The Existentialist Corral

AA Exposes Bush's 'Big Lie': Flight 11 DID NOT FLY on 911!

2009-07-02T04:42:00.000-07:00

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

American Airlines itself is the source for information that AA Flights 11 (North Tower) and 77 (Pentagon) did not fly on 911. These flights are critical to the the government's crumbling cover up! Without those flights, Bush and his murderous co-conspirators will have to revise the big lie. They will have to concoct yet another cover story from the ground up! A cover up is on the brink of collapse when those guilty of capital crimes and high treason either turn on one another or are forced to revise the lie!

If neither flight was in the air as American Airlines itself has so stated, then numerous 'official versions' of the 'official conspiracy theory' are all a pack of malicious lies. That includes almost every statement made by Bush. It is, in my opinion, probable cause to indict Bush and his co-conspirators for the crimes of mass murder and high treason.

WikiScanner discovered that American Airlines changed their Wikipedia entry to state that Flights 11 and 77 did not fly on 9/11. The original entry was as follows:

Two American Airlines aircraft were hijacked and crashed during the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack: American Airlines Flight 77 (a Boeing 757) and American Airlines Flight 11 (a Boeing 767).

New entry is as follows and includes the bolded text below:

Two American Airlines aircraft were hijacked and crashed during the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack: Flight 77 (a Boeing 757) and Flight 11 (a Boeing 767).

Although these flights were daily departures before and a month after September 11, 2001. Neither flight 11 nor 77 were scheduled on September 11, 2001. The records kept by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (www.bts.gov/gis/) do not list either flight that day.

--Wikipedia

To make the point: the source for these change is American Airlines by making changes to Wikipedia. The 'story' is not Wiki. The story is not about Wiki. The story is about how AA 'corrected' a wiki entry. The story is about the fact that the evidence that Flights 11 and 77 were not flying on 911 comes from American Airlines itself.

According to a Freedom of Information Act reply from the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS), the last known pre-9/11 flights for three of the four aircraft involved in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 took place in December, 2000, nine months before the attacks, while no pre-9/11 final flight information was provided for American Airlines flight 77 (N644AA).

However, a discovered searchable online BTS database produces the following search results for three of the four 9/11 aircraft on September 10, 2001:

AA 11 departs San Francisco (SFO): AA 09/10/2001 0198 (flight number) N334AA (tail number) BOS (destination) 22:04 (wheels-off time)

UA 175 departs San Francisco (SFO): UA 09/10/2001 0170 (flight number) N612UA (tail number) BOS (destination) 13:44 (wheels-off time)

UA 93 departs San Francisco (SFO): UA 09/10/2001 0078 (flight number) N591UA (tail number) EWR (destination) 23:15 (wheels-off time)
--911 Blogger, UPDATE: U.S. BTS FOIA Records For 9/11 Planes Differ From BTS Online Database [The records were obtained by Adrian Monaghan]

Anyone trying to prove that Flights 77 and 11 were not flying on 911 would have to verify that proposition through authoritative sources that could confirm it. The question is raised: how do we know who made the changes to Wiki? Everyone logged on to the internet does so from an IP address. In this case, the IP is that of American Airlines. It's traceable.

My own WHOIS lookup as well as a Google search of the IP address proves conclusively that it was --indeed --American Airlines itself that made the change. It is American Airlines --by way of Wiki --that has said that neither Flight 11 nor Flight 77 were in the air that day.

Therefore, the Bush theory of 911 is a deliberate lie.

My look up returned the following:

WHOIS - 144.9.8.21

Location: United States [City: Ft. Worth, Texas]


OrgName:    American Airlines Incorporated
OrgID:      AMERIC-112
Address:    P.O.Box 619616
Address:    MD 5308
City:       DFW Airport
StateProv:  TX
PostalCode: 75261
Country:    US

NetRange:   144.9.0.0 - 144.9.255.255
CIDR:       144.9.0.0/16
NetName:    AANET
NetHandle:  NET-144-9-0-0-1
Parent:     NET-144-0-0-0-0
NetType:    Direct Assignment
NameServer: DNS-P1.SABRE.COM
NameServer: DNS-P2.SABRE.COM
NameServer: DNS-P3.SABRE.COM
NameServer: DNS-P4.SABRE.COM
Comment:
RegDate:    1990-10-31
Updated:    2002-06-27

RTechHandle: OG60-ARIN
RTechName:   Gelbrich, Orf
RTechPhone:  +1-817-931-3145
RTechEmail:  ************@aa.com

OrgTechHandle: ZW72-ARIN
OrgTechName:   WARIS, ZISHAN
OrgTechPhone:  +1-817-967-1242
OrgTechEmail:  ************@aa.com

# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2008-06-29 19:10
# Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN's WHOIS database.

This is not the first major hole to be discovered. The many lies (many referenced in previous EC articles; see links below) are probable cause to begin a Federal Grand Jury investigation of George W. Bush's role in 911. Bush should be compelled by subpoena and Federal Marshals to testify under oath before an independent Federal Grand Jury. The AA revelations demand it!

Bush lies have the effect of covering up the truth, protecting the guilty and obstructing justice. The lies are an insult to the families of 911 victims, victims who are dishonored by the continuing cover-up! Bush's lies aggravate the crimes of mass murder, terrorism and high treason for which the penalty must surely be death.

911 did not happen as we have been told.

Bushco's 'official conspiracies theory' of 911 is full of holes. Flights 11 and 77 are essential ingredients in the 'official conspiracy theory' of 911. That AA claims that neither 11 nor 77 were in the air that day sinks Bush's theory. More importantly, however, it should get him an 'invitation' to appear before a Federal Grand Jury to answers charges that he betrayed his nation and waged war upon the people. Clearly --the official theory is a lie, an intentional cover-up. Cover-ups imply guilt! Otherwise --what is there to cover up? The official 'lie' goes like this:

At 8:20, Flight 11 stopped transmitting its transponder signal, and veered northward and departed dramatically from the westward heading of its planned route. The controllers concluded that the plane had probably been hijacked. 4 5 At 8:24, the following transmission was reportedly received from Flight 11: We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you'll be okay .. we are returning to the airport.
..Nobody move. Everything will be okay. If you try to make any moves, you'll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet. Nobody move please we are going back to the airport .. don't try to make any stupid moves. 6
Neither of the pilots pressed the distress call button. At 8:28 controllers reportedly watched the plane make a 100-degree turn toward the south. 7 Presumably, Flight 11 continued south along the Hudson River until it reached the World Trade Center, though documentation of this is sparse given the lack of public information.
According to NORAD's September 18 timeline, the FAA did not notify NORAD of the signs that Flight 11 was hijacked until 8:40, 25 minutes after the first signs of trouble. 8
--Flight 11, The First Jet Commandeered on September 11th, 911 Research

Elsewhere, 911 Research stats: "there is no evidence for the assertions by some people... that the North Tower was hit by something other than Flight 11". But, if 11 were not in the air as claimed by AA itself, it could not have struck the towers.

The house of cards collapses.

Assertions that Flight 11 struck the North Tower that are --therefore -- utterly baseless, if not a deliberate and criminal lie!

If neither Flight 11 or 77 was in the air that day, then nothing in the 'official statements' with regard to the Twin Towers or the Pentagon is true.

If flights 11 or 77 did not fly on 911, officialdom must come up with another explanation to explain the towers' falls.

If flights 11 or 77 did not crash into either the tower or the Pentagon, then the official theory must be discarded.

While it is not good news for Bush, it is consistent with the fact that no wreckage traceable to a 757 was ever found at the Pentagon.

Moreover, photos of an engine rotor appear to depict an engine used in the Global Hawk, a payload carrying missile that was, according to Britain's International Television News, flown from the US to Australia completely by remote control. "A robot plane has made aviation history by becoming the first unmanned aircraft to fly across the Pacific Ocean."

Britain's ITN continued: "The Global Hawk, a jet-powered aircraft with a wingspan equivalent to a Boeing 737, flew from Edwards Air Force Base in California and landed late on Monday at the Royal Australian Air Force base at Edinburgh, in South Australia state... It flies along a pre-programmed flight path, but a pilot monitors the aircraft during its flight via a sensor suite which provides infra-red and visual images."

ITN quoted Australian Global Hawk manager Rod Smith: '"The aircraft essentially flies itself, right t from takeoff, right through to landing, and even taxiing off the runway."'

The Global Hawk is a much better candidate for what Rumsfeld called '...the missile that struck this building' than a 757. Here's what you need to know about the Pentagon.

Only minutes after the strike, [see pic above] there is no sign of an airliner at all!!
No wreckage traceable to a 757 was ever recovered.
Only ONE engine rotor (seen in photos) was recovered! This rotor is about one third the diameter of a 757 rotor.
A 757 has two rotors, each of which are nearly three times the size of the SINGLE rotor located at the Pentagon
Engine rotors are made of a Steel/Titanium alloy to withstand high temps inside jet engines.
Flight 77 could not have crashed into the Pentagon

The time has come to consign Bush's official conspiracy theory to the dust bin of history. The theory is not even a good cover story, surviving for as long as it did only because millions of good Americans wanted to believe it. Millions of otherwise good Americans did not wish to believe the very, very worst about an administration that had claimed to represent and defend our interests. Millions of Americans chose to believe that the government was still responsible to us, that the government was still the defender of Democracy as we are always taught in school.

Below: a US Global Hawk painted to look like an AA airliner. There is really no way to prove that this is NOT the very Global Hawk that would later leave behind its engine rotor on the Pentagon lawn.

Recognizing lies for what they are is a part of the process of growing up! America, it is time to grow up! It is time to confront this heinous pack of lies! It is time to insist that the Obama administration begin a REAL investigation. It is time to insist that a Federal Grand Jury investigate every count of high treason, mass murder and domestic terrorism that was perpetrated upon the people of the US by the Bush administration, collaborators in the Pentagon, K-Street, the Congress and the leadership of the Republican party, Marvin Bush's 'Securacom', Larry Silverstein, General Myers, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and, of course, George W. Bush who was, at the time, the 'Commander-in-Chief' and ultimately responsible for the orders given the US military to 'stand down'.

By Donald Rumsfeld's own admission, he was unaware of any threats to the Pentagon -- the building where he was located during the September 11th attacks -- until an aircraft crashed into the side of it, and he ran out "into the smoke" to see if it might be a "A bomb? I had no idea." (ABC News This Week, Interview 9/16/01).
Well, that's a pretty tall tale by any standard. The New York Times reported that by 8:13am, the FAA was aware of the first hijacking out of Boston. The Pentagon explosion, which Donald Rumsfeld claimed he had "no idea," did not occur until approximately 9:37am, nearly an hour and a half later, this after two of the tallest buildings in the world were devastated. Note that a plane hijacked out of Boston can reach Washington D.C. as easily as it can reach New York City.
It was widely reported that Pentagon personnel were indeed aware of the threats to their security, and they took security measures on that morning. But not the "Secretary of Defense." Why should the man charged with defending the United States of America concern himself with hijacked aircraft?
There is a set of procedures for responding to hijackings. In particular, these procedures were changed on June 1, 2001 while Rumsfeld was in power as our Secretary of Defense, in a document called: "CHAIRMAN OF THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF INSTRUCTION, J-3 CJCSI 3610.01A"

The Global Hawk

The video asks: "Was 911 a Conspiracy?" That is NOT the question. Even Bushco claims that it was a conspiracy, a conspiracy of 19 Arab Hijackers who could not possibly have pulled it off. It is, frankly, a stupid scenario! Without the shock and awe campaign, no one would have believed it. The questions, rather, are which conspiracy and who were the conspirators? It was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's character Sherlock Holmes who said that when you have eliminated the impossible what remains however improbable MUST be the truth!

ADDENDUM:

There has been a spate of fallacious comments of the form: "...uh...what happened the passengers, dude?". A few points:

the 'question' is, in fact, an implied statement and ASSUMES there were flights! In a court, it would be said that the statement 'assumes facts NOT in evidence'!
absence of evidence is not evidence in support of anything, let alone Bush's idiotic, fallacious and pernicious lie! ! The 'absence of bodies' is not evidence of a crash of any sort; only the presence of bodies traceable to the alleged flights are evidence supporting Bush's unsupportable thoery.

There is --in fact --NO forensic evidence of any sort that supports the Bushco official theory of 911. There is no evidence whatsoever that there were --at any time --any Arabs of any sort (terrorist or otherwise) on board Flight 77, a flight for which there is no evidence whatsoever.

The AFIP suggest these numbers; 189 killed, 125 worked at the Pentagon and 64 were "passengers" on the plane. The AA list only had 56 and the list just obtained has 58. They did not explain how they were able to tell "victims" bodies from "hijacker" bodies. In fact, from the beginning NO explanation has been given for the extra five suggested in news reports except that the FBI showed us the pictures to make up the difference, and that makes it so.
Now, being the trusting sort, I figured that the government would want to quickly dispel any rumors so we could get on with the chore of kicking Osama/Sadaam's butt (weren't these originally two different people?). It seemed simple to me. . .produce the names of all the bodies identified by the AFIP and compare it with the publicized list of passengers. So, I sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the AFIP and asked for an expedited response, because we were getting ready to send our boys to war on the pretext that Osama/Saddam had done the deed. Fourteen months later, a few US soldiers dead, many Iraqi civilians pushing up daisies, and I finally get the list. Believe me that they weren't a bit happy to give it up, and I really have no idea why they choose now to release it.
foia-10003.jpg
No Arabs wound up on the morgue slab; however, three ADDITIONAL people not listed by American Airlines sneaked in. I have seen no explanation for these extras. I did American the opportunity to "revise" their original list, but they have not responded. The new names are: Robert Ploger, Zandra Ploger, and Sandra Teague. The AFIP claims that the only "passenger" body that they were not able to identify is the toddler, Dana Falkenberg, whose parents and young sister are on the list of those identified. The satanic masterminds behind this caper may be feeling pretty smug about the perfect crime, but they have left a raft of clues tying these unfortunates together.
--Thomas R. Olmsted, M.D., Autopsy: No Arabs on Flight 77

Worth repeating and in summary: the last known pre-9/11 flights for three of the four aircraft involved in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 took place in December, 2000, nine months before the attacks.

Unaccounted for passengers is among the biggest holes in Bush's cover story. If Bush cannot explain the absence of airliner wreckage or the alleged 'missing passengers', then his official theory must be discounted as utter bunkum, a pack of malicious lies. Unlike wine, crap does not improve with age.

Anyone believing that there were such flights AND that there were passengers should insist that a Federal Prosecutor put Bush on the witness stand in front of a federal grand jury and put to him the question: 'what was the fate of the passengers on flights 77 and 11?'

It would be very interesting to learn how he might manage to escape his experience without indictments for 1) MASS MURDER; 2) PERJURY; 3) OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE. Concerning possible charges of 'high treason' against Bush: was it not Bush who declared that we were at war? Was it not Bush and his shills who insist that the US attack, invasion and occupation of Iraq was in response to an 'attack' upon the US? Have not Bush partisans insisted, from the 'gitgo' that the US attack, invasion and occupatin of Iraq was part and parcel of the US 'war on terrorism'. That being the case, Bush's complity in the events of events of 911 are most certainly acts of betrayal against a sovereign in a time of war and, therefore, high treason.

At that point, his most effective defense will be bribery --tried and true for the rich and the guilty.

