Raw Story - Vice President Dick Cheney confessed to approving torture, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow. During an interview with ABC News on Monday evening, Cheney had said "I supported it," referring to the practice known as "water boarding," a form of simulated drowning.
"I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared, as the agency in effect came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn't do," Cheney said. "And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it."
"Did he just admit to condoning torture?" Maddow queries.
"As far as I'm concerned, that's exactly what he admitted," Levin said after a pause to shut his eyes, and shake his head as if still in disbelief. . .
Senator Levin oversaw an 18-month long investigation into the Bush administration's torture policy that established that the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo Bay resulted from policies introduced by George W. Bush. . . .
"Do there need to be prosecutions?" Maddow asked, steering the discussion towards the possibility of prosecution and indictments by noting that the Armed Services Committee report on the treatment of U.S. detainees seemed as if its purpose had been the gathering facts for an indictment.
Levin spoke hopefully that the Obama administration would take some "major steps" as "clearly this Justice Department is not willing," and the need for an independent commission that could be appointed by the Obama administration to examine the role of the CIA in the treatment of U.S. detainees as their role has not yet been made clear. Then with all the facts they "may or may not lead to indictments, or civil action."
Glenn Greenwald, Salon - Demands that Bush officials be held accountable for their war crimes are becoming more common in mainstream political discourse. . . The mountain of conclusive evidence that has recently emerged directly linking top Bush officials to the worst abuses -- combined with Dick Cheney's brazen, defiant acknowledgment of his role in these crimes (which perfectly tracked Bush's equally defiant 2005 acknowledgment of his illegal eavesdropping programs and his brazen vow to continue them) -- is forcing even the reluctant among us to embrace the necessity of such accountability.
It's almost as though everyone's nose is now being rubbed in all of this: now that the culpability of our highest government officials is no longer hidden, but is increasingly all out in the open, who can still defend the notion that they should remain immune from consequences for their patent lawbreaking? As Law Professor Jonathan Turley said several weeks ago on The Rachel Maddow Show: "It's the indictment of all of us if we walk away from a clear war crime." And this week, Turley pointed out to Keith Olbermann that "ultimately it will depend on citizens, and whether they will remain silent in the face of a crime that has been committed in plain view. . . . It is equally immoral to stand silent in the face of a war crime and do nothing."
That recognition, finally, seems to be spreading -- beyond the handful of blogs, civil liberties organizations and activists who have long been trumpeting the need for this accountability. The New York Times editorial page today has a lengthy, scathing decree demanding prosecutions: "It would be irresponsible for the nation and a new administration to ignore what has happened . . . . A prosecutor should be appointed to consider criminal charges against top officials at the Pentagon and others involved in planning the abuse." Today, Politico -- of all places -- is hosting a forum which asks: "Should the DOJ consider prosecuting Bush administration officials for detainee abuse as the NYT and others have urged?" Even Chris Matthews and Chris Hitchens yesterday entertained (albeit incoherently and apologetically) the proposition that top Bush officials committed war crimes. . .
Those who demand accountability will be derided as past-obsessed partisans who want to impede all the Glorious, Transcendent Gifts about to be bestowed on us by our new leaders. The manipulative claim will be endlessly advanced that our problems are too grand and pressing to permit the luxury of living under the rule of law. When all else fails in the stonewalling arsenal, impotent "fact-finding" commissions will be proposed to placate the demand for accountability but which will, in fact, be designed and empowered to achieve only one goal: to render actual prosecutions impossible.
But with these new, unprecedentedly stark revelations, this facade will be increasingly difficult to maintain. It is already the case, as the Times Editorial today notes, that "all but President Bush's most unquestioning supporters [i.e., this] recognized the chain of unprincipled decisions that led to the abuse, torture and death in prisons run by the American military and intelligence services." That leaves only two choices: (1) treat these crimes as the serious war crimes they are by having a prosecutor investigate and, if warranted, prosecute them, or (2) openly acknowledge -- to ourselves and the world -- that we believe that our leaders are literally entitled to commit war crimes at will, and that we -- but not the rest of the world -- should be exempt from the consequences. The clearer it becomes that those are the only two choices, the more difficult it will be to choose option (2), and either way, there is great benefit just from having that level of clarity and candor about what we are really doing.
Marjorie Cohn, Global Research - U.S. courts have long held that waterboarding, where water is poured into someone's nose and mouth until he nearly drowns, constitutes torture. Our federal War Crimes Act defines torture as a war crime punishable by life imprisonment or even the death penalty if the victim dies.
Under the doctrine of command responsibility, enshrined in U.S. law, commanders all the way up the chain of command to the commander-in-chief can be held liable for war crimes if they knew or should have known their subordinates would commit them and they did nothing to stop or prevent it.
Why is Cheney so sanguine about admitting he is a war criminal? Because he's confident that either President Bush will preemptively pardon him or President-elect Obama won't prosecute him. Both of those courses of action would be illegal.
First, a president cannot immunize himself or his subordinates for committing crimes that he himself authorized. On February 7, 2002, Bush signed a memo erroneously stating that the Geneva Conventions, which require humane treatment, did not apply to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. But the Supreme Court made clear that Geneva protects all prisoners. Bush also admitted that he approved of high level meetings where waterboarding was authorized by Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and George Tenet.
Attorney General Michael Mukasey says there's no need for Bush to issue blanket pardons since there is no evidence that anyone developed the policies "for any reason other than to protect the security in the country and in the belief that he or she was doing something lawful." But noble motives are not defenses to the commission of crimes.
Lt. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, said, "There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."
Second, the Constitution requires President Obama to faithfully execute the laws. That means prosecuting lawbreakers. When the United States ratified the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, thereby making them part of U.S. law, we agreed to prosecute those who violate their prohibitions.
The bipartisan December 11 report of the Senate Armed Services Committee concluded that "senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees."
Lawyers who wrote the memos that purported to immunize government officials from war crimes liability include John Yoo, Jay Bybee, William Haynes, David Addington and Alberto Gonzales. There is precedent in our law for holding lawyers criminally liable for participating in a common plan to violate the law. . .
During the campaign, Obama promised to promptly review actions by Bush officials to determine whether "genuine crimes" were committed. He said, "If crimes have been committed, they should be investigated," but "I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of the Republicans as a partisan witch hunt, because I think we've got too many problems we've got to solve."
Two Obama advisors told the Associated Press that "there's little-if any รข€“ chance that the incoming president's Justice Department will go after anyone involved in authorizing or carrying out interrogations that provoked worldwide outrage.". . .
Obama has promised to bring real change. This must be legal and moral change, where those at the highest levels of government are held accountable for their heinous crimes. The new president should move swiftly to set an important precedent that you can't authorize war crimes and get away with it.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
OBAMA CON
Sam Smith, Undernews
Barack Obama is one of the best con artists I've seen in a half century of covering politics. He's not quite the Bernie Madoff of liberalism, but there are some striking similarities, such as taking large sums of money from unsuspecting persons, using it for purposes quite contrary to those implied and leaving them, at the end of day, with little to show for their investment.
Admittedly, Obama really didn't deny his agenda; he merely concealed it behind clouds of platitudes, ambiguities and vague promises. But this is true of any good con; if the victims had just been a little more attentive and cautious they might not find themselves in a mess.
And there were plenty of clues. Almost a year ago, Obama said: "I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating."
As Matt Stoller of Open Left said at the time, "Those excesses, of course, were feminism, the consumer rights movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, and the antiwar movement. . . . It is extremely disturbing to hear, not that Obama admires Reagan, but why he does so. Reagan was not a sunny optimist pushing dynamic entrepreneurship, but a savvy politician using a civil rights backlash to catapult conservatives to power."
Then there was the fact that Obama made it from obscure state senator to presidential nominee in four years. That simply doesn't happen unless an individual does something extraordinary - and Obama did nothing - or if the candidate is seen as the right face and the right brand for something that others want to do.
To get a sense of how substantial the deception was, liberals should ask themselves this question: would you - on principle and not personality - have voted for someone who promised to appoint as secretary of agriculture an ethanol booster and ally of Monsanto, an education secretary who would continue the war on public education, an energy secretary who is pro nuke and pro Yucca Mountain, a defense secretary who has been part of the Iraq disaster, a budget director who favors cutting Social Security for those under 59, an attorney general who helped increase the prison time served by young blacks on minor drug offenses, a secretary of state involved in numerous scandals, a transportation secretary who is an extreme conservative and knows little about the field, a staff stuffed with a team of revivals form the Clinton years, and an inaugural preacher who treats gays and women as lesser beings much as others once did to blacks?
That is not change we can believe in. That's a lot of problems.
In short, Obama is not what he pretended to be nor what his most enthusiastic fans believed him to be. The sooner progressives and liberals face up to this the better off we all will be. The mere fact that so many are urging patience towards Obama suggests at least a nascent appreciation of the problem, but many, many more have to let him know that they feel let down or deceived. It doesn't have to mean total alienation; it does mean challenging his post-partisan hustle and his palling around with the very sorts that have brought America down. Just call his con and start treating him as what he really is: another politician who is only as good as the pressure he feels.
Barack Obama is one of the best con artists I've seen in a half century of covering politics. He's not quite the Bernie Madoff of liberalism, but there are some striking similarities, such as taking large sums of money from unsuspecting persons, using it for purposes quite contrary to those implied and leaving them, at the end of day, with little to show for their investment.
Admittedly, Obama really didn't deny his agenda; he merely concealed it behind clouds of platitudes, ambiguities and vague promises. But this is true of any good con; if the victims had just been a little more attentive and cautious they might not find themselves in a mess.
And there were plenty of clues. Almost a year ago, Obama said: "I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating."
As Matt Stoller of Open Left said at the time, "Those excesses, of course, were feminism, the consumer rights movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, and the antiwar movement. . . . It is extremely disturbing to hear, not that Obama admires Reagan, but why he does so. Reagan was not a sunny optimist pushing dynamic entrepreneurship, but a savvy politician using a civil rights backlash to catapult conservatives to power."
Then there was the fact that Obama made it from obscure state senator to presidential nominee in four years. That simply doesn't happen unless an individual does something extraordinary - and Obama did nothing - or if the candidate is seen as the right face and the right brand for something that others want to do.
To get a sense of how substantial the deception was, liberals should ask themselves this question: would you - on principle and not personality - have voted for someone who promised to appoint as secretary of agriculture an ethanol booster and ally of Monsanto, an education secretary who would continue the war on public education, an energy secretary who is pro nuke and pro Yucca Mountain, a defense secretary who has been part of the Iraq disaster, a budget director who favors cutting Social Security for those under 59, an attorney general who helped increase the prison time served by young blacks on minor drug offenses, a secretary of state involved in numerous scandals, a transportation secretary who is an extreme conservative and knows little about the field, a staff stuffed with a team of revivals form the Clinton years, and an inaugural preacher who treats gays and women as lesser beings much as others once did to blacks?
That is not change we can believe in. That's a lot of problems.
In short, Obama is not what he pretended to be nor what his most enthusiastic fans believed him to be. The sooner progressives and liberals face up to this the better off we all will be. The mere fact that so many are urging patience towards Obama suggests at least a nascent appreciation of the problem, but many, many more have to let him know that they feel let down or deceived. It doesn't have to mean total alienation; it does mean challenging his post-partisan hustle and his palling around with the very sorts that have brought America down. Just call his con and start treating him as what he really is: another politician who is only as good as the pressure he feels.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Got yer "Wonderful Life" right here...
From the New York Times:
Wonderful? Sorry, George, It’s a Pitiful, Dreadful Life
By WENDELL JAMIESON
MR. ELLMAN didn’t tell us why he wanted us to stay after school that December afternoon in 1981. When we got to the classroom — cinderblock walls, like all the others, with a dreary view of the parking lot — we smelled popcorn.
He had set up a 16-millimeter projector and a movie screen, and rearranged the chairs. Book bags, jackets and overcoats were tossed on seat backs, teenagers sat, suspicious, slumping, and Mr. Ellman started the projector whirring. “It’s a Wonderful Life” filled the screen.
I was not a mushy kid. My ears were fed a steady stream of the Clash and the Jam, and I was doing my best to conjure a dyed-haired, wry, angry-young-man teenage persona. But I was enthralled that afternoon in Brooklyn. In the years that followed, my affection for “It’s a Wonderful Life” has never waned, despite the film’s overexposure and sugar-sweet marketing, and the rolling eyes of friends and family.
Lots of people love this movie of course. But I’m convinced it’s for the wrong reasons. Because to me “It’s a Wonderful Life” is anything but a cheery holiday tale. Sitting in that dark public high school classroom, I shuddered as the projector whirred and George Bailey’s life unspooled.
Was this what adulthood promised?
“It’s a Wonderful Life” is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams, of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people. It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife. It is also a nightmare account of an endless home renovation.
I haven’t seen it on a movie screen since that first time, but on Friday it begins its annual pre-Christmas run at the IFC Cinema in Greenwich Village. I plan to take my 9-year-old son and my father, who has never seen it the whole way through because he thinks it’s too corny.
How wrong he is.
I’m no movie critic, and I’ll leave to others any erudite evaluation of the film as cinematic art, but to examine it closely is to experience “It’s a Wonderful Life” on several different levels.
