or if they must, Michael Bloomberg, the corporate Democrats! Of course, there is no evidence except just the word of Alex Thompson and Holly Otterbein who failed to produce any hard evidence for their article. I tell my writers to write whatever they like as long as it's about politics or American life. They know Issues & Alibi's is a liberal news magazine, and as long as their articles jibe with that, no problem. However, every one of them come across my desk, where I scrutinize every word before it's published, that's my job, as editor in chief. If you read it, I approved it! So, whose responsible for published materials at Politico? Why editor in chief Matthew Kaminski is. Why would Mathew allow such an article in print? Would it be because Matthew is a little to the right of... no, let's not always see the same hands... that's right, Darth Vader! Why, would I assume, such a thing about Matther? It's not an assumption folks, before Matthew came to Politico, Matthew was the editor of The Wall Street Journal! Now add to that the fact that Politico was from its very beginning a corporate, center right, magazine, pretending, like a wolf in sheeps clothing, to be liberal. Ergo, for trying to get a feud amongst the liberals going Matther Kaminski wins this week's Vidkun Quisling Award! Keepin' On
If you think that what we do is important and would like to see us keep on, keeping on, please send us whatever you can, whenever you can, and we'll keep telling you the truth!
 09-12-1952 ~ 01-07-2020 Thanks for the music!
 07-30-1933 ~ 01-08-2020 Thanks for the music and film!
 10-12-1948 ~ 01-14-2020 Thanks for the music!
 11-21-1924 ~ 01-15-2020 Thanks for the read!
(c) 2020 Ernest Stewart a.k.a. Uncle Ernie is an unabashed radical, author, stand-up comic, DJ, actor, political pundit and managing editor and publisher of Issues & Alibis magazine. Visit me on Facebook. and like us when you do. Follow me on Twitter. |
 War With Iran Is At Stake -- And Democrats' High Jumps Over Low Standards Aren't Helping By Norman Solomon War With Iran Is At Stake -- And Democrats' High Jumps Over Low Standards Aren't Helping By Norman Solomon The huge crisis with Iran is more dangerous because so many Democrats have been talking out of both sides of their congressional mouths. An example is the recent rhetoric from Sen. Chris Murphy. "The attack on our embassy in Baghdad is horrifying but predictable," he tweeted on the last day of 2019. "Trump has rendered America impotent in the Middle East. No one fears us, no one listens to us. America has been reduced to huddling in safe rooms, hoping the bad guys will go away. What a disgrace." Fast forward one week: Murphy was on the Senate floor declaring "we can choose to get off of this path of escalation and make decisions that correct this president's recklessness and keep Americans safe." On the same day, in Murphy's home state, the Connecticut Mirror reported that he "has emerged as a leading critic of Trump administration hostility to Iran" and called him "the most vocal" Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee "in criticizing President Donald Trump's decision to kill Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in a drone strike." It's a partisan pattern that's all too common among Democrats on Capitol Hill -- goading Trump as a wimp and then bemoaning his aggressive actions. And so, in a matter of days, Murphy was decrying the "recklessness" of the same president he'd alleged "has rendered America impotent in the Middle East because no one fears us." Murphy is one of the better senators on foreign policy -- and that's a key point here. He still couldn't resist baiting Trump in a way that implicitly scorned him for failure to use enough military violence. At a time like this, the spirit of Wayne Morse is badly needed. During his 24-year career representing Oregon in the Senate, he rose to prominence as a rigorously consistent defender of international law as well as the U.S. Constitution. An unwavering foe of might-makes-right foreign policy, he unequivocally opposed the Vietnam War from the outset. Morse never backed down. And he refused to play along with questions based on false premises, as network TV footage makes clear. During his appearance on the CBS program "Face the Nation" in May 1964, fireworks began a split second after moderator Peter Lisagor said: "Senator, the Constitution gives to the president of the United States the sole responsibility for the conduct of foreign policy." "Couldn't be more wrong," Morse shot back. "You couldn't make a more unsound legal statement than the one you have just made. This is the promulgation of an old fallacy that foreign policy belongs to the president of the United States. That's nonsense." Lisagor sounded a bit exasperated: "To whom does it belong then, senator?" Morse didn't hesitate. "It belongs to the American people," the senator fired back. And he added: "What I'm saying is -- under our Constitution all the president is, is the administrator of the people's foreign policy, those are his prerogatives, and I'm pleading that the American people be given the facts about foreign policy --" "You know, senator, that the American people cannot formulate and execute foreign policy --" "Why do you say that? Why, you're a man of little faith in democracy if you make that kind of comment," Morse retorted. "I have complete faith in the ability of the American people to follow the facts if you'll give them. And my charge against my government is we're not giving the American people the facts." Three months later, Morse was one of only two senators to vote against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that opened the floodgates to the mass carnage of the Vietnam War. When President Lyndon Johnson's iconic adviser Gen. Maxwell Taylor -- a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and ex-ambassador to South Vietnam -- appeared before the Foreign Relations Committee on February 17, 1966, this exchange (preserved on video) ensued:
GEN. TAYLOR: "That of course is good news to Hanoi, senator." SEN. MORSE: "Oh I know that that's the smear artists that your militarists give to those of us that have honest differences of opinion with you, but I don't intend to get down in the gutter with you and engage in that kind of debate, general. I'm simply saying that in my judgment the president of the United States is already losing the people of this country by the millions in connection with this war in Southeast Asia. And all I'm asking is -- if the people decide that this war should be stopped in Southeast Asia, are you going to take the position that's a weakness on the home front in a democracy?" GEN. TAYLOR: "I would feel that our people were badly misguided and did not understand the consequences of such a disaster." SEN. MORSE: "Well, we agree on one thing, that they can be badly misguided -- and you and the president, in my judgment, have been misguiding them for a long time in this war." Much has changed during the last five decades, but deception remains central to the state of perpetual war that funnels mega-billions in profits to the military-industrial complex. The vast majority of Congress members are part of that complex, including most Democrats. Instead of thanking those members of Congress for not being worse, progressive constituents should organize to insist that they quickly become much better -- or face escalating protests as well as political consequences. (c) 2020 Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death" and "Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State." |
 Full Impeachments For Trump Will Shake Senate Republicans From Kangaroo Court By Ralph Nader Many Americans have forecasted that the outlaw Donald Trump will commit even more illegal acts to increasing his support in the 2020 presidential year. Remember Wag the Dog, a film about using a fabricated war to draw attention away from presidential misdeeds. Those Americans have been proven right by Donald Trump's attempt to provoke an unlawful war with Iran. Likewise, Trump has illegally ordered his staff or ex-staff to ignore Congressional subpoenas to testify and provide documents. As the most impeachable president in American history, Trump continues to shred our Constitution and its critical separation of powers. Trump has repeatedly, brazenly seized Congressional authority in an attempt to turn the presidency into a monarchy. Trump once went so far as to say, "I am the chosen one." Unlike Nixon, who slinked away because of the Watergate scandal, every day Trump is providing more evidence to the Congress about his impeachability. He never stops. He never expresses remorse or apologizes for violating the Constitution or federal criminal statutes, such as the Antideficiency Act. Likewise, Trump has shown no respect for international treaties to which the U.S. is a solemn signatory. Trump's mantra of usurpation is clear. He declared that because of Article II of the Constitution, "I have the right to do whatever I want as President." Trump seems to have neglected Article I, which gives Congress the exclusive authority to declare war, to appropriate funds, and to conduct investigations of the Executive branch with the plenary authority, i.e. issue and enforce subpoenas. Congress is the primary branch of government, not a co-equal branch. Trump has refused to turn over his tax returns, unlike