Among a growing number of links back to this article is this excellent expose of the Flight 77 fraud:

According to the official story, AA Flight 77, a Boeing 757, took off from Dulles Airport in northern Virginia at 8:10 a.m. bound for Los Angeles, with between 50 and 58 passengers. It flew west for about 45 minutes, making a curious detour to the north, west and south, before turning around and flying for another 45 minutes back to Washington. Why hijackers would allow a jet which they planned to crash into a target in Washington to fly for 45 minutes away from its target is not explained. Why did they not commandeer the plane ten minutes after takeoff when the plane was only ten minutes flying time from its intended target? The official story ignores this question, as it does all other questions.

As reported by the New York Times (International Herald Tribune, 2001-10-17, p.8), as AA 77 approached the Pentagon it executed a 270-degree 7,000-foot descent over Washington while flying at 500 mph. It approached the Pentagon on a horizontal trajectory so low that it clipped the power lines across the street then (so the story goes) it smashed into an outer wall of the Pentagon.

We were told (and, of course, expected to believe without question) that this maneuver was executed by an Arab pilot, Hani Hanjour, who in August 2001 was judged by the chief flight instructor at Bowie's Maryland Freeway Airport as not having the piloting skills required to fly a Cessna 172 solo. (Is there something fishy here?)

In contrast to the attention given to the collapse of the Twin Towers, the attack on the Pentagon received little attention until in February 2002 a French website (by Thierry Meyssan) appeared which reproduced images obtained from U.S. Army websites: Hunt the Boeing! These images cast doubt upon the official story that the Pentagon was hit by a Boeing 757 jetliner. For example, here is a picture of the Pentagon crash site taken about two hours after the impact, with the fire still burning. Can you see any remains of the approximately 100 tons of metal (including engines, wings, and tail section) which makes up a Boeing 757? ...

--Pentagon Official Story Hoax

Following is a reader's playlist. I recommend it.

September Clues
Or --How to Fake a Terrorist Attack with an off-the-shelf video editing suite, a sound effects library, some audio samples and an utter lack of conscience or humanity!

911: Inside Job!

Why I Moderate Comments
American education has deteriorated inversely with the rise of right wing politics! [An example is the 'Texas' that Bush left behind. It beats out Mississippi for DEAD LAST in high school graduations at the same that that it LEADS the nation in executions due to the state's extremely high crime rate!]
I don't take kindly to threats and will trace IPs if I should take a threat seriously! Threats, it must be pointed out, are not protected 'free speech' and can be prosecuted.
I tire of bad grammar and fashionable but idiotic attempts to be cute.

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The New Chicago Eight

2008-09-07T16:11:00.000-07:00

..."The RNC Eight" Charged as Terrorists

A disturbing story from Information Clearing House explains why the RNC was held in Minnesota, and why the police there acted as if war had been declared on America's population.

In what appears to be the first use of criminal charges under the 2002 Minnesota version of the Federal Patriot Act, Ramsey County Prosecutors have formally charged 8 alleged leaders of the RNC Welcoming Committee with Conspiracy to Riot in Furtherance of Terrorism. Monica Bicking, Eryn Trimmer, Luce Guillen Givins, Erik Oseland, Nathanael Secor, Robert Czernik, Garrett Fitzgerald, and Max Spector, face up to 7 1/2 years in prison under the terrorism enhancement charge which allows for a 50% increase in the maximum penalty.

Affidavits released by law enforcement which were filed in support of the search warrants used in raids over the weekend, and used to support probable cause for the arrest warrants, are based on paid, confidential informants who infiltrated the RNCWC on behalf of law enforcement. They allege that members of the group sought to kidnap delegates to the RNC, assault police officers with firebombs and explosives, and sabotage airports in St. Paul. Evidence released to date does not corroborate these allegations with physical evidence or provide any other evidence for these allegations than the claims of the informants. Based on past abuses of such informants by law enforcement, the National Lawyers Guild is concerned that such police informants have incentives to lie and exaggerate threats of violence and to also act as provocateurs in raising and urging support for acts of violence.

WHAT?!? Minnesota has its own version of the constitutionally dubious USA PATRIOT Act? What folly is this? It does explain how and why the modern-day version of the 1968 'police riots' at the DNC in Chicago occurred in Minnesota. The sonsabitches want to establish a test case that equates protest, dissent, or simply thinking for yourself as TERRORISM.

They also want to send a message to legitimate political dissidents - STFU!! It's like Bill O'Reilly became the the head of DHS or something (shudder at the thought.) This is the government trying to cut off everyone's microphone at once.

I've already made my comparisons of the violence in 2008 with that in Chicago in 1968 in my recent post Police State 101 - but this development brings them into high relief. This is a nakedly aggressive crackdown designed to suppress people's constitutionally protected rights of assembly and expression. If you still want more background on the DNC riots of 1968, or the Chicago Eight (Later Chicago Seven) trials, consult Wikipedia. There's also a good article here at History and Education blog.

The evidence that the authorities are relying on in these cases seems to be paper-thin, and one wonders if they intend to use the dubious 'rules of evidence' established for the Guantanamo Bay military 'trials' as a precedent. None of this passes either the laugh test or the smell test.

The criminal complaints filed by the Ramsey County Attorney do not allege that any of the defendants personally have engaged in any act of violence or damage to property. The complaints list all of alleged violations of law during the last few days of the RNC — other than violations of human rights carried out by law enforcement — and seeks to hold the 8 defendants responsible for acts committed by other individuals. None of the defendants have any prior criminal history involving acts of violence. Searches conducted in connection with the raids failed to turn up any physical evidence to support the allegations of organized attacks on law enforcement. Although claiming probable cause to believe that gunpowder, acids, and assembled incendiary devices would be found, no such items were seized by police. As a result, police sought to claim that the seizure of common household items such as glass bottles, charcoal lighter, nails, a rusty machete, and two hatchets, supported the allegations of the confidential informants.

One has to assume that TPTB (the powers that be) really don't care about getting convictions in these cases. It will suffice for them if a pall of fear is cast over any act of political independence, and even if it doesn't they've got at least eight people who might question their 'patriotic' motives locked up at least until after the elections are over.

Anyone with two functioning synapses could have seen this coming from a long way off. The USA PATRIOT Act and its successors clearly were written in such a way that they sound like they are directed against foreign terrorists, but conveniently can be applied against domestic political opponents and critics of the government. "We'll try these draconian methods out on brown people for a while at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. If we get away with that we're clear to bring them home to Peoria, Bakersfield, Des Moines and St. Paul Minnesota." That's how I perceive their thinking.

What worries me the most about this is not what the government is doing, but what I fear the Lamestream Media won't do - report this as a major story, which it surely is. It's after all an indication of a fundamental shift in society, the breaking of a covenant between the government and the people that has endured since the American Revolution. And ultimately I fear that the American people themselves won't respond with the energy required to put a stop to this, and turn back the judicial clock to a time when fairness mattered.

A little voice in the corner of my mind asks, "is it fascism yet?" I don’t know, but as a rule I’d say that if you can actually smell the polish on the stormtrooper’s boot, it’s probably too close to your neck.

UPDATE: Firedoglake has this post, with the video below about how Americans were tortured Guantanamo style after being arrested in Minnesota.

Sadism, Cruelty, Torture In The Twin Cities:
Professional Cultural Norms For US “Law” Enforcement

The shocking thing is that it would be very unusual for any of these ~~thugs~~ cops to face discipline over these various crimes of assault and failure to recognize the rights of their fellow citizens.

TAGS: Police State, America: The Cradle of ~~Democracy~~ Fascism

Cross-posted from

Sauce for the Goose

2008-07-22T20:34:00.000-07:00

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill.
The eyes of all people are upon us.
-- John Winthrop, Governor of Massachusetts, 1630 --

A TERRIFIC POST from Bill W. (who is also a contributor at Crooks and Liars, who've also posted it) really lays on the line just how much harm the criminal Bush administration has done to international law, peace, and just incidentally, America's reputation. And it comes with a great video clip! (uploaded to YouTube by Bill W. - man, this guy does it all and gives you your correct change to boot.)

Sudan Cites US Example Why It Won't Comply With UN, ICC

One sad truth that Bill doesn't go into (and I'm racking my brains here to find a base he hasn't covered) - from the point of view of someone who isn't an American (I'm proudly Canadian, eh?) - is that this is just another example of the idea of American Exceptionalism that has been accepted and even nurtured under the good old Stars and Stripes for far too long.

Ah yes, American Exceptionalism - the bastard child of Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine. The not-quite-so-evil twin of Might Makes Right. Nurtured and fed on a falsehood that is older than the country itself - the idea that the US is so morally superior to everyone else that it can be described as The City on the Hill, The Beacon of Democracy, the Font of Everything That is Good in The World.

And the reason that the world doesn't have to be concerned about the actions of America or its leaders? - because they're just so darned peachy-keen, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed gee whiz golly gosh dripping with good intentions. And if those good intentions turn out to make some US businesses a tidy profit? Well all the better! We'll throw in a slice of hot apple pie, and teach your folks how to play baseball.

And if those good intentions lead to us backing a coup against your democratically elected leader and installing a business-friendly tinpot dictator who starts murdering the opposition? Well shucks, dang, and whoa there Bessie. That never happens! Except for a few times in Guatemala, Iran, Chile, Nicaragua, Panama, and enough places that it's hard to remember them all. But you can rest assured it will never happen again anyway. Trust us.

And not to seem too critical of our well-armed neighbour to the south, I'd like to add that this principle of Exceptionalism is running afoul of another principle that originated in the US, in fact the very principle that the ICC is based on. Yes, that's right, it's called the Nuremberg principle. The idea is that entire countries are not responsible for wars, their LEADERS are. Especially when the leaders in question have been caught in so many lies that no-one can even keep track anymore. And let's not forget that indispensable adjunct to the Nuremberg principle, that the leaders must be held accountable for their actions. Please let's not forget that.

If Bush and his gang of criminals are not held accountable, and significantly if that accounting is not spearheaded by America herself, any credibility you have internationally will be lost forever. Because in Bush's eye's it's not the country as a whole that benefits from this status of City on A Hill, it's himself personally. And that's just not right. As important as it is for the world that Bush be brought to justice it is equally important to America that they take an active role. Else you'll be painted with the brush of complicity in his crimes.

The eyes of all people are upon you.

To wind it up, I've got some more video for you that's to the point:

All Presidential Accountability Goes Out The Window!

Oh, and there's one other thing. Did I mention that this is all going on against the backdrop of a British Parliament report that US assurances that it does not torture can no longer be taken at face value? Well, I meant to. It seems relevant.

Cross-posted from Les Enragés.org

TAGS: War Crimes, ICC, International Criminal Court, American Exceptionalism

The Most Unlikely Ally

2008-04-02T14:42:00.000-07:00

Joseph Stalin's Connection
to Fascism in America

In the usual way that Americans have been taught to view history Joseph Stalin was an unrepentant monster whose Communist government suppressed and murdered its own citizens, denying them their rights and imprisoning them in cruel and inhuman gulags for the slightest act of disagreement with his regime.

As I have written before on my old blog, Friendly Neighbour, Stalin was, even after his death, an unwitting ally of far-right forces within the American system.

Stalin, while a valiant ally in the war, stands out as one of history's biggest meanest bastards. Estimates of the number of Soviet citizens killed by Stalin range as high as 20 Million. Most died by starvation as the result of disastrous agricultural policies that removed subsistence farmers from their land in misguided collectivization efforts. Many more died as a result of Stalin's extreme paranoia, taken out and shot or tortured to death in the infamous gulags. Stalin was evil.

...[I]n the post-war era, a great lie was sold to the American people, one I believe a vast majority of Americans still believe today. That lie was a great propaganda coup, providing the right wing with a magic hammer with which to beat its enemies mercilessly. That lie led to the cold war. That lie was that the evils of Stalin's Soviet Union were somehow the inevitable result of Marxist-Leninist doctrine. Which anyone even passingly familiar with socialist doctrine can tell you is absurd. A simple comparison that clarifies the effects of this great lie is this; The Red Scare was to post-war America as International Jewry was to Nazi Germany. The great threat that justifies all excesses. The great brush to paint all our enemies. The Red Scare.

My point was and remains that it wasn't Marxist doctrine that caused Stalin to be a megalomaniac, it was his paranoia and his embrace of totalitarian tactics to eliminate any threat to his rule. The great purges carried out in the 1930s are but one case in point.

The common belief that the cold war was a struggle between western democracy and Soviet Communism was a great lie. For one thing Soviet Communism didn't fit the egalitarian model at all. There was a privileged class of party members, military officers and secret policemen who lacked for little, lived in Dachas, rode around in chauffeur-driven hand-built automobiles and feared the peasantry no less than did their czarist predecessors. So Communism in the Soviet Union was a lie. But why on earth would the western world go along with that lie, even exaggerate it when it would have been much easier to call Stalin and his successors out for their hypocrisy?

“A lie would make no sense,
unless the truth were felt to be dangerous.”
- Carl G. Jung -

The simple answer to this is that this Soviet lie served the purposes of the corporatists to a tee to keep up the idea that the Soviet Union represented the inevitable outcome of Marxism, that is that it led to totalitarian regimes like that of Stalin. Which may have some truth to it, but it is simply astonishing how quickly the idea was extended to include not only Communists, but later 'Communist sympathizers', aka 'Pinkos' (not quite 'Red' in other words,) trade unionists, and later anyone who had the audacity to consider themselves anywhere to the left of center. Indeed, by the time Ronald Reagan ran for office they were using a new rhetorical technique - they began alluding to liberalism as 'the L word,' giving the impression that it was something so obscene that it couldn't be talked about in polite company.

Another device was in play - the ratchet effect. As this unrelenting stream of vitriol (based on absolutely nothing by the way) was directed on anyone to the left of center, inevitably people started moving out of the line of fire. They stopped calling themselves liberals even if they were by any definition of the word. They now self-identify as progressives or even moderate conservatives. The result of that was that the line that defined where 'left of center' was also moved to the right. So, in the next iteration (or turn of the ratchet in my analogy) people who had previously been to the right of center were called out, and some of them moved across the new 'middle' line - to end up on what used to be the far right. You can still see this process in effect anytime someone like Rush Limbaugh points to someone who is really quite moderate in their position and describes them as being from, not just the left, but the far left. Conversely, the term far right is almost never used in the United States. Which should give people cause for concern. The real outcome of this is class warfare in America with only the upper class having declared or holding any weapons.

"Surely, in the history of lies told to the population, this is the biggest lie.
In the history of secrets, withheld from the American people,
this is the biggest secret: that there are classes with different interests in this country.

To ignore that--not to know that the history of our country is a history of slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor--is to render us helpless before all the lesser lies told to us by people in power...

...If we as citizens start out with an understanding that these people up there--the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court, all those institutions pretending to be "checks and balances"--do not have our interests at heart, we are on a course towards the truth.
Not to know that is to make us helpless before determined liars."

-- Howard Zinn --

Just look at how successful this undeclared class warfare has been. The Republicans opposed Social Security when it was first introduced on the grounds that it led to the 'slippery slope towards communism.' The fact that it helped the vast majority of Americans survive was not an effective counterargument in their narrow rightwing view. And they are STILL trying to dismantle the most successful program in the country's history. They have successfully blocked any form of universal health care with the same slippery slope canard. "OOOH - it might lead to communism. Slippery slope - ooga booga. Be very, very afraid." So you see how the ghost of the long dead Joseph Stalin is still acting as an ally to Corporate Fascist America. The frickin' ownership society they envisage can hardly be differentiated from a slave state.