Many are pulling the movie out of the archives lately because of its prescience on the perils of trusting bankers. I’ve found, after repeated viewings, that the film turns upside down and inside out, and some glaring — and often funny — flaws become apparent. These flaws have somehow deepened my affection for it over the years.
Take the extended sequence in which George Bailey (James Stewart), having repeatedly tried and failed to escape Bedford Falls, N.Y., sees what it would be like had he never been born. The bucolic small town is replaced by a smoky, nightclub-filled, boogie-woogie-driven haven for showgirls and gamblers, who spill raucously out into the crowded sidewalks on Christmas Eve. It’s been renamed Pottersville, after the villainous Mr. Potter, Lionel Barrymore’s scheming financier.
Here’s the thing about Pottersville that struck me when I was 15: It looks like much more fun than stultifying Bedford Falls — the women are hot, the music swings, and the fun times go on all night. If anything, Pottersville captures just the type of excitement George had long been seeking.
And what about that banking issue? When he returns to the “real” Bedford Falls, George is saved by his friends, who open their wallets to cover an $8,000 shortfall at his savings and loan brought about when the evil Mr. Potter snatched a deposit mislaid by George’s idiot uncle, Billy (Thomas Mitchell).
But isn’t George still liable for the missing funds, even if he has made restitution? I mean, if someone robs a bank, and then gives the money back, that person still robbed the bank, right?
I checked my theory with Frank J. Clark, the district attorney for Erie County upstate, where, as far as I can tell, the fictional Bedford Falls is set. He thought it over, and then agreed: George would still face prosecution and possible prison time.
“In terms of the theft, sure, you take the money and put it back, you still committed the larceny,” he said. “By giving the money back, you have mitigated in large measure what the sentence might be, but you are still technically guilty of the offense.”
He took this a bit further: “If you steal over $3,000, it’s a D felony; 2 ½ to 7 years is the maximum term for that. The least you can get is probation. You know Jimmy Stewart, though, he had that hangdog face. He’d be a tough guy to send to jail.”
He paused, and then added: “You really have a cynical sense of humor.”
He should have met me when I was 15.
The movie starts sappily enough, with three angels in outer space discussing George’s fate. Maybe that’s what turned my dad off, that or the saccharine title. I’m amazed they didn’t spoil it for me in 1981, but I may not have been paying attention yet.
Soon enough, though, the darkness sets in. George’s brother, Harry (Todd Karns), almost drowns in a childhood accident; Mr. Gower, a pharmacist, nearly poisons a sick child; and then George, a head taller than everyone else, becomes the pathetic older sibling creepily hanging around Harry’s high school graduation party. That night George humiliates his future wife, Mary (Donna Reed), by forcing her to hide behind a bush naked, and the evening ends with his father’s sudden death.
Disappointments pile up. George can’t go to college because of his obligation to run the Bailey Building and Loan, and instead sends Harry. But Harry returns a slick, self-obsessed jerk, cannily getting out of his responsibility to help with the family business, by marrying a woman whose dad gives him a job. George again treats Mary cruelly, this time by chewing her out and bringing her to tears before kissing her. It is hard to understand precisely what she sees in him.
George is further emasculated when his bad hearing keeps him out of World War II, and then it’s Christmas Eve 1945. These scenes — rather than the subsequent Bizarro-world alternate reality — have always been the film’s defining moments for me. All the decades of anger boil to the surface.
After Potter takes the deposit, George flies into a rage and finally lets Uncle Billy know what he thinks of him, calling him a “silly, stupid old fool.” Then he explodes at his family.
If you watch the film this year, keep a close eye on Stewart during this sequence. First he smashes a model bridge he has built. Then, like any parent who loses his temper with his children, he seems genuinely embarrassed. He’s ashamed. He apologizes. And then ... slowly ... he starts getting angry all over again.
To me Stewart’s rage, building throughout the film, is perfectly calibrated — and believable — here.
Now as for that famous alternate-reality sequence: This is supposedly what the town would turn out to be if not for George. I interpret it instead as showing the true characters of these individuals, their venal internal selves stripped bare. The flirty Violet (played by a supersexy Gloria Grahame, who would soon become a timeless film noir femme fatale) is a dime dancer and maybe a prostitute; Ernie the cabbie’s blank face speaks true misery as George enters his taxi; Bert the cop is a trigger-happy madman, violating every rule in the patrol guide when he opens fire on the fleeing, yet unarmed, George, forcing revelers to cower on the pavement.
Gary Kamiya, in a funny story on Salon.com in 2001, rightly pointed out how much fun Pottersville appears to be, and how awful and dull Bedford Falls is. He even noticed that the only entertainment in the real town, glimpsed on the marquee of the movie theater after George emerges from the alternate universe, is “The Bells of St. Mary’s.”
Now that’s scary.
I’ll do Mr. Kamiya one better, though. Not only is Pottersville cooler and more fun than Bedford Falls, it also would have had a much, much stronger future. Think about it: In one scene George helps bring manufacturing to Bedford Falls. But since the era of “It’s a Wonderful Life” manufacturing in upstate New York has suffered terribly.
On the other hand, Pottersville, with its nightclubs and gambling halls, would almost certainly be in much better financial shape today. It might well be thriving.
I checked my theory with the oft-quoted Mitchell L. Moss, a professor of urban policy at New York University, and he agreed, pointing out that, of all the upstate counties, the only one that has seen growth in recent years has been Saratoga.
“The reason is that it is a resort, and it has built an economy around that,” he said. “Meanwhile the great industrial cities have declined terrifically. Look at Connecticut: where is the growth? It’s in casinos; they are constantly expanding.”
In New York, Mr. Moss added, Gov. David A. Paterson “is under enormous pressure to allow gambling upstate because of the economic problems.”
“We ease up on our lot of cultural behaviors in a depression,” he said.
What a grim thought: Had George Bailey never been born, the people in his town might very well be better off today.
Not too long ago I friended Mr. Ellman on Facebook. (To call him by his given name, Robert, is somehow still unnatural to me.)
I asked him about inviting us to stay after school to eat popcorn and watch “It’s a Wonderful Life.” He said it was always one of his favorite films, if a little corny and sentimental, and that he always saw staying late with us as part of his job. If anything, he said, there was just as much to learn after school as there was during it.
He reminded me that it was an actual film print we saw; this was before video took hold. And he also proved to be a close viewer. It was Mr. Ellman who pointed out to me how cruel George is to Mary the night they first kiss, and who told me to keep an eye out for Ernie’s vacant stare when George gets into the cab. He said he cried the first time he saw it.
I asked him if he’d continued those December viewings.
“In later years,” he wrote, “it became too difficult to get students to stay. We started doing a festival of student-written/student-directed one-act plays right after the end of the fall show. Everyone was too busy to stay and watch a movie.”
It’s a shame.
So I’ll tell Mr. Ellman a secret. It’s something I felt while watching the film all those years ago, but was too embarrassed to reveal.
That last scene, when Harry comes back from the war and says, “To my big brother, George, the richest man in town”? Well, as I sat in that classroom, despite the dreary view of the parking lot; despite the moronic Uncle Billy; despite the too-perfect wife, Mary; and all of George’s lost opportunities, I felt a tingling chill around my neck and behind my ears. Fifteen years old and imagining myself an angry young man, I got all choked up.
And I still do.
Wonderful? Sorry, George, It’s a Pitiful, Dreadful Life
By WENDELL JAMIESON
MR. ELLMAN didn’t tell us why he wanted us to stay after school that December afternoon in 1981. When we got to the classroom — cinderblock walls, like all the others, with a dreary view of the parking lot — we smelled popcorn.
He had set up a 16-millimeter projector and a movie screen, and rearranged the chairs. Book bags, jackets and overcoats were tossed on seat backs, teenagers sat, suspicious, slumping, and Mr. Ellman started the projector whirring. “It’s a Wonderful Life” filled the screen.
I was not a mushy kid. My ears were fed a steady stream of the Clash and the Jam, and I was doing my best to conjure a dyed-haired, wry, angry-young-man teenage persona. But I was enthralled that afternoon in Brooklyn. In the years that followed, my affection for “It’s a Wonderful Life” has never waned, despite the film’s overexposure and sugar-sweet marketing, and the rolling eyes of friends and family.
Lots of people love this movie of course. But I’m convinced it’s for the wrong reasons. Because to me “It’s a Wonderful Life” is anything but a cheery holiday tale. Sitting in that dark public high school classroom, I shuddered as the projector whirred and George Bailey’s life unspooled.
Was this what adulthood promised?
“It’s a Wonderful Life” is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams, of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people. It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife. It is also a nightmare account of an endless home renovation.
I haven’t seen it on a movie screen since that first time, but on Friday it begins its annual pre-Christmas run at the IFC Cinema in Greenwich Village. I plan to take my 9-year-old son and my father, who has never seen it the whole way through because he thinks it’s too corny.
How wrong he is.
I’m no movie critic, and I’ll leave to others any erudite evaluation of the film as cinematic art, but to examine it closely is to experience “It’s a Wonderful Life” on several different levels.
Many are pulling the movie out of the archives lately because of its prescience on the perils of trusting bankers. I’ve found, after repeated viewings, that the film turns upside down and inside out, and some glaring — and often funny — flaws become apparent. These flaws have somehow deepened my affection for it over the years.
Take the extended sequence in which George Bailey (James Stewart), having repeatedly tried and failed to escape Bedford Falls, N.Y., sees what it would be like had he never been born. The bucolic small town is replaced by a smoky, nightclub-filled, boogie-woogie-driven haven for showgirls and gamblers, who spill raucously out into the crowded sidewalks on Christmas Eve. It’s been renamed Pottersville, after the villainous Mr. Potter, Lionel Barrymore’s scheming financier.
Here’s the thing about Pottersville that struck me when I was 15: It looks like much more fun than stultifying Bedford Falls — the women are hot, the music swings, and the fun times go on all night. If anything, Pottersville captures just the type of excitement George had long been seeking.
And what about that banking issue? When he returns to the “real” Bedford Falls, George is saved by his friends, who open their wallets to cover an $8,000 shortfall at his savings and loan brought about when the evil Mr. Potter snatched a deposit mislaid by George’s idiot uncle, Billy (Thomas Mitchell).
But isn’t George still liable for the missing funds, even if he has made restitution? I mean, if someone robs a bank, and then gives the money back, that person still robbed the bank, right?
I checked my theory with Frank J. Clark, the district attorney for Erie County upstate, where, as far as I can tell, the fictional Bedford Falls is set. He thought it over, and then agreed: George would still face prosecution and possible prison time.
“In terms of the theft, sure, you take the money and put it back, you still committed the larceny,” he said. “By giving the money back, you have mitigated in large measure what the sentence might be, but you are still technically guilty of the offense.”
He took this a bit further: “If you steal over $3,000, it’s a D felony; 2 ½ to 7 years is the maximum term for that. The least you can get is probation. You know Jimmy Stewart, though, he had that hangdog face. He’d be a tough guy to send to jail.”
He paused, and then added: “You really have a cynical sense of humor.”
He should have met me when I was 15.
The movie starts sappily enough, with three angels in outer space discussing George’s fate. Maybe that’s what turned my dad off, that or the saccharine title. I’m amazed they didn’t spoil it for me in 1981, but I may not have been paying attention yet.
Soon enough, though, the darkness sets in. George’s brother, Harry (Todd Karns), almost drowns in a childhood accident; Mr. Gower, a pharmacist, nearly poisons a sick child; and then George, a head taller than everyone else, becomes the pathetic older sibling creepily hanging around Harry’s high school graduation party. That night George humiliates his future wife, Mary (Donna Reed), by forcing her to hide behind a bush naked, and the evening ends with his father’s sudden death.
Disappointments pile up. George can’t go to college because of his obligation to run the Bailey Building and Loan, and instead sends Harry. But Harry returns a slick, self-obsessed jerk, cannily getting out of his responsibility to help with the family business, by marrying a woman whose dad gives him a job. George again treats Mary cruelly, this time by chewing her out and bringing her to tears before kissing her. It is hard to understand precisely what she sees in him.
George is further emasculated when his bad hearing keeps him out of World War II, and then it’s Christmas Eve 1945. These scenes — rather than the subsequent Bizarro-world alternate reality — have always been the film’s defining moments for me. All the decades of anger boil to the surface.
After Potter takes the deposit, George flies into a rage and finally lets Uncle Billy know what he thinks of him, calling him a “silly, stupid old fool.” Then he explodes at his family.
If you watch the film this year, keep a close eye on Stewart during this sequence. First he smashes a model bridge he has built. Then, like any parent who loses his temper with his children, he seems genuinely embarrassed. He’s ashamed. He apologizes. And then ... slowly ... he starts getting angry all over again.
To me Stewart’s rage, building throughout the film, is perfectly calibrated — and believable — here.
Now as for that famous alternate-reality sequence: This is supposedly what the town would turn out to be if not for George. I interpret it instead as showing the true characters of these individuals, their venal internal selves stripped bare. The flirty Violet (played by a supersexy Gloria Grahame, who would soon become a timeless film noir femme fatale) is a dime dancer and maybe a prostitute; Ernie the cabbie’s blank face speaks true misery as George enters his taxi; Bert the cop is a trigger-happy madman, violating every rule in the patrol guide when he opens fire on the fleeing, yet unarmed, George, forcing revelers to cower on the pavement.