previous presidents who released them every year. Trump has much to hide in terms of entanglements with foreign entities. He is a walking violation of the Emoluments Clause (Article I, section 9, paragraph 8), which prohibits any president from profiting from foreign interests. Trump profits when foreign dignitaries patronize his hotels and other properties. The Constitution requires Trump to faithfully execute the law. Instead he is destroying health, safety, workplace, and environmental laws through his corrupt henchman. The Trump regime is dismantling congressionally mandated federal agency law enforcement programs and, in so doing, is removing lifesaving protections. At the same time, Trump is corruptly raising money from the corporate interests that want to dismantle these agencies, from Wall Street to Houston's oil barons. The most morally distinguishing impeachable offenses come under the heading of what Alexander Hamilton called "abuse of the public trust." Consider these abuses of the public trust: Trump's chronic, obsessive, pathological lying and falsifications (he has made over 15,000 false or misleading claims since January 21, 2017); Trump's history of being a serial sexual predator working to delay numerous court cases and escape demands for depositions under oath by many victims; Trump's endless racism and bigotry in words and deeds. Since becoming president, Trump has backed voter suppression aimed at minorities; and Trump's incitement of violence on more than one occasion. Trump should be impeached and convicted. If the supine Republican-controlled Senate fails to convict Trump, the voters should landslide him in November. It is almost as if Trump looks to setting records in how many parts of the Constitution he can violate. He interceded with the Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu to prevent two members of Congress visas to Israel. Trump's actions prevented these members of Congress from exercising their oversight responsibilities under the Speech and Debate Clause (Article I, section 6, clause 1). No president has ever dared such an intervention. For the elaboration of twelve impeachable counts under one major Article, see the letter by me, constitutional law experts Bruce Fein, and Louis Fisher in the Congressional Record (December 18, 2019, page H 12197). Speaker Pelosi must add some of these impeachable offenses, backed by constitutional law specialists, or Trump will trumpet that though she had the votes to do so, she didn't because they are "fake, lies." Exonerating him will prove to be a devastating precedent for future presidents behaving similarly, as the standards for presidential behavior keep dropping lower and lower into lawless immunity and impunity. Conservative Fox News commentator, constitutional law scholar, and former Judge Andrew Napolitano has said if he were the Democrats, he would reopen the impeachment case "on the basis of new evidence. That would justify holding onto the articles of impeachment [from the Senate] the articles of impeachment [abuse of power and contempt of Congress] because there's new evidence and perhaps new articles." Pelosi can strengthen her hand constitutionally by enlarging the impeachment case against Trump. This move would give millions of Americans a stake in impeachment because it would directly relate to protections and services they lost because of lawless Trump. In addition, more articles of impeachment would make the Senate Republicans led by "Moscow Mitch" McConnell far less able to hold a hasty kangaroo court trial without witnesses. Fein, Fisher, and I have written Speaker Pelosi and Senator McConnell urging that the trial's procedures should be established by Chief Justice John Roberts, subject to Senate majority repeal, to assure not only fairness, but the perception of fairness (See the letter here). Right now in the Senate there is too much bias, prejudgment, and conflict to avoid a farce. Moreover, when will the American Bar Association, with over 194,000 lawyer-members, insist on constitutional observance and the rule of law? When will all those original members of Trump's cabinet, whom he fired in favor of "yes men," stand up patriotically for America? When will Colin Powell, George Shultz, and other leading figures from past administrations stand tall and speak out? When will former President Barack Obama stand up to Donald Trump? All of these people are privately worried sick over what Trump is doing and will do to our country. These are very dangerous times for our Republic, its democratic processes, and our freedoms. Trump is going to "wave the flag" and try to intimidate and bully his opponents and the citizenry. Don't fall for it America! (c) 2020 Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His latest book is The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future. Other recent books include, The Seventeen Traditions: Lessons from an American Childhood, Getting Steamed to Overcome Corporatism: Build It Together to Win, and "Only The Super-Rich Can Save Us" (a novel). |
 MLK And The Black Misleadership Class By Glen Ford Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday is the greatest sheer spectacle of hypocrisy and historical duplicity of the year, as Black misleaders take center stage to claim his mandate and mission on behalf of a corporate party. The birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is commemorated each year at thousands of events in literally every U.S. city, yet the martyred human rights leader's political philosophy is totally absent from the agenda of today's Black Misleadership Class, a grasping cabal of hustlers and opportunists that have grown fat and infinitely corrupt through their collaboration with "the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism." Their "freedom train" was the Democratic Party, the half of the corporate electoral duopoly that allowed colored folks to ride as first class passengers - as long as they didn't question the schedule or the destination. The budding Black misleaders hopped on board the Democratic Party express to the boardrooms of corporate power at about the same time that Dr. King was making his definitive break with the evil "triplets'" infernal machinery, including both corporate parties. In his April 4, 1967 "Beyond Vietnam - A Time to Break Silence" speech at New York City's Riverside Church, Dr. King burned his bridges with the nation's top Democrat, despite President Lyndon Johnson's indispensable role in pushing civil and voting rights and anti-poverty bills through Congress and championing an affirmative action rationale that -- as spelled out in his 1965 speech at Howard University -- was a principled endorsement of reparations for crimes committed against Black people by the U.S. society and State. Johnson went farther than any previous U.S. president in acknowledging Black American citizenship rights and grievances, even as the Republican half of the electoral duopoly was preparing to assume the role of White Man's Party through Richard Nixon's "southern strategy." Yet, Dr. King, a proponent of peace and democratic socialism, understood that the way to the "Promised Land" was not through Black collaboration with the evils inherent in capitalism and its ceaseless, predatory wars. "I have come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house," King told his friend, Harry Belafonte. By 1967, the War in Vietnam was consuming the promises of Johnson's Great Society. America was undeniably the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world today," King declared. The U.S. had already killed a million Vietnamese, "mostly children," but it was also a war on America's poor. "I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube," King told the crowd at Riverside. "So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such." That meant breaking with the Democrats and their president. More importantly, in his Riverside speech Dr. King framed the Vietnamese as engaged in a righteous struggle to complete their long quest for sovereignty and independence. King broke with imperialism, the consummate expression of the all three "triple evils." So they killed him, the next year. The National Security State, the protector of the capitalist order, to which both parties are beholden, then proceeded to crush the Black movement to the left of Dr. King - most fiercely in the Gestapo-like assault on the self-determinationist and staunchly anti-imperialist Black Panther Party in the bloody year of 1969. By 1970, the Black Radical Tradition lay mostly in the graveyard, and the way was clear for the Black Misleadership Class to monopolize Black politics on behalf of their corporate overseers. The first act of the first big city Black mayor, Cleveland's Carl Stokes, was to put the police under the command of a Black retired general, whose first act was to issue the cops flesh- and bone-destroying hollow point bullets. The rise of the almost entirely Democrat-allied Black Misleadership Class is perfectly coterminous with construction of the Black Mass Incarceration State. The "New Jim Crow" was a bipartisan project, initiated under Democrat Lyndon Johnson's Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, which vastly increased the manpower and funding for local police departments, and was put on hyper-drive by Republican President Richard Nixon's "War on Drugs" - a War on Blacks