It's really tragic that a large number of working class Americans continue to vote against their own interests for two reasons. The first is that they are afraid of being labeled 'far left' by the flying monkey brigade of Limbaugh and his putrid ilk. The second is that they cling to the myth of the American dream. They hope that somehow, against all odds, they will pass through that velvet curtain into first class, and they don't want to piss in the complimentary champagne before they get to stretch out in their generous double wide reclining seats.

The fact is, social mobility (the likelihood that you will end up in a different income bracket than your parents) is MUCH less in the US than it is in the rest of the western industrialized world. And as everybody knows, the gap between rich and poor is opening up into an absolute chasm that you will never cross if you are currently living modestly.

"In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors,
since all men are equal,
but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors,
for, from the time of Jefferson onward,
the doctrine that all men are equal
applies only upwards, not downwards."
-- Bertrand Russell --

I will further cannibalize my old post by plagiarizing it's close (I hope the author doesn't go after me.)

In the opening pages of Tom Clancy's Patriot Games the hero, Jack Ryan is visiting London. Unfamiliar with the English practice of driving on the left side of the road he checks to the left, where he expects traffic, then steps out onto the road and is nearly killed by a bus coming from the right. It seems to me a fitting image of what has happened to the US in the last 7 or 8 decades. While paranoically obsessing about a perceived threat from the left, America has left itself wide open for a takeover from the corporate right.

To tie this in to what's happening today, one needs only this quote from a pre-eminent veteran of the cold war.

"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear-kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor-with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it."
-- General Douglas MacArthur --

A chillingly familiar theme in the post 9/11 America. It's hard not to see how the fear-mongering inspired by Stalin is just like that inspired by Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein. Stalin was of course the first bogie man bent on world domination and in possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Which brings me to another pithy and pertinent quote.

"Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely
or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear"
-- Bertrand Russell --

This post was written to set the table for a series of posts I intend to do under the heading of The History of Fascism in America. (THOFIA) It should fit in well with those of you who are already Naomi Wolf fans. It might rub some of you the wrong way if you believe the fascist influence to have begun with George W. Bush, his father, or even his grandfather. But that cannot be avoided.

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
-- George Orwell --

TAGS: Class Warfare, Fascism In America, Joseph Stalin, History

Sham on You

2008-02-05T08:11:00.001-08:00

~~Whither~~ Wither Democracy?

This item from the BBC strikes me as being painfully ironic.

The US, EU and other democracies are accepting flawed and unfair elections out of political expediency, Human Rights Watch says in its annual report.

Allowing autocrats to pose as democrats without demanding they uphold civil and political rights risked undermining human rights worldwide, it warned.
[..]
HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth said it had become too easy for autocrats to get away with mounting a sham democracy "because too many Western governments insist on elections and leave it at that".

"They don't press governments on the key human rights issues that make democracy function - a free press, peaceful assembly, and a functioning civil society that can really challenge power," he added.
[..]
"It seems Washington and European governments will accept even the most dubious election so long as the 'victor' is a strategic or commercial ally," Mr Roth said.

The ironic pain comes from the blatantly obvious fact that the most dubious elections of all have occurred right in the United States. The 2000 sElection of Bush the Lesser by a partisan and biased Supreme Court was a travesty. Four years later the more sophisticated but no less devastating electronic vote fraud in Ohio reinstalled the moron who would be king, to go on and add to the considerable damage he had inflicted on the nation. Anyone who thinks things are going to be better this time around should read this story from TPMMuckraker. I declare shenanigans!

I shouldn't need to elaborate - places like Bradblog and Black Box Voting have detailed the demise of democracy to death, for all the good it's done. I will sketch out just a few of the major ways that the electoral process has been thwarted in the last couple of elections:

1) Disenfranchisement before the fact: this includes practices such as caging lists and the generation of lists declaring people ineligible to vote because of criminal records that didn't exist. This latter instance was well documented after the fact in Florida, 2000, but too late to do any good as the result by then was a fait accompli.

2) Disenfranchisement after the fact: in 2000 this consisted of things like hanging chads and butterfly ballots. By 2004 it was implemented through electronic means, whereby your vote could be excluded or even flipped to the other side by the alteration of a memory card, taking only a few keystrokes.

3) False flag candidacies: Pssst. Hey, buddy! You want to ensure a Republican victory in an election? Just pour enough money into the Democratic primary to install a corporatist puppet on the other side. If you have an R - Republican running against a D - Republican, the Republicans will win every time. Do you think LIE-berman, Feinstein and Schumer are the only wolves dressed in sheep's clothing in Washington? Think again. It's not so hard to arrange things so the question becomes "will that be plastic, or plastic?" In fact it's a lot cheaper if you're an unprincipled Republican to eliminate your opposition in the Democratic primary than it is to defeat him in the general election.

4) Bulldozer tactics: Is there a particularly vocal opponent giving you trouble in Congress? Simply outspend him or her 5 to 1, and steal his seat. That's what's happening to Dennis Kucinich right now. Is it any wonder so many people choose not to participate when any good candidates are eliminated long before the ballot is even drawn up?

Here's another list, of a different kind altogether, from Mark Crispin Miller:

A 12-Step Program to Save US Democracy:

1. Repeal the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).
This step will inevitably follow an in-depth investigation of how HAVA came to be.

2. Replace all electronic voting with hand-counted paper ballots (HCPB).
Although politicians and the press dismiss this idea as utopian, the people would support it just as overwhelmingly as national health care, strong environmental measures, US withdrawal from Iraq, and other sane ideas.

3. Get rid of computerized voter rolls.
It isn’t just the e-voting machines that are obstructing our self-government. According to USA Today, thousands of Americans have had their names mysteriously purged from the electronic databases now used nationwide as records of our registration.

4. Keep all private vendors out of our elections.
With their commercial interests, trade secrets and unaccountable proceedings, private companies should have no role in the essential process of republican self-government.

5. Make it illegal for the TV networks to declare who won before the vote-count is complete.
Certainly the corporate press will scream about its First Amendment Rights, but they don’t have the right to interfere with our elections. When they declare a winner when we don’t yet even know if the election was legitimate, they de-legitimize all audits, recounts and even first counts of the vote as the mere desperate measures of “sore losers.”

6. Set up an exit polling system, publicly supported, to keep the vote-counts honest.
Only in America are exit poll results not meant to help us gauge the accuracy of the official count. Here they are meant only to allow the media to make its calls.

7. Get rid of voter registration rules, by allowing every citizen to register, at any post office, on his/her 18th birthday.
Either we believe in universal suffrage or we don’t.

8. Ban all state requirements for state-issued ID’s at the polls.
As the Supreme Court smiles on such Jim Crow devices, we need a law, or Constitutional amendment, to forbid them.

9. Put all polling places under video surveillance, to spot voter fraud, monitor election personnel, and track the turnout.
We’re under surveillance everywhere else, so why not?

10. Have Election Day declared a federal holiday,
requiring all employers to allow their workers time to vote.
No citizens of the United States should ever lose the right to vote because they have to go to work.

11. Make it illegal for Secretaries of State to co-chair political campaigns (or otherwise assist or favor them).
Katherine Harris wore both those hats in Florida in 2000, and, four years later, so did Ken Blackwell in Ohio and Jan Brewer in Arizona. Such Republicans should not have been allowed to do it, nor should any Democrats.

12. Make election fraud a major felony, with life imprisonment--and disenfranchisement--for all repeat offenders.
“Three strikes and you’re out” would certainly befit so serious a crime against democracy.

Not to diminish the value of Mr. Miller's list, but one must ask, "what government is going to implement these changes?" I see a catch-22 here, a 'you can't get there from here' barrier that will not easily be surmounted. You're not going to get these kind of reforms until you change the entire body politic in Washington. You're not going to get a new body politic without the reforms. If you go to this post at OpEd news you'll see that a lot of the commenters feel the same way.

A more sobering reflection comes with the assumption that the November elections will be above board and the results the best we can reasonably hope for under the current conditions. (which for me would mean Obama in the White House, and a Democratic supermajority in both houses.) My point is that even the best case scenario under current conditions would be far from adequate to restore the democracy that used to exist in America. So I've decided to take a little un-scientific survey that you can answer in comments. There's no format, no multiple choices, no boxes to fill in - very open ended and unruly, the way I like things. Here is the one multi-part question.

Given the very best outcome that you can currently imagine for the 2008 elections, (feel free to name the winning candidate and his or her running mate, even cabinet members if that floats your boat)
WHAT ARE THE CHANCES THAT:
The US will withdraw its troops from Iraq
Prisoners currently in Guantanamo and elsewhere will either be released or tried under internationally recognized procedural rules
The USA PATRIOT Act will be repealed
The Military Commissions Act will be repealed and habeas corpus restored
The Protect America Act will be repealed
Serious crimes committed by the current administration will be prosecuted fully, and guilty parties penalized without pardons or commutations of sentence
Crimes committed by corporate entities enabled by the current administration will be prosecuted
Even one of the worthy proposals made by Mark Crispin Miller will be enacted
Anything I missed? Add your own in comments and I will put it up here too.

Of course it's a given that there are some things that desperately need to be restored for democracy to work, but can't be without a second American Revolution. The partisan Supreme Court that the last two Bushes have left as their legacy for example. The pillaging of the economy by the multinationals. I'm sure you can think of a few more.

The worst case scenario is of course terrifying: the installation of a worldwide system of corporate fascism under the guise of globalisation. What's really scary is that the best case scenario doesn't look that good either.

TAGS: 2008 Elections, Electoral Reform, Best Case Scenario, Future Watch

Bush Think: A Nuclear War Can be Fought and Won!

2008-01-19T04:51:00.000-08:00

God, how I despise people who think war is a game.
--Last Chance Democracy Cafe

The origin of 'Bush think' may be found in a scenario dreamed up at the Rand Corporation at the height of the Cold War. Rand had designed mathematical models that dared think the unthinkable: a nuclear war can be won! Typically, the scenario relied heavily on 'game theory'. It proposed to use 'nukes' like poker chips, so-called 'rational incentives', to manipulate the other side. Rand theorists 'gamed' how many megatons might be dropped on a city, which cities would be nuked, how many deaths it would take to bring the Russians to the bargaining table.

A clue to Bush's thinking may be found in Bush's remarks to Matt Lauer of NBC Sept. 2, 2004. The topic was the War on Terrorism that Bush committed the US to fight.

I don’t think you can win it. But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world — let's put it that way.

That would appear not to have been the case or the outcome. Terrorism is always been worse under GOP administrations. There is no reason to believe that 'terrorism' is in any way 'less acceptable' especially to those to whom Bush had addressed his remarks at the outset of his foreign adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. Perhaps as a result of his failures, Bush has resorted to dragging out a scenario that had been 'gamed' by the Rand corporation at the height of the cold war.

According to Mother Jones, the robber barons of big oil, Bush's base, began planning for the war some thirty years ago. They had been 'inspired' by the Arab Oil Embargo. It was certainly an act of war: spoiled Americans had been grievously inconvenienced!

Three decades ago, in the throes of the energy crisis, Washington's hawks conceived of a strategy for US control of the Persian Gulf's oil. Now, with the same strategists firmly in control of the White House, the Bush administration is playing out their script for global dominance.

The Orwellian nightmare, the state of perpetual war, has come true but cannot be sustained. Worse than "mutually assured destruction", this universal exploitation of nightmare spells an end to those dreams that make life worth living. The grim vision offered by the GOP is --or had been --an avoidable choice. It was forced upon us by incompetent and cowardly. [See: Terrorism is worse under GOP regimes]

Dragging out Rand's Nuclear War Version 1.0 is not a good idea. Times have changed. Iran is not the Soviet Union. And, contrary to GOP tactics of exploitation of various threats and 'boogie men', terrorism is a tactic --not an ideology like communism. Terrorism is not a 'state' that can be identified. Terrorism, rather, is a tactic and, as such, it is inspired among many nations and many peoples at many and various times. An act of terrorism is a crime --not an act of war. Bush think is wrong and Rand's old scenario Version 1.0 is made obsolete by Reality Version 6.0.

Bush makes claims about Iranian nuclear capabilities are without independent and/or credible verification. The world has not forgotten the lies told about how Saddam Hussein was making chemical weapons in a beat up trailer, how Saddam tried to buy 'yellow cake' in Niger. Realistically --an anything said by Bush be believed?

Desperate to wage war on Saddam, Bushco told the world that Saddam was supporting terrorists. It was a lie. As the failed war dragged on, millions came to understand that Saddam's regime had not supported bona fide 'terrorists' in any way. According to the Pew Research Center, American skepticism about the war in Iraq increased steadily from its inception. It is increasingly seen as harming the "war on terrorism".

A plurality (47%) believes that the war in Iraq has hurt the war on terrorism, up from 41% in February of this year. Further, a plurality (45%) now says that the war in Iraq has increased the chances of terrorist attacks at home, up from 36% in October 2004, while fewer say that the war in Iraq has lessened the chances of terrorist attacks in the US (22% now and 32% in October). Another three-in-ten believe that the war in Iraq has no effect on the chances of a terrorist attack in the US
- Pew Research Center, "Iraq Hurting War on Terror"

Having lied about Iraq, Bush will certainly lie about Iran in order to justify an attack. There is a danger of massive over-response to provocation, a 'scenario' perhaps just recently was narrowly avoided in the Straits of Horumuz. The question now is: will the world surface the remainder of his tenure? But, as long as Bush continues to occupy the Oval Office, Americans must ask the question: is there any rational basis for fearing Iran when every credible and independent source has said that Iran is years away from developing nukes that the US had previously made available to other nations?

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, old 'cold warriors' had been overtaken by events and reality. Their very jobs depended upon scaring the beejebers out of Americans.

What if there really was no need for much - or even most - of the Cold War? What if, in fact, the Cold War had been kept alive for two decades based on phony WMD threats?
What if, similarly, the War On Terror was largely a scam, and the administration was hyping it to seem larger-than-life? What if our "enemy" represented a real but relatively small threat posed by rogue and criminal groups well outside the mainstream of Islam? What if that hype was done largely to enhance the power, electability, and stature of George W. Bush and Tony Blair?
And what if the world was to discover the most shocking dimensions of these twin deceits - that the same men promulgated them in the 1970s and today?
Thom Hartmann, Hyping Terror For Fun, Profit - And Power

Hartman's source was a BBC piece called "The Power of Nightmares".

In the past our politicians offered us dreams of a better world. Now they promise to protect us from nightmares.
The most frightening of these is the threat of an international terror network. But just as the dreams were not true, neither are these nightmares.
In a new series, the Power of Nightmares explores how the idea that we are threatened by a hidden and organized terrorist network is an illusion.
--BBC: The Power of Nightmares

In the US, more have begun to question the Bush modus operandi of exploiting our nightmares, our fears of "radical Islam", a prospect at least as terrifying as "radical Christianity" and the equally ideological, rabid "Christianist" movement which overtly seeks to make of the US a theocracy. Should either side "win", people themselves will be enslaved to nonsense, claptrap and ideology, nothing less than a new dark age.

