Friday, February 24, 2006
Whose Bombs were They?
by Mike Whitney - 02-23-06
OpEdnews.com
“The only viable strategy, then, may be to correct (Iraq’s) historical defect and move in stages toward a three-state solution: Kurds in the north, Sunnis in the center and Shiites in the south” Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations; from “Three-state Solution” NY Times 11-25-03
“We are facing a major conspiracy that is targeting Iraq’s unity.” Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.
There’s no telling who was behind the bombing of the al-Askariya Mosque. There were no security cameras at the site and it’s doubtful that the police will be able to perform a thorough forensic investigation.
That’s too bad; the bomb-residue would probably provide clear evidence of who engineered the attack. So far, there’s little more to go on than the early reports of four men (three who were dressed in black, one in a police uniform) who overtook security guards at the mosque and placed the bombs in broad daylight.
It was a bold assault that strongly suggests the involvement of highly-trained paramilitaries conducting a well-rehearsed plan. Still, that doesn’t give us any solid proof of what groups may have been involved.
The destruction of the Samarra shrine, also known as the Golden Mosque, has unleashed a wave of retaliatory attacks against the Sunnis. Overnight, more than 110 people were reported killed by the rampaging Shia. More than 90 Sunni mosques have been either destroyed or badly damaged. In Baghdad alone, 47 men have been found scattered throughout the city after being killed execution-style with a bullet to the back of the head. The chaos ends a week of increased violence following two major suicide bombings directed against Shia civilians that resulted in the deaths of 36 people.
The public outrage at the desecration of one of the country’s holiest sights has reached fever-pitch and its doubtful that the flimsy American-backed regime will be able to head-off a civil war.
It is difficult to imagine that the perpetrators of this heinous attack couldn’t anticipate its disastrous effects. Certainly, the Sunni-led resistance does not benefit from alienating the very people it is trying to enlist in its fight against the American occupation. Accordingly, most of the prominent Sunni groups have denied involvement in the attack and dismissed it as collaboration between American and Iranian intelligence agencies.
A communiqué from “The Foreign Relations Department of the Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party” denounced the attack pointing the finger at the Interior Ministry’s Badr Brigade and American paramilitaries.
The Ba’ath statement explains:
“America is the main party responsible for the crime of attacking the tomb of Ali al-Hadi…because it is the power that occupies Iraq and has a basic interest in committing it.”
“The escalation of differences between America and Iran has found their main political arena in Iraq, because the most important group of agents of Iran is there and are able to use the blood of Iraqis and the future of Iraq to exert pressure on America. Iran has laid out a plan to embroil America in the Iraqi morass to prevent it from obstructing Iran’s nuclear plans. Particularly since America is eager to move on to completing arrangements for a withdrawal from Iraq, after signing binding agreements on oil and strategy. America believes that without the participation of “Sunni” parties in the regime those arrangements will fail. For that reason ‘cutting Iran’s claws’ has become one of the important requirements for American plans. This is what Ambassador Zalmay spoke of recently when he declared that no sectarian would take control of the Ministries of the Interior or Defense. Similarly, America has begun to publish information that it formally kept hidden regarding the crimes of the Badr Brigade and the Interior Ministry.”
Whether the communiqué is authentic is incidental; the point is well taken. The escalating violence may prevent Iraq from forming a power-sharing government which would greatly benefit the Shia majority and their Iranian allies. Many critics agree that what is taking place Iraq represents a larger struggle between the United States and Iran for regional domination.
This theory, however, is at odds with the response of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei following the bombing. Khamenei said, “The occupation forces and Zionism, which seeing their plans dissolve, have planned this atrocity to sew hate between Muslims and fuel divisions between Sunnis and Shiites….Do not fall into the enemy trap by attacking mosques and sacred places of your Sunni brothers….The enemy wants nothing more than weakening of the Islamis front right as Muslims with a single voice have been protesting against the continual provocations of their enemies.”
The belief that the attack was the work of American and Israeli covert-operations (Black-ops) is widespread throughout the region as well as among leftist political-analysts in the United States. Journalist Kurt Nimmo sees the bombing as a means of realizing “a plan sketched out in Oded Yinon’s “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties” (the balkanization of Arab and Muslim society and culture.) Nimmo suggests that the plan may have been carried out by “American, British or Israeli Intelligence operatives or their double-agent Arab lunatics, or crazies incited by Rumsfeld’s Proactive Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG) designed to ‘stimulate’ terrorist reaction.”
Nimmo is not alone in his judgment. Other prominent analysts including, Pepe Escobar, Ghali Hassan, AK Gupta, Dahr Jamail, and Christian Parenti all agree that the Bush administration appears to be inciting civil war as part of an exit strategy. Certainly, the Pentagon is running out of options as well as time. Numerous leaked documents have confirmed that significant numbers of troops will have to be rotated out of the theatre by summer. A strategy to foment sectarian hostilities may be the last desperate attempt to divert the nearly 100 attacks per day away from coalition troops and finalize plans to divide Iraq into more manageable statlets.
The division of Iraq has been recommended in a number of documents that were prepared for the Defense Department. The Rand Corporation suggested that “Sunni, Shiite and Arab, non-Arab divides should be exploited to exploit the US policy objectives in the Muslim world.” The 2004 study titled “US Strategy in the Muslim World” was to identify key cleavages and fault-lines among sectarian, ethnic, regional, and national lines to assess how these cleavages generate challenges and opportunities for the United States.” (Abdus Sattar Ghazali; thanks Liz Burbank)
This verifies that the strategy to split up Iraq has been circulating at the top levels of government from the very beginning of the occupation.
A similar report was produced by David Philip for the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC) financed by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation a conservative think-tank with connections to the Bush administration and the American Enterprise Institute. According to Pepe Escobar:
“The plan would be ‘sold’ under the admission that the recently elected, Shi’ite dominated Jaafari government is incapable of controlling Iraq and bringing the Sunni-Arab guerillas to the negotiating table. More significantly, the plan is an exact replica of an extreme right-wing Israeli plan to balkanize Iraq—an essential part of the balkanization of the whole Middle East.”
Is the bombing of the Golden Mosque the final phase of a much broader strategy to inflame sectarian hatred and provoke civil war?
Clearly, many Sunnis, Iranians, and political analysts seem to believe so. Even the Bush administration’s own documents support the general theory that Iraq should be broken up into three separate pieces. But, is this proof that the impending civil war is the work of foreign provocateurs?
The final confirmation of Washington’s sinister plan was issued by Leslie Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, in a New York Times editorial on 11-25-03. The CFR is the ideological headquarters for America’s imperial interventions providing the meager rationale that papers-over the massive bloodletting that inevitably follow. Gelb stated:
“For decades, the United States has worshipped at the altar of a unified Iraqi state. Allowing all three communities within that false state to emerge at least as self-governing regions would be both difficult and dangerous. Washington would have to be very hard-headed and hard-hearted, to engineer this breakup. But such a course is manageable, even necessary, because it would allow us to find Iraq’s future in its denied but natural past.”
There you have it; the United States is only pursuing this genocidal policy for ‘Iraq’s own good’. We should remember Gelb’s statesman-like pronouncements in the months and years to come as Iraq slips further into the morass of social-disintegration and unfathomable human suffering.
*************************************************************************
by Mike Whitney - 02-23-06
OpEdnews.com
“The only viable strategy, then, may be to correct (Iraq’s) historical defect and move in stages toward a three-state solution: Kurds in the north, Sunnis in the center and Shiites in the south” Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations; from “Three-state Solution” NY Times 11-25-03
“We are facing a major conspiracy that is targeting Iraq’s unity.” Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.
There’s no telling who was behind the bombing of the al-Askariya Mosque. There were no security cameras at the site and it’s doubtful that the police will be able to perform a thorough forensic investigation.
That’s too bad; the bomb-residue would probably provide clear evidence of who engineered the attack. So far, there’s little more to go on than the early reports of four men (three who were dressed in black, one in a police uniform) who overtook security guards at the mosque and placed the bombs in broad daylight.
It was a bold assault that strongly suggests the involvement of highly-trained paramilitaries conducting a well-rehearsed plan. Still, that doesn’t give us any solid proof of what groups may have been involved.
The destruction of the Samarra shrine, also known as the Golden Mosque, has unleashed a wave of retaliatory attacks against the Sunnis. Overnight, more than 110 people were reported killed by the rampaging Shia. More than 90 Sunni mosques have been either destroyed or badly damaged. In Baghdad alone, 47 men have been found scattered throughout the city after being killed execution-style with a bullet to the back of the head. The chaos ends a week of increased violence following two major suicide bombings directed against Shia civilians that resulted in the deaths of 36 people.
The public outrage at the desecration of one of the country’s holiest sights has reached fever-pitch and its doubtful that the flimsy American-backed regime will be able to head-off a civil war.
It is difficult to imagine that the perpetrators of this heinous attack couldn’t anticipate its disastrous effects. Certainly, the Sunni-led resistance does not benefit from alienating the very people it is trying to enlist in its fight against the American occupation. Accordingly, most of the prominent Sunni groups have denied involvement in the attack and dismissed it as collaboration between American and Iranian intelligence agencies.
A communiqué from “The Foreign Relations Department of the Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party” denounced the attack pointing the finger at the Interior Ministry’s Badr Brigade and American paramilitaries.
The Ba’ath statement explains:
“America is the main party responsible for the crime of attacking the tomb of Ali al-Hadi…because it is the power that occupies Iraq and has a basic interest in committing it.”
“The escalation of differences between America and Iran has found their main political arena in Iraq, because the most important group of agents of Iran is there and are able to use the blood of Iraqis and the future of Iraq to exert pressure on America. Iran has laid out a plan to embroil America in the Iraqi morass to prevent it from obstructing Iran’s nuclear plans. Particularly since America is eager to move on to completing arrangements for a withdrawal from Iraq, after signing binding agreements on oil and strategy. America believes that without the participation of “Sunni” parties in the regime those arrangements will fail. For that reason ‘cutting Iran’s claws’ has become one of the important requirements for American plans. This is what Ambassador Zalmay spoke of recently when he declared that no sectarian would take control of the Ministries of the Interior or Defense. Similarly, America has begun to publish information that it formally kept hidden regarding the crimes of the Badr Brigade and the Interior Ministry.”
Whether the communiqué is authentic is incidental; the point is well taken. The escalating violence may prevent Iraq from forming a power-sharing government which would greatly benefit the Shia majority and their Iranian allies. Many critics agree that what is taking place Iraq represents a larger struggle between the United States and Iran for regional domination.
This theory, however, is at odds with the response of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei following the bombing. Khamenei said, “The occupation forces and Zionism, which seeing their plans dissolve, have planned this atrocity to sew hate between Muslims and fuel divisions between Sunnis and Shiites….Do not fall into the enemy trap by attacking mosques and sacred places of your Sunni brothers….The enemy wants nothing more than weakening of the Islamis front right as Muslims with a single voice have been protesting against the continual provocations of their enemies.”
The belief that the attack was the work of American and Israeli covert-operations (Black-ops) is widespread throughout the region as well as among leftist political-analysts in the United States. Journalist Kurt Nimmo sees the bombing as a means of realizing “a plan sketched out in Oded Yinon’s “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties” (the balkanization of Arab and Muslim society and culture.) Nimmo suggests that the plan may have been carried out by “American, British or Israeli Intelligence operatives or their double-agent Arab lunatics, or crazies incited by Rumsfeld’s Proactive Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG) designed to ‘stimulate’ terrorist reaction.”
Nimmo is not alone in his judgment. Other prominent analysts including, Pepe Escobar, Ghali Hassan, AK Gupta, Dahr Jamail, and Christian Parenti all agree that the Bush administration appears to be inciting civil war as part of an exit strategy. Certainly, the Pentagon is running out of options as well as time. Numerous leaked documents have confirmed that significant numbers of troops will have to be rotated out of the theatre by summer. A strategy to foment sectarian hostilities may be the last desperate attempt to divert the nearly 100 attacks per day away from coalition troops and finalize plans to divide Iraq into more manageable statlets.
The division of Iraq has been recommended in a number of documents that were prepared for the Defense Department. The Rand Corporation suggested that “Sunni, Shiite and Arab, non-Arab divides should be exploited to exploit the US policy objectives in the Muslim world.” The 2004 study titled “US Strategy in the Muslim World” was to identify key cleavages and fault-lines among sectarian, ethnic, regional, and national lines to assess how these cleavages generate challenges and opportunities for the United States.” (Abdus Sattar Ghazali; thanks Liz Burbank)
This verifies that the strategy to split up Iraq has been circulating at the top levels of government from the very beginning of the occupation.
A similar report was produced by David Philip for the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC) financed by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation a conservative think-tank with connections to the Bush administration and the American Enterprise Institute. According to Pepe Escobar:
“The plan would be ‘sold’ under the admission that the recently elected, Shi’ite dominated Jaafari government is incapable of controlling Iraq and bringing the Sunni-Arab guerillas to the negotiating table. More significantly, the plan is an exact replica of an extreme right-wing Israeli plan to balkanize Iraq—an essential part of the balkanization of the whole Middle East.”
Is the bombing of the Golden Mosque the final phase of a much broader strategy to inflame sectarian hatred and provoke civil war?
Clearly, many Sunnis, Iranians, and political analysts seem to believe so. Even the Bush administration’s own documents support the general theory that Iraq should be broken up into three separate pieces. But, is this proof that the impending civil war is the work of foreign provocateurs?
The final confirmation of Washington’s sinister plan was issued by Leslie Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, in a New York Times editorial on 11-25-03. The CFR is the ideological headquarters for America’s imperial interventions providing the meager rationale that papers-over the massive bloodletting that inevitably follow. Gelb stated:
“For decades, the United States has worshipped at the altar of a unified Iraqi state. Allowing all three communities within that false state to emerge at least as self-governing regions would be both difficult and dangerous. Washington would have to be very hard-headed and hard-hearted, to engineer this breakup. But such a course is manageable, even necessary, because it would allow us to find Iraq’s future in its denied but natural past.”
There you have it; the United States is only pursuing this genocidal policy for ‘Iraq’s own good’. We should remember Gelb’s statesman-like pronouncements in the months and years to come as Iraq slips further into the morass of social-disintegration and unfathomable human suffering.
*************************************************************************
Free Trading Away America's Security
by David Sirota
San Francisco Chronicle - 02-24-06
AT FIRST glance, it seems strange that President Bush threatened to use the first veto of his presidency to defend the right of the United Arab Emirates to manage six major U.S. ports.
It was certainly an extraordinary move. Bush, who bills himself as "tough" on terrorism, went to bat for the United Arab Emirates against the wishes of his own security experts and his own Republican colleagues in Congress, who noted that the Emirates has known ties to the Sept. 11 terrorists and Osama bin Laden. Why?
As an explanation, Bush publicly pointed to the merits of foreign investment. Foreign investment, of course, can be positive when it fuels the domestic economy but when it comes to America's ports, the extra security precaution of mandating American ownership and control far outweigh the economic benefits of foreign investment by a country such as the United Arab Emirates.
In 1999, Emirates officials were happily commiserating with bin Laden in Afghanistan. According to the Sept. 11 commission, these officials also provided "one of the Taliban's only travel and financial outlets to the outside world." This, at the same time as the Emirates rejected U.S. requests to crack down on terrorist financing. Today, the State Department's Web site about the Emirates notes the serious anti-American threats there.
So again, why? Because this is about far more than just one deal with one company or one country.
The Bush administration is unquestionably the most corporate-controlled administration in recent history, which means the White House doesn't sound the alarm unless corporate America is sounding the alarm. The veto threat is about preserving the rules of so-called "free trade" that big business relies on to maximize profit and that guide America's global economic policy.
Right now, the White House is putting the finishing touches on one of these free-trade agreements with the Emirates. If security concerns overturn the port deal -- and Dubai Ports World has offered to delay the takeover because of such concerns -- the free-trade accord and a subsequent Mideast regional trade pact will be jeopardized.
Free trade is all about allowing corporations to move capital wherever they please, without regard to the labor, human rights, environmental and -- yes -- security consequences of those moves. Nixing the Emirates port-security deal could set a new precedent, whereby our government would include security precautions in its trade policy and more aggressively regulate commerce based on those precautions.
That shift would create a new standard that could impede the as-yet uninhibited quest for profits. Put another way, trade policy would become not quite as free as big Business would like. Such a precedent would have global implications.
Suddenly, the public might want Congress to re-evaluate corporate subsidies with an eye to security. We might see a push, for instance, to rescind the billions in taxpayer-backed loans Congress provided last year to Westinghouse to build nuclear power facilities in China. The public might demand stricter security standards governing technology transfers and ownership privileges in future trade accords. Again, these moves are basic steps to protect our country -- but they would get in the way of companies who have eyes only for the bottom line.
This is why the president threatened his veto. His reflexes are trained to defend the corporate interests that bankrolled his political career. These are the same reflexes detailed in a September Government Accountability Office report chastising the Bush administration for employing overly narrow definitions of national security to expedite questionable transactions such as the Emirates port deal. Though President Bush won't admit this is what motivates his behavior, others are admitting it on his behalf.
Take Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. Days ago he said of the Emirates deal, "We have to balance the paramount urgency of security against the fact that we still want to have a robust global trading system." He's technically right, of course -- we do have to balance those needs. But coming from him, the comments were telling. Could the Bush administration's skewed priorities be any more visible?
