The tragic human cost of living in a corporatocracy is becoming ever more clear to anyone who takes the blinders off and thinks for a while.
Our corporatocracy has been ratified by the Supreme Court, has intimidated our president and bought our Congress. Tea Party Congresswomen to the contrary notwithstanding, that's all three branches of government. Total control.
The budget submitted by Dr. Kidglove, created under the specter of the deficit bogeyman, proposes to make the poor, the old, the sick and the uneducated pay for the economic crimes of filthy rich bankers and financiers.
While the filthy rich count their profits and chuckle like Scrooge, millions of Americans remain jobless. For the most recent quarter, the country has created barely one-fifth of the number of new jobs needed just to accommodate new workers entering the job market. So the net number of unemployed Americans continues to grow.
Meanwhile, corporate America is sitting on a cash horde of well over two trillion dollars. Their Republican puppets in Congress, willy-nilly cutting "job-killing entitlements," talk about the need for jobs even while opposing the very public policies that would create them. The United States Chamber of Commerce prattles about the need for jobs even while plotting possibly criminal disinformation campaigns against those who support proposals to create them.
Dr. Kidglove, eying the corporate stash of cash, went to the US C of C, hat in hand, and begged them to please, sir, spend some of that money putting Americans back to work. They listened grumpily, but have absolutely no intention of spending a dime of the cash horde to hire American workers. The business plans of corporate America have committed all of that cash to huge stock buyback programs and increased dividends to enrich big investors and senior managers. They did this in 2002-2006 with nearly three trillion in hoarded profits, which they dispensed just in time for filthy rich investors and managers to benefit from George Bush's first big round of tax cuts for the richest two percent of us. The new round of payouts comes just in time for the filthy rich to benefit from the recent extension of the Bush tax cuts.
Responding to the Big Bust of 2008, the Bush-Obama strategy was to bail out out the too-big-to-fail financial institutions that caused it. Obama's rationale was that the bailed-out banks and investors would eventually create jobs, lower mortgage rates and adjust terms to save homeowners and boost tax revenues of the cash-starved states. None of it happened.
Now the corporations and their lackeys in Congress have coerced Dr. Kidglove into a policy of cutting the social services that poor, old, jobless and sick Americans depend upon for their very lives. The cuts he offers won't satisfy them. They'll cut more.
Meanwhile, there's no talk whatsoever about cutting the defense budget or ending the immoral wars that drove us into this deficit. There's no talk of cutting the lavish subsidies to big oil and gas companies, to drug manufacturers, to health insurance companies, to the huge Agribusiness conglomerates. These suckers at the teats of tax revenue are part of the corporatocracy that owns us; of course their subsidies won't be touched.
Meanwhile, a new tip of the corporate iceberg is peeking out above the waves. It is the virtual merging of the government's massive spying on citizenry with corporate skullduggery against citizens who speak the truth to power.
The U.S. Chamber, through its rich and powerful Washington law firm, has conspired with government spy technology contractors to engage in possibly criminal disinformation campaigns against supporters of WikiLeaks and other progressive information outlets. It has targeted online journalists and others for "disruption."
And just today, the New York Times and the economist Joseph Stiglitz demonstrated how financial institutions manipulate their Congressional puppets and the public to avoid any real regulation of the sort of crimes that caused the 2008 Bust. They disclosed the utter fallacy of a major report commissioned by the "Derivative End Users Coalition" -- formed by the big banks to prevent implementation of the financial controls in the Dodd-Frank financial reform act. It was prepared by a consulting firm called Keybridge Research, which falsified data and lied about its affiliations with responsible academics.
Confronted with the Stiglitz findings by a Times reporter, the president of Keybridge replied that "the client had asked us" to create the report, which was "a hypothetical study."
Another term for it is lying, but it will serve as a rationale for the puppets of Congress to do the bidding of their corporate masters. The rich will get richer and the poor will pay.
Let them eat cake.
"Don't tell Momma I'm a journalist; say I play the piano in a whorehouse."
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Thursday, February 10, 2011
The Message from Liberation Square
Two protesters in Cairo have posted an open letter to the rest of the world that raises an interesting question in the United States.
Mahmoud Salem and Gihan Ibrahim, 20-ish activists and bloggers who have been in Tahir Square since Jan. 25, had this to say:
People here are tired. We’ve been beaten, shot at, tear-gassed, rained on,
denied medical access, and have lived in a public square for more than two
weeks. Mercenary thugs on horses have attacked us with whips, swords,
and knives. Hundreds of people have lost their lives and thousands are
hurt or missing.
The revolutionary feeling here is incredible. Every day this square is full of
peasants, workers, students and professionals, engineers, teachers, singers,
writers and celebrities, Muslims, Christians, young, old, rich and poor.
We are demanding things which everyone can agree on: an end to
corruption, dictatorship and oppression; the ability to vote in free, fair and
democratic elections; freedom, dignity and social justice to all citizens.
The "interesting question" is this.
When, if ever, will masses of Americans bestir themselves to demand the same things here?
Mahmoud Salem and Gihan Ibrahim, 20-ish activists and bloggers who have been in Tahir Square since Jan. 25, had this to say:
People here are tired. We’ve been beaten, shot at, tear-gassed, rained on,
denied medical access, and have lived in a public square for more than two
weeks. Mercenary thugs on horses have attacked us with whips, swords,
and knives. Hundreds of people have lost their lives and thousands are
hurt or missing.
The revolutionary feeling here is incredible. Every day this square is full of
peasants, workers, students and professionals, engineers, teachers, singers,
writers and celebrities, Muslims, Christians, young, old, rich and poor.
We are demanding things which everyone can agree on: an end to
corruption, dictatorship and oppression; the ability to vote in free, fair and
democratic elections; freedom, dignity and social justice to all citizens.
The "interesting question" is this.
When, if ever, will masses of Americans bestir themselves to demand the same things here?
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Chile to Egypt: A Broad, Blood-Red Line
Little noticed in the focus on Egypt's popular uprising, Chile at almost the same moment began a government investigation into the death of Salvador Allende. The timing is ironic. It calls attention to the continuum, under presidents of both parties, of American support for "friendly" dictators, never mind the poverty and misery of the people under their thumb.
The investigation announced Jan. 26 comes 38 years after Allende, the first democratically elected Socialist head of state in the Americas, died during a military coup d'etat engineered by the CIA . The police declared his death a suicide -- the same police who celebrated it with 24 documented cases of kidnaping, torture and murder in the immediate aftermath of the military takeover.
U.S.-backed Augusto Pinochet became Chile's dictator, lavishly supported by American taxpayer funds. This, according to the Human Rights Foundation, is what he accomplished: "He shut down parliament, suffocated political life, banned trade unions, and made Chile his sultanate. His government disappeared 3,200 opponents, arrested 30,000 (torturing thousands of them) ... Pinochet’s name will forever be linked to the Desaparecidos, the Caravan of Death, and the institutionalized torture that took place in the Villa Grimaldi complex."
And so as Chile seeks the truth about a savage dictator installed by the United States -- the long-held suspicion is that Allende was slain on the CIA's orders by Pinochet's troops -- Egypt seethes with popular revolt against another. It is four decades in time but only a moment of truth in ideology between Pinochet and Mubarak.
Washington's view is, and for too long has been, that bad guys are just fine as long as they're our bad guys. Let us never forget that before he was reviled, Saddam Hussein was our friend. Or that Maggie Thatcher and Ronnie Reagen, those great leaders of the free world, pointed with pride to the Chilean economic miracle while Pinochet was torturing and killing the people of Chile, while the underclass grew in number and diminished in its share of that economy, while oligarchs and military thugs and friends of the CIA -- and American corporations -- prospered.