that never ended but was re-declared by Republican President Reagan and reinforced by Democrat President Bill Clinton. At the local level, the exponential growth of the Mass Black Incarceration regime was administered by increasingly Black city governments, which oversaw and processed the deportation of millions of Black men, women and children to the Prison Gulag. Virtually all of these Black operatives of race and class oppression are Democrats. And all of them are celebrating their own political ascension as the wondrous outcome of Dr. King's "dream." By 2014, 80 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus was voting to continue the Pentagon 1033 program that funnels billions of dollars in military weapons and gear to local police departments. Four years later, 75 percent of the Black Caucus voted to make police a "protected class" and assault on cops a federal crime. (See BAR, "Black Caucus Sells Out Its Constituents Again - to the Cops.") Although the Black misleaders were quick to join the domestic war on the Black poor, African American public opinion remained war-averse, skeptical of U.S. motives on foreign shores. In 2003, only four Black members of Congress backed George Bush's invasion of Iraq. But the advent of the Black Democratic President -- a misleader par excellence - gave much of the Black Caucus a free pass to play warmonger. Half of the Blacks in Congress voted to continue the bombing and regime change in Libya, an African nation, in the summer of 2011. None of the Caucus has raised serious objections to the U.S.-aided slaughter of more than six million Congolese under Presidents Clinton (Dem.), Bush (Rep.), Obama (Dem.), and Trump (Rep.). The American military occupation of much of the African continent through AFRICOM is a non-issue among the Black misleaders. RUSSIA!!! on the other hand, is an existential threat "to our democracy," say the Black Democrats, who are eager to pledge their allegiance to the same CIA and National Security State that assassinated Patrice Lumumba, murdered Malcolm, King and scores of Black Panthers, and worked hand in glove with white-ruled South Africa to kill thousands of freedom fighters across the continent. Los Angeles Black Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who once (correctly) charged the CIA with flooding her city with crack cocaine, now struts around waving an American flag while denouncing "Russian" meddling in a U.S. election that was actually stolen by Republican suppression of Black votes, as usual - with no serious protest by Democrats, as usual. The Black misleaders are as silly as they are shameless, but they are not ineffectual. No white man could eviscerate Dr. King's radical legacy, or make Malcolm X appear harmless to the imperial order - that's a job for the Black Misleadershsip Class. While Dr. King rejected an alliance with the "triple evils," Black Democratic misleaders describe their deal with the Devil as smart, "strategic" politics. They whip up war fever against small, non-white nations that seek only the right to govern themselves, behaving no differently on the world scene - and sometimes worse - than Donald Trump. They shame and weaken Black America, and have joined the enemies of life on Earth. King would shake his head, mournfully. Malcolm would keep his tight smile, doggedly. Then both would organize to expose and depose the Black Misleadership Class. (c) 2019 Glen Ford is the Black Agenda Report executive editor. He can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com |
 The Other Mexican Migration By Jim Hightower You probably haven't heard about it, but there's another mass migration coming across the US-Mexico border. However, these are not Central American families fleeing horrific conditions back home - only to be separated, incarcerated, traumatized, and demonized by the Trump Gang for seeking humanitarian asylum in our country. Rather, these migrants are going the other way, from the USA into Mexican border towns, where they're welcomed with open arms instead of armed guards. They are mostly working-class people seeking relief from our nation's unaffordable, no-care healthcare system. As many as 6,000 a day travel to towns like Los Algodones, across from Yuma, Arizona, to get medical services and prescription drugs that are priced out of their reach here in the US. Nicknamed "Molar City," Los Algodones has more dentists per capita than anywhere else in the world - quality dental work in Mexico averages two-thirds less than it costs here. This is because the health system there prioritizes care over profits. Start with professional education, which is tuition-free in Mexico, meaning dentists and other healthcare providers don't have to jack-up prices to cover a crushing load of student debt. Also, Mexico's universal, tax-paid healthcare system doesn't saddle patients with exorbitantly-expensive, insurance bureaucracies. It's a system that's open, affordable, and accessible to all - the opposite of ours, which is why hordes of US working-class people go south to find care. As a Truthout article reports, "US citizens seeking healthcare can park in Yuma for $5, walk across the border, get the help they need and come back for dinner." Instead of building a senseless border wall to keep people out of the US, our leaders ought to be looking across the border for ideas on how to build a better healthcare system. (c) 2020 Jim Hightower's latest book, "If The Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates," is available in a fully revised and updated paperback edition. Jim writes The Hightower Lowdown, a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing fights by America's ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites. Sign up at HightowerLowdown.org. |
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What? Oh, sorry, it's actually the seventh debate of the season, my bad. The anticipation is just eating me up.
Few things in life could be more stimulating than watching the candidates try to discuss war with Iran, impeachment, climate disruption, racism, anti-Semitism, gun violence, health care, education, LGBTQ rights, economic justice, prison reform, the generalized awfulness of Donald Trump, and the importance of being earnest in one-minute blurts with 30 seconds for rebuttal. What could go wrong?
I snark, but in point of fact, this debate in Iowa may turn out to be the one we've all been waiting for. There are six candidates on the stage - Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Tom Steyer, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden - instead of an entire college football team. Four of the six are essentially neck and neck in the most recent polls, and unlike the other debates, this one comes with near-term consequences at the voting booth.
Tension is high. According to reports, many Iowa voters are going into vapor lock trying to pick a horse. Things began getting a bit chippy between the frontrunners a few days ago, most notably between Sanders and Warren, whose tacit non-aggression pact lasted far longer than anyone expected. Predictably, their mild beefing sent the "mainstream" political press in search of the fainting couches, because primary season is when everyone is supposed to get along, right? Hello? Is this thing on?
The candidate who should be the most worried tonight? Joe Biden. Trump's incredibly dangerous flirtation with Armageddon in Iran has motivated a number of Iraq War-related skeletons to come boogeying out of Biden's closet.
Biden has been heaving to and fro trying to dodge the fact that he voted for the war and supported it well after it became the entirely predictable calamity many of us saw coming, but Bernie Sanders - a vocal opponent of the war from the beginning - will be waiting to pounce on him like a wise old leopard on a tree branch.
As ever, it is Biden's own words that have grown sharp teeth and returned to gnaw on his legs. One moment in particular - Biden's 2003 post-invasion remarks at the Brookings Institute - stands out in stark relief:
"Some in my own party have said it was a mistake to go to Iraq in the first place, and believe it is not worth the cost, whatever benefit may flow from our engagement in Iraq."
This is Biden slagging the liberal/progressive wing of his own party and everyone else who opposed the invasion, including Sanders, all of whom were right about the war before it began.
"But the cost of not acting against Saddam, I think, would have been much greater."
Some 17 years later, that "cost" is in the trillions of dollars, with tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers either killed, seriously injured, mired in PTSD or dead by their own hand. Millions of civilians were killed, seriously injured or displaced during the Iraq war, and the ongoing war in Syria is its next chapter.
"The president of the United States is a bold leader, and he is popular."
George W. Bush is currently in a footrace with Donald Trump for the title of Worst U.S. President Ever. The fact that such a comparison is being made at all tells me Biden's judgment about "bold" leadership is more of his typical weathervane politics in the raw. As for the "and he is popular" bit, I am barred by the rules of decorum from deploying the kind of vocabulary required to properly characterize the odious nature of that sentiment.
"The stakes are high, and the need for leadership is great."
