Holding murderers accountable: The case against Bush, Cheney et al.

This from the Online Journal. Let's cross our fingers and push damn hard, since Uncle Joe Biden has already sold us out on this issue. No sleep 'til The Hague!--Pete

By William John Cox
Online Journal Contributing Writer

Although Americans have access to the greatest selection of information sources in the world, including books, newspapers, magazines, radio, television, cable, and the Internet, the frequency of the news cycle has increased to the point where we have forgotten that our president and vice president have committed horrendous war crimes, or we may have missed the fact as it flashed by.

Most of us may have been fleetingly aware in 2006 that President Bush and Vice President Cheney were lying to us about their reasons for the Iraq War, which caused the murder and maiming of tens of thousands of our American troops and the waste of billions of our tax dollars. We elected a majority of Democrats to Congress to hold them accountable; however, the Democratic leadership immediately announced that impeachment was off the table and it has been business as usual ever since.

Recently, there has been a flood of new evidence clearly proving beyond any reasonable doubt that our president and vice president, along with others, conspired to engage the United States in an unnecessary and illegal war and repeatedly and deliberately lied to the American people about the true facts of the matter. Most specifically, the president committed felonies when he lied to Congress about his justification for ordering the attack on Iraq which resulted in the murder of all who have died in his fraudulent “War on Terrorism.”

As governor of Texas, Bush executed 152 people, including Karla Faye Tucker, a born-again Christian, whose plea for clemency caused Bush to purse his lips in a false smirk of desperation and to whimper, “Please don’t kill me.” Under the “Felony Murder Rule,” known in Texas as the “Law of the Parties,” if a person commits a felony and someone dies during the course of the felony, all parties to the felony are guilty of murder irrespective of which one actually does the killing.

There is strict liability under the rule, even if the death is accidental or unintended. Almost 20 percent of all murder prosecutions result from the rule, and a significant number of Bush’s 152 executions involved criminals who had engaged in felonies where the actual killing was done by others.

Not only has the president escaped all accountability for the serial murders he committed during his phony “War on Terrorism,” he recently asked Congress to further aid and abet his crimes by acknowledging “again and explicitly that this nation remains engaged in an armed conflict with Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated organizations, who have already proclaimed themselves at war with us and who are dedicated to the slaughter of Americans.”

We now know to a high degree of certainty who the slaughterers are. The only remaining question is whether the murderers will escape justice.

The crime

Title 18, Section 2 of the U.S. Code says, “Whoever commits an offense against the United States or aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures its commission, is punishable as a principal.” Section 1111 defines murder as “the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought” and specifically holds that murders perpetrated by any kind of “willful, deliberate, malicious, and premeditated killing” are murders “in the first degree. Any other murder is murder in the second degree.”

If Bush willfully and deliberately misled Congress into authorizing him to engage in an unlawful war in which American troops and Iraqis were killed, he is guilty of murder. Not only would such killings be premeditated, but they would also be the legal result of his lies to Congress.

Title 18, Section 1001 prohibits anyone from “knowingly and willfully” making “any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation” in “any matter within the jurisdiction of the . . . legislative . . . branch of the Government.” Felony prosecution under the statute was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1955, and a violation of the statute is a crime.

Bush lied to Congress on a number of occasions. Most specifically during his State of the Union address on January 28, 2003, Bush told the following lies to Congress:

• “The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990s that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon and was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb.”
  
  
• “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
  
  
• “Year after year, Saddam Hussein has gone to elaborate lengths, spent enormous sums, taken great risks to build and keep weapons of mass destruction.”
  
  
• “With nuclear arms or a full arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, Saddam Hussein could resume his ambitions of conquest in the Middle East and create deadly havoc in that region.”
  
  
• “And this Congress and the America people must recognize another threat. Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda.”

• “We seek peace. We strive for peace.”

Ignoring the reports of UN inspectors that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Bush ordered its invasion on March 20, 2003 because: “the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised” and Iraq “has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al Qaeda.” When Bush deceptively ordered American troops to invade Iraq, he and his co-conspirators not only became war criminals under international law, they became murderers of all those who died as a result of their felonious conduct.

It can now be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Bush was deliberately lying about his justification for war against Iraq, and as of today 4,151 American soldiers and perhaps as many as a million Iraqis have become his victims.

The evidence

Bush’s conspiracy of deception held for several years, but on May 1, 2005, the Times of London published the first of the so-called “Downing Street Documents.” The documents informed us that Bush, irrespective of the lies he was telling at the time, was already committed to going to war with Iraq as early as 2002.

Calling the evidence of weapons of mass destruction “thin,” the British memos documented that “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” Richard Dearlove, the former head of Britain’s secret intelligence service later said that the Bush administration buried British information about the lack of WMDs.

We also learned that both the CIA and the State Department attempted to keep Bush from referring in his 2003 State of the Union Address to Saddam’s attempted purchase of “yellowcake” uranium from Niger. Indeed, the unsubstantiated allegations were later found to be a complete hoax based on a crude forgery disseminated by Sismi, the Italian intelligence service.

It has been revealed that Michael Ledeen, a representative of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s Office of Special Plans, had been in Rome at the same time gathering intelligence to support military intervention in Iraq and that the Sismi’s director later met with Stephen Hadley, Bush’s deputy national security advisor, after the CIA rejected his initial overtures.

Additional evidence has been provided by Pultizer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind in his new book, The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism. Suskind reveals that Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, the head of Saddam’s intelligence service, was secretly reporting the true status of Iraq’s WMDs to the British.

Habbush informed the British (and the Bush administration) in January 2003 that there were no WMDs in Iraq. When CIA Director George Tenet told Bush about Habbush’s information, Bush replied, “Well, why don’t you tell him to give us something we can use to make our case?”

Rather than using Habbush to provide Saddam with effective disinformation, to arrange Saddam’s removal, or to even make operational use of the valuable intelligence, the U.S. terminated further communication with Habbush, paid him $5 million to keep quiet and resettled him in Amman, Jordan. Officially, Habbush is still wanted by the U.S. and there is a $1 million reward offered for his capture.

Further evidence that Bush had official knowledge that there were no WMDs in Iraq was provided by Naji Sabri, Iraq’s foreign minister, in autumn 2002. He passed information through a French government official that Iraq’s “WMD program” was actually a ruse to ward off Iran and other foreign enemies.

Sabri was paid at least $200,000 by the CIA and French intelligence to provide documents about Saddam’s WMDs; however, Bush rejected Sabri’s intelligence as worthless when CIA director George Tenet tried to tell him about it on September 18, 2003. According to a senior CIA officer, “Bush didn’t give a fuck about the intelligence. He had his mind made up.”

Sabri received safe passage to Cairo during the first days of the Iraq invasion and is presently enjoying a comfortable retirement teaching journalism in Qatar.

Instead of informing the military, Secretary of State Powell, or Congress about Sabri’s high-quality intelligence, the CIA rewrote the report of his debriefing into an opposite falsehood stating that Saddam was “aggressively and covertly developing” nuclear weapons and that he already had chemical and biological weapons. The restructured report was then passed on to British intelligence to share with Prime Minister Blair.

During the same period, Saad Tawfik, an electrical engineer in Iraq, was identified by the CIA as a “key figure in Saddam Hussein’s clandestine nuclear weapons program.” His sister lived in Cleveland and was recruited by the CIA to meet with her brother in Iraq and to obtain details about the program. Tawfik told her the program was completely abandoned in 1991 and there were no centrifuges or nuclear weapon facilities. The CIA obtained similar results from 30 other former Iraqi WMD experts who also told relatives the same thing.

Evidence of Bush’s consciousness of guilt can be found in Ron Suskind’s report of the White House’s subsequent attempt to create a fraudulent justification following the invasion of Iraq and the failure to find any WMDs. The White House ordered the CIA to forge a backdated letter purportedly sent from Habbush to Saddam.

The resulting handwritten forgery dated July 1, 2001 talked about Saddam buying yellowcake uranium from Niger with the help of al Qaida. Fortuitously, the phony letter also mentioned that 9-11 ringleader Mohammad Atta was in Iraq at the time being trained by al Qaida terrorist Abu Nidal for an upcoming righteous mission.

Since the CIA is prohibited by law from engaging in covert activities intended to influence the U.S. political process, public opinion, policies, or the media, the forged letter was leaked through an aide to Ayad Allawi (a member of the Interim Governing Council and British intelligence informant) in Baghdad to an English journalist.

