RUNNING OUT OF CHANGE
Why it's so hard to make good things happen
Sam Smith, http://prorev.com
This is the part of history I don't like. Not the part where people don't know what's happening to them nor the part where they try to do something about it. There's plenty to do in both those parts. No, it's the part where people know there's something wrong but nobody knows what to do and how to do it and so they just sit around or go through the same old motions just as vulnerable as when they didn't know what was going on only now they're also mad and frustrated and confused and nothing happens even though everyone wants it to.
It's also a time of fear and, as boxing trainer Teddy Atlas points out, fear usually lasts longer than the thing you fear. You can count by seconds the time the other boxer smashes you about, but you can count by hours or days the time you spent worrying about it, hours and days that, that beyond their intrinsic pain, can make the thing you fear, when it happens, even worse than it had to be.
So you try to push away the fear and do the same old thing and just wait.
And what are you waiting for? Perhaps for something so catastrophic or moving that everyone changes what they're doing or not doing and does something else. Or for some group of people to do something nobody was expecting and then nothing is the same - typically because the group that does something is too young or too idealistic or too committed to have jettisoned all their hope, or because they're too poor or too beaten down to worry about falling any further.
If you follow history you know these times are going to come but you also know that you're not going to know when they're gong to come and so, if you still care at all, you just keep doing what you have been doing all along and hope that change will come sooner rather than later.
And then sometimes the hope just fizzles out. Like the Zapatistas, the World Trade demonstrations, the immigrant' protests with all their vibrations suggestive of something big about to happen. But in the end, the tectonic plates just stay right where they've been all along.
And what if we have fouled our own souls and psyches as badly as we have fouled the environment? What if we are the rats in a cage we call civilization but which is really the end of a civilization? Maybe we won't become extinct but only lousy versions of what we were once. It happens to other creatures. What gives us the immunity that frogs lack?
I would like to be surprised just like everyone was surprised when a few students sat down at a lunch counter in the 1960s but I'm struck by how many ways the rules have altered since then and how much harder that makes it for the serendipity of change.
Over the past few months I've been jotting some of these ways down on scratch pads, file cards, or the margins of the morning paper. Then one day I started putting them into the computer and even my keyboard almost went into catatonic collapse.
I can't write this, I scolded myself. I will just be aiding the enemy with gratuitous despair.
But the words still seemed true and, in a curious way, offered a glint of courage because they helped diagnose the cause of our suffering and perhaps contained, albeit well concealed, the hint of a cure. By considering these things we might find clues not only as to the true direction of hope but also about why so much of what has been tried hasn't worked. In doing so we may better distinguish between what is truly useless and what is merely the frustrations of the darkest part of the night.
Here then are a few of the ways in which America has become harder to change. Read them not as a victim seeking vindication for weakness or despair but as a mechanic seeking the right place to start the repairs:
- Americans are becoming increasingly socially isolated. It is hard, for example, to imagine a great social revolution with so many ears literally tuned out. And not just to Ipods. Many, as non-profits are finding, are too stressed or too busy to engage in joint ventures beyond the necessary or the profitable. From the hyper schedules of well-ordered pre-schoolers to the adult time destruction by the economy, it is harder to find the room to change.
- We live in a semiosphere of lies, noise and myth - bombarded by advertising, hype, interminable words and by sights and sounds devoid of meaning. The unavoidable ubiquity of these external messages is only a few decades old. Assessing reality in such circumstances is a chancy business at best.
- The media and its manipulators have developed weapons of propaganda far exceeding anything Goebbels could have imagined. Conversely badly needed information is simply not reported. As my nephew Trip Kise put it, "Information is marginalized, minimalized or spread as disinformation."
- Our educational system increasingly demands answers without thought and it tests for inculcation rather than judging imagination, critical analysis and comprehension. Pursuing change on campus has become a form of disorderly conduct.
- Progressive churches and church leaders have either vanished, become intimidated by the religious and secular right, or operate at funding and energy levels a fraction of what they enjoyed during earlier activist periods.
- Anyone wishing to create a coalition soon runs into the atomization of public interest groups each with their own turf and funding demands and often leery of taking up arms with others of whom their funders might not approve or who might be seeking funds from some of the same sources. Thus easily perceived demands of intramural competition among these groups often overwhelm grander but less obvious common causes.
- At the other end are pseudo movements that create the illusion of mass action while in fact being little more than public relation agencies for particular causes taking up space that a real movement might otherwise occupy. Many of these faux movements are funded by foundations or political groups that aren't all that interested in change anyway.
- A major decline of progressive America occurred during the Clinton years as many liberals and their organizations accepted the presence of a Democratic president as an adequate substitute for the things liberals once believed in. Liberalism and a social democratic spirit painfully grown over the previous 60 years withered during the Clinton administration.
- History has become far less socially important. In preliterate societies, history was inexorably blended with the present and was a living part of current reality. More modern societies put history in its temporal place but still gave it honor and considerable social significance. Now, however, we are increasingly relegating history to the back cable channels and replacing it in schools with driving and anti-drug programs. In its place, our culture gives extraordinary emphasis to the new and the ephemeral. The result is that both the virtues and the horrors of the past are not easily available as organizing or educational tools.
- Our constitutional republic is dead. One may argue whether we have only temporarily lost our way or are moving inexorably towards fascism but, in either case, social and political action lack the protection that comes from a commonly observed moral and democratic core.
- There is no clearly apparent counterculture around which dissent and action can organize itself.
- There are a lack of comfortable social refuges for dissenters.
- There is little sense of solidarity among the unhappy and restless of the country. It seems at times that the evolution of our culture, which has removed so many from family and community and left them to fight their battles on their own, makes the whole idea of solidarity an alien one.
- Nothing can happen for long before its definition and image becomes the intellectual property of a media that couldn't care less for its well being.
- America's most self-serving, self-promoting, self-important, self-absorbed and self-referential establishment - with the least possible justification for any of these traits - has spent the past quarter century destroying our economy, environment and constitution. Establishments are typically obstacles to change; this one has been a deadly enemy.
- We have changed from being a country that makes things to being a country that markets things. An extraordinary number of Americans outside the service industries spend their lives selling products, ideas or images to others. Their targets are no longer considered citizens but merely consumers and even many progressive organizations treat them this way, demanding only their contributions and their signatures. But consumers don't produce change; citizens do.
- More than a few young Americans have mentioned to me that whatever one does will simply get co-opted by greater forces in politics and corporations. This pessimism probably has a far greater hold than is generally recognized.
- The Internet was seen by many of its early users (including myself) as a tool for the restoration of democratic power and the achievement of change. We were wrong. In the 15 years that the Internet has played a marked social role, America has moved dramatically to the right. Coincidence? Perhaps, but it is something that needs to be examined.
- Our last two presidents have been pathologically clever and deceitful in manipulating public opinion and repeatedly dishonest.
- We haven't elected a president by a clear majority in nearly 20 years which has helped to leave a sense of a permanent insurmountable division.
- The population of the U.S. has nearly doubled since 1950; it has increased about 50% since 1970. The original 13 colonies - about the size of today's Los Angeles - had a population less than 2% of today's America. This has huge implications for how people relate to one another, how they spend their time, and how they go about getting other people to do good things.
- During the period that the size of the country has doubled, television has become an overwhelming factor in politics, business and social life. The time that televisions are turn on in the average home has increased by an hour just in the past decade.
- Television has had an impact on how people are organized and how organizers think they should be organized. Mass meetings of the sort that built the Populist and Socialist parties are rare; For the typical voter, politics is a virtual and lonely business.
- For most adults, a politics defined by television means that politics has not only become less personal and less communal but less dependent on folklore and local information. Politics was once about things remembered. Politics was also about gratitude. Above all, politics was about relationships. The politician grew organically out of a constituency and remained rooted to it as long as incumbency lasted. Today, we increasingly elect people about whom we have little to remember, to whom we owe no gratitude and with whom we have no relationship except that formed during the great carnie show we call a campaign.
- The media has shifted from being economically and socially representative of its audience to being a part of the establishment that controls the audience. The media can no longer be expected to stand up for its readers or viewers against the establishment.
- The media regularly suppresses debate on major issues such as national health insurance policy and the war on drugs. The media basically functions as a Berlin Wall of the mind, preventing the logical, the fair, the moral from entering public affairs.
- The government and its police have become more aggressively repressive of political action, more fascistic in techniques, and ubiquitous in surveillance.
- There has been, nationally and globally, a marked increase in Christian, Muslim and Jewish radical fundamentalism and aggressive self-righteousness.
- America has increasingly engaged in social bigotry towards groups that earlier would have been considered constituencies to which to appeal. This includes not only immigrants, but pot smokers, the young, the poor, and the overweight. In an older politics, simply thanks to the numbers of voters involved, politicians would have courted rather than alienating such groups. Now some are sent to jail, some are ridiculed, some are deported, some get their subsidies reduced, and some are held up as negative examples.
- Why is this possible? One good reason is that what matters now in campaigns is money - which the votes dutifully follow. Another is that far fewer people bother to vote. If those of voting age turned out today's presidential elections in the same proportion as they had in 1960, there would be 24 million more voters, or nearly 25% more cast ballots. Those are people who have given up on the system or have no idea of how to use it.
- Politicians and the media have conspired to redefine what were once considered "unalienable rights" as matters to be balanced at the will of the government by "responsibilities" as defined by that government.
- The direct intervention in politics by criminal - as opposed to merely corrupt - elements, which began with mob's involvement in the Kennedy election, has now become commonplace. In politics, we all live in a Mafia neighborhood now.
- The declining integrity of election systems has not only raised questions about the last two presidential votes, but for some about the value of voting at all.
- Traditional political corruption operated as a feudal system in which the politician was expected to repay favors at the grassroots level. Today's corruption offers no rebate to the average citizen. Instead, one has to be wealthy and powerful to benefit from political corruption.
- Politics is carried out in a culture of impunity in which those in the establishment increasingly see themselves exempt from standards previously established by tradition, community, constitution or ordinary law.
- Ethnic politicians - both black and latino - have retreated to, or been pushed into, the security of a ghettoized politics in which their positions are both safe and largely irrelevant. Given the perversity of our non-proportional election system, minority politicians can only exercise real influence when they lead the majority but most minority politicians - aided by the effects of growing gerrymandering - find themselves instead living on political reservations where what they do and think really doesn't matter. When one occasionally breaks out, such as Barak Obama, it is only because he represents a safe change in color without any significant change in politics.
- The drug Soma, obstacle golf, Feelie movies and Centrifugal Bumble-puppy were used in Huxley's Brave New World to placate the masses. These have been supplanted by a enormous variety of political tranquilizers ranging from actual drugs to distractions such as video games and even substitute elections such as American Idol and Survivor. Never have Americans in their off-work hours had so many ways to avoid what is really going on. Never have so many Americans been deactivated in imagination, creativity and energy by drugs prescribed by medicine rather than by taking those of their own choice.
Short of exile, how does one deal with such a situation? Merely berating it is futile, yet ignoring it is masochistic.
Part of the value in detailing our problem is that it reminds us in how many ways what we have been doing about it hasn't worked. Move On hasn't worked but then neither has the Green Party. The conventional media hasn't worked but then neither has the Internet. Thoughtful analysis hasn't helped but then neither have blogger rants or political pop theater.
Admittedly, maybe all we're waiting for is one of those mysterious moments when everything starts to move, a phase transition that frees up action, hope, and decency. Maybe nothing will work until forces that refuse to be hurried find themselves suddenly aligned.
But it is more likely that we simply haven't caught up with the number and mass of new influences affecting people and their politics so that we are, in effect, still fighting the last war.
What if, on the other hand, we accept that our approach to politics may be anachronistic and start asking questions that might lead us towards some new answers. Questions like:
- How does one increase the solidarity among those in opposition to greed-grounded and repressive forces in the face of all the distractions and disabilities of our semiotic addictions?
- How does one avoid the wheel spinning typical of normal progressive gatherings with their stolidly pre-determined agendas that limits both participants and results?
- Many Democrats, Greens, and Libertarians agree on some critical issues. Why is it so difficult to create cross-over coalitions on matters such as civil liberties?
- How could the Internet be better used to create broad-based consensus rather than being a largely tool for groups clever at niche manipulation? How do we make the Internet the virtual lower house of parliament in a world in which the major division is between governments and their peoples?
- What effect could voting reforms such as public campaign financing or instant runoff voting have? Don't we have to change the rules of the game before we stand a chance of winning it?
- How do we reintegrate politics and culture so that the former is no longer relegated to television but reflects and grows out of the latter? How do we train activists to make politics a part of culture again?
- Couldn't we at least have a button or logo - as with the peace symbol in the 60s - that would help us to know how many others draw from the same well of the soul?
- Which of our current habits bear up under today's conditions? Are marches and demonstrations really an effective way to produce change? Do we use radio enough? Do we use music as effectively as we might?
These are just a few examples of the sort of things worth discussing in seeking a new era in progressive politics that is not so heavily driven by traditional practices that once worked but no longer do.
Give each of the aforementioned problems some time and some meetings and some emails and some debates and maybe we can do better than we do right now. Give each problem some lateral thinking and maybe the guy on the left in the last row will come up with a new idea.
We can't lose anything from trying because even if we don't succeed we're only taking time and energy away from failure - so, at worse, it will just be a draw. And, as our belated awakening to ecological disaster reminds us, it is better to spend our time trying to figure out how the world really is than how we thought it was during the last war - which we didn't win either.
Thursday, November 23, 2006
Cops, cops, cops...
LA TIMES - The UCLA police officer videotaped last week using a Taser gun on a student also shot a homeless man at a campus study hall room three years ago and was earlier recommended for dismissal in connection with an alleged assault on fraternity row, authorities said. UCLA police confirmed late Monday that the officer who fired the Taser gun was Terrence Duren, who has served in the university's Police Department for 18 years. Duren, who was named officer of the year in 2001, also has been involved in several controversial incidents on campus with The Times on Monday night, Duren, 43, defended his record as a campus police officer and urged people to withhold judgment until the review of his Taser use is completed
LA Times Article...
LA Times Article...
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
MILTON FRIEDMAN: KILLING AMERICA SOFTLY WITH HIS SONG
Sam Smith, The Progressive Review
You'd never guess it from the sycophantic obituaries, but Milton Friedman did more damage to American democracy and culture than just about any figure in the 20th century.
The sycophancy isn't surprising. Friedman was blessed with it from the start. For example, the supposedly liberal PBS starred him in a ten part series, "Free to Choose" in 1980 just in time to help Reagan win the presidency. To this day, even NPR babbles about the "free market" when you all you have to do is count the number of lobbyists in Washington to understand that such an economy doesn't exist.
Further, one of the best kept secrets of economics is that there are lots of systems that work provided, that is, you don't care who they work for. Feudalism, for example, was great if you were a lord, not so efficient a marketplace is you were merely a serf. And each system works differently depending on the culture in which it operates, which is why communism in the Soviet Union, China and Italy meant such different things. In the end, the real test of an economy is not its math but its social, financial and moral effect on its culture and those who live there.
This is why the commentaries on Friedman were so consistently wrong. They treated economics as though it was a cold science when, in a mind as distorted as Friedman's, it was really just a sort of creationism myth applied to money.
If you read far enough down the stories, you would find, grudgingly, a single quote from a critic. The Washington Post cited Galbraith biographer Richard Parker who said that Friedman's "passionate calls for financial and securities market deregulation played no small role in ushering in the half-trillion dollar S&L fiasco of the 1980s and the deeply corrupt Wall Street stock market boom of the 1990s. His tax-reduction-at-all-costs policies helped lead to the nation's yawning budget deficits." And the Wall Street Journal admitted deep in its account, "Critics said he inspired policies that put millions of people out of work in pursuit of low inflation and demonized almost everything the government did, no matter how beneficial or democratically chosen.
'Milton Friedman didn't make a distinction between the big government of the People's Republic of China and the big government of the United States, said James Galbraith, professor of government at the University of Texas."
But for the most part both public figures and the media bought Friedman's mythology, never stopping to look critically at the effect it had on America. Here are a just few things that have happened since America's elite swallowed the Friedman myth:
But the worst damage of Friedman economics is not fiscal but what it has done to the social and moral principles that made America what it was before the greedsters of neo-capitalism began taking it apart. The underlying principle of laissez faire economics is that power is intrinsically good and decency intrinsically irrelevant.
No society can long function on such a lie. It is essentially that of the Mafia with the exception being that you don't have to always ignore the law to get what you want; often, with the help of your lobbyists and purchased politicians, you can just change it to fit your needs.
The moral vacuum was clear from the start. Ronald Reagan said things like "We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry every night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet." And: "Unemployment insurance is a pre-paid vacation for freeloaders."
As for Margaret Thatcher, whose platform of public selfishness was used as a model for the Reagan campaign, she thought there wasn't even anything one could call a community: "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families." Thatcher wrapped herself in economic slogans that justified greed not only to accomplish economic ends but also to deal with gays and abortions and everything else she didn't like. In her paradigm, the free market and Victorian tyranny formed a civil union. By the time Reagan, Bush, and Clinton were through with the concept, they had created a gaping corporate exemption from common morality and decency. The market not only offered adequate justification for any act, it had replaced God as the highest source of law.
We have paid a terrible price for this corruption of our culture by the new robber barons egged on by Friedman and his ilk. We so accept their foul standards that we don't even discuss or debate them. We have become prisoners of their lie.