Ibid.
"I wish he'd use some of his stored-up popularity to make what I admit is not a very popular case, but I and many others will support him when he makes the case."
George W. Bush and his henchmen did make the case, and it was a vast raft of lies that became publicly exposed before the first missiles flew. Biden voted for the war anyway. When he said these words - after the invasion with no WMD found anywhere - the chickens were only just coming home to roost. With this statement, Biden was declaring, "I am with Bush," for all to see. Today, he tries to pretend this never happened. He still doesn't get it, and probably never will.
There are many more pro-war Biden comments like this out there, and they will continue to come up until the sun burns out, or until Biden decides to go home.
A large segment of the voting populace, I think, approaches the career of Joe Biden from a profoundly mistaken mindset. The idea that his longevity in politics automatically bestows merit upon him has taken deep root. "Biden was in the Senate for years!" goes the thinking. "If he was awful, someone would have challenged him and taken his seat!"
This reasoning omits a critical element: the Delaware corporate/banking/credit card industry, which at this point is a significant portion of the reason why Delaware exists. Biden made himself a friend to that industry, and the industry repaid his fealty by digging a financial moat around his Senate seat.
With the help of that industry, Biden could overwhelmingly outspend any challengers, and this became common knowledge in the state. He lacked viable primary opponents over the years because only a fool tries to fight a brick wall. The fact that he has survived in politics for five decades is not due to any wisdom or sagacity on his part. It's because his friends had (have) money to burn in his defense.
All the money in the world, however, cannot erase the past, especially if you are standing on a debate stage next to a senator who did the right thing when you did not. As St. Paul said in Acts 26:26, this thing was not done in a corner. It went down in broad daylight, and the whole world was watching.
As then-Senator Barack Obama said when he was running for president against Biden in 2008, "You can't undo a vote for war just because a war stops being popular.... This is not just about the past. It is about the future. Voters need to judge us on the judgments we've made and the lessons we've learned."
That was during Joe Biden's second presidential campaign. He withdrew after Iowa. I'm just sayin', tonight could be pretty interesting. Will history rhyme?
(c) 2020 William Rivers Pitt is a senior editor and lead columnist at Truthout. He is also a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of three books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know, The Greatest Sedition Is Silence and House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation. His fourth book, The Mass Destruction of Iraq: Why It Is Happening, and Who Is Responsible, co_written with Dahr Jamail, is available now on Amazon. He lives and works in New Hampshire.
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It should not be hard for any member of the US House of Representatives, to declare, as Representative Ro Khanna did this week, that "it's time for Congress to step up and reclaim our authority."
But that proved to be too great a lift for 194 members of the House who, on Thursday, rejected a simple reassertion of the core constitutional premise that Congress, not the president, decides whether this country goes to war.
Khanna was one of 224 House members who got it right, when they voted for a resolution "directing the president pursuant to section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution to terminate the use of United States Armed Forces to engage in hostilities in or against Iran." In so doing, they sent a message that was summed up by Wisconsin Democrat Mark Pocan:
That's a sound vision for upholding the commitment that members of the House make at the start of each term to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States." At the heart of that oath in a commitment to a system of separated powers in which the House has a duty to check and balance the executive.
But what of the congressional ciphers who abandoned their oaths, dismissed the dictates of the Constitution, and signaled that they are ready and willing to preserve an imperial presidency?
Of the 194 "no" votes, eight came from Democrats: Ben McAdams (Utah), Anthony Brindisi (New York), Joe Cunningham (South Carolina), Kendra Horn (Oklahoma), Stephanie Murphy (Florida), Josh Gottheimer (North Jersey), and Elaine Luria (Virginia). Their votes were wrongheaded, and every bit as disappointing as Republican votes against the resolution.
While the critical mass of the Democratic Party was on the side of checking and balancing the president, the vast majority of Republicans chose a different course. Only three House Republicans sided with the Constitution: Thomas Massie, of Kentucky, and two Floridians: Francis Rooney and Matt Gaetz. They were joined by Michigan independent Justin Amash.
A stunning 186 Republicans fell in line with Trump's call for members of his adopted party to choose him over their oaths, tweeting,
Article II is not an independent grant of authority for nondefensive military action. The president's role as commander in chief no more allows him to enter offensively into conflicts than his role as executive allows him to make laws.
Amash, who was elected repeatedly as a libertarian-leaning Republican, made that statement as the chamber's lone independent member. He left the GOP last year, out of frustration with Trump's abuses of power-and Republican failures to counter them.
But it is important to recognize that there is no Democratic or Republican or independent way to read the Constitution when it comes to the exercise of war powers. As Pocan, the cochair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, says, "Congress holds the sole power to declare war, and we refuse to let Donald Trump wage a wholly avoidable and endless war with Iran."
(c) 2020 John Nichols writes about politics for The Capitol Times. His book on protests and politics, Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street, is published by Nation Books. Follow John Nichols on Twitter @NicholsUprising.
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Bad enough that the drugs we humans are taking are being passed through our excrements or being flushed down our toilets and making their way into our drinking water.
Now in addition to the antibiotics, the blood pressure medications, birth control pills, the tranquilizers, hormones, heart medicines and sexual stimulants passing through this nation of pill poppers, authorities say they also are finding traces of drugs used on farms for enhancing animal growth, preventing disease and increasing feed efficiency. That too is mixing with our drinking water.
And there is more. It also has been found that U.S. manufacturers, including major drug makers, are legally releasing millions of pounds of pharmaceuticals and other toxic chemicals into rivers, lakes and other bodies of water.
Trace amounts of a long list of pharmaceuticals, including antibiotics, mood stabilizers, sex hormones, and pharmaceuticals used in manufacturing like lithium and nitroglycerin are turning up in public drinking water.