What is the date of America's descent into madness? It might have been Pearl Harbor. Certainly, the US helped meet the very real threat posed by Hitler's Third Reich, but, in retrospect, our leaders may have learned all the wrong lessons. Did they learn only that FDR grew in strength by promising to protect Americans from the spectres of world wide fascism and Nazism? Certainly, GOP regimes, having propped up Saddam, tried to make of him --Hitler! The GOP hated FDR but again learned from him all the wrong lessons. The GOP never forgive FDR for winning World War II but have been eager to exploit war and manufactured crises in times of peace. The GOP became the party of wars though there is nary a war that it can claim it won! Desparate for any success at all, the GOP has become the party of phony wars on drugs, porn, immigration and Murphy Brown.

Bush sought a chance to use nukes! Surely, a war on terrorism would give him the opporttunity. But how? "Terrorism" is not a geographical location. It is, rather, a phantom menace that is whatever the right wing says it is.

Game theory aside --there are NO winners. Game theorists should read Godel, to wit: NO formal system can generate every theorem from any given set of axioms and, likewise, no "game theory" of any sort can "game" every contingency. The use of nukes of any size or sort in the middle east will be catastrophic beyond our abilities to predict or plan for. It could very well usher in the end of mankind.

BBC: The Trap

A related story:

If the U.S. were to face a new conventional threat, its military could not respond effectively without turning to air power, officials and analysts say.

"That is the ultimate upshot of the war in Iraq: a response elsewhere would consist largely of U.S. fighters and bombers -- even, perhaps, some degree of nuclear strike -- because so many ground troops are tied up in Operation Iraqi Freedom."

Even, perhaps, some degree of nuclear stike???

They are insane.
-- Iraq war has ground forces stretched thin

The "government" is not our "country". Bush is not the sovereign. We are the nation; we are the sovereign. Whatever "government" is in Washington, its only job is to protect and defend the country. The country is us! We can fire the government when it fails to do its job. New Orleans is merely the most graphic proof, the most dramatic illustration of how this government has failed the people of America and should be fired. Not just Bush --I envision a mass layoff! It is time the country changed its government. It is time to bring this government to its knees for having betrayed us --the nation.

The Oligarchs Strike Back

2008-01-14T05:32:00.000-08:00

War Declared on Populism

Or maybe it would be safer to say that a surge has been declared in a war on the ordinary people that business has been waging pretty much since the American Revolution. Here's the item that has me upset, from TPMMuckraker.

Alarmed at the increasingly populist tone of the 2008 political campaign, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is set to issue a fiery promise to spend millions of dollars to defeat candidates deemed to be anti-business.

"We plan to build a grass-roots business organization so strong that when it bites you in the butt, you bleed," chamber President Tom Donohue said....

Although Donohue shied away from precise figures, he indicated that his organization would spend in excess of the approximately $60 million it spent in the last presidential cycle. That approaches the spending levels planned by the largest labor unions....

"I'm concerned about anti-corporate and populist rhetoric from candidates for the presidency, members of Congress and the media," he said. "It suggests to us that we have to demonstrate who it is in this society that creates jobs, wealth and benefits -- and who it is that eats them."

I'm bewildered. What 'candidates deemed to be anti-business' could Lord Donohue be referring to? All of the front runners of both parties are clearly bought and paid for. Sure, John Edwards has declared a desire to reduce the power of the biggest multinational corporations, but the furniture stores on Main Street don't have to be afraid of anything. In fact if you look at the Saudi princes who are the biggest beneficiaries of tax breaks to Exxon, Enron and others, maybe the 'U.S.' chamber of commerce should consider changing their name. Besides, Edwards isn't doing that well. So do you think Ralph Nader is poised to make a miracle comeback? I think the concern about anti-corporatist rhetoric is misplaced.

So, I've written an open letter in response to Tom Donahue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce:

I think it's time for a reality check Mr. Donohue. Current campaign laws combined with the dubious principle of Corporate Personhood make your donations to candidates and your third party political ads to be 'free speech.' Imagine that - a corporation that speaks. Not only that, but the major media are owned by corporations - so you also have the power to stifle the free speech of anyone whose ideas you don't like, as Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul know only too well. The synergy of this is awesome to behold. The candidates have to toe your line to get advertising dollars, which you just get back in revenues at the television and radio stations you own. Pretty slick.

You've created a special industry of over 30,000 lobbyists, the vast majority working for corporations to make sure your point of view is always on the agenda of every elected representative in the country between election cycles. It would seem on the surface that your influence on the political process is overpowering. And you have the nerve to begrudge the common man his input for the less than a minute he spends in the booth every four years? It just doesn't pass the laugh test.

OK, reality check part 2: While you're busy whining about how hard done by your ultra-wealthy membership is, how have you been doing on advancing your agenda? Well, the percentage of government revenues coming from taxes on business has steadily declined over the last half century. Environmental regulations have been weakened, and those still left are no longer enforced. The heads of regulatory bodies under the Bu$hCo regime are themselves from the industries they are supposed to police. Likewise, business-friendly labor laws have weakened the unions, who now have a much smaller fraction of the workforce on their roles than they used to.

Antitrust laws haven't produced a meaningful lawsuit in some time. There was a significant judgment against Microsoft over Windows 95, but it was never enforced. Hell, Exxon still hasn't paid any fines over the Valdez oilspill in Alaska. CEOs salaries are off the charts, golden parachutes assure that there is no accountability. The most recent outrage is this story about Stanley O'Neal - whose stewardship of Merril Lynch cost the company $15 Billion in write-downs, but left him with a handsome $101 million pay-out. That's pretty hard to swallow for the working stiff who can't even cope with the rising cost of just about everything or the possible loss of his job or home.

Reality check, part 3 - What are the electorate seeing as the result of your success at getting your own way. Globalisation has allowed you to outsource to other countries, increasing your profits, decreasing the taxes paid to the U.S. government - all on the backs of your workers, many of whom are now your ex-workers. Unemployment is up by 5%, but that should make you happy because it drives the cost of labor down domestically. Who cares how many people lose their homes over it? Or that the result is a nation-wide recession? The fact is the top 1/10th of 1% have been strip mining the American economy since the Reagan years, and this is the result. You've got yours, to hell with anyone else, right? I swear your overall objective is to bring back the Dark Ages under a system of Corporate Feudalism.

As for who it is that creates wealth and benefits for society, it is and always has been the 'little guy' whose input into the political process you so fear. I'm calling you on that bullshit Mr. Donahue. If you want to call your beloved corrupt Republican party "the party of Lincoln," perhaps you should heed what he had to say on the subject:

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital.
Capital is only the fruit of labor,
and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed.
Labor is superior to capital,
and deserves much the higher consideration."
-- Abraham Lincoln --

That must sound like Marxism to your ears. In fact, I would almost guess old Karl may have read Lincoln when I read this.

"Capital is dead labor,
which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor,
and lives the more, the more labor it sucks."
-- Karl Marx --

And speaking of Karl Marx and Corporate Personhood, don't forget he also said,

"In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality,
while the living person is dependent and has no individuality."
-- Karl Marx --

Sounds pretty prophetic to this LIVING, BREATHING person. Have a nice day, Mr. Donahue. On second thought, don't bother. Frankly I found that threat about biting me on the butt kind of distasteful.

Further Reading: John Edwards: My Plan to Stop Corporate Abuses

TAGS: Greed, Oligarchy, Corporate Feudalism, Social Justice

Bush Promises to Nuke Iran

2008-01-13T06:02:00.000-08:00

Whether or not Bush manages to plunge the world into a new dark age may depend upon which version of the recent US/Iran confrontation is believed. So far, Bush's utter lack of credibility may be working to our advantage. One dares not think of the consequences to world peace if Bush had embarked upon this tour of the middle east with a shred of credibility, a modicum of political capital among every Middle Eastern capital but Jerusalem.

Israeli radio reports that Bush promised Israeli opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu that the United States will join Israel to nuke Iran. CNS reports the Bush administration had seriously considered the nuke option but put it on a back burner. Lydia Georgi, writing in Pakistan's Daily Times, thinks Bush is unlikely to win support outside Israel for any US military action against Iran.

It would appear, however, that the US has already tried to provoke a Gulf of Tonkin-like incident, releasing a video tape in which it is claimed that five small speed boats confronted US Navy ships in the strategic Straits of Hormuz on Sunday. Iran claims its video tape proves that its boats did not threaten US vessels in the Gulf.

Iran Version

Here is the US version:

US Version

Completely differing versions of events. Indeed, ABC News reports that voices on the recording may not have come from the Iranian speedboat. It comes down to credibility. The Bush administration has none. Bush is power mad. Someone should have told him that credibility is power! Real Texans have always known that.

Noam Chomsky

The Bush itinerary includes Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, a trip he claims is aimed at promoting peace between Israel and Palestinians. But it's what Bush calls the “aggressive ambitions” of Iran that has already trumped every other topic. The Iran version of the events in the Straits of Hormuz are credible.

Alec Russell: So is America going to bomb Iran?
Jack Straw: Iran attack would be 'nuts'

The Bush administration is planning to use nuclear weapons against Iran, to prevent it acquiring its own atomic warheads, claims an investigative writer with high-level Pentagon and intelligence contacts.

President George W Bush is said to be so alarmed by the threat of Iran's hard-line leader, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, that privately he refers to him as "the new Hitler", says Seymour Hersh, who broke the story of the Abu Ghraib Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal.

Some US military chiefs have unsuccessfully urged the White House to drop the nuclear option from its war plans, Hersh writes in The New Yorker magazine. The conviction that Mr Ahmedinejad would attack Israel or US forces in the Middle East, if Iran obtains atomic weapons, is what drives American planning for the destruction of Teheran's nuclear programme.

Hersh claims that one of the plans, presented to the White House by the Pentagon, entails the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites. One alleged target is Iran's main centrifuge plant, at Natanz, 200 miles south of Teheran.
--Philip Sherwell in Washington, Bush 'is planning nuclear strikes on Iran's secret sites'

A US intelligence report --released in December --pulled the rug from under Bush's primary pretext for war on Iran. If Bush wishes to begin a nuclear war, he will have to manufacture the pretext as Hitler faked a polish attack on German radio towers, as the US hoaxed a "Gulf of Tonkin" incident. Surely, there are some members of Bush's otherwise challenged administration who have bothered to read Goebbels and Goring. Nazi literature seems to have become Bush's Junior Woodchuck's Handbook.

An update:

Official Version of Naval Incident Starts to Unravel

Texas: The Gulag Wasteland Bush Left Behind

2008-01-07T07:02:00.000-08:00

The Texas Bush left behind leads the nation in crime, pollution and poverty. It trails the nation in education, quality of life, and the environment. Texas was once the largest state in the nation. Now --thanks to Bush --it is the largest disaster area outside of New Orleans.

Tom DeLay is remembered as the prototypical Texas politician defined by graft, arrogance and deceit. Voting in the Texas legislature is a sophomoric free for all. Their motto: vote early and often! There is precedent. It was in 1948 that one Luis Salas wrote in the names of dead people in order to get LBJ into the US Senate. Still --one would think politicians, even Texas politicians, would at least maintain the pretense of integrity. Nope!

Voting Means Nothing in Texas

Nothing will be done about it if the public doesn't scream bloody murder. It would be easy enough to program a system that would require a unique ID. But, lawmakers would simply pass their ID/passwords around. Perhaps a fingerprint scan!

To put this all in perspective, it's small stuff when you consider this state's recent record. Texas is the scene of the murder of JFK. Texas is home to the big oil companies that have partnered with crooked Saudis to screw the world. Tom DeLay perfected his gerrymandering and "fund raising" (read: shakedown) skills in Texas.

Texas is where GWB left every child behind, where the Houston Miracle wasn't, where Enron fleeced the stupid, the gullible, and California. Thanks to GWB primarily, Texas is where big polluting corporations take a satisfying dump and often! Texas is where murder rates outstrip every other state and death row is an industry! Texas is where the prison population may one day overtake the rest of the state.

I don't believe in GOP coincidence theories. There are reasons for the sorry state of nation and state --GOP incompetence, criminality, and endemic dishonesty. Let's put it in perspective.

The United States holds the dubious distinction of having the largest incarcerated population in the world, with 2 million people behind bars as of year-end 1999.2 With only 5% of the world's population, the US holds a quarter of the world's prisoners In the 1990s alone, more persons were added to prisons and jails than in any other decade on record.
...
In a continued examination of those states that lead the national trend in increasing levels of incarceration, the Justice Policy Institute turns a focus on the state of Texas. The Lone Star State's criminal justice system is particularly worthy of scrutiny at this time, as the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reported in August, 2000 that Texas, for the first time, leads the nation in imprisoning its citizens: Texas now has the nation's largest incarcerated population under the jurisdiction of its prison system. Since 1990, Texas has lead the nation's 50 states with an annual average growth rate of 11.8%, about twice the annual average growth rate of other state prison systems (6.1%). Even more important to the national context, since 1990, nearly one in five new prisoners added to the nation's prisons (18%) was in Texas.
--An Analysis of Incarceration and Crime Trends in The Lone Star State

The back to back GOP regimes of Bush/Perry have been disastrous. The state itself has become an environmental disaster where the deteriorating air quality is linked to increased incidences of respiratory diseases. [See Toxic TexasThe Environmental Legacy of Governor George W. Bush] The GOP played politics with the education of children, perpetrating a deliberate fraud called the "Houston Miracle". It would become the blueprint for "No Child Left Behind", a scam involving phony test scores and book cooking, an educational "Enron".

When nominated to serve in Bush’s cabinet, many marveled at Paige’s triumphs as Houston’s superintendent of public schools in Houston from 1994 to 2000. Usually near the top of Paige’s list of accomplishments was his success in dramatically bringing down dropout rates in one of the nation’s largest school districts.
There was one funny thing about those dramatically curtailed dropout rates, though. They weren’t true.

In Paige’s last year as Houston’s superintendent, the school district reported an incredibly low dropout rate of 1.5%. That was better than any comparably-sized school district in America. The problem, however, is that the district, which was under Paige’s supervision, cooked the books and failed to count thousands of students who dropped out and didn’t return.

As Cohen explained today, “As with Enron, [Houston’s] school system has kept a set of books that has absolutely nothing to do with reality. Some high schools reported absolutely no — that’s zero — dropouts. That these schools were in impoverished areas made the figures either preposterous or a miracle. The school system — not to mention George Bush — preferred to see a miracle.
--Rod Paige’s Houston ‘Miracle’, Carpetbagger Report

As the GOP "Enronized" the great state of Texas, an assembly line criminal justice system, in cahoots with a medieval, privatized prison system, proved to be an oxymoron. It was "criminal" but hardly "justice". Despite the GOPs "worst" efforts, crime in Texas, always a topic of much discussion and study, has gotten worse. Texas is big on capital punishment, but even its industrialized application of the death penalty just cannot kill off the criminals as fast as they procreate and multiply. The GOP may be seeking a "final solution".

...by year's end 1999, there were 706,600 Texans in prison, jail, parole or probation on any given day. In a state with 14 million adults, this meant that 5% of adult Texans, or 1 out of every 20, are under some form of criminal justice supervision. The scale of what is happening in Texas is so huge, it is difficult to contrast the size of its criminal justice systems to the other states' systems it dwarfs:

There are more Texans under criminal justice control than the entire populations of some states, including Vermont, Wyoming and Alaska.
According to Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates, one quarter of the nation's parole and probationers are in Texas. California and Texas, together, comprise half the nation's parolees and probationers.