You'd never guess it from the sycophantic obituaries, but Milton Friedman did more damage to American democracy and culture than just about any figure in the 20th century.
The sycophancy isn't surprising. Friedman was blessed with it from the start. For example, the supposedly liberal PBS starred him in a ten part series, "Free to Choose" in 1980 just in time to help Reagan win the presidency. To this day, even NPR babbles about the "free market" when you all you have to do is count the number of lobbyists in Washington to understand that such an economy doesn't exist.
Further, one of the best kept secrets of economics is that there are lots of systems that work provided, that is, you don't care who they work for. Feudalism, for example, was great if you were a lord, not so efficient a marketplace is you were merely a serf. And each system works differently depending on the culture in which it operates, which is why communism in the Soviet Union, China and Italy meant such different things. In the end, the real test of an economy is not its math but its social, financial and moral effect on its culture and those who live there.
This is why the commentaries on Friedman were so consistently wrong. They treated economics as though it was a cold science when, in a mind as distorted as Friedman's, it was really just a sort of creationism myth applied to money.
If you read far enough down the stories, you would find, grudgingly, a single quote from a critic. The Washington Post cited Galbraith biographer Richard Parker who said that Friedman's "passionate calls for financial and securities market deregulation played no small role in ushering in the half-trillion dollar S&L fiasco of the 1980s and the deeply corrupt Wall Street stock market boom of the 1990s. His tax-reduction-at-all-costs policies helped lead to the nation's yawning budget deficits." And the Wall Street Journal admitted deep in its account, "Critics said he inspired policies that put millions of people out of work in pursuit of low inflation and demonized almost everything the government did, no matter how beneficial or democratically chosen.
'Milton Friedman didn't make a distinction between the big government of the People's Republic of China and the big government of the United States, said James Galbraith, professor of government at the University of Texas."
But for the most part both public figures and the media bought Friedman's mythology, never stopping to look critically at the effect it had on America. Here are a just few things that have happened since America's elite swallowed the Friedman myth:
- Real income down
- Real manufacturing wages down
- Top one percent's share of wealth up
- Income gap between rich and poor up
- Family indebtedness up
- Bottom forty percent's share of wealth down
- CEO pay as a percent of average workers' pay up
- Workers covered by pensions down
- Workers covered by health plans down
- Age at which one can receive Social Security down
- Personal bankruptcies up
- Housing foreclosures up
- Median rent up
But the worst damage of Friedman economics is not fiscal but what it has done to the social and moral principles that made America what it was before the greedsters of neo-capitalism began taking it apart. The underlying principle of laissez faire economics is that power is intrinsically good and decency intrinsically irrelevant.
No society can long function on such a lie. It is essentially that of the Mafia with the exception being that you don't have to always ignore the law to get what you want; often, with the help of your lobbyists and purchased politicians, you can just change it to fit your needs.
The moral vacuum was clear from the start. Ronald Reagan said things like "We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry every night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet." And: "Unemployment insurance is a pre-paid vacation for freeloaders."
As for Margaret Thatcher, whose platform of public selfishness was used as a model for the Reagan campaign, she thought there wasn't even anything one could call a community: "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families." Thatcher wrapped herself in economic slogans that justified greed not only to accomplish economic ends but also to deal with gays and abortions and everything else she didn't like. In her paradigm, the free market and Victorian tyranny formed a civil union. By the time Reagan, Bush, and Clinton were through with the concept, they had created a gaping corporate exemption from common morality and decency. The market not only offered adequate justification for any act, it had replaced God as the highest source of law.
We have paid a terrible price for this corruption of our culture by the new robber barons egged on by Friedman and his ilk. We so accept their foul standards that we don't even discuss or debate them. We have become prisoners of their lie.
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Support the troops: leave Iraq
By Evan Derkacz
Posted on November 20, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/evan/44544/
A Zogby poll from February, showed that the troops wanted out.
Marines, Reservists, whatever; all thought the US should pull out within a year: "72% of American troops serving in Iraq think the U.S. should exit the country within the next year, and more than one in four [29%] say the troops should leave immediately..."
Here's the thing that blows the mind. The USA Today post notes that "58% of the soldiers said the mission is clear to them," but it misses the forest for the trees: The number of troops who believe we should remove ourselves from Iraq, militarily, is this high and MOST ARE COMPLETELY WRONG ABOUT WHY THEY'RE THERE.
85% said the U.S. mission is mainly "to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks..."
Imagine what percentage would've wanted out were they informed that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11?
Well, we're 3/4 of the way to that year mark and no signs of withdrawal... just so long as we're aware that this isn't being done in support of the troops but in spite of them...
Evan Derkacz is an AlterNet editor. He writes and edits PEEK, the blog of blogs.
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/evan/44544/
Posted on November 20, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/evan/44544/
A Zogby poll from February, showed that the troops wanted out.
Marines, Reservists, whatever; all thought the US should pull out within a year: "72% of American troops serving in Iraq think the U.S. should exit the country within the next year, and more than one in four [29%] say the troops should leave immediately..."
Here's the thing that blows the mind. The USA Today post notes that "58% of the soldiers said the mission is clear to them," but it misses the forest for the trees: The number of troops who believe we should remove ourselves from Iraq, militarily, is this high and MOST ARE COMPLETELY WRONG ABOUT WHY THEY'RE THERE.
85% said the U.S. mission is mainly "to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks..."
Imagine what percentage would've wanted out were they informed that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11?
Well, we're 3/4 of the way to that year mark and no signs of withdrawal... just so long as we're aware that this isn't being done in support of the troops but in spite of them...
Evan Derkacz is an AlterNet editor. He writes and edits PEEK, the blog of blogs.
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/evan/44544/
Saturday, November 18, 2006
From a San Francisco Liberal: Pelosi Is Not One Of Us!
TIM REDMOND, SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN - Pelosi is by no means a San Francisco liberal. She's a Washington insider, a born and bred politician who cares more about power and money than she does about any particular ideology. I'm glad the Democrats are in charge, and Pelosi deserves tremendous credit for making that happen. But she's not about to push any kind of ambitious left-wing political or cultural agenda.
Just look at her record. Pelosi was weak on the war and late in opposing it. She was the author of the bill that gave that well-known pauper George Lucas the lucrative contract to build a commercial office building in a national park. She worked with Republicans such as Don Fisher of the Gap on the Presidio privatization and set a precedent for the National Park System that the most rabid anti-government conservatives can love. Just this week Bloomberg News reported that Pelosi is working with Silicon Valley venture capital firms to weaken the post-Enron Sarbanes-Oxley law, which mandates strict accounting procedures for publicly held corporations. And just a couple of weeks before the election, she told 60 Minutes that same-sex marriage is "not an issue that we're fighting about here." I think it's pretty safe to say she's never been to Burning Man.
Pelosi. . . has an agenda for her first 100 hours. It's nice moderate stuff - raising the minimum wage (to all of $7.25 an hour), lowering interest on student loans (but not replacing loans with grants), and allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower-priced drugs (but not making Medicare a national health insurance program for every American). Tactically, it's brilliant: there won't be a lot of national opposition, and Bush will look like a heel if he vetoes the bills.
In fact, as a political strategist and tactician, Pelosi has proven brilliant. She's whipped together a dysfunctional party and led the most important electoral change to this country in more than a decade.Along the way, though, she's pretty much stopped representing San Francisco. On issue after issue, her constituents are way to the left of her. This fall she didn't even bother to show up in the district (except to extract money for Democratic congressional campaigns around the country). She spent election night in Washington. . .
If the right-wing talk show hosts are worried about San Francisco liberals like me, they can take it easy: Nancy Pelosi is not one of us.
http://www.sfbg.com/printable_entry.php?entry_id=2094
Just look at her record. Pelosi was weak on the war and late in opposing it. She was the author of the bill that gave that well-known pauper George Lucas the lucrative contract to build a commercial office building in a national park. She worked with Republicans such as Don Fisher of the Gap on the Presidio privatization and set a precedent for the National Park System that the most rabid anti-government conservatives can love. Just this week Bloomberg News reported that Pelosi is working with Silicon Valley venture capital firms to weaken the post-Enron Sarbanes-Oxley law, which mandates strict accounting procedures for publicly held corporations. And just a couple of weeks before the election, she told 60 Minutes that same-sex marriage is "not an issue that we're fighting about here." I think it's pretty safe to say she's never been to Burning Man.
Pelosi. . . has an agenda for her first 100 hours. It's nice moderate stuff - raising the minimum wage (to all of $7.25 an hour), lowering interest on student loans (but not replacing loans with grants), and allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower-priced drugs (but not making Medicare a national health insurance program for every American). Tactically, it's brilliant: there won't be a lot of national opposition, and Bush will look like a heel if he vetoes the bills.
In fact, as a political strategist and tactician, Pelosi has proven brilliant. She's whipped together a dysfunctional party and led the most important electoral change to this country in more than a decade.Along the way, though, she's pretty much stopped representing San Francisco. On issue after issue, her constituents are way to the left of her. This fall she didn't even bother to show up in the district (except to extract money for Democratic congressional campaigns around the country). She spent election night in Washington. . .
If the right-wing talk show hosts are worried about San Francisco liberals like me, they can take it easy: Nancy Pelosi is not one of us.
http://www.sfbg.com/printable_entry.php?entry_id=2094
Trent Lott's Redemption Song
Coverage of minority whip election ignores racist ties
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3002
11/17/06
Sen. Trent Lott's return to the ranks of the Senate Republican leadership has been broadly covered as a story of political redemption. In this scenario, the once-fallen Senate majority leader, having apologized and atoned for his sins—in this case, praising the racist 1948 presidential candidacy of the late Strom Thurmond—is restored to the body's top ranks with his election to the No. 2 Republican post of minority whip. But these redemption story reports have downplayed Lott's association with and praise for racists, while greatly exaggerating his atonement.
In his 2002 remarks, Lott said he was proud that his state, Mississippi, had supported Thurmond's 1948 presidential campaign; he added, "If the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either." The two central planks in Thurmond's 1948 platform were segregation and opposition to a federal anti-lynching statute. "All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the negro into our homes, our schools, our churches," Thurmond proclaimed at the time (Washington Post, 11/2/88).
Upon Lott's newfound "redemption," though, CNN (11/15/06) recalled the incident as a "blog-driven storm. Lott was accused of embracing Thurmond's past. He attempted to explain. He apologized, but it was too big and his Republican colleagues pushed him out of the leadership."
An Associated Press article (11/16/06), "Sweet redemption: Republicans return Lott to Senate leadership," passed lightly over Lott's loaded remarks: "At Sen. Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday bash, Lott had saluted the South Carolina senator with comments later interpreted as support for Southern segregationist policies."
A front-page New York Times report (11/16/06) employed a similar theme of redemption, calling Lott's story an "unlikely study in professional redemption" and describing him as "a man whose recent history is itself a testament to sudden falls, unlikely recoveries and the fickle hands of fortune in American politics"—as if Lott's troubles were simply a matter of bad luck.
Many other reports saw Lott's remarks as a judgment problem rather than a racism problem. A Times online report (11/15/06) called them "ill considered," while Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank (11/15/06) characterized them as "infelicitous," explaining that, in his battle back into the Senate leadership, Lott "was determined to demonstrate that he could control his mouth." Other reports called Lott's remarks a "gaffe" (Special Report With Brit Hume, 11/15/06), "racially impolitic" (Washington Post, 11/16/06), and "tasteless" (Los Angeles Times, 11/16/06).
Vocal enthusiasm for an openly racist campaign suggests a bigger problem than poor taste, certainly. But much of the coverage (e.g. New York Times, 11/16/06; Associated Press, 11/16/06) gave no inkling that Lott's record of racism and racist associations amounts to more than one isolated incident. As a member of the House of Representatives in 1978, Lott was behind a successful effort to re-instate the U.S. citizenship of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. In 1981, the year Lott became majority whip in the House, he prodded the Reagan administration to fight for tax exemptions for racist private schools like Bob Jones University. (The Supreme Court turned down the administration’s plea in an 8 to 1 decision.)
In 1982 and again in 1990, Lott voted against extending the Voting Rights Act. In 1983 he voted against a national holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr., and in 1994 voted to de-fund the Martin Luther King holiday commission. In 1990 Lott voted against the continuation of the Civil Rights Act. In 2005, Lott scored 5 percent on the NAACP's civil rights legislative report card (NAACP.org, 1/06).
And no mainstream media outlet seems to have reported that Trent Lott has never even motioned toward apologizing for his long association with the Council of Conservative Citizens, or for the lies he told denying his links to the group.
In late 1998, when it was learned that the then-Senate majority leader had had a long-term association with the CCC, a racist group the Southern Poverty Law Center described (Intelligence Report, Winter/99) as "the reincarnation of the infamous White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and 1960s,” Lott responded to questions about his appearance at a CCC event by denying, through an aide, any detailed knowledge of the group, and said he only “vaguely remembered” giving a single speech to the group more than ten years earlier (Extra!, 3-4/99).
In fact, Lott hosted CCC leaders at his Senate office in 1997 and addressed its events at least three times in the 1990s. As a keynote speaker at a 1992 CCC convention, Lott heaped praise on its members: “The people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy…. Let's take it in the right direction and our children will be the beneficiaries!"
This earlier racism scandal was widely reported at the time (e.g. Washington Post 12/11/98; New York Times, 1/14/99; Los Angeles Times, 1/29/99), but in just a few short years has been swept down the media memory hole—neatly clearing the path for Lott's unreconstructed "redemption."
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3002
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3002
11/17/06
Sen. Trent Lott's return to the ranks of the Senate Republican leadership has been broadly covered as a story of political redemption. In this scenario, the once-fallen Senate majority leader, having apologized and atoned for his sins—in this case, praising the racist 1948 presidential candidacy of the late Strom Thurmond—is restored to the body's top ranks with his election to the No. 2 Republican post of minority whip. But these redemption story reports have downplayed Lott's association with and praise for racists, while greatly exaggerating his atonement.
In his 2002 remarks, Lott said he was proud that his state, Mississippi, had supported Thurmond's 1948 presidential campaign; he added, "If the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either." The two central planks in Thurmond's 1948 platform were segregation and opposition to a federal anti-lynching statute. "All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the negro into our homes, our schools, our churches," Thurmond proclaimed at the time (Washington Post, 11/2/88).
Upon Lott's newfound "redemption," though, CNN (11/15/06) recalled the incident as a "blog-driven storm. Lott was accused of embracing Thurmond's past. He attempted to explain. He apologized, but it was too big and his Republican colleagues pushed him out of the leadership."
An Associated Press article (11/16/06), "Sweet redemption: Republicans return Lott to Senate leadership," passed lightly over Lott's loaded remarks: "At Sen. Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday bash, Lott had saluted the South Carolina senator with comments later interpreted as support for Southern segregationist policies."
A front-page New York Times report (11/16/06) employed a similar theme of redemption, calling Lott's story an "unlikely study in professional redemption" and describing him as "a man whose recent history is itself a testament to sudden falls, unlikely recoveries and the fickle hands of fortune in American politics"—as if Lott's troubles were simply a matter of bad luck.
Many other reports saw Lott's remarks as a judgment problem rather than a racism problem. A Times online report (11/15/06) called them "ill considered," while Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank (11/15/06) characterized them as "infelicitous," explaining that, in his battle back into the Senate leadership, Lott "was determined to demonstrate that he could control his mouth." Other reports called Lott's remarks a "gaffe" (Special Report With Brit Hume, 11/15/06), "racially impolitic" (Washington Post, 11/16/06), and "tasteless" (Los Angeles Times, 11/16/06).
Vocal enthusiasm for an openly racist campaign suggests a bigger problem than poor taste, certainly. But much of the coverage (e.g. New York Times, 11/16/06; Associated Press, 11/16/06) gave no inkling that Lott's record of racism and racist associations amounts to more than one isolated incident. As a member of the House of Representatives in 1978, Lott was behind a successful effort to re-instate the U.S. citizenship of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. In 1981, the year Lott became majority whip in the House, he prodded the Reagan administration to fight for tax exemptions for racist private schools like Bob Jones University. (The Supreme Court turned down the administration’s plea in an 8 to 1 decision.)
In 1982 and again in 1990, Lott voted against extending the Voting Rights Act. In 1983 he voted against a national holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr., and in 1994 voted to de-fund the Martin Luther King holiday commission. In 1990 Lott voted against the continuation of the Civil Rights Act. In 2005, Lott scored 5 percent on the NAACP's civil rights legislative report card (NAACP.org, 1/06).
And no mainstream media outlet seems to have reported that Trent Lott has never even motioned toward apologizing for his long association with the Council of Conservative Citizens, or for the lies he told denying his links to the group.
In late 1998, when it was learned that the then-Senate majority leader had had a long-term association with the CCC, a racist group the Southern Poverty Law Center described (Intelligence Report, Winter/99) as "the reincarnation of the infamous White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and 1960s,” Lott responded to questions about his appearance at a CCC event by denying, through an aide, any detailed knowledge of the group, and said he only “vaguely remembered” giving a single speech to the group more than ten years earlier (Extra!, 3-4/99).
In fact, Lott hosted CCC leaders at his Senate office in 1997 and addressed its events at least three times in the 1990s. As a keynote speaker at a 1992 CCC convention, Lott heaped praise on its members: “The people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy…. Let's take it in the right direction and our children will be the beneficiaries!"
