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In This Edition
Noam Chomski remembers, "Howard Zinn."
Welcome one and all to "Uncle Ernie's Issues & Alibis."
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  We Are Your Overlords By Ernest Stewart
How soft your fields, so green "Much of the debate over global warming is predicated on fear, rather than science. I called the threat of catastrophic global warming the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," a statement that, to put it mildly, was not viewed kindly by environmental extremists and their elitist organizations." ~~~ Senator James Inhofe
In a video translated into the Afghan languages of Dari and Pashto and set to an old Led Zeppelin tune, an embarrassed Gen. McChrystal apologized for the strike in central Uruzgan province on Sunday that Afghan officials say killed at least 27 people, just like a similar artillery strike did a week before. "I pledge to strengthen our efforts to regain your trust to build a brighter future for all Afghans," (Or a least that few still living when we pull out!) Gen McChrystal said in the video. "I have instituted a thorough investigation to prevent this from happening again." (Until the next time that it does!) The attack by NATO's junior birdmen on a convoy of cars was the deadliest on civilians in almost a week and prompted a sharp rebuke from the Afghan government. Gen. McChrystal apologized directly to President Hamid Karzai shortly after the incident.
Still, have no fear, Afghanistan. If one of our killers kills one of your family or just shoots off the arm or leg of your child, we got you covered! According to the Associated Press, "the death of a child or adult is worth $1,500 to $2,500 dollars, while the loss of limb and other injuries $600 to $1,500 dollars. A damaged or destroyed vehicle $500 to $2,500 dollars, and damage to a farmer's fields $50 to $250 dollars." Who says we don't have a big heart?
Before we entered WWII we had a very small standing military. In less than four years we were able to build that military into a force that beat the three mightiest armies, navies and air forces in the world. And yet now we have the mightiest army, navy, and air force the world has ever seen but after eight years, we are no further along in winning this illegal, immoral, unnecessary war than we were in 2001! I wish Stanley would explain that, don't you?
Especially since we're fighting against a lightly armed guerilla force with no air force or navy of their own!
Being the good little fascist puppet shill that he is, Jimmy wants to put all the scientists who have government funding and have come to the conclusion that Jimmy's puppet masters are to blame on trial for telling the truth and not the corpo-rats song and dance. In fact, he wants to put Al Gore behind bars for bringing our current climate disaster out in the open. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with putting Al away, just not for that, rather for winning the 2000 election and running away and leaving us to the tender mercies of the "Crime Family Bush!" Without Al's help Tony (light-fingers) Scalia and his "gang of five"(tm) on the Extreme Court wouldn't have been able to foster their judicial coup d'etat of 12-12-2000! Thanks Al! Of course, you hear it every day, everywhere from the vast rat-wing media. "Oh it's cold outside therefore global warming is just BS." No, you brain dead lying SOB's. It's cold outside because it's winter. I suppose by their logic if Tush Limburger has a full belly then there is no such thing as hunger in the world, huh? Well, it's snowing an awful lot in the south, something I hear most every day. That is a direct effect of global warming, i.e., ever heard of El Nino? El Nino happens when the seas heat up and one of the effects is to drive the jet streams south. So instead of the winter storms following the Ohio valley, they now form just off the coast of the Caribbean and suck up all that moisture and when lows push south and aren't blocked by the jet stream you get snowstorms in Dixie. Duh!
Listening to paid shills like Inhofe will end up getting us all killed. Which, I suppose, maybe the point in all of this? The elite want to thin the herd and what better way than by causing starvation, killer storms, acts of nature while they fill their pockets by ripping off Mother Nature for huge profits? Knowing full well that they'll be safe in their McMansions, in their gated communities, with their private security forces, i.e., Blackwater, while the rest of us starve, freeze or get blown away or flooded out by nature! Then we'll hear how it's Mother Nature's fault or it's "God's will," oh please! And since most of America has even fewer brains than Jimmy, we are so f*cked, America!
We'd also like to welcome James Donahue back to the magazine after a long absence. We missed your wisdom and wit James. Welcome back, bro! The key to the honor bar is still under the mat!
 02-09-1922 ~ 02-17-2010 Thanks for the memories!  06-10-1926 ~ 02-19-2010 Thanks for entertainment!  12-02-1924 ~ 02-20-2010 Burn Baby Burn!  08-17-1968 ~ 02-25-2010 Thanks for the films ***** We get by with a little help from our friends! So please help us if you can...? Donations ***** So how do you like Bush Lite so far? And more importantly, what are you planning on doing about it? Until the next time, Peace! (c) 2010 Ernest Stewart a.k.a. Uncle Ernie is an unabashed radical, author, stand-up comic, DJ, actor, political pundit and for the last 9 years managing editor and publisher of Issues & Alibis magazine. |
 Howard Zinn By Noam Chomski It is not easy for me to write a few words about Howard Zinn, the great American activist and historian who passed away a few days ago. He was a very close friend for 45 years. The families were very close too. His wife Roz, who died of cancer not long before, was also a marvelous person and close friend. Also somber is the realization that a whole generation seems to be disappearing, including several other old friends: Edward Said, Eqbal Ahmed, and others, who were not only astute and productive scholars but also dedicated and courageous militants, always on call when needed -- which was constant. A combination that is essential if there is to be hope of decent survival. Howard's remarkable life and work are summarized best in his own words. His primary concern, he explained, was "the countless small actions of unknown people" that lie at the roots of "those great moments" that enter the historical record -- a record that will be profoundly misleading, and seriously disempowering, if it is torn from these roots as it passes through the filters of doctrine and dogma. His life was always closely intertwined with his writings and innumerable talks and interviews. It was devoted, selflessly, to empowerment of the unknown people who brought about great moments. That was true when he was an industrial worker and labor activist, and from the days, 50 years ago, when he was teaching at Spellman college in Atlanta Georgia, a black college that was open mostly to the small black elite. While teaching at Spellman, Howard supported the students who were at the cutting edge of the civil rights movement in its early and most dangerous days, many of whom became quite well-known in later years -- Alice Walker, Julian Bond, and others -- and who loved and revered him, as did everyone who knew him well. And as always, he did not just support them, which was rare enough, but also participated directly with them in their most hazardous efforts -- no easy undertaking at that time, before there was any organized popular movement and in the face of government hostility that lasted for some years. Finally, popular support was ignited, in large part by the courageous actions of the young people who were sitting in at lunch counters, riding freedom buses, organizing demonstrations, facing bitter racism and brutality, sometimes death. By the early 1960s a mass popular movement was taking shape, by then with Martin Luther King in a leadership role, and the government had to respond. As a reward for his courage and honesty, Howard was soon expelled from the college where he taught. A few years later he wrote the standard work on SNCC (the Student non-violent Coordinating Committee), the major organization of those "unknown people" whose "countless small actions" played such an important part in creating the groundswell that enabled King to gain significant influence, as I am sure he would have been the first to say, and to bring the country to honor the constitutional amendments of a century earlier that had theoretically granted elementary civil rights to former slaves -- at least to do so partially; no need to stress that there remains a long way to go. On a personal note, I came to know Howard well when we went together to a civil rights demonstration in Jackson Mississippi in (I think) 1964, even at that late date a scene of violent public antagonism, police brutality, and indifference or even cooperation with state security forces on the part of federal authorities, sometimes in ways that were quite shocking. After being expelled from the Atlanta college where he taught, Howard came to Boston, and spent the rest of his academic career at Boston University, where he was, I am sure, the most admired and loved faculty member on campus, and the target of bitter antagonism and petty cruelty on the part of the administration -- though in later years, after his retirement, he gained the public honor and respect that was always overwhelming among students, staff, much of the faculty, and the general community. While there, Howard wrote the books that brought him well-deserved fame. His book Logic of Withdrawal, in 1967, was the first to express clearly and powerfully what many were then beginning barely to contemplate: that the US had no right even to call for a negotiated settlement in Vietnam, leaving Washington with power and substantial control in the country it had invaded and by then already largely destroyed. Rather, the US should do what any aggressor should: withdraw, allow the population to somehow reconstruct as they could from the wreckage, and if minimal honesty could be attained, pay massive reparations for the crimes that the invading armies had committed, vast crimes in this case. The book had wide influence among the public, although to this day its message can barely even be comprehended in elite educated circles, an indication of how much necessary work lies ahead. Significantly, among the general public by the war's end, 70% regarded the war as "fundamentally wrong and immoral," not "a mistake," a remarkable figure considering the fact that scarcely a hint of such a thought was expressible in mainstream opinion. Howard's writings -- and, as always, his prominent presence in protest and direct resistance -- were a major factor in civilizing much of the country. In those same years, Howard also became one of the most prominent supporters of the resistance movement that was then developing. He was one of the early signers of the Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority and was so close to the activities of Resist that he was practically one of the organizers. He also took part at once in the sanctuary actions that had a remarkable impact in galvanizing antiwar protest. Whatever was needed -- talks, participation in civil disobedience, support for resisters, testimony at trials -- Howard was always there. Even more influential in the long run than Howard's anti-war writings and actions was his enduring masterpiece, A People's History of the United States, a book that literally changed the consciousness of a generation. Here he developed with care, lucidity, and comprehensive sweep his fundamental message about the crucial role of the people who remain unknown in carrying forward the endless struggle for peace and justice, and about the victims of the systems of power that create their own versions of history and seek to impose it. Later, his "Voices" from the People's History, now an acclaimed theatrical and television production, has brought to many the actual words of those forgotten or ignored people who have played such a valuable role in creating a better world. Howard's unique success in drawing the actions and voices of unknown people from the depths to which they had largely been consigned has spawned extensive historical research following a similar path, focusing on critical periods of American history, and turning to the record in other countries as well, a very welcome development. It is not entirely novel -- there had been scholarly inquiries of particular topics before -- but nothing to compare with Howard's broad and incisive evocation of "history from below," compensating for critical omissions in how American history had been interpreted and conveyed. Howard's dedicated activism continued, literally without a break, until the very end, even in his last years, when he was suffering from severe infirmity and personal loss, though one would hardly know it when meeting him or watching him speaking tirelessly to captivated audiences all over the country. Whenever there was a struggle for peace and justice, Howard was there, on the front lines, unflagging in his enthusiasm, and inspiring in his integrity, engagement, eloquence and insight, light touch of humor in the face of adversity, dedication to non-violence, and sheer decency. It is hard even to imagine how many young people's lives were touched, and how deeply, by his achievements, both in his work and his life.