Gary Kamiya, in a funny story on Salon.com in 2001, rightly pointed out how much fun Pottersville appears to be, and how awful and dull Bedford Falls is. He even noticed that the only entertainment in the real town, glimpsed on the marquee of the movie theater after George emerges from the alternate universe, is “The Bells of St. Mary’s.”
Now that’s scary.
I’ll do Mr. Kamiya one better, though. Not only is Pottersville cooler and more fun than Bedford Falls, it also would have had a much, much stronger future. Think about it: In one scene George helps bring manufacturing to Bedford Falls. But since the era of “It’s a Wonderful Life” manufacturing in upstate New York has suffered terribly.
On the other hand, Pottersville, with its nightclubs and gambling halls, would almost certainly be in much better financial shape today. It might well be thriving.
I checked my theory with the oft-quoted Mitchell L. Moss, a professor of urban policy at New York University, and he agreed, pointing out that, of all the upstate counties, the only one that has seen growth in recent years has been Saratoga.
“The reason is that it is a resort, and it has built an economy around that,” he said. “Meanwhile the great industrial cities have declined terrifically. Look at Connecticut: where is the growth? It’s in casinos; they are constantly expanding.”
In New York, Mr. Moss added, Gov. David A. Paterson “is under enormous pressure to allow gambling upstate because of the economic problems.”
“We ease up on our lot of cultural behaviors in a depression,” he said.
What a grim thought: Had George Bailey never been born, the people in his town might very well be better off today.
Not too long ago I friended Mr. Ellman on Facebook. (To call him by his given name, Robert, is somehow still unnatural to me.)
I asked him about inviting us to stay after school to eat popcorn and watch “It’s a Wonderful Life.” He said it was always one of his favorite films, if a little corny and sentimental, and that he always saw staying late with us as part of his job. If anything, he said, there was just as much to learn after school as there was during it.
He reminded me that it was an actual film print we saw; this was before video took hold. And he also proved to be a close viewer. It was Mr. Ellman who pointed out to me how cruel George is to Mary the night they first kiss, and who told me to keep an eye out for Ernie’s vacant stare when George gets into the cab. He said he cried the first time he saw it.
I asked him if he’d continued those December viewings.
“In later years,” he wrote, “it became too difficult to get students to stay. We started doing a festival of student-written/student-directed one-act plays right after the end of the fall show. Everyone was too busy to stay and watch a movie.”
It’s a shame.
So I’ll tell Mr. Ellman a secret. It’s something I felt while watching the film all those years ago, but was too embarrassed to reveal.
That last scene, when Harry comes back from the war and says, “To my big brother, George, the richest man in town”? Well, as I sat in that classroom, despite the dreary view of the parking lot; despite the moronic Uncle Billy; despite the too-perfect wife, Mary; and all of George’s lost opportunities, I felt a tingling chill around my neck and behind my ears. Fifteen years old and imagining myself an angry young man, I got all choked up.
And I still do.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
"Bamboozled"
Fed Refuses to disclose recipients of 2 trillion in loans!
Who could have predicted that the Federal Reserve would abuse its authority by giving away over $2 trillion in "emergency loans" and then refuse to disclose the recipients of those loans when faced with a FOIA request by Bloomberg? Bloomberg:
The Federal Reserve refused a request by Bloomberg News to disclose the recipients of more than $2 trillion of emergency loans from U.S. taxpayers and the assets the central bank is accepting as collateral. Bloomberg filed suit Nov. 7 under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act requesting details about the terms of 11 Fed lending programs, most created during the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression. The Fed responded Dec. 8, saying it’s allowed to withhold internal memos as well as information about trade secrets and commercial information. The institution confirmed that a records search found 231 pages of documents pertaining to some of the requests. “If they told us what they held, we would know the potential losses that the government may take and that’s what they don’t want us to know,” said Carlos Mendez, a senior managing director at New York-based ICP Capital LLC, which oversees $22 billion in assets.Hmmm... I wonder why they would want to hide from the public who is getting all that money? It's sometimes hard to wrap your head around that huge sum of money, but when all is said and done, that is our money. We deserve to know who's getting it.
Blackwater Faulted In Baghdad Killings
Iraq Bans Security Contractor
by Joshua Partlow and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Foreign Service
BAGHDAD, Sept. 17 -- The Iraqi government on Monday said it had revoked the license of Blackwater USA, an American security company involved in a shootout in Baghdad that killed at least nine people, raising questions over which nation should regulate tens of thousands of civilian hired guns operating in Iraq.
The Iraqi government's announcement was its most public assertion to date of its right to take action against foreign security companies when a suspected crime has been committed.
Several violent episodes involving Blackwater have infuriated Iraqi officials. An Interior Ministry spokesman, Brig. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, said the decision meant Blackwater "cannot work in Iraq any longer."
"Blackwater has made many mistakes resulting in other deaths, but this is the last and the biggest mistake. This is unjustified," Khalaf said. "Security contracts do not allow them to shoot people randomly. They are here to protect personnel, not shoot people without reason."
Martin L. Strong, a Blackwater vice president, said that the company's guards had responded appropriately to an ambush and that the company had received "no official indication" of Iraqi action against Blackwater.
Blackwater, based in North Carolina, has an estimated 1,000 employees in Iraq. The company has a high profile because it guards U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker and other diplomats in the country. The company's black SUVs and agile, armed "Little Bird" helicopters escort diplomatic convoys throughout Baghdad.
Blackwater obtained a one-year operating license from the Interior Ministry in 2005, according to a scanned copy of the document provided by the company. After The Washington Post reported in June that the company was effectively operating outside of Iraqi law, Blackwater approached the Private Security Company Association of Iraq to request assistance to obtain a license, according to the trade group.
"We have a license renewal in process with the Ministry of Interior," Strong said.
The shooting started at noon on Sunday when a car bomb exploded near a State Department motorcade traveling through the western Mansour neighborhood of Baghdad near Nisoor Square, U.S. officials said. Following the explosion, Blackwater employees guarding the diplomats exchanged fire with armed attackers, Blackwater and U.S. officials said.
The subsequent battle killed at least nine people and wounded 14, Iraqi police and hospital workers said. Khalaf put the death toll at 11.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
It's time someone stood up to the bottled water industry. Looks like it's gonna be Toronto!
Tony Clarke
http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/551909
http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/551909
Toronto's decision last week to ban the sale and distribution of bottled water on city premises was a watershed moment for water justice advocates the world over. What was truly significant about Toronto's action was not that it banned an environmentally destructive product, but that it included a commitment to ensuring access to tap water in all city facilities.
Toronto is now the largest city in the world to pass such far-reaching regulations controlling the distribution of bottled water on municipal property and promoting the use of publicly delivered tap water. Other Canadian and American municipalities have enacted policies encouraging the consumption of tap water and limiting the distribution of bottled water using taxpayer money, but none as large as Toronto has taken such a comprehensive approach.
Toronto's action is in many ways the result of a diverse North American public campaign that has successfully raised awareness about bottled water as an unnecessary and wasteful product when the majority of people in Canada and the United States have access to clean drinking water from the tap.
In Canada, this campaign gained significant exposure in early 2005 when the Polaris Institute published Inside the Bottle: an Exposรฉ of the Bottled Water Industry, which provided an overview of the 10 key problems with bottled water. Over the nearly four years since, a popular movement to challenge the bottled water industry has emerged at an astonishing pace – as schools and universities, restaurants, hospitals, faith-based organizations, unions and municipalities have decided to turn on the tap and kick out the bottle.
As is often the case, Toronto's initiative had its own elected champions steering it forward. City Councillor Glen De Baeremaeker and Mayor David Miller had the progressive vision to include bottled water in their goal of keeping unnecessary packaging out of city landfills. Their efforts were coupled with a concerted grassroots push by Ontario-based activists, public interest organizations, community and student groups, labour unions and environmental networks.
In the days leading up to the Toronto vote, city councillors faced a barrage of lobbying from the bottled water industry. These frantic attempts to defeat the resolution continued over the two days of debates when the industry brought a battery of lobbyists, corporate executives and industry associations into the council chamber to influence the vote. Representatives from the Canadian Bottled Water Association, Refreshments Canada and Nestlรฉ Waters, along with their hired lobbyists from the Sussex Strategy Group and Argyle Communications, intensively lobbied councillors during the entire six-hour debate. However, their high-priced strategy ultimately failed to influence elected officials, who voted with a two-thirds majority to ban bottled water and reinvest in the public delivery of drinking water.
For many, Toronto has now become the champion of the "Back to the Tap" municipal movement in Canada. To date, this movement has already seen 17 municipalities from five provinces ban the bottle. With 45 others indicating an interest to follow suit, Toronto's leadership will no doubt inspire more municipalities to stand up and speak out in support of public water. To further enable this municipal movement, Toronto City Council also passed a motion to circulate its resolutions and amended staff report to the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, the Association of Municipalities of Ontario and the Regional Public Works Commissioners of Ontario.
Increasingly across Canada, municipal leaders are showing that there is a strong political will for reinvestments in public water services. However, access to municipal drinking water is dwindling with new buildings constructed without water fountains and older ones decommissioning existing fountains. Now is the time to issue strong calls to all levels of government for greater public access to free potable water and a wholesale reinvestment in water infrastructure and services
It's becoming clear that the recent love affair with bottled water has reached its limits. Bottled water's 15 minutes are up, the marketing scam is out of the closet and the tap is back. The simple fact is that there is no "green" solution to bottled water. While it might serve a function during natural disasters or other contingencies, it is no alternative to the tap.
Toronto has made the right choice to support public water infrastructure and to increase city residents' access to clean, convenient and environmentally sound drinking water – the only question now is which municipality or province will be next.
Tony Clarke is the executive director of the Polaris Institute in Ottawa and author of the book, Inside the Bottle. www.insidethebottle.org
Sunday, December 14, 2008
The Sucker Bait Called Hope
Making the best of a slow apocalypse
By Joe Bageant, Deer Hnting With Jesus
http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2008/11/the-sucker-bait-called-hope.html
We just concluded an election in which both parties talked about hope, one more so than the other. Hope, that murky, undefined belief that some unknown force, perhaps Jesus, or modern science, or some great political leader, or other -- as yet unknown force -- will reverse our national or personal condition ... will deliver us from what every bit of evidence indicates is irreversible, if not politically, then ecologically: Decline and eventual collapse. There is quite a difference between hope and understanding the facts, then holding justified optimism. Hope is magical thinking, a sucker's game. Politicians the world 'round fully understand this.
Consequently, we go into a new year with millions of Americans still clinging to The Audacity of Hope. And we do so because we are victims of learned helplessness, learned from the cradle as it is rocked by the foot of the Capitalist consumer state. Sure we can hope for movement away from domination of the weak by the arrogant, away from ecocide and genocide toward a better world. What the hell, hope is one of the few free activities in this society. We don't even have to put down the remote and get off our asses to do it. In fact, its delivered through television.
But the fact is that when we encounter in-the-flesh examples of any merciful movement -- even through television -- we blanch and erect a wall of denial and excuses for our refusal to support that thing. Consider how the American public and the media (is there a difference?) responded to Rachel Corrie, who willingly died under the Israeli bulldozer protecting the home of a non-partisan Palestinian village doctor. The U.S. media all but ignored her. What few of the public knew of Cory's sacrifice were at first nonplussed, then deemed it a bizarre and stupid act. But even most Americans who did know joined the Larry Kings of the world in backhandedly mocking her. Moral conviction scares the hell out of us. Hope is effortless.
Thus, hope is still the order of the day. Obama's election will keep millions of American liberals and much of the world deliriously happy for a time to come. And to some degree at least, Obama's victory is a national rejection of the phony and expensive war on terror. Which is not a step forward, but rather a partial recovery from the immense and spectral folly of our needless warmaking -- recovery of one small bit of the vast ground we have lost ... or simply the next thing to do, now that we have tortured, terrified and leveled an entire people for the hell of it. Take your pick. But at some point we will have to cease thinking like children politically, grow up and personally accept responsibility, if we are to rescue our republic from ourselves.
Meanwhile, Obama takes charge of a bankrupt nation collapsing under late stage capitalism. "Not good, say Chief Thunderthud! White man manage to fuck up even under good presidents." Right chief. Indeed, there are many destructive forces far larger and more longstanding than a president and his powers. We can start with Congress. But our planetary ecocide probably trumps Congress.
Now if you will allow me a temporary lapse into theological seizure here: When it comes to those larger forces at play, none is larger and more enduring than the spirit, regardless of whether you call its presence God, the laws of physics, eternity, the Buddhist "great void," or the governing principle of the universe. And it is mature and ever greater truth-seeking that connects us with that force -- not hoping someone else, an Obama perhaps, is connected to it, and will exercise it toward the common good.
Common good
Most Americans, regardless of their political leanings or religion, would not recognize the common good if it bit ‘em in the ass. We have no genuine concept of common good. We really don't. Toqueville observed that 170 years ago. He said that in America, no man owes another man anything. Nor is he owed by any other man. Where does that leave any movement toward the common weal requiring the cooperative efforts of more than one man?