Similarly, the New York Times this week quoted a corporate consultant who says that Congress' concerns about the port security deal are "totally illogical." Why? Because, he says, "The location of the headquarters of a company in the age of globalism is irrelevant." This is free-trade fundamentalism. Companies, of course, can't be blamed for being governed by it -- they are in the business of making money, nothing else. But there is a clear danger to America when free-trade fundamentalism becomes government policy, as it has become today.
In recent years, this fundamentalism convinced politicians to ink trade deals with Mexico that discarded labor and environmental standards. It convinced politicians to agree to accords with China that wave off basic human rights. Now, perhaps most incredibly, it convinced a supposedly "tough-on-terrorism" president to brandish his veto pen in defense of a policy that threatens America's national security. That fundamentalism may make the president's big donors happy, but it needlessly endangers our country in the post-Sept. 11 world.
*************************************************************************
by David Sirota
San Francisco Chronicle - 02-24-06
AT FIRST glance, it seems strange that President Bush threatened to use the first veto of his presidency to defend the right of the United Arab Emirates to manage six major U.S. ports.
It was certainly an extraordinary move. Bush, who bills himself as "tough" on terrorism, went to bat for the United Arab Emirates against the wishes of his own security experts and his own Republican colleagues in Congress, who noted that the Emirates has known ties to the Sept. 11 terrorists and Osama bin Laden. Why?
As an explanation, Bush publicly pointed to the merits of foreign investment. Foreign investment, of course, can be positive when it fuels the domestic economy but when it comes to America's ports, the extra security precaution of mandating American ownership and control far outweigh the economic benefits of foreign investment by a country such as the United Arab Emirates.
In 1999, Emirates officials were happily commiserating with bin Laden in Afghanistan. According to the Sept. 11 commission, these officials also provided "one of the Taliban's only travel and financial outlets to the outside world." This, at the same time as the Emirates rejected U.S. requests to crack down on terrorist financing. Today, the State Department's Web site about the Emirates notes the serious anti-American threats there.
So again, why? Because this is about far more than just one deal with one company or one country.
The Bush administration is unquestionably the most corporate-controlled administration in recent history, which means the White House doesn't sound the alarm unless corporate America is sounding the alarm. The veto threat is about preserving the rules of so-called "free trade" that big business relies on to maximize profit and that guide America's global economic policy.
Right now, the White House is putting the finishing touches on one of these free-trade agreements with the Emirates. If security concerns overturn the port deal -- and Dubai Ports World has offered to delay the takeover because of such concerns -- the free-trade accord and a subsequent Mideast regional trade pact will be jeopardized.
Free trade is all about allowing corporations to move capital wherever they please, without regard to the labor, human rights, environmental and -- yes -- security consequences of those moves. Nixing the Emirates port-security deal could set a new precedent, whereby our government would include security precautions in its trade policy and more aggressively regulate commerce based on those precautions.
That shift would create a new standard that could impede the as-yet uninhibited quest for profits. Put another way, trade policy would become not quite as free as big Business would like. Such a precedent would have global implications.
Suddenly, the public might want Congress to re-evaluate corporate subsidies with an eye to security. We might see a push, for instance, to rescind the billions in taxpayer-backed loans Congress provided last year to Westinghouse to build nuclear power facilities in China. The public might demand stricter security standards governing technology transfers and ownership privileges in future trade accords. Again, these moves are basic steps to protect our country -- but they would get in the way of companies who have eyes only for the bottom line.
This is why the president threatened his veto. His reflexes are trained to defend the corporate interests that bankrolled his political career. These are the same reflexes detailed in a September Government Accountability Office report chastising the Bush administration for employing overly narrow definitions of national security to expedite questionable transactions such as the Emirates port deal. Though President Bush won't admit this is what motivates his behavior, others are admitting it on his behalf.
Take Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. Days ago he said of the Emirates deal, "We have to balance the paramount urgency of security against the fact that we still want to have a robust global trading system." He's technically right, of course -- we do have to balance those needs. But coming from him, the comments were telling. Could the Bush administration's skewed priorities be any more visible?
Similarly, the New York Times this week quoted a corporate consultant who says that Congress' concerns about the port security deal are "totally illogical." Why? Because, he says, "The location of the headquarters of a company in the age of globalism is irrelevant." This is free-trade fundamentalism. Companies, of course, can't be blamed for being governed by it -- they are in the business of making money, nothing else. But there is a clear danger to America when free-trade fundamentalism becomes government policy, as it has become today.
In recent years, this fundamentalism convinced politicians to ink trade deals with Mexico that discarded labor and environmental standards. It convinced politicians to agree to accords with China that wave off basic human rights. Now, perhaps most incredibly, it convinced a supposedly "tough-on-terrorism" president to brandish his veto pen in defense of a policy that threatens America's national security. That fundamentalism may make the president's big donors happy, but it needlessly endangers our country in the post-Sept. 11 world.
*************************************************************************
Thursday, February 23, 2006
GAO Warned Gov't to Not Let Profit Motive Impede National Security
by David Siorta
workingforchange.com/blog
The New York Times today points out that government investigators basically reported in September what I have been saying is at the heart of the current UAE port security scandal: the profit motive.
Here is the excerpt:
"In September, the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said the Treasury Department, as head of the interagency committee that reviews such deals, had used an overly narrow definition of national security threats because it wanted to encourage foreign investment...The report by the General Accountability Office in September included sharp criticism of the review process carried out by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the committee created in 1975 to review foreign investments that could affect national security. The report said the committee, under the Clinton and Bush administrations, had often construed national security too narrowly, looking only at such factors as the control over technology exports, classified contracts and specific derogatory information about a company."
So there it is - corporate profits are more important to the political establishment than national security.
*************************************************************************
by David Siorta
workingforchange.com/blog
The New York Times today points out that government investigators basically reported in September what I have been saying is at the heart of the current UAE port security scandal: the profit motive.
Here is the excerpt:
"In September, the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said the Treasury Department, as head of the interagency committee that reviews such deals, had used an overly narrow definition of national security threats because it wanted to encourage foreign investment...The report by the General Accountability Office in September included sharp criticism of the review process carried out by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the committee created in 1975 to review foreign investments that could affect national security. The report said the committee, under the Clinton and Bush administrations, had often construed national security too narrowly, looking only at such factors as the control over technology exports, classified contracts and specific derogatory information about a company."
So there it is - corporate profits are more important to the political establishment than national security.
*************************************************************************
Wake Up America
We re Not In Kansas Anymore Toto
by Steve Bhaerman
OpEdnews.com
Have you ever had a dream like this? You’re cruising on the freeway, and you hit the brakes to slow down -- and nothing happens. Then you go to turn the steering wheel, and once again you have no control. You try the gas. Same thing. None of the control mechanisms are working, and you are helplessly careening down the freeway in an out-of-control vehicle. At that point, you usually wake up.
Well it’s time to wake up, America. Welcome to the new American “dream.” Over the past five years, the steering and driving mechanisms our country’s founders designed for our ship of state have been progressively (or rather, regressively) taken out of our hands. Our elected representatives ... our courts ... the “loyal opposition” ... the press ... the electoral process itself, have all come under the influence of some dark force. We find ourselves in an intractable, costly perpetual war. Civil liberties are being taken away, and those who have taken an oath to protect us are inexplicably going along with the program. Gold collar criminals and high-ranking officials are looting the commonwealth, as the middle class in our country disappears. Scientists who point out global warming or environmental distress are being silenced. The media keeps us numbed up and dumbed down by distracting us with the most divisive or trivial issues.
Aside from the real massive problems we face if we would only face them -- peak oil and global warming, and a house-of-cards economy where the Chinese hold the strongest hand -- we face the gravest political and moral crisis in our history. Yes, there was the bombardment of the Capitol during the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Great Depression, the war against fascism sixty-five years ago, and the ongoing cold war, ostensibly against totalitarian communism. But never, never in our history has the “enemy” been so starkly and obviously our own rulers.
This realization is a hard gulp to swallow. None of us have wanted to go there. But now, we must courageously wake up to the realization that “there” is already “here.” The body politic is gravely ill, and unless we open our eyes and face this condition squarely in the face, government of the people, by the people, and for the people will indeed perish from this earth, only to be replaced by neo-feudalism disguised as Big Brother totalitarianism.
This is not a time to push the panic button, but a time to push the “calm button” that activates our highest values of love, courage, imagination and curiosity. Einstein has told us that a problem can never be solved at the level of the problem. So as the “political” solutions seem to dissolve one by one, we must find the solution at the next level up.
Amazing Disgrace: How America Got Eaten By Her Own Shadow
First though, let’s see if we can get a handle on where we are and how we got here, as a nation and as a species. There is a phrase in America the Beautiful, our spiritual national anthem, asking God to “shed His grace on thee.” Indeed, grace has shone on this country, perhaps because of the radically enlightened principles and documents this country was founded on. The progressive forces of truth, freedom, and extending opportunity to all have created enough graceful momentum to counterbalance genocide against native peoples, slavery, and our own unique brand of imperialism.
But I submit we’ve finally used up our grace. We hit “peak grace” right after World War II, and we’ve been burning a dwindling supply of it for the past sixty years. Some would say that the downward turn began when we took a page from Orwell and renamed the “Department of War” the “Department of Defense,” and sold our soul to the military industrial complex. Since the end of World War II, we have sponsored over 200 wars resulting in the deaths of millions, all to protect “the free world.” Now I have a fierce practical streak in me, and an understanding that there are indeed “evil-doers” in the world, and we need to take steps to contain these toxic forces and protect ourselves. But now it’s time to face the sad fact that we’ve become the toxic force we’ve been protecting ourselves against.
Something happened back there in the late 1940s, and we took a wrong turn. We empowered a secret government, and we instructed them to do whatever they needed to do to “protect us,” as long as they didn’t tell us what they were doing. The way to beat the evil-doers was to out evil-do them, and the way to do that in a democratic republic like ours was to make sure we the people never had to directly face the moral dilemma of contradicting our highest spiritual values in a misguided effort to protect ourselves.
But when you set out to act in stealth and secrecy -- even in the service of “good” -- at some point you become the very thing you oppose. For who thrives in the darkness, but the dark forces? So it is that in the world of spyfare, we’re necessarily dealing with murderers, criminal syndicates, drug runners, and at some point we morphed into the anti-life force we claim to be fighting. Even worse, over the past two generations we have become addicted to the war economy. And thus we began our downhill slide from grace, slowly being devoured by our shadow.
The first obvious time the dark forces broke through the invisible “membrane” of decency was the Kennedy assassination. Even for those who bought the lone assassin theory, it was a perpetration that forever damaged our political psyche. Think of how the 60s began -- with hope, with the Peace Corps, with Alliance for Progress -- and how it ended -- with the assassinations of King and RFK, with angry anti-war protests, with Kent State. For those of us who grew up reciting the Pledge of Allegiance -- and believing in “liberty and justice for all” -- America would never be the same.
As the 60s gave way to the 70s, 80s and 90s and the hippies and yippies became yuppies, we the people “sold out” or rather “bought in” to the pervasive dominant meme that it was money, money, money that mattered. The culmination of the “me” society was the 90s, when a Democrat, Bill Clinton, raised more money than any Presidential candidate had ever done before. Under the guise of “benevolent” globalization, corporate rule and privatizing resource-rape was extended even further.
By the time 2000 rolled around, we had done run out of grace. Had we still had a little cache of grace in the bank, the scale would have tipped to Gore. 9/11 might have been thwarted or averted, and in any case not turned into “the New Pearl Harbor.” Had we had an even a little emergency stash of grace under the mattress, Congress or Colin Powell or someone would have been able to stop the Iraq War before it started. In 2004, voting fraud would have been exposed in Ohio and Florida, and Kerry would have been declared the rightful winner. And on and on it goes.
And here we are. We have seen our economy go from a “value-adding” economy to a “wealth-extracting” one. The dollar is now probably worth less than the paper it’s printed on. We’ve devolved into a debtor nation, little more than a banana republic in a super-power suit, armed to the teeth. We’ve watched the country of Martin Luther King regress back to the country of Pat Robertson. We have allowed ourselves to be dragged along into an illegal pre-emptive war for empire based on lies. Our President has been brought up on charges by an International Tribunal (with arms control expert Scott Ritter, Gen. Janis Karpinski and other respected authorities testifying) and the story isn’t even worth a paragraph in the “liberal” San Francisco Chronicle. We are flat out of grace, and have in fact disgraced our Founding Fathers. We have hit spiritual bottom -- and most Americans don’t even know it.
The Truth Shall Upset You Free
The first step in facing any grave illness -- particularly when the disease is addiction-based -- is telling the truth. This may not be pleasant or easy, but as the Swami says, “The truth shall upset you free.” The condition we face is life-threatening, not just to liberty and justice, not just to our democratic republic, but to human life on the planet itself. (We can assume that whatever happens to us, the roaches will very likely survive.)
In addition to the truths the framers of the Declaration of Independence held self-evident 230 years ago, we must now take the first step of facing some darker self-evident truths:
Now I hope all of that didn’t sound too cynical, because cynical is the last thing I want to be. The upside of “disillusionment” is that it disabuses us of of the “illusionment” that keeps us knocking on doors that will never open, and marching down pathways that lead to a dead end. The release of false hope is the gateway that can lead to real hope. Hopefully, that is where this is all leading.
So before we take a look at what we CAN do, let’s bump up to the macro to have a look at the big, big picture. We humans are, as a species, facing a “rendevous with destiny.” Despite Einstein’s assertion more than 100 years ago that we live in a universe where all is related, we are still acting as if we’re in a “Newtonian” universe of force opposing force. We humans are definitely slow learners. We’ve had “only” a century to integrate Einstein, and we used his theory to develop weapons of mass destruction. It’s been 2000 years since Jesus said “Love thy neighbor,” and yet we humans still seem to be marching under the “eye-for-an-eye” banner.
But now in this shrinking world that could definitely use a good shrink, push is finally coming to shove, and in the light of shrinking extractable resources and expanding intractable regimes, we are on a collision course with ourselves. The “middle” path of muddling along is about to hit a dead-end, and we stand at a crossroads in human evolution (or devolution). We must now choose one and only one of these two paths: “We’re all in this together,” or “it’s every man for himself.”
We can “play it safe” and say it’s either dominate or be dominated. We can then rally (or huddle) behind our troops and celebrate our own survival as we excuse genocide against others as a necessary by-product. It’s been done before, you know. And not just by the Third Reich. Every empire has done the same thing, and has found some creative way to cloak selfish motives in nobility. But time is running out, and more and more humans are coming to see that from the perspective of all the great spiritual teachings in the world, “survival” at this level is the booby prize.
What we humans are being called to is no less than an evolutionary step toward really giving our professed “faith” a run for its money. We are being called out from behind petty and ancient feuds, unconscious “miasmic” patterns that have thwarted us for centuries. We are being called out from behind the remote, away from reality TV, and towards reality. We are being asked to take the “red pill,” and emerge from the matrix of machine-made illusion and cultivate the “tree of life” right here in the so-called “real world.”
In this evolutionary mission, we have more going for us than we think. We have the teachings and techniques of great spiritual paths and masters, many just recently liberated from secrecy. We have technical know-how, and those most extraordinary of human resources, imagination and curiosity. We have worldwide networks of communication. And of course, we have the force of necessity, the Mother of all reasons to change and change now.
On the other side, the main weapons they have are fear and force. Although these may seem formidable in the short run, in the end they are no match for the power of life. “Life” relentlessly moves forward in greater expansion, creativity, diversity and freedom. Like the weed poking up between the cracks in the sidewalk, life has a tendency to prevail.
Of course, they want you to forget this, and sadly too many people have. As political responses to situations that are “bigger than politics” have been thwarted, and as the current Administration rains down outrageous perpetrations on a daily basis, people have allowed themselves to become disheartened. Without the spiritual compass that helped guide the likes of Martin Luther King, many modern progressives fail to see the spiritual context behind the values they are fighting for. How else could the “moral authority” in this country have been ceded over to those who rail against two men lying together as an “abomination,” but have no problem with a whole bunch of men lying together to bomb a nation?
Time To Face The Music and Dance
So how do we face these issues on a higher level, and translate all of this happy-sounding philosophizing into effective action? How do we make the shift from politics as usual to politics as unusual? What does the American Evolution look like in practice? Here are some ideas which will hopefully lead to better questions, and clearer answers:
If all this sounds “idealistic,” remember that we are rapidly approaching the point where the ideal must become the real deal -- otherwise, when it comes to human life on the planet, it’s no deal. For a long time now, we’ve been hearing that every generation must step up to defend freedom. Now it’s our turn. In the past, we’ve been called upon to march to some foreign land, armed with a gun. In these times, being a stand for freedom looks like standing up where we are, armed only with the Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and the knowledge that every religion or spiritual path boils down to some variation on the Golden Rule. A critical mass of citizens standing on the brink of evolution, firmly and fearlessly, stripped of illusion. Now that is the real “naked power” that will change the world as we know it.
*************************************************************************
We re Not In Kansas Anymore Toto
by Steve Bhaerman
OpEdnews.com
Have you ever had a dream like this? You’re cruising on the freeway, and you hit the brakes to slow down -- and nothing happens. Then you go to turn the steering wheel, and once again you have no control. You try the gas. Same thing. None of the control mechanisms are working, and you are helplessly careening down the freeway in an out-of-control vehicle. At that point, you usually wake up.