Con Coughlin, who has previously served as a conduit for British intelligence, wrote a front-page story in London’s Sunday Telegraph on December 14, 2003 headlined, “Terrorist behind September 11 strike ‘was trained by Saddam.’” As intended, the story was picked up and recycled by the U.S. media, including William Safire and Tom Brocaw, who treated the letter as genuine.

Suskind quotes two former CIA officers, Robert Richer and John Maguire, as witnesses to the forgery. Although both officers now deny any role in fabricating the false letter, Suskind states his interviews with them were tape recorded. On one recording, Richer is heard telling Suskind how Tenet assigned him to deal with the fabricated letter: “What I remember is George saying, ‘We got this from’ – basically, from what George said was ‘downtown.’” After Suskind says, “Which is the White House?” Richer says, “Yes. . . . I would probably stand on my, basically, my reputation and say it came from the vice president.”

When asked about the forgery, Tenet said, “There was no such order from the White House to me nor, to the best of my knowledge, was anyone from the CIA ever involved in such effort.” Suskind calls such statements “part of George’s memory issue.”

On December 14, 2004, Bush engaged in yet another coverup. He rewarded Tenet with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. Bush said that Tenet’s “tireless efforts have brought justice to America’s enemies and greater security to the American people.”

Accountability

Impeachment. On May 10, 2006, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Democrat Nancy Pelosi stated she was not interested in pursuing impeachment of President Bush; however, she has subsequently said that “If somebody had a crime that the president had committed, that would be a different story.”

On December 8, 2006, then-Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney introduced articles of impeachment against President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; however, her bill expired with the 109th Congress. McKinney is presently the Green Party’s nominee for president.

On November 6, 2007, Congressman Dennis Kucinich introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives to impeach Vice President Cheney.

On June 10, 2008, joined by Congressman Robert Wexler as cosponsor, Kucinich introduced a resolution of impeachment against President Bush listing 35 articles. The matter was referred to the Judiciary Committee by the House of Representatives; however, Speaker Pelosi refused to allow any hearings on the resolution.

On July 15, 2008, Congressman Kucinich introduced a new resolution of impeachment of President Bush limited to a single count stating that “President Bush, in violation of his oath of office, deceived Congress with fabricated threats of Iraq weapons of mass destruction to fraudulently obtain support for the authorization of use of force against Iraq and to commit troops to combat in Iraq.” The matter was again referred to the Judiciary Committee.

A hearing was held on July 25, 2008; however it was limited to “Executive Power and Its Constitutional Limitations.” Although Kucinich and others were allowed to testify, the question of impeachment was “not on the table.”

President Bush’s approval rating is around 28 percent; however, Congress’ rating, perhaps because of its inability or refusal to impose any accountability on President Bush and his co-conspirators, is just 18 percent and falling.

Impeachment is the only Constitutional way to stop a corrupt or insane president from defying the Constitution and becoming a dictator. A new president will be inaugurated on January 20, 2009, just 142 days from now. It is unlikely that Congress can or will act in that time; however, that refusal to act will surely go down in history as one of the greatest failures of our democracy.

Criminal Prosecution. It is generally assumed that a sitting president is immune from criminal prosecution while in office; however, following President Clinton’s impeachment acquittal by the Senate, the special prosecutor impaneled a grand jury to hear the same evidence and to seek an indictment once he left office. Clinton avoided indictment by entered into a plea bargain one day before he left office requiring him to publicly admit his false testimony, to surrender his law license and to pay a fine of $25,000.

Inasmuch as Attorney General Michael Mukasey serves at the pleasure of President Bush, it is highly unlikely that the current Justice Department will seek an indictment of Bush for the crimes he has committed while in office. However, given the fact that there is no statute of limitations for murder, a future Attorney General appointed by a different president may be more inclined to investigate and indict Bush and his co-conspirators for their criminal behavior.

One does not need to be a trial lawyer to review the preceding paragraphs and to identify the actual witnesses who could be called to testify, either before Congress or in a criminal trial. It is quite easy to say something like “to the best of my knowledge” to a journalist; it is much more difficult to equivocate under oath during vigorous questioning in criminal proceedings or to hide behind the Fifth Amendment.

Pardons. A president’s power to pardon is essentially absolute and is without legal review; its only constraint is the threat of impeachment. With impeachment “off the table” and with the holidays and the end of the president’s term approaching, the likelihood of mass pardons increases. There is a family precedent. With less than a month remaining in his term in 1992, President Bush’s father pardoned Caspar Weinberger, his former Secretary of Defense, and five others for the crimes they committed during the Iran-Contra fiasco.

The political pardons by Bush Sr. cancelled one conviction, three pending guilty pleas and two pending trials. Weinberger’s trial, which included charges of lying to Congress, was scheduled to commence within days of the pardon. The trial would have produced “evidence of a conspiracy among the highest ranking Reagan administration officials to lie to Congress and the American public.” By issuing the pardons, Bush Sr., who had refused to turn over his own “highly relevant contemporaneous notes,” avoided being called as a witness to testify under an oath about how he had come to be “out of the loop.”

The Constitution prohibits a president from interfering with the impeachment process; however, it is unclear if Bush can pardon his own crimes to avoid criminal prosecution. One scenario being circulated is for Bush to issue pardons to everyone conceivably subject to criminal prosecution arising out of their service in his administration, including Vice President Cheney, and for Bush to then resign from office. President Cheney could then pardon “former President” Bush for any and all crimes he committed while in office.

International Law. In one of his last official acts, President Clinton signed the “Rome” treaty establishing the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands to prosecute individuals accused of mass murders, war crimes, and other gross human rights violations. The treaty became effective on July 1, 2002; however, one of President Bush’s first acts was to “unsign” the treaty on behalf of the United States.

Even though George Bush rejected the jurisdiction of the International Court, the court has not rejected jurisdiction over him. Accordingly, while the United States can refuse to arrest and extradite a former president charged with war crimes, the treaty has been signed by 139 other sovereign nations and ratified by at least 107, all of which are legally committed to prosecuting war criminals whenever their own country refuses to or cannot do so.

Thus, while Bush may presently enjoy cutting brush in Crawford, Texas, his ability to vacation overseas might be severely curtailed in the future during his retirement years. Moreover, depending upon who the president is at the time charges are brought against Bush by the International Court, the United States could hand over Bush to the court for prosecution.

Summation

From childhood, George Bush displayed a disturbing lack of empathy. “Slapped around” by his mother as a boy, Bush enjoyed blowing up live frogs by putting firecrackers in their mouths and shooting at his brother with a BB gun. As he grew older, Bush presided over and defended the branding of pledges to his fraternity at Yale using red-hot wires and cigarettes; he became addicted to alcohol; he was arrested for drunk driving and he abused illegal drugs.

During the Vietnam War, Bush avoided military combat and was absent without leave from his stateside reserve assignment for more than a year. Using his father’s influence to gain political office, he smirked, giggled, and displayed other inappropriate behavior in response to the most serious of subjects.

Untreated, Bush’s sociopathy evolved as he achieved command of the most powerful military on earth and used its weapons to commit mass murder. Whenever a roadside IED explodes in Iraq and another American soldier dies, every time another wedding party is mistakenly bombed and children die, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney commit murder. Are we not willing accomplices if we continue to allow these crimes to continue?

Those whom we empower by our vote to either serve us in Congress or to lead our nation as president have a duty to use the power we give them to ensure accountability for its abuse. They have a duty to focus and to maintain attention on the most egregious and deadly violations of our laws and to not allow murder to go unpunished. They have a duty to do whatever it takes to make such crimes the headline of every newspaper and the lead of every radio, television and cable news program during every news cycle until such time as the murderers who occupy our nation’s highest offices are held fully accountable.

William John Cox is a retired supervising prosecutor for the State Bar of California. Acting as a public interest, pro bono, attorney, he filed a class action lawsuit in 1979 on behalf of every citizen of the United States petitioning the Supreme Court to order the other two branches of the federal government to conduct a National Policy Referendum; he investigated and successfully sued a group of radical right-wing organizations in 1981 that denied the Holocaust; and he arranged in 1991 for the publication of the suppressed Dead Sea Scrolls. His 2004 book, You’re Not Stupid! Get the Truth: A Brief on the Bush Presidency is reviewed at yourenotstupid.com, and his political writings are collected at thevoters.org. He can be contacted at u2cox@msn.com.

See also:
http://www.amazon.com/United-States-George-Bush-al/dp/1583227563

Blair, Bush could face probe at The Hague

I am looking forward to the illegitimate Bush administration's being taken to task finally for their crimes against the republic, the nation and the world. Hang 'em high!--Pete

From After Downing Street

Oldie But Goodie:

By Gethin Chamberlain, London, The Age [1]

TONY Blair could face the prospect of an International Criminal Court investigation for alleged coalition war crimes in Iraq.