We all know the answer -- The Gubbyment. Which leaves the common good to greaseball politicos, banking and mortgage sharks, and a private cartel of behind-the-scenes hustlers called the Fed. Nevertheless, we have lived under the myth of rugged individualism so long we think we are in charge of our destiny -- which in our utterly monetized American system, means our financial fate. No matter that we let unseen elites own and manage our hard-earned dough over quail and cognac on the 45th floor. They're of the sort who know what's best. You can tell them by their arrogance and their good looking trophy wives. And by their big limos. Americans know the superior man when they see it.
Meanwhile, thanks to the doctrine of no man owing anything to any other, this doctrine of not being our brother's keeper in any important way, we are left with the social ethic of "every man for himself. Damned all social taxes and collective effort, I'll claw down my own share, and let the devil take the hindmost. Hell, maybe I'll even end up there on the 45th floor among the quail eaters with a blonde waiting in the sack. Land of boundless opportunity, right?"
Or on a more mundane level, as countless Americans have told me, "Why should I pay for someone else's health care? Let them buy their own, just like I did."
Consequently, we've not had universal health care for the common good. We have never enjoyed the benefit of universal higher education, because collectively we cannot agree that it is in the common good for all citizens to be equally free from ignorance. We pay the price of that at every turn … in the lack of nuance in the national character, in the childlike and clichรฉd thinking of our electorate, in our satisfaction with a deluge of technological toys instead of meaningful work and leisure, or intellectual and spiritual substance. Nor is there assured food and shelter for the poorest among us, despite that it is in the common good that all children be raised in a secure environment … because over generations that produces an ever nobler community and nation. "Each generation better than the last," as the saying goes.
Now, that is moreover a pretty good description of the American Dream, at least as it regards fairness and justice. And halting as it has been, we have made progress in fairness and justice -- civil rights and women's suffrage being two examples. And we could have achieved more, had we been fixed upon the most fundamental sense of what is just. We did that collectively as American citizens.
But conceiving of one's self as a citizen of our republic is the poorest way to do so, given that it acknowledges us more as property of the state than of the planet. Especially considering that we have a far larger responsibility to our common planetary home than to any armed and squabbling, ambitious nation state. That we managed to overcome such obvious inequities as slavery and the oppression of women is no great accomplishment at all. Just two small acknowledgments of justness. Yet we wallow in those small expressions of human and national decency as if the advancement of humanity were all but accomplished (one more civil rights documentary rammed down my throat and I'm gonna drive over to PBS offices in D.C. and shoot out their latte machine).
At any rate, once we made these advances, we felt free to haul off and kill as much of humanity as we deemed necessary to keep the oil flowing and our capitalist masters in a permanent state of dominance and caviar flatulence. We'd banned slavery and let women vote for the same scallywags as men. Lettin' the queers get hitched however, is one we're gonna have to think over for a while Hoss, because there's still political mileage in being agin' it!
Still, despite our sorry-assed condition as a citizenry, as individuals every one of us can recognize what is just and right. In fact, when it comes to the private, inward self, it is harder to avoid fairness than it is to justify unfairness, though we manage to. Regardless of our deformation by capitalism's relentlessness, and its accompanying materialistic mediocrity, we know there's such a thing as balance, such a thing as justness, and equity for all people, however much we refuse to acknowledge it. This, thanks to the "eternal scales" inside us all. And the fulcrum of these scales, this always-present, wordless inner preference, if not action, toward just balance, is, I believe, the spirit.
A common grave
Scientists may yet reduce all human behavior, thought and emotion to neurochemistry. That's their bag -- reducing the universe to impressive displays of tinker toydom so The Discovery Channel will have grist. But the most sublime expression of humankind is nevertheless more than the sum of its parts and must be called spiritual. I don't have any lofty language to explain that. I'm as "ignernt as the next feller," as my old man used to say. Either we can feel, or can learn to feel the common soul … that essence coursing in all sentient things (and I for one, include trees, rivers, amoeba and the atmosphere in the count) and feel joy and unity in that, or we cannot. Either compassion enters our awareness and experiential reality through suffering and contemplation of the suffering of others … or it does not. Either way, it would seem incumbent upon each of us to try to bring about a world in which compassion occurs for the maximum number of our fellow men. Given that we all share a common grave, compassionate action may well be the only human action of any value. Compassion for all living things on a living planet. In that resides the equilibrium of the world.
Not that we're ever gonna see equilibrium in the world. Or even come close. The ungilded truth is that the planet, at least as regards its sustenance of mankind and thousands of other species, is irredeemably fucked. Toast. And we cannot fix it, only slow down the inevitable, and hopefully settle out at some level which, though desolate by today's standards, we are still in a breathing and shitting state of existence.
To actually grasp catastrophe on this order of magnitude leaves us numb with shock. Or sends us in search of some better notion of our destiny than Mother Nature flushing humankind down the crapper. "What the hell, bitch? Don't you know we are made in the image of God!" "Which one?" Mother Nature cackles, then reaches for the lever. "But wait, wait! I'm gonna make better consumer choices from now on."
"Oh spare me!" moans the grand dame of the trees and waters.
"Consuming was the problem, dickhead."
Nonetheless, there will be a helluva lot more consuming, this time centered around consuming "consumer alternatives," such as burning of corn in vehicles and "Going green with Monsanto!" before our folly is complete. I see that now even our dogs can "eat green," though I doubt they like it much.
Most people reading this understand that we can never again be what we once were… a civilization occupying a relative material paradise through a danse macabre of unsustainable growth through resource depletion. So no matter how much we hear about political change, no politician can save us. Because no presidential candidate can run on the promise that "If we do everything just right, pull in our belts and sacrifice, we can at best be a Second World nation in fifty years, providing we don't mind the lack of oxygen and a few cancers here and there."
Still, there is choice available, even a superior choice: Accept the truth and act upon it. We can at the very least say no to scorched babies in Iraq. We can refuse to participate in a dead society gone shopping. That in itself can be called embracing the spirit. It won't accomplish shit, but it is nevertheless the right thing to do. Because it's the only just thing left to do. Too late, for sure, but better than remaining a dysfunctional moral cretin. My inner scales tell me so.
As long as we are cataloguing pointless acts of moral common sense, we may as well turn off PBS's Nova for a while. Realize the limits of technology and quit looking for more techno solutions to what technology itself hath wrought. All the green energy sources and eating right cannot repair what has been irretrievably ruined. Species gluttony is nearly over and we've eaten the flesh of the earth and pissed upon its bones. Not because we are cruel by nature -- though a case might be made for stupidity -- but because we took the existence of individual consciousness to mean that each of us is some unique center of the world, acquisitive and deserving of all things. One brand of this collective hallucination, although there are others, is called American exceptionalism. And we can get away with that game as long as the oil and the entertainment last. Which looks to be about another half hour.
A simple life
You might be thinking: If those are the facts and there's really little I can do, why not just indulge myself and enjoy the life I have left? Sit and order a pizza? Well, those are the facts. And most people choose to do just that. So do I sometimes. Fortunately or unfortunately, my sense of indulgence is so repulsive it scares even me back onto the path.
Living more simply is a prerequisite to right action -- but it's no solution at all. Making the world a slightly less bad place than before is fine, but no solution. The problem is too far out of hand now. "Solutions," are over too. I'm sure by now, assuming you got this far, you're thinking, Bageant, you're a negative, gin-addled old toad. So be it.
But you might also ask, "Now that you've eliminated all hope in this screed, what does one do about all this? I'm sure that what you're gonna' suggest will be unpleasant as hell, and if it involves enemas or rubber gags and leather straps, I ain't gonna play." But to humor you, I'll ask, "Do I renounce materialism or what?
My own wife asks me this shit, so I think that's a fair question. And a fair answer is: "I don't know." But I do know what has worked for me. And since we are all arguably of the same species (I have my doubts about Adam Sandler fans and Dick Cheney) obviously at the very least, consumer renunciation is called for, strivance for a genuinely simple and essential life. Which is completely impossible in this country. But we can and should try.
In the big picture though, consumerism was never the problem. Capitalism was. And it still is. Conumerism is merely the way workers are compensated for the general shittiness of their lives. It seems to have worked. Thus, my urge to get on the public address system at the NASCAR Talledaga run and scream: "You fat fuckers don't need another corndog or that fifteenth beer that has made your belly so big you haven't seen your dick in ten years."
But as historian Eugene McCarrher points out, simply telling people that they're too consumeristic, too materialistic, doesn't work. It doesn't work because it gives people the impression that the material and the spiritual are antithetical. Yet the natural material world is the only sacramental thing that exists (minus the corndogs).
Commodity fetishism
Our relationship with the physical/material world is not only holistic and ecologically interwoven… it is also the source of our spiritual essence. Which is why monolithic production, monetization, and commodity fetishism destroy our essence. We must think through that. We must look around us at its proof, and learn it for ourselves. If you don't pick up on that, you're screwed. And if you do you pick up on it, you get to fester on real questions. Such as, "How do I accept responsibility for my life?" (which I never the hell wanted in the first place…) We can ask, "How do I leave the world a little better than I found it? And the answer is, who the hell cares? Making the world a slightly less bad place than before is fine… but it's no solution. The problem is too out of hand now for that to be any kind of solution. But we should try, because we have a lot of time on our hands yet.
We can also ask ourselves: are my living actions more contributory, more effective than, say, drinking a can of Drano? Don't laugh. If we really think that through, we will be surprised how hard that is to do. Not fuck things up worse, I mean. Life really ain't sacred in and of itself. You get born, you eat, breathe and shit, and you fuck things up. You start out with a negative balance in the ole karmic account. Then you start doing serious payback without even an inklng of the total amount due. No wonder babies come into the world with a squall of protest. Theologians tell me that this is called redemption, and that it gives life meaning. Maybe so, but it sure as hell makes things harder.
Perhaps we should all "dialogue on this" a bit? Nope. This thing we are facing, this thing we must do, is not just another topic for more "dialogue." And besides, this is a cyber monologue, and one of the nice things about the Internet is that you can't be interrupted while you're offending other people's sensibilities. In any case, regardless of who's doing the dialoging, Earth First, the Dalai Lama or the ghost of Reinhold Niebuhr, let's not kid ourselves that if we only yak some more, the world and mankind will somehow heal themselves. It's easy for the wealthy of the earth such as you and I (especially if one has an Internet connection) to want to believe that. After all, we had breakfast this morning and we not only have clean potable water to drink -- which 2.2 billion people do not -- but also shit in the stuff. The real solution -- not to the problem, which is unsolvable in the long haul, but to balancing those eternal scales inside ourselves -- begins with a more contemplative and reflective life, and the care of the soul. Both of which are necessarily thwarted by the wasteful daily busyness of our materialism and technology. Jesus did not text message his truth, and the Buddha never had a single friend on Facebook. Yet we hear their truth across millenniums. They simply practiced compassion. Only by eliminating suffering among sentient beings, do we create the spiritual soil in which peace can flourish. That takes conviction. The real stuff. It pisses me off that the Christian fundamentalists of my childhood were right about one thing -- the value of conviction -- but that's the way it is.
And as long as we are still breathing and passing water, choice remains available, even superior choice: Accepting the truth and acting upon it. Thankfully, we can do individual positive action. It starts with getting in touch with higher intelligence: Our own. After that, it's soul work.
We can, at the very least, deliver our bodies to the halls of power and say: "No more scorched babies in Iraq!" We can refuse to participate in a dead society gone shopping. We can remember and contemplate the example of Rachel Cory. Or even follow that dogged neocon mantra of "taking personal responsibility," but doing it for real. All of which can be considered voting for the spirit.
It will take an entire lifetime of commitment, and the world will continue to crumble around us even as we work. There will be not one ounce of public glory or reward during our lifetimes, not if we are doing it right. And if we turn a buck on it, we can be assured that we are playing the same game as this earth's wrecking crew. Which is called irony, I guess.
Yet the reward lies right there before us. Knowing and observing the spirit in all things... even above life itself. It is the first fearful step… the first stone on the path to liberation. Anyway, that's my take on things.
Namaste.
Get me a beer while you're up.
By Joe Bageant, Deer Hnting With Jesus
http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2008/11/the-sucker-bait-called-hope.html
We just concluded an election in which both parties talked about hope, one more so than the other. Hope, that murky, undefined belief that some unknown force, perhaps Jesus, or modern science, or some great political leader, or other -- as yet unknown force -- will reverse our national or personal condition ... will deliver us from what every bit of evidence indicates is irreversible, if not politically, then ecologically: Decline and eventual collapse. There is quite a difference between hope and understanding the facts, then holding justified optimism. Hope is magical thinking, a sucker's game. Politicians the world 'round fully understand this.
Consequently, we go into a new year with millions of Americans still clinging to The Audacity of Hope. And we do so because we are victims of learned helplessness, learned from the cradle as it is rocked by the foot of the Capitalist consumer state. Sure we can hope for movement away from domination of the weak by the arrogant, away from ecocide and genocide toward a better world. What the hell, hope is one of the few free activities in this society. We don't even have to put down the remote and get off our asses to do it. In fact, its delivered through television.