There are places where Howard's life and work should have particular resonance. One, which should be much better known, is Turkey. I know of no other country where leading writers, artists, journalists, academics and other intellectuals have compiled such an impressive record of bravery and integrity in condemning crimes of state, and going beyond to engage in civil disobedience to try to bring oppression and violence to an end, facing and sometimes enduring severe repression, and then returning to the task. It is an honorable record, unique to my knowledge, a record of which the country should be proud. And one that should be a model for others, just as Howard Zinn's life and work are an unforgettable model, sure to leave a permanent stamp on how history is understood and how a decent and honorable life should be lived.
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 Dubious In Dubai By Uri Avnery FROM TIME to time I ask myself: what would happen if the world's governments decided to abolish all their spy agencies simultaneously? True, it would be a great blow to the authors and movie producers who make their living from secret service stories. Their products would lose their appeal. It would be a disaster for the huge army of fans which gobbles up spy adventures, the enthusiastic consumers of books and movies about superhuman heroes like James Bond and super-devious geniuses like John La Carre's Smiley. But what would be the real damage if Washington stopped spying on Moscow and Moscow stopped spying on Washington, and both on Beijing? The result would be a draw. Immense sums of money would be saved, since a large part of the efforts of every spy agency is devoted to obstructing the intrigues of the competition. How many diseases could be overcome? How many hungry people fed, how many illiterates taught to read and write? The popular books and movies celebrate the imaginary successes of the intelligence agencies. Reality is much more prosaic, and it is replete with real failures. THE TWO classic intelligence disasters occurred during World War II. In both, the intelligence agencies either provided their political bosses with faulty assessments, or the leaders ignored their accurate assessments. As far as the results are concerned, both amount to the same. Comrade Stalin was totally surprised by the German invasion of the Soviet Union, even though the Germans needed months to assemble their huge invasion force. President Roosevelt was totally surprised by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, even though the bulk of the Japanese Navy took part in it. The failures were so fantastic, that spy aficionados had to resort to conspiracy theories to explain them. One such theory says that Stalin deliberately ignored the warnings because he intended to surprise Hitler with an attack of his own. Another theory asserts that Roosevelt practically "invited" the Japanese to attack because he was in need of a pretext to push the US into an unpopular war. But since then, failures continued to follow each other. All Western spy agencies were totally surprised by the Khomeini revolution in Iran, the results of which are still hitting the headlines today. All of them were totally surprised by the collapse of the Soviet Union, one of the defining events of the 20th century. They were totally surprised by the fall of the Berlin wall. And all of them provided wrong information about Saddam Hussein's imaginary nuclear bomb, which served as a pretext for the American invasion of Iraq. AH, OUR people say, that's what's happening among the Goyim. Not here. Our intelligence community is like no other. The Jewish brain has invented the Mossad, which knows everything and is capable of everything. (Mossad - "institute" - is short for the "Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations".) Really? At the outbreak of the 1948 war, all the chiefs of our intelligence community unanimously advised David Ben-Gurion that the armies of the Arab states would not intervene. (Fortunately, Ben-Gurion rejected their assessment.) In May 1967, our entire intelligence community was totally surprised by the concentration of the Egyptian army in Sinai, the step that led to the Six-Day war. (Our intelligence chiefs were convinced that the bulk of the Egyptian army was busy in Yemen, where a civil war was raging.) The Egyptian-Syrian attack on Yom Kippur, 1973, completely surprised our intelligence services, even though heaps of advance warnings were available. The intelligence agencies were totally surprised by the first intifada, and then again by the second. They were totally surprised by the Khomeini revolution, even though (or because) they were deeply imbedded in the Shah's regime. They were totally surprised by the Hamas victory in the Palestinian elections. The list is long and inglorious. But in one field, so they say, our Mossad performs like no other: assassinations. (Sorry, "eliminations".) STEVEN SPIELBERG'S movie "Munich" describes the assassination ("elimination") of PLO officials after the massacre of the athletes at the Olympic Games. As a masterpiece of kitsch it can be compared only to the movie "Exodus", based on Leon Uris' kitschy book. After the massacre (the main responsibility for which falls on the incompetent and irresponsible Bavarian police), the Mossad, on the orders of Golda Meir, killed seven PLO officials, much to the joy of the revenge-thirsty Israeli public. Almost all the victims were PLO diplomats, the civilian representatives of the organization in European capitals, who had no direct connection with violent operations. Their activities were public, they worked in regular offices and lived with their families in residential buildings. They were static targets - like the ducks in a shooting gallery. In one of the actions - which resembled the latest affair - a Moroccan waiter was assassinated by mistake in the Norwegian town of Lillehammer. The Mossad mistook him for Ali Hassan Salameh, a senior Fatah officer who served as contact with the CIA. The Mossad agents, including a glamorous blonde (there is always a glamorous blonde) were identified, arrested and sentenced to long prison terms (but released very soon). The real Salameh was "eliminated" later on. In 1988, five years before the Oslo agreement, Abu Jihad (Khalil al-Wazir), the No. 2 in Fatah, was assassinated in Tunis before the eyes of his wife and children. Had he not been killed, he would probably be serving today as the President of the Palestinian Authority instead of Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas). He would have enjoyed the same kind of standing among his people as did Yasser Arafat - who was, most likely, killed by a poison that leaves no traces. The fiasco that most resembles the latest action was the Mossad's attempt on the life of Khalid Mishal, a senior Hamas leader, on orders of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. The Mossad agents ambushed him on a main street of Amman and sprayed a nerve toxin in his ear - that was about to kill him without leaving traces. They were caught on the spot. King Hussein, the Israeli government's main ally in the Arab world, was livid and delivered a furious ultimatum: either Israel would immediately provide the antidote to the poison and save Mishal's life, or the Mossad agents would be hanged. Netanyahu, as usual, caved in, Mishal was saved and the Israeli government, as a bonus, released Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the main Hamas leader, from prison. He was "eliminated" by a hellfire missile later on. DURING THE last weeks, a deluge of words has been poured on the assassination in Dubai of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, another senior Hamas officer. Israelis agreed from the first moment that this was a job of the Mossad. What capabilities! What talent! How did they know, long in advance, when the man would go to Dubai, what flight he would take, in what hotel he would stay! What precise planning! The "military correspondents" and "Arab affairs correspondents" on screen were radiant. Their faces said: oh, oh, oh, if the material were not embargoed...If I could only tell you what I know...I can tell you only that the Mossad has proved again that its long arm can reach anywhere! Live in fear, oh enemies of Israel! When the problems started to become apparent, and the photos of the assassins appeared on TV all over the world, the enthusiasm cooled, but only slightly. An old and proven Israeli method was brought into play: to take some marginal detail and discuss it passionately, ignoring the main issue. Concentrate on one particular tree and divert attention from the forest. Really, why did the agents use the names of actual people who live in Israel and have dual nationality? Why, of all possible passports, did they use those of friendly countries? How could they be sure that the owners of these passports would not travel abroad at the critical time? Moreover, were they not aware that Dubai was full of cameras that record every movement? Did they not foresee that the local police would produce films of the assassination in almost all its details? But this did not arouse too much excitement in Israel. Everybody understood that the British and the Irish were obliged, pro forma, to protest, but that this was nothing but going through the motions. Behind the scenes, there are intimate connections between the Mossad and the other intelligence agencies. After some weeks, everything will be forgotten. That's how it worked in Norway after Lillehammer, that's how it worked in Jordan after the Mishal affair. They will protest, rebuke, and that's that. So what is the problem? THE PROBLEM is that the Mossad in Israel acts like an independent fiefdom that ignores the vital long-term political and strategic interests of Israel, enjoying the automatic backing of an irresponsible prime minister. It is, as the English expression goes, a "loose cannon" - the cannon of a ship of yore which has broken free of its mountings and is rolling around the deck, crushing to death any unfortunate sailor who happens to get in its way. From the strategic point of view, the Dubai operation causes heavy damage to the government's policy, which defines Iran's putative nuclear bomb as an existential threat to Israel. The campaign against Iran helps it to divert the world's attention from the ongoing occupation and settlement, and induces the US, Europe and other countries to dance to its tune. Barack Obama is in the process of trying to set up a world-wide coalition for imposing "debilitating sanctions" on Iran. The Israeli government serves him - willingly - as a growling dog. He tells the Iranians: The Israelis are crazy. They may attack you at any moment. I am restraining them with great difficulty. But if you don't do what I tell you, I shall let go of the leash and may Allah have mercy on your soul! Dubai, a Gulf country facing Iran, is an important component of this coalition. It is an ally of Israel, much like Egypt and Jordan. And here comes the same Israeli government and embarrasses it, humiliates it, arousing among the Arab masses the suspicion that Dubai is collaborating with the Mossad. In the past we have embarrassed Norway, then we infuriated Jordan, now we humiliate Dubai. Is that wise? Ask Meir Dagan, who Netanyahu has just granted an almost unprecedented eighth year in office as chief of the Mossad. PERHAPS THE impact of the operation on our standing in the world is even more significant. Once upon a time it was possible to belittle this aspect. Let the Goyim say what they want. But since the Molten Lead operation, Israel has become more conscious of its far-reaching implications. The verdict of Judge Goldstone, the echoes of the antics of Avigdor Lieberman, the growing world-wide campaign for boycotting Israel - all these tend to suggest that Thomas Jefferson was not talking through his hat when he said that no nation can afford to ignore the opinion of mankind. The Dubai affair is reinforcing the image of Israel as a bully state, a rogue nation that treats world public opinion with contempt, a country that conducts gang warfare, that sends mafia-like death squads abroad, a pariah nation to be avoided by right-minded people.
Was this worthwhile?