The number of people incarcerated in Texas (in prison or jail) reached 207,526 in mid-year 1999. Only California, with 10 million more citizens, has more people in both prison and jail.
Texas has a rate of 1,035 people behind bars for every 100,000 in the population, the second highest incarceration rate in the nation (second only to Louisiana). If Texas was a nation separate from the United States, it would have the world's highest incarceration rate--significantly higher than the United States (682), and Russia (685) which has 1 million prisoners, the world's third biggest prison system. Texas' incarceration rate is also higher than China (115), which has the world's second largest prison population (1.4 million prisoners).
If the US shared the incarceration rate of Texas, there would be nearly three million Americans behind bars (2,822,300)--instead of our current 2 million prisoners.
The Texas prison population tripled since 1990, and rose 61.5% in the last five years of this decade alone. In 1994, there were 92, 669 prisoners in Texas. This number had increased to 149,684 by mid-year 1999.
The Texas correctional system has grown so large that in July 2000, corrections officials ran out of six digit numbers to assign inmates, and officially created prisoner number 1,000,000.
--An Analysis of Incarceration and Crime Trends in The Lone Star State

Texas is called the gulag state for good reasons. Certainly, justice in Texas is applied inequitably. Minorities --primarily black and hispanic --are disproportionately represented in the Texas gulag system but under represented in the State legislature, the various city councils, and the state judicial system. For example, blacks represent only 12% of the Texas population but comprise 44% of the total incarcerated population. Whites make up about 58% of Texas' total population, but only 30% of the prison and jail population.

While one out of every 20 Texas adults is under some form of criminal justice control, one out of 3 young black men (29% of the black male population between 21 and 29) are in prison, jail, parole or probation on any given day.
One out of every four adult black men in Texas is under some form of criminal justice supervision.
Blacks in Texas are incarcerated at a rate seven times greater than whites. While there are 555 whites behind bars for every 100,000 in the Texas population, there are an astonishing 3862 African Americans behind bars for every 100,000 in the state. This is nearly 63% higher than the national incarceration rate for blacks of 2366 per 100,000.
If Texas' black incarceration rate was applied to the United States, the number of blacks behind bars on a national level would increase by half a million. There are currently an estimated 824,900 African Americans in prison and jail in the US The new figure, 1,346,370, would increase the number of African Americans incarcerated in the US by 63%.

The GOP are consistent to the point of boring. Therefore, what the GOP has done to Texas is a clue to the effect Bush/GOP rule has had nationally, globally. The GOP modus operandi is premised as it is upon delusion, lies, spin, claptrap ideology and bullshit! Failing to wage an effective "war on terrorism" abroad, the GOP presides over rising crime rates at home, throughout the nation.

Predictably, the GOP will blame the victims of GOP policies of disenfranchisement, elitism, and discrimination. The GOP has always been fond of waging wars on crime though the party itself is a crime syndicate. It was no suprise that Bush, like the failed Reagan before him, waged a failed war on terrorism, thoughBuish is the world's biggest terrorist.

Five years of crime rates show that murders, robberies, rapes and other violent offenses last year were returning to the peak, set in 2002. Crime dropped dramatically after that, the figures show.

In 2006, an estimated 1,417,000 violent crimes were committed, a sharp increase from the 1,360,000 reported in 2004 and approaching the estimated 1,425,000 in 2002.
--New York Times, Violent Crime Reported Up 2% in 2006

Those stats confirm a trend of at least two years. Yet, Justice Department flack, Brian Roehrkasse, called the report "good news", a lie not unlike "we are winning in Iraq". I wonder how Roehrkasse felt about the FBI summary of 2006 indicating that robberies had increased 9.7 percent nationwide, arson 6.8 percent, murders 1.4 percent! It is the situation in Texas, Bush's so-called "homestate", where the effects of the GOP's medieval policies have fallen to Rick Perry.

Reflecting a surge in crime in Texas after the dislocations of Hurricane Katrina, Houston recorded a sharp increase in homicides, to 202 for the first half of 2006, up from 158 in the comparable prestorm period last year. Three Texas cities ranked among the nation’s top 10 in crimes per capita.

Homicides in Dallas were down to 101 from 106 but it still ranked as the nation’s most crime-ridden big city, with 3,985 overall crimes per 100,000 population, followed by Houston with 3,444. After Phoenix with 3,436, San Antonio was 4th with 3,422.
--An Analysis of Incarceration and Crime Trends in The Lone Star State

FBI statistics prove that since Bush seized the White House, crime rates have jumped. Violent crime increased at 2.5 percent in 2005, the highest rate in 15 years. Nevermind! Bush favored a 52 percent cut in law enforcement funding. That's not the worst of it. Bush and the GOP will never admit that GOP policies prove the utter failure, the moral paucity, the complete intellectual inadequacy of the GOP as a party, as an institution. Utterly predictable, the GOP will cite every fact proving their endemic failures as reasons to compound the problem. Having replaced ideas with propaganda, plans with platitudes, the GOP will simply roll out more of the same old GOP eyewash, claptrap, and bullshit!

We would call a doctor an idiot who tells you to just keep on doing whatever it is that's making you sick. Yet the GOP does that repeatedly, mistaking the illness for the cure and making it worse with greed and incompetence. Confronted with rising crime and swelling prisons, the GOP will propose even newer programs guaranteed to raise crime rates even as they enrich cronies which privatized prison systems, privatized Blackwater storm-troopers, a robotized surveillance system.

It is but a small step then to privatizing the state police or even the various metropolitan police departments. Blackwater, I am sure, would love to get the juicy contract, the license to kill and get paid for it. In that event, the march toward fascism will have been completed. Life in America will have become a nightmare for everyone but an elite of about one to five percent of the population. The streets will be patrolled by armor-plated Blackwater goon squads and other gung ho gun nuts for whom human life means little to nothing.

In the meantime, the words of the late Molly Ivins seem prescient, a plaintive warning about the breakdown of law and order that follows from the complete and institutional breakdown of the rule of law. We will have the right-wing to blame for having made of America the ugliest police state in the history of the world.

The notorious inability of prosecutors to admit that they are ever wrong is a fact of life. What is far more horrifying is the refusal of judges and courts to look at evidence that proves innocence. Can you imagine how that must feel - to be in prison for a crime you didn't commit and to finally be able to prove it, only to have a court refuse to consider the evidence? Most of this is a consequence of a noxious law that Congress rushed through after the Oklahoma City bombing. Called the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, the law was aimed at the ability of federal judges to second-guess state courts and at the ability of prisoners to file endless habeas corpus claims challenging the constitutionality of their convictions.
--Molly Ivins

Think about how much better off the rest of the nation might have been if Texas had never been annexed and the rest of the South had been allowed to go its own way.

Bush, GOP, Iraq

Spread the word:

The Spoliation of America

2008-01-05T09:14:00.000-08:00

The What!? !?

Spoliation. OK, I'll admit I've never heard the word before either until Jonathan Turley brought it up in passing on this segment of COUNTDOWN with Keith Olbermann. The subject: the opening of a criminal probe into "Waterboarding-Gate" - the destruction of interrogation tapes by the CIA. The quote:

"There's a compelling basis for at least six [criminal charges.] You've got obstruction of congress, obstruction of justice, you have perjury, conspiracy, a thing called spoliation... There is also a chance that you might have false statements, so the list gets longer, but the original one is torture.

You know, many people in Congress, and in the White House, and at Justice Department are framing this as an obstruction investigation as if what's on those tapes is an episode of Barney. What's on those tapes is the original crime in the scandal, and that's the crime of torturing people."

There's a lot of good stuff on this video. Please watch the whole thing. As usual Olbermann and Turley explore issues in a way that is lamentably unique on network news these days. I was especially interested to hear Turley announce once again that the Bush administration has gone far beyond the Nixon Watergate era in malfeasance. And lamentably they are getting away with it because of the execrable performance of what passes these days for a free press.

What I'm going to concentrate on here is this obscure (to me anyway) legal term 'spoliation of evidence.' Obviously it's a form of obstruction of justice, and maybe Turley could have given a better explanation of its impact. Here's some relevant material from Wikipedia:

"Lawyers and courts use the term spoliation to refer to the withholding, hiding, or destruction of evidence relevant to a legal proceeding and is a criminal act in the United States under Federal and most State law.

Spoliation has two consequences: first the act is criminal by statute and may result in fines and incarceration for the parties who engaged in the spoliation, secondly case law has established that proceedings which might have been altered by the spoliation may be interpreted under a spoliation inference. The spoliation inference is a negative evidentiary inference that a finder of fact can draw from a party's destruction of a document or thing that is relevant to an ongoing or reasonably foreseeable civil or criminal proceeding: The finder of fact can review all evidence uncovered in as strong a light as possible against the spoliator and in favor of the opposing party. The theory of the spoliation inference is that when a party destroys evidence, it may be reasonable to infer that the party had consciousness of guilt or other motivation to avoid the evidence. Therefore, the factfinder may conclude that the evidence would have been unfavorable to the spoliator."

The underlines are mine, and point out what I think is key to Turley's use of this term. The implication is that evidence against the spoliator that has not been destroyed is for lack of a better term amplified in its impact on the case. And the way I see it that could be very bad for this administration in any legal proceedings against them in the future. Very, very bad. Why? Because their whole strategy has been one of obfuscation, stonewalling, and destruction of evidence.

Remember the story last year about the shredding trucks spotted outside of Dick Cheney's official residence? Looks like we got us some bigtime spoliation goin' on here. Or how about the story about the loss of millions of White House emails from an RNC server that they shouldn't even have been on in the first place? That's right, my friends. Spoliation, plain and simple.

Clearly the purpose of Extraordinary Rendition of 'suspected terrorists' to black sites in countries where the US has no jurisdiction can be none other than, you guessed it - spoliation. Perhaps the worst kind of spoliation occurs when these suspects turn out to be innocent after the most vigorous interrogation. There is a terrible but Inescapable Logic which suggests the interrogator must practice the most extreme act of spoliation imaginable in those instances - murder of the torture victim/potential witness.

And the infamous Prosecutors Purge scandal? Wow, with all the witnesses in the White House and Department of Justice claiming amnesia over that one, it looks like they all got some serious spoliation IN THEIR BRAINS! Not only does it sound like a communicable disease, apparently it actually is. I think Alberto Gonzales is a carrier, like typhoid Mary or something.

I think the most significant and far-reaching spoliation of all is the proliferation of electronic paperless voting systems throughout the country. This almost certainly resulted in persons unknown tampering with perhaps hundreds of thousands, even millions of votes in the last two general elections, and perhaps the 2006 midterms as well. Effectively allowing the retroactive 'caging' of votes that the powers that be don't like and the simultaneous destruction of any evidence of the crime. The spoliation of democracy. The spoliation of America to serve a criminal regime.

Spoliation.
It's the word of the day.
With any luck it might become the word of 2008.
I already like it better than truthiness.

Note: image at top of article is the painting "The spoliation of Christ" by el Greco. In that context spoliation means when the Centurions stripped his clothes off. It has nothing to do with the content of my post, but it's what I came up with in an image search, and I liked it - a little random culture never hurt anybody. Click for link to the online art museum where I found it.

Cross-posted from Les Enragés.org
TAGS: Spoliation, Justice, Bush Administration, Malfeasance

John Edwards: My Plan to Stop Corporate Abuses

2008-01-04T13:24:00.000-08:00

The basic bargain of America -- that everyone should have a chance to work hard and build a better future -- is falling apart. Families are working longer hours, but skyrocketing education and health-care costs, the foreclosure crisis and stagnant incomes have made it harder for working Americans to provide a better future for their children.

Not everyone in America is struggling. Investors on Wall Street took home a record-setting $38 billion in bonuses this past year, even after losing millions in the credit meltdown.

In 1960, the average CEO made 41 times what the average worker made. But in 2005, the average CEO made over 400 times the average worker's salary. The share of corporate profits going to CEO pay has doubled since the 1990s. Meanwhile, the value of the minimum wage has plummeted 30% since 1979.

Don't get me wrong -- it is a good thing that some Americans are doing well. The son of working class parents, I have been blessed with extraordinary success in my own life and now want for no material thing. The problem is that the successes of our economy are no longer shared. Forty percent of all economic growth over the past 20 years has gone to the top 1% of American families.

The success of our own economy demands that we uphold our country's values: fair reward for work and opportunity for all. To meet these goals, we must renew America's basic bargain with the middle class and remove the stranglehold that entrenched corporate interests have on Washington.

The first thing we need to do is to make affordable, high-quality health care a part of the social compact. Not only are health-care costs putting a huge strain on American families and our competitiveness in the global economy, but a system that leaves 47 million Americans without health care is a moral disgrace. As president, universal health care will be my number one domestic priority.

Second, we also need to adapt retirement savings to the modern work environment. In the past, it was common for people to stay with the same company their entire career, and so it made sense for pensions to be connected to employers. Today, the average worker will probably hold jobs with multiple companies.

As president, I will create a new universal retirement account requiring every business to automatically enroll its workers in at least one plan: a traditional pension, a 401(k) or an IRA. Workers will be able to choose to have their contributions deducted automatically from their paychecks, and they will be able to carry these accounts with them from job to job.

We can't allow fundamentally healthy companies to go into bankruptcy just to avoid keeping their promises to employees, or to emerge from bankruptcy with millions for executives and nothing for workers. As president, I will ensure that corporations honor the pension promises they've made to workers, by giving workers a claim for lost pensions, just like lost wages.

Third, our companies should be run for the benefit of workers and shareholders as well as insiders. Today, too many companies in America are putting far too much of their earnings into excessive CEO and executive pay, when this money could be going to increased worker salaries, better benefits and investments in plants and equipment.

As president, I will immediately cap untaxed deferred compensation for executives. I will also give shareholders new rights and responsibilities so that they can call shareholder meetings, remove directors who aren't acting responsibly, and have a say on executive pay.

Globalization, technology and demographic change have transformed our economy. Corporations have adapted, but our basic bargain with America's workers has not. We are living in a 21st-century economy, but are asking our workers to compete with a 20th-century set of tools.

In order to fulfill our obligation to future generations of Americas, we must restore balance between America's corporations and America's working families. Only then will we be able to guarantee that anyone who is willing to work hard and do the right thing has the opportunity to share in our nation's prosperity.

Published in the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Edwards, a Democrat and a former senator from North Carolina, is running for president.

The corporate domination of American life is most certainly to blame for the income inequalities that I have been writing about since the ascension of Ronald Reagan. But that is but one side of the issue. Corporations, it would seem, are above the law. Bringing them to justice for felony and capital crimes has been all but impossible. Corporations are shape shifters, invoking "corporate personhood" for the "freedom of speech" it gives them, but denying "personhood" in cases of mass murder and/or manslaughter.

Some twenty years on, the disaster in Bhopal in which some 8,000 people were killed is still in the news. There are two important and related developments. Last month, Dow Chemical literally purchased immunity from prosecution for its role in the Bhopal disaster even as the UK seeks to make corporations --not individuals --criminally responsible for deaths caused by a firm's gross negligence. The new law is entitled the "Corporate Manslaughter Statute."