But the fact is that when we encounter in-the-flesh examples of any merciful movement -- even through television -- we blanch and erect a wall of denial and excuses for our refusal to support that thing. Consider how the American public and the media (is there a difference?) responded to Rachel Corrie, who willingly died under the Israeli bulldozer protecting the home of a non-partisan Palestinian village doctor. The U.S. media all but ignored her. What few of the public knew of Cory's sacrifice were at first nonplussed, then deemed it a bizarre and stupid act. But even most Americans who did know joined the Larry Kings of the world in backhandedly mocking her. Moral conviction scares the hell out of us. Hope is effortless.
Thus, hope is still the order of the day. Obama's election will keep millions of American liberals and much of the world deliriously happy for a time to come. And to some degree at least, Obama's victory is a national rejection of the phony and expensive war on terror. Which is not a step forward, but rather a partial recovery from the immense and spectral folly of our needless warmaking -- recovery of one small bit of the vast ground we have lost ... or simply the next thing to do, now that we have tortured, terrified and leveled an entire people for the hell of it. Take your pick. But at some point we will have to cease thinking like children politically, grow up and personally accept responsibility, if we are to rescue our republic from ourselves.
Meanwhile, Obama takes charge of a bankrupt nation collapsing under late stage capitalism. "Not good, say Chief Thunderthud! White man manage to fuck up even under good presidents." Right chief. Indeed, there are many destructive forces far larger and more longstanding than a president and his powers. We can start with Congress. But our planetary ecocide probably trumps Congress.
Now if you will allow me a temporary lapse into theological seizure here: When it comes to those larger forces at play, none is larger and more enduring than the spirit, regardless of whether you call its presence God, the laws of physics, eternity, the Buddhist "great void," or the governing principle of the universe. And it is mature and ever greater truth-seeking that connects us with that force -- not hoping someone else, an Obama perhaps, is connected to it, and will exercise it toward the common good.
Common good
Most Americans, regardless of their political leanings or religion, would not recognize the common good if it bit ‘em in the ass. We have no genuine concept of common good. We really don't. Toqueville observed that 170 years ago. He said that in America, no man owes another man anything. Nor is he owed by any other man. Where does that leave any movement toward the common weal requiring the cooperative efforts of more than one man?
We all know the answer -- The Gubbyment. Which leaves the common good to greaseball politicos, banking and mortgage sharks, and a private cartel of behind-the-scenes hustlers called the Fed. Nevertheless, we have lived under the myth of rugged individualism so long we think we are in charge of our destiny -- which in our utterly monetized American system, means our financial fate. No matter that we let unseen elites own and manage our hard-earned dough over quail and cognac on the 45th floor. They're of the sort who know what's best. You can tell them by their arrogance and their good looking trophy wives. And by their big limos. Americans know the superior man when they see it.
Meanwhile, thanks to the doctrine of no man owing anything to any other, this doctrine of not being our brother's keeper in any important way, we are left with the social ethic of "every man for himself. Damned all social taxes and collective effort, I'll claw down my own share, and let the devil take the hindmost. Hell, maybe I'll even end up there on the 45th floor among the quail eaters with a blonde waiting in the sack. Land of boundless opportunity, right?"
Or on a more mundane level, as countless Americans have told me, "Why should I pay for someone else's health care? Let them buy their own, just like I did."
Consequently, we've not had universal health care for the common good. We have never enjoyed the benefit of universal higher education, because collectively we cannot agree that it is in the common good for all citizens to be equally free from ignorance. We pay the price of that at every turn … in the lack of nuance in the national character, in the childlike and clichรฉd thinking of our electorate, in our satisfaction with a deluge of technological toys instead of meaningful work and leisure, or intellectual and spiritual substance. Nor is there assured food and shelter for the poorest among us, despite that it is in the common good that all children be raised in a secure environment … because over generations that produces an ever nobler community and nation. "Each generation better than the last," as the saying goes.
Now, that is moreover a pretty good description of the American Dream, at least as it regards fairness and justice. And halting as it has been, we have made progress in fairness and justice -- civil rights and women's suffrage being two examples. And we could have achieved more, had we been fixed upon the most fundamental sense of what is just. We did that collectively as American citizens.
But conceiving of one's self as a citizen of our republic is the poorest way to do so, given that it acknowledges us more as property of the state than of the planet. Especially considering that we have a far larger responsibility to our common planetary home than to any armed and squabbling, ambitious nation state. That we managed to overcome such obvious inequities as slavery and the oppression of women is no great accomplishment at all. Just two small acknowledgments of justness. Yet we wallow in those small expressions of human and national decency as if the advancement of humanity were all but accomplished (one more civil rights documentary rammed down my throat and I'm gonna drive over to PBS offices in D.C. and shoot out their latte machine).
At any rate, once we made these advances, we felt free to haul off and kill as much of humanity as we deemed necessary to keep the oil flowing and our capitalist masters in a permanent state of dominance and caviar flatulence. We'd banned slavery and let women vote for the same scallywags as men. Lettin' the queers get hitched however, is one we're gonna have to think over for a while Hoss, because there's still political mileage in being agin' it!
Still, despite our sorry-assed condition as a citizenry, as individuals every one of us can recognize what is just and right. In fact, when it comes to the private, inward self, it is harder to avoid fairness than it is to justify unfairness, though we manage to. Regardless of our deformation by capitalism's relentlessness, and its accompanying materialistic mediocrity, we know there's such a thing as balance, such a thing as justness, and equity for all people, however much we refuse to acknowledge it. This, thanks to the "eternal scales" inside us all. And the fulcrum of these scales, this always-present, wordless inner preference, if not action, toward just balance, is, I believe, the spirit.
A common grave
Scientists may yet reduce all human behavior, thought and emotion to neurochemistry. That's their bag -- reducing the universe to impressive displays of tinker toydom so The Discovery Channel will have grist. But the most sublime expression of humankind is nevertheless more than the sum of its parts and must be called spiritual. I don't have any lofty language to explain that. I'm as "ignernt as the next feller," as my old man used to say. Either we can feel, or can learn to feel the common soul … that essence coursing in all sentient things (and I for one, include trees, rivers, amoeba and the atmosphere in the count) and feel joy and unity in that, or we cannot. Either compassion enters our awareness and experiential reality through suffering and contemplation of the suffering of others … or it does not. Either way, it would seem incumbent upon each of us to try to bring about a world in which compassion occurs for the maximum number of our fellow men. Given that we all share a common grave, compassionate action may well be the only human action of any value. Compassion for all living things on a living planet. In that resides the equilibrium of the world.
Not that we're ever gonna see equilibrium in the world. Or even come close. The ungilded truth is that the planet, at least as regards its sustenance of mankind and thousands of other species, is irredeemably fucked. Toast. And we cannot fix it, only slow down the inevitable, and hopefully settle out at some level which, though desolate by today's standards, we are still in a breathing and shitting state of existence.
To actually grasp catastrophe on this order of magnitude leaves us numb with shock. Or sends us in search of some better notion of our destiny than Mother Nature flushing humankind down the crapper. "What the hell, bitch? Don't you know we are made in the image of God!" "Which one?" Mother Nature cackles, then reaches for the lever. "But wait, wait! I'm gonna make better consumer choices from now on."
"Oh spare me!" moans the grand dame of the trees and waters.
"Consuming was the problem, dickhead."
Nonetheless, there will be a helluva lot more consuming, this time centered around consuming "consumer alternatives," such as burning of corn in vehicles and "Going green with Monsanto!" before our folly is complete. I see that now even our dogs can "eat green," though I doubt they like it much.
Most people reading this understand that we can never again be what we once were… a civilization occupying a relative material paradise through a danse macabre of unsustainable growth through resource depletion. So no matter how much we hear about political change, no politician can save us. Because no presidential candidate can run on the promise that "If we do everything just right, pull in our belts and sacrifice, we can at best be a Second World nation in fifty years, providing we don't mind the lack of oxygen and a few cancers here and there."
Still, there is choice available, even a superior choice: Accept the truth and act upon it. We can at the very least say no to scorched babies in Iraq. We can refuse to participate in a dead society gone shopping. That in itself can be called embracing the spirit. It won't accomplish shit, but it is nevertheless the right thing to do. Because it's the only just thing left to do. Too late, for sure, but better than remaining a dysfunctional moral cretin. My inner scales tell me so.
As long as we are cataloguing pointless acts of moral common sense, we may as well turn off PBS's Nova for a while. Realize the limits of technology and quit looking for more techno solutions to what technology itself hath wrought. All the green energy sources and eating right cannot repair what has been irretrievably ruined. Species gluttony is nearly over and we've eaten the flesh of the earth and pissed upon its bones. Not because we are cruel by nature -- though a case might be made for stupidity -- but because we took the existence of individual consciousness to mean that each of us is some unique center of the world, acquisitive and deserving of all things. One brand of this collective hallucination, although there are others, is called American exceptionalism. And we can get away with that game as long as the oil and the entertainment last. Which looks to be about another half hour.
A simple life
You might be thinking: If those are the facts and there's really little I can do, why not just indulge myself and enjoy the life I have left? Sit and order a pizza? Well, those are the facts. And most people choose to do just that. So do I sometimes. Fortunately or unfortunately, my sense of indulgence is so repulsive it scares even me back onto the path.
Living more simply is a prerequisite to right action -- but it's no solution at all. Making the world a slightly less bad place than before is fine, but no solution. The problem is too far out of hand now. "Solutions," are over too. I'm sure by now, assuming you got this far, you're thinking, Bageant, you're a negative, gin-addled old toad. So be it.
But you might also ask, "Now that you've eliminated all hope in this screed, what does one do about all this? I'm sure that what you're gonna' suggest will be unpleasant as hell, and if it involves enemas or rubber gags and leather straps, I ain't gonna play." But to humor you, I'll ask, "Do I renounce materialism or what?
My own wife asks me this shit, so I think that's a fair question. And a fair answer is: "I don't know." But I do know what has worked for me. And since we are all arguably of the same species (I have my doubts about Adam Sandler fans and Dick Cheney) obviously at the very least, consumer renunciation is called for, strivance for a genuinely simple and essential life. Which is completely impossible in this country. But we can and should try.
In the big picture though, consumerism was never the problem. Capitalism was. And it still is. Conumerism is merely the way workers are compensated for the general shittiness of their lives. It seems to have worked. Thus, my urge to get on the public address system at the NASCAR Talledaga run and scream: "You fat fuckers don't need another corndog or that fifteenth beer that has made your belly so big you haven't seen your dick in ten years."
But as historian Eugene McCarrher points out, simply telling people that they're too consumeristic, too materialistic, doesn't work. It doesn't work because it gives people the impression that the material and the spiritual are antithetical. Yet the natural material world is the only sacramental thing that exists (minus the corndogs).
Commodity fetishism
Our relationship with the physical/material world is not only holistic and ecologically interwoven… it is also the source of our spiritual essence. Which is why monolithic production, monetization, and commodity fetishism destroy our essence. We must think through that. We must look around us at its proof, and learn it for ourselves. If you don't pick up on that, you're screwed. And if you do you pick up on it, you get to fester on real questions. Such as, "How do I accept responsibility for my life?" (which I never the hell wanted in the first place…) We can ask, "How do I leave the world a little better than I found it? And the answer is, who the hell cares? Making the world a slightly less bad place than before is fine… but it's no solution. The problem is too out of hand now for that to be any kind of solution. But we should try, because we have a lot of time on our hands yet.
We can also ask ourselves: are my living actions more contributory, more effective than, say, drinking a can of Drano? Don't laugh. If we really think that through, we will be surprised how hard that is to do. Not fuck things up worse, I mean. Life really ain't sacred in and of itself. You get born, you eat, breathe and shit, and you fuck things up. You start out with a negative balance in the ole karmic account. Then you start doing serious payback without even an inklng of the total amount due. No wonder babies come into the world with a squall of protest. Theologians tell me that this is called redemption, and that it gives life meaning. Maybe so, but it sure as hell makes things harder.
Perhaps we should all "dialogue on this" a bit? Nope. This thing we are facing, this thing we must do, is not just another topic for more "dialogue." And besides, this is a cyber monologue, and one of the nice things about the Internet is that you can't be interrupted while you're offending other people's sensibilities. In any case, regardless of who's doing the dialoging, Earth First, the Dalai Lama or the ghost of Reinhold Niebuhr, let's not kid ourselves that if we only yak some more, the world and mankind will somehow heal themselves. It's easy for the wealthy of the earth such as you and I (especially if one has an Internet connection) to want to believe that. After all, we had breakfast this morning and we not only have clean potable water to drink -- which 2.2 billion people do not -- but also shit in the stuff. The real solution -- not to the problem, which is unsolvable in the long haul, but to balancing those eternal scales inside ourselves -- begins with a more contemplative and reflective life, and the care of the soul. Both of which are necessarily thwarted by the wasteful daily busyness of our materialism and technology. Jesus did not text message his truth, and the Buddha never had a single friend on Facebook. Yet we hear their truth across millenniums. They simply practiced compassion. Only by eliminating suffering among sentient beings, do we create the spiritual soil in which peace can flourish. That takes conviction. The real stuff. It pisses me off that the Christian fundamentalists of my childhood were right about one thing -- the value of conviction -- but that's the way it is.