Now the successors to Maggie and Ron wring their hands over the situation in Egypt, piously proclaiming their support for "democracy" yet fretting about "stability." These are code words. "Support for democracy" means the western powers don't want to reveal their hypocrisy by endorsing a ruthless military suppression of the popular uprising. Let the blood flow in prisons and torture chambers, but not on TV. "Stability" means retaining a pro-Israel government in a populous Arab country that controls an absolutely vital strategic venue in the Middle East, the Suez Canal. The people be damned; Washington must remain the off-stage power in the region; its warships must retain free access and egress on the Suez.
Searching for soothing classical music yesterday, the "seek" function on my car radio paused briefly on one of the stations that blares those insufferably stupid right wing talk shows. Sotto voce: "Well, yes Mubarak is a dictator," host and guest agreed. Energico: "But the great danger is that they'll replace him with something worse."
No, no you fools! Here is the "great danger:"
Our government's domestic policies are moving uncomfortably parallel to our failed foreign policy. Abroad, we prop up regimes that enrich corporations, oligarchs and despots while the mass of common people suffer, starve and die. At home we are ruled by a shadow government of corporations and oligarchs who find plenty of money for weapons but none for health care or social security. People don't count, democracy is just a word, what's good for business is good for America whose business is war.
Pinochet kept his grip in Chile firm by creating a Death Squad of several Army officers and two infantrymen which traveled from prison to prison in a U.S.-supplied Puma helicopter, picking out those detainees -- all of them held incognito and without charge -- considered most dangerous to the state, murdering them and burying them in unmarked mass graves.
Legislation passed in the Bush Administration, and policies continuing under Obama, could over time lead to that very thing happening here.
Look what's happening -- legally -- to a kid named Bradley Manning.
The investigation announced Jan. 26 comes 38 years after Allende, the first democratically elected Socialist head of state in the Americas, died during a military coup d'etat engineered by the CIA . The police declared his death a suicide -- the same police who celebrated it with 24 documented cases of kidnaping, torture and murder in the immediate aftermath of the military takeover.
U.S.-backed Augusto Pinochet became Chile's dictator, lavishly supported by American taxpayer funds. This, according to the Human Rights Foundation, is what he accomplished: "He shut down parliament, suffocated political life, banned trade unions, and made Chile his sultanate. His government disappeared 3,200 opponents, arrested 30,000 (torturing thousands of them) ... Pinochet’s name will forever be linked to the Desaparecidos, the Caravan of Death, and the institutionalized torture that took place in the Villa Grimaldi complex."
And so as Chile seeks the truth about a savage dictator installed by the United States -- the long-held suspicion is that Allende was slain on the CIA's orders by Pinochet's troops -- Egypt seethes with popular revolt against another. It is four decades in time but only a moment of truth in ideology between Pinochet and Mubarak.
Washington's view is, and for too long has been, that bad guys are just fine as long as they're our bad guys. Let us never forget that before he was reviled, Saddam Hussein was our friend. Or that Maggie Thatcher and Ronnie Reagen, those great leaders of the free world, pointed with pride to the Chilean economic miracle while Pinochet was torturing and killing the people of Chile, while the underclass grew in number and diminished in its share of that economy, while oligarchs and military thugs and friends of the CIA -- and American corporations -- prospered.
Now the successors to Maggie and Ron wring their hands over the situation in Egypt, piously proclaiming their support for "democracy" yet fretting about "stability." These are code words. "Support for democracy" means the western powers don't want to reveal their hypocrisy by endorsing a ruthless military suppression of the popular uprising. Let the blood flow in prisons and torture chambers, but not on TV. "Stability" means retaining a pro-Israel government in a populous Arab country that controls an absolutely vital strategic venue in the Middle East, the Suez Canal. The people be damned; Washington must remain the off-stage power in the region; its warships must retain free access and egress on the Suez.
Searching for soothing classical music yesterday, the "seek" function on my car radio paused briefly on one of the stations that blares those insufferably stupid right wing talk shows. Sotto voce: "Well, yes Mubarak is a dictator," host and guest agreed. Energico: "But the great danger is that they'll replace him with something worse."
No, no you fools! Here is the "great danger:"
Our government's domestic policies are moving uncomfortably parallel to our failed foreign policy. Abroad, we prop up regimes that enrich corporations, oligarchs and despots while the mass of common people suffer, starve and die. At home we are ruled by a shadow government of corporations and oligarchs who find plenty of money for weapons but none for health care or social security. People don't count, democracy is just a word, what's good for business is good for America whose business is war.
Pinochet kept his grip in Chile firm by creating a Death Squad of several Army officers and two infantrymen which traveled from prison to prison in a U.S.-supplied Puma helicopter, picking out those detainees -- all of them held incognito and without charge -- considered most dangerous to the state, murdering them and burying them in unmarked mass graves.
Legislation passed in the Bush Administration, and policies continuing under Obama, could over time lead to that very thing happening here.
Look what's happening -- legally -- to a kid named Bradley Manning.
Monday, January 31, 2011
We Cannot Hear the Chains Break and Fall
Current events limn with absolute clarity the reasons why the American public is the worst-informed citizenry in the civilized world.
Most Americans get most of their "news" from television. The revolution in Egypt makes for great television because it offers so many startling images -- protesters scrambling aboard the tanks sent to suppress them, Molotov cocktails exploding against vehicles, dead bodies, bloodied faces, dramatic clouds of tear gas, evil muslims doing their nasty stuff on prayer rugs, military jets flying menacingly over Cairo. . . the producers must be wetting themselves with joy. Meanwhile, the talking heads and the analysts they bring in to answer their feeble questions, manage to get the story totally wrong even as the images flicker and fascinate in the background.
To correct just a few of their falsehoods: This is not an Islamic uprising. The protesters are from every walk of Egyptian life and every political and religious persuasion except blind support of the U.S. puppet dictator Mubarak. The Muslim Brotherhood is a small but extremely outspoken Islamist sect that has a stake, but not a controlling one, in the revolution. It is not the next al Qaeda, plotting to overthrow the United States by remote control from Cairo. The Egyptian revolution is spontaneous and grassroots; it is a not a creation of 'outside interests" funded by Hamas and Iran. The looters are not part of the revolution; when the police withdrew from public view they turned loose thugs and thieves to loot and plunder as a "lesson" about "anarchy" in the streets. The government did not shut down the internet and create a communications blackout, silencing cell phones and social media. The corporations that provide these services, such as Vodaphone, voluntarily shut them down at the behest of the Mubarak thuggery.
Corporations have an enormous stake in the Egyptian regime and are scrambling to cover their filthy rich asses against its now likely collapse. Boeing, via its Narus subsidiary in Sunnyvale, CA, equipped the dictatorship police with "Deep Packet Inspection (DPI)" hardware used by the regime to target and track dissenting communications over the Internet and mobile phones. The revolution spread far faster than the government's ability to track down and punish opposition figures, so the next step was to silence everything. The corporatocracy that rules America has its fingerprints all over the Mubarak dictatorship: one of its principal lobbyists in Washington is the Podesta group, consultant to giant corporations founded a quarter of a century ago by John Podesta, Bill Clinton's former chief of staff, and his brother, Tony; BAE Systems, General Dynamics, General Electric, Raytheon and Lockeed Martin prominently have sucked up billions of our tax dollars filtered through the Mubarak government to buy weapons and services to keep the despot in power.
You won't learn these things from Fox, CNN or network "news." You've got to monitor Al Jazeera and the BBC, and read the Guardian U.K. For a partial list of other sources worth consulting: http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2011/01/egypt-people-who-might-actually-know-what-theyre-talking-about.html.
* * *
The first producer of "60 Minutes" on CBS, Don Hewitt, and all of his reporters, were acolytes of Edward R. Murrow, the finest broadcast journalist ever to serve this country.