Corporations often seem to be above the law and are. While corporations cite rights normally accorded individuals, they are rarely held to standards of equal responsibility. A single individual would have been imprisoned for an oil spill of Exxon Valdez magnitude but Exxon got off with a payoff. An individual responsible for the deaths of 8,000 at Bhopal might have gotten hard jail time for life or, in Texas, death at the end of a needle. Union Carbide, by contrast, got slapped on the corporate wrist for the deaths of 8,000 the night of December 3, 1984. There is, in fact, no definitive total of deaths.

THAT NIGHT, DECEMBER 3, 1984Shortly after midnight poison gas leaked from a factory in Bhopal, India, owned by Union Carbide Corporation. There was no warning, none of the plant's safety systems were working. In the city people were sleeping. They woke in darkness to the sound of screams with the gases burning their eyes, noses and mouths. They began retching and coughing up froth streaked with blood. Whole neighborhoods fled in panic, some were trampled, others convulsed and fell dead. People lost control of their bowels and bladders as they ran. Within hours thousands of dead bodies lay in the streets. ....

--International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal

The testimony of Mohammed Karim

I used to drive a truck to dispose of dirt and waste. My truck was also a special truck - I used to pick up unclaimed dead bodies from the mortuary, I was used to doing it. That night (3rd December 1984) I put in thousands of bodies that we dumped - in one grave we would put 5-6 bodies, and we burnt piles and piles with logs. Many bodies were burnt unidentified - Muslims were burnt and Hindus were buried.

"They (the govt.) said 'leave your wives and children in your houses and go on duty'. We used to be on duty till 12:00 at night and after that the military trucks used to come and dump the bodies in the Narmada river. This went on for three to four days. Even on the 16th (of December 1984) we had to come back again. They gave us R500 for this but then they took it back from our wages.

We would fit 120 bodies in one truck and this we would fill and empty five times a day. There were eight trucks on duty (so that is 4,800 bodies a day). It carried on for exactly the same intensity for three to four days, and after 12:00 am the military took over.

We took a bulldozer and dug pits to bury all the animals. Some people were picking up bodies and some animals. 50 - 60 drivers were all working that day (3rd December). We picked up the bodies with our own hands. Every time we picked one up it gave out gas. The bodies had all turned blue, and had froth oozing from their mouths.

In some houses everyone had died so there was no one to break the locks. In one case a 6 month old girl had survived and everybody else (mother, father and siblings) was dead. I broke the locks to that house.

At least 15 - 20,000 people died in those first few days. What they said in the papers was absolutely wrong. What could I have done? I was a government servant. What the government said was absolutely wrong but what could I do?

--How many died in Bhopal? A reply to the Houston Chronicle from Tim Edwards of the UK Campaign for Justice in Bhopal

Holding corporations responsible for crimes seems all but impossible.

In the United States, as in England, it is very difficult to hold either organizations or their officers responsible for gross negligence. For example, while many law students learn about the success civil tort plaintiffs had in suing Ford for failing to spend $13 per car to strengthen a gas tank known to be vulnerable to rear- end collisions, few learn that, at the same time, a prosecutor brought a case in criminal negligence against Ford in Indiana—and lost the jury trial.

--Anthony J. Sebok, The U.K.'s "Corporate Manslaughter" Statute, Findlaw

Dow Chemical, it appears, will escape all responsibility.

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Labels: Bhutto, Bin Laden, Musharraf, Pakistan, Terrorism

Musharraf Lies About the Assassination of Benazir Bhutto

2008-01-04T13:09:00.000-08:00

If you want to find a culprit, look among those who lie about the crime. Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf failed to provide security for Benazir Bhutto. Now --he's lying about Bhutto, his own role, and the so-called "lone lever" theory of her death.

Describing the ground ringed by numerous buildings as a "vulnerable place", Musharraf said: "This time she went of her volition, ignoring the threat." The President, who yesterday sought the help of Britain's Scotland Yard to probe Bhutto's death, ruled out the involvement of the country's military and intelligence agencies in the assassination.
"No intelligence agency of Pakistan is capable of motivating or indoctrinating a man to blow himself up," he said, adding one has to find out who gained the most from Bhutto's killing. "Would I and the government be the maximum gainer? Or is there someone else who could gain more?"
--Musharraf denies involvement of military, ISI in Bhutto murder

Clearly --Musharraf is trying to implicate the man who Musharraf said blew himself up. Clearly, the Pakistani Prime Minister has not read this blog, has not watched YouTube, nor any number of credible sources. Let's clear this up! Benazir Bhutto was not murdered by the man who blew himself up! She was not the victim of a "terrorist" attack! She was, rather, the victim of a professional hit. I saw at least one gunman on the video and saw at least two muzzle flashes. The explosion might as well have been on another planet but for the cover, the misdirection it might have provided the gunmen.

...the establishment media is already blaming Al-Qaeda for the assassination because ever since the attacks of 9/11 the media has blamed every government sponsored terrorist attack on this fictional organization. Al-Qaeda is nothing more than a front for government intelligence agencies that was originally formed in the 1970’s as a database of people who could be counted on to fight the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan. There have already been news reports mentioning how the Pakistani ISI has associations with Islamic extremists and members of al-Qaeda.
Bhutto Killing Points To Pakistani ISI, Lee Rogers, Rogue Government

Musharraf's statement follows two previous and equally absurd cover stories: 1) that Bhutto was killed by the shrapnel from the blast; 2) that she died of wounds sustained when she banged her head on a lever, the "lone lever" theory! The "official theories" are inconsistent with one another and inconsistent with the video tapes of the event as it happened. Benazir Bhutto was shot to death. The primary suspects are those, like Musharraf, who are telling transparent lies designed to deflect suspicion and obstruct objective investigation. Having already failed to provide adequate security, Musharraf has done both.

Officialdom wasted no time in trying to pin the murder on al Qaeda. At this point, one must ask: which al Qaeda? Are we talking about the al Qaeda as envisioned by Colin Powell, George Bush, and Dick Cheney? That al Qaeda is a rag tag mob of Islamic extremists trained in the mountains by Osama bin Laden. But there is another, a real al Qaeda, a "base", specifically a CIA database.

The intelligence service of Pakistan, a crucial American ally in the war on terrorism, has had an indirect but longstanding relationship with Al Qaeda, turning a blind eye for years to the growing ties between Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, according to American officials.
The intelligence service even used Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan to train covert operatives for use in a war of terror against India, the Americans say.
The intelligence service, known as Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI , also maintained direct links to guerrillas fighting in the disputed territory of Kashmir on Pakistan's border with India, the officials said.Pakistani Intelligence Had Ties To al Qaeda, US Officials Say
James Risen and Judith Miller, New York Times, Published: October 29, 2001

Clearly, Bhutto posed a threat not only to Musharraf but to western imperial powers to whom he is dependent and indebted. The Bush administration!

Bhutto's edited remarks have caused a bit of a stir of late. In a BBC interview --edited by the BBC --Bhutto stated that Osama bin Laden was dead, a statement that strikes at the very heart of George W. Bush's "war on terrorism". Recently, however, some have said that it no longer matters whether bin Laden is alive or dead.

But --it does matter. Truth always matters especially when it strikes at the very heart of "officialdom" propped up by lies and propaganda. Osama was, after all, the Bush administration's poster boy for world wide terrorism.

Bhutto’s claim that Bin Laden is dead may very well be true. Several MSM outlets have reported precisely that, and, inexplicably they have been ignored. The best example is the FOX report of Dec 2001, for example. All but ignored until recently —-even by Fox. The New York Times reported in 2002 that Bin Laden was dead and has apparently re-discovered their story. As of yesterday, it had been republished on the NYT web site.

My own opinion is that Bin Laden had been long dead by the time a "tape" surfaced just prior to the 2004 elections. Many believe the tape was faked. Whoever faked that tape had a dog in the race --George W. Bush! Qui Bono? George W. Bush? Who had lied most loudly, most vehemently and most often about "terrorism". George W. Bush! Again --if you want to find a culprit, look first at those who lie about the crime. Who lies? Bush. Qui Bono? Bush. Who is compromised? Certainly, the release of what is most certainly a "fake Osama" benefited one who presumes to rule by decree. George W. Bush.

Conspiracy theories, moreover, are most vociferously denounced by conspirators. The only world wide conspiracy that we are supposed to believe in is the one that has been promoted most vociferously by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney et al. What is al Qaeda, if not a conspiracy?

In the meantime, check Findlaw or the Cornell Law School library. Search for SCOTUS or Federal Court decisions having to do with ’conspiracies’. That’s a helluva lot of ink, time, and labor about something that does not exist. What is al Qaeda if not a conspiracy? What is an Islamcist radicalism, if not a conspiracy? Certainly --the GOP does believe in conspiracy theories. They believe and have a religious-like faith in many worldwide conspiracies of anti-war hippies, secular humanists, pornographers, liberals, feminists, academics, environmentalists, baby killers, and --during the Nixon years --nattering nabobs of negativism. The GOP leadership is a conspiracy of liars, graft-takers, and co-conspirators in the Military/Industrial complex, itself a conspiracy best described by St. Thomas More:

So God help me, I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth.
They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely, without fear of losing, that they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labour of the poor for as little money as may be.
-Of the Religions in Utopia, St. Thomas More

The conspiracy described by More is as accurate today as a description of the Military/Industrial complex and the web of robber barons that comprised the GOP base. Of course, the GOP has a stake in making sure you don't believe the truth about them. If they truth were know about their party, a Republican candidate might never, ever get elected.

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BYRON BAY 2007 BLUES & ROOTS FESTIVAL

2007-04-22T03:58:00.000-07:00

BYRON BAY 2007 BLUES & ROOTS FESTIVAL by Enemy Combatant

Byron Bay is a town on the easternmost tip of continental Australia two and a half hours by car south of Brisbane.

The Pacific Ocean first meets the almost sheer cliffs of Cape Byron before spreading to lap onto golden, sandy beaches. Lush sub-tropical coastal plains reach west through hinterland to the mountains of the Great Dividing Range, many miles inland. Byron Bay has no high rise buildings, zippo traffic control lights and if Maccas and KFC are in town, I sure didn’t notice them. A majority of voting locals like it that way.

They’re a weird mob. I feel comfortable in Byron Bay.

The Arakwal people have “Native Title” to many of their sacred sites and traditional hunting grounds.

Board surfers “discovered” Byron, a former whaling port, after the huge success of ‘The Endless Summer” and other American surf movies in the Sixties. Now their grandkids are dolphins. Old hippies mix easily with retired city professionals in cafes that serve outstanding espresso and food. Jumbo U-Choose organic fruit juice made before your eyes, $6. Far fucken out, man! The farmers, mainly dairy and sugar cane, shrug and mosey on by without so much as a sideways glance at the legions of international backpackers. Mercifully Club Med were thwarted in a tight Shire Council vote recently, when they tried to weasel in on the potentially huge yuppie tourist action.

The festival began 18 years ago at a local juke joint called The Piggery. Johnny Winter headlined. These days it is held at a football ground, a couple of miles south of Byron. Two large circus tents separately house the Mojo and Crossroads stages , The Jambalaya stage lies beneath a third, smaller tent. Another enclosed bar stage caters for those with a taste for pressure cooker action. Originally a Bluesfest, it’s now a Blues & Roots fest, which gives promoters a lot a scope in bringing musicians and music lovers of many persuasions shoulder to shoulder.

Ben Zweller meet Bo Diddly. Paolo Nuttini, this is Lee “Scratch” Perry. Bela Fleck, say hi to Mojo Webb. The music plays Thursday through Monday of Easter with performances from early afternoon till midnight.

One has to pace oneself to make the most of such a feast. The line up is too long to list. Check it out on http://www.bluesfest.com.au

Standouts were The Sierra Leone Refugee All Stars. They performed a superb repertoire of reggae and West African numbers.

These guys and one lady are the real deal. Bona fide refugees five short years ago, they are infused with joie de vivre such that they can barely believe their change in fortunes. Their music compels all within earshot to dance and smile.

Ziggy Marley: A fully-fledged top shelf Jamaican musician. His band is in the same league as the original Wailers. Although Ziggy’s voice has less of Bob’s embellishments, it is honeyed and true. Every now and then a flick of his dreads or an on-the-spot hop underlines his immediate heritage. Brilliant hour of beautifully mixed reggae music, mon.

The Brownian motion of the passing parade as you move from venue to venue facilitates human interaction. No social barriers. Anyone will talk to you about the music. There was absolutely no aggro or violence. Orderly lines for booze. Very low-key unarmed security. Many punters discreetly puffed reefer, the pleasant aroma was all pervading.

Nobody said boo, sparse heat pointed their snouts the other way. Very civilised. Just thousands of happy people from teens to sixties gettin’ down together with good vibes and quality live music.

Tony Joe White: Dug the guy since I first heard him growl his way through Polk Salad Radio on AM radio all those years ago.

It took a lot of courage for a Southern white boy in the sixties to sing about (in Willie and Laura May Jones);

“When you work in the fields,
You don’t have the time,
To worry about another man’s colour.”

Backed only by a session drummer, he purred his way through many an old favourite.

From Tunica Motel:

“I find myself at midnight
Moving to the back porch blues
the guitar cries, telling me
About the hard times

Something moves in the shadows
Giving me a little chill
I thought I saw Robert Johnson
Walking out across the field.”

Tony Joe has lost a little of his top register but has found a rasping Neil Young-like buzz in his trusty sky blue Fender. He uses this to magnificent effect in “Closer To The Truth” - sung in 1991 in a gently prophetic tone on CD but here, live at Byron, as an angry call to action:

“The eagle watches from the mountain
As the warriors turn into fools
And the dice are thrown on sacred ground
And they move closer to the truth

And who's gonna tell the children
How the rivers used to flow crystal blue

And we keep leaving scars on Mother Earth
And moving closer to the truth"

Other impressive performers were Chris Smither: one golden baritone, one amplified
acoustic guitar, one stomp box, a wicked wit and brilliantly timed patter.

The McClymonts: three sisters with harmonies to match The Dixie Chicks but apolitical. Should take Nashville by storm in the manner of Kasey Chambers.

Taj Mahal Trio: After thirty years together they play as one, live. Much more fun than his recordings. Taj cake-walked, hollered chants and demanded responses and made everyone happy. First time I’ve seen him perform without his shades. His eyes twinkle when he hits it.

Thursday teased us with brilliant sunshine, but rolling showers for the next three days pushed many campers to the limit after four days, so I missed Bonnie Raitt who closed the fest on Monday night with a set that “reliable sources” claim was top order. Can’t win ‘em all but a hot bath and fresh-sheeted bed were blissful after the three hour drive home.

I do have reservations about the East Coast Blues and Roots festival. They need a much bigger venue like, for example like Jazzfest at New Orleans, to prevent sounds overlapping from venue to venue. The food choices are appalling compared to what’s on offer in town. Finally, there is a creeping commercialism about the festival that on the one hand I understand, but on the other, is the antithesis of the essence of roots music. The celebration of the human spirit is not about turning a buck.

After 18 years the festival has progressed from a ragin’ roadhouse to an almost-slick House of Blues event. Don’t misconstrue me, I’ll jump at the chance to see great performers play at any corporate House of Blues, anywhere I’m passin’ through, but I know where the real deal went down.

It is practically impossible to get the stuff no more.