The court's chief prosecutor said at the weekend that he would be willing to launch an inquiry and could envisage a scenario in which the British Prime Minister and US President George Bush could one day face charges at The Hague.

Luis Moreno-Ocampo urged Arab countries, particularly Iraq, to sign up to the court to enable allegations against the West to be pursued. Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations said that his country was actively considering signing up.

The US has refused to accept the court's jurisdiction and is unlikely to hand over any of its citizens to face trial. However, Britain has signed up and the Government has indicated its willingness to tackle accusations of war crimes against a number of British soldiers.

Mr Moreno-Ocampo said it was frustrating that the court was viewed in the Arab world as biased in favour of the West.

Asked whether he could envisage a situation in which Mr Blair and Mr Bush found themselves in the dock answering charges of war crimes in Iraq, he replied: "Of course, that could be a possibility … whatever country joins the court can know that whoever commits a crime in their country could be prosecuted by me."

Human rights lawyers remain sceptical about whether charges will ever be brought.

Some Muslim countries have criticised what they claim is the court's reluctance to deal with offences committed by Western governments. Sudan has called for the court to investigate coalition actions in Iraq.

Obama positioned to reverse Bush actions

Stem cell and climate rules among targets of president-elect's team

In light of my last post, this certainly looks promising. As president, Barack Obama will feel at least some pressure from progressive liberals and this is the sort of thing to expect in the first weeks. With the economy in the worst shape of its history and his charge being to fix it, Obama will be searching for ways to appear resolute in his promise to reverse the sort of heinous neo-con policies that BushCo were known for. The reversal on stem cell research is by far one of the best.--Pete

By Ceci Connolly and R. Jeffrey Smith

The Washington Post

Transition advisers to President-elect Barack Obama have compiled a list of about 200 Bush administration actions and executive orders that could be swiftly undone to reverse White House policies on climate change, stem cell research, reproductive rights and other issues, according to congressional Democrats, campaign aides and experts working with the transition team.

A team of four dozen advisers, working for months in virtual solitude, set out to identify regulatory and policy changes Obama could implement soon after his inauguration. The team is now consulting with liberal advocacy groups, Capitol Hill staffers and potential agency chiefs to prioritize those they regard as the most onerous or ideologically offensive, said a top transition official who was not permitted to speak on the record about the inner workings of the transition.

In some instances, Obama would be quickly delivering on promises he made during his two-year campaign, while in others he would be embracing Clinton-era policies upended by President Bush during his eight years in office.

"The kind of regulations they are looking at" are those imposed by Bush for "overtly political" reasons, in pursuit of what Democrats say was a partisan Republican agenda, said Dan Mendelson, a former associate administrator for health in the Clinton administration's Office of Management and Budget. The list of executive orders targeted by Obama's team could well get longer in the coming days, as Bush's appointees rush to enact a number of last-minute policies in an effort to extend his legacy.

Stem cell research
A spokeswoman said yesterday that no plans for regulatory changes had been finalized. "Before he makes any decisions on potential executive or legislative actions, he will be conferring with congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle, as well as interested groups," Obama transition spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said. "Any decisions would need to be discussed with his Cabinet nominees, none of whom have been selected yet."

Still, the preelection transition team, comprising mainly lawyers, has positioned the incoming president to move fast on high-priority items without waiting for Congress.

Obama himself has signaled, for example, that he intends to reverse Bush's controversial limit on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, a decision that scientists say has restrained research into some of the most promising avenues for defeating a wide array of diseases, such as Parkinson's.

Bush's August 2001 decision pleased religious conservatives who have moral objections to the use of cells from days-old human embryos, which are destroyed in the process.

But Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) said that during Obama's final swing through her state in October, she reminded him that because the restrictions were never included in legislation, Obama "can simply reverse them by executive order." Obama, she said, "was very receptive to that." Opponents of the restrictions have already drafted an executive order he could sign.

The new president is also expected to lift a so-called global gag rule barring international family planning groups that receive U.S. aid from counseling women about the availability of abortion, even in countries where the procedure is legal, said Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, he rescinded the Reagan-era regulation, known as the Mexico City policy, but Bush reimposed it.

"We have been communicating with his transition staff" almost daily, Richards said. "We expect to see a real change."

While Obama said at a news conference last week that his top priority would be to stimulate the economy and create jobs, his advisers say that focus will not delay key shifts in social and regulatory policies, including some -- such as the embrace of new environmental safeguards -- that Obama has said will have long-term, beneficial impacts on the economy.

The president-elect has said, for example, that he intends to quickly reverse the Bush administration's decision last December to deny California the authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles. "Effectively tackling global warming demands bold and innovative solutions, and given the failure of this administration to act, California should be allowed to pioneer," Obama said in January.

California had sought permission from the Environmental Protection Agency to require that greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles be cut by 30 percent between 2009 and 2016, effectively mandating that cars achieve a fuel economy standard of at least 36 miles per gallon within eight years. Seventeen other states had promised to adopt California's rules, representing in total 45 percent of the nation's automobile market. Environmentalists cheered the California initiative because it would stoke innovation that would potentially benefit the entire country.

"An early move by the Obama administration to sign the California waiver would signal the seriousness of intent to reduce the nation's dependence on foreign oil and build a future for the domestic auto market," said Kevin Knobloch, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Carbon dioxide emissions
Before the election, Obama told others that he favors declaring that carbon dioxide emissions are endangering human welfare, following an EPA task force recommendation last December that Bush and his aides shunned in order to protect the utility and auto industries.

Robert Sussman, who was the EPA's deputy administrator during the Clinton administration and is now overseeing EPA transition planning for Obama, wrote a paper last spring strongly recommending such a finding. Others in the campaign have depicted it as an issue on which Obama is keen to show that politics must not interfere with scientific advice.

Some related reforms embraced by Obama's transition advisers would alter procedures for decision-making on climate issues. A book titled "Change for America," being published next week by the Center for American Progress, an influential liberal think tank, will recommend, for example, that Obama rapidly create a National Energy Council to coordinate all policymaking related to global climate change.

The center's influence with Obama is substantial: It was created by former Clinton White House official John D. Podesta, a co-chairman of the transition effort, and much of its staff has been swept into planning for Obama's first 100 days in office.

The National Energy Council would be a counterpart to the White House National Economic Council that Clinton created in a 1993 executive order.

"It would make sure all the oars are rowing in the right direction" and ensure that climate change policy "gets lots of attention inside the White House," said Daniel J. Weiss, a former Sierra Club official and senior fellow with the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The center's new book will also urge Obama to sign an executive order requiring that greenhouse gas emissions be considered whenever the federal government examines the environmental impact of its actions under the existing National Environmental Policy Act. Several key members of Obama's transition team have already embraced the idea.

Other early Obama initiatives may address the need for improved food and drug regulation and chart a new course for immigration enforcement, some Obama advisers say. But they add that only a portion of his early efforts will be aimed at undoing Bush initiatives.

Striking a balance
Despite enormous pent-up Democratic frustration, Obama and his team realize they must strike a balance between undoing Bush actions and setting their own course, said Winnie Stachelberg, the center's senior vice president for external affairs.

"It took eight years to get into this mess, and it will take a long time to get out of it," she said. "The next administration needs to look ahead. This transition team and the incoming administration gets that in a big way."

Staff writers Juliet Eilperin, Spencer S. Hsu and Carol D. Leonnig and staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.

© 2008 The Washington Post Company

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27628719/

Will Obama Bring "Only Technical" Changes to Iraq?

Found this at Alternet. Gotta say, there will be many more articles, commentaries and essays regarding our being forced once again into having to choose the lesser of two evils, this time with the added bonus of that minor evil being a minority. When will the system be transformed to better reflect that which we pay lip service to constantly - True Democracy?--Pete

By Raed Jarrar, Raed in the Middle

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/106226/

I didn't find this in the English media, but Arab media (including Al-Jazeera) reported today:

Iraqi Presidency Council said in its first reaction to Barack Obama winning the U.S. presidential election: there is only one U.S. policy in Iraq, and the changes that may occur during Obama's time "would be only technical."

As you've heard already, Obama picked congressman Rahm Emanuel to become the White House's chief of staff. Mr. Emanuel, an Israeli citizen who has served in the Israeli Army (he denies both), was the only one out of Illinois' nine congressmen who voted for the invasion of Iraq in 2002.