The "60 Minutes" broadcast last night, a hatchet job on Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, was a tragic disgrace to their legacy. Carefully editing more than six hours of interviews to reflect badly on Assange, it was a flagrant example of propaganda as journalism. A single scene serves as an indictment of the entire spectacle: the producers showed a snippet of the infamous "collateral murder" video -- but cut out the footage showing the murder of innocent people in a van.
The New York Observer's headline tells it best: "Who Put the 'BS' in CBS?"
* * *
Another example of the kind of journalism you don't get in this country, either on TV or in print, is the Guardian's clear, concise, brief analysis of our government's dilemma in Egypt, entitled, "White House Wobbles on Egyptian Tightrope."
"In the final analysis," it says, "The U.S. needs a friendly government in Cairo more than it needs a democratic one."
Throughout the Arab world, in response to events in Tunisia and Egypt, views of the common man expose the hypocrisy of that policy.
From Jordan comes the voice of Laith Shbillat:
"People want their freedom, people want their bread, people want to stop these lousy dictators from looting their countries. I'd follow anybody, I 'd follow Vladimir Lenin if he came and led me."
He quotes an Arab poet:
If one day a people desires to live,
Then Fate will answer their call.
And their night will then begin to fade,
And their chains break and fall."
Most Americans get most of their "news" from television. The revolution in Egypt makes for great television because it offers so many startling images -- protesters scrambling aboard the tanks sent to suppress them, Molotov cocktails exploding against vehicles, dead bodies, bloodied faces, dramatic clouds of tear gas, evil muslims doing their nasty stuff on prayer rugs, military jets flying menacingly over Cairo. . . the producers must be wetting themselves with joy. Meanwhile, the talking heads and the analysts they bring in to answer their feeble questions, manage to get the story totally wrong even as the images flicker and fascinate in the background.
To correct just a few of their falsehoods: This is not an Islamic uprising. The protesters are from every walk of Egyptian life and every political and religious persuasion except blind support of the U.S. puppet dictator Mubarak. The Muslim Brotherhood is a small but extremely outspoken Islamist sect that has a stake, but not a controlling one, in the revolution. It is not the next al Qaeda, plotting to overthrow the United States by remote control from Cairo. The Egyptian revolution is spontaneous and grassroots; it is a not a creation of 'outside interests" funded by Hamas and Iran. The looters are not part of the revolution; when the police withdrew from public view they turned loose thugs and thieves to loot and plunder as a "lesson" about "anarchy" in the streets. The government did not shut down the internet and create a communications blackout, silencing cell phones and social media. The corporations that provide these services, such as Vodaphone, voluntarily shut them down at the behest of the Mubarak thuggery.
Corporations have an enormous stake in the Egyptian regime and are scrambling to cover their filthy rich asses against its now likely collapse. Boeing, via its Narus subsidiary in Sunnyvale, CA, equipped the dictatorship police with "Deep Packet Inspection (DPI)" hardware used by the regime to target and track dissenting communications over the Internet and mobile phones. The revolution spread far faster than the government's ability to track down and punish opposition figures, so the next step was to silence everything. The corporatocracy that rules America has its fingerprints all over the Mubarak dictatorship: one of its principal lobbyists in Washington is the Podesta group, consultant to giant corporations founded a quarter of a century ago by John Podesta, Bill Clinton's former chief of staff, and his brother, Tony; BAE Systems, General Dynamics, General Electric, Raytheon and Lockeed Martin prominently have sucked up billions of our tax dollars filtered through the Mubarak government to buy weapons and services to keep the despot in power.
You won't learn these things from Fox, CNN or network "news." You've got to monitor Al Jazeera and the BBC, and read the Guardian U.K. For a partial list of other sources worth consulting: http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2011/01/egypt-people-who-might-actually-know-what-theyre-talking-about.html.
* * *
The first producer of "60 Minutes" on CBS, Don Hewitt, and all of his reporters, were acolytes of Edward R. Murrow, the finest broadcast journalist ever to serve this country.
The "60 Minutes" broadcast last night, a hatchet job on Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, was a tragic disgrace to their legacy. Carefully editing more than six hours of interviews to reflect badly on Assange, it was a flagrant example of propaganda as journalism. A single scene serves as an indictment of the entire spectacle: the producers showed a snippet of the infamous "collateral murder" video -- but cut out the footage showing the murder of innocent people in a van.
The New York Observer's headline tells it best: "Who Put the 'BS' in CBS?"
* * *
Another example of the kind of journalism you don't get in this country, either on TV or in print, is the Guardian's clear, concise, brief analysis of our government's dilemma in Egypt, entitled, "White House Wobbles on Egyptian Tightrope."
"In the final analysis," it says, "The U.S. needs a friendly government in Cairo more than it needs a democratic one."
Throughout the Arab world, in response to events in Tunisia and Egypt, views of the common man expose the hypocrisy of that policy.
From Jordan comes the voice of Laith Shbillat:
"People want their freedom, people want their bread, people want to stop these lousy dictators from looting their countries. I'd follow anybody, I 'd follow Vladimir Lenin if he came and led me."
He quotes an Arab poet:
If one day a people desires to live,
Then Fate will answer their call.
And their night will then begin to fade,
And their chains break and fall."
Saturday, January 29, 2011
'The Long Night of Misery Is Just Beginning'
The Jasmine Revolution has delivered yet another smack in the face to the myth of American moral leadership in the so-called Free World.
The common people of Egypt have taken to the streets to try to bring down the U.S.puppet government of Hosni Mubarak, whose increasingly cruel 30-year rule has been sustained by American dollars, weapons and corporations.
Egypt's massive protests were fueled by the successful revolution in Tunisia which ended the 23-year dictatorship of the American-backed tyrant, President Ben Ali. They come amid similar, if as yet smaller, protests against the repressive U.S.- backed regimes in Jordan, Algeria and Yemen.
When the truncheons, riot shields and tear gas of his corrupt police failed to contain the uprising in Cairo and other cities, Mubarak called in the army whose weaponry he received from his United States benefactors.
[UPDATE: The following is from an AP report Saturday:
His grip on power was further challenged Saturday as the military that he had
deployed to take back control of the streets showed few signs of suppressing
the unrest, and in several cases the army took the side of the protesters in the
capital and the northern port city of Alexandria.
In the most striking instance, members of the army joined with a crowd of
thousands of protesters in a pitched battle against Egyptian security police
officers defending the Interior Ministry on Saturday afternoon.
Protesters crouched behind armored trucks as they advanced on the ministry
building, hurling rocks and a few Molotov cocktails and setting abandoned cars
on fire. But the soldiers providing cover for the advancing protesters refused their
pleas to open fire on the security police, while the police defending the ministry
battered the protesters with tear gas, buckshot and rubber bullets. There were
pools of blood in the streets as protesters carried a number of wounded back out
of their ranks]
Our London correspondent, a former Woodrow Wilson fellow and an award-winning contemporary historian, notes:
"The Arab 'street' is at last rebelling against repressive, tyrannical regimes put in place and kept in place by the U.S. They must be shitting themselves at Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon. How to 'we' prop up these dictators while maintaining the pretense of supporting freedom, democracy, self-determination etc? And how to 'we' do so without making the mass of the Arab world hate us even more?
"One has to laugh or cry."
Indeed, the Oz world inside the Beltway reverberates these days with those very questions as insiders across the political spectrum offer their solutions -- be more like Bush, be less like Bush, send more aid, cut off aid, teach 'them' more about Democracy. . . .They treat these events, as usual, like moves on a great global chess board for which the U.S. Empire makes the rules and decides who wins and who loses. Nowhere in any of these solutions does any expert exhibit the slightest concern about the people under the heel of these regimes, the people in the streets.
An opposition leader, Mohammed El Baradei, flew in from exile to join them. "Egypt," he said, "is one big prison."
A victim of that prison, who had been raped and tortured by Mubarak's corrupt police, was in the streets, too. "I hope Mubarak dies tonight," he shouted.