And as long as we are still breathing and passing water, choice remains available, even superior choice: Accepting the truth and acting upon it. Thankfully, we can do individual positive action. It starts with getting in touch with higher intelligence: Our own. After that, it's soul work.
We can, at the very least, deliver our bodies to the halls of power and say: "No more scorched babies in Iraq!" We can refuse to participate in a dead society gone shopping. We can remember and contemplate the example of Rachel Cory. Or even follow that dogged neocon mantra of "taking personal responsibility," but doing it for real. All of which can be considered voting for the spirit.
It will take an entire lifetime of commitment, and the world will continue to crumble around us even as we work. There will be not one ounce of public glory or reward during our lifetimes, not if we are doing it right. And if we turn a buck on it, we can be assured that we are playing the same game as this earth's wrecking crew. Which is called irony, I guess.
Yet the reward lies right there before us. Knowing and observing the spirit in all things... even above life itself. It is the first fearful step… the first stone on the path to liberation. Anyway, that's my take on things.
Namaste.
Get me a beer while you're up.
Obama's election will keep liberals happy
From Joe Bageant's Blog, Deer Hunting With Jesus - dispatches from America's class war.
http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2008/12/obamas-election-will-keep-liberals-happy.html
http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2008/12/obamas-election-will-keep-liberals-happy.html
Dear Joe,
It has been a very sobering experience to see all my "liberal" friends rolling on the floor in the throes of ecstasy over Obama's win. Miraculously, the democrats succeeded at what the republicans have been proficiently doing for quite a long time; convincing a large number of people to be ecstatic about voting against their own interests. Maybe the self destructive red neck paradigm needs to be adjusted to include shell shocked liberals.
My friends are so overjoyed about all the 'change' that is certainly coming our way that I can't bring myself to spoil their happiness with rude facts about what political interests Obama represents or how his advisers are responsible for many of the problems facing working class people. My lack of enthusiasm over his victory creates awkwardness among my peers and heightens my feeling of political alienation. After the election I had the queasy sense of being on the outside edge of a mass delusion.
What prompted me to write today was an article from Robert Scheer lamenting Obama's choices for cabinet positions. A few months back when Scheer spoke at our local library on his book tour, (about 20 people attended) he advocated voting for Obama. I asked him why anyone who cared about the Constitution, civil liberties, international law, etc., should vote for someone who didn't support any of that is his campaign. He replied, "It's the best we can do." Now it appears in his recent article that Sheer is not so enthusiastic anymore. I defiantly voted for Nader "without any illusions", but with apologies to Noam Chomsky.
So now Obama parades his lineup of economic advisers and, in the immortal words of Gomer Pyle, "Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!" But only if you've not been paying attention all along. The only surprise is how easily the democrats managed to get people all jacked up about pissing in their own beds. I am hoping that Thomas Frank will explain all this in his next book.
Sincerely,
Tomas
------
Tomas,
I know what you mean about the queasy experience of being on the outside edge of mass delusion. If you look around in the current national darkness, you will notice millions of us alongside you.
Consequently, we go into a new year with millions of Americans still clinging to The Audacity of Hope. And we do so because we are victims of learned helplessness. Sure we can hope. What the hell, hope is one of the few remaining free activities. We don't even have to put down the remote and get off our asses to do it. It is delivered through television.
In the end however, hope is the junk food of the mind and soul. It is the murky, undefined belief that some unknown force, perhaps Jesus or modern science or some great political leader, or other as yet unknown force will reverse our national or personal condition will deliver us from the results of living in a perpetual state of childhood. Hope is magical thinking, a sucker's game. Politicians the world round fully understand this.
Obama's election will keep millions of American liberals and much of the world deliriously happy for some time to come. And to some degree at least, Obama's victory is a national public rejection of the phony and expensive war on terror, but not necessarily a rejection by the empire's rulers. Anyway, even that is not a step forward, but rather a partial recovery from the immense and spectral folly of our needless war making -- recovery of one small bit of the immense moral ground we have ceded. But at some point we will have to cease thinking like children politically, grow up and personally accept responsibility, if we are to rescue our republic from ourselves.
Electing someone else to do it looks good on paper. But no politician can campaign on the facts. Why hell, that might not sound hopefull enough to sustain America's cupcake and bunny voters. Take the ecology and the depletion of worldresources, the collapsing planet. No presidential candidate can run on the promise that "If we do everything just right, pull in our belts and sacrifice, we can at best be a second world nation in fifty years, providing we don't mind the lack of oxygen and a few cancers here and there."
Hope is a particular vice of the liberal solar power electric car set. I suggest they turn off PBS's Nova for a while. Realize the limits of technology and quit looking for more techno solutions to what technology itself hath wrought. All the green energy sources and eating right cannot repair what has been irretrievably ruined. Species gluttony is nearly over and we've eaten the flesh of the earth and pissed upon its bones. Not because we are cruel by nature -- though a case might be made for stupidity -- but because we took the existence of individual consciousness to mean that each of us is some unique center of the world, acquisitive and deserving of all things -- $700 latte machines, $90 a night dog hotels, hard-on drugs in the bedrooms of Brentwood in place of anti-malarial drugs in African villages (though at age 62, I am sorely tempted by the promise of a four-hour boner.) One brand of this collective hallucination, although there are others, is called American exceptionalism. Liberals are as guilty of that as conservatives, simply because they partake of the American Lifestyle. We can get away with that game as long as the oil and the entertainment last. Which looks to be about another half hour.
There is quite a difference between hope and understanding the facts, then holding justified optimism. It will take quite a while for liberals wake up and meet the new boss -- same as the old boss, yada yada. Hell, most of them have not figured out Bill Clinton yet. But when and if it does happen, I wanna be in California, the land of compulsory Oprah style optimism, and where so many childish souls nurse at the ever flowing tit of hope. It's gonna be the biggest squalling diaper change in history.
In art and labor,
Joe
Ramsey Clark receives UN Human Rights Award 2008
International Action Center founder Ramsey Clark, a former US Attorney General and internationally renown human rights defender, received the respected United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights on the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at United Nations Headquarters in New York on 10 December 2008.
The announcement of the award was presented by the President of the General Assembly, Miguel d´Escoto Brockmann, who is one of the five members of the selection committee. The award is made every five years to five human rights defenders whose life's work has been outstanding. It is presented on December 10, International Human Rights Day, every five years
At the UN Press Conference after accepting the award, Ramsey Clark emphasized the UN's role in ensuring world peace reminding journalists that “The greatest threat to human rights is war.”
The award is given to individuals and organizations in recognition of their outstanding contribution to the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms. Previous recipients have included Nelson Mandela, Amnesty International, Jimmy Carter, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Reverend Dr. Martin L. King.”
Assembly President Miguel D’Escoto said “As we mark the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we acknowledge the tireless work and invaluable contribution of these individuals and organizations that have fought to see the rights and freedoms embodied in this historic document become a reality for people in all corners of the world.”
“These awardees constitute symbols of persistence, valour and tenacity in their resistance to public and private authorities that violate human rights. They constitute a moral force to put an end to systematic human rights violations.”
The UN announcement described Ramsey Clark as “a veteran human rights defender and rule of law advocate, played a key role in the civil rights and peace movements in the US, and more recently has spoken out against abuses committed in the name of “counter-terrorism.”
The International Action Center, founded by Ramsey Clark in 1992 is known internationally for its major role in the anti-war movement in the U.S. and its actions in the forefront of extending solidarity to countries and peoples facing U.S. attack and threats.
The many activists and the large all-volunteer staff of the International Action Center along with hundreds of people who have worked with him over many years extend their enthusiastic congratulations to Ramsey Clark for his tireless and courageous efforts. This United Nations Human Rights Award is well deserved.
We remain committed to solidarity with peoples and countries under U.S. attack. We are determined to continue developing ever wider opposition to U.S. policies of endless war, expanding militarism, racism and growing poverty for millions. Si se puede!
The announcement of the award was presented by the President of the General Assembly, Miguel d´Escoto Brockmann, who is one of the five members of the selection committee. The award is made every five years to five human rights defenders whose life's work has been outstanding. It is presented on December 10, International Human Rights Day, every five years
At the UN Press Conference after accepting the award, Ramsey Clark emphasized the UN's role in ensuring world peace reminding journalists that “The greatest threat to human rights is war.”
The award is given to individuals and organizations in recognition of their outstanding contribution to the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms. Previous recipients have included Nelson Mandela, Amnesty International, Jimmy Carter, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Reverend Dr. Martin L. King.”
Assembly President Miguel D’Escoto said “As we mark the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we acknowledge the tireless work and invaluable contribution of these individuals and organizations that have fought to see the rights and freedoms embodied in this historic document become a reality for people in all corners of the world.”
“These awardees constitute symbols of persistence, valour and tenacity in their resistance to public and private authorities that violate human rights. They constitute a moral force to put an end to systematic human rights violations.”
The UN announcement described Ramsey Clark as “a veteran human rights defender and rule of law advocate, played a key role in the civil rights and peace movements in the US, and more recently has spoken out against abuses committed in the name of “counter-terrorism.”
The International Action Center, founded by Ramsey Clark in 1992 is known internationally for its major role in the anti-war movement in the U.S. and its actions in the forefront of extending solidarity to countries and peoples facing U.S. attack and threats.
The many activists and the large all-volunteer staff of the International Action Center along with hundreds of people who have worked with him over many years extend their enthusiastic congratulations to Ramsey Clark for his tireless and courageous efforts. This United Nations Human Rights Award is well deserved.
We remain committed to solidarity with peoples and countries under U.S. attack. We are determined to continue developing ever wider opposition to U.S. policies of endless war, expanding militarism, racism and growing poverty for millions. Si se puede!
Saturday, December 13, 2008
End, don't mend, the Transportation Security Administration
Passenger pat-downs haven't dug up a single terrorist.
By Becky Akers
from the December 8, 2008 edition
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/1208/p09s02-coop.html
New York - Sometime in 2010, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will stop swiping airline passengers' bottled water and cups of coffee at security checkpoints. Instead, the agency will once again permit us to carry liquids and gels aboard planes.
It's not that the TSA has finally realized mouthwash and moisturizer really can't explode, not even at 30,000 feet. Rather, it claims it has a combination of new contraptions to prove that. Advanced Technology X-ray machines, bottle scanners, and spectrometers will confirm that your unopened, factory-sealed Listerine is, well, Listerine.
The ban on liquids and gels has plagued passengers for over two years now, ever since British police insisted they had foiled a plot for bombing jetliners en route from London to the US and Canada. Supposedly, terrorists planned to smuggle the ingredients of an explosive elixir aboard their flights in soft-drink containers, then combine them to blow the planes sky-high.
Horrific, murderous – and virtually impossible. The TSA makes it sound as though anyone with a year of high-school chemistry and some hydrogen peroxide can whip up explosives in an airplane's restroom. But mixing a truly explosive bomb is a delicate operation. It requires exact temperatures, precise measurements and methods, and specialized equipment – all more commonly found in laboratories than lavatories. The procedure takes a while, too. And the fumes are likely to alert the passengers shifting from foot to foot in the aisle as they await their turn in the washroom.
In fact, chemists worldwide doubt that even the most accomplished terrorist can concoct such a combustive cocktail high above the Atlantic. A British jury this summer didn't buy the allegations, either. Due to lack of evidence, only eight of the plot's original 25 suspects finally made it to trial. As it turns out, police should have freed all the defendants: jurors refused to convict anyone of terrorism. They exonerated one man, returned no verdict on four others, and settled on lesser charges for the remaining three.
But none of these facts seem to matter to the TSA. It needs something to justify its existence: Despite six years of patting down passengers, it hasn't reported uncovering a single terrorist. No wonder it latched onto the nonsense about liquid bombs. Ferreting out and confiscating everyday substances not only makes work for 43,000 screeners, it also fools us into thinking this protects us.
The TSA has always been a political, not practical, response to 9/11. It hassles us at checkpoints not because of penetrating insights on security or some brilliant breakthrough, but because politicians handed it power. Specialists in security didn't invent the TSA; the Bush administration imposed it on us. So we might hope the incoming president would abolish this absurd agency.
Unfortunately, Barack Obama wants to improve the TSA rather than send it packing. His suggestions for that improvement? Passengers still aren't screened against a comprehensive terrorist watch list, his website proclaims. Such a list must be developed.
Why? The watch list has already kept Rep. John Lewis (D) of Georgia and Sen. Ted Kennedy (D) of Massachusetts off planes: Will a comprehensive list bar Republican congressmen, too? That'll protect us about as well as unionizing screeners will – another change the campaigning Obama said he favors.
An administration serious about preserving passengers' lives rather than screeners' jobs would dismantle the TSA. Experts in the field, not the government, should design security. And it's senseless to fear that without the TSA airlines won't protect us. Businesses never willingly risk their inventory or customers; the aviation industry is no exception.