It went down on porches and juke joints and clubs like the Checkerboard Lounge on Chicago’s Southside and on Maxwell Street, both long gone tabernacles of the Blues. Before that it went down on plantations and levee bank and railroad camps of the South where Jim Crow perpetually threatened to break out The Klan. On Parchman Farm and Angola Prison, systematically oppressed people reached to their African roots and sang the blues to lift their spirits.

In doing so they kept themselves and their culture alive.

When it comes right down to it, Sam “Lightnin’ ” Hopkins once sang:

“The Blues…….The Blues is a feelin’ ”. Couldn’t agree more

Another First Amendment Right

2007-04-12T09:20:00.000-07:00

I've had a great time with Blog Against Theocracy Weekend, which for me was extended for a couple of days of reading terrific, provocative posts spanning the gamut of First Freedoms First issues. Now, back to blogging, but we're not going to stray too far from the nest for our first post-swarm post. Here's how the first amendment reads,

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

The blogswarm has been all about the first 16 words of the amendment, known as the establishment clause. This post is about the next 10 words, which guarantee freedom of speech, and of the press. A number of things converged to compel me to address this subject. The one you're most likely familiar with is the controversy surrounding Don Imus' on-air idiocy. On top of that are a couple of items in my inbox, the first from Blue Gal,

"Thought you would want to see this and maybe even linky.
Ben Heine Silenced by DKos
Ben Heine is a Belgian Cartoonist. A Cartoonist, folks.
Where has this kinda censorship happened before? Huh?"

That's my private inbox. I got this from comments, which I think of as kind of my public inbox.

"hey sbt,
sorry to be off topic, but check this out:
(Link)"

The link goes to an Amy Goodman article in TruthDig called Take Back the Airwaves.

"As the TV pundits on the networks gab about the tens of millions of dollars raised by the top presidential candidates, what they don’t talk about is where that money is going: to their own networks.

Money is now considered the single most important factor in our electoral process. Ideas and issues take a back seat to the bottom line. This prostitution of our electoral process has one key culprit: television advertising."

These three items converge onto an issue so full of complexities that I hesitate to even approach it. Hopefully I can bring out some aspects that will provoke everyone to think it through themselves a bit. I'll start with my off-the cuff response to the TruthDig link, from comments, "The TruthDig article is right on the money, one of my top concerns - actually two - the overbearing influence of money on American politics, and the conflict of interest that DOES exist in a medium that accepts advertising dollars from the candidates."

To continue in that vein, most broadcasting facilities in America are owned by corporate interests who have other fish to fry than just the revenues they make from politicians on a cyclic basis. (meaning those revenues dry up when there is no pending election) They pay taxes, and face various forms of regulations, so it is in their interest to promote politicians that reduce any associated costs. In many cases the broadcast companies are in turn owned by larger corporations. An example of this is NBC, owned by General Electric. (I learned that from Dave Letterman) GE is a huge corporation, with major revenues coming from such things as supplying equipment to the military - guidance packages for smart bombs, that sort of thing. On balance, these concerns could far outweigh something as trivial as a few million dollars in advertising every couple of years. They might even be tempted to side with politicians who were pro-military, interventionist, and in favor of lower taxes, even if their opponents spent twice as much on campaign ads.

These circumstances apply to all the media; television, radio and print - to varying degrees from entity to entity. You might think the truth would stand as much chance in this environment as an elderly lawyer facing Cheney with a shotgun in his hands. There use to be something called the fairness doctrine, which required overtly political opinions expressed over the air to be balanced by someone with a differing view. That died in 1987.

Now we depend on broadcasters to be fair and balanced due to their respect for the fine traditions of journalistic integrity. The problem is, people like Don Imus, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly etc. don't even pretend to be journalists, but most of their audience assumes that they are anyway. They self-identify as entertainers, commenters, editorialists, or that old standby, pundits. I don't think that word even existed in the days of real journalists like Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, or Huntley and Brinkley.

[There is a lot of difference between the legislative control that can be exerted over on-air broadcasting and cable or satellite broadcasting. The former is subject to regulation because of its dependency on a limited electronic spectrum or bandwidth - you can't have two Channel 5's in the same geographical area after all, their signals would interfere with one another. This makes bandwidth a precious commodity which has always been construed as belonging to the public and doled out to the broadcasters as a sacred trust. Cable and satellite can get around this technical restriction, and in so doing escape most of the government's regulative authority. This explains why you see so much of Janet Jackson's nipple on cable.]

Back to Imus. To me the biggest effect of this story has been that it has given the rest of the media an excuse to conduct their own senseless swarm over a relative non-issue. I can't believe how much airtime has been devoted to this over the last couple of days. Oh, yes I can. On top of the questions of who's Anna Nicole's baby's daddy and who has a chance to advance on American Idol, it's helping the Corporate Owned Media (COM) to push the real news (like White House illegal emails, for instance) off the headlines. And flash to CNN et. al. - it only takes 30 seconds to announce that charges have been dropped in the Duke lacrosse rape allegation case, not 25% of total airtime for 48 hours. How about mentioning the recently released scathing report on Walter Reed Hospital? Oh, right - that one makes Bu$hCo™ look bad. Or how about this story that totally yanks the rug out from under the DoJ's reasoning for firing David Iglesias? Oh, right...

What we have here is a failure to communicate the truth to the American people. That is serious business. Listen to Abe Lincoln on this one,

"I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crises. The great point is to bring them the real facts."
-- Abraham Lincoln --
"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time."
-- Abraham Lincoln --

The thing is, the COM are trying to fool all of the people - by not bringing them the real facts. At least not the relevant facts. I would support Don Imus's right to spew whatever idiotic diatribe he likes. It is after all his First Amendment right to do so, and the best way to deal with an abuse of free speech really is with more free speech. But there's a problem with that.

More and more, free speech in America is being defined as 'money talks.' After Nixon was brought down, not by the FBI, not by Congress, not by the Department of Justice, but by the media, the right wing responded in a predictably slimy way. First, they bought up as much of the media as they could. Second, Reagan appointed head of the FCC Mark S. Fowler worked to abolish the fairness doctrine. Third, FOX "news" and a number of right-wing news consortia spent a lot of money and time on a relatively unknown Florida case to establish as a matter of law that they had a RIGHT under the first amendment to LIE to their audiences. That's right. No, that's very, very wrong. Sad, but true. PLEASE click the last three links - herein lies the oh-so-sad truth of how the first amendment is being interpreted in modern America. Lincoln would weep.

The complexity of this issue derives from the tension between First Amendment free speech guarantees and the necessity in a democracy, recognized by Lincoln, of the electorate being informed by the truth. As the Third link shows, the right wing are exploiting the first amendment in order to manipulate the American political arena. Swiftboat Veterans For Truth cynically relied on the First Amendment to get their message out, for instance. FOX "news" regularly exploits their position to act as a blatant propaganda arm of the GOP. How much of this form of freedom of speech can America stand before democracy itself falls?

As American journalist A. J. Liebling of the New Yorker magazine pointed out, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." In modern times, the impact of YOUR freedom of speech can only be meaningfully measured against that of those who own, not just a newspaper, which is expensive enough - not even a chain of newspapers, but a freaking television network. Think about that. Here are a few more talking points for discussion.

"Paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell."
-- Hugo L Black --
"War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it."
-- George Orwell --
"All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values."
-- Marshall McLuhan --
"Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless."
-- Sinclair Lewis --
"The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power."
-- Henry A. Wallace, Vice President to FDR, 1944 --
The Danger of American Fascism

Cross-posted from Les Enragés.org

TAGS: First Amendment, Free Speech, Freedom of the Press, Propaganda

Supreme Court Jesters

2007-04-03T20:47:00.001-07:00

...And Obscene Court Gestures

Perhaps one should be a little pleased with the Supreme Court's recent decision to allow the Environmental Protection Agency to actually, ahem, protect the freakin' environment. On balance I would give that up to have them rule on the constitutionality of the odious Military Commissions Act. As the BBC reports, they have recently decided not to decide this vital issue.

The US Supreme Court has said it will not decide whether detainees held at Guantanamo have the right to challenge their detention in US federal courts.

The decision means the court will not rule on the constitutionality of an anti-terror law pushed through Congress by President George W Bush last year.

The provision in question states that Guantanamo Bay inmates cannot challenge their detention in US civil courts.

Many of the 385 detainees at the camp have been held for five years or more.

None has yet been able to challenge their detention in a US civil court.

The provision stripping detainees of their right to mount a legal challenge to their confinement was upheld by a federal appeals court in Washington in February.

The court's majority opinion was that "the will of Congress" should prevail and that habeas corpus did not apply to foreign nationals being held at Guantanamo Bay because it is not US soil.

Now, I don't have a law degree or anything, but it seems a simple enough task to interpret the clear language of Article 1, section 9 of the Constitution with regard to the Military Commissions Act passed on Sept. 28, 2006. (NYT news story), (Amnesty International response)

"The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.
No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed."

Since what we're dealing with here is in fact a suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and an ex post facto law (one that purports to take effect before it was passed), the matter seems to have been settled back in 1787. So that only leaves one issue as far as I can see, "that habeas corpus did not apply to foreign nationals being held at Guantanamo Bay because it is not US soil." And once again, I'm not at all impressed with the validity of this argument. What they're saying in effect is that US jurisdiction does not apply in this case - but wait, what they're REALLY saying is that jurisdiction applies so far as the government is concerned, but not so far as the detainees' rights are concerned.

This is a continuation of a trend in BushAmerika towards an institutionally asymmetrical application of legal principle, just as in the comparison I recently made between Monica Goodling's rights and those of detainee David Hicks. This abomination of a government continues to rely on the most tissue-thin of specious arguments, proffered by a gaggle of cronies similar to Alberto Gonzales - who recently testified in the Senate that the Constitutional guarantee not to suspend habeas corpus does not indicate that habeas corpus is a guaranteed right. This kind of reasoning should be met with an instant response of, "whoo boy, what the heck are YOU on?"

As far as the court's unusual respect for "the will of Congress" is concerned, I'm quite certain that Congress does NOT have the authority to amend the Constitution. So who are these clowns that Bushie and his father have appointed to the US Supreme Court? Bozos in expensive Italian suits, they should all be sent to a circus stuffed into the same Austin Mini. At least that would yield a laugh for the kiddies. They sure aren't looking anything like qualified lawyers from where I'm standing.

One other thing I think is really important and likely to be skipped over. The court is claiming that they are not making a decision here, but from a practical standpoint I can hardly imagine anything more deceptive. The detainees are not being released, nor are they being afforded an appearance before the court, so a de facto decision has been reached - from the point of view of the detainees, very emphatically so.

Clinton appointees Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer were joined by George H. W. Bush pick David Souter in dissenting this decision, Breyer writing, "I believe these questions deserve this court's immediate attention." The rest of the court, ALL REPUBLICAN APPOINTEES (Roberts and Alito by Junior, Kennedy by Reagan, Stevens by Ford and Clarence Thomas by Poppy) join with Reagan appointee Antonin Scalia in collectively making an obscene gesture towards the rule of law that can be interpreted to mean, "Go F#@k Yourself!"

One other thing. The court could have accepted this case and then ruled in the government's favor. There are two reasons this did not happen, both of them as sinister as they are cynical. The first is obvious. They are reluctant for political reasons to signal to the public that a police state has fully entrenched itself on American soil. The second is even more disturbing. By withholding final judgement on this issue the court gives a level of authority to President Bush that it can later deny to any Democratic successor.

I can hardly imagine anything more partisan than that, nor any more grievous example of the asymmetrical application of the law that I lamented above. The really sad thing is, recent history has shown that the administration is probably even now hatching something even worse. When someone respects the law as a concept, they see it as the glue that holds civilized society together. When someone like Bush, Gonzales, Scalia, or these other Republican-appointed toadies thinks of the law, they only see an armed thug in a uniform, willing to do their bidding.

TAGS: Supreme Court, Detainees, Constitution, Police State

The Fifth Amendment

2007-03-27T20:15:00.000-07:00

Exclusive Property of the Bush Administration?

Nothing brings the Bush administration's naked partisanship and arrogant contempt for the law into focus so much as do two of today's top news items. Both have strong connections to the fifth amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. The first, the case of Monica Goodling, pictured to the right.

Goodling, 33, is a 1995 graduate Messiah College in Grantham, Pa., an institution that describes itself as "committed to embracing an evangelical spirit."

She received her law degree at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Va. Regent, founded by Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson, says its mission is "to produce Christian leaders who will make a difference, who will change the world."

E-mails show that Goodling was involved in planning the dismissals and in later efforts to limit the negative reaction. As the Justice Department's liaison to the White House, she could shed light on the extent of White House involvement in the dismissals.

Goodling took a leading role in making sure that Tim Griffin, a protege of presidential adviser Karl Rove, replaced H.E. "Bud" Cummins as the U.S. attorney in Arkansas. Documents released to Congress include communications between Goodling and Scott Jennings, Rove's deputy.

Ms. Goodling would be a key witness in the Congressional investigation into the dismissal of federal prosectutors if not for her invocation of her fifth amendment rights not to incriminate herself. This has already made a difference, and changed the world in a number of ways. First, it has pundits on the right actually defending the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, something they haven't been doing much since ~~their beloved Führer~~ President Bush infamously referred to the Constitution as 'that Goddamn piece of paper.' Second, it sends a clear signal to Congress that at least in Ms. Goodling's opinion laws were indeed broken in this case. Did I mention she has a law degree?

One other way she has changed the world is that now Monica Lewinski can breathe more easily - Monica Goodling seems well on her way to replacing Lewinski as the Monica whose name is most firmly associated with White House scandal in future history books.

Let us now shift our focus to the second case, that of Australian David Hicks (pictured to the left.) Hicks just plead guilty to terrorism charges after over 5 years detention at the infamous Guantanamo Bay - part of America's own Gulag Archipelago. Some great links courtesy of TomPaine.com help one appreciate just what 'enemy combatants' have to endure. BringHicksHome.com actually built a replica of his cell in Australia that people could visit, and took it on tour. The fact that it could be transported on the back of a truck should tell you something. Peter Murphy created a virtual reality model of the cell for those unable to make it to any of the Australian locations. Amnesty International has also taken up his case, and the World Socialist Web Site has details of his brutal treatment.

He explained that he was “beaten before, after, and during interrogations... [and] threatened, directly and indirectly, with firearms and other weapons before and during interrogations” during his three-year detention.
He also heard the bashing of other detainees during interrogations and saw their injuries. He states that he has been hit in the face, head, feet, and torso with hands, fists and other objects, including rifle butts.

“At one point, a group of detainees, including myself, was subjected to being randomly hit over a eight-hour session while handcuffed and blindfolded,” he said. His head was rammed into the ground several times.

Other elements of prisoner abuse exposed show that Gitmo was a testing ground for the regime of physical and psychological abuses that later would be associated with Abu Ghraib - sleep deprivation, threats with attack dogs, forced injections with unknown drugs, humiliation and intimidation of naked prisoners, and more.

Why was David Hicks treated this way?

“I was told there was an ‘easy way’ and a ‘hard way’ to respond to interrogation,” he said. ... “Cooperation with interrogators,” Hicks stated, “offered the only means of relief from the miserable treatment and abuse the detainees suffered. Those who failed to comply suffered abuse until they gave in.”