Mubarak dismissed his cabinet but vowed to stay on himself as president and to appoint a new government today (Saturday). "My government is stepping down," a protester said, "but I am not. The long night of misery is just beginning."
Some see El Baradei as a potential savior of Egypt. He is a former UN official and won a Nobel Peace Prize for his opposition to the invasion of Iraq. But on the street his Peace Prize isn't worth a lot. "He should go and share a room with that asshole Ben Ali in his Jidah hotel," a protester said. El Baradei is thought of -- if he is thought of at all -- as a mere political opportunist by the people in the streets.
For three decades he has neither seen nor experienced their abject poverty. Eighty million people in Egypt are hopelessly poor, starving poor. Half the population lives on $2 a day or less. Ghada Shabander, a human rights activist, put it this way: "Egyptians are sick and tired of being corrupted, living on $51 a month. You have two choices: you either become a beggar or a thief. We are not beggars. And we do not want to become thieves." And someone who can afford a newspaper reads to them from a Cairo daily a report that one of Mubarak's top aides has fled the country with 97 suitcases stuffed with cash.
And America? America is the source of the tear gas canisters the police hurl into the protesting mobs. On the street, an Arab man with bruised face and bloody arms holds up a spent canister so that a western reporter can read its markings: "Made in the USA by Combined Tactical Systems, Jamestown, PA." Also made in the USA: the war gear of the troops surging today into Cairo, Suez, Alexandria, Luxor, Mahla and Manoura to put an end to the rising of the people.
Moral leadership, indeed.
The common people of Egypt have taken to the streets to try to bring down the U.S.puppet government of Hosni Mubarak, whose increasingly cruel 30-year rule has been sustained by American dollars, weapons and corporations.
Egypt's massive protests were fueled by the successful revolution in Tunisia which ended the 23-year dictatorship of the American-backed tyrant, President Ben Ali. They come amid similar, if as yet smaller, protests against the repressive U.S.- backed regimes in Jordan, Algeria and Yemen.
When the truncheons, riot shields and tear gas of his corrupt police failed to contain the uprising in Cairo and other cities, Mubarak called in the army whose weaponry he received from his United States benefactors.
[UPDATE: The following is from an AP report Saturday:
His grip on power was further challenged Saturday as the military that he had
deployed to take back control of the streets showed few signs of suppressing
the unrest, and in several cases the army took the side of the protesters in the
capital and the northern port city of Alexandria.
In the most striking instance, members of the army joined with a crowd of
thousands of protesters in a pitched battle against Egyptian security police
officers defending the Interior Ministry on Saturday afternoon.
Protesters crouched behind armored trucks as they advanced on the ministry
building, hurling rocks and a few Molotov cocktails and setting abandoned cars
on fire. But the soldiers providing cover for the advancing protesters refused their
pleas to open fire on the security police, while the police defending the ministry
battered the protesters with tear gas, buckshot and rubber bullets. There were
pools of blood in the streets as protesters carried a number of wounded back out
of their ranks]
Our London correspondent, a former Woodrow Wilson fellow and an award-winning contemporary historian, notes:
"The Arab 'street' is at last rebelling against repressive, tyrannical regimes put in place and kept in place by the U.S. They must be shitting themselves at Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon. How to 'we' prop up these dictators while maintaining the pretense of supporting freedom, democracy, self-determination etc? And how to 'we' do so without making the mass of the Arab world hate us even more?
"One has to laugh or cry."
Indeed, the Oz world inside the Beltway reverberates these days with those very questions as insiders across the political spectrum offer their solutions -- be more like Bush, be less like Bush, send more aid, cut off aid, teach 'them' more about Democracy. . . .They treat these events, as usual, like moves on a great global chess board for which the U.S. Empire makes the rules and decides who wins and who loses. Nowhere in any of these solutions does any expert exhibit the slightest concern about the people under the heel of these regimes, the people in the streets.
An opposition leader, Mohammed El Baradei, flew in from exile to join them. "Egypt," he said, "is one big prison."
A victim of that prison, who had been raped and tortured by Mubarak's corrupt police, was in the streets, too. "I hope Mubarak dies tonight," he shouted.
Mubarak dismissed his cabinet but vowed to stay on himself as president and to appoint a new government today (Saturday). "My government is stepping down," a protester said, "but I am not. The long night of misery is just beginning."
Some see El Baradei as a potential savior of Egypt. He is a former UN official and won a Nobel Peace Prize for his opposition to the invasion of Iraq. But on the street his Peace Prize isn't worth a lot. "He should go and share a room with that asshole Ben Ali in his Jidah hotel," a protester said. El Baradei is thought of -- if he is thought of at all -- as a mere political opportunist by the people in the streets.
For three decades he has neither seen nor experienced their abject poverty. Eighty million people in Egypt are hopelessly poor, starving poor. Half the population lives on $2 a day or less. Ghada Shabander, a human rights activist, put it this way: "Egyptians are sick and tired of being corrupted, living on $51 a month. You have two choices: you either become a beggar or a thief. We are not beggars. And we do not want to become thieves." And someone who can afford a newspaper reads to them from a Cairo daily a report that one of Mubarak's top aides has fled the country with 97 suitcases stuffed with cash.
And America? America is the source of the tear gas canisters the police hurl into the protesting mobs. On the street, an Arab man with bruised face and bloody arms holds up a spent canister so that a western reporter can read its markings: "Made in the USA by Combined Tactical Systems, Jamestown, PA." Also made in the USA: the war gear of the troops surging today into Cairo, Suez, Alexandria, Luxor, Mahla and Manoura to put an end to the rising of the people.
Moral leadership, indeed.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
How, Then, to Deal With This Beast We Feed?
The American empire, like all others before it, is doomed to fall. Acknowledgment of that fate was implicit in Dr. Franklin's warning that the democratic republic he helped form would endure only "if you can keep it." The founders divorced their new republic from the British empire and did not aspire to empire for themselves or their progeny. It is we, the people, who have failed to keep what we were given.
What course is open to us now? Chris Hedges, one of the few keepers of contemporary history who fully understands what we have done to ourselves, prescribes a course of growing civil disobedience. To follow this course we must be prepared, like Ghandi and King, to suffer incarceration, abuse and pain. But few of America's vast and privileged middle class are willing to endure such sufferings even if to restore democracy, even as their "class" disappears around them.
We live under an iron fist of little minds and great wealth. Edmund Burke warned Britannia that "great empire and little minds go ill together." In our conduct of public affairs, we Americans pay no mind to history. And so, as Bernard De Voto observed three quarters of a century ago, "American empire careens toward its unpredicted end."
The question, I guess, is, will the people of these United States take a hand in their own fate? And, if so, how will they go about it? When will they begin to assert themselves? What remains in their power to turn the course of the ship of state?
First, of course, there must be an awakening to what has already happened. The last great empire to fall, the Soviet Union, imploded when people under its yoke began to learn the truth about the modern world and reacted to it. We as a people have had constant access to truth and turned our backs to it. One important example: we have been shown the evidence that government alone can assure adequate health care for all of its citizens, yet collectively we choose to believe in death panels and an ogre called "socialized medicine" -- and to just let our fellow citizens die.
Corporations wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of Midas or Khan, and controlled by a relative handful of oligarchs, have revised the vocabulary of public discourse to the extent that we no longer speak plain English to or about one another. They own our fate because they own not just every aspect of our government but the very ways in which we communicate with one another.
Even if we, as a people, understood and renounced this; even if we, as a people, achieved a common will to overthrow the corporatocracy that oppresses us, how would we go about it? Has any peoples' revolution in history confronted such enormous wealth and power?
We, the people, have plenty of guns. But could an armed revolution succeed in today's United States any better than, say, the Hungarian revolution of 1956 against the might of the Soviet empire? Obviously not. Glocks with big magazines can kill our fellow citizens, but will not fell Exxon Mobile or Goldman Sachs.