Well it’s time to wake up, America. Welcome to the new American “dream.” Over the past five years, the steering and driving mechanisms our country’s founders designed for our ship of state have been progressively (or rather, regressively) taken out of our hands. Our elected representatives ... our courts ... the “loyal opposition” ... the press ... the electoral process itself, have all come under the influence of some dark force. We find ourselves in an intractable, costly perpetual war. Civil liberties are being taken away, and those who have taken an oath to protect us are inexplicably going along with the program. Gold collar criminals and high-ranking officials are looting the commonwealth, as the middle class in our country disappears. Scientists who point out global warming or environmental distress are being silenced. The media keeps us numbed up and dumbed down by distracting us with the most divisive or trivial issues.
Aside from the real massive problems we face if we would only face them -- peak oil and global warming, and a house-of-cards economy where the Chinese hold the strongest hand -- we face the gravest political and moral crisis in our history. Yes, there was the bombardment of the Capitol during the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Great Depression, the war against fascism sixty-five years ago, and the ongoing cold war, ostensibly against totalitarian communism. But never, never in our history has the “enemy” been so starkly and obviously our own rulers.
This realization is a hard gulp to swallow. None of us have wanted to go there. But now, we must courageously wake up to the realization that “there” is already “here.” The body politic is gravely ill, and unless we open our eyes and face this condition squarely in the face, government of the people, by the people, and for the people will indeed perish from this earth, only to be replaced by neo-feudalism disguised as Big Brother totalitarianism.
This is not a time to push the panic button, but a time to push the “calm button” that activates our highest values of love, courage, imagination and curiosity. Einstein has told us that a problem can never be solved at the level of the problem. So as the “political” solutions seem to dissolve one by one, we must find the solution at the next level up.
Amazing Disgrace: How America Got Eaten By Her Own Shadow
First though, let’s see if we can get a handle on where we are and how we got here, as a nation and as a species. There is a phrase in America the Beautiful, our spiritual national anthem, asking God to “shed His grace on thee.” Indeed, grace has shone on this country, perhaps because of the radically enlightened principles and documents this country was founded on. The progressive forces of truth, freedom, and extending opportunity to all have created enough graceful momentum to counterbalance genocide against native peoples, slavery, and our own unique brand of imperialism.
But I submit we’ve finally used up our grace. We hit “peak grace” right after World War II, and we’ve been burning a dwindling supply of it for the past sixty years. Some would say that the downward turn began when we took a page from Orwell and renamed the “Department of War” the “Department of Defense,” and sold our soul to the military industrial complex. Since the end of World War II, we have sponsored over 200 wars resulting in the deaths of millions, all to protect “the free world.” Now I have a fierce practical streak in me, and an understanding that there are indeed “evil-doers” in the world, and we need to take steps to contain these toxic forces and protect ourselves. But now it’s time to face the sad fact that we’ve become the toxic force we’ve been protecting ourselves against.
Something happened back there in the late 1940s, and we took a wrong turn. We empowered a secret government, and we instructed them to do whatever they needed to do to “protect us,” as long as they didn’t tell us what they were doing. The way to beat the evil-doers was to out evil-do them, and the way to do that in a democratic republic like ours was to make sure we the people never had to directly face the moral dilemma of contradicting our highest spiritual values in a misguided effort to protect ourselves.
But when you set out to act in stealth and secrecy -- even in the service of “good” -- at some point you become the very thing you oppose. For who thrives in the darkness, but the dark forces? So it is that in the world of spyfare, we’re necessarily dealing with murderers, criminal syndicates, drug runners, and at some point we morphed into the anti-life force we claim to be fighting. Even worse, over the past two generations we have become addicted to the war economy. And thus we began our downhill slide from grace, slowly being devoured by our shadow.
The first obvious time the dark forces broke through the invisible “membrane” of decency was the Kennedy assassination. Even for those who bought the lone assassin theory, it was a perpetration that forever damaged our political psyche. Think of how the 60s began -- with hope, with the Peace Corps, with Alliance for Progress -- and how it ended -- with the assassinations of King and RFK, with angry anti-war protests, with Kent State. For those of us who grew up reciting the Pledge of Allegiance -- and believing in “liberty and justice for all” -- America would never be the same.
As the 60s gave way to the 70s, 80s and 90s and the hippies and yippies became yuppies, we the people “sold out” or rather “bought in” to the pervasive dominant meme that it was money, money, money that mattered. The culmination of the “me” society was the 90s, when a Democrat, Bill Clinton, raised more money than any Presidential candidate had ever done before. Under the guise of “benevolent” globalization, corporate rule and privatizing resource-rape was extended even further.
By the time 2000 rolled around, we had done run out of grace. Had we still had a little cache of grace in the bank, the scale would have tipped to Gore. 9/11 might have been thwarted or averted, and in any case not turned into “the New Pearl Harbor.” Had we had an even a little emergency stash of grace under the mattress, Congress or Colin Powell or someone would have been able to stop the Iraq War before it started. In 2004, voting fraud would have been exposed in Ohio and Florida, and Kerry would have been declared the rightful winner. And on and on it goes.
And here we are. We have seen our economy go from a “value-adding” economy to a “wealth-extracting” one. The dollar is now probably worth less than the paper it’s printed on. We’ve devolved into a debtor nation, little more than a banana republic in a super-power suit, armed to the teeth. We’ve watched the country of Martin Luther King regress back to the country of Pat Robertson. We have allowed ourselves to be dragged along into an illegal pre-emptive war for empire based on lies. Our President has been brought up on charges by an International Tribunal (with arms control expert Scott Ritter, Gen. Janis Karpinski and other respected authorities testifying) and the story isn’t even worth a paragraph in the “liberal” San Francisco Chronicle. We are flat out of grace, and have in fact disgraced our Founding Fathers. We have hit spiritual bottom -- and most Americans don’t even know it.
The Truth Shall Upset You Free
The first step in facing any grave illness -- particularly when the disease is addiction-based -- is telling the truth. This may not be pleasant or easy, but as the Swami says, “The truth shall upset you free.” The condition we face is life-threatening, not just to liberty and justice, not just to our democratic republic, but to human life on the planet itself. (We can assume that whatever happens to us, the roaches will very likely survive.)
In addition to the truths the framers of the Declaration of Independence held self-evident 230 years ago, we must now take the first step of facing some darker self-evident truths:
- 1. The results of the Presidential elections in 2000 and 2004 were very likely the result of fraud, and thanks to very hackable voting machines future elections are in jeopardy.
- 2. The official 9/11 story has more holes in it than Dick Cheney’s hunting buddy, and could very well be the most devastating and cynical scam ever imposed on the American people.
- 3. The media -- the fabled “fifth estate” has become the “fifth column,” betraying the truth left and right, mostly right. The one major difference between our “liberal” media and Pravda of 30 years ago is that the Russian people knew they were being lied to.
- 4. The Democratic Party leadership (an oxymoron very high in irony content) lacks vision, courage and integrity. You can count on them to once again trot out the slogan that has kept them safely out of power for years now: “We’re not as bad as the Republicans.” Not even this is true. In my book, the enabler bears as much responsibility as the abuser. Until they prove otherwise, the only things the Democrats are good for are taking our money and wasting our votes.
Now I hope all of that didn’t sound too cynical, because cynical is the last thing I want to be. The upside of “disillusionment” is that it disabuses us of of the “illusionment” that keeps us knocking on doors that will never open, and marching down pathways that lead to a dead end. The release of false hope is the gateway that can lead to real hope. Hopefully, that is where this is all leading.
So before we take a look at what we CAN do, let’s bump up to the macro to have a look at the big, big picture. We humans are, as a species, facing a “rendevous with destiny.” Despite Einstein’s assertion more than 100 years ago that we live in a universe where all is related, we are still acting as if we’re in a “Newtonian” universe of force opposing force. We humans are definitely slow learners. We’ve had “only” a century to integrate Einstein, and we used his theory to develop weapons of mass destruction. It’s been 2000 years since Jesus said “Love thy neighbor,” and yet we humans still seem to be marching under the “eye-for-an-eye” banner.
But now in this shrinking world that could definitely use a good shrink, push is finally coming to shove, and in the light of shrinking extractable resources and expanding intractable regimes, we are on a collision course with ourselves. The “middle” path of muddling along is about to hit a dead-end, and we stand at a crossroads in human evolution (or devolution). We must now choose one and only one of these two paths: “We’re all in this together,” or “it’s every man for himself.”
We can “play it safe” and say it’s either dominate or be dominated. We can then rally (or huddle) behind our troops and celebrate our own survival as we excuse genocide against others as a necessary by-product. It’s been done before, you know. And not just by the Third Reich. Every empire has done the same thing, and has found some creative way to cloak selfish motives in nobility. But time is running out, and more and more humans are coming to see that from the perspective of all the great spiritual teachings in the world, “survival” at this level is the booby prize.
What we humans are being called to is no less than an evolutionary step toward really giving our professed “faith” a run for its money. We are being called out from behind petty and ancient feuds, unconscious “miasmic” patterns that have thwarted us for centuries. We are being called out from behind the remote, away from reality TV, and towards reality. We are being asked to take the “red pill,” and emerge from the matrix of machine-made illusion and cultivate the “tree of life” right here in the so-called “real world.”
In this evolutionary mission, we have more going for us than we think. We have the teachings and techniques of great spiritual paths and masters, many just recently liberated from secrecy. We have technical know-how, and those most extraordinary of human resources, imagination and curiosity. We have worldwide networks of communication. And of course, we have the force of necessity, the Mother of all reasons to change and change now.
On the other side, the main weapons they have are fear and force. Although these may seem formidable in the short run, in the end they are no match for the power of life. “Life” relentlessly moves forward in greater expansion, creativity, diversity and freedom. Like the weed poking up between the cracks in the sidewalk, life has a tendency to prevail.
Of course, they want you to forget this, and sadly too many people have. As political responses to situations that are “bigger than politics” have been thwarted, and as the current Administration rains down outrageous perpetrations on a daily basis, people have allowed themselves to become disheartened. Without the spiritual compass that helped guide the likes of Martin Luther King, many modern progressives fail to see the spiritual context behind the values they are fighting for. How else could the “moral authority” in this country have been ceded over to those who rail against two men lying together as an “abomination,” but have no problem with a whole bunch of men lying together to bomb a nation?
Time To Face The Music and Dance
So how do we face these issues on a higher level, and translate all of this happy-sounding philosophizing into effective action? How do we make the shift from politics as usual to politics as unusual? What does the American Evolution look like in practice? Here are some ideas which will hopefully lead to better questions, and clearer answers:
- 1. Cultivate the Field. Early last summer -- at a time when I was feeling particularly frustrated and impatient -- I got an insight which proved to be prophetic: At times when the “form” isn’t fully formulated, focus on “the field.” In other words, all we had to do was to continue speaking our truth with open-hearted courage, and these thought-forms would manifest in unexpected ways. Indeed, within a few months, we had seen the Cindy Sheehan phenomenon, and the whole world had seen the Bush Administration’s response to Katrina. Later on in the year, Scooter Libby was indicted, and then Tom DeLay.
Right now, the most effective thing we can do on a daily basis is speak the truth with “calm passion.” In their heart of hearts, a majority of Americans know there is something terribly wrong. We’re not in Kansas anymore, and we may not even be in America, at least not the America we love. The media refuses to go any deeper than positional squabbling. So we must do it. The biggest obstacle we face right now is our collective unwillingness to see our own shadow. However, once a critical mass of us face this fear directly -- and act anyway -- it only becomes easier. Remember, the wall of lies is “hanging by a threat.” When we the people no longer feel threatened by that threat, the wall of lies will crumble into dust. All it takes are one or two or three or a dozen respected prominent Americans to “break through the soundless barrier,” and the media will finally have to cover the story. The stronger the “field” of courage and truth we create at the grassroots, the more inevitable the breakthrough.
- 2. Stop Marching, and “Stand” Instead. The new theme song for “politics as unusual” should be “I Ain’t A-Marchin’ Anymore.” What? How else are we going to protest? How else are we going to show the world our numbers? I heard Tom Hayden say something last year that struck a chord: “Marching and demonstrations are a tactic used by a besieged minority. Today, those who oppose the Iraq War are in the majority.” The whole idea of marching, shouting, protesting and being “anti” is oppositional. In a perverse way, it actually strengthens our “opponents” by reinforcing polarity.
So, I propose that we never march again, and that we “stand” instead. No more yelling, no more shouting, no more spouting anger that squanders energy better spent. Marching indicates there is someplace to get to. Standing demonstrates that we are already “here” and are quietly steadfast as a “stand” for the world we know is possible -- and necessary. “Standing” is an acknowledgment that we are not fearful or intimidated. It is an invitation to courage, and an inspiration to those who are ready to evolve beyond dueling dualities. Standing also acknowledges that darkness isn’t the “opposite” of light, it is the absence of light. So there is no need to “fight” darkness, as long as we shine the light.
What might this look like? I am envisioning something I call the 50 Million American “Stand.” 50 million Americans voted for regime change in 2004, and with the President’s approval numbers hovering just above freezing, there is the growing understanding that we have now devolved into an entirely new form of government -- an “illegitimacy”: government of the bastards, by the bastards and for the bastards. I know that sounds harsh and judgmental, but have you noticed that these people aren’t even feeling the need to cover up their crimes? Our government is cheating on us, and top officials are brazenly being seen consorting with these gold-diggers in public.
So ... what if on an appointed day -- July 4th would work -- Americans willing to be a stand for what our Founders stood for (truth, justice, liberty and transparency) gathered at every town hall, city hall, state capital, and on the mall in Washington, D.C.? What if 50 million or more Americans took that one day to stand in front of whatever symbolizes governance in America, and reminded our “leaders” that this is ultimately “our” country? Those unable to be there in person could “appoint” a representative by handing them a letter to that effect, and on the appointed day in every city, county, state and in our nation’s capital these citizens would let themselves be counted. Thus, a gathering of 10,000 people might represent 50,000. The theme would be “Stand Up ... And Be Counted.” And we would indeed count the people who show up and are represented, and in this way we would let our erstwhile leaders know that we “count.”
The prevailing mood at all of these events would be hope, inspiration, joy, and a peaceful steadfastness that perhaps hasn’t been experienced since the great civil rights march on Washington forty-something years ago. We would aim for 50 million Americans to be represented, and because of the local connection, the events would have to be covered by every local newspaper and TV station. These events would be reported worldwide, and the message to the world would be: We the people of America have made the choice to take back our country, our heritage, our legacy.
- 3. Pray For the Soul of America, and Invite the People of the World to Do the Same. I’m sorry if this sounds unctuous, and before you secular humanists reading this run for the hills please take a minute to sit with this idea. There are many definitions of prayer, but if we go with the most generic, it boils down to “shared intention for the good.” In his book on the subject, Dr. Larry Dossey cites studies that show people who are “prayed for” actually recover more quickly from surgery and have fewer complications. Interestingly, it doesn’t seem to matter what tradition the prayer is in. As long as there’s healing intention, it works. In this sense, even a self-identified atheist could participate in this field, simply by wishing an individual, a group, or a situation well. In a similar way, practitioners of Transcendental Meditation have correlated an influx of meditators to an area with a reduction of the crime rate.
Would it help heal our afflicted body politic? Well, it would be worth finding out, and like chicken soup, it couldn’t hurt. Imagine a “tag-team” prayer vigil, 24/7 where any and all spiritual groups that want to participate can keep the “flame” burning. Imagine tens of thousands of communities across the country, unified in intention that “only love prevails.” Such a “field” would enliven and inspire the same kinds of gatherings worldwide, among those of all religions (and no religion at all) ready to affirm “we’re all in it together.”
Think of it this way. If we the people of America are able to turn things around here, imagine the inspiration for the rest of the world. Imagine the impact that real freedom -- not economic exploitation and cultural disrespect covered by a thin, artificial veneer -- would have on those who might otherwise be polarized into radical Islam. Who knows? If we birth real freedom at home and treat others with respect abroad, we might be surprised to find that millions of people who “hate” us now will step up and proclaim, “I’ll have what they’re having.”
- 4. Flex Your Fiscal Muscles. In a country where it’s money, money über alles, let’s begin to flex our fiscal muscles by withdrawing financial energy from what we don’t want, and investing it in what we do. 50 million voters voted for regime change in 2004. If each of those individuals shifted just $100, that’s $5 billion. Now, of course that ain’t much, but it’s a start. What if just one fiftieth of that number, a million people, pulled the plug on their cable, or stopped their daily newspaper subscription, and shifted that money to support online news services such as TruthOut, OpEd News, Common Dreams?
A recent Zogby poll indicated that 64% of the Democrats in Pennsylvania are women, and I suspect that the trend is true in other states as well. Since every piece of marketing research I could find says that women do the bulk of the shopping in this country, that would indicate a lot of under-utilized clout. What if women who instinctively understand that a “you-and-me” world is safer and more life-affirming than a “you-or-me” world, used their spending power to feed the healing forces in this country, and starve the hurting forces? For starters, folks can check out BuyBlue.org.
If all this sounds “idealistic,” remember that we are rapidly approaching the point where the ideal must become the real deal -- otherwise, when it comes to human life on the planet, it’s no deal. For a long time now, we’ve been hearing that every generation must step up to defend freedom. Now it’s our turn. In the past, we’ve been called upon to march to some foreign land, armed with a gun. In these times, being a stand for freedom looks like standing up where we are, armed only with the Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and the knowledge that every religion or spiritual path boils down to some variation on the Golden Rule. A critical mass of citizens standing on the brink of evolution, firmly and fearlessly, stripped of illusion. Now that is the real “naked power” that will change the world as we know it.
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Dubai and The Bush Dynasty Deal with the Devil
A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL
Permanent url: http://www.buzzflash.com/editorial/06/02/edi06016.html
February 23, 2006
The Bush family has always had a deal with the devil.