What is scary about this is that our septic systems and municipal waste treatment systems are not equipped to filter these chemicals from the water. Most cities and water providers do not even test for these elements. Yet researchers say that they find pharma-tainted water everywhere they look. That means most Americans consume traces of these pharmaceuticals every time they drink a glass of water or eat food prepared in water from their kitchen faucets.  The sources of all of this contamination are so extensive, gaining some control is almost impossible to consider. People consume prescribed drugs and then excrete what the bodies do not absorb. If the drugs go unused, they are flushed down toilets thus going directly into the treatment systems that discharge it all into rivers and lakes. It is estimated that another 250 million pounds of pharmaceuticals and contaminated packaging are thrown away by hospitals and long-term care facilities. A 2004 study designed to identify antibiotics in waterways that originated from both human and animal users also found traces of the drugs specifically used in farm animals. The study looked for the antibiotic monensin, used to enhance growth in cattle. The results were shocking. In some cases the concentration of the drug near big cattle feeding areas measured from 20 to 1,000 times greater in stream sediment. Ken Carlson, the principal investigator in that study, said the discovery raises three primary concerns. He said there is a potential toxic danger to fish, plants and other aquatic organisms. There also is concern that the drugs will affect humans who consume them in drinking water, since existing water treatment plants are not equipped to eliminate them. The final and most disconcerting worry is that the types of animal and human antibiotics getting in the water are contributing to the emergence of new strains of drug-resistant disease bacteria. Researchers have found that even diluted amounts of these drugs indeed harm fish and other aquatic creatures and that human cells do not grow normally in the laboratory when exposed even to trace amounts of certain drugs. Thus they reason that the constant consumption of large combinations of so many narcotics is having its affect on humans. A collaborative study by the Federal Drug Administration and the Colorado State College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences is not only looking for drugs in waterways, but attempting to find ways to control them. For example, the Colorado State group has been working with area cattlemen in an effort to identify the best management practices to minimize the release of these drugs into the environment, said cooperative investigator Amy Pruden. Pruden said it is believed these compounds get in waterways because only a fraction of the drugs are metabolized by both animals and humans. This means active compounds pass through the body and are discharged into public wastewater systems. Because the compounds are still active, they become an environmental issue. Thus the very real threat grows that the water we drink, that we use for cooking and bathing, is saturated with minute traces of uninvited narcotics that are collectively affecting our health. Even though we are aware of this problem . . . we are not sure a solution can be found. The complex system of human and animal waste disposal, involving home and farm septic tank processing, municipal lagoon and chemical processing plants, have no way of separating these drugs from the water that eventually finds it way back into the lakes, streams and ground water supplies. The best solutions, it seems, would include either reducing the amount of narcotic use or sending all human and animal excrement to toxic waste dumps. But drug companies will not want to give up their big profits so getting us all off the drug machine probably won't be considered. Could enough disposable land be found in this overpopulated and polluted world? (c) 2020 James L. Donahue is a retired newspaper reporter, editor and columnist with more than 40 years of experience in professional writing. He is the published author of five books, all dealing with Michigan history, and several magazine articles. |
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I suppose you have to actually be convicted of a felony to be a felon, but I also think we should make an exception for U.S. presidents. Take the current one, for example. Donald Trump just murdered Iranian and Iraqi military officials at an airport in Baghdad. His staff later "briefed" Congress members on why these murders were "legal." Congress members denounced the briefing as utter nonsense, and yet labeled the murders "a strike of choice." People who have been convicted of murder, and who are properly called felons, never had the option of getting their crimes labeled "strikes of choice."
Noam Chomsky famously said that, by the standards of the post-World War II trials, all of the post-World War II U.S. presidents would be hung. Of course, I don't want anyone hung or killed in any manner or assaulted in any way, ever. But it's not exactly disputable that presidents launch and facilitate wars and invasions and coups and assassinations and all variety of murders, and always have. We can dispute which forms of murder were legal on which dates. But it's hard to escape the understanding that U.S. presidents, when examined closely, represent in certain ways the worst of U.S. society, and always have.
Margaret Kimberley examines U.S. presidents on the question of their treatment of African-Americans (plus a few tangents into their treatment of Native Americans) in her new book, Prudential: Black America and the Presidents. Her focus is very rightly on the policies presidents imposed on the country, but also on what their personal actions and statements were throughout their lives. After all, these people, especially the longer they have been dead, are held up to us as model human beings.
Kimberley gives us 45 chapters, one on each president, making the book a very handy resource. After reading it, I felt compelled to flip back through and do a little math, to try to convey the consistent patterns of horrible behavior. I noticed not only that a large number of presidents enslaved other human beings, but that an even larger number had parents and families that did so (though Ulysses Grant was a first-generation slave owner in his family), that an enormous number favored shipping African-Americans to Africa, that segregation was very popular among presidents once that era had begun, and that racist attitudes and racist policies were ubiquitous in the presidential catalogue.
It's hard to put numbers on everything without a great deal of additional research, but Kimberley documents many things for us, including how 10 of the first 12 presidents enslaved other human beings. The two exceptions are white supremacist John Adams, and his son John Quincy Adams, who in fact appears to have owned people as slaves.
Making a list or a mathematical calculation is easily (and eagerly) misinterpreted, of course. What I hope the 10 (or 11) out of 12 figure conveys is the dominance of slavery among the wealthy and political elite of the early United States, and not the idiotic and incoherent idea that each person on the list is the exact moral equivalent of each other person on the list each of whom is pure evil and never did anything good in their lives.
Washington, D.C., is named for the wealthiest enslaver of his day, and located in the swamp it's in because powerful slave-owners wanted it there and wanted to be able to bring slaves there. George Washington, or Conotocaurious (his Iroquois name meaning Town Destroyer), was the first of every president up through Lincoln who supported the continuation of slavery. Kimberley notes that "[a] great irony exists in the fact that Washington is now the 'blackest' surname in the United States. Ninety percent of the Washingtons in America are black people."
John Adams favored the forced removal of black people from the United States. At the time of the war of 1812, Adams denounced the British for not leaving the "stolen Negroes" (men who had escaped slavery to fight on the British side) to starve, or shipping them to Africa, but rather giving them a colony in Nova Scotia - just as the British had done with those who had escaped at the time of the revolution, including at least one man who had been enslaved by George Washington.
John Quincy Adams was the most anti-slavery president and former president the United States has had, but was no abolitionist. How much credit you should give people who obtain powerful positions and act relatively better, as compared with people who act far better but don't obtain power, is open to discussion, but I look a bit more favorably on JQA than Kimberley does. She denounces his support for compensated emancipation or for ending slavery by freeing all those born after a certain date, and follows a quote by him in this regard by crediting him with rightly predicting war - despite no such prediction being contained in the quote.
Needless to say, it's a disgusting notion that one should compensate the enslaver and purchase someone's freedom, rather than compensating the person who has been enslaved while punishing the person who has enslaved them. Needless to say, it is a repulsive idea that anyone should remain in slavery an instant longer. And here's another hideous idea that was actually tried: you murder three-quarters of a million people, destroy towns and cities, create bitter, seemingly eternal resentment, and fail to fully end slavery, sending black people in states like Alabama to work in underground mines for de facto owners who could now place zero value on black lives and behave accordingly.
The fact is that U.S. slave owners refused to allow freedom to be purchased. But it is also a fact that much of the world ended slavery and serfdom with compensated emancipation and without war. When John Quincy Adams said he would not support freeing slaves without "the consent of their masters," his motivations may perhaps have been despicable, but he was proposing a rational solution that was supported by a great many well-meaning abolitionists - and one that succeeded in many places, including within the boundaries of Washington D.C.
On June 20, 2013, the Atlantic published an article by Ta-Nehisi Coates called "No, Lincoln Could Not Have 'Bought the Slaves'." Why not? Well, the slave owners didn't want to sell. That's perfectly true. They didn't, not at all. But the Atlantic also focuses on another argument, namely that it would have just been too expensive, costing as much as $3 billion (in 1860s money). Yet, if you had read closely-it was easy to miss it-the author admitted that the war cost over twice that much.
Nobody foresees what a war will cost at its start, but given that every war in history, as far as I know, has been confidently predicted to cost dramatically less than it ended up costing, and given that wars today never end, we could start considering their costs to lie in a range between enormous and infinite. We could also start distinguishing just causes from wars they are tied to. If we decide today to end mass incarceration, no matter what we think of the U.S. Civil War - no matter if we glorify or are indifferent or hold a mixture of feelings about it - we can all agree that it would be idiotic to pick out some fields, kill millions of young people, and then pass a bill ending mass incarceration, rather than simply passing the bill and being done with it.
Kimberley's portraits of presidents are complex. There are familiar hypocrites like Jefferson who expressed both fine and awful sentiments while pretty consistently engaging in awful behavior politically and personally. There are others like William Henry Harrison who owned people as slaves his whole life and is said to have fathered six children with an enslaved woman, and who expressed both fine and awful sentiments while pretty consistently engaging in awful behavior politically and personally, but whose story may be less familiar than Jefferson's.