This earlier racism scandal was widely reported at the time (e.g. Washington Post 12/11/98; New York Times, 1/14/99; Los Angeles Times, 1/29/99), but in just a few short years has been swept down the media memory hole—neatly clearing the path for Lott's unreconstructed "redemption."
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3002
Dems grow spine; oppose Military Commissions Act
By Joshua Holland
Posted on November 17, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/joshua/44437/
The Hill:
Gearing up for a major clash with the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress, several key Senate Democrats are planning to overhaul the newly minted legislation governing military tribunals of detainees.
Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who is running for president and who, come January, will be the second ranking Democrat on the International Relations Committee, introduced legislation today that would amend the existing law.
"The bill goes back and undoes what was done," Dodd told The Hill. Dodd was one of the top critics of the military tribunal bill the GOP hashed out with the White House and was signed into law last month.
Dodd's bill, which currently has no co-sponsors, seeks to give habeas corpus protections to military detainees; bar information that was gained through coercion from being used in trials and empower military judges to exclude hearsay evidence they deem to be unreliable.
Dodd's bill also narrows the definition of "unlawful enemy combatant" to individuals who directly participate in hostilities against the United States who are not lawful combatants. The legislation would also authorize the U.S. Court of Appeals for the armed forces to review decisions made by the military commissions.
Moreover, Dodd seeks to have an expedited judicial review of the new law to determine the constitutionality of its provisions.
Dodd is the first Democrat to take aim at the controversial military tribunals bill. But Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the incoming Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, also said that he is in the process of drafting "major changes" to the legislation.
Among the planned changes are instituting habeas corpus rights for detainees and looking into the current practice of extraordinary rendition.
Leahy is among several other Democrats, including incoming Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who are concerned about the practice of sending suspected terrorists to countries other than the United States for imprisonment and interrogation.
The incoming chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), said he is going to look into the rendition process.
"I'm not comfortable with the system," Levin said earlier this week. "I think that there's been some significant abuses which have not made us more secure, but have made us less secure and have also perhaps cost us some real allies, as well as not producing particularly useful information. So I think the system needs a thorough review, and as the military would say, a thorough scrubbing."
Congress rushed through the terror-detainee legislation before its election break in response to a Supreme Court's ruling earlier this year that Bush exceeded his authority by establishing military tribunals to try detainees without congressional authorization.
As I pointed out in an earlier post, this isn't being driven by public opinion. A CNN poll last week found that 39 percent of Americans think the administration has gone "too far in restricting civil liberties" and 59 percent think it's struck a good balance or not gone far enough.
It’s a principled stance and Dodd and others will no doubt be attacked by the right for taking it. So the senate needs to hear from voters about how important these efforts are. You can contact your senator here. Please take a few minutes and do so, and forward this on to people you know.
Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/joshua/44437/
Posted on November 17, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/joshua/44437/
The Hill:
Gearing up for a major clash with the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress, several key Senate Democrats are planning to overhaul the newly minted legislation governing military tribunals of detainees.
Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who is running for president and who, come January, will be the second ranking Democrat on the International Relations Committee, introduced legislation today that would amend the existing law.
"The bill goes back and undoes what was done," Dodd told The Hill. Dodd was one of the top critics of the military tribunal bill the GOP hashed out with the White House and was signed into law last month.
Dodd's bill, which currently has no co-sponsors, seeks to give habeas corpus protections to military detainees; bar information that was gained through coercion from being used in trials and empower military judges to exclude hearsay evidence they deem to be unreliable.
Dodd's bill also narrows the definition of "unlawful enemy combatant" to individuals who directly participate in hostilities against the United States who are not lawful combatants. The legislation would also authorize the U.S. Court of Appeals for the armed forces to review decisions made by the military commissions.
Moreover, Dodd seeks to have an expedited judicial review of the new law to determine the constitutionality of its provisions.
Dodd is the first Democrat to take aim at the controversial military tribunals bill. But Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the incoming Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, also said that he is in the process of drafting "major changes" to the legislation.
Among the planned changes are instituting habeas corpus rights for detainees and looking into the current practice of extraordinary rendition.
Leahy is among several other Democrats, including incoming Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who are concerned about the practice of sending suspected terrorists to countries other than the United States for imprisonment and interrogation.
The incoming chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), said he is going to look into the rendition process.
"I'm not comfortable with the system," Levin said earlier this week. "I think that there's been some significant abuses which have not made us more secure, but have made us less secure and have also perhaps cost us some real allies, as well as not producing particularly useful information. So I think the system needs a thorough review, and as the military would say, a thorough scrubbing."
Congress rushed through the terror-detainee legislation before its election break in response to a Supreme Court's ruling earlier this year that Bush exceeded his authority by establishing military tribunals to try detainees without congressional authorization.
As I pointed out in an earlier post, this isn't being driven by public opinion. A CNN poll last week found that 39 percent of Americans think the administration has gone "too far in restricting civil liberties" and 59 percent think it's struck a good balance or not gone far enough.
It’s a principled stance and Dodd and others will no doubt be attacked by the right for taking it. So the senate needs to hear from voters about how important these efforts are. You can contact your senator here. Please take a few minutes and do so, and forward this on to people you know.
Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/joshua/44437/
Friday, November 17, 2006
Why I'm Not Celebrating Yet
Margy Waller, TomPaine.commonsense
November 17, 2006
Margy Waller is the project director of The Mobility Agenda at The Center for Community Change.
Apparently, we’re in for a couple years of change and disappointingly incremental policymaking. Signals are clear—and all over the press.
For example, just two days after the “left turn” election, we heard that “Victorious Democrats vow cooperative approach on taxes and the economy.” Well, bollocks.
My friends and family keep asking if I am excited, celebrating, partying up a storm, and so on. I am not.
Everyone assumes that inclusionist economic policies stand a chance of implementation in the next Congress. Well, maybe—some of those ideas. But is it a new day for equitable economic policy? Not so much…not just yet.
Of course, it’s good news that so many of the president’s worst ideas are now buried deep and going nowhere. Plans to further reduce taxes on the wealthy (by eliminating the estate tax) and kill the universal retirement system (by privatizing Social Security) are dead in the 110th Congress.
But, we aren’t likely to see meaningful progress on economic fairness and inclusion just because both houses have new leadership.
Why not? It’s our own fault. Progressives haven’t given members of Congress a clear signal about what we want in years. Instead, the message from the think tank and advocacy crowd on economic and social policy has been: “Get the best deal you can!” and “Take the crumbs, if that’s all you can get from your seat at the table.”
Even more importantly, we’ve in no way prepared the public to demand or support steps that improve our national economy by increasing economic and social mobility. We’ve barely touched on the need to strengthen the 30 percent of the labor market that is made up of jobs paying less than $10 an hour. We hardly ever focus our advocacy and media work on the damage to our economy stemming from the large and growing percentage of jobs no one could call “decent work.”
And until voters demand equitable economic policy, we should not expect members of Congress to take the lead.
We can expect smallish changes like the very belated minimum wage increase that is on the “to-do” list of our madam speaker-elect. But, will Congress take the next logical step—one adopted by many of the successful state initiative campaigns: Ensuring that wages increase automatically with the cost of living?
Will Congress pursue any of the other new ideas developing at the state and local level to strengthen economic mobility by making bad jobs into better jobs?
Will we see federal policy movement toward the delinking of health care coverage from employment, like steps taken in a few states and one locality (San Francisco, natch)?
How about ensuring that all employees are offered a limited number of paid sick days as one city (yeah, yeah—San Francisco again) did on November 8?
Will Congress take action to clarify that employees are free to organize and negotiate for better jobs?
Sure, it’s not necessarily wrong for incoming leadership to signal a desire to cooperate with the administration and other conservatives. That’s all the voters are truly prepared to accept at this point. It’s our job to start demanding better policy in the future.
We’ve already heard “progressives” advising the new leadership to “resist the impulse to pursue big ambitions.” This might be the right political advice for today, but it is also strong evidence that another kind of institution is required—one that has the freedom to focus on long-term goals and a mission specific to policy outcomes, uncolored by campaign goals.
It’s no good thinking that we can hold our fire now and turn to the bigger stuff in 2008, when many hope that progressives will still be surfing the wave of voter discontent with conservatives. We have to start sharing our most ambitious goals now, if we want them to be adopted by future candidates, members of Congress, and presidential administrations.
The thing about the new Congress is not so much what its members choose to do, as what we share with them about our expectations. If our stated goals are limited, then the outcomes will be small-bore and we shouldn’t be disappointed. It’s not about them; it’s about what we want.
November 17, 2006
Margy Waller is the project director of The Mobility Agenda at The Center for Community Change.
Apparently, we’re in for a couple years of change and disappointingly incremental policymaking. Signals are clear—and all over the press.
For example, just two days after the “left turn” election, we heard that “Victorious Democrats vow cooperative approach on taxes and the economy.” Well, bollocks.
My friends and family keep asking if I am excited, celebrating, partying up a storm, and so on. I am not.
Everyone assumes that inclusionist economic policies stand a chance of implementation in the next Congress. Well, maybe—some of those ideas. But is it a new day for equitable economic policy? Not so much…not just yet.
Of course, it’s good news that so many of the president’s worst ideas are now buried deep and going nowhere. Plans to further reduce taxes on the wealthy (by eliminating the estate tax) and kill the universal retirement system (by privatizing Social Security) are dead in the 110th Congress.
But, we aren’t likely to see meaningful progress on economic fairness and inclusion just because both houses have new leadership.
Why not? It’s our own fault. Progressives haven’t given members of Congress a clear signal about what we want in years. Instead, the message from the think tank and advocacy crowd on economic and social policy has been: “Get the best deal you can!” and “Take the crumbs, if that’s all you can get from your seat at the table.”
Even more importantly, we’ve in no way prepared the public to demand or support steps that improve our national economy by increasing economic and social mobility. We’ve barely touched on the need to strengthen the 30 percent of the labor market that is made up of jobs paying less than $10 an hour. We hardly ever focus our advocacy and media work on the damage to our economy stemming from the large and growing percentage of jobs no one could call “decent work.”
And until voters demand equitable economic policy, we should not expect members of Congress to take the lead.
We can expect smallish changes like the very belated minimum wage increase that is on the “to-do” list of our madam speaker-elect. But, will Congress take the next logical step—one adopted by many of the successful state initiative campaigns: Ensuring that wages increase automatically with the cost of living?
Will Congress pursue any of the other new ideas developing at the state and local level to strengthen economic mobility by making bad jobs into better jobs?
Will we see federal policy movement toward the delinking of health care coverage from employment, like steps taken in a few states and one locality (San Francisco, natch)?
How about ensuring that all employees are offered a limited number of paid sick days as one city (yeah, yeah—San Francisco again) did on November 8?
Will Congress take action to clarify that employees are free to organize and negotiate for better jobs?
Sure, it’s not necessarily wrong for incoming leadership to signal a desire to cooperate with the administration and other conservatives. That’s all the voters are truly prepared to accept at this point. It’s our job to start demanding better policy in the future.
We’ve already heard “progressives” advising the new leadership to “resist the impulse to pursue big ambitions.” This might be the right political advice for today, but it is also strong evidence that another kind of institution is required—one that has the freedom to focus on long-term goals and a mission specific to policy outcomes, uncolored by campaign goals.
It’s no good thinking that we can hold our fire now and turn to the bigger stuff in 2008, when many hope that progressives will still be surfing the wave of voter discontent with conservatives. We have to start sharing our most ambitious goals now, if we want them to be adopted by future candidates, members of Congress, and presidential administrations.
The thing about the new Congress is not so much what its members choose to do, as what we share with them about our expectations. If our stated goals are limited, then the outcomes will be small-bore and we shouldn’t be disappointed. It’s not about them; it’s about what we want.
Thursday, November 16, 2006
The Media's Iraq Offensive
Norman Solomon
November 16, 2006
Norman Solomon’s latest book, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, is out in paperback. For information, go to: www.warmadeeasy.com.
The American media establishment has launched a major offensive against the option of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.
In the latest media assault, right-wing outfits like Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page are secondary. The heaviest firepower is now coming from the most valuable square inches of media real estate in the USA—the front page of The New York Times.
The present situation is grimly instructive for anyone who might wonder how the Vietnam War could continue for years while opinion polls showed that most Americans were against it. Now, in the wake of midterm elections widely seen as a rebuke to the Iraq war, powerful media institutions are feverishly spinning against a pullout of U.S. troops.
Under the headline “Get Out of Iraq Now? Not So Fast, Experts Say,” the Nov. 15 front page of The New York Times prominently featured a “Military Analysis” by Michael Gordon. The piece reported that—while some congressional Democrats are saying withdrawal of U.S. troops “should begin within four to six months”—“this argument is being challenged by a number of military officers, experts and former generals, including some who have been among the most vehement critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq policies.”
Reporter Gordon appeared hours later on Anderson Cooper’s CNN show, fully morphing into an unabashed pundit as he declared that withdrawal is “simply not realistic.” Sounding much like a Pentagon spokesman, Gordon went on to state in no uncertain terms that he opposes a pullout.
If a New York Times military-affairs reporter went on television to advocate for withdrawal of U.S. troops as unequivocally as Gordon advocated against any such withdrawal during his Nov. 15 appearance on CNN, he or she would be quickly reprimanded—and probably would be taken off the beat—by the Times hierarchy. But the paper’s news department eagerly fosters reporting that internalizes and promotes the basic worldviews of the country’s national security state.
That’s how and why the Times front page was so hospitable to the work of Judith Miller during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. That’s how and why the Times is now so hospitable to the work of Michael Gordon.
At this point, categories like “vehement critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq policies” are virtually meaningless. The bulk of the media’s favorite “vehement critics” are opposed to reduction of U.S. involvement in the Iraq carnage, and some of them are now openly urging an increase in U.S. troop levels for the occupation.
Too often, media coverage of U.S. policy in Iraq seems little more than a remake of how mainstream news outlets portrayed Washington’s options during the war in Vietnam. Routine deference to inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom has turned many prominent journalists into co-producers of a “Groundhog Day” sequel that insists the U.S. war effort must go on.
During the years since the fall of Saddam, countless news stories and commentaries have compared the ongoing disaster in Iraq to the Vietnam War. But those comparisons have rarely illuminated the most troubling parallels between the U.S. media coverage of both wars.
Whether in 1968 or 2006, most of the Washington press corps has been at pains to portray withdrawal of U.S. troops as impractical and unrealistic.
Contrary to myths about media coverage of the Vietnam War, the American press lagged way behind grassroots antiwar sentiment in seriously contemplating a U.S. pullout from Vietnam. The lag time amounted to several years—and meant the additional deaths of tens of thousands of Americans and perhaps 1 million more Vietnamese people.
A survey by the Boston Globe , conducted in February 1968, found that out of 39 major daily newspapers in the United States, not one had editorialized for withdrawing American troops from Vietnam. Today—despite the antiwar tilt of national opinion polls and the recent election—advocacy of a U.S. pullout from Iraq seems almost as scarce among modern-day media elites.
The standard media evasions amount to kicking the bloody can down the road. Careful statements about benchmarks and getting tough with the Baghdad government—as with the Saigon government—are markers for a national media discourse that dodges instead of enlivens debate.
Many journalists are retreading the notion that the pullout option is not a real option at all. And the Democrats who’ll soon be running Congress, we’re told, wouldn’t—and shouldn’t—dare to go that far if they know what’s good for them.
Implicit in such media coverage is the idea that the real legitimacy for U.S. war policymaking rests with the president, not the Congress. When I ponder that assumption, I think about 42-year-old footage of the CBS program “Face the Nation.”
The show’s host on that 1964 telecast was the widely esteemed journalist Peter Lisagor, who told his guest:
“Couldn’t be more wrong,” Sen. Wayne Morse broke in with his sandpapery voice. “You couldn’t make a more unsound legal statement than the one you have just made. This is the promulgation of an old fallacy that foreign policy belongs to the president of the United States. That’s nonsense.”
Lisagor was almost taunting as he asked, “To whom does it belong then, senator?”
Morse did not miss a beat. “It belongs to the American people,” he shot back—and “I am pleading that the American people be given the facts about foreign policy.”
The journalist persisted: “You know, Senator, that the American people cannot formulate and execute foreign policy.”
Morse’s response was indignant: “Why do you say that? ... I have complete faith in the ability of the American people to follow the facts if you’ll give them. And my charge against my government is, we’re not giving the American people the facts.”
Morse, the senior senator from Oregon, was passionate about the U.S. Constitution as well as international law. And, while rejecting the widely held notion that foreign policy belongs to the president, he spoke in unflinching terms about the Vietnam War. At a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on Feb. 27, 1968, Morse said that he did not “intend to put the blood of this war on my hands.”
And, prophetically, Morse added: “We’re going to become guilty, in my judgment, of being the greatest threat to the peace of the world. It’s an ugly reality, and we Americans don’t like to face up to it.”
November 16, 2006
Norman Solomon’s latest book, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, is out in paperback. For information, go to: www.warmadeeasy.com.
The American media establishment has launched a major offensive against the option of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.
In the latest media assault, right-wing outfits like Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page are secondary. The heaviest firepower is now coming from the most valuable square inches of media real estate in the USA—the front page of The New York Times.
The present situation is grimly instructive for anyone who might wonder how the Vietnam War could continue for years while opinion polls showed that most Americans were against it. Now, in the wake of midterm elections widely seen as a rebuke to the Iraq war, powerful media institutions are feverishly spinning against a pullout of U.S. troops.