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 New Grist For Hype On Iran By Ray McGovern Here we go again. A report issued Thursday by the new Director General of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano, has injected new adrenalin into those arguing that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon. The usual suspects are hyping - and distorting - thin-gruel language in the report to "prove" that Iran is hard at work on a nuclear weapon. The New York Times' David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, for example, highlighted a sentence about "alleged activities related to nuclear explosives," which Amano says he wants to discuss with Iran. Amano's report said: "Addressing these issues is important for clarifying the Agency's concerns about these activities and those described above, which seem to have continued beyond 2004." Sanger and Broad play up the "beyond 2004" language as "contradicting the American intelligence assessment ... that concluded that work on a bomb was suspended at the end of 2003." Other media have picked that up and run with it, apparently without bothering to read the IAEA report itself. The Times article is, at best, disingenuous in claiming: "The report cited new evidence, much of it collected in recent weeks, that appeared to paint a picture of a concerted drive in Iran toward a weapons capability." As far as I can tell, the "new evidence" consists of the "same-old, same-old" allegations and inferences already reported in the open press - material that failed to convince the Director of Intelligence, Dennis Blair, to depart from previous assessments during his Congressional testimony on February 2. Rather, he adhered closely to the unanimous conclusions of the 16 US intelligence agencies expressed in the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of November 2007. So, what's new? The director general of the IAEA, for one thing. Amano found huge shoes to fill when he took over from the widely respected Mohamed ElBaradei on December 1. ElBaradei had the courage to call a spade a spade and, when necessary, a forgery a forgery - like the documents alleging that Iraq had sought yellowcake uranium in Niger. ElBaradei took a perverse - if diplomatic - delight in giving the lie to spurious allegations, and became persona non grata to the Bush/Cheney administration. So much so that, in an unsuccessful campaign to deny him a third four-year term as director general, the administration called in many diplomatic chits in 2005 - the same year he won the Nobel Peace Prize. In addition to a strong spine, ElBaradei had credentials that would simply not quit. His extensive diplomatic experience together with a Ph.D. in international law from New York University, gave him a gravitas that enabled him to lead the IAEA effectively. Gravitas Needed Lacking gravitas, one bends more easily. It is a fair assumption that Amano will prove more malleable than his predecessor - and surely more naïve. How he handles the controversy generated by Thursday's report should show whether he means to follow ElBaradei's example or the more customary "flexible" example so common among UN bureaucrats. Press reports over the past few days - as well as past experience - strongly suggest that the "new evidence" cited by the Times may have comes from the usual suspects - agenda-laden sources, like Israeli intelligence. On Saturday, the Jerusalem Post quoted the Israeli government as saying the IAEA report "establishes that the agency has a lot of trustworthy information about the past and present activities that testify to the military tendencies of the Iranian program." The newspaper cited the IAEA report as suggesting that "Teheran had either resumed such work [on a nuclear weapon] or had never stopped when US intelligence said it did." Perhaps, the Jerusalem Post should have stopped there. Rather, in a highly suggestive sentence, it went on to suggest that "intelligence supplied by the US, Israel, and other IAEA member states on Iran's attempts to use the cover of a civilian nuclear program to move toward a weapons program was compelling." Compelling? Not so much. It beggars belief that Israel would withhold such "intelligence" from the US. And judging from the Congressional testimony of National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair on February 2, the US intelligence community sees the evidence as neither new nor compelling. The analysis and judgments of the November 2007 NIE were a product of the original ethos of CIA's intelligence directorate where the premium was on speaking without fear or favor - speaking truth to power. That estimate was like a breath of fresh air for those of us aware of the importance of that kind of integrity. Some of us proudly bear the retaliatory scars from administration officials, pundits and academics pushing agenda-shaped, alternative analyses. The supreme indignity was former CIA Director George Tenet's tenet that intelligence should be cooked to order - as was done in the September 2002 NIE regarding WMD in Iraq. That was, pure and simple, prostitution of our profession, and not very different from what John Yoo and his lawyer accomplices did to the legal profession in finding waterboarding and other acts of torture not torture. An Honest Estimate After a bottom-up investigation of all evidence on Iran's nuclear activities and plans, the November 2007 estimate boldly contradicted what President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their Israeli counterparts had been claiming about the imminence of a nuclear threat from Iran. Happily, courage was not limited to Tom Fingar, then chair of the National Intelligence Council, and those working under his supervision on the estimate. The most senior US military officers took the unusual step of insisting that the essence of the estimate's key judgments be made public. They calculated, correctly, that this would put a spike in the wheels of the juggernaut then rolling toward a fresh disaster - war with Iran. Recall that Adm. William Fallon, who became CENTCOM commander in March 2007, leaked to the press that there would be no attack on Iran "on my watch." Fallon was fired in March 2008. While not as outspoken as Fallon, his senior military colleagues shared his disdain for the dangerously simplistic views of Bush and Cheney on the use of military power. Among a handful of key judgments of the November 2007 NIE were these:
"-We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; But that was more than two years ago, you say. What about now? February 2010 In formal testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee on February 2, Blair wore out the subjunctive mood in addressing Iran's possible plans for a nuclear weapon. His paragraphs were replete with dependent clauses, virtually all of them beginning with "if." Blair repeated verbatim the 2007 judgment that Iran is "keeping the option open to develop nuclear weapons," and repeated the intelligence community's agnosticism on the $64 question: "We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons." Addressing the uranium enrichment plant at Qom, Blair pointed out that its small size and location under a mountain "fit nicely with a strategy of keeping the option open to build a nuclear weapon at some future date, if Tehran ever decides to do that." Such "advancements lead us to affirm our judgment from the 2007 NIE that Iran is technically capable of producing enough HEU [highly enriched uranium] for a weapon in the next few years, if it chooses to do so." Notably absent from Blair's testimony was the first "high confidence" judgment of the 2007 NIE that "in fall 2003 Iran halted its nuclear weapons program," and the "moderate confidence" assessment that Iran had not restarted it. These were the most controversial judgments in 2007. Blair did not disavow them; he just didn't mention them - probably in an attempt to let sleeping dogs lie. Less likely, Blair may have chosen to sequester for closed session any discussion of "recent evidence" bearing on these key judgments. It is likely that Blair was aware of the doubts that would be raised by Amano's IAEA report just two weeks later. Spreading Confusion As if the considered judgments of the intelligence community had no weight, US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice was quick to cite the IAEA report to charge that Iran is pursuing "a nuclear weapons program with the purpose of evasion." Presumably, she was merely repeating the talking points given to her boss a week ago on her way to the Middle East. Speaking a week ago in Qatar, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed her deep concern at "accumulating evidence" that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon - as though deterrence is a thing of the past. On the question of what kind of threat the "accumulating evidence" poses to the US, Clinton inadvertently spilled the beans. The evidence is deeply concerning, she said, not because it "directly threatens the United States, but it directly threatens a lot of our friends" - read Israel. Recall that Clinton is on record saying the she would "obliterate" Iran if it attacked Israel with a nuclear weapon. It is de rigueur never to mention the 200-300 nuclear weapons already in Israel's arsenal. Greg Thielmann, senior fellow at the Arms Control Association, noted that it would be far better if the US would stress that Iran's right to uranium enrichment, consistent with Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Article IV, is contingent on Iran's adherence to the treaty's Articles I, II and III. Thielmann noted that Iran has no inherent right to uranium enrichment while it is violating its Safeguards Agreement with the IAEA. Yet, this point is being lost by the West's unqualified emphasis on the demand that uranium enrichment be suspended, and inconsistent US statements about Iran's intention to develop nuclear weapons. Consequently, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can posture that the West is just trying to keep Iran down and deny it the rights guaranteed under the NPT. Deja Iraq All Over Again On June 5, 2008, then-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Jay Rockefeller made some remarkable comments that got sparse attention in the fawning corporate media in the United States. Announcing the findings of a bipartisan report of a multi-year study on misstatements on prewar intelligence on Iraq, Rockefeller said: "In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed."
For God's sake, spare us such "intelligence" on Iran.
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 Rogues Gone Wild By David Sirota Ah, the good old days when even a big shot like Gen. Al Haig could get in trouble for such mavericky declarations that defy basic constitutional precedents. In the 21st century, that's ancient history. We've so idealized cowboy-style rebellion in matters of war and law enforcement that "going Haig" is today honored as "going rogue." Defiance, irreverence, contempt-these are the moment's most venerated postures, no matter how destructive or lawless. The Bush administration's illegal wiretapping and torture sessions were the most obvious examples of the rogue sensibility on steroids. But then came McCain-Palin, a presidential ticket predicated almost singularly on the rogue brand. And now, even in the Obama era, that brand pervades. It began re-emerging in September with Gen. Stanley McChrystal's Afghan escalation plan. McChrystal didn't just ask President Barack Obama for more troops-protocol-wise, that would have been completely appropriate. No, McChrystal went rogue, pre-emptively leaking his request to the media, then delivering a public address telling Obama to immediately follow his orders. Incredibly, few politicians or pundits raised objections to McChrystal's behavior. Worse, rather than firing McChrystal, Obama meekly agreed to his demands, letting Americans know that when it comes to foreign policy, the rogue general-not the popularly elected president-is in control in the White House. Of course, while McChrystal's insubordination was extra-constitutional in spirit, he at least made the effort to obtain the commander in chief's rubber-stamp approval. The same cannot be said for the rogues inside Obama's Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). Recall that one year ago, Obama instructed the DEA to follow his campaign pledge and respect local statutes legalizing medicinal marijuana. When the DEA kept raiding pot dispensaries in states that had passed such laws, Attorney General Eric Holder reiterated the cease-and-desist decree, stating, "What [Obama] said during the campaign is now American policy." As even more raids nonetheless continued, the Justice Department then issued an explicit memo ordering federal agents to refrain from prosecuting those who are in "compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana." And yet the DEA has recently intensified its crackdown. Here in Colorado-where voters enshrined medical marijuana's legality in our state constitution-the feds not only raided two dispensaries, but did so in a way that deliberately humiliated their superiors. In January, the DEA stormed a company that performs cannabis quality tests. The firm's alleged infraction? Following protocol and formally applying for a federal equipment license. DEA rogues responded to the request not with thanks or-heaven forbid-approval, but instead with the gestapo. This was topped last week when DEA agents arrested a medical marijuana grower who dared discuss his business with a local news outlet. Sensing a PR opportunity, DEA agent Jeffrey Sweetin used the spectacle to insist that he will not listen to stand-down directives from his bosses. "The time is coming when we go into a dispensary, we find out what their profit is, we seize the building and we arrest everybody," Sweetin menacingly intoned. Once again, a rogue going wild and, once again, tacit acceptance. Rather than personnel changes reining in the out-of-control agency, the president has nominated the acting Bush-appointed DEA administrator, Michele Leonhart, to a full term.