As Kevin Phillips, the man who originally crafted the GOP "Southern Strategy" for Nixon, told BuzzFlash, the Bush family only excels at two things: corporate cronyism and stealing elections.
In the introduction to our 2004 interview with Philips about his book "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush," we wrote:
"Few have looked at the facts of the family's rise, but just as important, commentators have neglected the thread -- not the mere occasion -- of special interests, biases, scandals (especially those related to arms dealing), and blatant business cronyism" Phillips writes in his preface. "The evidence that accumulates over four generations [of the Bush family dynasty] is really quite damning."
"Three generations of immersion in the culture of secrecy...deceit and disinformation have become Bush political hallmarks," Phillips notes.
Entitlement, elitism, privilege, secrecy, mediocrity, corruption, financial cronyism, bailouts of family failures by the taxpayers -- these are some of the true characteristics of the Bush Dynasty, according to Phillips.
To Phillips, however, the greatest threat to America posed by the Bush dynasty is not its inherent unfitness to rule. What most offends and angers Phillips is the threat that the imposition of the Bush dynasty on America poses to democracy itself. The American rebellion in 1776 represented the creation of a nation built on the foundations of a government elected by the people, not determined by the restoration to power of corrupt bloodlines.
So it came as no surprise to BuzzFlash that the secret, labyrinthian corporate cronyism of the Bush Dynasty would ultimately unfold in a betrayal as bold as turning over our port security to a nation that has enjoyed close ties with Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. After all, Bush went to war with Iraq when it was Saudi Arabians who were the primary financiers of Al-Qaeda and 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi, and the Wahabi religious faction nurtured by the Saudi royal family is the leading Islamic promoter of terrorism against the West.
It has nothing to do with Dubai being an Arab nation (that would be racist); it has everything to do with Dubai (as part of the United Arab Emirates) cozying up to the terrorists who threaten us in order to buy them off and prevent an overthrow of their corrupt sheikdom, as is the case in Saudi Arabia.
The treasonous port deal brings into direct conflict the primary domestic and foreign agendas of the Bush Administration. The former "faith-based" coordinator didn't call the White House staff the Mayberry Machiavellis for nothing.
First, you have the Rovian agenda of using the "appearance" of "a war on terrorism" to instill fear in the American Public and using that primal emotion to secure Republican victories in the voting booth (along with voter suppression and stealing an election or two, just ask Al Gore). Rove is a master of manipulating "perception," not accomplishing national security goals. In fact, a feeling of national insecurity better serves his political goals than implementing measures to assure our safety as a nation. In short, the "war on terrorism" is a political construct.
Yes, there are terrorists out there, and we should protect ourselves against them, but that is precisely not what the Bush Administration is doing. They are as incompetent in fighting terrorism as they were in dealing with Hurricane Katrina. In fact, their policies increase the risk of terrorism and the number of terrorists.
While Rove played the domestic fear fiddle, Cheney used foreign policy to advance big oil and financial interests in the Middle East. The big oil/big banking/big business agenda has a lot of leeway for friendly relationships with nations that condone or overlook the terrorists in their midst. In fact, as we and others have pointed out, the Saudi Arabian and Dubai (United Arab Emirates) royal families have paid "insurance money" to terrorists in order to prevent themselves from being overthrown.
What the Dubai port deal represents is the seedy, treacherous, greedy, cynical underside of the Bush dynasty. They are experts at playing the American public for suckers while they and the Republican Party -- which is really their Royal Treasury (along with private firms like Halliburton and the Carlyle Group) -- gorge themselves at the trough of big oil and multinational corporate sellouts.
The Dubai arrangement is perfectly reasonable to Bush: it's about the money. And as Kevin Phillips might tell you, for the Bush Dynasty, money and corporate cronyism trump national security any old day.
What you have here is a collision in the goals of our two real co-presidents: Rove for domestic affairs and Cheney for international affairs.
Maybe it was because Cheney was distracted with his big Saturday: a couple of beers, shooting some quail, shooting a man, followed by a "hold off the hangover" cocktail at the Armstrong ranch, an early night's sleep and desperate calls to Mary Matalin to bail him out.
Or maybe it is because Rove was distracted by a still possible indictment for betraying the nation by being involved in the outing of a CIA operative specializing in the tracking of illicit weapons of mass destruction.
But whatever the cause of the distraction, it's clear that the fault line of the insane clown posse has temporarily been exposed for all to see, even the Kool-Aid drinking rubber stamp Republican Congress.
It is like the San Andreas fault plates reaching the point of tension that they have to snap and cause an earthquake.
But remember that after an earthquake, things settle back to "normal" after awhile. That's what the Bush Dynasty is counting on.
Of course, it's only our national security that is at stake.
(Editor's note ... Actions speak louder than words about the reality of Bush's 'War on Terrorism'.)
*************************************************************************
A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL
Permanent url: http://www.buzzflash.com/editorial/06/02/edi06016.html
February 23, 2006
The Bush family has always had a deal with the devil.
As Kevin Phillips, the man who originally crafted the GOP "Southern Strategy" for Nixon, told BuzzFlash, the Bush family only excels at two things: corporate cronyism and stealing elections.
In the introduction to our 2004 interview with Philips about his book "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush," we wrote:
"Few have looked at the facts of the family's rise, but just as important, commentators have neglected the thread -- not the mere occasion -- of special interests, biases, scandals (especially those related to arms dealing), and blatant business cronyism" Phillips writes in his preface. "The evidence that accumulates over four generations [of the Bush family dynasty] is really quite damning."
"Three generations of immersion in the culture of secrecy...deceit and disinformation have become Bush political hallmarks," Phillips notes.
Entitlement, elitism, privilege, secrecy, mediocrity, corruption, financial cronyism, bailouts of family failures by the taxpayers -- these are some of the true characteristics of the Bush Dynasty, according to Phillips.
To Phillips, however, the greatest threat to America posed by the Bush dynasty is not its inherent unfitness to rule. What most offends and angers Phillips is the threat that the imposition of the Bush dynasty on America poses to democracy itself. The American rebellion in 1776 represented the creation of a nation built on the foundations of a government elected by the people, not determined by the restoration to power of corrupt bloodlines.
So it came as no surprise to BuzzFlash that the secret, labyrinthian corporate cronyism of the Bush Dynasty would ultimately unfold in a betrayal as bold as turning over our port security to a nation that has enjoyed close ties with Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. After all, Bush went to war with Iraq when it was Saudi Arabians who were the primary financiers of Al-Qaeda and 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi, and the Wahabi religious faction nurtured by the Saudi royal family is the leading Islamic promoter of terrorism against the West.
It has nothing to do with Dubai being an Arab nation (that would be racist); it has everything to do with Dubai (as part of the United Arab Emirates) cozying up to the terrorists who threaten us in order to buy them off and prevent an overthrow of their corrupt sheikdom, as is the case in Saudi Arabia.
The treasonous port deal brings into direct conflict the primary domestic and foreign agendas of the Bush Administration. The former "faith-based" coordinator didn't call the White House staff the Mayberry Machiavellis for nothing.
First, you have the Rovian agenda of using the "appearance" of "a war on terrorism" to instill fear in the American Public and using that primal emotion to secure Republican victories in the voting booth (along with voter suppression and stealing an election or two, just ask Al Gore). Rove is a master of manipulating "perception," not accomplishing national security goals. In fact, a feeling of national insecurity better serves his political goals than implementing measures to assure our safety as a nation. In short, the "war on terrorism" is a political construct.
Yes, there are terrorists out there, and we should protect ourselves against them, but that is precisely not what the Bush Administration is doing. They are as incompetent in fighting terrorism as they were in dealing with Hurricane Katrina. In fact, their policies increase the risk of terrorism and the number of terrorists.
While Rove played the domestic fear fiddle, Cheney used foreign policy to advance big oil and financial interests in the Middle East. The big oil/big banking/big business agenda has a lot of leeway for friendly relationships with nations that condone or overlook the terrorists in their midst. In fact, as we and others have pointed out, the Saudi Arabian and Dubai (United Arab Emirates) royal families have paid "insurance money" to terrorists in order to prevent themselves from being overthrown.
What the Dubai port deal represents is the seedy, treacherous, greedy, cynical underside of the Bush dynasty. They are experts at playing the American public for suckers while they and the Republican Party -- which is really their Royal Treasury (along with private firms like Halliburton and the Carlyle Group) -- gorge themselves at the trough of big oil and multinational corporate sellouts.
The Dubai arrangement is perfectly reasonable to Bush: it's about the money. And as Kevin Phillips might tell you, for the Bush Dynasty, money and corporate cronyism trump national security any old day.
What you have here is a collision in the goals of our two real co-presidents: Rove for domestic affairs and Cheney for international affairs.
Maybe it was because Cheney was distracted with his big Saturday: a couple of beers, shooting some quail, shooting a man, followed by a "hold off the hangover" cocktail at the Armstrong ranch, an early night's sleep and desperate calls to Mary Matalin to bail him out.
Or maybe it is because Rove was distracted by a still possible indictment for betraying the nation by being involved in the outing of a CIA operative specializing in the tracking of illicit weapons of mass destruction.
But whatever the cause of the distraction, it's clear that the fault line of the insane clown posse has temporarily been exposed for all to see, even the Kool-Aid drinking rubber stamp Republican Congress.
It is like the San Andreas fault plates reaching the point of tension that they have to snap and cause an earthquake.
But remember that after an earthquake, things settle back to "normal" after awhile. That's what the Bush Dynasty is counting on.
Of course, it's only our national security that is at stake.
(Editor's note ... Actions speak louder than words about the reality of Bush's 'War on Terrorism'.)
*************************************************************************
Monday, February 20, 2006
The Republican Talk Radio “Big Lie”
by Stephen Crockett
http://www.opednews.com
It has always been known that more people will believe a lie, the bigger the lie is and the more often the lie is repeated. Talk radio as defined by the Republican Right mindset is completely based on lies. The entire way Republican Right talk show hosts present political events and issues are based on lies designed to deceive their listeners instead of educating them.
The Republican Right dominates talk radio entirely by using business pressure to keep Democrats, environmentalists, labor leaders, progressives and independent thinkers off the air. Arnie Arnesen in New Hampshire and Guy James in Florida are two of the most recent examples of Republican using business pressure to censor Democratic talk show programs. This writer will write more columns soon giving details on Arnie Arnesen and Guy James among other talkers forced off the air by what should be illegal actions by Republican businesses.
Republican business leaders routinely organize advertiser boycotts to pressure the few independent radio station owners to remove local Democratic friendly talk shows off the air. Examples are everywhere for the past few decades. When the FCC removed the Equal Time Provisions and Fairness Doctrines from broadcasting, (starting under Ronald Reagan) Republican Right fanatics, with huge amounts of money, targeted radio. The removed broadcasting restrictions should immediately be returned to American broadcasting law. Station owners are using free of charge the public airwaves for private profit. They should be required to serve the public interest by promoting fairness and balance in terms of political programming.
Talk radio was seen as a way to advance their political agenda while avoiding campaign finance laws and lobbying restrictions. Corporations and Republican Right local business leaders started using their advertising budgets to achieve political goals like stopping consumers from suing them, weakening labor law enforcement, fighting increases in the minimum wage, fighting environmental protection regulations, etc.
By gutting the monopoly ownership provisions, fewer and fewer business concerns began to own the stations and control broadcasting. The Republican Right “Big Lie” is that Democratic shows cannot gain large listening audiences. The second supporting lie is that advertisers will buy time on shows that gain large listening audiences regardless of their political content.
The Republican Right business community has used their political agenda funded by advertising dollars to change laws in order to make huge profits. They shifted the tax burden once carried by large corporations to individual middle class taxpayers. They advanced the “free trade” nonsense relentlessly until most Americans falsely believe that sending good paying jobs out of country and globalization is inevitable and not the result of deliberate policy choices by governments and large corporations acting together.
They have undermined traditional American political values. They have made money the dominant force in American politics instead of the average voters. They have lowered voter turn-out by making political discussions nasty and vicious. They created a climate that tolerates corruption, “no-bid” contracts and vote rigging.
The Republican Right talk radio shows have convinced many weak minded voters that Bush is essentially above the law. They convinced many that any criticism of Republican policies or Republican politicians is somehow un-Patriotic. Shockingly, they have promoted a hatred of the Poor even to some Christian listeners. They have sold government abuses as “common sense” even when those very same abuses caused our Founding Fathers to revolt against the oppressive government of King George during the American Revolution.
Radio station owners should have their broadcasting licenses revoked when they fail to promote diversity in political programming. They should be required by law to publicly report all politically motivated advertiser boycotts or threats. Listeners should be able to know about these attempts so they can boycott those businesses for their attempts at political censorship.
Our American freedom requires a free exchange of ideas. Those using our publicly owned airwaves should be required by law to advance that free exchange of ideas. They owe us that information in exchange for their huge private profits made from use of our airwaves. They should not be using our assets to manipulate us politically!
*************************************************************************
by Stephen Crockett
http://www.opednews.com
It has always been known that more people will believe a lie, the bigger the lie is and the more often the lie is repeated. Talk radio as defined by the Republican Right mindset is completely based on lies. The entire way Republican Right talk show hosts present political events and issues are based on lies designed to deceive their listeners instead of educating them.
The Republican Right dominates talk radio entirely by using business pressure to keep Democrats, environmentalists, labor leaders, progressives and independent thinkers off the air. Arnie Arnesen in New Hampshire and Guy James in Florida are two of the most recent examples of Republican using business pressure to censor Democratic talk show programs. This writer will write more columns soon giving details on Arnie Arnesen and Guy James among other talkers forced off the air by what should be illegal actions by Republican businesses.
Republican business leaders routinely organize advertiser boycotts to pressure the few independent radio station owners to remove local Democratic friendly talk shows off the air. Examples are everywhere for the past few decades. When the FCC removed the Equal Time Provisions and Fairness Doctrines from broadcasting, (starting under Ronald Reagan) Republican Right fanatics, with huge amounts of money, targeted radio. The removed broadcasting restrictions should immediately be returned to American broadcasting law. Station owners are using free of charge the public airwaves for private profit. They should be required to serve the public interest by promoting fairness and balance in terms of political programming.
Talk radio was seen as a way to advance their political agenda while avoiding campaign finance laws and lobbying restrictions. Corporations and Republican Right local business leaders started using their advertising budgets to achieve political goals like stopping consumers from suing them, weakening labor law enforcement, fighting increases in the minimum wage, fighting environmental protection regulations, etc.
By gutting the monopoly ownership provisions, fewer and fewer business concerns began to own the stations and control broadcasting. The Republican Right “Big Lie” is that Democratic shows cannot gain large listening audiences. The second supporting lie is that advertisers will buy time on shows that gain large listening audiences regardless of their political content.
The Republican Right business community has used their political agenda funded by advertising dollars to change laws in order to make huge profits. They shifted the tax burden once carried by large corporations to individual middle class taxpayers. They advanced the “free trade” nonsense relentlessly until most Americans falsely believe that sending good paying jobs out of country and globalization is inevitable and not the result of deliberate policy choices by governments and large corporations acting together.
They have undermined traditional American political values. They have made money the dominant force in American politics instead of the average voters. They have lowered voter turn-out by making political discussions nasty and vicious. They created a climate that tolerates corruption, “no-bid” contracts and vote rigging.
The Republican Right talk radio shows have convinced many weak minded voters that Bush is essentially above the law. They convinced many that any criticism of Republican policies or Republican politicians is somehow un-Patriotic. Shockingly, they have promoted a hatred of the Poor even to some Christian listeners. They have sold government abuses as “common sense” even when those very same abuses caused our Founding Fathers to revolt against the oppressive government of King George during the American Revolution.
Radio station owners should have their broadcasting licenses revoked when they fail to promote diversity in political programming. They should be required by law to publicly report all politically motivated advertiser boycotts or threats. Listeners should be able to know about these attempts so they can boycott those businesses for their attempts at political censorship.
Our American freedom requires a free exchange of ideas. Those using our publicly owned airwaves should be required by law to advance that free exchange of ideas. They owe us that information in exchange for their huge private profits made from use of our airwaves. They should not be using our assets to manipulate us politically!
*************************************************************************
Who Is Really "Weak" on National Security?
by David Sirota
http://www.workingforchange.com/blog
02-20-06
Karl Rove has made no secret of his desire to try to ramrod the 2006 elections into a debate over who is "tough" on national security. And it seems more and more Democrats are frightened to actually have the debate. Oh sure, these Democrats wouldn't tell you that - in fact, many are posturing as tough guys even as they cower in fear of Rove. A few weeks back, it was Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN), self-servingly reinforcing Rove's dishonest storyline of Democrats as "afraid" (read: weak) on national security. And now today in the Toledo Blade, it's failed Ohio Senate candidate Paul Hackett's campaign.
Yes, you read that correctly. A week after Hackett got out of the race, Hackett's campaign - now in the process of closing down - leaked all of its "opposition research" on Rep. Sherrod Brown (D) to the Toledo Blade - opposition research that regurgitates the same Karl-Rove-esque "weak on national security" lies that have eroded Democrats' image over the years.
Clearly, the Hackett campaign's move is disgusting on many levels. First and foremost, is the sheer pathetic, sore-loserish quality of it. A week ago, it was Hackett who appeared on Air America radio saying: "I’d rather see Sherrod Brown as my next Senator [than Republican Mike DeWine]…Why do I want to hurt him if we can get him elected...I’m proud to say that I’m a team player...Everybody who is upset about this, get over it now and let’s work hard to get Democrats on the ticket elected." Now, this "team player" is out spreading dishonest GOP propaganda. Classy.