Millions of Americans who want and need to work are jobless. Millions of baby boomers, when they reach retirement age, will have no social safety net to sustain them. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will vanish under the weight of a debt created by the empire's endless pursuit of war, mindlessly funded by a congress owned by the military-industrial corporatocracy.
Impoverished, lacking adequate medical care, ill-educated, self-deluded, short sighted, small-minded, blinded by prejudice and oppressed by oligarchy, how can a people rise up and take control of its own destiny?
Oligarchies, like kingdoms, may indeed be clay, as Antony remarked to Cleopatra. But this empire will not melt into the Tiber, nor will its wide arch of ranged empire simply fall.
It will be conquered by another, stronger, smarter empire, not by force of arms, but by force of economics. Or it will be toppled by its own people in a tsunami of return to self-governance.
But are the American people capable of that?
What course is open to us now? Chris Hedges, one of the few keepers of contemporary history who fully understands what we have done to ourselves, prescribes a course of growing civil disobedience. To follow this course we must be prepared, like Ghandi and King, to suffer incarceration, abuse and pain. But few of America's vast and privileged middle class are willing to endure such sufferings even if to restore democracy, even as their "class" disappears around them.
We live under an iron fist of little minds and great wealth. Edmund Burke warned Britannia that "great empire and little minds go ill together." In our conduct of public affairs, we Americans pay no mind to history. And so, as Bernard De Voto observed three quarters of a century ago, "American empire careens toward its unpredicted end."
The question, I guess, is, will the people of these United States take a hand in their own fate? And, if so, how will they go about it? When will they begin to assert themselves? What remains in their power to turn the course of the ship of state?
First, of course, there must be an awakening to what has already happened. The last great empire to fall, the Soviet Union, imploded when people under its yoke began to learn the truth about the modern world and reacted to it. We as a people have had constant access to truth and turned our backs to it. One important example: we have been shown the evidence that government alone can assure adequate health care for all of its citizens, yet collectively we choose to believe in death panels and an ogre called "socialized medicine" -- and to just let our fellow citizens die.
Corporations wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of Midas or Khan, and controlled by a relative handful of oligarchs, have revised the vocabulary of public discourse to the extent that we no longer speak plain English to or about one another. They own our fate because they own not just every aspect of our government but the very ways in which we communicate with one another.
Even if we, as a people, understood and renounced this; even if we, as a people, achieved a common will to overthrow the corporatocracy that oppresses us, how would we go about it? Has any peoples' revolution in history confronted such enormous wealth and power?
We, the people, have plenty of guns. But could an armed revolution succeed in today's United States any better than, say, the Hungarian revolution of 1956 against the might of the Soviet empire? Obviously not. Glocks with big magazines can kill our fellow citizens, but will not fell Exxon Mobile or Goldman Sachs.
Millions of Americans who want and need to work are jobless. Millions of baby boomers, when they reach retirement age, will have no social safety net to sustain them. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will vanish under the weight of a debt created by the empire's endless pursuit of war, mindlessly funded by a congress owned by the military-industrial corporatocracy.
Impoverished, lacking adequate medical care, ill-educated, self-deluded, short sighted, small-minded, blinded by prejudice and oppressed by oligarchy, how can a people rise up and take control of its own destiny?
Oligarchies, like kingdoms, may indeed be clay, as Antony remarked to Cleopatra. But this empire will not melt into the Tiber, nor will its wide arch of ranged empire simply fall.
It will be conquered by another, stronger, smarter empire, not by force of arms, but by force of economics. Or it will be toppled by its own people in a tsunami of return to self-governance.
But are the American people capable of that?
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Kimmy and Johnny and Dr. Kidglove and All the Good News
Kim Clisters, a really nice kid who plays pretty good tennis for a Momma, was struggling to put away the Polish girl after winning the first set easily in the Australian Open quarterfinals.
"The State of the Union is on! ," my soul mate and social planner said. "Turn it on."
I risked civil disobedience. I didn't know how this second set was going to end; I knew exactly the kind of bullshit Dr. Kidglove was delivering. More articulate, for sure, than George Bush's bullshit, but bullshit nonetheless. So I stayed tuned to the tennis.
One hates to be an uninformed citizen, however. I read Dr. Kidglove's text today.
The head of the United States of Goldman Sachs, Corporatocracy Inc. and the Empire of Endless War called John Boehner a working class hero and declared that we as Americans "share . . . a common creed." Has he repealed freedom of religion? He celebrated because "Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back, corporate profits are up." Golly Gee, happy are we who thanks to that roaring stock market have recouped nearly 10% of what we lost in the great recession!
Whoopee Dee, whee, whee, whee that corporations, which are really just people, just like you and me, are making bigger profits. I'll bet that Exxon person, who was the most profitable corporation in the history of money even before he (she?) became a person, will put another hundred million or so into the pockets of degree-holders willing to become change-denying climate science whores. Never mind whether they have any actual expertise in climate science.
Climate change -- which is merely the biggest threat to human health and welfare since the development of the atomic bomb -- didn't even rate a mention in Dr. Kidglove's corporate-sanitized oratorical Librium. He rhapodized about how the fishing has improved without mentioning that the dam was breaking upstream.
His ecstasy about corporate profit left no room to mention unemployment, either. The offricial rate in this country is close to 10 per cent, but the real rate is probably closer to 20 per cent if you count all the starving workers doing part-time jobs or those who have been unemployed so long that they've quit looking for work. Are the jobless still part of the union?
Dr. Kidglove patted himself and his Republican playmates on the back for preserving the tax cuts for the richest two per cent of us and celebrated that greatest of all national myths, The American Dream. Once upon a time home ownership was part of that dream.
Dr. Kidglove did not mention the bleak fact that in the year just ended, Americans purchased fewer new homes than in any year in the last half-century. Sales for all of 2010 totaled 321,000, a drop of 14.4 percent from the 375,000 homes sold in 2009.It was the fifth consecutive year that sales have declined after hitting record highs for the five previous years.
Nor did he mention the record rate of foreclosures -- many of them illegal -- on the homes that were sold during those record high years.
In Melbourne, Kimmy finally closed out that second set, thanks as much to her opponent's unforced errors as to her own good play.
But a win is a win is a win and she's a nice kid.
Makes ya feel good, ya know?
"The State of the Union is on! ," my soul mate and social planner said. "Turn it on."
I risked civil disobedience. I didn't know how this second set was going to end; I knew exactly the kind of bullshit Dr. Kidglove was delivering. More articulate, for sure, than George Bush's bullshit, but bullshit nonetheless. So I stayed tuned to the tennis.
One hates to be an uninformed citizen, however. I read Dr. Kidglove's text today.
The head of the United States of Goldman Sachs, Corporatocracy Inc. and the Empire of Endless War called John Boehner a working class hero and declared that we as Americans "share . . . a common creed." Has he repealed freedom of religion? He celebrated because "Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back, corporate profits are up." Golly Gee, happy are we who thanks to that roaring stock market have recouped nearly 10% of what we lost in the great recession!
Whoopee Dee, whee, whee, whee that corporations, which are really just people, just like you and me, are making bigger profits. I'll bet that Exxon person, who was the most profitable corporation in the history of money even before he (she?) became a person, will put another hundred million or so into the pockets of degree-holders willing to become change-denying climate science whores. Never mind whether they have any actual expertise in climate science.
Climate change -- which is merely the biggest threat to human health and welfare since the development of the atomic bomb -- didn't even rate a mention in Dr. Kidglove's corporate-sanitized oratorical Librium. He rhapodized about how the fishing has improved without mentioning that the dam was breaking upstream.
His ecstasy about corporate profit left no room to mention unemployment, either. The offricial rate in this country is close to 10 per cent, but the real rate is probably closer to 20 per cent if you count all the starving workers doing part-time jobs or those who have been unemployed so long that they've quit looking for work. Are the jobless still part of the union?