The message, then, should be clear: If you're looking for who is "in control" of our military and police forces, don't look to the established chain of command and don't look to constitutional provisions that mandate civilian authority over the government bayonet. Look to the most reckless rogues-it's a good bet they're the ones running the show.
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The latest national poll shows that Americans of all political stripes overwhelmingly oppose the recent 5-4 decree by the Supremes to allow unlimited corporate spending in our elections. "Holy Thomas Jefferson," shouted 85 percent of Democrats to the pollsters - "No!" Likewise, 81 percent of independents said "No way." But get this - 76 percent of Republicans also joined in this emphatic national " uh-uh" to the Court's corporatization of our politics. Indeed, the decision was opposed by big majorities of all ages, education levels, and racial categories.
So, with eight out of ten Americans united in opposition to this gaping wound that the Court inflicted on our democracy, we can expect quick action by Congress to heal it. Right?
Uh... No. First, Republican leaders (who're ever-faithful, tail-wagging kowtowers to any whim of their corporate sponsors) have cheered this unleashing of special-interest money and will oppose any efforts to restrict it. Second, the Democrats' designated leader for dealing with the court's ruling is Sen. Chuck Schumer, a notorious corporate servant whose chief skill is rasing corporate campaign cash. Sending Schumer to restrain the political power of corporations is like going lion hunting with a flyswatter.
Sure enough, Schumer is not even considering a constitutional amendment to force these corporate powers out of our elections, instead offering a patchwork of regulatory bandaids to cover the wound - but not heal it. To get real action, we have to produce it ourselves. Connect with these two grassroots coalitions: FreeSpeechForPeople.org and MoveToAmend.org.
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The battle to control big profits by the health insurance and health care industry has dominated the news in the United States almost since President Barack Obama first stepped foot in the White House.
What few people realize is that what is happening in the US is only the tip of a massive iceberg kind of a conspiracy linked to something known as Codex Alimentarius, a global plan hatched within the United Nations to establish controls on the production, sale and use of food, food supplements, vitamins and minerals everywhere.
If the insurance lobby wins the health bill battle in America, and if big pharma succeeds in pushing legislation to enforce rules established under Codex Alimentarius, the people will not only be saddled with the high cost of health care, but they will be forced to use poisonous prescription drugs rather than natural home remedies in their quest to stay healthy.
The name Codex Alimentarius is a Latin phrase that simply means "food rules." The concept had its origins in 1962 when the United Nations created the Codex Alimentarius Commission (CAC) for the regulation and control of the production and sale of food and nutritional supplements to the consumer. At the heart of the commission was the interests of trade and the profits of multi-national corporations which were even then in the planning stages.
The plot thickened in 1995 when the United States and World Health Organization in conjunction with the then newly formed World Trade Organization named the UN Codex Alimentarius Commission as one of the recognized standard-setting bodies.
Some world leaders involved in the scheme might claim that the CAC was created with the best of intentions, although Big Pharma has quickly managed to bore its way into the organization, helping to outline its so-called "scientific research" and establish the policies that are now beginning to thread their way throughout Europe, Canada, the United States and other participating members of the United Nations.
The rules, that have already become law in some European countries, are designed to protect Big Pharma profits by prohibiting natural health products and treatments used by many people as an alternative to facing big doctor bills and prescription drug costs.
Canadians are currently facing the threat of a proposed new law known as C-51, introduced by the Canadian Minister of Health in 2008, that proposes sweeping changes to Canada's Food and Drugs Act. If adopted the act would outlaw up to 60 percent of natural health products now being sold in Canada and criminalize parents who give herbs or supplements to their children.
The Canadian proposal would substitute the words "therapeutic product" for the word "drug," and give the government broad powers to regulate the sale of all herbs, vitamins, supplements that would include bottled water, blueberries, dandelion greens and essentially all plant-derived substances commonly used for thousands of years as natural remedies. Thus anyone caught using roots, leaves or stems from plants to prepare a home-produced treatment for asthma, burns, bee stings or other health issues could be arrested and charged for violation of Canadian drug laws.
If you think that is just Canada's problem, think again. U.S. Senators John McCain of Arizona, last year's defeated Republican candidate for president, and Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota, have just introduced S-3002, a proposed bill that could eventually be named the Dietary Supplement Safety Act of 2010
While little is yet known about the contents of this proposed legislation, we are told it would amend the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act "to more effectively regulate dietary supplements that may pose safety risks unknown to consumers."
The bill would gut the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act that became law in 1994. That act stripped the Food and Drug Administration's powers over supplements.
Does this sound familiar? As with all bill proposals that go before the House and Senate, we must not let the title lull us into thinking we can trust our elected legislators to do what is right for the people. As they have clearly demonstrated throughout the battle over President Obama's proposed health care reform bill, most of them . . . and especially the Republicans . . . are clearly sold out to Big Pharma.
If the organized criminals now running Washington get their way, it will soon be a crime in America to rub juice from an aloe vera leaf on a burn to ease the pain.
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Business ethics has become an oxymoron. Wall Street bonuses were up 17 percent to over $20 billion in 2009, the year taxpayers bailed out the financial sector after its meltdown. So, everyone has many reasons to hate the banking and financial sectors that dumped our economy, and the general corruption of American politics by corporate interests. There are good reasons to detest the pharmaceutical industry. Besides raping people with onerous prices for prescription drugs, corporate greed coupled with ineffective government regulation and oversight is actually killing Americans through unsafe drugs.
Enter the newest fiasco, that sweetly named diabetes drug Avandia, so heavenly sounding, yet now revealed to be just another in a long history of drugs that get government approval but turn out to be lethal. According to Bloomberg News: "Safety reviewers at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration urged the agency to take GlaxoSmithKline Plc's diabetes drug Avandia off the market in 2008 because they said it was causing 500 additional heart attacks per month." A month! The drug was linked to 304 deaths during the third quarter of 2009, which implies many thousands of deaths to date.
Consider these depressing developments. In recent years, pharmaceutical companies have committed acts that forced them to pay the largest criminal fines in American history. In cases involving Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Bristol Myers Squibb and four other drug companies, these fines and penalties have totaled over $7 billion since May 2004. That is an amazing number, but in comparison to drug industry profits, merely a pittance.
In particular, Pfizer has been fined multiple times in the past 6 years for illegal off-label promotion of their drugs. In its latest plea agreement, which took place last September, Pfizer paid $2.3 billion in fines and penalties for off-label promotion of Bextra. This settlement was the largest criminal fine in US history. Clearly, this kind of corporate behavior requires diligent oversight by the Food and Drug Administration to protect Americans and to ensure the safety of American medicine. Yet this newest Avandia outrage proves, yet again, that the federal government is failing people.
The Senate Finance Committee has just released a report and a letter to the FDA. They have revealed that the FDA itself estimated that the drug caused approximately 83,000 excess heart attacks between 1999 and 2007. "Americans have a right to know there are serious health risks associated with Avandia and GlaxoSmithKline had a responsibility to tell them. Patients trust drug companies with their health and their lives and GlaxoSmithKline abused that trust," said Senator Max Baucus.
The Senate committee started their investigation after the New England Journal of Medicine published a study in May 2007 warning of the possible cardiovascular risk of Avandia. Avandia entered the market in 1999 and reached annual revenue of $3 billion by 2006, including sales of a combination drug that includes Avandia. Sales plummeted to $1.2 billion in 2009, two years after that study was published which linked Avandia to a 43 percent increased risk of heart attack. Before that the drug was the company's second best selling drug, and they did everything to protect sales, rather than users of the drug.
The Senate report provides incredible details on how the drug company pursued countless awful tactics to thwart many efforts to reveal to the public and the medical community just how unsafe Avandia is. The report notes: "The totality of evidence suggests that GSK was aware of the possible cardiac risks associated with Avandia years before such evidence became public.... Based on this knowledge, GSK had a duty to sufficiently warn patients and the FDA of its concerns in a timely manner. Instead, GSK executives intimidated independent physicians, focused on strategies to minimize findings that Avandia may increase cardiovascular risk, and sought ways to downplay findings that the rival drug ACTOS (pioglitazone) might reduce cardiovascular risk."
The company continues to fight to keep its drug in the market. You can imagine the army of lobbyists being used to safeguard the interests of drug companies. Other industries exhibit the same behavior, giving us widespread corporate pillage.
I and millions of other owners of Toyota vehicles cringe because, like so many other companies, it lost the capacity for telling the truth and protecting their consumers, and the federal government failed its oversight function. With 31 lobbyists in Washington last year, Toyota has spent nearly $25 million on federal regulatory and legislative lobbying matters in the last five years, much more than any other foreign automaker. Toyota's registered lobbyists include at least eight former officials from Congress and the executive branch and it employs former engineers and officials from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the regulatory agency that failed to detect a pattern of safety problems at Toyota.
Put aside the anti-government rhetoric of the Tea Party movement. The critical need is not for less government but for better government that really works in the public interest, especially protecting consumers from dastardly corporate powers. Until that happens it is not surprising that the recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that two-thirds of Americans are dissatisfied or angry about the federal government. Nearly 75 percent of independents feel this way. If you think that electing either Democrats or Republicans will fix broken government, think again. Both major parties are corrupted by corporate interests.
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O.K., the beast is starving. Now what? That's the question confronting Republicans. But they're refusing to answer, or even to engage in any serious discussion about what to do.
For readers who don't know what I'm talking about: ever since Reagan, the G.O.P. has been run by people who want a much smaller government. In the famous words of the activist Grover Norquist, conservatives want to get the government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."
But there has always been a political problem with this agenda. Voters may say that they oppose big government, but the programs that actually dominate federal spending - Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security - are very popular. So how can the public be persuaded to accept large spending cuts?
The conservative answer, which evolved in the late 1970s, would be dubbed "starving the beast" during the Reagan years. The idea - propounded by many members of the conservative intelligentsia, from Alan Greenspan to Irving Kristol - was basically that sympathetic politicians should engage in a game of bait and switch. Rather than proposing unpopular spending cuts, Republicans would push through popular tax cuts, with the deliberate intention of worsening the government's fiscal position. Spending cuts could then be sold as a necessity rather than a choice, the only way to eliminate an unsustainable budget deficit.