I know that the confetti has not settled down yet, but I think it's time already to ask the Obama-Biden campaign some questions about their foreign policy plans, especially regarding the U.S. role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and regarding ending the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

I did not vote for Obama or donate to his campaign, but I'll send him a couple of questions anyway. For those of you who have donated your money or time to support Obama, or have voted for him, I think it's your personal responsibility to contact him. You can send your questions to the campaign by clicking here.

Here is the question I've sent:

Dear President-elect Obama

I am writing to congratulate you for your landslide victory yesterday.

I am very concerned about the Iraqi government's announcement today that your administrations' policy in Iraq will continue to be the same one adopted by the Bush administration, and that any changes that may occur during your time "would be only technical."

Do you agree with this statement, or are you still committed to ending the U.S. occupation like you have promised during the campaign?

Thank you.

Raed Jarrar is an Iraqi architect who writes the Raed In The Middle blog and contributes to numerous others.

More bad news with possible Obama appointments

Lawrence Summers, mentioned as a possible Treasury Secretary, is a managing director at the hedge fund D.E. Shaw Group.

Robert Rubin, mentioned as a possible Treasury Secretary, has been temporary chair of Citgroup (and a current director) and co chair of Goldman Sachs. He also was a founder of the conlib economic group, the Hamilton Project.

Top Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett was a member of the board of the Chicago Stock Exachange from 2000 to 2007 and was chair from 2004-2007

Top Obama advisor John Podesta has a lobbying firm that has represented BP, Lockheed Martin, National Association of Broadcasters, Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics, Sunoco and Wal-Mart

Bill Daley, advisor to the transition team, is mid west chairman of JP Morgan Chase.

Rahm Emanuel, whom Obama selected to be chief of staff, earned, according to Fortune magazine, $18 million between 1999 and 20002 working as a managing director for the investment banks Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein

Tim Geithner, a possible Treasury Secretary, is head of the NY Federal Reserve. His first boss was Henry Kissinger and he has close ties to the Wall Street players.

John Corzine, now governor of New Jewrsey and possible Treasury Secretary and CEO of Goldman Sachs before Hank Paulsen staged a coup and got rid of him

Richard Holbrooke, mentioned for Secretary of State, is vice president of Perseus, a major private equity firm. He was a member of the board of AIG until July when he resigned. He has also been vice chair of Credit Suisse First Boston, and managing director of Lehman Brothers.

Other names dropped:

John W Rogers Jr runs a mutual fund company in Chicago where Obama spent much of the day after the election.

Otto Kramer is a financier at Boston Provident.

Robert Wolfe is an investment banker and CEO of UBS Americas

Mark Gallogly is a private equity expert who funded the firm Centerbridge after working at Blackstone.

Jim Torrey is a fund manager.

Brian Mathis works for the Provident Group

Frank Brosens runs Taconic Capital Advisors

Josh Gotbaum formerly with Lazard Freres

Great Moments with Larry Summers

In 1991, Larry Summers - now reputed to be high on Obama's appointment list - signed a memo when he was vice president and chief economist of the World Bank concerning the handling of pollution in less wealthy lands. When an excerpt of the memo was leaked, more than a few people became upset. Summers initially took responsibility for the memo but claimed it was satirical. Later, blame for writing the memo was taken by aide Lant Pritchett. Pritichett went on to lecture at the Harvard Kennedy School and Summers went on to be president of Harvard.

If the memo was in fact intended to be humorous, whoever wrote it didn't understand that humor used against the poor and defenseless is not satire but ridicule and bigotry. The fact that Summers thought it funny should disqualify him from any government position.

The excerpt:

|||| 'Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:

1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I've always though that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.

3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.

The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization. ||||

While Summers and Pritchett survived the memo incident, the Brazilian secretary of the environment was not as fortunate. He was fired after writing to Summers:

"Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane. . . Your thoughts [provide] a concrete example of the unbelievable alienation, reductionist thinking, social ruthlessness and the arrogant ignorance of many conventional 'economists' concerning the nature of the world we live in. . . If the World Bank keeps you as vice president it will lose all credibility."

It may be too soon, but it must be said - and who better to say it than Sam Smith?

Can we talk about the real Obama now?

Sam Smith, The Progressive Review

Over the past few weeks I've been a good boy. I've placed everything having to do with the real Barack Obama into a futures file and spent my time on the far grimmer matter of the real John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Now the party is over and it's time for people to put away their Barack and Michelle dolls and start dealing with what has truly happened.

This, I admit, is difficult because the real Obama doesn't exist yet. He follows in the footsteps of our first postmodern president, Bill Clinton, who observed the principles outlined by scholar Pauline Marie Rosenau:

Post-modernists recognize an infinite number of interpretations . . . of any text are possible because, for the skeptical post-modernists, one can never say what one intends with language, [thus] ultimately all textual meaning, all interpretation is undecipherable.. . . Many diverse meanings are possible for any symbol, gesture, word . . . Language has no direct relationship to the real world; it is, rather, only symbolic.

As James Krichick wrote in the New Republic, "Obama is, in his own words, something of a Rorschach test. In his latest book, The Audacity of Hope, he writes, 'I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.' "

This is remarkably similar to Ted Koppel's description of Vanna White of TV's Wheel of Fortune: "Vanna leaves an intellectual vacuum, which can be filled by whatever the predisposition of the viewer happens to be."

Obama has left the same kind of vacuum. His magic, or con, was that voters could imagine whatever they wanted and he would do nothing to spoil their reverie. He was a handsome actor playing the part of the first black president-to-be and, as in films, he was careful not to muck up the role with real facts or issues that might harm the fantasy. Hence the enormous emphasis on meaningless phrases like hope and change.

Of course, in Obama's postmodern society -- one that rises above the purported false teachings of partisanship -- we find ourselves with little to steer us save the opinions of whatever non-ideologue happens to be in power. In this case, we may really only have progressed from the ideology of the many to the ideology of the one or, some might say, from democracy to authoritarianism.

The Obama campaign was driven in no small part by a younger generation trained to accept brands as a substitute for policies. If the 1960s had happened like this, the activists would have spent all their time trying to get Martin Luther King or Joan Baez elected president rather than pursing ancillary issues like ending segregation and the war in Vietnam.

Obama himself took his vaunted experience in community organizing and turned its principles on its head. Instead of empowering the many at the bottom, he used the techniques to empower one at the top: himself.

It is historic that a black has been elected president, but we should remember that Obama was not running against Bull Connor, George Wallace or Strom Thurmond. Putting Obama in the same class as earlier black activists discredits the honor of those who died, suffered physical harm or were repeatedly jailed to achieve equality. Obama is not a catalyst of change, but rather its belated beneficiary. The delay, to be sure, is striking; after all, the two white elite sports of tennis and golf were integrated long before presidential politics, but Washington - as Phil Hart said of the Senate - has always been a place that always does things twenty years after it should have.

There is an informative precedent to Obama's rise. Forty-two years ago Edward Brooke became the first black senator to be elected with a majority of white votes. Brooke was chosen from Massachusetts as a Republican in a state that was 97% white.

Jason Sokol, who teaches history at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in History News Network:

|||| On Election Day, Brooke triumphed with nearly 60 percent of the vote. Newspapers and magazines hummed with approval. The Boston Globe invoked a legacy that included the Pilgrims, Daniel Webster, and Charles Sumner, offering the Bay State as the nation's racial and political pioneer. Journalist Carl Rowan was among the unconvinced. For whites, voting for Brooke became "a much easier way to wipe out guilt feelings about race than letting a Negro family into the neighborhood or shaking up a Jim Crow school setup." Polling numbers lent credence to Rowan's unease. They showed that only 23 percent of Massachusetts residents approved of a statewide school integration law; just 17 percent supported open housing. ||||

That's the problem with change coming from the top, as Obama might have heard when he was involved in real community organizing. It also may help to explain why there have been no more Catholic presidents since John Kennedy. Symbolism is not the change we need.

Getting at the reality of Obama is difficult. He performs as the great black liberal, but since he is one half white and one half conservative, that doesn't leave him a lot of wiggle room.

To be sure, in the Senate he got good ratings from various liberal groups, but two things need to be remembered:

First, liberals aren't that liberal any more. Thus getting a 90% score merely means that you went along with the best that an extremely conservative Democratic Party was willing to risk. This is not a party that would, in these times, have passed Social Security, Medicare or minimum wage. In fact, many liberals aren't much interested in economic issues at all - especially that portion of the constituency that controls the money, the media and the message.