Dr. Kidglove patted himself and his Republican playmates on the back for preserving the tax cuts for the richest two per cent of us and celebrated that greatest of all national myths, The American Dream. Once upon a time home ownership was part of that dream.
Dr. Kidglove did not mention the bleak fact that in the year just ended, Americans purchased fewer new homes than in any year in the last half-century. Sales for all of 2010 totaled 321,000, a drop of 14.4 percent from the 375,000 homes sold in 2009.It was the fifth consecutive year that sales have declined after hitting record highs for the five previous years.
Nor did he mention the record rate of foreclosures -- many of them illegal -- on the homes that were sold during those record high years.
In Melbourne, Kimmy finally closed out that second set, thanks as much to her opponent's unforced errors as to her own good play.
But a win is a win is a win and she's a nice kid.
Makes ya feel good, ya know?
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
News Item: Clarence Says, "Oops!"
Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas said he had misunderstood the filing and reporting instructions when he failed for 13 years to properly disclose his wife's income on federal financial forms. The justice then formally amended each of his forms, spanning the years 1997-2009, the accurate contents of which are required from the justices under the Ethics in Government Act.
His acknowledgment came after Common Cause disclosed he had failed to report nearly $700,000 of his wife's income from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank at which Virginia Thomas worked from 2003 to 2007.
"It has come to my attention," Justice Thomas wrote Monday to federal officials, "that information regarding my spouse's employment required in Part III B of my financial disclosure report was inadvertently omitted due to a misunderstanding of the filing instructions."
There was no comment about his misunderstanding of the Fourteenth Amendment which resulted in his casting the decisive vote in the Citizens United case holding that corporations are people, and Constitutionally entitled to buy as many elections as they can afford.
His acknowledgment came after Common Cause disclosed he had failed to report nearly $700,000 of his wife's income from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank at which Virginia Thomas worked from 2003 to 2007.
"It has come to my attention," Justice Thomas wrote Monday to federal officials, "that information regarding my spouse's employment required in Part III B of my financial disclosure report was inadvertently omitted due to a misunderstanding of the filing instructions."
There was no comment about his misunderstanding of the Fourteenth Amendment which resulted in his casting the decisive vote in the Citizens United case holding that corporations are people, and Constitutionally entitled to buy as many elections as they can afford.
News Item: A Chicago Judge Goes Caroling
No go, no go, Emanuel,
I deem you are not mayoral.
You haven't lived in Chi a year
And so your name cannot appear.
We'll vote we'll vote, Emanuel
For others with less capital.
I deem you are not mayoral.
You haven't lived in Chi a year
And so your name cannot appear.
We'll vote we'll vote, Emanuel
For others with less capital.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Democracy to Corporatocracy. Truth to Mythology. Let Us Pray.
The American vox populi feeds on myth. It is intolerant of dissent and of uncomfortable truths.
This is why the democracy of the Founding Fathers has vanished unnoticed and unlamented. Soon, truth of any kind will vanish as well.
Illicit governments historically thrived only for as long as they could prevent truth from reaching the ears and minds of their citizens. It was not the actor Reagan's playing the role of Joshua in front of the Berlin Wall that brought down the Soviet Union. It was the emerging communications technology that could leap over the Iron Curtain and beam truth directly to the people of the Soviet enislement. The most myth-dependent of Americans cherish the belief that Reagan blew the trumpet that made the walls come tumblin' down.
But the Reagan myth's parallels with the Biblical myth of Jericho are not mere coincidence; many of the most firmly rooted myths in America's political culture spring from the country's religiosity. Others, like the myth of American exceptionalism, are rooted in the tragically flawed narrative of American history that has traditionally been taught in our schools, airbrushing away the human flaws of our white male heroes, whitewashing black slavery, glorifying the brutal suppression of the original Americans and transmogrifying the bloated American war machine into an instrument of freedom.
Inevitably such childish addiction to myth -- like carrying a belief in Santa Clause, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny into adulthood -- produces an emotionally-crippled populace incapable of accepting and dealing with reality.
And so millions still deny the corporatocracy America has become, even after the Supreme Court Gang of Five, in collusion with the extraction Midases named Koch, gave it official sanction with the Citizens United decision.
And millions look the other way -- indeed, even cheer their own derogation -- as our illicit government slowly strips us of access to truth. It is a government increasingly controlled by those who deny science such as anthropogenic global climate change or human evolution; who are sustained in office by instilling fear in the citizenry; who sell their souls to corporations, especially those corporations that suck obscene profits from our perpetual war machine; and, most of all, who pluck the national harp strings of our desperate belief in myths.
Little by little, truth-tellers are being driven from the temples of big-corporation journalism. Even NPR bowed to corporate pressure and tried to silence Bill Moyers. More and more of our mainstream media are controlled by fewer and fewer of the richest of corporate profiteers. The ink had barely dried on the government's blessing of the obscene Comcast-NBC union when Keith Olberman's head rolled. He was the first and for years the only broadcast antidote to the lies and propaganda of Fox and the rest of the Murdoch media empire.
Seekers after truth who had time and patience could always venture into the world wide web, filter the enormous ocean of information, good and bad, out there, and accumulate grains of truth.
Now the FCC, the illicit government's enfeebled watchdog over the communications industry, has sanctioned the "right" of giants like Murdoch and Comcast-NBC to refuse to open the gates of cyberspace to information they do not like. With deliberate speed, with relentless determination, enormously rich and powerful corporations are squeezing truth out of the public domain.
Too soon, truth, like democracy, will have vanished from our bleak landscape. Vox populi will be left with only myth to feed upon.
Will they then invoke a prophetic phrase from a great repository of their own mythology? "Forgive them, Father," it goes, "for they know not what they do."
This is why the democracy of the Founding Fathers has vanished unnoticed and unlamented. Soon, truth of any kind will vanish as well.
Illicit governments historically thrived only for as long as they could prevent truth from reaching the ears and minds of their citizens. It was not the actor Reagan's playing the role of Joshua in front of the Berlin Wall that brought down the Soviet Union. It was the emerging communications technology that could leap over the Iron Curtain and beam truth directly to the people of the Soviet enislement. The most myth-dependent of Americans cherish the belief that Reagan blew the trumpet that made the walls come tumblin' down.
But the Reagan myth's parallels with the Biblical myth of Jericho are not mere coincidence; many of the most firmly rooted myths in America's political culture spring from the country's religiosity. Others, like the myth of American exceptionalism, are rooted in the tragically flawed narrative of American history that has traditionally been taught in our schools, airbrushing away the human flaws of our white male heroes, whitewashing black slavery, glorifying the brutal suppression of the original Americans and transmogrifying the bloated American war machine into an instrument of freedom.
Inevitably such childish addiction to myth -- like carrying a belief in Santa Clause, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny into adulthood -- produces an emotionally-crippled populace incapable of accepting and dealing with reality.
And so millions still deny the corporatocracy America has become, even after the Supreme Court Gang of Five, in collusion with the extraction Midases named Koch, gave it official sanction with the Citizens United decision.
And millions look the other way -- indeed, even cheer their own derogation -- as our illicit government slowly strips us of access to truth. It is a government increasingly controlled by those who deny science such as anthropogenic global climate change or human evolution; who are sustained in office by instilling fear in the citizenry; who sell their souls to corporations, especially those corporations that suck obscene profits from our perpetual war machine; and, most of all, who pluck the national harp strings of our desperate belief in myths.
Little by little, truth-tellers are being driven from the temples of big-corporation journalism. Even NPR bowed to corporate pressure and tried to silence Bill Moyers. More and more of our mainstream media are controlled by fewer and fewer of the richest of corporate profiteers. The ink had barely dried on the government's blessing of the obscene Comcast-NBC union when Keith Olberman's head rolled. He was the first and for years the only broadcast antidote to the lies and propaganda of Fox and the rest of the Murdoch media empire.