And the deficit came. True, more than half of this year's budget deficit is the result of the Great Recession, which has both depressed revenues and required a temporary surge in spending to contain the damage. But even when the crisis is over, the budget will remain deeply in the red, largely as a result of Bush-era tax cuts (and Bush-era unfunded wars). And the combination of an aging population and rising medical costs will, unless something is done, lead to explosive debt growth after 2020.
So the beast is starving, as planned. It should be time, then, for conservatives to explain which parts of the beast they want to cut. And President Obama has, in effect, invited them to do just that, by calling for a bipartisan deficit commission.
Many progressives were deeply worried by this proposal, fearing that it would turn into a kind of Trojan horse - in particular, that the commission would end up reviving the long-standing Republican goal of gutting Social Security. But they needn't have worried: Senate Republicans overwhelmingly voted against legislation that would have created a commission with some actual power, and it is unlikely that anything meaningful will come from the much weaker commission Mr. Obama established by executive order.
Why are Republicans reluctant to sit down and talk? Because they would then be forced to put up or shut up. Since they're adamantly opposed to reducing the deficit with tax increases, they would have to explain what spending they want to cut. And guess what? After three decades of preparing the ground for this moment, they're still not willing to do that.
In fact, conservatives have backed away from spending cuts they themselves proposed in the past. In the 1990s, for example, Republicans in Congress tried to force through sharp cuts in Medicare. But now they have made opposition to any effort to spend Medicare funds more wisely the core of their campaign against health care reform (death panels!). And presidential hopefuls say things like this, from Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota: "I don't think anybody's gonna go back now and say, Let's abolish, or reduce, Medicare and Medicaid."
What about Social Security? Five years ago the Bush administration proposed limiting future payments to upper- and middle-income workers, in effect means-testing retirement benefits. But in December, The Wall Street Journal's editorial page denounced any such means-testing, because "middle- and upper-middle-class (i.e., G.O.P.) voters would get less than they were promised in return for a lifetime of payroll taxes." (Hmm. Since when do conservatives openly admit that the G.O.P. is the party of the affluent?)
At this point, then, Republicans insist that the deficit must be eliminated, but they're not willing either to raise taxes or to support cuts in any major government programs. And they're not willing to participate in serious bipartisan discussions, either, because that might force them to explain their plan - and there isn't any plan, except to regain power.
But there is a kind of logic to the current Republican position: in effect, the party is doubling down on starve-the-beast. Depriving the government of revenue, it turns out, wasn't enough to push politicians into dismantling the welfare state. So now the de facto strategy is to oppose any responsible action until we are in the midst of a fiscal catastrophe. You read it here first.
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 Teach Your Children Well There Is No Law but Might and Murder By Chris Floyd This is the lesson that the United States government -- the government of the historic progressive, Barack Obama -- taught the children of America today: "Children, the law is nothing but a rag smeared with blood and shit. "It is only for suckers, rubes and losers. "Claw your way to the top -- by any means necessary -- and the law can never touch you. "This is the American way." Yes, as the Washington Post reports, the United States government announced today that there will be no penalties whatsoever for the lawyers who were ordered by their superiors, George Bush and Dick Cheney, to write memos "justifying" the tortures that Bush and Cheney wanted to unleash upon captives held indefinitely without charges, without evidence, without trial, without rights. Dick Cheney has openly confessed to instructing his pathetic little minions, his nasty little modern-day Vyshinksys, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, to write the scraps of paper of twisted legalese meant to pre-emptively exonerate the top officials of the United States government for the unambiguously criminal actions they were to inflict upon their uncharged, untried prisoners -- some of whom had actually been purchased, like slaves, from traffickers in human bodies -- around the world. Cheney boasts openly of supporting and facilitating torture techniques -- such as waterboarding -- which have historically been prosecuted as high crimes by American authorities, and are, in fact, capital crimes under the laws of the United States today. But on Friday, February 19, 2010, the administration of President Barack Obama declared that not only will it not prosecute the avowed and boastful perpetrators and accomplices of the capital crime of torture, it will not impose even the mildest of administrative or professional reprimands upon them. For the foulest of tortures, reaching even to murder, the government of the United States will do nothing: no investigation, no prosecution, no penalty. I have run out of words to describe how vile this is. The mind recoils against fully comprehending the moral depravity of our leaders -- and the reeking stench of their pious hypocrisy. "The kinge is in this worlde without lawe and maye at his own lust doo right and wronge and shall geve acomptes but to God only." Thus William Tyndale, in his 1528 work, Obedience of a Christian Man, helped usher in the doctrine of the "divine right of kings," overthrowing centuries of political, religious and philosophical thought and practice which had insisted that rulers too were fully subject to the law, as A.D. Nuttall points out. In support of the latter, he quotes Richard Hooker -- no radical, but a "profoundly traditional" churchman: "Where the lawe doth give dominion, who doubteth that the King who receiveth it is under the lawe?" (Shakespeare The Thinker, p. 140.)
But in our degenerate day, Hooker's reasonable formulation has been waterboarded into oblivion, and we are back to Tyndale's cringing doctrine. Our bipartisan kinges are indeed without lawe: no penalty, no punishment for these vile malefactors, these barbaric abusers and corrupters of our children.
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 Herding Cats By Case Wagonvoord There has been a lot written about the "War on the Middle Class," an unfortunate choice of words. Granted, the middle class is certainly under siege, but to call it a "war" is misleading. War needs a central command and a central strategy. What we have, instead, is an ooligarchical lynch mob, an example of monkey-see-monkey-do, all in the name of maximizing profits. And the maximization of profits is the sole measure by which our oligarchs measure the economic health of America. They crow over the fact that productivity increased by 9.5 percent in the third quarter of 2009 and that 78 percent of the companies in the S&P 500 exceeded earning expectations. All of these glowing reports of "better than expected earnings" are meaningless in light of the fact that a contributing factor to these increased earning has been a 5.2 percent reduction in unit labor costs thanks to the off-shoring jobs and the use of foreign workers. So, the increase in productivity has not seen a corresponding increase in wages. Had wages kept pace with productivity, the minimum wage would now be somewhere in the neighborhood of $18 per hour. However, it must be remembered that our oligarchs would shed no tears over the demise of the middle class with its periodic outbreaks of reform mania that brought us an end to child labor laws, the civil rights movement, reforms in the treatment of the mentally ill, a regulated food and drug industry and scores of antismoking legislation, all of which have cut into to corporate profits. It is true that the modern day reforms have become trivialized with the contemporary emphasis on such nonissues as second-hand smoke, childhood obesity and the elimination of transfats from restaurant menus. Of course, our oligarchs are four-square behind these reforms since they divert the middle class's attention away from core issues such as the erosion of our civil liberties and the militarization of America. The media loves to market the lie that we are the "richest nation in the world." How can a nation be rich when its total corporate, private and public indebtedness equals 350% of it s GDP? Sorry fellows, but debt isn't wealth as millions are discovering as their homes go underwater. Now American is suffering from "new-age" poverty in which one is poor because one does not have access to credit. Some call the elimination of the middle class economic terrorism. I call it economic stupidity. The middle class has long been the backbone of the consumer spending that made up 70 percent of our GDP. The only thing that could possibly replace it is total war, which might give us a clue as to the direction in which we're heading. Our oligarchs have one unifying factor working for them that progressives don't, and that is greed. Just as a lynch mob is an undisciplined collection of individuals focused on a single victim, so is our oligarchy an undisciplined collection of individuals focused on a single objective, the bottom line. The more labor costs are slashed, the better the bottom line looks. And if the middle class is destroyed in the process, it's all the better. That means an end to pesky reform movements.
History isn't planned; it just happens that way. And if we don't like the way it's happening then the solution is to make it happen another way. It's kind of like herding cats. You never know where it's gong to end up.
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 Bob Moore, An Inspiration To Middle America By Mike Folkerth Good Morning Middle America, your King of Simple News is on the air. I have continually suggested that the only possibility of patching the hole in our sinking economy is to produce the goods and services in America that Americans consume every day. Such activity has been found in conclusive laboratory tests to prevent unemployment. Why would we ever import food in a country is that is quite capable of producing food aplenty for one and all? Why would we buy our clothing from foreign sources when we have thousands upon thousands of people who would gladly work in the textile and clothing manufacturing industries? One example that I have given is the need to restore local bakeries who utilize local flour and grains in their process. Why ship bread 300 miles from a mega automated bakery when the local folks are more than capable of producing those same baked goods locally? Price comes to mind. When a multimillion dollar machine can mix, bake, and package baked goods without being touched by human hands...it's cheaper and corporate profits are higher. Our lives are then patterned in accordance with producing higher corporate profits gained by creating cheaper goods regardless of the long term consequences to Middle America. It's the law of intended consequences at work. If it were possible to ship fresh bread here from China and to then shut down even the mega bakeries in the U.S., consider that it would have already been done. What I'm saying is that there are two very different America's; the ones who are programmed in our finest universities to create greater corporate profits and the ones who suffer daily from the cumulative effects of that impossible folly. Not everyone in the United States worships at the altar of corporate profits. Not everyone is blind to the ruination of operating their lives based on the greatest amount of personal gain. If in fact, we had had people such as 81 year old Bob Moore steering our economic futures, America would be a very different place. Note the nature of the business in the following video and listen carefully to what Mr. Moore has to say. Please take the time to view this video. It is the key to our survival.
If you don't have streaming video capability, you can read this wonderful story here.