Under the headline “Get Out of Iraq Now? Not So Fast, Experts Say,” the Nov. 15 front page of The New York Times prominently featured a “Military Analysis” by Michael Gordon. The piece reported that—while some congressional Democrats are saying withdrawal of U.S. troops “should begin within four to six months”—“this argument is being challenged by a number of military officers, experts and former generals, including some who have been among the most vehement critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq policies.”
Reporter Gordon appeared hours later on Anderson Cooper’s CNN show, fully morphing into an unabashed pundit as he declared that withdrawal is “simply not realistic.” Sounding much like a Pentagon spokesman, Gordon went on to state in no uncertain terms that he opposes a pullout.
If a New York Times military-affairs reporter went on television to advocate for withdrawal of U.S. troops as unequivocally as Gordon advocated against any such withdrawal during his Nov. 15 appearance on CNN, he or she would be quickly reprimanded—and probably would be taken off the beat—by the Times hierarchy. But the paper’s news department eagerly fosters reporting that internalizes and promotes the basic worldviews of the country’s national security state.
That’s how and why the Times front page was so hospitable to the work of Judith Miller during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. That’s how and why the Times is now so hospitable to the work of Michael Gordon.
At this point, categories like “vehement critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq policies” are virtually meaningless. The bulk of the media’s favorite “vehement critics” are opposed to reduction of U.S. involvement in the Iraq carnage, and some of them are now openly urging an increase in U.S. troop levels for the occupation.
Too often, media coverage of U.S. policy in Iraq seems little more than a remake of how mainstream news outlets portrayed Washington’s options during the war in Vietnam. Routine deference to inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom has turned many prominent journalists into co-producers of a “Groundhog Day” sequel that insists the U.S. war effort must go on.
During the years since the fall of Saddam, countless news stories and commentaries have compared the ongoing disaster in Iraq to the Vietnam War. But those comparisons have rarely illuminated the most troubling parallels between the U.S. media coverage of both wars.
Whether in 1968 or 2006, most of the Washington press corps has been at pains to portray withdrawal of U.S. troops as impractical and unrealistic.
Contrary to myths about media coverage of the Vietnam War, the American press lagged way behind grassroots antiwar sentiment in seriously contemplating a U.S. pullout from Vietnam. The lag time amounted to several years—and meant the additional deaths of tens of thousands of Americans and perhaps 1 million more Vietnamese people.
A survey by the Boston Globe , conducted in February 1968, found that out of 39 major daily newspapers in the United States, not one had editorialized for withdrawing American troops from Vietnam. Today—despite the antiwar tilt of national opinion polls and the recent election—advocacy of a U.S. pullout from Iraq seems almost as scarce among modern-day media elites.
The standard media evasions amount to kicking the bloody can down the road. Careful statements about benchmarks and getting tough with the Baghdad government—as with the Saigon government—are markers for a national media discourse that dodges instead of enlivens debate.
Many journalists are retreading the notion that the pullout option is not a real option at all. And the Democrats who’ll soon be running Congress, we’re told, wouldn’t—and shouldn’t—dare to go that far if they know what’s good for them.
Implicit in such media coverage is the idea that the real legitimacy for U.S. war policymaking rests with the president, not the Congress. When I ponder that assumption, I think about 42-year-old footage of the CBS program “Face the Nation.”
The show’s host on that 1964 telecast was the widely esteemed journalist Peter Lisagor, who told his guest:
Senator, the Constitution gives to the president of the United States the sole responsibility for the conduct of foreign policy.
“Couldn’t be more wrong,” Sen. Wayne Morse broke in with his sandpapery voice. “You couldn’t make a more unsound legal statement than the one you have just made. This is the promulgation of an old fallacy that foreign policy belongs to the president of the United States. That’s nonsense.”
Lisagor was almost taunting as he asked, “To whom does it belong then, senator?”
Morse did not miss a beat. “It belongs to the American people,” he shot back—and “I am pleading that the American people be given the facts about foreign policy.”
The journalist persisted: “You know, Senator, that the American people cannot formulate and execute foreign policy.”
Morse’s response was indignant: “Why do you say that? ... I have complete faith in the ability of the American people to follow the facts if you’ll give them. And my charge against my government is, we’re not giving the American people the facts.”
Morse, the senior senator from Oregon, was passionate about the U.S. Constitution as well as international law. And, while rejecting the widely held notion that foreign policy belongs to the president, he spoke in unflinching terms about the Vietnam War. At a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on Feb. 27, 1968, Morse said that he did not “intend to put the blood of this war on my hands.”
And, prophetically, Morse added: “We’re going to become guilty, in my judgment, of being the greatest threat to the peace of the world. It’s an ugly reality, and we Americans don’t like to face up to it.”
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
The Collapse of Hip Capitalism
How Tower Records Committed Suicide
http://www.counterpunch.org/ballinger11012006.html
I cry like a baby every time I read this.--Pete
By LEE BALLINGER
The calamity caused by the liquidation of Tower Records doesn't just consist of the 2700 workers fired and the dozens of small label releases that will lose their most important national outlet. It isn't just that Tower will certainly take down with it some indie labels and distributors to whom it owed a fortune. It certainly isn't just the eight-figure losses each of the major labels will absorb, probably resulting in more firings at those that aren't already pared to the bone.
You're going to feel the demise of Tower too, even if there isn't a Tower anywhere near you. Tower died not because of illegal downloading or any other record biz boogeyman. What killed the chain, in the final analysis, is the breakneck expansion and consolidation of the past 20 years. Although Tower didn't participate in the merger and acquisition of other chains which have led to so many other bankruptcies, it did attempt to spread tentacles coast to coast and continent to continent.
Tower CEO Russ Solomon is revered in the music industry. But why? In the name of profit, Solomon made Tower one of the chains that most avidly championed Tipper stickers and record label lyric screening committees. Combined with the equally crazy campaign to condemn fair use of copyrighted material to the dustbin of history, this shrewd maneuver choked the most exciting record-making climate since the dawn of rock'n'roll. Then he expanded his California business all the way to New York and Tokyo, without managing to figure out how to do anything but lose money.
Now, consider what you'll do for an alternative. Probably, if you're a big music fan, you'll do more ordering from the Internet--meaning a wait of a day to a week before you can hear the music you've paid for.
What you won't be doing is going to your town's record store with the knowledgeable staff . That store doesn't exist any more. Most likely, price competition from the chains drove it out of existence. So what we get out of the process is a temporary set of lowball prices, vastly fewer musical options, and a long-term lack of convenience and absence of expertise.
This phenomena operates throughout our society. It's the reason airlines and oil companies, insurers and drug corporations, even electricity providers, jack up prices and strip down their services. Most of the time, the only people who come out smiling are the financiers, who peel off a part of every dollar in order to hire sometimes great artists to play at their birthday parties.
Tower Records was a poster child for "hip capitalism," a fig leaf term meant to cover a system which justifies itself by providing "competition" that leads to "innovation"--until the reckoning comes and the cartel or monopoly begins to take shape, driving out all not on the inside. The idea that this has made our society wealthy, efficient and convenient is lunacy, as Tower's demise confirms.
Tower Records was a suicide.
The choice we face is whether we'd like our entire society to do the same or whether we will begin working to change it fundamentally.
Lee Ballinger is coeditor of one of CounterPunch's favorite newsletters, Rock and Rap Confidential, where this article originally appeared. He can be reached at: Rockrap@aol.com
For a free copy of the latest RRC issue, email your postal address to: RRC, Box 341305, LA CA 90034 or send an email to: Rockrap@aol.com
http://www.counterpunch.org/ballinger11012006.html
I cry like a baby every time I read this.--Pete
By LEE BALLINGER
The calamity caused by the liquidation of Tower Records doesn't just consist of the 2700 workers fired and the dozens of small label releases that will lose their most important national outlet. It isn't just that Tower will certainly take down with it some indie labels and distributors to whom it owed a fortune. It certainly isn't just the eight-figure losses each of the major labels will absorb, probably resulting in more firings at those that aren't already pared to the bone.
You're going to feel the demise of Tower too, even if there isn't a Tower anywhere near you. Tower died not because of illegal downloading or any other record biz boogeyman. What killed the chain, in the final analysis, is the breakneck expansion and consolidation of the past 20 years. Although Tower didn't participate in the merger and acquisition of other chains which have led to so many other bankruptcies, it did attempt to spread tentacles coast to coast and continent to continent.
Tower CEO Russ Solomon is revered in the music industry. But why? In the name of profit, Solomon made Tower one of the chains that most avidly championed Tipper stickers and record label lyric screening committees. Combined with the equally crazy campaign to condemn fair use of copyrighted material to the dustbin of history, this shrewd maneuver choked the most exciting record-making climate since the dawn of rock'n'roll. Then he expanded his California business all the way to New York and Tokyo, without managing to figure out how to do anything but lose money.
Now, consider what you'll do for an alternative. Probably, if you're a big music fan, you'll do more ordering from the Internet--meaning a wait of a day to a week before you can hear the music you've paid for.
What you won't be doing is going to your town's record store with the knowledgeable staff . That store doesn't exist any more. Most likely, price competition from the chains drove it out of existence. So what we get out of the process is a temporary set of lowball prices, vastly fewer musical options, and a long-term lack of convenience and absence of expertise.
This phenomena operates throughout our society. It's the reason airlines and oil companies, insurers and drug corporations, even electricity providers, jack up prices and strip down their services. Most of the time, the only people who come out smiling are the financiers, who peel off a part of every dollar in order to hire sometimes great artists to play at their birthday parties.
Tower Records was a poster child for "hip capitalism," a fig leaf term meant to cover a system which justifies itself by providing "competition" that leads to "innovation"--until the reckoning comes and the cartel or monopoly begins to take shape, driving out all not on the inside. The idea that this has made our society wealthy, efficient and convenient is lunacy, as Tower's demise confirms.
Tower Records was a suicide.
The choice we face is whether we'd like our entire society to do the same or whether we will begin working to change it fundamentally.
Lee Ballinger is coeditor of one of CounterPunch's favorite newsletters, Rock and Rap Confidential, where this article originally appeared. He can be reached at: Rockrap@aol.com
For a free copy of the latest RRC issue, email your postal address to: RRC, Box 341305, LA CA 90034 or send an email to: Rockrap@aol.com
Beltway Bromo-Seltzer
A Sneak Peak at the Baker Commission Report
http://www.counterpunch.org/werther11142006.html
This is absolutely delightful!--Pete
By WERTHER
As we have stated in the past, the reports of government commissions serve their intended purposes best when they act as a cover-up disguised as an exposé. The 9/11 Commission Report is the classic and best-known recent example, with Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton giving bravura performances in pretended gravitas, with only an occasional lapse into imbecility by John Lehman or Jim Thompson. [1] The Robb-Silverman Report, by contrast, was so shakily constructed, and the co-chairmen's dissembling so unconvincing, that their "investigation" should have been accompanied by the music track of "Three Blind Mice."
In the wake of the human and fiscal wreckage of the Iraq fiasco, all Washington trembles in anticipation at the release of the Baker-Hamilton Commission's report on Iraq. Unlike many other commissions, its lucubrations have been held in camera, the method favored by chief Bush family consigliere and fixer James Baker.
A run-down of its other principals should give us a strong indication where this operation is heading. Aside from Baker, there is as co-chairman once again Lee Hamilton, a past master at these performances. As the éminence beige of the Democratic foreign policy apparatus, Hamilton has been participating in high-level cover-ups of government shenanigans stretching back to the Iran-Contra affair.
The rest of the cast consists of: Vernon Jordan, one of Bill Clinton's money men and obviously intended to slap the Wahabbite insurgents of the Black Caucus into line; Ed Meese, faithful purveyor of balderdash for countless decades and a link to the Reaganites; Lawrence Eagleburger, a saturnine Bush family wheel horse and Kissinger liegeman known mainly for his staggeringly immense girth and ability to balance on a cane while juggling a cigarette and an asthma inhaler; Leon Panetta, a professional ward heeler and thief of a 1986 Indiana Congressional election, tasked to corral a spectrum of Democrats roughly bounded by Rahm Emanuel and Steny Hoyer; former Defense Secretary William Perry, representing the interests of the merchants of death; Charles Robb, who began his career as a White House doorman and who symbolically remains one four decades later; ex-Senator Alan Simpson, wise-cracking cowpoke (and member of a disastrous Congressional delegation to Iraq in 1990, whose purpose was to ply Saddam with U.S. taxpayer loot via the Commodity Credit Corporation); and former Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the lone member of the commission with no obvious ties to Beltway monkey business and presumably tapped for the sheer novelty value.
Probably the only reason Baker and Hamilton didn't select Clark Clifford or Paul Nitze to serve on the commission is that these two quintessential Establishmentarians are legally dead. But the leaden predictability of its membership preordains its conclusions.
Given that the rules governing these types of commissions are as ritualized as Noh drama, we believe it is safe to roll out our own projection of what its findings will be. Here, in capsule form, are the Baker-Hamilton report's major findings:
There have been major challenges to stabilizing Iraq, but it remains vital to our interests; precipitate withdrawal risks chaos and a power vacuum (i.e., Iraq has been a colossal screw-up, but we are holding no one accountable. "Our" interests means superior folks like us. Nature abhors a vacuum; too bad it does not abhor drones and aged blowhards).
The next six months will be critical (Where have we heard that before? As we have been in Iraq for over 42 months, there have been at least 7 inflexion points where "the next six months will be critical." These are Fabian tactics).
The Iraq government needs to get its act together (Do tell. But how can the dummy solve problems created by the ventriloquist?).
The Iraq government must be given a timetable/benchmarks/some other euphemism (This finding will challenge the creative writing skills of the commission staff).
We need to strengthen/beef-up/robustify Iraq's army and police forces (No kidding; you geniuses earned your per diems for this? We tried that with a variety of indigenous forces: the ARVN, Hmong, Meo, Coral Gables Cubans, and a host of other Third World paladins now operating chop suey parlors in proximity to CIA front buildings in the Northern Virginia suburbs).
U.S. forces will redeploy to neighboring states (where the ruler has a CIA stipend or the local emir has business interests intertwined with the Bush family. The "deliberate" and "phased" withdrawal means the redeployment will proceed at the speed of the Humboldt Glacier).
The United States must pursue a multilateral approach with its friends/allies/coalition partners/nodding acquaintances in order to bring stability to Iraq (That would be a first; but why, then, has the Executive Mansion resubmitted the nomination of acting UN ambassador John Bolton, who vetoes UN resolutions as maniacally as Grover Cleveland vetoed pension bills? And for the express purpose "as part of a public relations strategy to put the onus on the Democrats for not allowing a vote on his appointment to go to the floor"). [2]
There must be a just and lasting peace in the Middle East. But Israel, our major ally/the only true democracy in the region/the light unto the gentiles, deserves blah blah blah (This is standard boilerplate wherewith the commissioners will simultaneously sound "balanced," yet not risk suffering a boycott against their lucrative consultancies by the Israel lobby).
There will be more in the report, but it will amount to cotton-wool packing, filigree, and cathedral gargoyles.
The politicians will rush to praise the report's sagacity, and heed it, more or less. For the Establishment, which stretches back through Clifford and Nitze, through Henry Stimson, Colonel House, Albert Beveridge, back through the Morgans and the Astors, through the founding of Skull & Bones, and finally alighting on Alexander Hamilton, the prototypical oligarch of the new North American republic, it will be a Bromo-Seltzer after the nightmarish hangover of a failed scion's rebellion against his illustrious father. It will be an assurance, like a bank vault slamming shut, that in Washington, everything will be fundamentally the same for all eternity.
Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst.
[1] Indeed, the session in which then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice writhed on the cruel hook set by commissioner Richard Ben Veniste was a masterpiece of high television drama which connoisseurs of the old Perry Mason series could fully savor.
[2] "U.N. Post Will Test Bush on Pledge for Consensus," The New York Times, 11 November 2006.
http://www.counterpunch.org/werther11142006.html
This is absolutely delightful!--Pete
By WERTHER
As we have stated in the past, the reports of government commissions serve their intended purposes best when they act as a cover-up disguised as an exposé. The 9/11 Commission Report is the classic and best-known recent example, with Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton giving bravura performances in pretended gravitas, with only an occasional lapse into imbecility by John Lehman or Jim Thompson. [1] The Robb-Silverman Report, by contrast, was so shakily constructed, and the co-chairmen's dissembling so unconvincing, that their "investigation" should have been accompanied by the music track of "Three Blind Mice."
In the wake of the human and fiscal wreckage of the Iraq fiasco, all Washington trembles in anticipation at the release of the Baker-Hamilton Commission's report on Iraq. Unlike many other commissions, its lucubrations have been held in camera, the method favored by chief Bush family consigliere and fixer James Baker.
A run-down of its other principals should give us a strong indication where this operation is heading. Aside from Baker, there is as co-chairman once again Lee Hamilton, a past master at these performances. As the éminence beige of the Democratic foreign policy apparatus, Hamilton has been participating in high-level cover-ups of government shenanigans stretching back to the Iran-Contra affair.