But the shameless disloyalty of Hackett's campaign isn't really what's interesting. The broader attempt by the right to create a storyline about "weakness" and "strength" on national security is. So let's just look at the Toledo Blade story and what it represents at a deeper level. Hackett's campaign tries to attack Brown for voting against the Patriot Act - even though polls show the public has serious reservations about the law, and want it to be changed (see question 19 of this USA Today/CNN poll from last month for reference).
But beyond the hyperbole on the Patriot Act - which lawmakers in both parties have now raised objections to - is the more pressing attack on Brown's votes to slightly reduce spending for intelligence in the 1990s. Like an obedient appendage of Rove's smear machine, Hackett's campaign says the votes essentially mean Brown is "weak" on national security. But let's just think about how truly ridiculous that line of reasoning is. The intelligence bills passed, the funding went through, and we still got hit on 9/11, even though we had overt warnings.
That makes something very clear: our intelligence apparatus in the 1990s was focused on outdated Cold War priorities - not on the new threats to America. Brown's votes were a courageous attempt to force reform - instead of simply throwing more money at an outdated apparatus that ultimately failed us on 9/11 because it hadn't been reformed earlier. If anyone is "weak" on national security, it is the people who blindly voted for these bills - not those who tried to force a debate that may have sharpened our intelligence system's focus on the real threats to America BEFORE they materialized.
Fortunately, the American public - who clearly wants its security protected - seems to innately understand that the national security spending decisions by the establishment need re-focusing. Take a look at the University of Maryland's poll from a year ago:
"A majority rejects the idea that net increases in the defense budget as a whole are necessary to fight terrorism...When presented most of the major items in the discretionary federal budget and given the opportunity to modify it, Americans make some dramatic changes. The largest cut by far is to defense spending, which is reduced by nearly one-third ($133 billion), followed by spending on Iraq and Afghanistan."
In other words, Americans don't buy the Rove-Hackett storyline. They get that the defense/intelligence budget has, for years, been increasingly corrupted by bought-off politicians who have used it to enrich their defense industry campaign contributors. You have to look no further than the shenanigans of Reps. Duke Cunningham (R-CA) or Jerry Lewis (R-CA) on the Defense Appropriations Committee to know why Americans see the truth on this. In fact, it was none other than Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who tacitly acknowledged this reality when he recently advocated for military "transformation" - a program that included major defense spending cuts to outdated weapons systems that contractors were getting fat off of, but that weren't targeted to the War on Terror. And throughout the 1980s it was Dick Cheney who pushed repeatedly to cut defense spending, again citing the wastefulness of outdated programs. These two are clearly "weak" on national security because of their decisions to send us into a war that diverted resources from pursuing the perpetrators of 9/11 - but they are not "weak" on national security because of their previous (and now abandoned) efforts to refocus national security spending.
In a previous post, I wrote about how this country desperately needs to have the debate over national security spending that Brown clearly supported in voting the way he did in the 1990s. As former Reagan Assistant Secretary of Defense Larry Korb recently noted:
"Over $40 billion in savings from wasteful Pentagon programs could be achieved quickly – by cutting only the most egregious examples of misplaced priorities. These programs include the F-22 Raptor fighter jet and Virginia Class submarines, designed to achieve superiority over Soviet jets and submarines that were never built; missile defense, proposed when terrorists were not our primary enemy; bases in Asia, Europe and here at home that are irrelevant in today's geopolitical reality."
Sherrod Brown and the courageous lawmakers who voted with him in the 1990s were trying to bring this debate to the forefront. And had they been successful in forcing reform, our defenses against the real terrorist threats may have been stronger when we were ultimately attacked. This is why, instead of running scared from Rove like Evan Bayh, or reinforcing Rove's talking points as Hackett did, Democrats must go right at the Republicans on this issue. They must forcefully remind the public that progressives were trying to reform and refocus national security spending on the real threats to America in the lead up to 9/11, and that they are continuing to try to reform and refocus that spending today.
The public would clearly be receptive to this message. Americans are waiting for party to articulate this reality - they know that our national security resources aren't being spent properly. Whether we are diverting resources from the War on Terror in Iraq, or outsourcing port security to firms owned by countries with connections to terrorists - Americans see what's going on. And they are sick of dishonest opportunists like Rove using the veil of "national security" as a way to perpetuate budget policies that have weakened U.S. national security by blindly handing over billions of dollars to defense contractor campaign donors, regardless of whether those contracts will actually protect America against the threats we now face.
*************************************************************************
by David Sirota
http://www.workingforchange.com/blog
02-20-06
Karl Rove has made no secret of his desire to try to ramrod the 2006 elections into a debate over who is "tough" on national security. And it seems more and more Democrats are frightened to actually have the debate. Oh sure, these Democrats wouldn't tell you that - in fact, many are posturing as tough guys even as they cower in fear of Rove. A few weeks back, it was Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN), self-servingly reinforcing Rove's dishonest storyline of Democrats as "afraid" (read: weak) on national security. And now today in the Toledo Blade, it's failed Ohio Senate candidate Paul Hackett's campaign.
Yes, you read that correctly. A week after Hackett got out of the race, Hackett's campaign - now in the process of closing down - leaked all of its "opposition research" on Rep. Sherrod Brown (D) to the Toledo Blade - opposition research that regurgitates the same Karl-Rove-esque "weak on national security" lies that have eroded Democrats' image over the years.
Clearly, the Hackett campaign's move is disgusting on many levels. First and foremost, is the sheer pathetic, sore-loserish quality of it. A week ago, it was Hackett who appeared on Air America radio saying: "I’d rather see Sherrod Brown as my next Senator [than Republican Mike DeWine]…Why do I want to hurt him if we can get him elected...I’m proud to say that I’m a team player...Everybody who is upset about this, get over it now and let’s work hard to get Democrats on the ticket elected." Now, this "team player" is out spreading dishonest GOP propaganda. Classy.
But the shameless disloyalty of Hackett's campaign isn't really what's interesting. The broader attempt by the right to create a storyline about "weakness" and "strength" on national security is. So let's just look at the Toledo Blade story and what it represents at a deeper level. Hackett's campaign tries to attack Brown for voting against the Patriot Act - even though polls show the public has serious reservations about the law, and want it to be changed (see question 19 of this USA Today/CNN poll from last month for reference).
But beyond the hyperbole on the Patriot Act - which lawmakers in both parties have now raised objections to - is the more pressing attack on Brown's votes to slightly reduce spending for intelligence in the 1990s. Like an obedient appendage of Rove's smear machine, Hackett's campaign says the votes essentially mean Brown is "weak" on national security. But let's just think about how truly ridiculous that line of reasoning is. The intelligence bills passed, the funding went through, and we still got hit on 9/11, even though we had overt warnings.
That makes something very clear: our intelligence apparatus in the 1990s was focused on outdated Cold War priorities - not on the new threats to America. Brown's votes were a courageous attempt to force reform - instead of simply throwing more money at an outdated apparatus that ultimately failed us on 9/11 because it hadn't been reformed earlier. If anyone is "weak" on national security, it is the people who blindly voted for these bills - not those who tried to force a debate that may have sharpened our intelligence system's focus on the real threats to America BEFORE they materialized.
Fortunately, the American public - who clearly wants its security protected - seems to innately understand that the national security spending decisions by the establishment need re-focusing. Take a look at the University of Maryland's poll from a year ago:
"A majority rejects the idea that net increases in the defense budget as a whole are necessary to fight terrorism...When presented most of the major items in the discretionary federal budget and given the opportunity to modify it, Americans make some dramatic changes. The largest cut by far is to defense spending, which is reduced by nearly one-third ($133 billion), followed by spending on Iraq and Afghanistan."
In other words, Americans don't buy the Rove-Hackett storyline. They get that the defense/intelligence budget has, for years, been increasingly corrupted by bought-off politicians who have used it to enrich their defense industry campaign contributors. You have to look no further than the shenanigans of Reps. Duke Cunningham (R-CA) or Jerry Lewis (R-CA) on the Defense Appropriations Committee to know why Americans see the truth on this. In fact, it was none other than Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who tacitly acknowledged this reality when he recently advocated for military "transformation" - a program that included major defense spending cuts to outdated weapons systems that contractors were getting fat off of, but that weren't targeted to the War on Terror. And throughout the 1980s it was Dick Cheney who pushed repeatedly to cut defense spending, again citing the wastefulness of outdated programs. These two are clearly "weak" on national security because of their decisions to send us into a war that diverted resources from pursuing the perpetrators of 9/11 - but they are not "weak" on national security because of their previous (and now abandoned) efforts to refocus national security spending.
In a previous post, I wrote about how this country desperately needs to have the debate over national security spending that Brown clearly supported in voting the way he did in the 1990s. As former Reagan Assistant Secretary of Defense Larry Korb recently noted:
"Over $40 billion in savings from wasteful Pentagon programs could be achieved quickly – by cutting only the most egregious examples of misplaced priorities. These programs include the F-22 Raptor fighter jet and Virginia Class submarines, designed to achieve superiority over Soviet jets and submarines that were never built; missile defense, proposed when terrorists were not our primary enemy; bases in Asia, Europe and here at home that are irrelevant in today's geopolitical reality."
Sherrod Brown and the courageous lawmakers who voted with him in the 1990s were trying to bring this debate to the forefront. And had they been successful in forcing reform, our defenses against the real terrorist threats may have been stronger when we were ultimately attacked. This is why, instead of running scared from Rove like Evan Bayh, or reinforcing Rove's talking points as Hackett did, Democrats must go right at the Republicans on this issue. They must forcefully remind the public that progressives were trying to reform and refocus national security spending on the real threats to America in the lead up to 9/11, and that they are continuing to try to reform and refocus that spending today.
The public would clearly be receptive to this message. Americans are waiting for party to articulate this reality - they know that our national security resources aren't being spent properly. Whether we are diverting resources from the War on Terror in Iraq, or outsourcing port security to firms owned by countries with connections to terrorists - Americans see what's going on. And they are sick of dishonest opportunists like Rove using the veil of "national security" as a way to perpetuate budget policies that have weakened U.S. national security by blindly handing over billions of dollars to defense contractor campaign donors, regardless of whether those contracts will actually protect America against the threats we now face.
*************************************************************************
Forget D.C. - The Battle Is in the States.
by Nathan Newman and David Sirota
www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2509
02-20-06
Speaking to a packed room of 2,000 state legislators and business lobbyists gathered in Grapevine, Texas, last fall, George W. Bush thanked the crowd for its work on behalf of the conservative agenda. He wasn't talking about work they'd done on Capitol Hill, but about their collaboration to push the corporate agenda forward in statehouses across the country. The meeting was the 32nd annual gathering of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a membership association for conservative lawmakers. As its chairman, Georgia State Rep. Earl Ehrhart, said of the president's speech: "It was like the governor of a state talking to his legislative leaders."
This is the critical point: The highest echelons of the conservative movement and corporate America treat state legislators not as members of 50 different institutions, but as a single set of leaders who can be mobilized on a national basis.
Recognizing this reality, the Progressive Legislative Action Network (PLAN) was formed in fall 2005 to create a counterforce to the right in statehouses across the country. Supported by groups like MoveOn and the Center for American Progress, along with unions like SEIU, AFSCME, the AFL-CIO and the Steelworkers, PLAN is working with state legislators across the country to move both a united agenda and strategic plan to take on ALEC and its allies throughout the country.
The conservative march through the states
The need to challenge the right-wing movement in the states is clear. ALEC claims more than 2,400 state lawmakers as members--roughly one-third of all state legislators--and has become one of the critical fulcrums of conservative power in the United States. Backed by many of the largest corporations in the country--including Exxon Mobil, Coors Brewing, Pfizer and Phillip Morris--ALEC is networked into conservative think tanks and allied political operations such as the Heartland Institute and the corporate-backed American Tort Reform Association. At the center of this network, ALEC helps draft and promote legislation that has crippled social service budgets, deregulated industries, slashed medical care for the poor, and undermined consumer and worker protections in state after state.
In 2004 alone, 1,108 ALEC model bills were introduced and 178 were enacted into law, a legislative assault that ALEC and its conservative allies have been repeating year after year. Given the prominence of its legislative supporters--34 state speakers of the house, 25 state senate presidents, 31 state senate leaders and 33 state house leaders are ALEC members--this success is hardly surprising.
Sadly, in the face of this daunting right-wing machine, many progressive leaders and activists remain fixated on Capitol Hill and the White House, leaving state legislators, local political organizations and unions to battle ALEC all alone. The problem is compounded by a national media that barely covers these state struggles. Even the most sophisticated national political commentators typically see fights for control of state legislatures as important only insofar as they impact redistricting of federal congressional races. Except for the occasional media spasm around a particularly virulent state legislative proposal that hands out pork to a corporation or restricts civil rights, the overall march of conservative legislation in the statehouses gets relatively little attention from progressive activists fixated on "serious" politics at the federal level.
Yet the battle for our states is incredibly serious. The conservative strategy is to use the state political arena to leverage control of national policy, and unless progressives get focused and view the battle for the states as crucial to America's political future, no amount of change at the federal level will allow us to take our country back.
Why state policy matters
Most progressives fail to realize that state governments collectively have as much--and in some cases, more--power over the issues they care about as the federal government. State and local revenues are about equal to federal tax revenue, and in an era of "flexibility" and "waivers," federal money is increasingly handed over to the states with few strings attached. In explaining conservatives' focus on state legislation, ALEC's Medicaid specialist James Frogue observed, "Innovations and reforms in Medicaid will come from the states. They will not come from D.C."
Most federal civil rights, consumer and employment laws only modify the baseline of rights established by state governments. In fact, only a tiny minority of legal struggles are pursued under federal statutes. Instead, state courts handle roughly 17 million civil cases every year, including contract, tort and real property disputes, the outcome of which turn overwhelmingly on state, not federal, law. Through state law and liability rules, the states regulate trillions of dollars of commerce.
Similarly, while there were 170,535 federal prisoners in 2004, that number is dwarfed by the 1.9 million prisoners in state and local prisons and jails. The criminal sentencing decisions that have decimated a generation of young people in minority communities were made in statehouses, not on Capitol Hill. And one of the least-understood areas of increasing state power is that wielded by public pension funds, which now control $2.7 trillion in financial assets and can shape financial markets with their investment decisions--a fact that the right is all too aware of as they launch campaigns to privatize those pensions.
With all this power in the hands of the states, conservatives recognize that with a coordinated strategy, a movement can govern the nation from the statehouses. States have been vulnerable to this right-wing takeover because most state legislatures are made up of poorly paid, part-time lawmakers with few--if any--staff to research or evaluate the laws they are asked to approve. The lack of resources means there are few staffers in legislatures who can challenge the expertise presented by ALEC and other conservative operatives, or uncover the hidden payoffs for corporate interests contained in legislation. Thus ALEC provides a stealthy, tax-exempt front for corporate interests to sell their ideas directly to statehouse leaders across the country.
At the most obvious level, ALEC gives a "public interest" sheen to the raw special pleading of Big Money before state legislatures. Here are just a few of these recent corporate campaigns:
The right's strategic agenda
Still, if the right-wing movement in the states only amounted to a series of individual profit-driven campaigns, the threat posed by ALEC would merely be one of a slick, well-funded public relations operation, albeit a nasty and effective one.
But the real danger from ALEC and its associated organizations comes from conservatives' aim to structurally undermine the very capacities of government that restrain corporate power and to fuel campaigns that fracture progressive alliances and political power.
Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform and arguably the premiere right-wing strategist, has famously described the conservative goal as cutting government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." Key to that objective is cutting tax revenues and using constitutional limits on state taxing powers to make it politically impossible to fund social needs through government action. This strategy serves not just to limit progressive policy but, by creating a limited pool of funds, pits progressive groups against each other in a fight for resources.
Conservatives also aim to shut down the enforcement of business regulations across the states. The very success of state attorneys general in bringing tobacco and financial firms to heel has led to a backlash to limit the power of attorneys general. And where citizens have the ability to enforce regulations in the courts, the right has been gutting those citizens' legal powers. For example, one of the first acts of Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration was forcing through restrictions on the state labor code's Private Attorney General Act, which had given advocates greater power to enforce the state's labor laws.
In the last few years, no issue has consumed corporate America more than shutting the courtroom door to plaintiffs injured by corporate malfeasance under the campaign of "tort reform." Damage awards have been limited and judges have increasingly been granted the right to exclude evidence of corporate wrongdoing by limiting plaintiff witnesses. This is done through the banning of so-called "junk science," with an often-politically connected judge (rather than the jury) getting to decide which witnesses are credible. The end result of this campaign is to make it nearly impossible for poor plaintiffs to get a day in court or to prevent a judge from overturning any judgment in their favor.
Another key strategy for the corporate right is privatization, a strategy that both undermines labor standards for government services and opens the labor market to corporate profiteering. The conservative-induced budget crises in many states have served to help this process along. In 2002, ALEC co-wrote a report with the Manhattan Institute that made privatization a key solution for balancing state budgets. They proposed that Medicaid be replaced with private Medical Savings Accounts and public schools be funded with vouchers. Similarly, prison management would be privatized. Name an area of government and conservatives are seeking to hand its operations over to corporate allies who, in turn, can eliminate labor unions and use the profits to fund more campaign contributions to their political machine.
A special case of privatization has been the recent assault on state employee pension funds. In 2005, Alaska passed legislation ending guaranteed pensions for all newly hired state employees in favor of individual accounts, and legislators in California, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Virginia are heading in the same direction.