Seekers after truth who had time and patience could always venture into the world wide web, filter the enormous ocean of information, good and bad, out there, and accumulate grains of truth.
Now the FCC, the illicit government's enfeebled watchdog over the communications industry, has sanctioned the "right" of giants like Murdoch and Comcast-NBC to refuse to open the gates of cyberspace to information they do not like. With deliberate speed, with relentless determination, enormously rich and powerful corporations are squeezing truth out of the public domain.
Too soon, truth, like democracy, will have vanished from our bleak landscape. Vox populi will be left with only myth to feed upon.
Will they then invoke a prophetic phrase from a great repository of their own mythology? "Forgive them, Father," it goes, "for they know not what they do."
Friday, January 21, 2011
If Spunk Were Eggs, We'd All Eat Omelets
Say this for the handful of true progressives in American political life: they've got spunk.
It's a pity that the likes of Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich have no option in party affiliation except to align themselves with the gutless Milquetoasts who call themselves Democrats. But such is political reality in the two-party system of the former democracy called the United States. They have to lie down with dogs and accept fleas like the so-called health care reform act, which passed only after it was so modified that it merely perpetuates the crimes it set out to reform. Dean and Kucinich ultimately supported it because, for a complicated set of reasons, they perceived it as slightly better than nothing at all.
In his working class district of Ohio, Kucinich has retained his seat in Congress in successive elections despite enormous sums of money spent by the Republicans in vain efforts to buy enough votes to oust him. But if they failed at the ballot box, the Republicans now will get rid of Kucinich by the massive scam called redistricting.
Under the law, each state gains or loses seats every ten years according to its new population as determined by the U.S. Census. Because Ohio lost population, it is required to redraw its Congressional districts later this year.
Here's what Kucinich said in a recent letter to constituents:
My district might be eliminated. We need to begin to work now to prepare for what is sure to be a major effort to silence your voice. As you know, my work in Congress has never been about me. It's about the hopes and aspirations of the people of the 10th district and the people of our Nation.
I don't know where my district will be. But I owe it to you and to all those who have ever supported me to not sit idly while questions are being raised in every major media outlet about whether I will be forced out of Congress by redistricting. I will not let any special interests force me out. Your support will ensure that the debate - on issues as important as ending the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, implementing single-payer healthcare, and remaking our economy for Main Street not Wall Street - will continue.
I'm not going to let our voices and our movement be abolished by the stroke of a pen. There's too much at stake. This is the time to stand up and speak out. And based on the support and responses I've seen so far, I know you're right there with me.
Good luck, Dennis. Hell, I remember the afternoon a friend plunked down two bucks at the parimutuel window in Liberty Bell park for a "win" ticket on a 1,000-to-one shot, the longest odds in the history of the venue. The nag won and my friend took his bride out to dinner at Le Bec Fin.
And here's Dean:
The question is still what kind of country do we want to live in?
Republicans often play to the worst impulses in human nature and separate people from each other, scapegoating minority groups and dismantling our community support systems. We have a better answer.
We know what we believe.
We believe in community. We care about our neighbors and we help each other. We can provide a bright future to our children with a quality education and we can provide a secure retirement free from poverty and dependence for our grandparents. And we can accomplish it within a reasonable budget so we don't leave a burden of debt on the next generation. Democrats are responsible and balance budgets. Democrats lift up the community and make sure that everyone has a chance for a future.
We believe in security. We will foster strong partnerships with other nations to ensure the secure and safe prosperity for all. We will reduce our dependence on resources that make us vulnerable to attack. We will use our American ingenuity to strengthen our own economy and our environment. We won't start wars of choice and then perpetuate them to keep the military contractors in business. We will fund schools and investment in green jobs over funding bombers and missile defense our military doesn't need or even want.
We believe in liberty. We respect every American's right to practice their own religion and to live a life free from bigotry, abuse, and harassment. We will fight discrimination and deliver on the promise of equality for all Americans. We believe that no one, not multinational corporations nor the government, has the right to your personal information to keep tabs on you for profit or unwarranted policing.
We believe in community, security and liberty and we will never back down.
Truly, they won't quit. But how often do thousand-to-one shots win? Don't make your dinner reservations yet.
It's a pity that the likes of Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich have no option in party affiliation except to align themselves with the gutless Milquetoasts who call themselves Democrats. But such is political reality in the two-party system of the former democracy called the United States. They have to lie down with dogs and accept fleas like the so-called health care reform act, which passed only after it was so modified that it merely perpetuates the crimes it set out to reform. Dean and Kucinich ultimately supported it because, for a complicated set of reasons, they perceived it as slightly better than nothing at all.
In his working class district of Ohio, Kucinich has retained his seat in Congress in successive elections despite enormous sums of money spent by the Republicans in vain efforts to buy enough votes to oust him. But if they failed at the ballot box, the Republicans now will get rid of Kucinich by the massive scam called redistricting.
Under the law, each state gains or loses seats every ten years according to its new population as determined by the U.S. Census. Because Ohio lost population, it is required to redraw its Congressional districts later this year.
Here's what Kucinich said in a recent letter to constituents:
My district might be eliminated. We need to begin to work now to prepare for what is sure to be a major effort to silence your voice. As you know, my work in Congress has never been about me. It's about the hopes and aspirations of the people of the 10th district and the people of our Nation.
I don't know where my district will be. But I owe it to you and to all those who have ever supported me to not sit idly while questions are being raised in every major media outlet about whether I will be forced out of Congress by redistricting. I will not let any special interests force me out. Your support will ensure that the debate - on issues as important as ending the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, implementing single-payer healthcare, and remaking our economy for Main Street not Wall Street - will continue.
I'm not going to let our voices and our movement be abolished by the stroke of a pen. There's too much at stake. This is the time to stand up and speak out. And based on the support and responses I've seen so far, I know you're right there with me.
Good luck, Dennis. Hell, I remember the afternoon a friend plunked down two bucks at the parimutuel window in Liberty Bell park for a "win" ticket on a 1,000-to-one shot, the longest odds in the history of the venue. The nag won and my friend took his bride out to dinner at Le Bec Fin.
And here's Dean:
The question is still what kind of country do we want to live in?
Republicans often play to the worst impulses in human nature and separate people from each other, scapegoating minority groups and dismantling our community support systems. We have a better answer.
We know what we believe.
We believe in community. We care about our neighbors and we help each other. We can provide a bright future to our children with a quality education and we can provide a secure retirement free from poverty and dependence for our grandparents. And we can accomplish it within a reasonable budget so we don't leave a burden of debt on the next generation. Democrats are responsible and balance budgets. Democrats lift up the community and make sure that everyone has a chance for a future.
We believe in security. We will foster strong partnerships with other nations to ensure the secure and safe prosperity for all. We will reduce our dependence on resources that make us vulnerable to attack. We will use our American ingenuity to strengthen our own economy and our environment. We won't start wars of choice and then perpetuate them to keep the military contractors in business. We will fund schools and investment in green jobs over funding bombers and missile defense our military doesn't need or even want.
We believe in liberty. We respect every American's right to practice their own religion and to live a life free from bigotry, abuse, and harassment. We will fight discrimination and deliver on the promise of equality for all Americans. We believe that no one, not multinational corporations nor the government, has the right to your personal information to keep tabs on you for profit or unwarranted policing.
We believe in community, security and liberty and we will never back down.
Truly, they won't quit. But how often do thousand-to-one shots win? Don't make your dinner reservations yet.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Out of the Phone Booth and into Cyberspace
Going to lunch with the late Tad Szulc was better than going to the theater.