The rest of the cast consists of: Vernon Jordan, one of Bill Clinton's money men and obviously intended to slap the Wahabbite insurgents of the Black Caucus into line; Ed Meese, faithful purveyor of balderdash for countless decades and a link to the Reaganites; Lawrence Eagleburger, a saturnine Bush family wheel horse and Kissinger liegeman known mainly for his staggeringly immense girth and ability to balance on a cane while juggling a cigarette and an asthma inhaler; Leon Panetta, a professional ward heeler and thief of a 1986 Indiana Congressional election, tasked to corral a spectrum of Democrats roughly bounded by Rahm Emanuel and Steny Hoyer; former Defense Secretary William Perry, representing the interests of the merchants of death; Charles Robb, who began his career as a White House doorman and who symbolically remains one four decades later; ex-Senator Alan Simpson, wise-cracking cowpoke (and member of a disastrous Congressional delegation to Iraq in 1990, whose purpose was to ply Saddam with U.S. taxpayer loot via the Commodity Credit Corporation); and former Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the lone member of the commission with no obvious ties to Beltway monkey business and presumably tapped for the sheer novelty value.
Probably the only reason Baker and Hamilton didn't select Clark Clifford or Paul Nitze to serve on the commission is that these two quintessential Establishmentarians are legally dead. But the leaden predictability of its membership preordains its conclusions.
Given that the rules governing these types of commissions are as ritualized as Noh drama, we believe it is safe to roll out our own projection of what its findings will be. Here, in capsule form, are the Baker-Hamilton report's major findings:
There have been major challenges to stabilizing Iraq, but it remains vital to our interests; precipitate withdrawal risks chaos and a power vacuum (i.e., Iraq has been a colossal screw-up, but we are holding no one accountable. "Our" interests means superior folks like us. Nature abhors a vacuum; too bad it does not abhor drones and aged blowhards).
The next six months will be critical (Where have we heard that before? As we have been in Iraq for over 42 months, there have been at least 7 inflexion points where "the next six months will be critical." These are Fabian tactics).
The Iraq government needs to get its act together (Do tell. But how can the dummy solve problems created by the ventriloquist?).
The Iraq government must be given a timetable/benchmarks/some other euphemism (This finding will challenge the creative writing skills of the commission staff).
We need to strengthen/beef-up/robustify Iraq's army and police forces (No kidding; you geniuses earned your per diems for this? We tried that with a variety of indigenous forces: the ARVN, Hmong, Meo, Coral Gables Cubans, and a host of other Third World paladins now operating chop suey parlors in proximity to CIA front buildings in the Northern Virginia suburbs).
U.S. forces will redeploy to neighboring states (where the ruler has a CIA stipend or the local emir has business interests intertwined with the Bush family. The "deliberate" and "phased" withdrawal means the redeployment will proceed at the speed of the Humboldt Glacier).
The United States must pursue a multilateral approach with its friends/allies/coalition partners/nodding acquaintances in order to bring stability to Iraq (That would be a first; but why, then, has the Executive Mansion resubmitted the nomination of acting UN ambassador John Bolton, who vetoes UN resolutions as maniacally as Grover Cleveland vetoed pension bills? And for the express purpose "as part of a public relations strategy to put the onus on the Democrats for not allowing a vote on his appointment to go to the floor"). [2]
There must be a just and lasting peace in the Middle East. But Israel, our major ally/the only true democracy in the region/the light unto the gentiles, deserves blah blah blah (This is standard boilerplate wherewith the commissioners will simultaneously sound "balanced," yet not risk suffering a boycott against their lucrative consultancies by the Israel lobby).
There will be more in the report, but it will amount to cotton-wool packing, filigree, and cathedral gargoyles.
The politicians will rush to praise the report's sagacity, and heed it, more or less. For the Establishment, which stretches back through Clifford and Nitze, through Henry Stimson, Colonel House, Albert Beveridge, back through the Morgans and the Astors, through the founding of Skull & Bones, and finally alighting on Alexander Hamilton, the prototypical oligarch of the new North American republic, it will be a Bromo-Seltzer after the nightmarish hangover of a failed scion's rebellion against his illustrious father. It will be an assurance, like a bank vault slamming shut, that in Washington, everything will be fundamentally the same for all eternity.
Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst.
[1] Indeed, the session in which then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice writhed on the cruel hook set by commissioner Richard Ben Veniste was a masterpiece of high television drama which connoisseurs of the old Perry Mason series could fully savor.
[2] "U.N. Post Will Test Bush on Pledge for Consensus," The New York Times, 11 November 2006.
Sunday, November 12, 2006
GATES AND ZBIGGY GET THE TALIBAN GOING
[Interview with former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski by Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998]
Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?
Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.
Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?
B: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?
B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.
B: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.
Translated from the French by Bill Blum
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html
Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?
Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.
Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?
B: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?
B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.
B: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.
Translated from the French by Bill Blum
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html
U.S. shows its complicity in Security Council veto
U.S. Vetoes Security Council Resolution Assailing Israel for Attacks
By WARREN HOGE, New York Times
UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 11 — The United States vetoed a Security Council resolution on Saturday that condemned Israel for its military actions in Gaza and called for an immediate withdrawal of Israeli forces from the area.
The United States ambassador, John R. Bolton, told the Council that the resolution “does not display an even-handed characterization of the recent events in Gaza, nor does it advance the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace.”
The resolution, introduced by Qatar, the Arab representative on the Council, had been amended during two days of negotiations to meet objections that it was not balanced. But Mr. Bolton said it remained “in many places biased against Israel and politically motivated.”
In the vote, 4 countries abstained — Britain, Denmark, Japan and Slovakia — and 10 were in favor — Argentina, China, Congo, France, Ghana, Greece, Peru, Russia, Qatar and Tanzania.
The original draft had made no mention of Palestinian rocket strikes into Israel and accused Israel of conducting a “massacre” of civilians in its attack at Beit Hanun on Wednesday that killed 18 civilians.
New language was inserted condemning the firing of rockets from Gaza into Israel and calling upon the Palestinian Authority to take “immediate and sustained action” to end the rocket fire. But while the resolution named Israel as liable for the attacks on Gaza, it was silent on who or what group was responsible for the attacks on Israel.
In other changes, a reference to “indiscriminate” Israeli violence became “disproportionate” violence, and the words “military assault,” “aggression” and “massacre” were dropped in favor of the general phrase “military operations.”
Another provision had proposed that a new United Nations observer force be sent into the area to monitor a cease-fire, but it was substituted with language suggested by France that called for the creation of “an international mechanism for the protection of civilians.”
Mr. Bolton said the United States considered this “a promise which is unwise and unnecessary and which, at any rate, raises false hopes.”
The resolution that was voted on requested that Secretary General Kofi Annan establish a fact-finding mission to investigate Wednesday’s attack and report back within 30 days and called for the resumption of international efforts to achieve peace by the so-called quartet — the United Nations, the European Union, Russia and the United States.
Israel has apologized for the deaths at Beit Hanun, blaming a “technical error,” and has announced its own investigation of the episode. But it has said it will continue to try to stop militants from launching rockets into Israel from Gaza.
The United States traditionally opposes what it considers one-sided Security Council resolutions on Israel, and Saturday’s vote was the fourth time in three years that Washington had taken such action.
In July the United States vetoed another resolution on Gaza; in March 2004 it vetoed a resolution condemning Israel for killing the Hamas leader, Sheik Ahmed Yassin; and in December 2003 it blocked a measure protesting the construction of the Israeli separation barrier in the West Bank.
Almost all of the 45 nations that spoke during a daylong debate on the Middle East on Thursday condemned Israel. Arab nations are now expected to move for a vote in the 192-member General Assembly, a path they have followed in the past when such measures have failed to pass the Security Council.
Unlike Security Council resolutions, those passed in the General Assembly are nonbinding and largely symbolic. But they generally attract widespread support when Israel, and, by extension, the United States, are the targets.
Jean-Marc de la Sablière, the French ambassador, said he felt the final negotiated text was “a balanced one” and would have sent the right message to both Israel and the Palestinians. He added, “I hope that the fact this text has not been adopted will not renew tensions on the ground.”
By WARREN HOGE, New York Times
UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 11 — The United States vetoed a Security Council resolution on Saturday that condemned Israel for its military actions in Gaza and called for an immediate withdrawal of Israeli forces from the area.
The United States ambassador, John R. Bolton, told the Council that the resolution “does not display an even-handed characterization of the recent events in Gaza, nor does it advance the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace.”
The resolution, introduced by Qatar, the Arab representative on the Council, had been amended during two days of negotiations to meet objections that it was not balanced. But Mr. Bolton said it remained “in many places biased against Israel and politically motivated.”
In the vote, 4 countries abstained — Britain, Denmark, Japan and Slovakia — and 10 were in favor — Argentina, China, Congo, France, Ghana, Greece, Peru, Russia, Qatar and Tanzania.
The original draft had made no mention of Palestinian rocket strikes into Israel and accused Israel of conducting a “massacre” of civilians in its attack at Beit Hanun on Wednesday that killed 18 civilians.
New language was inserted condemning the firing of rockets from Gaza into Israel and calling upon the Palestinian Authority to take “immediate and sustained action” to end the rocket fire. But while the resolution named Israel as liable for the attacks on Gaza, it was silent on who or what group was responsible for the attacks on Israel.
In other changes, a reference to “indiscriminate” Israeli violence became “disproportionate” violence, and the words “military assault,” “aggression” and “massacre” were dropped in favor of the general phrase “military operations.”
Another provision had proposed that a new United Nations observer force be sent into the area to monitor a cease-fire, but it was substituted with language suggested by France that called for the creation of “an international mechanism for the protection of civilians.”
Mr. Bolton said the United States considered this “a promise which is unwise and unnecessary and which, at any rate, raises false hopes.”
The resolution that was voted on requested that Secretary General Kofi Annan establish a fact-finding mission to investigate Wednesday’s attack and report back within 30 days and called for the resumption of international efforts to achieve peace by the so-called quartet — the United Nations, the European Union, Russia and the United States.
Israel has apologized for the deaths at Beit Hanun, blaming a “technical error,” and has announced its own investigation of the episode. But it has said it will continue to try to stop militants from launching rockets into Israel from Gaza.
The United States traditionally opposes what it considers one-sided Security Council resolutions on Israel, and Saturday’s vote was the fourth time in three years that Washington had taken such action.
In July the United States vetoed another resolution on Gaza; in March 2004 it vetoed a resolution condemning Israel for killing the Hamas leader, Sheik Ahmed Yassin; and in December 2003 it blocked a measure protesting the construction of the Israeli separation barrier in the West Bank.
Almost all of the 45 nations that spoke during a daylong debate on the Middle East on Thursday condemned Israel. Arab nations are now expected to move for a vote in the 192-member General Assembly, a path they have followed in the past when such measures have failed to pass the Security Council.
Unlike Security Council resolutions, those passed in the General Assembly are nonbinding and largely symbolic. But they generally attract widespread support when Israel, and, by extension, the United States, are the targets.
Jean-Marc de la Sablière, the French ambassador, said he felt the final negotiated text was “a balanced one” and would have sent the right message to both Israel and the Palestinians. He added, “I hope that the fact this text has not been adopted will not renew tensions on the ground.”
The Terrorists Who Aren't in the News
By Jennifer L. Pozner, AlterNet
Posted on November 11
http://www.alternet.org/story/43182/
This piece was originally published by Newsday.
On Sept. 11, 2006, the fifth anniversary of the terror attacks that devastated our nation, a man crashed his car into a building in Davenport, Iowa, hoping to blow it up and kill himself in the fire.
No national newspaper, magazine or network newscast reported this attempted suicide bombing, though an AP wire story was available. Cable news (save for MSNBC's Keith Olbermann) was silent about this latest act of terrorism in America.
Had the criminal, David McMenemy, been Arab or Muslim, this would have been headline news for weeks. But since his target was the Edgerton Women's Health Center, rather than, say, a bank or a police station, media have not called this terrorism -- even after three decades of extreme violence by anti-abortion fanatics, mostly fundamentalist Christians who believe they're fighting a holy war.
Since 1977, casualties from this war include seven murders, 17 attempted murders, three kidnappings, 152 assaults, 305 completed or attempted bombings and arsons, 375 invasions, 482 stalking incidents, 380 death threats, 618 bomb threats, 100 acid attacks, and 1,254 acts of vandalism, according to the National Abortion Federation.
Abortion providers and activists received 77 letters threatening anthrax attacks before 9/11, yet the media never considered anthrax threats as terrorism until after 9/11, when such letters were delivered to journalists and members of Congress.
After 9/11, Planned Parenthood and other abortion rights groups received 554 envelopes containing white powder and messages like: "You have been exposed to anthrax. ... We are going to kill all of you." They were signed by the Army of God, a group that hosts Scripture-filled web pages for "Anti-Abortion Heroes of the Faith," including minister Paul Hill, Michael Griffin and James Kopp, all convicted of murdering abortion providers, and a convicted clinic bomber, the Rev. Michael Bray. Another of their "martyrs," Clayton Waagner, mailed anthrax letters while a fugitive on the FBI's 10 most wanted list for anti-abortion related crimes.
"I am a terrorist," Waagner declared on the Army of God's web site. Boasting that God "freed me to make war on his enemy," he claimed he knew where 42 Planned Parenthood workers lived. "It doesn't matter to me if you're a nurse, receptionist, bookkeeper, or janitor, if you work for the murderous abortionist, I'm going to kill you."
That's textbook terrorism, defined by the USA Patriot Act as dangerous criminal acts that "appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population" or "to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion."
Which brings us back to car bomber, McMenemy. According to the Detroit Free Press (the only newspaper in the Nexis news database that reported his crime), he targeted the women's health center because he thought it provided abortions. It doesn't. (oops!) It provides mostly low-income patients with pap smears, ob-gyn care, testing for sexually transmitted diseases, birth control, and nutrition and immunization programs for women and children.
The attack caused $170,000 in property damage and left poor families without health care for a week. But long after Edgerton's water-logged carpets are removed, scorched medical equipment replaced and new doors reopened to the public, a culture of fear will linger among doctors, nurses, advocates and patients across the country, who will worry they could be next. Some frightened workers will quit their jobs; some women will be too scared to get the health care they need.
Every fresh incident of anti-abortion terrorism is a reminder that women's health supporters are not safe in a country where abortion is legal but mobilized zealots believe Jesus has empowered them to kill to prevent women from choosing it.
Is McMenemy a lone nut case, or a member of that network of violent extremists? We don't know, because journalists haven't investigated.
Nor have they reported that just last year, nearly one in five abortion clinics experienced gunfire, arson, bombings, chemical attacks, assaults, stalking, death threats and blockades, according to the 2005 National Clinic Violence Survey. Additionally, 59 percent suffered intimidation tactics such as photo/video surveillance.
Federal efforts to hunt down these terrorists improved with the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act in 1994 and the National Task Force on Violence Against Health Care Providers, established by the Department of Justice in 1998. The feds have taken over McMenemy's case, charging him with arson against a business affecting interstate commerce. Yet as of Oct. 5, no news outlet on Nexis reported this, despite a second AP story.
As we continue national debates on how to keep America safe from terrorism, journalists do us -- and especially women -- no good pretending that the threats come only from radical Muslims outside our borders.
Jennifer L. Pozner is founder and executive director of Women In Media & News, a national media analysis, education and advocacy group. She lectures about women, media, politics and popular culture on college campuses across the country, and can be reached at director@wimnonline.org
Posted on November 11
http://www.alternet.org/story/43182/
This piece was originally published by Newsday.
On Sept. 11, 2006, the fifth anniversary of the terror attacks that devastated our nation, a man crashed his car into a building in Davenport, Iowa, hoping to blow it up and kill himself in the fire.
No national newspaper, magazine or network newscast reported this attempted suicide bombing, though an AP wire story was available. Cable news (save for MSNBC's Keith Olbermann) was silent about this latest act of terrorism in America.
Had the criminal, David McMenemy, been Arab or Muslim, this would have been headline news for weeks. But since his target was the Edgerton Women's Health Center, rather than, say, a bank or a police station, media have not called this terrorism -- even after three decades of extreme violence by anti-abortion fanatics, mostly fundamentalist Christians who believe they're fighting a holy war.
Since 1977, casualties from this war include seven murders, 17 attempted murders, three kidnappings, 152 assaults, 305 completed or attempted bombings and arsons, 375 invasions, 482 stalking incidents, 380 death threats, 618 bomb threats, 100 acid attacks, and 1,254 acts of vandalism, according to the National Abortion Federation.
Abortion providers and activists received 77 letters threatening anthrax attacks before 9/11, yet the media never considered anthrax threats as terrorism until after 9/11, when such letters were delivered to journalists and members of Congress.
After 9/11, Planned Parenthood and other abortion rights groups received 554 envelopes containing white powder and messages like: "You have been exposed to anthrax. ... We are going to kill all of you." They were signed by the Army of God, a group that hosts Scripture-filled web pages for "Anti-Abortion Heroes of the Faith," including minister Paul Hill, Michael Griffin and James Kopp, all convicted of murdering abortion providers, and a convicted clinic bomber, the Rev. Michael Bray. Another of their "martyrs," Clayton Waagner, mailed anthrax letters while a fugitive on the FBI's 10 most wanted list for anti-abortion related crimes.
"I am a terrorist," Waagner declared on the Army of God's web site. Boasting that God "freed me to make war on his enemy," he claimed he knew where 42 Planned Parenthood workers lived. "It doesn't matter to me if you're a nurse, receptionist, bookkeeper, or janitor, if you work for the murderous abortionist, I'm going to kill you."