Second, politicians reflect their constituency. Obama's constituency is no longer Illinois. He has a whole new set of folks to pander to.

There is one story from Chicago, however, that remains relevant. A citizen walks into his alderman's office looking for a job. "Who sent you?" he asks. "Nobody," he replies. Says the staffer: "We don't want nobody nobody sent."

Who sent Barack Obama remains a mystery. He has risen from an unknown state senator to president in exactly four years and that only happens when somebody sends for you.

The black liberal image falters on a number of other scores including Obama's affection for extreme right wingers like Chuck Hagel and an obvious indifference to anybody who votes like, say, a state senator from Hyde Park. Think back over the campaign and try to recall a single instance when Obama reached out to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party or to the better angels of the Congressional Black Caucus. Instead his ads attacked as 'extreme' the single payer health insurance backed by many of his own supporters, he dissed ACORN and Colin Powell was as radical a black as he wanted to be seen palling around with.

The key issue that has driven Obama throughout his career has been Obama. He has achieved virtually nothing for any other cause. His politics reflects whatever elite consensus he gathers around himself. This is why his "post partisanship" needs to be watched so carefully. If Bernie Sanders and John Conyers don't get to White House meetings as often as Chuck Hagel, Obama will glide easily to the right, as every president has done over the past thirty years. If liberals, as they did with Clinton, watch without a murmur as their president redesigns their party to fit his personal ambitions, then the whole country will continue to move to the right as well.

Since the real Obama doesn't exist yet, it is impossible to predict with any precision what he will do. But here is some of the evidence gathered over the past months that should serve both as a warning and as a prod to progressives not to take today's dreams as a reasonable facsimile of reality:

Business interests

Advisor Cass Sunstein told Jeffrey Rosen of the NY Times: "I would be stunned to find an anti-business [Supreme Court] appointee from either [Clinton or Obama]. There's not a strong interest on the part of Obama or Clinton in demonizing business, and you wouldn't expect to see that in their Supreme Court nominees."

Obama supported making it harder to file class action suits in state courts. David Sirota in the Nation wrote, "Opposed by most major civil rights and consumer watchdog groups, this big business-backed legislation was sold to the public as a way to stop 'frivolous' lawsuits. But everyone in Washington knew the bill's real objective was to protect corporate abusers."
He voted for a business-friendly "tort reform" bill

He voted against a 30% interest rate cap on credit cards

He had the most number of foreign lobbyist contributors in the primaries

He was even more popular with Pentagon contractors than McCain

He was most popular of the candidates with K Street lobbyists

In 2003, rightwing Democratic Leadership Council named Obama as one of its "100 to Watch." After he was criticized in the black media, Obama disassociated himself with the DLC. But his major economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee, is also chief economist of the conservative organization. Writes Doug Henwood of the Left Business Observer, "Goolsbee has written gushingly about Milton Friedman and denounced the idea of a moratorium on mortgage foreclosures."

Added Henwood, "Top hedge fund honcho Paul Tudor Jones threw a fundraiser for him at his Greenwich house last spring, 'The whole of Greenwich is backing Obama,' one source said of the posh headquarters of the hedge fund industry. They like him because they're socially liberal, up to a point, and probably eager for a little less war, and think he's the man to do their work. They're also confident he wouldn't undertake any renovations to the distribution of wealth."

Civil liberties

He supports the war on drugs

He supports the crack-cocaine sentence disparity

He supports Real ID

He supports the PATRIOT Act

He supports the death penalty

He opposes lowering the drinking age to 18

He supported amnesty for telecoms engaged in illegal spying on Americans

Conservatives

He went to Connecticut to support Joe Lieberman in the primary against Ned Lamont

Wrote Paul Street in Z Magazine, "Obama has lent his support to the aptly named Hamilton Project, formed by corporate-neo-liberal Citigroup chair Robert Rubin and other Wall Street Democrats to counter populist rebellion against corporatist tendencies within the Democratic Party. . . Obama was recently hailed as a Hamiltonian believer in limited government and free trade by Republican New York Times columnist David Brooks, who praises Obama for having "a mentality formed by globalization, not the SDS."

Writes the London Times, "Obama is hoping to appoint cross-party figures to his cabinet such as Chuck Hagel, the Republican senator for Nebraska and an opponent of the Iraq war, and Richard Lugar, leader of the Republicans on the Senate foreign relations committee. Senior advisers confirmed that Hagel, a highly decorated Vietnam war veteran and one of McCain's closest friends in the Senate, was considered an ideal candidate for defense secretary.

Richard Lugar was rated 0% by SANE. . . rated 0% by AFL-CIO. . . rated 0% BY NARAL. . . rated 12% by American Public Health Association. . . rated 0% by Alliance for Retired Americans. . . rated 27% by the National Education Association. . . rated 5% by League of Conservation Voters. . . He voted no on implementing the 9/11 Commission report. . . Vote against providing habeas corpus for Gitmo prisoners. . .voted no on comprehensive test ban treaty. . .voted against same sex marriage. . . strongly anti-abortion. . . opposed to more federal funding for healthcare. . .voted for unconstitutional wiretapping. . .voted to increase penalties for drug violations

Chuck Hagel was rated 0% by NARAL. . . rated 11% by NAACP. . . rated 0% by Human Rights Coalition. . . rated 100% by Christian Coalition. . . rated 12% by American Public Health Association. . . rated 22% by Alliance for Retired Americans. . . rated 36% by the National Education Association. . . rated 0% by League of Conservation Voters. . . rated 8% by AFL-CIO. . . He is strongly anti-abortion. . .voted for anti-flag desecration amendment. . .voted to increase penalties for drug violations. . . favors privatizing Social Security

Ecology

Obama voted for a nuclear energy bill that included money for bunker buster bombs and full funding for Yucca Mountain.

He supports federally funded ethanol and is unusually close to the ethanol industry.

He led his party's reversal of a 25-year ban on off-shore oil drilling

Education

Obama has promised to double funding for private charter schools, part of a national effort undermining public education.

He supports the No Child Left Behind Act albeit expressing reservations about its emphasis on testing. Writes Cory Mattson, "Despite NCLB''s loss of credibility among educators and the deadlock surrounding its attempted reauthorization in 2007, Barack Obama still offers his support. Even the two unions representing teachers, both which for years supported reform of the policy to avoid embarrassing their Democratic Party 'friends,' declared in 2008 that the policy is too fundamentally flawed to be reformed and should be eliminated."

Fiscal policy

Obama rejected moratoriums on foreclosures and a freeze on rates, measures supported by his primary opponents John Edwards and Hillary Clinton

He was a strong supporter of the $700 billion cash-for-trash banker bailout plan.

Two of his top advisors are former Goldman Sachs chair Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers. Noted Glen Ford of black Agenda Report, "In February 1999, Rubin and Summers flanked Fed Chief Alan Greenspan on the cover of Time magazine, heralded as, 'The Committee to Save the World.' Summers was then Secretary of the Treasury for Bill Clinton, having succeeded his mentor, Rubin, in that office. Together with Greenspan, the trio had in the previous year labored successfully to safeguard derivatives, the exotic 'ticking time bomb' financial instruments, from federal regulation."

Robert Scheer notes that "Rubin, who pocketed tens of millions running Goldman Sachs before becoming treasury secretary, is the man who got President Clinton to back legislation by then-Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, to unleash banking greed on an unprecedented scale."

Obama's fund-raising machine has been headed by Penny Prtizker former chair of the Superior Bank, one of the first to get into subprime mortgages. While she resigned as chair of the family business in 1994, as late as 2001 she was still on the board and wrote a letter saying that her family was recapitalizing the bank and pledging to "once again restore Superior's leadership position in subprime lending." The bank shut down two months later and the Pritzker family would pay $460 million in a settlement with the government.

Foreign policy

Obama endorsed US involvement in the failed drug war in Colombia: "When I am president, we will continue the Andean Counter-Drug Program."

He has expressed a willingness to bomb Iran and won't rule out a first strike nuclear attack.

He has endorsed bombing or invading Pakistan to go after Al Qaeda in violation of international law. He has called Pakistan "the right battlefield ... in the war on terrorism."

He supports Israeli aggression and apartheid. Obama has deserted previous support for two-state solution to Mid East situation and refuses to negotiate with Hamas.

He has supported Jerusalem as the capitol of Israel, saying "it must remain undivided."

He favors expanding the war in Afghanistan.

Although he claims to want to get out of Iraq, his top Iraq advisor wrote that America should keep between 60,000 and 80,000 troops in Iraq. Obama, in his appearances, blurred the difference between combat soldiers and other troops.