The most obvious goal is to cut benefits for union workers by ending guaranteed benefits--using exactly the same rhetoric of "choice" that President Bush employed to sell his Social Security privatization scheme at the federal level. But what really enrages conservatives are decisions by trustees of these pension funds to use their shareholder voting power to challenge corporate abuses, such as the pension funds in Ohio, New York and California that voted to divest in firms involved in privatization. And of course, there is the direct payoff to the financial services firms who will end up administering the millions of private accounts in a privatized state pension system and collecting the billions of dollars in fees.
Defunding the left
The shift in control of financial assets from public trustees to private corporations highlights the most pervasive and dangerous goal of the right's campaign in the states: defunding progressive institutions and thereby leaving corporations--and a few religious conservative allies--as the only forces with significant resources in politics.
Take the 2003 legislation passed in Texas that reserved family planning dollars, including those from the federal government, exclusively for healthcare providers that do not offer abortion services or referrals. This kind of proposal, coupled with "gag rules" and "abstinence only" legislation, not only shifts abortion policy, but strips resources from the broader pro-choice community. Similarly, the push for "faith based initiatives" shifts resources from nonprofits embedded in social justice networks to conservative organizations engaged in active conservative politics.
State-based "Right to Work" campaigns were conservatives' original weapons to cut off union dues, one of the primary sources of funding for political campaigns that oppose conservatives day-in and day-out. The present round of attacks is labeled "paycheck protection"--a nice-sounding term for crippling union workers' ability to donate political contributions through workplace deductions.
The whole right-wing attack on the civil justice system also has the effect of cutting the fees for employment and other trial lawyers, who have been strong sources of political funding for progressive causes. Passing tort reforms nationally, Grover Norquist argued back in 1999, takes "a $5-10 billion a year bite out of trial lawyer fees" and shuts down the progressive "get-out-the-vote effort, funded with money from trial lawyers."
By operating at the state level, Norquist et al have successfully avoided the glare of media attention and the full political focus of progressives. It's as if the right is tunneling under the foundation of progressives; by the time the ground--and financial resources--give way, it'll be too late to save the house.
How progressives fight back
So how should progressives respond to this coordinated assault on every level of progressive policy?
The key is to fight back, coordinate our own battles, think as strategically as ALEC and its allies and win back power at the state level. As People for the American Way said in a 2003 report about ALEC: "Progressives need a collaborative and equally coordinated effort to successfully counter ALEC's influence, expose its corporate and right-wing ties, and defeat dangerous proposals launched by this 'common enemy.'"
While many grassroots efforts have continued across the country since that report, progressives have not established the coordinated response that is needed to beat back the right. To do so, we must take three steps.
Ultimately, each strategic issue will reinforce the others, undercutting opposition coalitions while adding new allies to the progressive side, exposing the hypocrisy of the conservative agenda while clarifying the progressive program, and, step-by-step, entrenching progressive power in ways that the right wing will find harder and harder to dislodge.
Progressives need to use every tool of grassroots mobilization to build unity among our side's state legislators and deploy both strong policies and innovative strategies to beat the conservatives at their own game. Our overarching strategy: find the best public policies and champion them with effective and cohesive messaging. That is what the new Progressive Legislative Action Network (PLAN) is all about. It's time to finally end conservatives' dominance of state policy. It is time for progressives to govern from the states.
*************************************************************************
by Nathan Newman and David Sirota
www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2509
02-20-06
Speaking to a packed room of 2,000 state legislators and business lobbyists gathered in Grapevine, Texas, last fall, George W. Bush thanked the crowd for its work on behalf of the conservative agenda. He wasn't talking about work they'd done on Capitol Hill, but about their collaboration to push the corporate agenda forward in statehouses across the country. The meeting was the 32nd annual gathering of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a membership association for conservative lawmakers. As its chairman, Georgia State Rep. Earl Ehrhart, said of the president's speech: "It was like the governor of a state talking to his legislative leaders."
This is the critical point: The highest echelons of the conservative movement and corporate America treat state legislators not as members of 50 different institutions, but as a single set of leaders who can be mobilized on a national basis.
Recognizing this reality, the Progressive Legislative Action Network (PLAN) was formed in fall 2005 to create a counterforce to the right in statehouses across the country. Supported by groups like MoveOn and the Center for American Progress, along with unions like SEIU, AFSCME, the AFL-CIO and the Steelworkers, PLAN is working with state legislators across the country to move both a united agenda and strategic plan to take on ALEC and its allies throughout the country.
The conservative march through the states
The need to challenge the right-wing movement in the states is clear. ALEC claims more than 2,400 state lawmakers as members--roughly one-third of all state legislators--and has become one of the critical fulcrums of conservative power in the United States. Backed by many of the largest corporations in the country--including Exxon Mobil, Coors Brewing, Pfizer and Phillip Morris--ALEC is networked into conservative think tanks and allied political operations such as the Heartland Institute and the corporate-backed American Tort Reform Association. At the center of this network, ALEC helps draft and promote legislation that has crippled social service budgets, deregulated industries, slashed medical care for the poor, and undermined consumer and worker protections in state after state.
In 2004 alone, 1,108 ALEC model bills were introduced and 178 were enacted into law, a legislative assault that ALEC and its conservative allies have been repeating year after year. Given the prominence of its legislative supporters--34 state speakers of the house, 25 state senate presidents, 31 state senate leaders and 33 state house leaders are ALEC members--this success is hardly surprising.
Sadly, in the face of this daunting right-wing machine, many progressive leaders and activists remain fixated on Capitol Hill and the White House, leaving state legislators, local political organizations and unions to battle ALEC all alone. The problem is compounded by a national media that barely covers these state struggles. Even the most sophisticated national political commentators typically see fights for control of state legislatures as important only insofar as they impact redistricting of federal congressional races. Except for the occasional media spasm around a particularly virulent state legislative proposal that hands out pork to a corporation or restricts civil rights, the overall march of conservative legislation in the statehouses gets relatively little attention from progressive activists fixated on "serious" politics at the federal level.
Yet the battle for our states is incredibly serious. The conservative strategy is to use the state political arena to leverage control of national policy, and unless progressives get focused and view the battle for the states as crucial to America's political future, no amount of change at the federal level will allow us to take our country back.
Why state policy matters
Most progressives fail to realize that state governments collectively have as much--and in some cases, more--power over the issues they care about as the federal government. State and local revenues are about equal to federal tax revenue, and in an era of "flexibility" and "waivers," federal money is increasingly handed over to the states with few strings attached. In explaining conservatives' focus on state legislation, ALEC's Medicaid specialist James Frogue observed, "Innovations and reforms in Medicaid will come from the states. They will not come from D.C."
Most federal civil rights, consumer and employment laws only modify the baseline of rights established by state governments. In fact, only a tiny minority of legal struggles are pursued under federal statutes. Instead, state courts handle roughly 17 million civil cases every year, including contract, tort and real property disputes, the outcome of which turn overwhelmingly on state, not federal, law. Through state law and liability rules, the states regulate trillions of dollars of commerce.
Similarly, while there were 170,535 federal prisoners in 2004, that number is dwarfed by the 1.9 million prisoners in state and local prisons and jails. The criminal sentencing decisions that have decimated a generation of young people in minority communities were made in statehouses, not on Capitol Hill. And one of the least-understood areas of increasing state power is that wielded by public pension funds, which now control $2.7 trillion in financial assets and can shape financial markets with their investment decisions--a fact that the right is all too aware of as they launch campaigns to privatize those pensions.
With all this power in the hands of the states, conservatives recognize that with a coordinated strategy, a movement can govern the nation from the statehouses. States have been vulnerable to this right-wing takeover because most state legislatures are made up of poorly paid, part-time lawmakers with few--if any--staff to research or evaluate the laws they are asked to approve. The lack of resources means there are few staffers in legislatures who can challenge the expertise presented by ALEC and other conservative operatives, or uncover the hidden payoffs for corporate interests contained in legislation. Thus ALEC provides a stealthy, tax-exempt front for corporate interests to sell their ideas directly to statehouse leaders across the country.
At the most obvious level, ALEC gives a "public interest" sheen to the raw special pleading of Big Money before state legislatures. Here are just a few of these recent corporate campaigns:
- Backed by the oil industry, ALEC has lined up legislators to lower taxes on gasoline and to undermine regulations aimed at curbing the carbon dioxide emissions leading to global warming.
- Backed by the drug companies, ALEC has mounted a full-scale campaign to defeat initiatives by cities and states to promote importing lower-priced select medicines from Canada.
- Backed by low-wage employers, ALEC has promoted legislation to block local governments from raising local minimum wages or even requiring government contractors to pay a fair wage to their employees.
- Backed by the telephone companies, ALEC has worked to bar or hamstring cities that have sought to build cheaper or even free Internet services for their residents.
- Backed by the insurance companies, ALEC has been promoting a campaign to stop state insurance commissioners from requiring insurance companies to meet the same accountability and auditing rules that were imposed on publicly-traded corporations in the wake of the Enron debacle.
- And ALEC has been advocating cracking down on seniors who shelter income in a home while using Medicaid to finance long term care, a campaign that would force seniors to buy "reverse annuity mortgages," a new financial instrument promoted by ALEC's financial services industry funders.
The right's strategic agenda
Still, if the right-wing movement in the states only amounted to a series of individual profit-driven campaigns, the threat posed by ALEC would merely be one of a slick, well-funded public relations operation, albeit a nasty and effective one.
But the real danger from ALEC and its associated organizations comes from conservatives' aim to structurally undermine the very capacities of government that restrain corporate power and to fuel campaigns that fracture progressive alliances and political power.
Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform and arguably the premiere right-wing strategist, has famously described the conservative goal as cutting government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." Key to that objective is cutting tax revenues and using constitutional limits on state taxing powers to make it politically impossible to fund social needs through government action. This strategy serves not just to limit progressive policy but, by creating a limited pool of funds, pits progressive groups against each other in a fight for resources.
Conservatives also aim to shut down the enforcement of business regulations across the states. The very success of state attorneys general in bringing tobacco and financial firms to heel has led to a backlash to limit the power of attorneys general. And where citizens have the ability to enforce regulations in the courts, the right has been gutting those citizens' legal powers. For example, one of the first acts of Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration was forcing through restrictions on the state labor code's Private Attorney General Act, which had given advocates greater power to enforce the state's labor laws.
In the last few years, no issue has consumed corporate America more than shutting the courtroom door to plaintiffs injured by corporate malfeasance under the campaign of "tort reform." Damage awards have been limited and judges have increasingly been granted the right to exclude evidence of corporate wrongdoing by limiting plaintiff witnesses. This is done through the banning of so-called "junk science," with an often-politically connected judge (rather than the jury) getting to decide which witnesses are credible. The end result of this campaign is to make it nearly impossible for poor plaintiffs to get a day in court or to prevent a judge from overturning any judgment in their favor.
Another key strategy for the corporate right is privatization, a strategy that both undermines labor standards for government services and opens the labor market to corporate profiteering. The conservative-induced budget crises in many states have served to help this process along. In 2002, ALEC co-wrote a report with the Manhattan Institute that made privatization a key solution for balancing state budgets. They proposed that Medicaid be replaced with private Medical Savings Accounts and public schools be funded with vouchers. Similarly, prison management would be privatized. Name an area of government and conservatives are seeking to hand its operations over to corporate allies who, in turn, can eliminate labor unions and use the profits to fund more campaign contributions to their political machine.
A special case of privatization has been the recent assault on state employee pension funds. In 2005, Alaska passed legislation ending guaranteed pensions for all newly hired state employees in favor of individual accounts, and legislators in California, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Virginia are heading in the same direction.
The most obvious goal is to cut benefits for union workers by ending guaranteed benefits--using exactly the same rhetoric of "choice" that President Bush employed to sell his Social Security privatization scheme at the federal level. But what really enrages conservatives are decisions by trustees of these pension funds to use their shareholder voting power to challenge corporate abuses, such as the pension funds in Ohio, New York and California that voted to divest in firms involved in privatization. And of course, there is the direct payoff to the financial services firms who will end up administering the millions of private accounts in a privatized state pension system and collecting the billions of dollars in fees.
Defunding the left
The shift in control of financial assets from public trustees to private corporations highlights the most pervasive and dangerous goal of the right's campaign in the states: defunding progressive institutions and thereby leaving corporations--and a few religious conservative allies--as the only forces with significant resources in politics.
Take the 2003 legislation passed in Texas that reserved family planning dollars, including those from the federal government, exclusively for healthcare providers that do not offer abortion services or referrals. This kind of proposal, coupled with "gag rules" and "abstinence only" legislation, not only shifts abortion policy, but strips resources from the broader pro-choice community. Similarly, the push for "faith based initiatives" shifts resources from nonprofits embedded in social justice networks to conservative organizations engaged in active conservative politics.
State-based "Right to Work" campaigns were conservatives' original weapons to cut off union dues, one of the primary sources of funding for political campaigns that oppose conservatives day-in and day-out. The present round of attacks is labeled "paycheck protection"--a nice-sounding term for crippling union workers' ability to donate political contributions through workplace deductions.
The whole right-wing attack on the civil justice system also has the effect of cutting the fees for employment and other trial lawyers, who have been strong sources of political funding for progressive causes. Passing tort reforms nationally, Grover Norquist argued back in 1999, takes "a $5-10 billion a year bite out of trial lawyer fees" and shuts down the progressive "get-out-the-vote effort, funded with money from trial lawyers."
By operating at the state level, Norquist et al have successfully avoided the glare of media attention and the full political focus of progressives. It's as if the right is tunneling under the foundation of progressives; by the time the ground--and financial resources--give way, it'll be too late to save the house.
How progressives fight back
So how should progressives respond to this coordinated assault on every level of progressive policy?
The key is to fight back, coordinate our own battles, think as strategically as ALEC and its allies and win back power at the state level. As People for the American Way said in a 2003 report about ALEC: "Progressives need a collaborative and equally coordinated effort to successfully counter ALEC's influence, expose its corporate and right-wing ties, and defeat dangerous proposals launched by this 'common enemy.'"
While many grassroots efforts have continued across the country since that report, progressives have not established the coordinated response that is needed to beat back the right. To do so, we must take three steps.
- First, we need to develop a deep national network of progressive legislators supported by grassroots organizations. We have to establish partnerships between national organizations, grassroots activists and state legislators in each state to find state-specific ideas that represent home-grown progressivism. Not only will these networks help bring progressive-minded people together, but they also will serve as a hotbed of information exchange so progressive legislators can equip themselves with all of the information they need to promote progressive bills.
- Second, we need to promote a set of popular issues that define the progressive state agenda in the minds of voters. This could include raising the minimum wage, expanding health care, promoting family issues like paid family leave and pre-K education for all children, protecting free speech in the workplace as well as the political realm, and developing an energy independence policy that creates jobs in each state.
- Third, we must develop a set of policies that beat back the right-wing attack and turn the tables on conservatives. We should use legislation strategically to highlight the hypocrisy of groups like ALEC and put conservative legislators in the uncomfortable public position of voting either the interests of their corporate patrons or the desires of their constituents.
For instance, recent legislative initiatives in states ranging from Virginia to Michigan to preserve public lands and stop sprawl divide sprawl developers from a broader population that wants both livable communities and green areas for recreation. Similarly, targeting taxpayer subsidies specifically to entrepreneurial businesses that provide a living wage, as progressives have done in a number of cities, challenges conservatives to justify their fealty to low-wage companies. Supporting paid family leave and expanded child care for working parents forces legislators to confront empty "families values" rhetoric.
Ultimately, each strategic issue will reinforce the others, undercutting opposition coalitions while adding new allies to the progressive side, exposing the hypocrisy of the conservative agenda while clarifying the progressive program, and, step-by-step, entrenching progressive power in ways that the right wing will find harder and harder to dislodge.
Progressives need to use every tool of grassroots mobilization to build unity among our side's state legislators and deploy both strong policies and innovative strategies to beat the conservatives at their own game. Our overarching strategy: find the best public policies and champion them with effective and cohesive messaging. That is what the new Progressive Legislative Action Network (PLAN) is all about. It's time to finally end conservatives' dominance of state policy. It is time for progressives to govern from the states.
*************************************************************************
Sunday, February 19, 2006
U.S. Church Alliance Denounces Iraq War
by Brian Murphy - AP religion writer - 02-18-06
PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil -- A coalition of American churches sharply denounced the U.S. war in Iraq on Saturday, accusing Washington of "raining down terror" and apologizing to other nations for "the violence, degradation and poverty our nation has sown."
The statement, issued at the largest gathering of Christian churches in nearly a decade, also warned the United States was pushing the world toward environmental catastrophe with a "culture of consumption" and its refusal to back international accords seeking to battle global warming.
"We lament with special anguish the war in Iraq, launched in deception and violating global norms of justice and human rights," said the statement from representatives of the 34 U.S. members of World Council of Churches. "We mourn all who have died or been injured in this war. We acknowledge with shame abuses carried out in our name."
The World Council of Churches includes more than 350 mainstream Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox churches; the Roman Catholic Church is not a member. The U.S. groups in the WCC include the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Methodist Church, several Orthodox churches and Baptist denominations, among others.
The statement is part of widening religious pressure on the Bush administration, which still counts on the support of evangelical churches and other conservative denominations but is widely unpopular with liberal-minded Protestant congregations.
The Very Rev. Leonid Kishkovsky, the moderator for the U.S. group of WCC members, said the letter was backed by the leaders of the churches but was not cleared by lower-level bodies. He predicted friction within congregations about the tone of the message.