That's textbook terrorism, defined by the USA Patriot Act as dangerous criminal acts that "appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population" or "to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion."
Which brings us back to car bomber, McMenemy. According to the Detroit Free Press (the only newspaper in the Nexis news database that reported his crime), he targeted the women's health center because he thought it provided abortions. It doesn't. (oops!) It provides mostly low-income patients with pap smears, ob-gyn care, testing for sexually transmitted diseases, birth control, and nutrition and immunization programs for women and children.
The attack caused $170,000 in property damage and left poor families without health care for a week. But long after Edgerton's water-logged carpets are removed, scorched medical equipment replaced and new doors reopened to the public, a culture of fear will linger among doctors, nurses, advocates and patients across the country, who will worry they could be next. Some frightened workers will quit their jobs; some women will be too scared to get the health care they need.
Every fresh incident of anti-abortion terrorism is a reminder that women's health supporters are not safe in a country where abortion is legal but mobilized zealots believe Jesus has empowered them to kill to prevent women from choosing it.
Is McMenemy a lone nut case, or a member of that network of violent extremists? We don't know, because journalists haven't investigated.
Nor have they reported that just last year, nearly one in five abortion clinics experienced gunfire, arson, bombings, chemical attacks, assaults, stalking, death threats and blockades, according to the 2005 National Clinic Violence Survey. Additionally, 59 percent suffered intimidation tactics such as photo/video surveillance.
Federal efforts to hunt down these terrorists improved with the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act in 1994 and the National Task Force on Violence Against Health Care Providers, established by the Department of Justice in 1998. The feds have taken over McMenemy's case, charging him with arson against a business affecting interstate commerce. Yet as of Oct. 5, no news outlet on Nexis reported this, despite a second AP story.
As we continue national debates on how to keep America safe from terrorism, journalists do us -- and especially women -- no good pretending that the threats come only from radical Muslims outside our borders.
Jennifer L. Pozner is founder and executive director of Women In Media & News, a national media analysis, education and advocacy group. She lectures about women, media, politics and popular culture on college campuses across the country, and can be reached at director@wimnonline.org
Saturday, November 11, 2006
More Fatuous Journalism
GREAT MOMENTS IN THE WASHINGTON POST'S NEVER-ENDING STRUGGLE TO AVOID USING THE WORD 'LIE' WHEN WRITING OF GEORGE BUSH
President's Evasion Raises Truth Issues
- Washington Post headline
President's Evasion Raises Truth Issues
- Washington Post headline
Bush lost but we haven't won
Sam Smith, The Progressive Review
I woke up the morning after the election feeling surprisingly glum. It took me awhile to figure out what was wrong. It certainly wasn't that Bush had lost. That was wonderful. Then it hit me. The trouble was that we hadn't won.
An improvement, yes, but nowhere near the sort of improvement that brings real joy. Then thoughts of the Clinton years came back, when the capital city turned myopically smug and anything not on the agenda was off the table. If you weren't with the program you were only slightly better than a Republican.
The fact that all sorts of issues were ignored, that the social democracy of the New Deal and Great Society was being deliberately undermined and that the country was moving steadily to the right were not meant to be mentioned. The capital had turned into another football stadium.
I wrote about it in my memoirs:
To be sure, it is different this time. The White House is still clearly the enemy and the Congress has some, like John Conyers, Bernie Sanders and Russ Feingold, who may be granted some long overdue respect. But the bulk of the Democratic Party remains aground on the reefs of myopic centrism where they were lured by their campaign contributors. Dean Baker of the Prospect gives some of the flavor: "One of the items on the Democrats' '100 hours' agenda is reforming the Medicare prescription drug bill. The bill passed by the Republican Congress prohibited Medicare from offering its own plan. This denied seniors the benefits of Medicare's lower administrative costs and it means that drugs cost almost twice as much as if Medicare bargained directly with the industry and secured the same prices as the Veterans Administration or the Canadian government. The Republicans also added a seemingly gratuitous clause that explicitly prohibited Medicare from negotiating prices with the industry.
During the campaign, the Democrats had promised that they would reform the drug bill to allow Medicare to offer its own drug plan. On NPR this morning, it was reported that the Democrats now are just planning to remove the gratuitous clause prohibiting Medicare from negotiating prices with the drug industry, while not allowing Medicare to offer its own plan.
Removing this prohibition by itself will mean nothing. What would Medicare negotiate over, if it doesn't offer its own plan? This could lead cynics to believe that the Democrats are trying to pull in some of the campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries which have disproportionately gone to Republicans in recent election cycles. Fixing the prescription drug benefit to save seniors and taxpayers money was one of the main promises made by the Democratic Party during the campaign. If they instead pursue a purely symbolic measure, with no practical significance, millions of people who voted for them on Tuesday will rightfully feel betrayed."
What is important at a time like this is that those who truly want a democratic, decent and progressive America have to clearly differentiate themselves from both parties. There needs to be a loud third voice - not so much a political one as a moral and pragmatic one - constantly reminding the political leeches on both sides of the real issues, the real reforms, the real problems. One of the reasons Bush won office originally was because too many members of this third voice - including women's, civil liberties, and environmental groups - had indentured themselves to the Clinton machine and the sound of progress had gone voluntarily silent.
Now is the time not for silence but for the third voice of American politics to become far louder and to be constantly holding a light on a better path than is likely to followed by the new Congress. There must be a clearly visible alternative for everything the cowardly and corrupt center does or refuses to do. Phrases like 'universal healthcare' can not be politely avoided nor can the fact that those who fund both parties are destroying our planet.
We must always remember that while Bush and his capos lost this time we have yet to win.
I woke up the morning after the election feeling surprisingly glum. It took me awhile to figure out what was wrong. It certainly wasn't that Bush had lost. That was wonderful. Then it hit me. The trouble was that we hadn't won.
An improvement, yes, but nowhere near the sort of improvement that brings real joy. Then thoughts of the Clinton years came back, when the capital city turned myopically smug and anything not on the agenda was off the table. If you weren't with the program you were only slightly better than a Republican.
The fact that all sorts of issues were ignored, that the social democracy of the New Deal and Great Society was being deliberately undermined and that the country was moving steadily to the right were not meant to be mentioned. The capital had turned into another football stadium.
I wrote about it in my memoirs:
I realized later that I had stumbled upon the outlines of a new American political fault line. It was so new that it lacked a name, stereotypes, cliches, experts and prophets. In many ways it seemed more a refugee camp than a voluntary assembly, yet, as I thought about it, the more its logic seemed only concealed rather than lacking.On one side were libertarians, blacks, greens, populists, free thinkers, the alienated apathetic, the rural abandoned, the apolitical young, as well as others convinced America was losing its democracy, its sovereignty and its decency. On the other side was a technocratic, media, legal, business and cultural elite centered in New York and Washington. At times it felt as if all of America outside of these two centers had turned into a gigantic, chaotic salon des refuses. Another thing I noticed was that this was about far more than politics. A cultural and class coup was underway, of which the Clinton administration was a part, one that was creating a gated economy and transforming those outside the barriers into pliant, homogenized, multi-nationalized consumers for whom freedom, choice and democracy would atrophy into symbols of only virtual meaning. People like me were traitors to the cause. . .
Increasingly, the words of encouragement that I received came from somewhere other than my home town, a place whose conventional thinking I had happily challenged for nearly thirty years. In the 1960s and 1970s it had been no problem; there had always been plenty of similar voices and I never felt alone. Washington -- like Madison or Berkeley -- possessed a vigorous counterculture ready to strike out, provoke, and outrage and to enjoy every minute of it. Although by the 1980s the voices of protest had greatly dulled, dissent was still fair game as long as one's targets were Reagan or Bush.In the 1990s, however, the Washington establishment simply closed down the marketplace of ideas. This involved not merely Democratic lawyer-lobbyists now pursuing openly the cynical abuse of government they had discreetly enjoyed during the Republican years. It included not merely journalists whose sycophancy towards the powerful was now promiscuously out of the closet. It also included the professional liberal establishment of Washington -- labor, feminist, and environmental leaders whose heady new access to government blinded them to how distant what they had once advocated was from what they were now willing to accept over -- or even in return for -- lunch.For mainstream Washington, there was no longer any politics, only deals. No victories, only leveraged buyouts. No ideology; only brand loyalty. No conservative and liberal, only Coke and Pepsi. . .
To be sure, it is different this time. The White House is still clearly the enemy and the Congress has some, like John Conyers, Bernie Sanders and Russ Feingold, who may be granted some long overdue respect. But the bulk of the Democratic Party remains aground on the reefs of myopic centrism where they were lured by their campaign contributors. Dean Baker of the Prospect gives some of the flavor: "One of the items on the Democrats' '100 hours' agenda is reforming the Medicare prescription drug bill. The bill passed by the Republican Congress prohibited Medicare from offering its own plan. This denied seniors the benefits of Medicare's lower administrative costs and it means that drugs cost almost twice as much as if Medicare bargained directly with the industry and secured the same prices as the Veterans Administration or the Canadian government. The Republicans also added a seemingly gratuitous clause that explicitly prohibited Medicare from negotiating prices with the industry.
During the campaign, the Democrats had promised that they would reform the drug bill to allow Medicare to offer its own drug plan. On NPR this morning, it was reported that the Democrats now are just planning to remove the gratuitous clause prohibiting Medicare from negotiating prices with the drug industry, while not allowing Medicare to offer its own plan.
Removing this prohibition by itself will mean nothing. What would Medicare negotiate over, if it doesn't offer its own plan? This could lead cynics to believe that the Democrats are trying to pull in some of the campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries which have disproportionately gone to Republicans in recent election cycles. Fixing the prescription drug benefit to save seniors and taxpayers money was one of the main promises made by the Democratic Party during the campaign. If they instead pursue a purely symbolic measure, with no practical significance, millions of people who voted for them on Tuesday will rightfully feel betrayed."
What is important at a time like this is that those who truly want a democratic, decent and progressive America have to clearly differentiate themselves from both parties. There needs to be a loud third voice - not so much a political one as a moral and pragmatic one - constantly reminding the political leeches on both sides of the real issues, the real reforms, the real problems. One of the reasons Bush won office originally was because too many members of this third voice - including women's, civil liberties, and environmental groups - had indentured themselves to the Clinton machine and the sound of progress had gone voluntarily silent.
Now is the time not for silence but for the third voice of American politics to become far louder and to be constantly holding a light on a better path than is likely to followed by the new Congress. There must be a clearly visible alternative for everything the cowardly and corrupt center does or refuses to do. Phrases like 'universal healthcare' can not be politely avoided nor can the fact that those who fund both parties are destroying our planet.
We must always remember that while Bush and his capos lost this time we have yet to win.
Robert Gates Complicit In Vote Fraud?
BEV HARRIS, BLACK BOX VOTING - Robert Gates was on the board of directors of Vote Here, a strange little company that was the biggest elections industry lobbyist for the Help America Vote Act. Vote Here spent more money than ES&S, Diebold, and Sequoia combined to help ram HAVA through. And HAVA, of course, was a bill sponsored by by convicted Abramoff pal Bob Ney and K-street lobbyist buddy Steny Hoyer. HAVA put electronic voting on steroids.
Vote Here was a company shilling cryptographic solutions and filled with NSA types (another director was Admiral Bill Owens, another crony of Rummy, Perle and Wolfowitz. . .
For some reason, it was decided that I should be investigated in connection with [a reported] "hack" of Vote Here -- never mind that I can't remember how to change the password on my own laptop. Therefore I was interviewed by the Secret Service several times about this. Curiously, they never seemed to ask any questions about Vote Here, only my role in finding the Diebold files and publishing the Diebold memos.
This nonsense eventually culminated in a gag order and a letter from the U.S. Attorney to appear in front of a federal grand jury with information on all the visitors to the Black Box Voting Web site. . .
Attorney Lowell Finley went to bat for me on this. A reporter named George Howland from the Seattle Weekly also got wind of it. When it hit the press, and with Lowell Finley's help, their harassment of me stopped.
Vote Here never sold any voting machines that I can find, but apparently did set up some deals to embed its cryptography into some voting systems. We found memos in the Diebold trash about Vote Here's crypto-crap, and Maryland Director of Elections Linda Lamone shows up in Vote Here-related letters. Sequoia Voting Systems signed an agreement with Vote Here, but it's not clear to me whether they ever did anything about it. . .
I don't know about you, but I'd rather use a paper, pencil, and count by hand at the polling place than have former CIA director Robert Gates fooling around with my vote. But that's just me.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0611/S00178.htm
Vote Here was a company shilling cryptographic solutions and filled with NSA types (another director was Admiral Bill Owens, another crony of Rummy, Perle and Wolfowitz. . .
For some reason, it was decided that I should be investigated in connection with [a reported] "hack" of Vote Here -- never mind that I can't remember how to change the password on my own laptop. Therefore I was interviewed by the Secret Service several times about this. Curiously, they never seemed to ask any questions about Vote Here, only my role in finding the Diebold files and publishing the Diebold memos.
This nonsense eventually culminated in a gag order and a letter from the U.S. Attorney to appear in front of a federal grand jury with information on all the visitors to the Black Box Voting Web site. . .
Attorney Lowell Finley went to bat for me on this. A reporter named George Howland from the Seattle Weekly also got wind of it. When it hit the press, and with Lowell Finley's help, their harassment of me stopped.
Vote Here never sold any voting machines that I can find, but apparently did set up some deals to embed its cryptography into some voting systems. We found memos in the Diebold trash about Vote Here's crypto-crap, and Maryland Director of Elections Linda Lamone shows up in Vote Here-related letters. Sequoia Voting Systems signed an agreement with Vote Here, but it's not clear to me whether they ever did anything about it. . .
I don't know about you, but I'd rather use a paper, pencil, and count by hand at the polling place than have former CIA director Robert Gates fooling around with my vote. But that's just me.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0611/S00178.htm
Army Officer To Be Court Martialed For Refusing To Redeploy
Russell McSpadden - All Headline News News Writer
http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7005466456
Seattle, WA (AHN) -Ehren Watada, a first 1st Lieutenant in the U.S. army, will stand before a military court for refusing to redeploy to Iraq, officials of the Army said Thursday.
Watada, a Hawaii native, is charged with missing troop movement and conduct unbecoming of an officer.
Watada, who has called the war in Iraq illegal, failed to redeploy from Fort Lewis in Washington for Iraq on June 22 of this year.
The army officer had previously attempted to resign from the military over his objections to the war but the army refused the motion.
At a peace rally in Seattle last August, Lt. Watada called on other soldiers in the U.S. military to refuse any participation in the war in Iraq.
Prosecutors in a previous hearing showed footage of the August speech, prompting the Army to charge Watada with conduct unbecoming of an officer.
According to Army officials, Watada could face up to six years confinement and dismissal from the military.
The date of the trial is yet to be set.
http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7005466456
Seattle, WA (AHN) -Ehren Watada, a first 1st Lieutenant in the U.S. army, will stand before a military court for refusing to redeploy to Iraq, officials of the Army said Thursday.
Watada, a Hawaii native, is charged with missing troop movement and conduct unbecoming of an officer.
Watada, who has called the war in Iraq illegal, failed to redeploy from Fort Lewis in Washington for Iraq on June 22 of this year.
The army officer had previously attempted to resign from the military over his objections to the war but the army refused the motion.
At a peace rally in Seattle last August, Lt. Watada called on other soldiers in the U.S. military to refuse any participation in the war in Iraq.
Prosecutors in a previous hearing showed footage of the August speech, prompting the Army to charge Watada with conduct unbecoming of an officer.
According to Army officials, Watada could face up to six years confinement and dismissal from the military.
The date of the trial is yet to be set.
Friday, November 10, 2006
War Crimes Suit Prepared against Rumsfeld
Via Democracy Now
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/09/1444246
The president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Michael Ratner, is heading to Germany today to file a new case charging outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with war crimes for authorizing torture at Guantanamo Bay.
Would Rumsfeld stepping down leave him open to prosecution? In 2004, the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a criminal complaint in Germany on behalf of several Iraqi citizens who alleged that a group of U.S. officials committed war crimes in Iraq. Rumsfeld was among the officials named in the complaint. The Iraqis claimed they were victims of electric shock, severe beatings, sleep and food deprivation and sexual abuse.
Germany's laws on torture and war crimes permits the prosecution of suspected war criminals wherever they may be found.
Source...
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/09/1444246
The president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Michael Ratner, is heading to Germany today to file a new case charging outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with war crimes for authorizing torture at Guantanamo Bay.
Would Rumsfeld stepping down leave him open to prosecution? In 2004, the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a criminal complaint in Germany on behalf of several Iraqi citizens who alleged that a group of U.S. officials committed war crimes in Iraq. Rumsfeld was among the officials named in the complaint. The Iraqis claimed they were victims of electric shock, severe beatings, sleep and food deprivation and sexual abuse.
Germany's laws on torture and war crimes permits the prosecution of suspected war criminals wherever they may be found.
Source...
THE PARIAH ISSUES
IN KEEPING with the new spirit of bipartisanship, here are some of the major issues that neither party addressed seriously during the campaign and for which neither party has a decent, coherent program. We welcome additions
Climate change
Sustainable living
Restoring constitutional government
Restoring civil liberties
Getting out of Iraq
Ending hostilities against Islam
Palestinian statehood
Ending use of torture
Population growth
Ending the war on drugs
Universal healthcare
Public campaign financing
Instant runoff voting
Climate change
Sustainable living
Restoring constitutional government
Restoring civil liberties
Getting out of Iraq
Ending hostilities against Islam
Palestinian statehood
Ending use of torture
Population growth
Ending the war on drugs
Universal healthcare
Public campaign financing
Instant runoff voting
RNC Chairman Kaput!