Presidents numbers 13, 14, and 15 were Northerners who did not own anyone but fully supported the practice of doing so. Fillmore supported and signed the Fugitive Slave Act. He also supported forcibly sending all blacks to Africa or the West Indies. Pierce wrote to his friend Jefferson Davis in 1860 expressing his support for slavery. Buchanan, as president elect, urged Supreme Court Justices to rule in the Dred Scott case in the manner that they did, namely denying rights to African Americans, and attempting to block legal means of ending slavery.
President #16, the Great Emancipator, was openly racist, supported forced colonization, blamed black people's presence for the war (and told them that directly), and fought a war for years before self-emancipating blacks and slagging northern support for war led him to declare the cause to be freedom. Kimberley also denounces Lincoln for proposing compensated emancipation, though how that could have been worse than continuing the war she doesn't explain.
With Andrew Johnson (#17) it was right back to a president who had owned slaves, as had #18 Ulysses S. Grant. Johnson did so much to deny freedom to black people that Congress impeached him (though the ground for impeachment was the firing of the Secretary of War). Grant oversaw and tolerated a rise in racism, segregation, and terrorism. Rutherford B. Hayes (#19) was actually selected (not elected) as part of a deal to end Reconstruction.
There followed numerous racist, pro-colonization, and pro-white presidents. One of the nastiest was that hero of popular culture, Teddy Roosevelt. Another was that beta version of Barack Obama, Woodrow Wilson, a horribly racist, oligarchic, warmonger, raised by parents who had owned slaves, who has gone down in history as a liberal spreader of democracy.
Then came three racist Republican opponents of black rights, each chronicled by Kimberley.
Franklin Roosevelt (#32) rejected a proposal to consider the case of a black man accused of murder in Virginia, by telling the U.S. Attorney General, "I warned you not to call me again about any of Eleanor's niggers. Call me one more time and you are fired." FDR successfully advocated for legislation like the Social Security Act that excluded agriculture and domestic work and therefore most black people.
Harry Truman (#33) was openly racist and had been a member of the KKK, but was moved by public pressure to take steps such as desegregating the military. Former president Truman in 1960 remarked that if civil rights advocates staged a sit-in in a store he owned, he'd throw them out. Kimberley discusses a trend in her accounts of numerous presidents, of liberals and black people giving enormous credit to presidents for occasional crumbs tossed their way. She quotes Truman's special assistant on civil rights recounting a large crowd praying prior to a speech by Truman. "They thought it was a religious occasion."
Eisenhower (#34) was no hero, generally dragging his feat on civil rights. But taking action (even if it was with the National Guard) to protect students integrating a school seems like a positive thing, whereas Kimberley writes that he only did so because the Governor of Arkansas refused to allow black students to attend the school. Why else would he possibly have done so? One good act, of course, does not outweigh numerous bad ones.
A pattern of giving Democratic presidents dramatically too much credit is well documented through the remaining presidents in the list. LBJ did what activists compelled him to do (though he gave up his career rather than do what peace activists sought to compel him to do). Nixon re-normalized racism and promoted numerous harmful policies, including one that Kimberley might have added to her account: the "war" on drugs. Ford opposed busing, refused to send troops as Eisenhower had, and backed segregated private schools.
Jimmy Carter campaigned for president, saying, "I see nothing wrong with ethnic purity being maintained. I would not force racial integration of a neighborhood by government action." Ronald Reagan pursued the re-legalization of segregation. Bill Clinton made sure more black people went to prison and fewer received welfare benefits. Barack Obama's policies hurt black people, but his blackness gave him protection from any public activism.
Should anyone be added to this rogues' gallery in the future? Well, no person should ever be given the sort of beyond-royal power that U.S. presidents are given. That Trump has been impeached, even for a bizarre and warmongering reason while dozens of critical reasons stare us in the face, is a good thing in the same way that the U.S. media finally calling an acting president a liar and a scoundrel (except when he's bombing people) is a good thing. The office of the presidency needs to be brought down to size. It seems destined to hold in the future the worst representatives of U.S. society that can be found.
Yet, we also have to try to fill that office, as long as it exists, with the least awful person we can manage. It must be noted that one of the leading candidates in the polls for this year's election is a far-from-perfect individual (aren't we all?) who nonetheless stands head and shoulders above the entire crowd of 45 thus far (no matter what kind of hat Lincoln wears). I mean, of course, Bernie Sanders. If he were elected, as a president with the updated and developed domestic policies of FDR, but without the lust for another World War, and without the bigotry that has dominated the White House for centuries, would he scale back presidential power? Would we want him to? Would he pursue what he promised to pursue? Would he succeed? Let's find out.
(c) 2020 David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. He is a 2015 and 2016 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook.
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 A 2020 Vision For Climate Action By David Suzuki Let's hope 2020 marks the start of a year and decade when we finally take climate disruption as seriously as the evidence shows we must. We understand the problem and know how to deal with it. Many solutions exist and more are being developed daily. Consuming less of everything, including energy, rapidly shifting to renewable energy, and protecting and restoring green spaces and wetlands that store carbon are all things we've been doing and can do more. We'd have healthier children, less risk of extreme weather-related events like floods and fires, fewer refugees, cleaner cities and more sustainably managed resources. It's astounding that anyone would oppose that. Yes, people working in coal, oil and gas have legitimate fears about their futures, which is why they need support and training as the industry automates and transitions. But we make it more difficult with every year we fail to act decisively. The talk is often of a "gradual" transition, the cliche being, "We can't get off fossil fuels overnight." That's true, but it's used as an excuse to avoid getting off fossil fuels at all. Through decades of increasingly urgent warnings from the scientific community about the dangers of pumping massive amounts of long-lasting greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, many governments, including ours, have facilitated rapid expansion of the industry, especially for dirtier, less-efficient, harder-to-obtain products like oilsands bitumen. Despite promises to stop, our government and others continue to massively subsidize the most profitable industry in history with tax breaks, reduced royalties and incentives. Governments develop climate strategies - many of them good - and then turn around and buy a pipeline or frack the hell out of the landscape. It doesn't make sense. Looking south of the border and elsewhere in the world is even more bewildering. The U.S. president rambles incoherently about wind energy while rolling back decades of practical environmental laws and regulations. Australian politicians reject climate solutions and promote the dying coal industry while evacuating their people from record-breaking heat and a country on fire. What's going on? Is it simply profit and greed? Fear of change? A lack of empathy and caring for the future? Ignorance? All the above? Some people who oppose environmental protection believe it's their religious duty to help speed the "end times." Politicians on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border are known to follow these beliefs. It's absurd that people who believe God created the heavens and Earth would be so hell-bent on destroying all they've been given. It's like burning down your house so you can speed your move to a new one that you have not yet seen! Declining education standards, especially around critical thinking, have made many people more susceptible to the barrage of conspiratorial and other false information flowing through social and conventional media. That information - from climate science denial to outlandish conspiracy theories - is intentionally produced by people determined to maintain their mostly unearned privilege no matter what the cost to the rest of society. If we had politicians willing to act with the urgency the evidence shows is necessary, curbing climate catastrophe would still be a challenge this late in the game, but we could do it. We could at least start to ensure things don't get worse than they already are. We can and must do better. But it's going to take more than changing our diets, buying e-vehicles and conserving energy - as important as those are. We must adapt our economic systems to current conditions and work on solutions that may not fit within the profit-and-gro wth paradigm, including massive reforestation projects, better environmental regulation, and education, strengthened women's rights and family planning to stabilize population growth. We can't afford to squander limited resources for the sake of a seemingly endless cycle of working and consuming. And we can't just keep polluting air, water and land and not expect consequences. Some people may accept the idea of an apocalypse, even to the extent of praying for it and wanting to speed its coming. But most of us just want to live healthy, happy lives, where friends, family and experience mean more than money and "stuff." We're the majority and so must continue to speak out and speak loudly. (c) 2020 Dr. David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author, and co_founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. |