"There is much internal anguish and there is division," said Kishkovsky, ecumenical officer of the Orthodox Church of America. "I believe church leaders and communities are wrestling with the moral questions that this letter is addressing."
On Friday, the U.S. National Council of Churches - which includes many WCC members - released a letter appealing to Washington to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and saying reports of alleged torture violated "the fundamental Christian belief in the dignity of the human person."
The two-page statement from the WCC group came at the midpoint of a 10-day meeting of more than 4,000 religious leaders, scholars and activists discussing trends and goals for major Christian denominations for the coming decades. The WCC's last global assembly was in 1998 in Zimbabwe - just four months after al-Qaida staged twin bombings at U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
"Our country responded (to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks) by seeking to reclaim a privileged and secure place in the world, raining down terror on the truly vulnerable among our global neighbors ... entering into imperial projects that seek to dominate and control for the sake of national interests," said the statement. "Nations have been demonized and God has been enlisted in national agendas that are nothing short of idolatrous."
The Rev. Sharon Watkins, president of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), worried that some may interpret the statement as undermining U.S. troops in Iraq.
"We honor their courage and sense of duty, but ... we, as people of faith, have to say to our brothers and sisters, `We are so profoundly sorry,'" Watkins said.
The message also accused U.S. officials of ignoring warnings about climate change and treating the world's "finite resources as if they are private possessions." It went on to criticize U.S. domestic policies for refusing to confront racism and poverty.
"Hurricane Katrina revealed to the world those left behind in our own nation by the rupture of our social contract," said the statement.
The churches said they had "grown heavy with guilt" for not doing enough to speak out against the Iraq war and other issues. The statement asked forgiveness for a world that's "grown weary from the violence, degradation and poverty our nation has sown."
************************************************************************
by Brian Murphy - AP religion writer - 02-18-06
PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil -- A coalition of American churches sharply denounced the U.S. war in Iraq on Saturday, accusing Washington of "raining down terror" and apologizing to other nations for "the violence, degradation and poverty our nation has sown."
The statement, issued at the largest gathering of Christian churches in nearly a decade, also warned the United States was pushing the world toward environmental catastrophe with a "culture of consumption" and its refusal to back international accords seeking to battle global warming.
"We lament with special anguish the war in Iraq, launched in deception and violating global norms of justice and human rights," said the statement from representatives of the 34 U.S. members of World Council of Churches. "We mourn all who have died or been injured in this war. We acknowledge with shame abuses carried out in our name."
The World Council of Churches includes more than 350 mainstream Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox churches; the Roman Catholic Church is not a member. The U.S. groups in the WCC include the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Methodist Church, several Orthodox churches and Baptist denominations, among others.
The statement is part of widening religious pressure on the Bush administration, which still counts on the support of evangelical churches and other conservative denominations but is widely unpopular with liberal-minded Protestant congregations.
The Very Rev. Leonid Kishkovsky, the moderator for the U.S. group of WCC members, said the letter was backed by the leaders of the churches but was not cleared by lower-level bodies. He predicted friction within congregations about the tone of the message.
"There is much internal anguish and there is division," said Kishkovsky, ecumenical officer of the Orthodox Church of America. "I believe church leaders and communities are wrestling with the moral questions that this letter is addressing."
On Friday, the U.S. National Council of Churches - which includes many WCC members - released a letter appealing to Washington to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and saying reports of alleged torture violated "the fundamental Christian belief in the dignity of the human person."
The two-page statement from the WCC group came at the midpoint of a 10-day meeting of more than 4,000 religious leaders, scholars and activists discussing trends and goals for major Christian denominations for the coming decades. The WCC's last global assembly was in 1998 in Zimbabwe - just four months after al-Qaida staged twin bombings at U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
"Our country responded (to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks) by seeking to reclaim a privileged and secure place in the world, raining down terror on the truly vulnerable among our global neighbors ... entering into imperial projects that seek to dominate and control for the sake of national interests," said the statement. "Nations have been demonized and God has been enlisted in national agendas that are nothing short of idolatrous."
The Rev. Sharon Watkins, president of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), worried that some may interpret the statement as undermining U.S. troops in Iraq.
"We honor their courage and sense of duty, but ... we, as people of faith, have to say to our brothers and sisters, `We are so profoundly sorry,'" Watkins said.
The message also accused U.S. officials of ignoring warnings about climate change and treating the world's "finite resources as if they are private possessions." It went on to criticize U.S. domestic policies for refusing to confront racism and poverty.
"Hurricane Katrina revealed to the world those left behind in our own nation by the rupture of our social contract," said the statement.
The churches said they had "grown heavy with guilt" for not doing enough to speak out against the Iraq war and other issues. The statement asked forgiveness for a world that's "grown weary from the violence, degradation and poverty our nation has sown."
************************************************************************
Annexing Khuzestan; Battle-Plans for Iran
by Mike Whitney
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11743.htm - 02-01-05
The Bush administration has coerced both Russia and China into bringing Iran before the United Nations Security Council although (as Mohamed ElBaradei says) "There's no evidence of a nuclear weapons program." The surprising capitulation of Russia and China has forced Iran to abandon its efforts for further negotiations; cutting off dialogue that might diffuse the volatile situation.
"We consider any referral or report of Iran to the Security Council as the end of diplomacy," Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, told state television.
The administration's success with Iran ends the diplomatic charade and paves the way for war. Now, UN Ambassador John Bolton will appear before the Security Council making spurious allegations of "noncompliance" that will rattle through the corporate media and prepare the world for unilateral military action.
The administration has no hope of securing the votes needed for sanctions or punitive action. The trip to the Security Council is purely a ploy to provide the cover of international legitimacy to another act of unprovoked aggression. The case has gone as far as it will go excluding the requisite "touched up" satellite photos and bogus allegations of unreliable dissidents.
We should now be focused on how Washington intends to carry out its war plans, since war appears to be inevitable.
Those who doubt that the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld team will attack Iran, while so conspicuously overextended in Iraq, are ignoring the subtleties of the administration's Middle East strategy.
Bush has no intention of occupying Iran. Rather, the goal is to destroy major weapons-sites, destabilize the regime, and occupy a sliver of land on the Iraqi border that contains 90% of Iran's oil wealth. Ultimately, Washington will aim to replace the Mullahs with American-friendly clients who can police their own people and fabricate the appearance of representative government. But, that will have to wait. For now, the administration must prevent the incipient Iran bourse (oil-exchange) from opening in March and precipitating a global sell-off of the debt-ridden dollar. There have many fine articles written about the proposed "euro-based" bourse and the devastating effects it will have on the greenback. (Petrodollar Warfare: Oil, Iraq and the Future of the Dollar*"
by William R. Clark )
The bottom line on the bourse is this; the dollar is underwritten by a national debt that now exceeds $8 trillion dollars and trade deficits that surpass $600 billion per year. That means that the greenback is the greatest swindle in the history of mankind. It's utterly worthless. The only thing that keeps the dollar afloat is that oil is traded exclusively in greenbacks rather than some other currency. If Iran is able to smash that monopoly by trading in petro-euros then the world's central banks will dump the greenback overnight, sending markets crashing and the US economy into a downward spiral.
The Bush administration has no intention of allowing that to take place. In fact, as the tax-cuts and the budget deficits indicate, the Bush cabal fully intends to perpetuate the system that trades worthless dollars for valuable commodities, labor, and resources. As long as the oil market is married to the dollar, this system of global indentured servitude will continue.
Battle Plans
The Bush administration's attention has shifted to a small province in southwestern Iran that is unknown to most Americans. Never the less, Khuzestan will become the next front in the war on terror and the lynchpin for prevailing in the global resource war. If the Bush administration can sweep into the region (under the pretext disarming Iran's nuclear weapons programs) and put Iran's prodigious oil wealth under US control, the dream of monopolizing Middle East oil will have been achieved.
Not surprisingly, this was Saddam Hussein's strategy in 1980 when he initiated hostilities against Iran in a war that would last for eight years. Saddam was an American client at the time, so it is likely that he got the green-light for the invasion from the Reagan White House. Many of Reagan's high-ranking officials currently serve in the Bush administration; notably Rumsfeld and Cheney.
Khuzestan represents 90% of Iran's oil production. The control over these massive fields will force the oil-dependent nations of China, Japan and India to continue to stockpile greenbacks despite the currency's dubious value. The annexing of Khuzestan will prevent Iran's bourse from opening, thereby guaranteeing that the dollar will maintain its dominant position as the world's reserve currency. As long as the dollar reigns supreme and western elites have their hands on the Middle East oil-spigot, the current system of exploitation through debt will continue into perpetuity. The administration can confidently prolong its colossal deficits without fear of a plummeting dollar. (In fact, the American war-machine and all its various appendages, from Guantanamo to Abrams Tanks, are paid for by the myriad nations who willingly hold reserves of American currency)
This extortion-scheme is typically referred to as the global economic system. In reality, it has nothing to do with either free markets or capitalism. That is just philosophical mumbo-jumbo. This is the dollar-system; predicated entirely on the ongoing monopoly of the oil trade in dollars.
Invading Khuzestan
Zolton Grossman's article, "Khuzestan; the First Front in the War on Iran?", cites the Beirut Daily Star's prediction that the "first step taken by an invading force would be to occupy Iran's oil-rich Khuzestan Province. This occupation would secure the sensitive Straits of Hormuz and cutting off the Iranian military's oil supply, forcing it to depend on its limited stocks."
This strategy has been called the "Khuzestan Gambit" and we can expect that some variant of this plan will be executed following the aerial bombardment of Iranian military installations and weapons sites. If Iran retaliates, then there is every reason to believe that either the United States or Israel will respond with low-yield, bunker-busting nuclear weapons. In fact, the Pentagon may want to demonstrate its eagerness to use nuclear weapons do deter future adversaries and to maintain current levels of troop deployments without a draft.
Tonkin Bay Redux
On January 28, 2006, Iranian officials announced that they would "hand over evidence that proved British involvement in bombings in the southern city of Ahvaz earlier in the week" that killed eight civilians and wounded 46 others. This was just one of the many bombings, incitements, and demonstrations that have taken place in Khuzestan in the last year that suggest foreign intervention. The action is strikingly similar to the 2 British commandoes who were apprehended in Basra a few months ago dressed as Arabs with a truckload of explosives during the week of religious festival.
Coincidence? - Perhaps
But, step by step, Iran is being set up for war. What difference does the provocation make? The determination to consolidate the oil reserves in the Caspian Basin was made more than a decade ago and is clearly articulated in the policy papers produced by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) The Bush administration is one small province away from realizing the its dream of controlling the world's most valued resource. They won't let that opportunity pass them by.
*************************************************************************
by Mike Whitney
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11743.htm - 02-01-05
The Bush administration has coerced both Russia and China into bringing Iran before the United Nations Security Council although (as Mohamed ElBaradei says) "There's no evidence of a nuclear weapons program." The surprising capitulation of Russia and China has forced Iran to abandon its efforts for further negotiations; cutting off dialogue that might diffuse the volatile situation.
"We consider any referral or report of Iran to the Security Council as the end of diplomacy," Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, told state television.
The administration's success with Iran ends the diplomatic charade and paves the way for war. Now, UN Ambassador John Bolton will appear before the Security Council making spurious allegations of "noncompliance" that will rattle through the corporate media and prepare the world for unilateral military action.
The administration has no hope of securing the votes needed for sanctions or punitive action. The trip to the Security Council is purely a ploy to provide the cover of international legitimacy to another act of unprovoked aggression. The case has gone as far as it will go excluding the requisite "touched up" satellite photos and bogus allegations of unreliable dissidents.
We should now be focused on how Washington intends to carry out its war plans, since war appears to be inevitable.
Those who doubt that the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld team will attack Iran, while so conspicuously overextended in Iraq, are ignoring the subtleties of the administration's Middle East strategy.
Bush has no intention of occupying Iran. Rather, the goal is to destroy major weapons-sites, destabilize the regime, and occupy a sliver of land on the Iraqi border that contains 90% of Iran's oil wealth. Ultimately, Washington will aim to replace the Mullahs with American-friendly clients who can police their own people and fabricate the appearance of representative government. But, that will have to wait. For now, the administration must prevent the incipient Iran bourse (oil-exchange) from opening in March and precipitating a global sell-off of the debt-ridden dollar. There have many fine articles written about the proposed "euro-based" bourse and the devastating effects it will have on the greenback. (Petrodollar Warfare: Oil, Iraq and the Future of the Dollar*
The bottom line on the bourse is this; the dollar is underwritten by a national debt that now exceeds $8 trillion dollars and trade deficits that surpass $600 billion per year. That means that the greenback is the greatest swindle in the history of mankind. It's utterly worthless. The only thing that keeps the dollar afloat is that oil is traded exclusively in greenbacks rather than some other currency. If Iran is able to smash that monopoly by trading in petro-euros then the world's central banks will dump the greenback overnight, sending markets crashing and the US economy into a downward spiral.
The Bush administration has no intention of allowing that to take place. In fact, as the tax-cuts and the budget deficits indicate, the Bush cabal fully intends to perpetuate the system that trades worthless dollars for valuable commodities, labor, and resources. As long as the oil market is married to the dollar, this system of global indentured servitude will continue.
Battle Plans
The Bush administration's attention has shifted to a small province in southwestern Iran that is unknown to most Americans. Never the less, Khuzestan will become the next front in the war on terror and the lynchpin for prevailing in the global resource war. If the Bush administration can sweep into the region (under the pretext disarming Iran's nuclear weapons programs) and put Iran's prodigious oil wealth under US control, the dream of monopolizing Middle East oil will have been achieved.
Not surprisingly, this was Saddam Hussein's strategy in 1980 when he initiated hostilities against Iran in a war that would last for eight years. Saddam was an American client at the time, so it is likely that he got the green-light for the invasion from the Reagan White House. Many of Reagan's high-ranking officials currently serve in the Bush administration; notably Rumsfeld and Cheney.
Khuzestan represents 90% of Iran's oil production. The control over these massive fields will force the oil-dependent nations of China, Japan and India to continue to stockpile greenbacks despite the currency's dubious value. The annexing of Khuzestan will prevent Iran's bourse from opening, thereby guaranteeing that the dollar will maintain its dominant position as the world's reserve currency. As long as the dollar reigns supreme and western elites have their hands on the Middle East oil-spigot, the current system of exploitation through debt will continue into perpetuity. The administration can confidently prolong its colossal deficits without fear of a plummeting dollar. (In fact, the American war-machine and all its various appendages, from Guantanamo to Abrams Tanks, are paid for by the myriad nations who willingly hold reserves of American currency)
This extortion-scheme is typically referred to as the global economic system. In reality, it has nothing to do with either free markets or capitalism. That is just philosophical mumbo-jumbo. This is the dollar-system; predicated entirely on the ongoing monopoly of the oil trade in dollars.
Invading Khuzestan
Zolton Grossman's article, "Khuzestan; the First Front in the War on Iran?", cites the Beirut Daily Star's prediction that the "first step taken by an invading force would be to occupy Iran's oil-rich Khuzestan Province. This occupation would secure the sensitive Straits of Hormuz and cutting off the Iranian military's oil supply, forcing it to depend on its limited stocks."
This strategy has been called the "Khuzestan Gambit" and we can expect that some variant of this plan will be executed following the aerial bombardment of Iranian military installations and weapons sites. If Iran retaliates, then there is every reason to believe that either the United States or Israel will respond with low-yield, bunker-busting nuclear weapons. In fact, the Pentagon may want to demonstrate its eagerness to use nuclear weapons do deter future adversaries and to maintain current levels of troop deployments without a draft.
Tonkin Bay Redux
On January 28, 2006, Iranian officials announced that they would "hand over evidence that proved British involvement in bombings in the southern city of Ahvaz earlier in the week" that killed eight civilians and wounded 46 others. This was just one of the many bombings, incitements, and demonstrations that have taken place in Khuzestan in the last year that suggest foreign intervention. The action is strikingly similar to the 2 British commandoes who were apprehended in Basra a few months ago dressed as Arabs with a truckload of explosives during the week of religious festival.
Coincidence? - Perhaps
But, step by step, Iran is being set up for war. What difference does the provocation make? The determination to consolidate the oil reserves in the Caspian Basin was made more than a decade ago and is clearly articulated in the policy papers produced by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) The Bush administration is one small province away from realizing the its dream of controlling the world's most valued resource. They won't let that opportunity pass them by.
*************************************************************************
Making America Work for the Working Poor
By John Edwards and John Wilhelm,
The Boston Globe - 2-17-06
It used to be that poverty was invisible in America. When Michael Harrington published "The Other America" in 1960, he wrote about the unseen millions living in inner-city housing projects, in Appalachia, in rural America. The poor were stuck in isolated ghettos, dying towns, and industries that Harrington called the economic underworld of American life. As the rest of the country went to work and prospered, the poor were bypassed.
Our nation launched a war on poverty in the 1960s and 1970s that helped move millions of Americans out of poverty and into the middle class. While we were able to make some important progress, we still have much work to do. We saw just how pervasive poverty is when we saw the images of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on our television sets.
One of the great disgraces of our country is that a vast new impoverished population has developed in our midst. These are the Americans who work -- in fact, they labor at the heart of the industries that drive our economy -- yet they still are unable to make ends meet, even as they work at two or three jobs.