Eliminating the TSA allows airlines to protect their customers and multimillion-dollar jets with real security, tailored to each company's needs. AirTran, for instance, confronts different challenges from Air Jamaica, just as banks in midtown Manhattan deal with different dangers than do those in suburban Sioux City. In a world free of the TSA, an airline might arm its pilots or hire private security firms.
More likely, ideas and options we nonexperts can't imagine would render aviation's security as unobtrusive and effective as it is in other industries. There's no limit to human ingenuity and innovation – until the government stifles them with one-size-fits-all regulation.
Unfortunately, we can expect the airlines to fight as hard as the TSA for its survival: requiring security and establishing a bureaucracy to run it sticks taxpayers, rather than airlines, with the bill.
We've paid aviation's operating costs long enough. It's time to bring down the curtain on the TSA's security theater.
Becky Akers, a freelance writer and historian, is finishing a book about the TSA.
By Becky Akers
from the December 8, 2008 edition
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/1208/p09s02-coop.html
New York - Sometime in 2010, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will stop swiping airline passengers' bottled water and cups of coffee at security checkpoints. Instead, the agency will once again permit us to carry liquids and gels aboard planes.
It's not that the TSA has finally realized mouthwash and moisturizer really can't explode, not even at 30,000 feet. Rather, it claims it has a combination of new contraptions to prove that. Advanced Technology X-ray machines, bottle scanners, and spectrometers will confirm that your unopened, factory-sealed Listerine is, well, Listerine.
The ban on liquids and gels has plagued passengers for over two years now, ever since British police insisted they had foiled a plot for bombing jetliners en route from London to the US and Canada. Supposedly, terrorists planned to smuggle the ingredients of an explosive elixir aboard their flights in soft-drink containers, then combine them to blow the planes sky-high.
Horrific, murderous – and virtually impossible. The TSA makes it sound as though anyone with a year of high-school chemistry and some hydrogen peroxide can whip up explosives in an airplane's restroom. But mixing a truly explosive bomb is a delicate operation. It requires exact temperatures, precise measurements and methods, and specialized equipment – all more commonly found in laboratories than lavatories. The procedure takes a while, too. And the fumes are likely to alert the passengers shifting from foot to foot in the aisle as they await their turn in the washroom.
In fact, chemists worldwide doubt that even the most accomplished terrorist can concoct such a combustive cocktail high above the Atlantic. A British jury this summer didn't buy the allegations, either. Due to lack of evidence, only eight of the plot's original 25 suspects finally made it to trial. As it turns out, police should have freed all the defendants: jurors refused to convict anyone of terrorism. They exonerated one man, returned no verdict on four others, and settled on lesser charges for the remaining three.
But none of these facts seem to matter to the TSA. It needs something to justify its existence: Despite six years of patting down passengers, it hasn't reported uncovering a single terrorist. No wonder it latched onto the nonsense about liquid bombs. Ferreting out and confiscating everyday substances not only makes work for 43,000 screeners, it also fools us into thinking this protects us.
The TSA has always been a political, not practical, response to 9/11. It hassles us at checkpoints not because of penetrating insights on security or some brilliant breakthrough, but because politicians handed it power. Specialists in security didn't invent the TSA; the Bush administration imposed it on us. So we might hope the incoming president would abolish this absurd agency.
Unfortunately, Barack Obama wants to improve the TSA rather than send it packing. His suggestions for that improvement? Passengers still aren't screened against a comprehensive terrorist watch list, his website proclaims. Such a list must be developed.
Why? The watch list has already kept Rep. John Lewis (D) of Georgia and Sen. Ted Kennedy (D) of Massachusetts off planes: Will a comprehensive list bar Republican congressmen, too? That'll protect us about as well as unionizing screeners will – another change the campaigning Obama said he favors.
An administration serious about preserving passengers' lives rather than screeners' jobs would dismantle the TSA. Experts in the field, not the government, should design security. And it's senseless to fear that without the TSA airlines won't protect us. Businesses never willingly risk their inventory or customers; the aviation industry is no exception.
Eliminating the TSA allows airlines to protect their customers and multimillion-dollar jets with real security, tailored to each company's needs. AirTran, for instance, confronts different challenges from Air Jamaica, just as banks in midtown Manhattan deal with different dangers than do those in suburban Sioux City. In a world free of the TSA, an airline might arm its pilots or hire private security firms.
More likely, ideas and options we nonexperts can't imagine would render aviation's security as unobtrusive and effective as it is in other industries. There's no limit to human ingenuity and innovation – until the government stifles them with one-size-fits-all regulation.
Unfortunately, we can expect the airlines to fight as hard as the TSA for its survival: requiring security and establishing a bureaucracy to run it sticks taxpayers, rather than airlines, with the bill.
We've paid aviation's operating costs long enough. It's time to bring down the curtain on the TSA's security theater.
Becky Akers, a freelance writer and historian, is finishing a book about the TSA.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Faux News Whines and Whines Some More
This is rich, campers! The funniest thing about this is that O'Reilly is a tool and he has no clue!
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Monday, December 08, 2008
NO BLANKET COVERAGE WHEN THE TERROR IS AMERICAN
Couldn't have said it better myself. Well put, Billy Blum!--Pete
Bill Blum - The next time you encounter a defender of American foreign policy, someone insisting that something like Mumbai justifies Washington's rhetorical and military attacks against Islam, you might want to point out that the United States does the same on a regular basis. For seven years in Afghanistan, almost six in Iraq, to give only the two most obvious examples . . . breaking down doors and machine-gunning strangers, infidels, traumatizing children for life, firing missiles into occupied houses, exploding bombs all over the place, pausing to torture . . . every few days dropping bombs on Pakistan or Afghanistan. . . bombing wedding parties, one after another, 20 or 30 or 70 killed, all terrorists of course, often including top al-Qaeda leaders, the number one or number two man, so we're told; so not completely mindless, not totally random. . .
Does any of that depress you like Mumbai? . . . "The United States military since 2004 has used broad, secret authority to carry out nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks against Al Qaeda and other militants in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere, according to senior American officials. . . The secret order gave the military new authority to attack the Qaeda terrorist network anywhere in the world, and a more sweeping mandate to conduct operations in countries not at war with the United States," the New York Times informs us. So it's all nice and legal, not an attack upon civilization by a bunch of escaped mental patients. Maybe the Mumbai terrorists also have a piece of paper, from some authority, saying that it's okay what they did.
Bill Blum - The next time you encounter a defender of American foreign policy, someone insisting that something like Mumbai justifies Washington's rhetorical and military attacks against Islam, you might want to point out that the United States does the same on a regular basis. For seven years in Afghanistan, almost six in Iraq, to give only the two most obvious examples . . . breaking down doors and machine-gunning strangers, infidels, traumatizing children for life, firing missiles into occupied houses, exploding bombs all over the place, pausing to torture . . . every few days dropping bombs on Pakistan or Afghanistan. . . bombing wedding parties, one after another, 20 or 30 or 70 killed, all terrorists of course, often including top al-Qaeda leaders, the number one or number two man, so we're told; so not completely mindless, not totally random. . .
Does any of that depress you like Mumbai? . . . "The United States military since 2004 has used broad, secret authority to carry out nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks against Al Qaeda and other militants in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere, according to senior American officials. . . The secret order gave the military new authority to attack the Qaeda terrorist network anywhere in the world, and a more sweeping mandate to conduct operations in countries not at war with the United States," the New York Times informs us. So it's all nice and legal, not an attack upon civilization by a bunch of escaped mental patients. Maybe the Mumbai terrorists also have a piece of paper, from some authority, saying that it's okay what they did.
In Banking, Emanuel Made Money and Connections
In late 1998, while Washington was in the throes of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Rahm Emanuel, a departing senior political aide to President Bill Clinton, ventured out to an elegant restaurant in Dupont Circle for something of a job interview.
John Simpson, who ran the Chicago office of the investment banking boutique Wasserstein Perella & Company, had flown to Washington to meet with Mr. Emanuel at the behest of Mr. Simpson’s boss, Bruce Wasserstein, a major Democratic donor and renowned Wall Street dealmaker who had gotten to know Mr. Emanuel.
“I had this idea that this could work and that it had upside,” said Mr. Wasserstein, now chairman and chief executive of Lazard, the investment bank. “It worked out better than I could have hoped.”
And better than Mr. Emanuel could have imagined as well. Over the course of a three-hour-plus dinner, Mr. Simpson and Mr. Emanuel discussed how they might work together. Shortly afterward, Mr. Emanuel accepted an offer, nudging him down what has by now become a well-trodden gilded path out of politics and into the lucrative world of business.
Mr. Emanuel, who was chosen last month to become President-elect Barack Obama’s White House chief of staff, went on to make more than $18 million in just two-and-a-half years, turning many of his contacts in his substantial political Rolodex into paying clients and directing his negotiating prowess and trademark intensity to mergers and acquisitions. He also benefited from the opportune sale of Wasserstein Perella to a German bank, helping him to an unusually large payout.
The period before he was elected to a House seat from Illinois is a little-known episode of Mr. Emanuel’s biography. Former colleagues said the insight it afforded him on the financial services sector is invaluable especially now. But Mr. Emanuel built up strong ties with an industry now at the heart of the economic crisis, one that will be girding for a pitched lobbying battle next year as the incoming Democratic administration considers a potentially sweeping regulatory overhaul.
After Mr. Emanuel left banking to run for Congress, members of the securities and investment industry became his biggest backers, donating more than $1.5 million to his campaigns dating back to 2002, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Mr. Emanuel also leaned heavily upon the industry while he was chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during the 2006 midterm elections. Financial industry donors contributed more than $5.8 million to the committee, behind only retirees.
Friends of Mr. Emanuel’s from his private-sector days said he still checks in with them regularly to plumb their insights on economic issues.
“He asks me what am I seeing, what business is like, what’s the climate, where are the weak spots,” said John A. Canning Jr., chairman of Madison Dearborn Partners, a Chicago private equity firm that is in the same building as Wasserstein’s offices.
Mr. Canning was one of many financial executives Mr. Emanuel met with soon after he left the White House to discuss job prospects, with Mr. Emanuel’s political connections often opening doors. Mr. Canning agreed to sit down with Mr. Emanuel at the recommendation of several friends, including Stanley S. Shuman, an investment banker at Allen & Company and a major Democratic donor who once stayed in the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House as a guest of President Clinton’s.
Mr. Canning could not offer him a job, but Mr. Emanuel came to pitch deals to him and they became friends. Employees of that particular firm became Mr. Emanuel’s biggest financial supporters in Congress, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
When the House was weighing a measure last year to significantly increase the tax rate on profits earned by private equity firms, Mr. Canning said Mr. Emanuel attended a luncheon with Madison Dearborn executives, first reported by Bloomberg News, to listen to their arguments against the changes.
Mr. Emanuel, however, wound up joining other Democrats in voting for the measure.
In an interview, Mr. Emanuel, pointed to other actions he had taken over the objections of the financial industry, including sponsoring a bill last year to curb the ability of hedge fund managers to defer paying taxes on compensation they stashed in offshore tax havens and another measure that imposed new reporting requirements on financial firms for what investors pay on stocks and mutual funds.
“I would say I’ve been as tough on my friends as others,” Mr. Emanuel said. “I call it like I see it.”
Confidants of Mr. Emanuel’s said he decided to try his hand at business because he wanted financial security for his family, before eventually returning to public service.
“He had a number in his head to make enough for the family,” said Ezekiel J. Emanuel, one of Rahm’s two brothers and a prominent bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health.
It was Morton L. Janklow, the literary agent for several former presidents, who introduced Mr. Emanuel to Mr. Wasserstein. Erskine B. Bowles, the White House chief of staff and a former investment banker, also said he recommended Mr. Emanuel. Mr. Emanuel met in Mr. Wasserstein in his New York office, where they had a wide-ranging discussion about the future of financial regulation, as well as Mr. Emanuel’s plans.
Jeffrey A. Rosen, now deputy chairman of Lazard and a former managing director of Wasserstein Perella’s international practice, said Mr. Emanuel was “both a developed and a raw talent.”
“His years in the White House and what he’d done before that really honed what I’d call deal-making instincts, which could be easily translated into the business arena,” Mr. Rosen said. “Plus, he was someone who was well connected in Chicago and highly respected.”
Mr. Emanuel turned out to be an effective banker, proving a quick study with financial concepts, even as he relied on others in his office for heavy number crunching, former colleagues said. He worked 12-hour days and was known among clients for his relentlessness, constantly on the phone or sending e-mail, and being unafraid to pitch deals. Revenue in Wasserstein’s Chicago office climbed significantly after his arrival.
There is no evidence Mr. Emanuel used his political clout on behalf of his clients, but his connections certainly helped drum up business and contributed to his hiring, former colleagues said. Indeed, a partial list of clients from Mr. Emanuel’s Congressional financial disclosure in 2002 is easily linked up to the various strands of his political career, including his time as a fund-raiser for Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago and then for Mr. Clinton’s first presidential run.
The clients included Loral Space & Communications, run by Bernard L. Schwartz, one of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors, who said he got to know Mr. Emanuel while he was in the White House; the Chicago Board Options Exchange, whose chairman and chief executive, William J. Brodsky, became friends with Mr. Emanuel while he was working for Mayor Daley; and Avolar, a business aviation company whose top executive, Stuart I. Oran, was formerly in charge of governmental affairs for United Airlines, a role in which he said he interacted with Mr. Emanuel at the White House.