A day after he's outed on Larry King
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/44140/
"He’s been on the gerbil wheel, as one of his close friends put it, for well in excess of six years now and he’s tired," said Ken Mehlman soon-to-be-former RNC Chairman, discussing his imminent unemployment.
Most public officials opt for the "spend time with the family," refrain, only Mehlman doesn't have one. If he is indeed gay, as Bill Maher said he was, just yesterday, and if the agenda and candidates he just finished gerbiling for are successful, then he won't ever have one. Not legally anyway.
Fortunately for him, perhaps, he ended up not being all that successful as his candidates took a historically unprecedented pounding on Tuesday.
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/44140/
"He’s been on the gerbil wheel, as one of his close friends put it, for well in excess of six years now and he’s tired," said Ken Mehlman soon-to-be-former RNC Chairman, discussing his imminent unemployment.
Most public officials opt for the "spend time with the family," refrain, only Mehlman doesn't have one. If he is indeed gay, as Bill Maher said he was, just yesterday, and if the agenda and candidates he just finished gerbiling for are successful, then he won't ever have one. Not legally anyway.
Fortunately for him, perhaps, he ended up not being all that successful as his candidates took a historically unprecedented pounding on Tuesday.
Australian Report Blasts Music Industry Piracy Claims
AUSTRALIAN - A confidential briefing for the Attorney-General's Department, prepared by the Australian Institute of Criminology, lashes the music and software sectors. The draft of the institute's intellectual property crime report, sighted by The Australian, shows that copyright owners "failed to explain" how they reached financial loss statistics used in lobbying activities and court cases.
Figures for 2005 from the global Business Software Association showing $361 million a year of lost sales in Australia are "unverified and epistemologically unreliable", the report says. . .
The study, which says some of the statistics used by copyright owners are "absurd," will be redrafted after senior researchers disagreed with its conclusions. . .
"Of greatest concern is the potentially unqualified use of these statistics in courts of law," the draft reads. . .
The report, intended as a confidential government briefing, casts doubt on the methodology of some industry piracy studies. . .
Copyright owners often use street-value estimates to calculate losses, but this assumes that every person who bought pirated goods would otherwise have paid for a legitimate item, the report notes.
Article Here...
Figures for 2005 from the global Business Software Association showing $361 million a year of lost sales in Australia are "unverified and epistemologically unreliable", the report says. . .
The study, which says some of the statistics used by copyright owners are "absurd," will be redrafted after senior researchers disagreed with its conclusions. . .
"Of greatest concern is the potentially unqualified use of these statistics in courts of law," the draft reads. . .
The report, intended as a confidential government briefing, casts doubt on the methodology of some industry piracy studies. . .
Copyright owners often use street-value estimates to calculate losses, but this assumes that every person who bought pirated goods would otherwise have paid for a legitimate item, the report notes.
Article Here...
OBAMA CONT'D
From Prorev.com
- So Obama has a reasoned reply. Big deal. Nobody said he was stupid, or enable to craft a good rebuttal. Know a man by his deeds, not his words. And Obama's deeds are pure corporatocracy. Obama is loved because he's a black man who has the accomplishments of white America's ideal savior, and talks like a white intellectual Ivy League nebbish.
If Obama were white, he'd be accurately labeled as the phony suit he is.
- So Obama has a reasoned reply. Big deal. Nobody said he was stupid, or enable to craft a good rebuttal. Know a man by his deeds, not his words. And Obama's deeds are pure corporatocracy. Obama is loved because he's a black man who has the accomplishments of white America's ideal savior, and talks like a white intellectual Ivy League nebbish.
If Obama were white, he'd be accurately labeled as the phony suit he is.
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Four Things From The '06 Midterms That Progressives Can Take To Heart
1. The GOP's race-baiting anti-immigrant ads did not save the day for the Republicans in the short-term, but will harm their efforts to build support with Latinos in the long-term.
2. Voter turnout was strong enough to overwhelm a flawed election system and Republican gerrymandering.
3. The election system is still flawed. Now we are in position to begin reforming it for real.
4. Dubya has a press conference after election day at 1 PM ET. There is no time for a breather. The next round starts now.
2. Voter turnout was strong enough to overwhelm a flawed election system and Republican gerrymandering.
3. The election system is still flawed. Now we are in position to begin reforming it for real.
4. Dubya has a press conference after election day at 1 PM ET. There is no time for a breather. The next round starts now.
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
THE LOW POST: Not Better Late Than Never
Mass culture turns on the Republicans -- but why?
MATT TAIBBI
Rolling Stone Online Article Here...
Anyone out there see the Letterman-O'Reilly dust-up last week? On the surface it looked like a seminal moment in modern television history, a Godzilla v. Megalon monster epic in which Godzilla was finally toppled just outside the Tokyo city gates. Keeled over, its rubber eyes flitting dumbly against the cardboard landscape, we finally saw the great lizard's vulnerable side. It was almost possible to feel sorry for Bill O'Reilly, who had trotted out on set with the peace-offering of a plastic sword and shield, expecting to make nice with his fellow overpaid TV icon -- but who instead ended up skewered and turned over the video-spit by the end of the segment, with an apple in his mouth and Sumner Redstone's massive billionaire foot wedged firmly in his ass.
For the rest of his days, few people will forget the image of O'Reilly sitting glumly and taking it while some smug ex-weatherman called him a "bonehead" to raucous studio applause. Which is too bad, because Bill O'Reilly wasn't even the dumbest person on the set that day. For that honor my vote goes to Letterman. Here's Letterman's explanation of his initial position on the Iraq war:
I think I sort of felt the way everybody did. We felt like we wanted to do something, because something terrible had been done to us. We did not understand exactly why, all we knew was something terrible, something heinous, something obscene had been done to us. So, while it didn't necessarily make as much sense to go in to Iraq as it did perhaps to go into Afghanistan, I like most everybody else felt like, yes, we need to do something. We need to do something. And as the weeks turned into months, turned into years, and one death became a dozen deaths became a hundred deaths became a thousand deaths, then we began to realize, you know what, maybe we're causing more trouble over there than the whole effort has been worth.
That's a hell of a speech -- back to it in a moment. For now, consider the context in which it was delivered. We are in the last week before midterm elections in George Bush's second term, five years after 9/11, three and a half since the beginning of the Iraq war. By now we can say without much hesitation that the media establishment has turned not only on George Bush, but on the public attack-dogs of his right flank who dominated the national political media for so long. There's no more free lunch for the likes of O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, the latter of whom also took an unusually savage fragging in the national media last week for his attack on Michael J. Fox. That incident basically moved Al Franken into the national mainstream, with even a normally gentle humorist like Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Muke Luckovich (from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution) calling Rush a "big fat idiot" last week.
What's happening is that these talk-radio pit-vipers who for a decade or so had us all wondering, "How the fuck do these guys get away with this stuff?" are now no longer getting away with it -- there's now a mechanism in place in the national media that is poised to savage these guys for the same kinds of tactics that for the last ten years were mostly left to the likes of FAIR and Eric Alterman to bitch about.
And it goes beyond beating on O'Reilly and Rush. All across the media landscape, once-reviled liberal or Democratic figures are being rehabilitated and celebrated by the same national media that, at best, habitually described Democrats as soft on defense or as unelectable political losers throughout most of the Bush years. This process actually began some time ago, around the time the Iraq war really started to go sour; I remember in particular one week in May when Good Morning America had a fuzzy-warm bit on Al Gore's "comeback" and a laudatory piece on the Dixie Chicks on successive days. Could that have happened in 2003? I doubt it. And it's continuing today; Chris Matthews last week called Nancy Pelosi "stylish" and compared her to Joe DiMaggio, of all people, while David Gregory went on the campaign trail with Michael J. Fox for the Today show. Can you imagine NBC news throwing a tow-line to a liberal Hollywood actor before the 2000 presidential elections? 2004? No way. But this year, it's possible.
Last week we also saw Wolf Blitzer, before the war one of the chief cheerleaders for the invasion, finding himself arrayed in an antiwar pose in another Japanese monster-movie debate situation with Lynne Cheney, with whom he had a fierce exchange over the broadcast of unpleasant footage from Iraq. And of course there was Bob Woodward, who a few years ago published one of the all-time Electrolux suck jobs for the administration with Bush at War, reading the writing on the wall and doing a complete about-face in his new book State of Denial, which came out to much fanfare and an uncompromising 60 Minutes segment last month.
Look, there's nothing mysterious about any of this. It's pretty obvious what's going on. We saw this same kind of cultural shift in 1968, after the Tet offensive (an analogy so obvious that even Tom Friedman saw it recently), when the American political establishment soured on the Vietnam War. Despite the conservative propaganda that for decades has insisted that it was the media that lost the war for us in Vietnam, in fact the media didn't turn on the Vietnam war effort until the war was already lost. And the reason the media soured on that war had nothing to do with it being wrong; it had to do with the post-Tet realization that the war was expensive, unwinnable and politically costly. America is reaching the same conclusion now about Iraq, and so, like Dave Letterman, a whole host of people who just a few years ago thought we "had to do something" are now backing off and repositioning themselves in an antiwar stance.
What's dangerous about what's going on right now is that an electoral defeat of the Republicans next week, and perhaps a similar defeat in a presidential race two years from now, might fool some people into thinking that the responsibility for the Iraq war can be sunk forever with George Bush and the Republican politicians who went down with his ship. But in fact the real responsibility for the Iraq war lay not with Bush but with the Lettermans, the Wolf Blitzers, the CNNs, The New York Timeses of the world -- the malleable middle of the American political establishment who three years ago made a conscious moral choice to support a military action that even a three-year-old could have seen made no fucking sense at all.
It doesn't take much courage to book the Dixie Chicks when George Bush is sitting at thirty-nine percent in the polls and carrying 3,000 American bodies on his back every time he goes outside. It doesn't take much courage for MSNBC's Countdown to do a segment ripping the "Swift-Boating of Al Gore" in May 2006, or much gumption from Newsweek's Eleanor Clift to say that many people in the media "regret" the way Gore was attacked and ridiculed in 2000. We needed those people to act in the moment, not years later, when it's politically expedient. We needed TV news to reject "swift-boating" during the actual Swift Boat controversy, not two years later; we needed ABC and NBC to stand up to Clear Channel when that whole idiotic Dixie Chicks thing was happening, not years later; we needed the networks and the major dailies to actually cover the half-million-strong protests in Washington and New York before the war, instead of burying them in inside pages or describing the numbers as "thousands" or "at least 30,000," as many news outlets did at the time; and we needed David Letterman to have his war epiphany back when taking on Bill O'Reilly might actually have cost him real market share.
Take a look again at Letterman's comment last week:
So, while it didn't necessarily make as much sense to go in to Iraq as it did perhaps to go into Afghanistan, I like most everybody else felt like, yes, we need to do something.
Well, that's putting it pretty fucking mildly, wouldn't you say? It's not that Iraq didn't make "as much sense" as Afghanistan -- it didn't make any sense, and anyone with half a brain could have seen that. And Letterman's subsequent reasoning -- that seeing one death turn into dozens and then hundreds and thousands made him reconsider the whole thing -- all that tells you is that this is a person who makes life-and-death decisions without considering the consequences. If the Iraq war was not ever going to be worth 3,000 American lives (and countless more Iraqi lives), then why the hell did we go in in the first place? If you make a decision to fight, you had better not be scared of blood. And if you're suddenly changing your mind about things after you lose a few teenage lives, you're a hundred times more guilty than the guys like Bush who are actually sticking to their guns about this war.
Because Bush and the rest of that crew sent young men to die for something they believed in, fucked-up as their reasoning might be and have been. But these shitheads in the political middle who are flip-flopping right now sentenced teenagers to death for the cause of expediency and careerism. There are young men coming home now without arms and legs because the Wolf Blitzers of the world were too afraid to lose their jobs or piss off advertisers bucking the war hysteria of the times. Remember, CNN and the rest of the networks did great business in the run-up to the war. They had artists cooking up fancy new "America's New War" graphics and they were selling lawn fertilizer and soda and male-enhancement drugs by the metric ton right up to the time when the Saddam statue came down. But the war isn't selling anymore; the war is a bummer. And so these guys are changing their minds.
Are you throwing up yet? Surely that behavior is more shameful than anything coming out of the White House.
This assault on the Republicans that's taking place in the national media right now is partially a reflection of national attitudes, but mostly a matter of internal housecleaning. The members of the Bush administration have proven to be incompetent managers of the American system, and so they are being removed. It's that simple. They screwed up a war that all of these people wanted, turned public opinion against the dumbed-down militarist politics that until recently was good business for everybody. And so they have to go. Mistake any of this for ideology or principle at your peril.
MATT TAIBBI
Rolling Stone Online Article Here...
Anyone out there see the Letterman-O'Reilly dust-up last week? On the surface it looked like a seminal moment in modern television history, a Godzilla v. Megalon monster epic in which Godzilla was finally toppled just outside the Tokyo city gates. Keeled over, its rubber eyes flitting dumbly against the cardboard landscape, we finally saw the great lizard's vulnerable side. It was almost possible to feel sorry for Bill O'Reilly, who had trotted out on set with the peace-offering of a plastic sword and shield, expecting to make nice with his fellow overpaid TV icon -- but who instead ended up skewered and turned over the video-spit by the end of the segment, with an apple in his mouth and Sumner Redstone's massive billionaire foot wedged firmly in his ass.
For the rest of his days, few people will forget the image of O'Reilly sitting glumly and taking it while some smug ex-weatherman called him a "bonehead" to raucous studio applause. Which is too bad, because Bill O'Reilly wasn't even the dumbest person on the set that day. For that honor my vote goes to Letterman. Here's Letterman's explanation of his initial position on the Iraq war:
I think I sort of felt the way everybody did. We felt like we wanted to do something, because something terrible had been done to us. We did not understand exactly why, all we knew was something terrible, something heinous, something obscene had been done to us. So, while it didn't necessarily make as much sense to go in to Iraq as it did perhaps to go into Afghanistan, I like most everybody else felt like, yes, we need to do something. We need to do something. And as the weeks turned into months, turned into years, and one death became a dozen deaths became a hundred deaths became a thousand deaths, then we began to realize, you know what, maybe we're causing more trouble over there than the whole effort has been worth.
That's a hell of a speech -- back to it in a moment. For now, consider the context in which it was delivered. We are in the last week before midterm elections in George Bush's second term, five years after 9/11, three and a half since the beginning of the Iraq war. By now we can say without much hesitation that the media establishment has turned not only on George Bush, but on the public attack-dogs of his right flank who dominated the national political media for so long. There's no more free lunch for the likes of O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, the latter of whom also took an unusually savage fragging in the national media last week for his attack on Michael J. Fox. That incident basically moved Al Franken into the national mainstream, with even a normally gentle humorist like Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Muke Luckovich (from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution) calling Rush a "big fat idiot" last week.
What's happening is that these talk-radio pit-vipers who for a decade or so had us all wondering, "How the fuck do these guys get away with this stuff?" are now no longer getting away with it -- there's now a mechanism in place in the national media that is poised to savage these guys for the same kinds of tactics that for the last ten years were mostly left to the likes of FAIR and Eric Alterman to bitch about.
And it goes beyond beating on O'Reilly and Rush. All across the media landscape, once-reviled liberal or Democratic figures are being rehabilitated and celebrated by the same national media that, at best, habitually described Democrats as soft on defense or as unelectable political losers throughout most of the Bush years. This process actually began some time ago, around the time the Iraq war really started to go sour; I remember in particular one week in May when Good Morning America had a fuzzy-warm bit on Al Gore's "comeback" and a laudatory piece on the Dixie Chicks on successive days. Could that have happened in 2003? I doubt it. And it's continuing today; Chris Matthews last week called Nancy Pelosi "stylish" and compared her to Joe DiMaggio, of all people, while David Gregory went on the campaign trail with Michael J. Fox for the Today show. Can you imagine NBC news throwing a tow-line to a liberal Hollywood actor before the 2000 presidential elections? 2004? No way. But this year, it's possible.
Last week we also saw Wolf Blitzer, before the war one of the chief cheerleaders for the invasion, finding himself arrayed in an antiwar pose in another Japanese monster-movie debate situation with Lynne Cheney, with whom he had a fierce exchange over the broadcast of unpleasant footage from Iraq. And of course there was Bob Woodward, who a few years ago published one of the all-time Electrolux suck jobs for the administration with Bush at War, reading the writing on the wall and doing a complete about-face in his new book State of Denial, which came out to much fanfare and an uncompromising 60 Minutes segment last month.
Look, there's nothing mysterious about any of this. It's pretty obvious what's going on. We saw this same kind of cultural shift in 1968, after the Tet offensive (an analogy so obvious that even Tom Friedman saw it recently), when the American political establishment soured on the Vietnam War. Despite the conservative propaganda that for decades has insisted that it was the media that lost the war for us in Vietnam, in fact the media didn't turn on the Vietnam war effort until the war was already lost. And the reason the media soured on that war had nothing to do with it being wrong; it had to do with the post-Tet realization that the war was expensive, unwinnable and politically costly. America is reaching the same conclusion now about Iraq, and so, like Dave Letterman, a whole host of people who just a few years ago thought we "had to do something" are now backing off and repositioning themselves in an antiwar stance.