He indicated to Amy Goodman that he would leave 140,000 private contractors and mercenaries in Iraq because "we don't have the troops to replace them."

He has called Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez an enemy of the United States and urged sanctions against him.

He claimed "one of the things that I think George H.W. Bush doesn't get enough credit for was his foreign policy team and the way that he helped negotiate the end of the Cold War and prosecuted the Gulf War. That cost us $20 billion dollars. That's all it cost. It was extremely successful. I think there were a lot of very wise people."

He has hawkish foreign policy advisors who have been involved in past US misdeeds and failures. These include Zbigniew Brzezinski, Anthony Lake, General Merrill McPeak, and Dennis Ross.
It has been reported that he might well retain as secretary of defense Robert Gates who supports actions in violation of international law against countries merely suspected of being unwilling or unable to halt threats by militant groups.

Gays

Obama opposes gay marriage. He wouldn't have photo taken with San Francisco mayor because he was afraid it would seem that he supported gay marriage

Health

Obama opposes single payer healthcare or Medicare for all.

Military

Obama would expand the size of the military.

National Service

Obama favors a national service plan that appears to be in sync with one being promoted by a new coalition that would make national service mandatory by 2020, and with a bill requiring such mandatory national service introduced by Rep. Charles Rangel.

He announced in Colorado Springs last July, "We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded."

On another occasion he said, "It's also important that a president speaks to military service as an obligation not just of some, but of many. You know, I traveled, obviously, a lot over the last 19 months. And if you go to small towns, throughout the Midwest or the Southwest or the South, every town has tons of young people who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's not always the case in other parts of the country, in more urban centers. And I think it's important for the president to say, this is an important obligation. If we are going into war, then all of us go, not just some." Some have seen this as a call for reviving the draft.

He has attacked the exclusion of ROTC on some college campuses

Presidential crimes

Obama aggressively opposed impeachment actions against Bush. One of his key advisors, Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago Law School, said prosecuting government officials risks a "cycle" of criminalizing public service.

Progressives

Unlike his deferential treatment of rightwing conservatives, Obama's treatment of the left has been dismissive to insulting. He dissed Nader for daring to run for president again. And he called the late Paul Wellstone "something of a gadfly"

Public Campaign Financing

Obama's retreat from public campaign financing has endangered the whole concept.

Social welfare

Obama wrote that conservatives and Bill Clinton were right to destroy social welfare,

Social Security

Early in the campaign, Obama said, "everything is on the table" with Social Security.

o

As things now stand, the election primarily represents the extremist center seizing power back from the extremist right. We have moved from the prospect of disasters to the relative comfort of mere crises.

Using the word 'extreme' alongside the term 'center' is no exaggeration. Nearly all major damage to the United States in recent years - a rare exception being 9/11 - has been the result of decisions made not by right or left but by the post partisan middle: Vietnam, Iraq, the assault on constitutional liberties, the huge damage to the environment, and the collapse of the economy - to name a few. Go back further in history and you'll find, for example, the KKK riddled with members of the establishment including - in Colorado - a future governor, senator and mayor after whom Denver's airport is named. The center, to which Obama pays such homage, has always been where most of the trouble lies.

The only thing that will make Obama the president pictured in the campaign fantasy is unapologetic, unswerving and unendingly pressure on him in a progressive and moral direction, for he will not go there on his own. But what, say, gave the New Deal its progressive nature was pressure from the left of a sort that simply doesn't exist today.

Above are listed nearly three dozen things that Obama supports or opposes with which no good liberal or progressive would agree. Unfortunately, what's out there now, however, looks more like a rock concert crowd or evangelical tent meeting than a determined and directed political constituency. Which isn't so surprising given how successful our system have been at getting people to accept sights, sounds, symbols and semiotics as substitutes for reality. Once again, it looks like we'll have to learn the hard way.

The Triumph of Ignorance: How Morons Succeed in U.S. Politics

By George Monbiot, Monbiot.com

http://www.alternet.org/story/105447/

How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the United States come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity that has permitted mankind's closest living relative to spend two terms as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and other such gibbering numbskulls get to where they are? How could Republican rallies in 2008 be drowned out by screaming ignoramuses insisting that Barack Obama is a Muslim and a terrorist?

Like most people on this side of the Atlantic, I have spent my adult life mystified by American politics. The United States has the world's best universities and attracts the world's finest minds. It dominates discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed nations (with the possible exception of Australia), learning is a grave political disadvantage.

There have been exceptions over the past century: Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy and Clinton tempered their intellectualism with the common touch and survived; but Adlai Stevenson, Al Gore and John Kerry were successfully tarred by their opponents as members of a cerebral elite (as if this were not a qualification for the presidency). Perhaps the defining moment in the collapse of intelligent politics was Ronald Reagan's response to Jimmy Carter during the 1980 presidential debate. Carter -- stumbling a little, using long words -- carefully enumerated the benefits of national health insurance. Reagan smiled and said, "There you go again." His own health program would have appalled most Americans, had he explained it as carefully as Carter had done, but he had found a formula for avoiding tough political issues and making his opponents look like wonks.

It wasn't always like this. The founding fathers of the republic -- men like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton -- were among the greatest thinkers of their age. They felt no need to make a secret of it. How did the project they launched degenerate into George W. Bush and Sarah Palin?

On one level, this is easy to answer: Ignorant politicians are elected by ignorant people. U.S. education, like the U.S. health system, is notorious for its failures. In the most powerful nation on Earth, 1 adult in 5 believes the sun revolves around the Earth; only 26 percent accept that evolution takes place by means of natural selection; two-thirds of young adults are unable to find Iraq on a map; two-thirds of U.S. voters cannot name the three branches of government; and the math skills of 15-year-olds in the United States are ranked 24th out of the 29 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

But this merely extends the mystery: How did so many U.S. citizens become so dumb and so suspicious of intelligence? Susan Jacoby's book The Age of American Unreason provides the fullest explanation I have read so far. She shows that the degradation of U.S. politics results from a series of interlocking tragedies.

One theme is both familiar and clear: Religion -- in particular fundamentalist religion -- makes you stupid. The United States is the only rich country in which Christian fundamentalism is vast and growing.

Jacoby shows that there was once a certain logic to its anti-rationalism. During the first few decades after the publication of Origin of Species, for example, Americans had good reason to reject the theory of natural selection and to treat public intellectuals with suspicion. From the beginning, Darwin's theory was mixed up in the United States with the brutal philosophy -- now known as Social Darwinism -- of the British writer Herbert Spencer. Spencer's doctrine, promoted in the popular press with the help of funding from Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Thomas Edison, suggested that millionaires stood at the top of a scala natura established by evolution. By preventing unfit people from being weeded out, government intervention weakened the nation, according to the doctrine; gross economic inequalities were both justifiable and necessary.

Darwinism, in other words, became indistinguishable to the public from the most bestial form of laissez-faire economics. Many Christians responded with revulsion. It is profoundly ironic that the doctrine rejected a century ago by such prominent fundamentalists as William Jennings Bryan is now central to the economic thinking of the Christian Right. Modern fundamentalists reject the science of Darwinian evolution and accept the pseudoscience of Social Darwinism.

But there were other, more powerful reasons for the intellectual isolation of the fundamentalists. The United States is peculiar in devolving the control of education to local authorities. Teaching in the Southern states was dominated by the views of an ignorant aristocracy of planters, and a great educational gulf opened up. "In the South," Jacoby writes, "what can only be described as an intellectual blockade was imposed in order to keep out any ideas that might threaten the social order."

The Southern Baptist Convention, now the biggest Protestant denomination in the United States, was to slavery and segregation what the Dutch Reformed Church was to apartheid in South Africa. It has done more than any other force to keep the South stupid. In the 1960s it tried to stave off desegregation by establishing a system of private Christian schools and universities. A student can now progress from kindergarten to a higher degree without any exposure to secular teaching. Southern Baptist beliefs pass intact through the public school system as well. A survey by researchers at the University of Texas in 1998 found that 1 in 4 of the state's public school biology teachers believed that humans and dinosaurs lived on Earth at the same time.

This tragedy has been assisted by the American fetishization of self-education. Though he greatly regretted his lack of formal teaching, Abraham Lincoln's career is repeatedly cited as evidence that good education, provided by the state, is unnecessary; all that is required to succeed is determination and rugged individualism. This might have served people well when genuine self-education movements, like the one built around the Little Blue Books in the first half of the 20th century, were in vogue. In the age of infotainment, it is a recipe for confusion.