Tad and I were colleagues at the New York Times Washington Bureau during the Nixon administration. Between them, Tad and the late Pete Willett of United Press (who is another story entirely) knew every single person in the world who was in any way worth knowing, or so it seemed.
Tad was born in Czechoslovakia, lived all over the world, and spoke half a dozen or more languages fluently. Frequently we would lunch at a restaurant favored by the embassy crowd. Tad would scan the room, taking note of who was lunching with whom, then signal the Captain to take us to his personal table. From there he would decide which tables to visit between lunch and desert. Like a devoted puppy, I would follow him on his table-hopping rounds, watching him converse in most of the languages he commanded, with diplomats whose names were the fodder of headlines all over the world. Over desert, he'd tell me what he'd heard and we'd talk about the stories to pursue.
We'd also lunch at out-of-the-way little restaurants that only Tad and a select few other citizens of the world knew about, where the food was recherché and the lighting was dim. En route to one of these one day, Tad paused outside a downtown DC drugstore and said, "Wait here just a moment for me, please, Tomas, I've got to go in and pick up some secret documents." He entered the store, chose a certain phone booth, went inside and emerged with a manilla envelope, whose contents he scrutinized in the dim light of the restaurant.
It contained the bill of lading of a ship called the Padma and it gave Tad a worldwide scoop on how the CIA was secretly violating our own government's ban by shipping illegal arms to Pakistan.
Tad was a master of a commonplace journalistic skill back in those days: cultivation of sources who could provide the classified documents that penetrated the veil of secrecy behind which governments like to operate. It was because that skill is so scarce among today's so-called journalists, who see themselves as stenographers for government propagandists, that somebody had to begin doing what Julian Assange does.
As our government has intensified its campaign to demonize the founder of WikiLeaks, the stenographers of our mainstream media have willingly turned against a man whose efforts they once supported and now offer him up for sacrifice in the name of national security.
"Journalistic" agencies like the National Press Club, the Overseas Press Club (whose only redeeming social value is that it once employed a bartender who made the world's finest martini), and the AP (which has no redeeming social value) have agonized, reassessed and concluded that Assange isn't really a journalist and so is not entitled to the First Amendment protection that real journalists enjoy.
Among the canards these mainstreamers propagate is this: Assange "recklessly" endangers people and policies by "willy-nilly" (Real Journalist and Stenographer Bob Woodward's phrase) making public certain of the 250,000 secret cables that have produced so many major news stories in the last two months.
What the blood-lusters overlook is the real manner in which the once-secret cables, documents and videos become public. Assange simply plays the role of whomever left that manilla envelope taped under the seat of the drug store phone booth for Tad Szulc to find. Assange obtains the documents, and makes them available to a select few prestigious journalistic institutions like our New York Times, the UK's Guardian, Germany's Der Spiegel, etc. They perform Tad's journalistic function, deciding what to publish, verifying it, checking ancillary facts, providing context, soliciting the usual denials by the usual suspects, etc. Only after the journalists have finished their work and made the material public does WikiLeaks, virtually simultaneously, and with the journalists' redactions and emendings, post the same information on its own site.
And so the very methods by which WikiLeaks material becomes public has been falsified by the mainstreamers who now decry Assange's "treachery."
The question is not and never has been whether Assange is a "journalist." What he does is an essential part of the process, usually called journalism, by which citizens are given access to information to which they are entitled under the First Amendment.
Back in Tad's day, the Nixon crowd went berserk when one of their secrets got out, putting me and Tad and Neil Sheehan and a bunch of our colleagues on Tricky Dick's infamous "Enemies' List." As Thomas Paine noted, "Only error, and never truth, shrinks from free inquiry."
Many of the loudest callers for Assange's head to roll are themselves not only non-journalists, but also apologists for corrupt government officials and purveyors of bias and hate. What's really needed is for Americans to become smart enough to quit listening to them. One way for that to happen is for Americans to have access to the very kinds of information that pass through WikiLeaks and into the public domain.
Another word for it is "truth."
Tad and I were colleagues at the New York Times Washington Bureau during the Nixon administration. Between them, Tad and the late Pete Willett of United Press (who is another story entirely) knew every single person in the world who was in any way worth knowing, or so it seemed.
Tad was born in Czechoslovakia, lived all over the world, and spoke half a dozen or more languages fluently. Frequently we would lunch at a restaurant favored by the embassy crowd. Tad would scan the room, taking note of who was lunching with whom, then signal the Captain to take us to his personal table. From there he would decide which tables to visit between lunch and desert. Like a devoted puppy, I would follow him on his table-hopping rounds, watching him converse in most of the languages he commanded, with diplomats whose names were the fodder of headlines all over the world. Over desert, he'd tell me what he'd heard and we'd talk about the stories to pursue.
We'd also lunch at out-of-the-way little restaurants that only Tad and a select few other citizens of the world knew about, where the food was recherché and the lighting was dim. En route to one of these one day, Tad paused outside a downtown DC drugstore and said, "Wait here just a moment for me, please, Tomas, I've got to go in and pick up some secret documents." He entered the store, chose a certain phone booth, went inside and emerged with a manilla envelope, whose contents he scrutinized in the dim light of the restaurant.
It contained the bill of lading of a ship called the Padma and it gave Tad a worldwide scoop on how the CIA was secretly violating our own government's ban by shipping illegal arms to Pakistan.
Tad was a master of a commonplace journalistic skill back in those days: cultivation of sources who could provide the classified documents that penetrated the veil of secrecy behind which governments like to operate. It was because that skill is so scarce among today's so-called journalists, who see themselves as stenographers for government propagandists, that somebody had to begin doing what Julian Assange does.
As our government has intensified its campaign to demonize the founder of WikiLeaks, the stenographers of our mainstream media have willingly turned against a man whose efforts they once supported and now offer him up for sacrifice in the name of national security.
"Journalistic" agencies like the National Press Club, the Overseas Press Club (whose only redeeming social value is that it once employed a bartender who made the world's finest martini), and the AP (which has no redeeming social value) have agonized, reassessed and concluded that Assange isn't really a journalist and so is not entitled to the First Amendment protection that real journalists enjoy.
Among the canards these mainstreamers propagate is this: Assange "recklessly" endangers people and policies by "willy-nilly" (Real Journalist and Stenographer Bob Woodward's phrase) making public certain of the 250,000 secret cables that have produced so many major news stories in the last two months.
What the blood-lusters overlook is the real manner in which the once-secret cables, documents and videos become public. Assange simply plays the role of whomever left that manilla envelope taped under the seat of the drug store phone booth for Tad Szulc to find. Assange obtains the documents, and makes them available to a select few prestigious journalistic institutions like our New York Times, the UK's Guardian, Germany's Der Spiegel, etc. They perform Tad's journalistic function, deciding what to publish, verifying it, checking ancillary facts, providing context, soliciting the usual denials by the usual suspects, etc. Only after the journalists have finished their work and made the material public does WikiLeaks, virtually simultaneously, and with the journalists' redactions and emendings, post the same information on its own site.
And so the very methods by which WikiLeaks material becomes public has been falsified by the mainstreamers who now decry Assange's "treachery."
The question is not and never has been whether Assange is a "journalist." What he does is an essential part of the process, usually called journalism, by which citizens are given access to information to which they are entitled under the First Amendment.
Back in Tad's day, the Nixon crowd went berserk when one of their secrets got out, putting me and Tad and Neil Sheehan and a bunch of our colleagues on Tricky Dick's infamous "Enemies' List." As Thomas Paine noted, "Only error, and never truth, shrinks from free inquiry."
Many of the loudest callers for Assange's head to roll are themselves not only non-journalists, but also apologists for corrupt government officials and purveyors of bias and hate. What's really needed is for Americans to become smart enough to quit listening to them. One way for that to happen is for Americans to have access to the very kinds of information that pass through WikiLeaks and into the public domain.
Another word for it is "truth."
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