What's dangerous about what's going on right now is that an electoral defeat of the Republicans next week, and perhaps a similar defeat in a presidential race two years from now, might fool some people into thinking that the responsibility for the Iraq war can be sunk forever with George Bush and the Republican politicians who went down with his ship. But in fact the real responsibility for the Iraq war lay not with Bush but with the Lettermans, the Wolf Blitzers, the CNNs, The New York Timeses of the world -- the malleable middle of the American political establishment who three years ago made a conscious moral choice to support a military action that even a three-year-old could have seen made no fucking sense at all.
It doesn't take much courage to book the Dixie Chicks when George Bush is sitting at thirty-nine percent in the polls and carrying 3,000 American bodies on his back every time he goes outside. It doesn't take much courage for MSNBC's Countdown to do a segment ripping the "Swift-Boating of Al Gore" in May 2006, or much gumption from Newsweek's Eleanor Clift to say that many people in the media "regret" the way Gore was attacked and ridiculed in 2000. We needed those people to act in the moment, not years later, when it's politically expedient. We needed TV news to reject "swift-boating" during the actual Swift Boat controversy, not two years later; we needed ABC and NBC to stand up to Clear Channel when that whole idiotic Dixie Chicks thing was happening, not years later; we needed the networks and the major dailies to actually cover the half-million-strong protests in Washington and New York before the war, instead of burying them in inside pages or describing the numbers as "thousands" or "at least 30,000," as many news outlets did at the time; and we needed David Letterman to have his war epiphany back when taking on Bill O'Reilly might actually have cost him real market share.
Take a look again at Letterman's comment last week:
So, while it didn't necessarily make as much sense to go in to Iraq as it did perhaps to go into Afghanistan, I like most everybody else felt like, yes, we need to do something.
Well, that's putting it pretty fucking mildly, wouldn't you say? It's not that Iraq didn't make "as much sense" as Afghanistan -- it didn't make any sense, and anyone with half a brain could have seen that. And Letterman's subsequent reasoning -- that seeing one death turn into dozens and then hundreds and thousands made him reconsider the whole thing -- all that tells you is that this is a person who makes life-and-death decisions without considering the consequences. If the Iraq war was not ever going to be worth 3,000 American lives (and countless more Iraqi lives), then why the hell did we go in in the first place? If you make a decision to fight, you had better not be scared of blood. And if you're suddenly changing your mind about things after you lose a few teenage lives, you're a hundred times more guilty than the guys like Bush who are actually sticking to their guns about this war.
Because Bush and the rest of that crew sent young men to die for something they believed in, fucked-up as their reasoning might be and have been. But these shitheads in the political middle who are flip-flopping right now sentenced teenagers to death for the cause of expediency and careerism. There are young men coming home now without arms and legs because the Wolf Blitzers of the world were too afraid to lose their jobs or piss off advertisers bucking the war hysteria of the times. Remember, CNN and the rest of the networks did great business in the run-up to the war. They had artists cooking up fancy new "America's New War" graphics and they were selling lawn fertilizer and soda and male-enhancement drugs by the metric ton right up to the time when the Saddam statue came down. But the war isn't selling anymore; the war is a bummer. And so these guys are changing their minds.
Are you throwing up yet? Surely that behavior is more shameful than anything coming out of the White House.
This assault on the Republicans that's taking place in the national media right now is partially a reflection of national attitudes, but mostly a matter of internal housecleaning. The members of the Bush administration have proven to be incompetent managers of the American system, and so they are being removed. It's that simple. They screwed up a war that all of these people wanted, turned public opinion against the dumbed-down militarist politics that until recently was good business for everybody. And so they have to go. Mistake any of this for ideology or principle at your peril.
Leftist Headed Toward Victory in Nicaragua
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. and JILL REPLOGLE
NYT Article...
MANAGUA, Nicaragua, Nov. 6 — Sixteen years after he left power, Daniel Ortega, a former Marxist president and the Sandinista leader who is still regarded as a sworn foe by many in Washington, appeared headed to a victory on Monday in the Nicaraguan presidential election.
Though electoral officials had yet to release final tallies from Sunday’s vote, preliminary results and the country’s electoral watchdog groups all indicated that Mr. Ortega, who had failed three times before to gain the presidency in elections, would win a clear victory.
An Ortega win in a five-way race would be a defeat for the Bush administration, which strongly opposed his election and worked hard to unite a fractious opposition against him with little success. The White House has said it would withdraw aid from an Ortega government.
With about 61 percent of the vote counted, Mr. Ortega had 38.6 percent of the ballots, about 8 points ahead of the second-place candidate, Eduardo Montealegre, a Harvard-educated financier and conservative Washington has openly supported. Final results were not expected until Tuesday, an election official said.
Now 60 years old and balding, Mr. Ortega has maintained he is no longer a Marxist, but more of a pragmatist. He has promised to keep good relations with the United States and chose a former political opponent as his running mate. He has also vowed to help the poor and run a positive campaign around the themes of “peace, love and unity.”
But he maintains close ties to Cuba and to Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, the leftist president who has become a thorn in the side of the United States. Mr. Chávez gave the Ortega campaign significant support by sending subsidized oil to Nicaragua and distributing it through Sandinista politicians.
Mr. Ortega’s expected victory appeared to be another gain for leftists in Latin America, who, despite recent setbacks in Peru and Mexico, have also persuaded voters to abandon conservative governments in Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Bolivia.
Although the results were preliminary, supporters of the Sandinista National Liberation Front party of Mr. Ortega set off fireworks around the city on Monday, and drove around honking horns, shouting victory slogans and waving red and black Sandinista flags. Mr. Ortega had yet to make a statement.
Cuba immediately congratulated Mr. Ortega. “This is good for the people of Nicaragua and for the integration of Latin America,” Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque told The Associated Press on Monday.
Mr. Ortega’s opponents refused to recognize his expected victory until all the votes were counted. The United States took a similar stance. The State Department’s deputy spokesman, Tom Casey, said Monday that the administration would wait to comment until the Nicaraguan electoral council announced who won. He also said it was too early to comment on procedural problems during the voting, noting that several groups of observers planned to file reports.
Mr. Casey said the United States delegation in Nicaragua had remarked on “high turnout and given praise to the Nicaraguan people for their patience and their willingness to show support for this democratic process.”
Mr. Ortega was one of the leaders of the Sandinista rebels that swept to power in 1979, toppling the Somoza dynasty of right-wing dictators friendly to the United States and setting up an authoritarian left-wing government.
With the cold war still driving United States policy, President Reagan imposed sanctions on the country and financed anti-Sandinista guerrillas, known as contras, in part by secretly selling arms to the revolutionary Islamic government in Iran. It was Mr. Ortega who led his Soviet-backed government in a bloody decade-long civil war.
The last time Mr. Ortega ran Nicaragua, he seized private assets and redistributed land to peasants. Capital fled the country, along with many of its business leaders. He vows a different approach this time.
The advertising campaign against the former rebel leader was vicious, showing images from the civil war, women weeping, guns blaring. His opponents lost no chance to remind people of the economic collapse that followed the fighting and the United States embargo.
Mr. Ortega was elected president in 1984 and served from 1985 to 1990, before losing to Violeta Chamorro. He struggled to regain power through the ballot box, but without success, in 1996 and 2001.
This time, however, a change in the election law and a strong throw-the-bums-out sentiment in the country after campaign financing scandals involving President Enrique Bolaños helped carry him to what appears to be a victory.
He was also aided significantly by a change in election rules that allows a candidate to win in the first round with only 35 percent of the vote, so long as he is 5 points above his closest opponent. If Mr. Ortega had not won on the first round, most political strategists predicted he would not have survived a second round, as the splintered anti-Sandinista vote would have united.
As it was, the anti-Sandinista vote seemed split mostly between Mr. Montealegre, with 30.9 percent, and José Rizo, the candidate of the conservative ruling party, who had 22.9 percent, according to the Supreme Electoral Council, the Nicaraguan election authority. Two other candidates, Edmundo Jarquín, a dissident former Sandinista, and Edén Pastora, a former Sandinista who later became a contra rebel, trailed behind.
Results of a quick count carried out by a local monitoring group, Ethics and Transparency, tracked with the official results.
“It’s been a pretty exact count, we can say that Ortega’s triumph is almost sure,” said Carlos Tunnerman, a political analyst and former Nicaraguan ambassador to Washington from 1984 to 1988.
Former President Jimmy Carter, who was in Nicaragua to monitor the election, said the quick count was “among the most definitive I have ever seen.” The count is based on a large, and strategically varied, sample of votes from urban and rural areas and different social strata, explained Mr. Carter and local analysts.
On Sunday night, following the first presentation of results by the election authorities, Mr. Montealegre denounced the early closing of some polling places and problems with the delivery of voter identification cards. He said he would not concede defeat until all votes were counted.
Mr. Carter agreed that there were minor problems with the voting process, but said he did not think they were significant enough to affect the results.
“The likelihood is that those few anomalies, which exist in every election in the world, will not be substantive enough collectively to change the apparent results of this election,” Mr. Carter said.
Electoral observers have said the vote was mostly peaceful and orderly, despite long lines and some angry confrontations among voters who claimed polling stations closed before they could vote.
Observers from the Organization of American States said 2 percent of potential voters were not able to cast ballots, and they estimated turnout around 70 percent, The A.P. reported.
Because the front-runner was a cold-war icon for the left, the race generated interest in the United States. Even Oliver North, a former White House aide to President Reagan, visited to speak against Mr. Ortega. Mr. North was at the heart of what became known as the Iran-contra affair.
But in recent years, American money has flowed into Nicaragua in the form of investments. The country has cheap labor and low crime rates, and recently joined the Central American Free Trade Agreement.
During his campaign, Mr. Ortega emphasized his goal of peace and reconciliation, choosing bright pink as the color for his campaign and adopting the rhythm of John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” for his jingle.
For some, Mr. Ortega and the Sandinistas still conjure up memories of the war and tough economic times. Marlon José Sánchez Padilla, 36, who sold oranges on Sunday outside of a polling station in the town of Nindirí, bitterly recalled his two years of military service in the 1980s. “Many people were mutilated,” he said. “Now he promises the sky, earth and highways, but we don’t believe him anymore.”
Others at the polls on Sunday said it was time to give Mr. Ortega another chance. “It seems that Daniel Ortega has asked for pardon,” said Ninosca Leets, 46, a housewife who said she fled to the United States during the former Sandinista government. “He’s asked for reconciliation. He’s asked for a change, and I think he should be given the opportunity.”
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
NYT Article...
MANAGUA, Nicaragua, Nov. 6 — Sixteen years after he left power, Daniel Ortega, a former Marxist president and the Sandinista leader who is still regarded as a sworn foe by many in Washington, appeared headed to a victory on Monday in the Nicaraguan presidential election.
Though electoral officials had yet to release final tallies from Sunday’s vote, preliminary results and the country’s electoral watchdog groups all indicated that Mr. Ortega, who had failed three times before to gain the presidency in elections, would win a clear victory.
An Ortega win in a five-way race would be a defeat for the Bush administration, which strongly opposed his election and worked hard to unite a fractious opposition against him with little success. The White House has said it would withdraw aid from an Ortega government.
With about 61 percent of the vote counted, Mr. Ortega had 38.6 percent of the ballots, about 8 points ahead of the second-place candidate, Eduardo Montealegre, a Harvard-educated financier and conservative Washington has openly supported. Final results were not expected until Tuesday, an election official said.
Now 60 years old and balding, Mr. Ortega has maintained he is no longer a Marxist, but more of a pragmatist. He has promised to keep good relations with the United States and chose a former political opponent as his running mate. He has also vowed to help the poor and run a positive campaign around the themes of “peace, love and unity.”
But he maintains close ties to Cuba and to Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, the leftist president who has become a thorn in the side of the United States. Mr. Chávez gave the Ortega campaign significant support by sending subsidized oil to Nicaragua and distributing it through Sandinista politicians.
Mr. Ortega’s expected victory appeared to be another gain for leftists in Latin America, who, despite recent setbacks in Peru and Mexico, have also persuaded voters to abandon conservative governments in Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Bolivia.
Although the results were preliminary, supporters of the Sandinista National Liberation Front party of Mr. Ortega set off fireworks around the city on Monday, and drove around honking horns, shouting victory slogans and waving red and black Sandinista flags. Mr. Ortega had yet to make a statement.
Cuba immediately congratulated Mr. Ortega. “This is good for the people of Nicaragua and for the integration of Latin America,” Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque told The Associated Press on Monday.
Mr. Ortega’s opponents refused to recognize his expected victory until all the votes were counted. The United States took a similar stance. The State Department’s deputy spokesman, Tom Casey, said Monday that the administration would wait to comment until the Nicaraguan electoral council announced who won. He also said it was too early to comment on procedural problems during the voting, noting that several groups of observers planned to file reports.
Mr. Casey said the United States delegation in Nicaragua had remarked on “high turnout and given praise to the Nicaraguan people for their patience and their willingness to show support for this democratic process.”
Mr. Ortega was one of the leaders of the Sandinista rebels that swept to power in 1979, toppling the Somoza dynasty of right-wing dictators friendly to the United States and setting up an authoritarian left-wing government.
With the cold war still driving United States policy, President Reagan imposed sanctions on the country and financed anti-Sandinista guerrillas, known as contras, in part by secretly selling arms to the revolutionary Islamic government in Iran. It was Mr. Ortega who led his Soviet-backed government in a bloody decade-long civil war.
The last time Mr. Ortega ran Nicaragua, he seized private assets and redistributed land to peasants. Capital fled the country, along with many of its business leaders. He vows a different approach this time.
The advertising campaign against the former rebel leader was vicious, showing images from the civil war, women weeping, guns blaring. His opponents lost no chance to remind people of the economic collapse that followed the fighting and the United States embargo.
Mr. Ortega was elected president in 1984 and served from 1985 to 1990, before losing to Violeta Chamorro. He struggled to regain power through the ballot box, but without success, in 1996 and 2001.
This time, however, a change in the election law and a strong throw-the-bums-out sentiment in the country after campaign financing scandals involving President Enrique Bolaños helped carry him to what appears to be a victory.
He was also aided significantly by a change in election rules that allows a candidate to win in the first round with only 35 percent of the vote, so long as he is 5 points above his closest opponent. If Mr. Ortega had not won on the first round, most political strategists predicted he would not have survived a second round, as the splintered anti-Sandinista vote would have united.
As it was, the anti-Sandinista vote seemed split mostly between Mr. Montealegre, with 30.9 percent, and José Rizo, the candidate of the conservative ruling party, who had 22.9 percent, according to the Supreme Electoral Council, the Nicaraguan election authority. Two other candidates, Edmundo Jarquín, a dissident former Sandinista, and Edén Pastora, a former Sandinista who later became a contra rebel, trailed behind.
Results of a quick count carried out by a local monitoring group, Ethics and Transparency, tracked with the official results.
“It’s been a pretty exact count, we can say that Ortega’s triumph is almost sure,” said Carlos Tunnerman, a political analyst and former Nicaraguan ambassador to Washington from 1984 to 1988.
Former President Jimmy Carter, who was in Nicaragua to monitor the election, said the quick count was “among the most definitive I have ever seen.” The count is based on a large, and strategically varied, sample of votes from urban and rural areas and different social strata, explained Mr. Carter and local analysts.
On Sunday night, following the first presentation of results by the election authorities, Mr. Montealegre denounced the early closing of some polling places and problems with the delivery of voter identification cards. He said he would not concede defeat until all votes were counted.
Mr. Carter agreed that there were minor problems with the voting process, but said he did not think they were significant enough to affect the results.
“The likelihood is that those few anomalies, which exist in every election in the world, will not be substantive enough collectively to change the apparent results of this election,” Mr. Carter said.
Electoral observers have said the vote was mostly peaceful and orderly, despite long lines and some angry confrontations among voters who claimed polling stations closed before they could vote.
Observers from the Organization of American States said 2 percent of potential voters were not able to cast ballots, and they estimated turnout around 70 percent, The A.P. reported.
Because the front-runner was a cold-war icon for the left, the race generated interest in the United States. Even Oliver North, a former White House aide to President Reagan, visited to speak against Mr. Ortega. Mr. North was at the heart of what became known as the Iran-contra affair.
But in recent years, American money has flowed into Nicaragua in the form of investments. The country has cheap labor and low crime rates, and recently joined the Central American Free Trade Agreement.
During his campaign, Mr. Ortega emphasized his goal of peace and reconciliation, choosing bright pink as the color for his campaign and adopting the rhythm of John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” for his jingle.
For some, Mr. Ortega and the Sandinistas still conjure up memories of the war and tough economic times. Marlon José Sánchez Padilla, 36, who sold oranges on Sunday outside of a polling station in the town of Nindirí, bitterly recalled his two years of military service in the 1980s. “Many people were mutilated,” he said. “Now he promises the sky, earth and highways, but we don’t believe him anymore.”
Others at the polls on Sunday said it was time to give Mr. Ortega another chance. “It seems that Daniel Ortega has asked for pardon,” said Ninosca Leets, 46, a housewife who said she fled to the United States during the former Sandinista government. “He’s asked for reconciliation. He’s asked for a change, and I think he should be given the opportunity.”
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
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