Besides fundamentalist religion, perhaps the most potent reason why intellectuals struggle in elections is that intellectualism has been equated with subversion. The brief flirtation of some thinkers with communism a long time ago has been used to create an impression in the public mind that all intellectuals are communists. Almost every day, men like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly rage against the "liberal elites" destroying America.

The specter of pointy-headed alien subversives was crucial to the elections of Reagan and Bush. A genuine intellectual elite -- like the neocons (some of them former communists) surrounding Bush -- has managed to pitch the political conflict as a battle between ordinary Americans and an overeducated pinko establishment. Any attempt to challenge the ideas of the right-wing elite has been successfully branded as elitism.

Obama has a good deal to offer America, but none of this will come to an end if he wins. Until the great failures of the U.S. education system are reversed or religious fundamentalism withers, there will be political opportunities for people, like Bush and Palin, who flaunt their ignorance.

George Monbiot is the author of Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. Read more of his writings at Monbiot.com. This article originally appeared in the Guardian.

Jerry's diggin' for that prison-guard cash to help fund his gubernatorial run...

...and it looks like he got it!

From Daniel Abrahamson at HuffPo

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-abrahamson/jerrys-brown-nosin-ith-c_b_139293.html

The California prison guards' union -- one of the state's richest and most reviled special-interest groups -- is funding a multi-million-dollar attack on Proposition 5, the Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation Act. The prison guards' newest ally is Jerry Brown, attorney general and former governor of California.

Prop. 5 is a modest and sensible reform of California's corrections system that promises to reduce the state's bloated prison population and, in the process, cut state spending by billions of dollars. The measure is supported by a wide-range of treatment professionals, good-government types and former high-ranking corrections and law enforcement officials.

The prison guards, however, oppose Prop. 5. They don't like the math. Fewer prisoners will mean fewer jobs and less overtime pay for prison guards. Today we released a new ad that will be running throughout the state that shows how the prison guards are sabotaging California's future for their own self interest.

Prop. 5 would also forestall massive new prison construction. For taxpayers, that means saving $2.5 billion for each new prison that is no longer needed. For the guards, however, fewer prisons will mean less staff to run them -- and possibly fewer new dues-paying members in the future. This is bad news for a union with burgeoning membership that boasts higher annual take-home pay than the governor. To put it bluntly, the prison guards' union is built on the backs of human beings in cages.

A.G. Jerry Brown's role in all this is the most perplexing. He is either taking progressives for granted or figures they'll give him a pass for cozying up to the prison guards and fighting a measure that offers drug treatment and a second chance to young people, nonviolent offenders and prisoners.

Since I am a co-author of Prop. 5, Jerry contacted me a couple of weeks back. Said he wanted to talk about Proposition 5. He called me on my cell phone while I was participating in a panel discussion about California's prison crisis sponsored by U.C. Berkeley. I decided to duck out of the symposium. Months earlier, I had reached out to Jerry to discuss the details of Prop. 5, but those calls went unreturned. I figured that, if Jerry Brown was now ready to talk about Prop. 5, that would be a good use of my time.

"OK," I say, "let's talk." Turns out, Jerry doesn't want to chat about public policy. He wants to vent. He lectures me for five minutes about how, when he's governor, he'll solve the state's decades-old prison crisis in his first month in office. He neglects to mention that the roots of the prison crisis date back to his first stint as governor.

Jerry pounces: "Prop. 5 is anti-democratic," he complains. I tell him that that's an odd attack, particularly when Prop. 5 creates an independent citizen's oversight commission, appointed by the legislature and governor, to bring transparency and change to the state's prison system. And what could be more democratic than a voter initiative?

Jerry switches tack. He argues that Prop. 5 deprives him -- and by "him" it is clear Jerry means the next governor of California -- of too much power over prisons. I ask him whether he's actually read Prop. 5. No response. I note that Prop. 5 in fact allows the governor to appoint two officials to head up the state's prison and parole agency, not just the one allowed under current law. The governor also gets to appoint more than half the members of new oversight panels that, in turn, must run public hearings, take public comment and publish audits and reports on their activities. These panels provide new levels of transparency and accountability for prisons and for treatment programs statewide.

Jerry gets flustered. His angry pit-bull persona dissolves into more of a wet pug. "But the drug court judges oppose you," he stammers. "True," I respond. "But their opposition, like the prosecutors and prison guards, is ideological, not evidence-based." I continue, "All of the state's leading drug treatment and medical professionals -- the folks who know the most about delivering substance abuse and mental health services to this population -- support Prop. 5." Also, recalling Jerry's "anti-democratic" blast earlier, I note that the drug court judges voted to oppose Prop. 5 when their partners in the treatment community were out of the room.

Jerry wants off the phone. "Okay. Listen. This thing is complicated," he says. "I need you to walk me through Prop. 5, line by line, so I can understand what you are doing here."

"Great," I say. "How about we talk later today or tonight, right after this prison symposium is over. I can meet you or go over it by phone." Jerry gives me his mobile number.

Later that evening, I call Jerry. No response.

I call Jerry more than a dozen times over the next week, not only on the cell number he gave me, but also on two other numbers I have for him. I call every morning and every afternoon. I leave messages. Jerry has my home, office and wife's cell phone numbers. He knows what time I pick up and drop off my son at kindergarten. Still no word from Jerry. I'm starting to think the facts don't matter, despite his entreaty to grapple with the details of Prop. 5.

Two weeks later, Jerry accidentally answers his cell phone while getting in his car to go to Sacramento. It's me. "Let's talk," I say. Jerry sounds bummed that he forgot to check caller ID. He says, "Can't talk now. I'll call you tonight at home." I say, "Great. No hour is too late." I give him my numbers again.

Jerry doesn't call.

But Jerry was working the phones, after all. He's done a press conference for No on 5. He's inserted himself into the campaign, courtesy of the prison guards. They are now listed as among the largest contributors to "Jerry Brown 2010." Their biggest gift to date: $825,000 worth of TV time starting this week for No-on-5 ads starring Jerry.

If those ads help Jerry, he'll move one step closer to becoming CEO of one of the largest, most expensive and worst-performing penal colonies in the world. History suggests that in 2010 he will need some help with his prison problems. I don't trust him to make the right call.

Daniel Abrahamson is the Director of Legal Affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance Network and co-author of Prop. 5

Palin Tells Dobson That 'Prayer Warriors' Should Ask God to Intervene in U.S. Election for GOP

By Blue Texan, Firedoglake

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/104166/

Awesome!

In an interview posted online Wednesday, Sarah Palin told Dr. James Dobson of "Focus on the Family" that she is confident God will do "the right thing for America" on Nov. 4.

...

She also thanked her supporters -- including Dobson, who said he and his wife were asking "for God’s intervention" on election day -- for their prayers of support.

"It is that intercession that is so needed," she said. "And so greatly appreciated. And I can feel it too, Dr. Dobson. I can feel the power of prayer, and that strength that is provided through our prayer warriors across this nation. And I so appreciate it."

From this we can deduce that:

1. Sarah Palin believes God personally chooses our Presidents and Vice Presidents.
2. Sarah Palin believes that God should choose her as Vice President.
3. Sarah Palin believes that without God's intervention she will lose.

AlterNet is a nonprofit organization and does not make political endorsements. The opinions expressed by its writers are their own.

Blue Texan is a regular contributing blogger for FireDogLake.

© 2008 Firedoglake All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://www.firedoglake.com//104166/

ACORN, Rightwing Media and Election "Fraud"

Anthony DiMaggio: The Scandal That Never Was

The massive attention surrounding ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) is as indicative of Republican and media racism as it is their class prejudice. Much of this attention centers on John McCain's attacks on the organization, which were voiced during the third Presidential debate. McCain warned viewers that ACORN, which has endorsed Obama, is "on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history," and "may be destroying the fabric of democracy." Those are pretty vigilant claims for someone with no evidence.

I can't say I'm surprised that the Republicans have taken to demonizing ACORN. I have been a long supporter of the group in light of their strong support for the living wage movement. Considering that ACORN is a progressive-left, Obama affiliated organization, it was only a matter of time before it became a major focus of conservative hate. ACORN has recently made the news, due to reports that it employed a number of canvassers who registered voters, while using fabricated information and fake names such as "Micky Mouse" or "Brad Pitt," amongst others.