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 Boycott FedEx By Chris Hedges Dean Henderson's career with FedEx ended abruptly when a reckless driver plowed into his company truck and mangled his leg. His doctor will decide this week if it needs to be amputated. No longer able to drive, stripped of value in our commodity culture, he was tossed aside by the company. He became human refuse. He spends most of his days, because of the swelling and the pain, with his leg raised on a recliner in the tiny apartment in Fairfax, Va., he shares with his stepsister. He struggles without an income and medical insurance, and he fears his future. Henderson is not alone. Workers in our corporate state earn little when they work-Henderson made $18 an hour-and they are abandoned when they can no longer contribute to corporate profits. It is the ethic of the free market. It is the cost of unfettered capitalism. And it is plunging tens of millions of discarded workers into a collective misery and rage that is beginning to manifest itself in a dangerous right-wing backlash. "This happened while I was wearing their uniform and driving one of their company vehicles," Henderson, a 40-year-old military veteran, told me. "My foot is destroyed. I have a fused ankle. I have had over a dozen surgeries. It hurts to wear a sock. I was limping pretty badly, but in the spring of 2008 FedEx said I had to come back to work and sit in a chair. It saved them money on workers' compensation payments. I worked a call center job and answered telephones. I did that for three months. I had my ankle fused in January 2009, and then FedEx fired me. I was discarded. They washed their hands of me and none of this was my fault." Our destitute working class is beginning to grasp that Barack Obama and other elected officials in Washington, who speak in a cloying feel-your-pain language, are liars. They are not attempting to prevent wages from sinking, unemployment from mounting, foreclosures from ripping apart communities, banks from looting the U.S. Treasury or jobs from being exported. The gap between our stark reality and the happy illusions peddled by smarmy television news personalities and fatuous academic and financial experts, as well as oily bureaucrats and politicians, is becoming too wide to ignore. Those cast aside are reaching out to anyone, no matter how buffoonish or ignorant, who promises that the parasites and courtiers who serve the corporate state will disappear. Right-wing rage is being fused with right-wing populism. And once this takes hold, a protofascism will sweep across our blighted landscape fueled by a mounting personal and economic despair. Take a look at Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here." It is a good window into what awaits us. "One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out," the philosopher Richard Rorty warns in his book "Achieving Our Country." "Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words 'nigger' and 'kike' will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet." Whoever rides to power on the back of this rage will swiftly broker a deal with corporations and corporate overlords. But by then it will be too late. Dissent will become a form of treason. The security state will be quickly cemented in place. The bankrupt liberal class, which abandoned the working class and the fight for basic civil liberties, will be reviled, discredited and impotent. America will develop its own peculiar form of Christian fascism. Obama, entranced with power and prestige, is more interested in courting the elite than saving the disenfranchised. The president, when asked to name a business executive he admires, cited Frederick Smith of FedEx, although Smith is a union-busting Republican. Smith, who was a member of Yale's secret Skull & Bones Society along with George W. Bush, served as John McCain's finance chair. I guess Obama is hoping for some cash. And Smith has a lot of it. He founded FedEx in 1971, and the company had more than $35 billion in revenue in the fiscal year that ended in May. Smith is rich and powerful, but there is no ethical system, religious or secular, that would hold him up as a man worthy of emulation. Those who make vast profits at the expense of workers and the common good are not moral. They are not worthy of adulation. They build fortunes and little monuments to themselves off the pain and suffering of people like Henderson. Jesus called them "vipers." "He's an example of somebody who is thinking long term," the president said of Smith in an interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, adding that he "really enjoyed talking" with him at a Feb. 4 White House luncheon. Smith does think in the long term. His company lavished money on members of Congress in 1996 so they would vote for an ad hoc change in the law banning the Teamsters Union from organizing workers at Federal Express. A few stalwarts in the Senate, including Edward Kennedy (in a speech reprinted in the Congressional Record on Oct. 1, 1996) and his then-colleague Paul Simon, denounced the obvious. The company had bought its legislative exemption. Most members of Congress, then as now, had become corporate employees. "I think we have to honestly ask ourselves, why is Federal Express being given preferential treatment in this body now?" Sen. Simon said at the time. "I think the honest answer is Federal Express has been very generous in their campaign contributions." Following the Senate vote, a company spokesman was quoted as saying, "We played political hardball, and we won." What happened to our historical memory? How did we forget that those who built our democracy and protected American workers were not men like Smith, who use power and money to further the parochial and selfish interests of the elite, but the legions of embattled strikers in the coal fields, on factory floors and in steel mills that gave us unions, decent wages and the 40-hour workweek. How was it possible in 1947 to pass the Taft-Hartley Labor Act, which, in one deft move, emasculated the labor movement? How is it possible that it remains in force? Union workers, who at times paid with their lives, halted the country's enslavement to the rich and the greedy. And now that unions have been broken, rapacious corporations like FedEx and toadies in Congress and the White House are turning workers into serfs. UPS is unionized. It is the largest employer of the Teamsters. Labor costs, because of the union, account for almost two-thirds of its operating expenses. But Smith spends only a third of his costs on labor. There is something very wrong with a country that leaves a worker like Henderson sitting most of the day in a tiny apartment in excruciating pain and fighting off depression while his billionaire former boss is feted as a man of vision and invited to lunch at the White House. A country that stops taking care of its own, that loses the capacity for empathy and compassion, that crumples up human beings and throws them away when it is done with them, feeds dark ideological monsters that inevitably rise to devour the body politic. FedEx is busy making sure Congress keeps unions out of its shops. It has lavished $17 million, double its 2008 total, on Congress to fight off an effort by UPS and the Teamsters to revoke Smith's tailor-made ban on unions. Smith, again thinking "long term," plans to continue to hire thousands of full-time employees and list them as independent contractors. If his workers are listed as independent contractors he does not have to pay Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance taxes. And when they get sick or injured or old he can push them onto the street. Henderson says FedEx treats its equipment as shabbily as its employees. There's no difference between trucks and people to corporations that view everything as a commodity. Corporations exploit human beings and equipment and natural resources until exhaustion or collapse. They are cannibals. "The trucks are a liability," Henderson said. "They are junk. The tires are bald. The engines cut out. There are a lot of mechanical problems. The roofs leak. They wobble and pull to one side or the other. The heating does not work. And the company pushes its employees in the same way. The first Christmas I was there I worked 13 hours without a break and without anything to eat. It is dangerous. I could have fallen asleep at the wheel and injured someone."
If you have to send packages do not be a scab. Send it with UPS or the U.S. Postal Service. They have unions. Every step, however tiny, we take to thwart the corporate rape of the country and protect workers counts. We would have to do more, much more, but this would be a small start. Like Smith, our politicians have sold their souls. They will not help us. We must help ourselves. And the longer we stand by and permit the Democrats and the Republicans to strip American workers of their jobs and their dignity the less we will have to say when the day of angry retribution arrives.
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 This Is Liberalism? By David Michael Green You gotta hand it to the agents of the regressive right for playing the weakest imaginable hand so well. I'm talking about the Lee Atwaters and Frank Luntzs of the world, who both understand human psychology (read fear) and are absolutely pitiless about employing it for purposes of assisting the rich and powerful in raping the rest of us. If you can get past the absolute amoral viciousness of these sociopaths, you have to admire their handiwork at some level. (Oh, wait a minute: correction. Lee Atwater actually did apologize for some of his crimes against humanity. Of course, it was on his death bed.) These guys are good. They understand the necessity of remaking the world when the actual one we live in would never dream of embracing their destructive initiatives. These guys could not only sell ice to Eskimoes, they could peddle dirt to an ant colony. They could market garbage at the county dump. They could sell crap to the local sewer district. We know this, because they do it all the time. The entire regressive agenda is based on lies, most of them both whopping in scale and utterly transparent to any remotely sentient human being. How, then, has it succeeded so well these last thirty years? There are many answers to that question, including, especially, the collapse in confidence of alternative ideologies, the wholesale, marked-down-today-only, outright purchase of the Democratic Party by corporate interests, and the stunning derogation of duty by the mainstream media. But one key answer involves the work of these masters at the marketing of deceit. And one of their greatest achievements has been to pick up the whole ideological playing field and move it about a thousand miles to the right. This is what I mean by remaking reality. They've created a whole new normal. And in this new normal, anything to the left of Dick Cheney is liberal, if not far left. And that, of course, includes the hated Barack Obama sitting like some squatter in their White House. As it happens, I hate Barack Obama, too. And my reasons for doing so are piling up fast. But I would never mistake him for a liberal. And that, in fact, is one of the things I most despise about this disastrous fool of a president. I couldn't possibly care less what happens to him, other than hoping for fate to return the favor after all he's done (and, especially, failed to do) to the country he promised to rescue. But I do care about progressivism (or liberalism, if one prefers - I typically avoid that term now that the Atwaters and Luntzs have turned it into something slightly less hated than pedophilia), and I'm furious that this pathetic president and his horrid little whorehouse of a political party, who are about as liberal as George W. Bush was, are taking down the political ideas I care about with their own sinking ship. By not refuting the false accusations that he is a liberal or even a socialist, and by running an abysmal presidency, Obama has done as much as the scum on the right in service to wrecking a set of ideas that are not only noble and correct, but are desperately needed now by a country imploding under the weight of the regressive politics which has been ascendant for thirty years now. Worst of all - and quite by design - Americans are forgetting what any sort of progressive politics would even actually look like. Orwell understood the significance of this phenomenon so well he made it the existential nightmare of his protagonist, Winston Smith. All Winston wanted to do was to hold onto some sense of a tangible reality. O'Brien, his torturer, showed him what happens when power not only wants to win battles, but better yet end them forever by eliminating the very opposing ideas people might embrace. In that spirit, it's well to remember what a progressive America might actually look like, and how different that is from the botched abortion of bogus liberalism that is supposed to be Democratic Party policy today. Let's start with what the Democrats - who, after all, control the government - should have started with: the economy. People are miserable and frightened today because they have so much job insecurity. The so-called liberals in Washington provided them with a 'jobs summit' as a remedy. And then there was that amazing stimulus bill that was one-third tax cut sop for Republicans (who still wouldn't vote for it), mostly otherwise pork barrel legislation for the benefit of members of Congress, and still too small anyhow to do much good. The right has been apoplectic ever since, calling it the socialist takeover of America. Hell, it wasn't even remotely liberal. A real progressive solution would have been big, and would have involved government spending to stimulate the economy and create jobs, either directly