One of Mr. Emanuel’s major deals was the purchase in 2001 of a home alarm business, SecurityLink, from SBC Communications, the telecommunications company that was run by William M. Daley, the former secretary of commerce in the Clinton administration and the brother of Chicago’s mayor.
Mr. Emanuel represented GTCR Golder Rauner, a Chicago private equity firm that was buying the business for an affiliate. Bruce Rauner, the firm’s chairman, had first met Mr. Emanuel when he was still exploring job prospects in Chicago after getting a call from Mr. Bowles, an old friend.
Instead of private equity, Mr. Rauner advised Mr. Emanuel to pursue investment banking, where his political experience might be more valuable in landing deals in regulated industries.
Mr. Emanuel called him back after starting at Wasserstein and asked if he could take over coverage of GTCR for his new employer. That eventually led to the nearly $500 million SecurityLink deal.
Mr. Emanuel’s biggest transaction came in late 1999 when he landed an advisory role for Wasserstein in the $8.2 billion merger of two utility companies, Unicom, the parent company of Commonwealth Edison, and Peco Energy, to create Exelon, now one of the nation’s largest power companies.
John W. Rowe, the former chief executive of Unicom who now holds the same position at Exelon, sought out Mr. Emanuel after he went to Wasserstein. Mr. Rowe said he believed Mr. Emanuel would offer a different dimension, providing wisdom on what might pass muster at the governmental level.
“You can’t understand utility transactions without thinking about whether they’ll play or not play in legal and political circles,” said Mr. Rowe, who was first introduced to Mr. Emanuel by Lester Crown, the billionaire scion of Chicago’s influential Crown family.
Tax returns Mr. Emanuel released while first running for office and reported in news articles, along with Congressional financial disclosures, reveal his steep financial ascent while working at Wasserstein. He earned more than $900,000 in 1999, his first year at the firm; nearly $1.4 million in 2000; and $6.5 million in 2001, when he left the firm in midyear to run for Congress. He collected $9.7 million more from the firm in deferred compensation in 2002.
Mr. Emanuel’s annual salary was not especially large but his hefty paydays came from bonuses for the business he brought in, as is customary in investment banking, along with the company’s sale in 2001 to the German Dresdner Bank, which allowed him to benefit from an equity stake, as well a large retention bonus paid to him based on his prior performance.
The bonanza Mr. Emanuel reaped would come in handy when he ran for the House seat vacated by Representative Rod R. Blagojevich, now governor.
Mr. Emanuel contributed $450,000 out of his own pocket to his campaign in the primary, and his leading rival accused him of trying to buy a seat in Congress.Obama's Health Care Reform Plan Is Based on the Clintons' Failed 1990s Model
By Marie Cocco, Washington Post Writers Group
http://www.alternet.org/story/109844/
WASHINGTON -- Here is a number easily understood by even the math-phobic: Every 1 percent increase in the unemployment rate leads to another 1.1 million Americans becoming uninsured -- and causes still another million more children and adults to become eligible for state health insurance programs.
This means that over the past 10 months, as the hemorrhage of jobs began to push the national unemployment rate toward its October level of 6.5 percent, about 3 million Americans were thrown off the insurance rolls or had their incomes fall so much that they became eligible for Medicaid or the State Children's Health Insurance Program.
These estimates by the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured do not bewilder as much as do the tallies associated with the various federal bailouts and guarantees of banks and other institutions at the core of the financial crisis. Those are in the hundreds of billions -- actually, we're into the trillions when you count up each form of taxpayer backing -- to shore up this or that part of the teetering financial system.
But before long, if unemployment climbs as predicted to 8 percent or 9 percent next year, the worsening economic crisis will deepen the health insurance crisis. And the combination of job losses and the loss of insurance that is inevitably connected to them is likely to be an awful lot like the crisis of the early 1990s -- the last time the political system tried to fix the confused, costly and crumbling health insurance system.
The recession of the early '90s led the Clinton administration to attempt universal health care. Though the Clinton plan is consistently derided as a failure, in truth, President-elect Barack Obama's campaign pledge to build a universal system based on the current, employer-based method of delivering insurance is in good measure modeled upon it. And that is the problem.
Look only to the Detroit automakers' current economic straits for the reasons why. The car companies' unionized workers still count on a model health insurance safety net -- but even this has been scaled back repeatedly in successive contracts. Last year, the United Auto Workers Union and the Big Three entered into a deal to create a separate trust fund to bear the cost of retiree health benefits. The fund is jointly financed by the union and the companies, and a substantial part of the money is coming from current workers' forgoing promised wage hikes.
Year after year, employers demand health benefit cuts in contract talks, or impose them unilaterally where there is no union. In a 2008 survey, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 40 percent of firms that offer insurance said they are "somewhat likely" or "very likely" to increase the amount their workers contribute to insurance in the coming year, a cost shift that includes higher premiums and co-payments. Yet the average annual worker contribution toward premiums for a family policy already has more than doubled in the past nine years. During the same period, middle-class incomes have been largely stagnant.
With employers quickly shedding workers, is there any doubt that more health benefit cuts are coming for those lucky enough to keep their jobs? And when recovery comes, does anyone think American business is going to abandon its argument that health costs represent a competitive disadvantage in the global marketplace? They won't, because it's accurate. And that's largely because other countries have universal, taxpayer-funded health care systems.
These are the immutable truths of the health care conundrum. They haven't changed much in two decades. Costs are driven inexorably higher by continual advances in care as well as an aging population that needs more of it. Employers can't cope unless they scale back coverage, shift costs to workers or eliminate benefits altogether. States have become insurers of last resort -- but right now they face crippling budget shortfalls that threaten this safety net.
Using this compromised system as the basis for health insurance revision is folly -- more so now than it was in the Clinton era, when more employers still were covering their workers. Tightening regulation of the insurance industry and creating a new, government-based plan to make coverage available to those who cannot afford to buy it from private insurers -- the essence of Obama's campaign proposal -- would only add another layer of complexity and, eventually, cost. Only a single, government-financed system can eliminate the administrative waste, unfairness and economic burden of our current health insurance scheme. Timidity is no longer an option.
Marie Cocco's e-mail address is mariecocco(at)washpost.com.
(c) 2008, Washington Post Writers Group
Marie Cocco is a prize-winning syndicated columnist on political and cultural topics for The Washington Post Writers Group. She is a frequent commentator on national TV and radio shows.
Sunday, December 07, 2008
SWAMPOODLE REPORT: BAIT AND SWITCH
Sam Smith
Watching Barack Obama's bait and switch left me with an indefinable sense of deja vu until the parallel finally dawned. The personalities were so different that they obscured a common technique.
Marion Barry was elected mayor of Washington in 1978 thanks to a coalition of blacks and white liberals. So strong was white liberal participation that a columnist in the Washington Afro American said Barry was part of a plan by whites to take over the city.
By the end of Barry's second term, however, his constituency had shifted. The blacks were still there but the white liberals had become largely irrelevant thanks to funding from the white business community. The most integrated meetings in town were when the Barry team sat down with its campaign contributors.
His stand on development issues, in particular, had alienated white liberal support. Development, he promised blacks, was going to bring jobs. Since most of the development would be in white neighborhoods, the question of density, traffic and destruction of community would not be a black political issue.
Thus black power cut a deal with white power. The middle class and poor of either race weren't part of the deal although they were mightily affected by it.
In fact, the deal didn't bring jobs to blacks. By 1986 there were some 40,000 more private jobs in DC than in 1980, but a thousand fewer DC residents were employed. All the new jobs in that period went to mostly white suburban commuters.
Entering office with a biracial liberal coalition, Barry had converted his base into one that relied heavily on black votes and white corporate money. The former he attracted by rhetoric, the latter with the real estate at his disposal.
This is in contrast to the popular image of Barry as portrayed in the press, but when I would ask for examples of Barry doing anything that seriously jarred the agenda of the white business community, nobody could come up with an example.
If you ignore Barry's other big shift - from power to cocaine as his drug of choice - and if you substitute Wall Street and similar big lobbies for Washington's local Board of Trade, what Obama is doing to his white liberal constituency seems oddly familiar.
And Barry and Obama are far from alone. The typical black politician of modern times - i.e. a mayor - has been a king whose power has been rigorously circumscribed by a white business community serving as the local parliament. In the end it turned out to be a fool's paradise of black power because within a decade and a half, upper income whites were taking back the cities and the constituents of the black mayors were being evicted in what amounted to socio-economic urban cleansing.
Civil rights and black power - as independent movements - faded in inverse proportion to the rise of black politicians, and with this shift symbols replaced substance. The power of the many became the power of the one.
This wasn't the case of earlier political machines, but these were created upon building an organization of voters rather than of contributors. Once we dumped the old machines in favor of television and dollar driven machines, ordinary people became important only at election time, and they were easily swayed by the exploding tools of propaganda. Thus we found Obama running as a "community organizer" when in fact the only community he was organizing was a temporary one for himself.
Obama is only the latest reincarnation of this trend applied at a national level. But the local precursors are useful in understanding what's going on. And it serves as another reminder of why our system of campaign financing is so terrible.
This doesn't mean that Obama will necessarily be all bad as president. Barry's first two mayoral terms, for example, were arguably the best DC has seen in recent times, judged by the number of people in the city - including blacks, women and gays - who did better during them. My hunch is that Obama will be like the little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead: "When she was good, she was very, very good. . .And when she was bad, she was horrid."
But it does mean that Obama's liberal coalition has served its purpose - to get him elected - and will be replaced by those who will also serve their purpose - to keep him there. That's the way politics is these days. The tone and the target of the 2012 election will be strikingly different as Obama goes after his new constituency. If you don't like it, next time find out what your candidate means when he talks of "change."
Related Article From Counterpunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/early12082008.html
Watching Barack Obama's bait and switch left me with an indefinable sense of deja vu until the parallel finally dawned. The personalities were so different that they obscured a common technique.
Marion Barry was elected mayor of Washington in 1978 thanks to a coalition of blacks and white liberals. So strong was white liberal participation that a columnist in the Washington Afro American said Barry was part of a plan by whites to take over the city.
By the end of Barry's second term, however, his constituency had shifted. The blacks were still there but the white liberals had become largely irrelevant thanks to funding from the white business community. The most integrated meetings in town were when the Barry team sat down with its campaign contributors.
His stand on development issues, in particular, had alienated white liberal support. Development, he promised blacks, was going to bring jobs. Since most of the development would be in white neighborhoods, the question of density, traffic and destruction of community would not be a black political issue.
Thus black power cut a deal with white power. The middle class and poor of either race weren't part of the deal although they were mightily affected by it.
In fact, the deal didn't bring jobs to blacks. By 1986 there were some 40,000 more private jobs in DC than in 1980, but a thousand fewer DC residents were employed. All the new jobs in that period went to mostly white suburban commuters.
Entering office with a biracial liberal coalition, Barry had converted his base into one that relied heavily on black votes and white corporate money. The former he attracted by rhetoric, the latter with the real estate at his disposal.
This is in contrast to the popular image of Barry as portrayed in the press, but when I would ask for examples of Barry doing anything that seriously jarred the agenda of the white business community, nobody could come up with an example.
If you ignore Barry's other big shift - from power to cocaine as his drug of choice - and if you substitute Wall Street and similar big lobbies for Washington's local Board of Trade, what Obama is doing to his white liberal constituency seems oddly familiar.
And Barry and Obama are far from alone. The typical black politician of modern times - i.e. a mayor - has been a king whose power has been rigorously circumscribed by a white business community serving as the local parliament. In the end it turned out to be a fool's paradise of black power because within a decade and a half, upper income whites were taking back the cities and the constituents of the black mayors were being evicted in what amounted to socio-economic urban cleansing.
Civil rights and black power - as independent movements - faded in inverse proportion to the rise of black politicians, and with this shift symbols replaced substance. The power of the many became the power of the one.
This wasn't the case of earlier political machines, but these were created upon building an organization of voters rather than of contributors. Once we dumped the old machines in favor of television and dollar driven machines, ordinary people became important only at election time, and they were easily swayed by the exploding tools of propaganda. Thus we found Obama running as a "community organizer" when in fact the only community he was organizing was a temporary one for himself.
Obama is only the latest reincarnation of this trend applied at a national level. But the local precursors are useful in understanding what's going on. And it serves as another reminder of why our system of campaign financing is so terrible.
This doesn't mean that Obama will necessarily be all bad as president. Barry's first two mayoral terms, for example, were arguably the best DC has seen in recent times, judged by the number of people in the city - including blacks, women and gays - who did better during them. My hunch is that Obama will be like the little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead: "When she was good, she was very, very good. . .And when she was bad, she was horrid."
But it does mean that Obama's liberal coalition has served its purpose - to get him elected - and will be replaced by those who will also serve their purpose - to keep him there. That's the way politics is these days. The tone and the target of the 2012 election will be strikingly different as Obama goes after his new constituency. If you don't like it, next time find out what your candidate means when he talks of "change."
Related Article From Counterpunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/early12082008.html
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