In danger of losing its eight year hold on the Presidency, the Republican Party has become increasingly desperate in its attacks on poor and minority groups, who have registered in increasingly large numbers this election year. The attacks on ACORN must be understood within the context of this enfranchisement of dispossessed groups. John Danforth, a Republican McCain ally and former senator, has publicly pressured Obama about his "special responsibility to rein in ACORN," while VP candidate Sarah Palin decries "the Left-wing activist group ACORN [that] is now under investigation for voter registration fraud in a number of battleground states. We can't allow leftist groups like ACORN to steal this election." Palin's remarks are extremely revealing in light of the increased registration of the poor. Empowerment of poor minority voters certainly does constitute a threat to the Republican's class war against the masses of Americans. It's easy to see why Palin, McCain, and company see ACORN's efforts as theft – considering that the country's "legitimate" voting pool is expected to be restricted to the affluent, disproportionately white minorities who benefit from the Republican Party's class war (any others who vote must be duped into supporting this class war against themselves).

Republican attacks on ACORN have been followed by vigilant action. The FBI is now investigating ACORN and has raided its offices to try and find information of alleged fraud. Republicans in Ohio have appealed to the Supreme Court (unsuccessfully) to grant them the power to comb through registered voter rolls, with the possibility of purging voters (remember Florida in 2000?) whose information that includes mismatches between information provided by the registrants and information held by Ohio's 88 counties. Although such mismatches are often either arbitrary or the result of faulty record keeping by the state, this hasn't stopped Republicans from seeking power to throw registered voters off the rolls.

Media discussions of ACORN have predictably followed the talking points issued by Republican Party leaders to Fox News and right-wing radio, and the rhetoric of the McCain-Palin team. Attention has been massive, with over sixty stories alone on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC emphasizing the ACORN controversy in the two days following the third Presidential debate. The uniformity of conservative attacks on ACORN has been rather impressive, although hardly intellectual or informative. The editors at the Washington Times lambasted ACORN for being "either co-opted by an outside group bent on committing massive voter fraud to rig this election," or as "itself intent on" committing fraud. "Mr. Obama, whose campaign paid ACORN $800,000 to register voters during the primary, should be saddled with the burden of proof and take the lead in addressing the allegations." Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer draws attention to "Barack Obama's long-standing relationship with the left-wing vote-fraud specialist ACORN" (Obama had worked with the group in a voter registration drive when he was a Chicago community organizer, and his campaign reportedly provided the group with money for a "get-out-the-vote" campaign). Radio personalities such as Rush Limbaugh, Dennis Prager, and Michael Medved and Fox News commentators such as Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity have relentlessly emphasized the ACORN issue in their programs.

Presumably, the right-wing foot soldiers in the media, who couldn't have cared less what ACORN was doing months ago let alone describe what the acronym stood for, have now become independent experts on the organization's negligence and duplicity in destroying democracy. There's only one problem with this narrative – none of it's true.

When interviewed on Fox News' Hannity and Colmes, Court TV news anchor Jami Floyd claimed that "John McCain would support ACORN. Wouldn't anybody support an effort to get more voters to the polls? That's what America is about. That's what we fought our revolution for. Representation, right? That's what we're about." Floyd fundamentally misunderstands what's at stake in this election. The right-wing hate machine hasn't gone after ACORN because of a voting scandal (which never existed) but because of the threat poor voters pose to business dominance of government. While the faith of new voters in Obama is probably misplaced (he has not promised to promote a new social welfare state the likes of the New Deal or Great Society), support for Obama nonetheless constitutes a major threat to Republican dominance of government. It is this threat of bringing millions of poor into the political process (ACORN registered 1.3 million poor and minority voters for the 2008 election) that is really driving recent attacks.

If readers are still unconvinced, consider the following: No evidence was ever presented that ACORN leaders intended to register voters using false information. Establishing such intent is the first requisite for demonstrating voter fraud. As the New York Times reports, the charges against ACORN are "wildly overblown" and intended, rather, to "hobble ACORN's [registration] efforts." While the group admits that some canvassers did hand in false names, those accounted for less than 1 percent of the total gathered. ACORN thoroughly reviews the voter information it gathers, flagging any cases that seem suspicious. ACORN has admitted to firing any canvassers who were found to submit faulty voter information. ACORN representatives also call those who have registered with them, in order to verify the information they've collected. If any of the cases turn up questionable information, ACORN attaches a warning card to that case as it submits the forms to the states within which it operates.

The real problem, often times, appears to have been with the states and Republican partisans themselves, rather than with ACORN. Most of the faulty forms that have fed attention to the "scandal" were only condemned by political leaders because ACORN warned them about the individual cases, not due to the investigative diligence of Republican lawmakers or right-wing media pundits. One wouldn't know this from reading media accounts. Neoconservatives such as Charles Krauthammer condemn ACORN itself for "voter registration fraud" in states like Nevada. What Krauthammer conveniently neglects to mention is that Nevada Secretary of State Bob Walsh's orders to raid ACORN's Las Vegas office took place only after the state ignored ACORN's pleas that it investigate possibly fraudulent voter registrations. The account of the fiasco below, provided by ACORN representative Bertha Lewis, is worth reading. In an October press release, Lewis explained that:

"Over the past year, ACORN has worked hard to help over 80,000 people in Clark County [Nevada] register to vote. As part of our nonpartisan voter registration program, we have reviewed all the applications submitted by our canvassers. When we have identified suspicious applications, we have separated them out and flagged them for election officials. We have zero tolerance for fraudulent registrations. We immediately dismiss employees we suspect of submitting fraudulent registrations. For the past 10 months, any time ACORN has identified a potentially fraudulent application, we turn that application into election officials separately and offer to provide election officials with the information they would need to pursue an investigation or prosecution of the individual. Election officials routinely ignored this information and failed to act."

The Republican Party and right-wing media's attack on ACORN is motivated primarily by their fear of electoral defeat, and their contempt for poor, minority voters who will help usher in that defeat. Sadly, the Obama campaign failed to condemn this racist hate movement by distancing itself from ACORN in the third debate. It should be applauding the group for its important and necessary work in registering disenfranchised voters. At a time when Obama leads in the polls by 6.5-7% over McCain, he should feel empowered to take on racism and class biased directed at those who're simply exercising their basic, democratic right to vote. This may be asking too much, sadly, from Democratic leaders who would rather pander to the affluent than stand up for the disadvantaged.

Anthony DiMaggio teaches Politics of the Developing World and American Government at Illinois State University. His book, Mass Media, Mass Propaganda: Examining American News in the "War on Terror" will be released in paperback this December. He may be reached at: adimagg@ilstu.edu

Palin crucufied on SNL. She let it happen.

No fan myself, I still couldn't believe the McCain campaign allowed Governor Palin to participate in this sketch. Not only was it bad, it was a direct personal assault.

It also shows a decided lack of judgment on the part of the Governor Palin, John McCain and the campaign staff, who seem to want McCain to lose badly.

Colin Powell Slams McCain After Endorsing Obama

By Steve Benen, Washington Monthly

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/election08/103696/

After his "Meet the Press" appearance, during which he endorsed Barack Obama, Colin Powell stopped to answer reporters' questions outside the studio. As it happens, his remarks were nearly as interesting after the program as they were during.

Powell was asked about the relentless negativity of the McCain campaign, and Powell made no effort to hide his disappointment. Perhaps most importantly, Powell noted that the constant right-wing efforts to a) falsely label Obama as a Muslim; and b) make "Muslim" some kind of slur, not only undermines national unity, but also damages America's standing in the world. "Those types of images going out on Al Jazeera are killing us around the world," Powell said.

He went on to express his disgust for Rep. Michele Bachmann's (R-Minn.) neo-McCarthyism. "We have got to stop this kind of nonsense," Powell said, "pull ourselves together, and remember that our great strength is in our unity and in our diversity."

Tying it all together, Powell concluded, "We can't judge our people and hold our elections on that kind of basis. Yes, that kind of negativity troubled me. And the constant shifting of the argument, I was troubled a couple of weeks ago when in the middle of the crisis the campaign said, 'We're going to go negative,' and they announced it. 'We're going to go negative and attack his character through Bill Ayers.' And now I guess the message this week is we're going to call him a socialist. Mr. Obama is now a socialist, because he dares to suggest that maybe we ought to look at the tax structure that we have. Taxes are always a redistribution of money. Most of the taxes that are redistributed go back to those who pay them, in roads and airports and hospitals and schools. And taxes are necessary for the common good. And there's nothing wrong with examining what our tax structure is or who should be paying more or who should be paying less, and for us to say that makes you a socialist is an unfortunate characterization that isn't accurate."

Powell has gotten a good look at what's become of his Republican Party, and he really doesn't like what he sees.