on the government payroll, or through incentives to the private sector. In reality, the Democratic plan has failed to revive the economy - not because it was progressive but, quite the contrary, because it wasn't remotely so. The same is true with respect to what got us into this mess. Conservative catechism teaches that regulation is evil. Like Satan. And Saddam. Real progressives understand that it is entirely necessary. Take it away and greedy pigs masquerading as human beings will sell their own children for a buck, discounting them on a volume deal if you buy the whole brood. Even after the experience of the Great Depression, regressive predators couldn't satiate their greed enough, so they dismantled the regulatory structure of the mid-twentieth century that had brought prosperity to so many Americans. That old system was real liberalism, ladies and gentlemen. Calling what Obama or Bill Clinton have done by that name is an insult to the intelligence of people everywhere (even in America, where it is so scarce). Clinton was absolutely no less a friend to corporate America than Ronald Reagan, and Obama has made zero serious attempt to outlaw the very practices that got us into the economic nightmare we're digging out from now, while simultaneously rescuing the Wall Street pigs from the destructive fruits of their own greed. That's liberal? Who messed with my dictionary while I was napping? The same is true of government spending. Obama is now proposing cuts to federal spending, a pretty unliberal thing to do. He wants all those cuts to come from the domestic side, and none at all from an astonishingly bloated military budget that dwarfs the combined total of every other country in the world. A real progressive would spend money on people, not on more weapons crack to feed the 'defense' contractors' insatiable addictions. Now Obama is pushing his 'bipartisan' deficit-cutting commission, to be led by Erskine Bowles, a Clinton hack, and Alan Simpson, a Reagan-era regressive whack job. Guess how that's gonna turn out? Look at what supposedly constitutes 'socialized medicine' for another great example of the total disconnect between rhetoric and reality that regressive mythmakers have so successfully fabricated. The Democratic plan is a complete exercise in idiocy for one reason and one reason only. It twists itself into pretzel-like contortions in order to avoid confronting the simple basic problem at the core of the country's health care woes: the useless and parasitic private insurance industry inserted between the public and their health care delivery. These racketeers provide absolutely no value added whatsoever, but suck up one-third of every dollar spent on health care. What a coincidence that we spend about exactly that much more per capita than any other country in the world, and still die younger. A progressive plan would do what almost every other developed country has successfully done for decades, and simply nationalize health care. What the supposedly liberal/socialist Democrats are doing instead is proposing to massively expand the great insurance scam by forcing thirty or forty million Americans to buy insurance from these profiteers or get fined for failing to do so. Sorry. That's about as liberal as the electric chair. And about as health-inducing too. Energy policy provides another great example. Big Daddy Liberal in the White House is running around the country nowadays flacking for nuclear power, proposing billions in federal loan guarantees to underwrite a dangerous technology that is not even economically feasible without government assistance. Jackson Browne must be spinning in his grave, and he's not even dead yet. If nuclear power is the liberal answer to energy questions, then Sarah Palin is a giant of political philosophy. But since Palin, The Great Defender Against Rampaging Ruskies, couldn't tell Putin from pet food, non-zombies amongst us can also agree that a liberal energy policy would look a lot more like a giant national effort to develop alternative fuel sources than the reinvigoration of the one kind of energy production liberals absolutely hate the most. The question of civil liberties provides another spot-on example. Remember how the elder Bush won office by trashing his hapless opponent as a card-carrying member of the ACLU? Well, this White House has made almost no serious departures from the human rights horrors promulgated by Junior Bush. Obama says we don't torture. Guess what? So did Bush. Obama says he wants to close Guantánamo, but hasn't. Guess what? So did the Cowboy Caligula. Obama has also kept and in some cases extended a plethora of the Texas Torquemada's policies, ranging from indefinite detention to rendition for sub-contracted torture to state secrets to executive authority and beyond. For all this - which is nearly identical to the little shop of horrors that Cheney ran - Obama's 'liberal' national security policies are being regularly trashed by regressives as left-wing capitulation to terrorists, not least by the monster himself, Dick "Dick" Cheney. You have to be insane to think this is liberalism. I guarantee you they're not popping champagne corks in the ACLU offices across the country in celebration of the new respect-for-civil-liberties sheriff come to town. It's true that Obama and the Democrats have talked about ending Don't Ask Don't Tell. That's pretty impressive, eh? They're so liberal that they're now, er, coming up right behind Colin Powell, Bob Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Now there's a crop o' radical lefties for you. You could organize a pretty good Maoist revolutionary cell with that lot, I'll tell ya. And, of course, the emphasis remains on the term "talked about". That's all he's done so far. Obama also talked about closing Gitmo. In fact, he promised us he would do it in a year. Didn't happen. He talked about bringing new transparency to Washington, especially in the health care negotiations. Didn't happen. He talked about leaning on the Israelis to stop building settlements in the West Bank. They just built more and he did nothing. Are you getting the picture here? Obama talking about civil rights for gays literally puts him on the same moral and ideological plane as Dick Cheney, who - because his daughter is a lesbian - actually has similar politics on this issue as the current president. Do I need to mention that Ol' Dick is not the most liberal fellow to be found in America? But speaking of liberals, do you remember them ever clamoring for more war? Remember back in the Nam days. Weren't the liberals on the side of ending the war? Remember in 2003. Weren't liberals trying to block the Bush thugs from invading Iraq? This president has massively escalated the American military presence in Afghanistan, while also significantly increasing the use of drone missile attacks in Pakistan. Maybe I need to lay off the Boone's Farm for a little while, 'cause I'm feeling kinda confused. I always thought the liberals were the anti-war crowd. We could go on and on here, folks. The current Democratic government in Washington bears no resemblance whatsoever to liberalism. We know this, because we know what a real progressive government would actually do. It would spend a pile of money to create jobs and stimulate the economy. It would regulate economic actors so that they served the public interest or were instead promptly disappeared. It would create a universal, publicly-funded, national health care plan. It would launch a major initiative to create a new alternative energy industry. It would resurrect the Bill of Rights and restore human rights to the American legal system. It would act immediately to guarantee that all people were subject to equal treatment, regardless of their sexual orientation. It would be searching for political solutions to the conflict in Afghanistan and bringing troops home, rather than escalating the war. This is what real liberalism would look like in America today, and this is not remotely comparable to what the so-called liberals in Washington are actually doing. None of it is, let alone all of it. It's really quite amazing. First, because of how regressive Obama has turned out to be. In all honesty, I cannot think of a single serious policy or action by this president that could be genuinely called liberal, with perhaps the possible exception of reversing the Republican clamp-down on stem cell research and on overseas abortion counseling (yet he's also been simultaneously selling out abortion rights at home in legislating the health care debacle). I mean it. Obama may be a stylistic breath of fresh air after Bush (but, then, a rotting corpse would be, too) - but substantively, he's little short of W's third term. In fact, Bush was even more progressive than Obama if you compare their two signature health care initiatives. One of those two guys came up with a plan to massively increase government-provided benefits to the public. (Shhh! That's called socialism.) Guess, what? It wasn't Obama. But what's really amazing is how Obama is broadly perceived as being a liberal. This is just yet another framing victory by the right, and one of stunning proportions. By erroneously tagging Obunkster with the bleeding-heart liberal moniker, they manage to simultaneously tear him down, make liberalism unpalatable to the public, and shift the center of political gravity so far starboard that even a right-wing president like Obummer and his band of Democratic merry men become unacceptable because they are insufficiently regressive. Like I said, you have to admire these guys for their craft. You know. Just like you have to admire the Holocaust for its good ol' German efficiency. Meanwhile, though, it's scary that America has so little in the way of a real progressive option in our politics. It's scary that those politicians who are today widely considered to be liberal are in fact mostly deeply regressive. And it's scary that we keep following the same right-wing prescriptions, decade in and decade out, even though they have done nothing but wreck the planet, wreck the country, and wreck the lives of individual Americans. But what is really scary is that we are now losing the capacity to even contemplate what a progressive set of politics would look like. These ideas are now so marginalized that people increasingly can't even conceive of them anymore. Orwell would be horrified.
Comrade O'Brien would be very proud indeed.
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Dear Uberfuhrer Inhofe, 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, Ralph Nader, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Prescott Bush, Fredo Bush, Vidkun Quisling and last year's winner Volksjudge Sonia (get whitey) Sotomayor. Without your lock step calling for the repeal of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, your many and varied attempts to cover up global warming so our corpo-rat puppet masters can make a killing, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and those many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Republican 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 Iron Cross, first class with diamond clusters presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Obama at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker," formally the "White House," on 03-15-2010. We salute you Herr Inhofe, Sieg Heil!
Signed by, Heil Obama |
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There's a major political fraud underway: the GOP is once again donning their libertarian, limited-government masks in order to re-invent itself and, more important, to co-opt the energy and passion of the Ron-Paul-faction that spawned and sustains the "tea party" movement. The Party that spat contempt at Paul during the Bush years and was diametrically opposed to most of his platform now pretends to share his views. Standard-issue Republicans and Ron Paul libertarians are as incompatible as two factions can be -- recall that the most celebrated right-wing moment of the 2008 presidential campaign was when Rudy Giuliani all but accused Paul of being an America-hating Terrorist-lover for daring to suggest that America's conduct might contribute to Islamic radicalism -- yet the Republicans, aided by the media, are pretending that this is one unified, harmonious, "small government" political movement.
The Right is petrified that this fraud will be exposed and is thus bending over backwards to sustain the myth. Paul was not only invited to be a featured speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference but also won its presidential straw poll. Sarah Palin endorsed Ron Paul's son in the Kentucky Senate race. National Review is lavishly praising Paul, while Ann Coulter "felt compelled [in her CPAC speech] to give a shout out to Paul-mania, saying she agreed with everything he stands for outside of foreign policy -- a statement met with cheers." Glenn Beck -- who literally cheered for the Wall Street bailout and Bush's endlessly expanding surveillance state -- now parades around as though he shares the libertarians' contempt for them. Red State's Erick Erickson, defending the new so-called conservative "manifesto," touts the need for Congress to be confined to the express powers of Article I, Section 8, all while lauding a GOP Congress that supported countless intrusive laws -- from federalized restrictions on assisted suicide, marriage, gambling, abortion and drugs to intervention in Terri Schiavo's end-of-life state court proceeding -- nowhere to be found in that Constitutional clause. With the GOP out of power, Fox News suddenly started featuring anti-government libertarians such as John Stossel and Reason Magazine commentators, whereas, when Bush was in power, there was no government power too expanded or limitless for Fox propagandists to praise.