 Democrats Express Shock That Actual Politics Have Broken Out In A Primary Campaign Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (sort of) do battle, while Cory Booker calls it quits. By Charles P. Pierce For the life of me, I'll never understand why Cory Booker's presidential campaign never even made it to the pad, let alone why it never achieved liftoff. He began with as large a national profile as any of them except, possibly, Joe Biden. He had solid debate performances. He has a large and expansive personality. Then he announced and, well...nothing. His numbers petrified. When he dropped out of the race on Monday, he did so from a position that was pretty much the same one he held on the day of his announcement. (One other curious thing: for years, Booker was sniped at from the left for being too close to Wall Street and the financial-services industry, which, since he's a senator from New Jersey, is rather like Mitch McConnell's relationship with tobacco magnates. But those same people virtually abandoned his campaign, so Booker now has been pilloried for drawing support from people who ghosted him when he ran for president.) Anyway, Andrew Yang aside, this leaves the Democratic presidential field looking as white as the 1955 Red Sox, which certainly was unanticipated six months ago. By all accounts, Joe Biden has a hammerlock on the party's African-American constituency. Because of the utterly idiotic placement of Iowa and New Hampshire at the top of the nominating process-and Julian Castro is correct, this situation can't be allowed to continue-Biden doesn't have to sweat those two states as much as most of the rest of them do. Add to that the Double Millionaire Factor-Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer-and Biden likely will end up with a grip on the plutocrat end of the party when those two vanity exercises finally fizzle out.  Cory Booker's campaign never got to the launch pad. SPW said she was "disappointed" that the Sanders forces had chosen to "trash" her. Sanders, meanwhile, explained that the two of them were still thick as thieves, and all of the folks who have parachuted into Iowa for the next few weeks had something interesting to write about. But there's no question that the Sanders campaign was the initial belligerent here, and SPW, for her part, handled it in the proper Federalist Papers fashion. "We all saw the impact of the factionalism in 2016, and we can't have a repeat of that. I hope Bernie reconsiders and turns his campaign in a different direction."This was a nice riposte, sending a hardly subliminal message to those Hillary Rodham Clinton voters who are still frosted over the damage they believe Sanders did to HRC last time around. As for Tuesday's debate, it's no better than 6-5 that Sanders's primary target will be Biden, and not Warren. But the narrowing of the field paradoxically means less ground to fight on. Small things become bigger. Lighter issues gain substance and weight. Factionalism rears its head, just like it was supposed to long ago. (c) 2020 Charles P. Pierce has been a working journalist since 1976. He is the author of four books, most recently 'Idiot America.' He lives near Boston with his wife but no longer his three children.
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 All The Times The US Allied With Soleimani Against Common Enemies, Giving Him Air Support At Tikrit Soleimani played a key role in helping defeat ISIL in Iraq, where he was a de facto and even tactical U.S. ally. By Juan Cole Since the U.S. political establishment and press has been demonizing Gen. Qasem Soleimani since he was rubbed out by Trump, it is perhaps worth complicating the story-especially now that Trump is accusing him of having targeted not one but four U.S. embassies. Trump is a notorious and compulsive liar, and there is no reason to think that charge is true. The prime minister of Iraq says he invited Soleimani to Baghdad for peace negotiations with Saudi Arabia and then Trump just suddenly blew his guest away. Soleimani came openly on a commercial flight and went through passport control with his diplomatic passport. His arrival in Baghdad was not part of a covert operation to hit Americans. Nor did Soleimani, as Wolf Blitzer breathlessly reported on CNN kill "millions" (when? where?). Nor was he a terrorist; terrorists are non-state actors. He was a general in the Iranian military. Soleimani fought in the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, which was a defensive war on Iran's part, since Iraq aggressively invaded under Saddam Hussein. The United States supported Saddam to the hilt in his aggression. So you'd have to say that in the 1980s Soleimani was doing something heroic, whereas the Reagan administration was doing something shameful. Reagan even ran interference for Saddam at the U.N. when Iran brought a complaint about the Iraqi use of chemical weapons. In the 1980s and 1990s, Soleimani trained the Badr Corps, the Iraqi paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which is now the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. When George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, his viceroy, Paul Bremer, appointed a Transitional Governing Council made up of Iraqis who were glad that the U.S. had overthrown Saddam Hussein. Bremer appointed Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim as a member of the council, who were sort of his cabinet. Al-Hakim led SCIRI, of which Badr was the military arm. Bush and Bremer were indirectly hand in glove with Soleimani's main proxy in Iraq. When al-Hakim was killed by a bombing on Aug. 29, 2003, Bremer appointed his brother Abdul Aziz al-Hakim as a governing council member. Abdul Aziz had been the head of the Badr Corps, and was reporting back to Soleimani. In Syria, Soleimani fought ISIL and al-Qaeda linked groups, making him a de facto ally of the U.S., though his hard line pro-Shiite policies also did alienate Sunni Syrians. But many Syrian opposition groups had hooked up with al-Qaeda or ISIL well before 2015, when Soleimani began intervening directly in Syria at the request of the government of Bashar al-Assad. Sunni Syrians don't forgive him for his role in the taking of, say, East Aleppo. But it is also true that his forces helped defeat groups that praised al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and even took orders from him. Then there was Soleimani's key role in helping defeat ISIL in Iraq, where, again, he was a de facto and even tactical U.S. ally (see below). Soleimani was a complicated man, a man of the religious far right, an authoritarian. Although I think it is nonsense to speak of him committing terrorism, he did commit war crimes. I am not sure he is responsible for nearly as many deaths as George W. Bush, though. In this essay I'm not defending Soleimani, I'm only trying to complicate the glib story being pushed at U.S. by the Trump administration, which can't speak two sentences without telling four lies. The best antidote to black and white authoritarian views of the world is an attention to irony and ambiguity. Remember that in 2014 ISIL (ISIS, Daesh) took 40% of Iraq and the Iraqi army trained by the U.S. collapsed and ran away. Without the Shiite militias that Soleimani organized, Iraq would have been supine. So here's what I wrote about the beginning of the Tikrit campaign against ISIL in March, 2015: The Iraqi military and allied Shiite militias are mounting a campaign to take the largely Sunni town of Tikrit (original pop. 300,000), which is alleged to have been planned and is being directed by the Jerusalem (Quds) Brigade, the foreign special ops arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Quds Brigade commander Qasim Soleimani has been photographed on site.I later wrote: U.S. fighter jets have, at the request of the Iraqi government of Haydar al-Abadi, begun bombing Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) positions in Tikrit, according to al-Hayat (Life).I finished up the story at The Nation: Finally, Daesh was defeated by early April in Tikrit north of Baghdad, a major Sunni city of some 300,000 that was the birthplace of Saddam Hussein and many other high Baath officials who bestrode Iraq in the 1980s and 1990s. The initial Tikrit campaign was planned out by Iran and was a land action that ran into trouble because of Daesh booby-traps and medium weaponry such as artillery and armored vehicles. The vast majority of the fighters were militiamen, supported by only one Iraqi military brigade and by a thousand Sunni tribesmen. The campaign stalled out because Washington, miffed at being sidelined by an Iranian-planned battle, at first declined to send aerial support. In the end, faced with the prospect of a Daesh victory, president Obama ordered bombing raids in aid of the attack on Tikrit, which turned the tide.Lest the Trumpies imply that only Obama de facto allied with Soleimani and his Iraqi Shiite militias, it should be pointed out that they played an important role in the defeat of ISIL at Mosul during Trump's presidency. Although they did not fight their way into the city, they fanned out to the west and north to prevent ISIL terrorists from escaping to Raqqa in Syria. That was why Kata'ib Hizbullah had a base at Qa'im, a checkpoint between Iraq and Syria, where they were preventing ISIL agents from going back and forth. Trump kicked off the current crisis by bombing his allies at Qa'im, killing some 26 militiamen. And then he droned his sometime ally Soleimani to death at Baghdad airport as Soleimani was about to begin covert peace talks with Saudi Arabia. Bonus video from CNBC International: "Iran's Soleimani is seen by many as 'the man who kept ISIS' out of the country" (c) 2020 Juan R.I. Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He has written extensively on modern Islamic movements in Egypt, the Persian Gulf and South Asia and has given numerous media interviews on the war on terrorism and the Iraq War. He lived in various parts of the Muslim world for nearly 10 years and continues to travel widely there. He speaks Arabic, Farsi and Urdu. |
Dear Chefredakteur Kaminski, Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Prescott Bush, Sam Bush, Fredo Bush, Kate Bush, Kyle Busch, Anheuser Busch, Vidkun Quisling, and last year's winner Volksjudge John (the enforcer) Roberts. Without your lock step calling for the repeal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, your scheme to get the liberal Democrats infighting amongst themselves thus allowing a corporate Democrat that Trump could beat to get the nomination, Yemen, Syria, Iran and those many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Rethuglican Whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account! Along with this award you will be given the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Trump at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker," formally the "White House," on 01-25-2020. We salute you Herr Kaminski, Sieg Heil!
Signed by, Heil Trump |
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If climate change, nuclear standoffs, assault weapons, hate crimes, mass killings, Russian trolls, near-record inequality, kids locked in cages at our border, and Donald Trump in the White House don't occasionally cause you feelings of impending doom, you're not human.
But I want you to remember this: As bad as it looks - as despairing as you can sometimes feel - the great strength of this country is our resilience. We bounce back. We will again. We already are.
Not convinced?
First, come back in time with me to when I graduated college in 1968. That year, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. Our cities were burning. Tens of thousands of young Americans were being ordered to Vietnam to fight an unwinnable and unjust war, which ultimately claimed over 58,000 American lives and the lives of over 3 million Vietnamese. The nation was deeply divided. And then in November of that year, Richard Nixon was elected president.
I recall thinking this nation would never recover. But somehow we bounced back.
In subsequent years we enacted the Environmental Protection Act. We achieved marriage equality for gays and lesbians. We elected a black man to be president of the United States. We passed the Affordable Care Act.
Even now, it's not as bleak as it sometimes seems. In 2018 we elected a record number of women, people of color, and LGBTQ representatives to Congress, including the first Muslim women. Eighteen states raised their minimum wages.
Even in traditionally conservative states, surprising things are happening. In Tennessee, a Republican legislature has enacted free community college and raised taxes for infrastructure. Nevada has expanded voting rights and gun controls. New Mexico has increased spending by 11 percent and raised its minimum wage by 60 percent. Teachers have gone on strike in Virginia, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Kentucky, and North Carolina - and won. The public sided with the teachers.
In several states, after decades of tough-on-crime policies, conservative groups have joined with liberals to reform criminal justice systems. Early childhood education and alternative energy promotion have also expanded nationwide, largely on a bipartisan basis.
Now, come forward in time with me.
Look at the startling diversity of younger Americans. Most Americans now under 18 years old are ethnically Hispanic, Asian or Pacific Islander, African-American, or of more than one race. In ten years, it's estimated that most Americans under 35 will also be people of color or of mixed races. Thirty years from now, most of us will be.
That diversity will be a huge strength. We will be more tolerant, less racist, less xenophobic.
Our young people are also determined to make America better. I've been teaching for almost 40 years, and I've never taught a generation of students as dedicated to public service, as committed to improving the nation and the world as is the generation I'm now teaching. That's another sign of our future strength.
Meanwhile, most college students today are women, which means that in future years even more women will be in leadership positions - in science, politics, education, nonprofits, and in corporate suites. That will also be a great boon to America.
I don't want to minimize the problems we now have. I just want to remind you of how resilient America has been, and how well situated we are for the future.
Never give up fighting for a more just society.
The forces of greed and hate would prefer you give up, because that way they win it all. But we have never given up. And we never will.
(c) 2020 Robert B. Reich has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. His latest book is "Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few." His web site is www.robertreich.org.
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 American Democracy We also vote with our feet By Jane Stillwater According to Gayle Greene in her excellent book Insomniac, sleep is very important. According to me, I do my very best thinking in my sleep. So when I went over to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco recently to hear a lecture by Peter Dale Scott, I couldn't really understand what he was talking about -- until I slept on it. Scott said that American history has been composed largely of various social movements. Even the American Revolution was more of a social movement than a war. "For instance, when the majority of Americans finally got fed up with all that wealth disparity during the Gilded Age, they initiated the graduated income tax back in 1909." This tax was originally designed to cut wealthy Robber Barons down to size -- except that now it has become graduated in the opposite direction. You and I pay more. Billionaires pay less. And after a good night's sleep last night, another idea just dawned on me with regard to current social movements here in America. Let's take a look at our current voting system for instance. What do you think about that? America's wealthy elite have hacked our voting machines, smothered us with commercials paid for by Citizens United, gerrymandered us like pretzels, bought off Congress, stacked the Supreme Court, put a yes-man in the White House and even physically crossed a whole bunch of us off the voters' rolls. And yet. Even despite all these vote-suppression tactics, Americans still arise from the ground up to vote with our feet. We march. We sign petitions. We boycott. We picket. We strike. We turn to alternative news sources. We even sometimes begin to think for ourselves. Yikes! And another social movement that is developing here in America is a new anti-war surge. "You know you want it," our leaders tell us. "That war on Iran is gonna be even better than Christmas morning!" No, it's not. We Americans are finally becoming sick and tired of having our money spent on oil-baron piracy in the Middle East and our kids coming home in a box. And so an anti-war social movement is gradually building up again too. According to Scott, however, the biggest American social movement of all is about to happen and is now in the works. Consensus is about to be reached here -- no matter what the pundits tell us or Washington decides. "And what movement is that?" you might ask. The climate crisis movement. Apparently when all our forests burn down, we can no longer breathe safely and our toes curl up from the heat, Americans are finally going to reach a consensus and join together in a movement that will cross political, regional, religious, class and even racial lines. And then Americans are going to truly vote with their feet. (c) 2020 Jane Stillwater. Stop Wall Street and War Street from destroying our world. And while you're at it, please buy my books!
~~~ Pat Bagley ~~~  |
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Parting Shots-
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