Thirty million American workers, 1 out of every 4, make less than $8.70 an hour. These workers, even the ones who work full time year-round, do not earn enough to lift a family of four out of poverty. While whole industries are exporting high-wage jobs to other nations, American workers have been left with jobs that don't pay enough to cover their rent, healthcare, or school books for their children. In this global economy, the service industry jobs that are staying here are not the jobs with the best pay and benefits.
This is both a shame and a challenge -- a shame because America has always honored the ethic of hard work -- yet millions of Americans are struggling at two or three jobs and still finding the middle class out of reach. It's a challenge because we have a moral responsibility to help those who are doing everything they can to get by, but are still stuck at jobs with poverty wages. The fact that powerful corporations make huge profits by keeping wages low does not reduce our moral obligation to help the working poor. In fact, it adds to our obligation.
Consider the hotel industry, which employs more than 1.3 million people in this country. The consulting firm Ernst & Young, in its outlook on the hotel and lodging industry, says: "The Good Times Continue to Roll." But good times for whom? Profits have risen to pre-9/11 levels, yet the average wage for a housekeeper is below the poverty line. Hotel chains are finding the money to invest in their image, their grounds, and their rooms, while wages for hotel workers remain far too low. Hotel chains are investing more in imported cotton sheets, yet relatively less in wages for workers.
Hotel workers all across this country believe in the American ethic based on the principle that hard work can lead to a better future. They do not lack motivation, dedication, or skill. What they lack is power. About 90,000 workers in the hotel industry are represented by the union UNITE HERE. In such cities as New York and San Francisco, where UNITE HERE has made significant progress on behalf of workers, wages are significantly higher than in cities where most workers do not belong to a union.
Hotel workers who belong to unions have been able to save money, buy homes, and give their children more opportunities. Imagine what it would mean for such cities and towns as Boston, Lynn, and Framingham if the wages for hotel workers could match the wages of disappearing manufacturing jobs. These families would be able to move out of poverty and into the middle class, which would help reinvigorate these communities.
To support the hard work of hotel workers by giving them more opportunities to achieve the American dream, we are launching the "Hotel Workers Rising" campaign. Our goal is to build a broad coalition of hotel workers, community activists, religious leaders, political leaders, and people of conscience to encourage the hotel industry to make good on the American promise.
For generations, America has been the land of opportunity -- the place where if you worked hard and played by the rules, you could get ahead. Unfortunately, most Americans are working just as hard, but still struggling to make ends meet.
It is time for America to become the land of opportunity again, so no American who works full time lives in poverty.
Too many hard-working Americans are struggling to get by. It is time for America to once again reward work. It's time to make work pay again and to give these workers the opportunity to live the American dream.
(John Edwards is a former Democratic senator from North Carolina and vice presidential nominee. John Wilhelm is president of the UNITE HERE hotel workers union.)
*************************************************************************
By John Edwards and John Wilhelm,
The Boston Globe - 2-17-06
It used to be that poverty was invisible in America. When Michael Harrington published "The Other America" in 1960, he wrote about the unseen millions living in inner-city housing projects, in Appalachia, in rural America. The poor were stuck in isolated ghettos, dying towns, and industries that Harrington called the economic underworld of American life. As the rest of the country went to work and prospered, the poor were bypassed.
Our nation launched a war on poverty in the 1960s and 1970s that helped move millions of Americans out of poverty and into the middle class. While we were able to make some important progress, we still have much work to do. We saw just how pervasive poverty is when we saw the images of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on our television sets.
One of the great disgraces of our country is that a vast new impoverished population has developed in our midst. These are the Americans who work -- in fact, they labor at the heart of the industries that drive our economy -- yet they still are unable to make ends meet, even as they work at two or three jobs.
Thirty million American workers, 1 out of every 4, make less than $8.70 an hour. These workers, even the ones who work full time year-round, do not earn enough to lift a family of four out of poverty. While whole industries are exporting high-wage jobs to other nations, American workers have been left with jobs that don't pay enough to cover their rent, healthcare, or school books for their children. In this global economy, the service industry jobs that are staying here are not the jobs with the best pay and benefits.
This is both a shame and a challenge -- a shame because America has always honored the ethic of hard work -- yet millions of Americans are struggling at two or three jobs and still finding the middle class out of reach. It's a challenge because we have a moral responsibility to help those who are doing everything they can to get by, but are still stuck at jobs with poverty wages. The fact that powerful corporations make huge profits by keeping wages low does not reduce our moral obligation to help the working poor. In fact, it adds to our obligation.
Consider the hotel industry, which employs more than 1.3 million people in this country. The consulting firm Ernst & Young, in its outlook on the hotel and lodging industry, says: "The Good Times Continue to Roll." But good times for whom? Profits have risen to pre-9/11 levels, yet the average wage for a housekeeper is below the poverty line. Hotel chains are finding the money to invest in their image, their grounds, and their rooms, while wages for hotel workers remain far too low. Hotel chains are investing more in imported cotton sheets, yet relatively less in wages for workers.
Hotel workers all across this country believe in the American ethic based on the principle that hard work can lead to a better future. They do not lack motivation, dedication, or skill. What they lack is power. About 90,000 workers in the hotel industry are represented by the union UNITE HERE. In such cities as New York and San Francisco, where UNITE HERE has made significant progress on behalf of workers, wages are significantly higher than in cities where most workers do not belong to a union.
Hotel workers who belong to unions have been able to save money, buy homes, and give their children more opportunities. Imagine what it would mean for such cities and towns as Boston, Lynn, and Framingham if the wages for hotel workers could match the wages of disappearing manufacturing jobs. These families would be able to move out of poverty and into the middle class, which would help reinvigorate these communities.
To support the hard work of hotel workers by giving them more opportunities to achieve the American dream, we are launching the "Hotel Workers Rising" campaign. Our goal is to build a broad coalition of hotel workers, community activists, religious leaders, political leaders, and people of conscience to encourage the hotel industry to make good on the American promise.
For generations, America has been the land of opportunity -- the place where if you worked hard and played by the rules, you could get ahead. Unfortunately, most Americans are working just as hard, but still struggling to make ends meet.
It is time for America to become the land of opportunity again, so no American who works full time lives in poverty.
Too many hard-working Americans are struggling to get by. It is time for America to once again reward work. It's time to make work pay again and to give these workers the opportunity to live the American dream.
(John Edwards is a former Democratic senator from North Carolina and vice presidential nominee. John Wilhelm is president of the UNITE HERE hotel workers union.)
*************************************************************************
Friday, February 17, 2006
President Bush, Fire "Loose Cannon" Cheney
Contributed by Working Assets
Back in June of 2004, a reporter asked President Bush if he would fire anyone found to have been connected to the leaking of Valerie Plame's covert identity. His one-word answer was "Yes."
It has now come to light, as part of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into possible perjury and obstruction of justice by Scooter Libby, that Vice President Cheney "authorized" Libby to divulge classified information to order to hide the administration's wanton mishandling of pre-invasion intelligence.
So far, there is no public evidence that Cheney specifically instructed Libby to disclose Plame's identity to reporters. But it's unlikely that Libby would have taken such a step without authorization from his boss -- and in any case, why in the world is the Vice President authorizing disclosure of classified information simply to try to make the administration look good?
If President Bush is serious about keeping his word, or keeping America safe from terrorism, we simply cannot have "loose cannons" leaking classified information from within the White House. He needs to ask for Dick Cheney's resignation immediately.
*************************************************************************
Contributed by Working Assets
Back in June of 2004, a reporter asked President Bush if he would fire anyone found to have been connected to the leaking of Valerie Plame's covert identity. His one-word answer was "Yes."
It has now come to light, as part of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into possible perjury and obstruction of justice by Scooter Libby, that Vice President Cheney "authorized" Libby to divulge classified information to order to hide the administration's wanton mishandling of pre-invasion intelligence.
So far, there is no public evidence that Cheney specifically instructed Libby to disclose Plame's identity to reporters. But it's unlikely that Libby would have taken such a step without authorization from his boss -- and in any case, why in the world is the Vice President authorizing disclosure of classified information simply to try to make the administration look good?
If President Bush is serious about keeping his word, or keeping America safe from terrorism, we simply cannot have "loose cannons" leaking classified information from within the White House. He needs to ask for Dick Cheney's resignation immediately.
*************************************************************************
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
The Pentagon’s War on the Internet
by Mike Whitney - opednews.com
The Pentagon has developed a comprehensive strategy for taking over the internet and controlling the free flow of information. The plan appears in a recently declassified document, “The Information Operations Roadmap”, which was provided under the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) and revealed in an article by the BBC.
The Pentagon sees the internet in terms of a military adversary that poses a vital threat to its stated mission of global domination. This explains the confrontational language in the document which speaks of “fighting the net”; implying that the internet is the equivalent of “an enemy weapons system."
The Defense Dept. places a high-value on controlling information. The new program illustrates their determination to establish the parameters of free speech.
The Pentagon sees information as essential in manipulating perceptions and, thus, a crucial tool in eliciting public support for unpopular policies. The recent revelations of the military placing propaganda in the foreign press demonstrate the importance that is given to co-opting public opinion.
Information-warfare is used to create an impenetrable cloud around the activities of government so that decisions can be made without dissent. The smokescreen of deception that encompasses the Bush administration has less to do with prevaricating politicians than it does with a clearly articulated policy of obfuscation. “The Information Operations Roadmap” is solely intended to undermine the principle of an informed citizenry.
The Pentagon’s focus on the internet tells us a great deal about the mainstream media and its connection to the political establishment.
Why, for example, would the Pentagon see the internet as a greater threat than the mainstream media, where an estimated 75% of Americans get their news?
The reason is clear; because the MSM is already a fully-integrated part of the corporate-system providing a 24 hour per day streaming of business-friendly news. Today’s MSM operates as a de-facto franchise of the Pentagon, a reliable and sophisticated propagandist for Washington’s wars of aggression and political subterfuge.
The internet, on the other hand, is the last bastion of American democracy; a virtual world where reliable information moves instantly from person to person without passing through the corporate filter. Online visitors can get a clear picture of their governments’ depredations with a click of the mouse. This is the liberalization of the news, an open source of mind-expanding information that elevates citizen awareness of complex issues and threatens the status quo.
The Pentagon program is just one facet of a broader culture of deception; a pervasive ethos of dishonesty that envelopes all aspects of the Bush White House. The “Strategic Intelligence” Dept is a division of the Defense establishment that is entirely devoted to concealing, distorting, omitting and manipulating the truth.
In what way is “strategic intelligence” different from plain intelligence?
It is information that is shaped in a way that meets the needs of a particular group. In other words, it is not the truth at all, but a fabrication, a fiction, a lie.
Strategic intelligence is an oxymoron; a tidy bit of Orwellian doublespeak that reflects the deeply rooted cynicism of its authors.
The internet is a logical target for the Pentagon’s electronic warfare. Already the Downing Street memos, Bush’s bombing-threats against Al Jazeera, the fraudulent 2004 elections, and the leveling of Falluja, have disrupted the smooth execution of Bush’s wars. It is understandable that Rumsfeld and Co. would seek to transform this potential enemy into an ally, much as it has done with the MSM.
The Pentagon’s plans for engaging in “virtual warfare” are impressive. As BBC notes: “The operations described in the document include a surprising range of military activities: public affairs officers who brief journalists, psychological operations troops who try to manipulate the thoughts and beliefs of an enemy, computer network attack specialists who seek to destroy enemy networks.” (BBC)
The enemy, of course, is you, dear reader, or anyone who refuses to accept their role as a witless-cog in new world order. Seizing the internet is a prudent way of controlling every piece of information that one experiences from cradle to grave; all necessary for an orderly police-state.
The Information Operations Roadmap (IOR) recommends that psychological operations (Psyops) “should consider a range of technologies to disseminate propaganda in enemy territory: unmanned aerial vehicles, "miniaturized, scatterable public address systems", wireless devices, cellular phones and the internet.” No idea is too costly or too far-fetched that it escapes the serious consideration of the Pentagon chieftains.
The War Dept. is planning to insert itself into every area of the internet from blogs to chat rooms, from leftist web sites to editorial commentary. The objective is to challenge any tidbit of information that appears on the web that may counter the official narrative; the fairytale of benign American intervention to promote democracy and human rights across the planet.
The IOR aspires to "provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum" and develop the capability to "disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum". (BBC)
Full spectrum dominance.
The ultimate goal of the Pentagon is to create an internet-paradigm that corresponds to the corporate mainstream model, devoid of imagination or divergent points of view. They envision an internet that is increasingly restricted by the gluttonous influence of industry and its vast “tapestry of lies”.
The internet is the modern-day marketplace of ideas, an invaluable resource for human curiosity and organized resistance. It provides a direct link between the explosive power of ideas and engaged citizen involvement. (aka; participatory democracy)
The Pentagon is laying the groundwork for privatizing the internet so the information-revolution can be transformed into an information-tyranny, extending to all areas of communications and serving the exclusive interests of a few well-heeled American plutocrats.
*************************************************************************
by Mike Whitney - opednews.com
The Pentagon has developed a comprehensive strategy for taking over the internet and controlling the free flow of information. The plan appears in a recently declassified document, “The Information Operations Roadmap”, which was provided under the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) and revealed in an article by the BBC.
The Pentagon sees the internet in terms of a military adversary that poses a vital threat to its stated mission of global domination. This explains the confrontational language in the document which speaks of “fighting the net”; implying that the internet is the equivalent of “an enemy weapons system."
The Defense Dept. places a high-value on controlling information. The new program illustrates their determination to establish the parameters of free speech.
The Pentagon sees information as essential in manipulating perceptions and, thus, a crucial tool in eliciting public support for unpopular policies. The recent revelations of the military placing propaganda in the foreign press demonstrate the importance that is given to co-opting public opinion.
Information-warfare is used to create an impenetrable cloud around the activities of government so that decisions can be made without dissent. The smokescreen of deception that encompasses the Bush administration has less to do with prevaricating politicians than it does with a clearly articulated policy of obfuscation. “The Information Operations Roadmap” is solely intended to undermine the principle of an informed citizenry.
The Pentagon’s focus on the internet tells us a great deal about the mainstream media and its connection to the political establishment.
Why, for example, would the Pentagon see the internet as a greater threat than the mainstream media, where an estimated 75% of Americans get their news?
The reason is clear; because the MSM is already a fully-integrated part of the corporate-system providing a 24 hour per day streaming of business-friendly news. Today’s MSM operates as a de-facto franchise of the Pentagon, a reliable and sophisticated propagandist for Washington’s wars of aggression and political subterfuge.
The internet, on the other hand, is the last bastion of American democracy; a virtual world where reliable information moves instantly from person to person without passing through the corporate filter. Online visitors can get a clear picture of their governments’ depredations with a click of the mouse. This is the liberalization of the news, an open source of mind-expanding information that elevates citizen awareness of complex issues and threatens the status quo.
The Pentagon program is just one facet of a broader culture of deception; a pervasive ethos of dishonesty that envelopes all aspects of the Bush White House. The “Strategic Intelligence” Dept is a division of the Defense establishment that is entirely devoted to concealing, distorting, omitting and manipulating the truth.
In what way is “strategic intelligence” different from plain intelligence?
It is information that is shaped in a way that meets the needs of a particular group. In other words, it is not the truth at all, but a fabrication, a fiction, a lie.
Strategic intelligence is an oxymoron; a tidy bit of Orwellian doublespeak that reflects the deeply rooted cynicism of its authors.
The internet is a logical target for the Pentagon’s electronic warfare. Already the Downing Street memos, Bush’s bombing-threats against Al Jazeera, the fraudulent 2004 elections, and the leveling of Falluja, have disrupted the smooth execution of Bush’s wars. It is understandable that Rumsfeld and Co. would seek to transform this potential enemy into an ally, much as it has done with the MSM.
The Pentagon’s plans for engaging in “virtual warfare” are impressive. As BBC notes: “The operations described in the document include a surprising range of military activities: public affairs officers who brief journalists, psychological operations troops who try to manipulate the thoughts and beliefs of an enemy, computer network attack specialists who seek to destroy enemy networks.” (BBC)
The enemy, of course, is you, dear reader, or anyone who refuses to accept their role as a witless-cog in new world order. Seizing the internet is a prudent way of controlling every piece of information that one experiences from cradle to grave; all necessary for an orderly police-state.
The Information Operations Roadmap (IOR) recommends that psychological operations (Psyops) “should consider a range of technologies to disseminate propaganda in enemy territory: unmanned aerial vehicles, "miniaturized, scatterable public address systems", wireless devices, cellular phones and the internet.” No idea is too costly or too far-fetched that it escapes the serious consideration of the Pentagon chieftains.
The War Dept. is planning to insert itself into every area of the internet from blogs to chat rooms, from leftist web sites to editorial commentary. The objective is to challenge any tidbit of information that appears on the web that may counter the official narrative; the fairytale of benign American intervention to promote democracy and human rights across the planet.
The IOR aspires to "provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum" and develop the capability to "disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum". (BBC)
Full spectrum dominance.
The ultimate goal of the Pentagon is to create an internet-paradigm that corresponds to the corporate mainstream model, devoid of imagination or divergent points of view. They envision an internet that is increasingly restricted by the gluttonous influence of industry and its vast “tapestry of lies”.
The internet is the modern-day marketplace of ideas, an invaluable resource for human curiosity and organized resistance. It provides a direct link between the explosive power of ideas and engaged citizen involvement. (aka; participatory democracy)
The Pentagon is laying the groundwork for privatizing the internet so the information-revolution can be transformed into an information-tyranny, extending to all areas of communications and serving the exclusive interests of a few well-heeled American plutocrats.
*************************************************************************