This is what Republicans always do. When in power, they massively expand the power of the state in every realm. Deficit spending and the national debt skyrocket. The National Security State is bloated beyond description through wars and occupations, while no limits are tolerated on the Surveillance State. Then, when out of power, they suddenly pretend to re-discover their "small government principles." The very same Republicans who spent the 1990s vehemently opposing Bill Clinton's Terrorism-justified attempts to expand government surveillance and executive authority then, once in power, presided over the largest expansion in history of those very same powers. The last eight years of Republican rule was characterized by nothing other than endlessly expanded government power, even as they insisted -- both before they were empowered and again now -- that they are the standard-bearers of government restraint.
What makes this deceit particularly urgent for them now is that their only hope for re-branding and re-empowerment lies in a movement -- the tea partiers -- that has been (largely though not exclusively) dominated by libertarians, Paul followers, and other assorted idiosyncratic factions who are hostile to the GOP's actual approach to governing. This is a huge wedge waiting to be exposed -- to explode -- as the modern GOP establishment and the actual "small-government" libertarians that fuel the tea party are fundamentally incompatible. Right-wing mavens like Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin and National Review are suddenly feigning great respect for Ron Paul and like-minded activists because they're eager that the sham will be maintained: the blatant sham that the modern GOP and its movement conservatives are a coherent vehicle for those who believe in small government principles. The only evidence of a passionate movement urging GOP resurgence is from people whose views are antithetical to that Party. That's the dirty secret which right-wing polemicists are desperately trying to keep suppressed. Credit to Mike Huckabee for acknowledging this core incompatibility by saying he would not attend CPAC because of its "increasing libertarianism."
These fault lines began to emerge when Sarah Palin earlier this month delivered the keynote speech to the national tea party conference in Nashville, and stood there spitting out one platitude after the next which Paul-led libertarians despise: from neoconservative war-loving dogma and veneration of Israel to glorification of "War on Terror" domestic powers and the need of the state to enforce Palin's own religious and cultural values. Neocons (who still overwhelmingly dominate the GOP) and Paul-led libertarians are archenemies, and the social conservatives on whom the GOP depends are barely viewed with greater affection. Sarah Palin and Ron Paul are about as far apart on most issues as one can get; the "tea party movement" can't possibly be about supporting each of their worldviews. Moreover, the GOP leadership is currently promising Wall Street even more loyal subservience than Democrats have given in exchange for support, thus bolstering the government/corporate axis which libertarians find so repugnant. And Coulter's manipulative claim that she "agrees with everything [Paul] stands for outside of foreign policy" is laughable; aside from the fact that "foreign policy" is a rather large issue in our political debates (Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan, Iran, Russia), they were on exactly the opposite sides of the most intense domestic controversies of the Bush era: torture, military commissions, habeas corpus, Guantanamo, CIA secrecy, telecom immunity, and warrantless eavesdropping.
Part of why this fraud has been sustainable thus far is that libertarians -- like everyone who doesn't view all politics through the mandated, distorting, suffocating Democrat v. GOP prism -- are typically dismissed as loons and nuts, and are thus eager for any means of achieving mainstream acceptance. Having the GOP embrace them is one way to achieve that (Karl Rove: some "see the tea party movement as a recruiting pool for volunteers for Ron Paul's next presidential bid . . . . The Republican Party and the tea party movement have many common interests"). Additionally, just as the Paul-faction of libertarians is in basic harmony with many progressives on issues of foreign policy and civil liberties, they do subscribe to the standard GOP rhetoric on domestic spending, social programs and the like.
But that GOP limited government rhetoric is simply never matched by that Party's conduct, especially when they wield power. The very idea that a political party dominated by neocons, warmongers, surveillance fetishists, and privacy-hating social conservatives will be a party of "limited government" is absurd on its face. There literally is no myth more transparent than the Republican Party's claim to believe in restrained government power. For that reason, it's only a matter of time before the fundamental incompatibility of the "tea party movement" and the political party cynically exploiting it is exposed.
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Well, I do want as many of you as possible to participate in some way in our cross-country bike for peace. Some of you will ride, some of you will support, some of you will pray/chant/meditate for us and keep the positive vibrations with us while our core group is out there on the road. Well, if my first foray into training is any indication, we're--or more specifically--I'M--going to need all you have to share.
I'll start with the weather--a great day for a ride, although it started a bit cold, so I waited for the temperature to rise a bit. It did and so I got ready for a great ride. It went downhill from here.
I studiously bought all of the appurtenances of cycling: fancy bike rack for the car and since I have a girl's bike, the bar that fits across the bike to keep it on the rack; the camelback; the heart rate monitor; had my bike tuned up at the local bike store; had all the latest gadgets put on it, etc. It was too cold for my special bike shirt--of which I'll have to purchase quite a few more 'cause I can't imagine wearing the same one for two months!!--and why are they so expensive? So I wore my regular clothes in layers.
Unfortunately, it took me a while to figure out how to take the bike bar off the bike. Well, I should've known it was not going to be so smooth. I bought a fancy TREK cycle ops so I could practice-ride indoors and I NEVER got that contraption to work, so that's why this was my FIRST training session for the big ride. The cycle ops is still in my bedroom waiting for me to load it up, take it to the bike store, and maybe THEY can put the darn thing together.
Then, the camelback was so complicated, I chucked it for a regular plain old water bottle which kept getting caught in my unstrapped pantsleg, along with the fancy airpump lodged just above it. Even though the heart rate monitor was brand new, it didn't work, so I pulled out my instructions, read them carefully, and figured it must be a dead battery. Now, I'm on my way to the store to get a battery. The fancy odometer/timer/speedometer was the next fiasco. I think I finally got it programmed after I completed the ride!! Hey, I thought the bike store would make sure all the settings were right!!! So, I pulled on my new biking gloves and by this time was ready to actually get on the bike.
Then came the mapping fiasco--since the bridge was out and I had to take a detour. I had studiously chosen to "cheat" a little bit by selecting a route that was relatively flat. That was a good thing. However, the detour was anything but flat!! I found myself rather quickly calling on the Ancestors for help to get up the first hill. By the third hill, very long and very steep, I decided that I needed to retry this in the morning, taking into account the detour, and come up with another route. How am I going to cross the Sierra Nevada if I can't make it up a hill?? For the documentarians, this might turn into a comedy as well as an adventure! On the real ride, I know I'll have great moral support, experienced yet considerate riders, plus the mapping has already been done. You can see the route here, including rest stops and everything.
My first outing fiasco was compounded by "bicycle unfriendly," plus too much, traffic. Tomorrow morning, I will try again. New route, new battery in my heart rate monitor, odometer/speedometer settings all correct, appropriately layered clothing, tires filled with the right amount of air, and the will to make it to my destination this time.
Stay tuned. This promises to be a doozy!! And anyone who wants to ride with us, put the riders up overnight, make a donation to support our project plus the videographers who will be with us, please just let me know. I'll be doing updates regularly of my trainings and you'll be able to mark my progress as well as our progress along the route. It promises to be great fun, especially if we can keep our sense of humor. Hey, with me on this ride, we're going to need it.
So, now I queue up the Young Rascals, "It's a Beautiful Morning," in my iTunes playlist and anticipate my full ride tomorrow. I almost can't wait!! I hope you will enjoy this adventure with me and your suggestions are most certainly welcome!!
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http://dignity.ning.com/
Silence is the deadliest weapon of mass destruction.
~~~ R.J. Matson ~~~  |
It's nature's way of telling you something's wrong
It's nature's way of telling you, summer breeze
It's nature's way, it's nature's way
It's nature's way of telling you something's wrong 
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Parting Shots...
 My Two Cents By Will Durst I'm only guessing, but a major problem with being President has to be people around you being more likely to stick their face in a cast iron oscillating fan than tell you the truth. Let's say you slip and fall and rip a hole in your pants down to your ankle while spilling hot coffee on a little blind girl in a wheelchair in front of a nationally televised audience. The worst you could expect to hear from a staffer is "well, that could have gone better." Therefore, I consider it my patriotic duty to offer up a little unsolicited advice intended for the President's Eyes Only. Yo. Barack. Dude. You should totally chill. And listen up. Why? Cuz I can tell you the stuff that Mister Chaff of Staff Rahm Emanuel can't. And I won't go all ballistic on your butt or singe your receptionist's eardrums either. First thing. Don't worry so much about the Republicans. They're going to do what they're going to do. You don't even enter into the equation. Expect to be accused of everything. All the way from "done nothing at all" to "moved too quickly" and all permutations in between. At least you always know where these guys are coming from. From behind and in front and 16 different sides- throwing knives of negativity. It's your so- called friends you need to watch out for. The ones who smile and nod and laugh at your jokes to cover the slip of a shiv between your third and fourth ribs on the left side. Trust me, with friends like these, you don't need Richard Shelby. Unfortunately, most of your buddies are Democrats. Which is a lot like saying most of a general's fighting force is terra cotta. The difference being terra cotta soldiers don't cut and run so fast they leave little puffs of cartoon smoke. The second thing is, you need to develop an "or else." Work with you, or what? Or Joe Biden sits next to you in the Congressional dining room and cuts your meat every day for a week? Lyndon Johnson plucked at the horsehair holding up the sword of Damocles for his "or else." Walk the line or find yourself whisked back to your home district as a clerk in Park and Rec's lost and found. His idea of compromise was letting you use his pen to sign your vow of allegiance. Finally, your people have lost all sense of urgency. You got to fire somebody. You know- ax. Can. Dump. Sack. Pink slip. Terminate with extreme prejudice. Discharge. Unassign. 86. Downsize. Furlough. Ease out. Make redundant. Perform a bum's rush. Give the boot. Hand someone their marching orders. Assist in an accelerated career development shift. Impose a synergy related headcount restructuring. Heave a ho.
It doesn't matter who. Are you telling me in more than a year, nobody in the administration has made a mistake bad enough to be let go? Because if they haven't, you have. If you can't come up with an obvious target, pick someone out at random. You really want to put the fear of god into Team Obama, get rid of Michelle. Or one of the kids. That's the best way of saying, "don't anybody want to get too complacent." Anyhow, that's my advice. No thanks necessary, I'm here to help. First one's free.
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Email:issues@issuesandalibis.org
| The Gross National Debt |
View my page on indieProducer.net
Issues & Alibis Vol 10 # 09 (c) 02/26/2010
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