David Hicks has plead guilty to aiding the cause of terrorism, under a system of military tribunals that didn't even exist when he was incarcerated. He was previously charged with attempted murder, which charge has since evaporated. I think it would be perfectly reasonable to conclude that Hicks' plea came about because, “Cooperation with interrogators offered the only means of relief from the miserable treatment and abuse the detainees suffered." Prior to today Hicks' lawyers have consistently stated that he did not expect a fair trial. Let me make that point a little clearer.

- From Canada.com:

Marine Lt.-Col. Colby Vokey, [Canadian Gitmo detainee Omar] Khadr’s lead defence attorney, said he believes Hicks pleaded guilty simply to "escape the hell" of Guantanamo, because a deal with the Australian government will allow him to return home to serve his sentence... The guilty plea gives a boost to President George W. Bush, who was forced last year to abandon an earlier system of military tribunals after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled they violated international law... Hicks’ guilty plea sets a dangerous precedent because it came after a stormy, one-day tribunal hearing in which a U.S. military judge dismissed two of the Australian’s defence lawyers.

- From ABC News online (Australia), Aug., '05:

Two emails, which have been obtained by the ABC, were sent to supervisors in the Office of Military Commissions in March of last year - three months before Australian detainee David Hicks was charged and five months before his trial began.

The first email is from prosecutor Major Robert Preston to his supervisor.

Maj Preston writes that the process is perpetrating a fraud on the American people, and that the cases being pursued are marginal.

"I consider the insistence on pressing ahead with cases that would be marginal even if properly prepared to be a severe threat to the reputation of the military justice system and even a fraud on the American people," Maj Preston wrote.

"Surely they don't expect that this fairly half-arsed effort is all that we have been able to put together after all this time."

Maj Preston says he cannot continue to work on a process he considers morally, ethically and professionally intolerable.

The second email is written by another prosecutor, Captain John Carr, who also ended up leaving the department.

Capt Carr says the commissions appear to be rigged.

"When I volunteered to assist with this process and was assigned to this office, I expected there would at least be a minimal effort to establish a fair process and diligently prepare cases against significant accused," he wrote.

"Instead, I find a half-hearted and disorganised effort by a skeleton group of relatively inexperienced attorneys to prosecute fairly low-level accused in a process that appears to be rigged."

Capt Carr says that the prosecutors have been told by the chief prosecutor that the panel sitting in judgment on the cases would be handpicked to ensure convictions.

"You have repeatedly said to the office that the military panel will be handpicked and will not acquit these detainees and that we only needed to worry about building a record for the review panel," he said.

- From Leftwrites, just a few weeks ago:

So the US military has charged David Hicks—but not with attempted murder. What a slap in the face for all those who loyally mouthed the American talking points on Hicks!

The evidence against Hicks was so strong, they assured us, and the things he’d done were so heinous, that the man deserved nothing less than Guantanamo Bay. Rumsfeld (remember him?) told us that Gitmo contained only the "most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the Earth," and all the right-wing ditto-heads nodded their slack-jawed assent. Yet now, with the US under pressure to provide some proof, the attempted murder charge miraculously evaporates.

That, boys and girls, is the reason we have a legal process, since (gasp!) not everything that the authorities say turns out to be true.

In any case, now that the Americans no longer claim that Hicks actually tried to kill anyone, it will be interesting to see the basis on which the Right tries to defend the continuing violation of the rules of law in his case.

- And again from ABC News online Feb. 3, '07:

The US military has revealed details of the drafted charges that include attempted murder and providing material support for terrorism... Mr Hicks's US military lawyer, Major Michael Mori, has questioned the charge of attempted murder, pointing out that the US military prosecutor has acknowledged that Mr Hicks never fired a shot in anger.

To sum up, the so-called 'due process' of this case is a sham, fitting well with my earlier description of the Bush 'Potemkin Village' of justice. But to get back to my original point - let's act like good high school students, and compare and contrast the functional impact of the fifth amendment in the case of Monica Goodling compared to the case of David Hicks.

I believe it will eventually be revealed that Monica Goodling's hiding behind the fifth amendment is frivolous. If she did so to hide someone else's wrongdoing rather than her own, say Alberto Gonzales, Karl Rove, or someone even higher in the White House food chain, that would not be her right, that would be obstruction of justice. As a lawyer she should know that. But her frivolous and obstructionist misuse of the Bill of Rights is OK, because she is connected to this administration. And this administration is acting like the Constitution is their property.

There could be no more egregious breach of the principal that one cannot be made to bear witness against oneself than a coerced guilty plea, as that of Hicks appears to be. But he isn't in the White House 'in crowd', so he doesn't get to make use of 'their' Bill of Rights.

And sadly, neither do you or I

UPDATE: If this article doesn't already have you seething at the inequity and iniquity of Bu$hCo™ justice, read this HuffPo piece.

U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan threw out a lawsuit brought on behalf of nine former prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said Rumsfeld cannot be held personally responsible for actions taken in connection with his government job... "This is a lamentable case," Hogan began his 58-page opinion Tuesday.

No matter how appealing it might seem to use the courts to correct allegations of severe abuses of power, Hogan wrote, government officials are immune from such lawsuits. Additionally, foreigners held overseas are not normally afforded U.S. constitutional rights.

TAGS: Monica Goodling, David Hicks, The Fifth Amendment, War Crimes

Potemkin Village of Justice

2007-03-26T14:07:00.000-07:00

Perhaps you've heard of the architectural concept of the false front, where a humble building has a phony second floor added on to it to make it appear more substantial than it is. They were especially popular in the one horse towns of the old west, but thus far the pinnacle of achievement in deceptive architecture goes to the Potemkin village.

"Potemkin villages were, purportedly, fake settlements erected at the direction of Russian minister Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin to fool Empress Catherine II during her visit to Crimea in 1787. Conventional wisdom has it that Potemkin, who led the Crimean military campaign, had hollow facades of villages constructed along the desolate banks of the Dnieper River in order to impress the monarch and her travel party with the value of her new conquests, thus enhancing his standing in the empress's eyes."

America became, in effect, a Potemkin Village of Democracy in January, 2001 when George W. Bush, who had lost the federal Presidential election, was nonetheless appointed to his first term in the White House by five Republican-appointed Supreme Court Justices. The scaffolding was up to erect a higher, sturdier facade when Bush was 're-elected' by the 'democratic' process of Diebold voting. This process would more accurately be called demockracy, and should have been called out by the mainstream media - but they were too busy maintaining their own Potemkin Village of Journalism.

Efforts by the administration to create a 'permanent Republican majority' (without regard to the will of the electorate) could just as well be described as a campaign to suspend democracy permanently. Nothing so despicably serves that end as the subversion of the Department of Justice to the aims of the Republican party, even when those aims are in direct conflict with the people of the United States of America. This is not just corruption, but wholesale corruption of the system in order to enable ordinary corruption. Corruption squared, if you will - or perhaps metacorruption.

No-one personifies this process so much as Attorney General Alberto 'Abu' Gonzales.
- Firing Carol Lam in the middle of an investigation into who else was involved with GOP congressman Randy 'Duke' Cunningham in influence peddling. Lam had just "notified the Justice Department that she intended to execute search warrants on a high-ranking CIA official as part of a corruption probe." Carol Lam herself has been pretty taciturn on the circumstances of her dismissal - not so Josh Marshall, with this excellent post.
- Firing David Iglesias for NOT harassing Democratic candidates before the November elections.
- Firing H. E. Cummings in order to replace him with Karl Rove aide and designated GOP hitman J. Timothy Griffin.
- And why was John McKay fired, again? "A Democratic candidate won Washington state's 2004 gubernatorial race by just a couple of hundred votes. McKay didn't call a grand jury to investigate questions of voter fraud, and he heard about it when he sought a promotion."
Gonzales lied to congress repeatedly about the reasoning and process behind these dismissals, lies that were immediately and irrefutably exposed. In fact he has been a baldfaced liar from his confirmation on, and was called on it by Russ Feingold over a year ago. This is the guy appointed to uphold the sanctity of the law? WTF!?! Impeaching and convicting him for serial perjury would be a slam dunk except for the unmitigated partisanship of GOP senators and congresscritters. In fact, Stephen Crockett of Consortium News just espoused a theme I have advanced a number of times in past comments - that the entire Republican party is a criminal conspiracy as defined by the RICO statutes. Don't get me started on the likes of Arlen Specter or the execrable Orrin Hatch.

While Gonzales is certainly the point man in this perversion of the justice system he is not the main actor. As in the Libby case, all the documents point to the Cheney-Rove connection being the key. And like Libby, Gonzo runs the ever-increasing risk of being thrown to the wolves as a sacrifice if either of these principal players is threatened. Once again Josh Marshall comes through with the key statement,

"This isn't a case where Alberto Gonzales has fallen short of the president's standards or bungled some process. This is the standard. The Attorney General has done and is doing precisely what is expected of him... the president is fine with all of this. Fine with the fact that the Attorney General has not only repeatedly lied to the public but has also been exposed as repeatedly lying to the public. He's fine with at least two US Attorneys being fired for not giving in to pressure to file bogus charges to help Republican candidates.

Of course he's fine with it. Because it comes from him. None of this is about Alberto Gonzales. This is about the president and the White House, which is where this entire plan was hatched. Gonzales was just following orders, executing the president's plans. This is about this president and this White House, which ... let's be honest, everyone on both sides of the aisle already knows."

Gonzo took this job with the expectation he would emerge as the Mayor of Bush's Potemkin village of shame. More and more he is looking like just another village idiot.

One last thing, on the subject of the White House's declaration that they will 'stonewall' the Congressional subpoenas directed at insiders like KKKarl Rove and Harriet Miers. Pundits in the MSM will hammer on this as a 'constitutional crisis.' I don't buy that for an instant. A constitutional crisis would exist if Congress didn't confront the White House. Congressional oversight, examination of the administration's actions, and legal repercussions are what the Constitution expects and demands in these circumstances.

TAGS: Department of Justice, Potemkin Village, Alberto Gonzales
Subpoena Power!!!

Is the Chaos in Iraq Deliberate?

2007-03-26T04:09:00.000-07:00

A interesting theory is making the rounds. And, at a time when it would appear that sectarian violence in Iraq will, in fact, spread and endanger the entire Middle East, it is hard not to conclude that the Bush gang is deliberately "fomenting" chaos and plans to benefit from it. It is a fact, after all, that when Bush ordered the attack and invasion of Iraq, Iraq was destabilized. Every facet of the war since then has been a mistake if not a debacle. Morons could have done better.

It may be prudent, therefore, to ask the tough question: is team Bush deliberately spreading chaos in Iraq? Has team Bush intentionally mucked it all up? Is it all just a part of a wider, nefarious plan? We have always suspected that oil was behind Bush's imperial ambitions. Will chaos in Iraq help Bush deliver to the oil barons an inflamed Middle East? Or has Bush gone too far? Has the ticking time bomb already blown up in his stupid face?

I am impatient with speculation at this point. I no longer give a damn why the resident criminal does what he does. The public record is clear enough; there is enough evidence now to try and convict him of war crimes. This gang of criminals seized the White House with a stolen election. Since then, it has committed treason in order to shut up its critics, most, prominently Ambassador Joe Wilson. This administration has sought to ramrod through Congress tax cuts that rob the poor and benefit the rich and corporate. Fortunately, the GOP effort to embezzle the Social Security trust fund failed. Still, it is difficult to understand how George W. Bush will pay for the murders that he has committed in Iraq without financing that ongoing war crime upon the backs of America's retiring seniors and mortgaging the future of America's youth.

There is a special place in hell...and to speak eloquently to that, here's Bill Maher.

In the meantime, even members of Bush's own party are daring to say the "I" word --impeachment.

Senator: Some See Impeachment As Option

WASHINGTON Mar 25, 2007 (AP)— With his go-it-alone approach on Iraq, President Bush is flouting Congress and the public, so angering lawmakers that some consider impeachment an option over his war policy, a senator from Bush's own party said Sunday.

Meanwhile, the Senate's No. 2 Republican leader harshly criticized House Democrats for setting an "artificial date" for withdrawing troops from Iraq and said he believes Republicans have enough votes to prevent passage of a similar bill in the Senate.

"We need to put that kind of decision in the hands of our commanders who are there on the ground with the men and women," said Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss. "For Congress to impose an artificial date of any kind is totally irresponsible."

GOP Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a frequent critic of the war, stopped short of calling for Bush's impeachment. But he made clear that some lawmakers viewed that as an option should Bush choose to push ahead despite public sentiment against the war.
...

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--The Existentialist Cowboy

Terrorism, Imperialism
Bush, War Crimes, Iraq

Pan's Labyrinth and Us

2007-03-20T18:30:00.000-07:00

The life of the mind and the practical realities of planetary life are often difficult to reconcile. There is so much beauty and joy available in personal Fantasias but dreaming and imagining, no matter how stimulating, will not provide shelter, sustenance and society when one is cold hungry and lonely. Most people etch out a compromise that works OK for them and bravely continue their journey. Extremes of the human condition have always proved fascinating and when polar personality opposites occupy the same territory, the outcomes are worthy of our consideration in a manner that transcends mere entertainment.

Some years ago I saw the trailer for a film, "Life Is Beautiful" about how different Holocaust victims coped with incarceration prior to achieving their "Final Solution". The director and star , Roberto Benigni is seen prat-walking in front of a rifle carrying Nazi guard. The pantomime is for the benefit of a small child watching through a window who is being "sheltered" from the brutal realities by the Benigni character's kindness. But a real Nazi with such a weapon in his hands would have riflebutt-whipped and bashed him into submission. What if his peers saw him go soft on a "nitwit"? For a hard bitten old fogey like me, the whole set-up didn't ring true. In a situation like this a cowed and bleeding Benigni would have have simpered post beating:"But why did you do that?", to which the guard would have replied: "Here there is no why!" Great that it picked up a swathe of Oscars, but it didn't get me to the box office.

From the outset of Pan's Labyrinth suspension of disbelief was as instantaneous and seductive as a stroll through an enchanted forest. Set in the mountains of northern Spain in 1944, a prepubescent girl arrives (15 minutes late) with her pregnant mother at a Hacienda Grande to meet her new stepfather, one of Generalissimo Franco's commandants who is hunting down the remnants of the Partisans, survivors of the Spanish Civil War whose guerilla resistance is proving more than a minor inconvenience.

One of Pan's Labyrinth's themes is the contrast in character between step-father and daughter. The annals are rife with uber-authoritarian types but no one gets it down more precisely than the Commandant, from the way he shaves and polishes his jack-boots to his total lack of empathy with the feelings of his perceived underlings. The child is an avid reader which warmed me to her from the outset, but it's her manner of coping with the all-pervading evil surrounding her, that is the film's core. It's the thread that connects our pagan, pantheistic past, to the prevailing horrors of twenty- first century crypto-Fascism. How does one cope, as a victim of relative comfort, with the ongoing ugliness and excesses of BushCo and their ilk, without cruelling the innocense of free spirited souls who are more than content to savour life's sweetnees. How does one shatter the innocense of those who are by their nature, immune from seduction by the superficiality of Mammon's golden calves or the sadistic thrills of totalitarianism, without destroying that person's essence? The question is existential not rhetorical, how say ye, comrades?

"Like the strangers that you've met,
The ragged men in the ragged clothes,
The silver thorn of bloody rose,
Lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow.

Now I think I know what you tried to say to me,
How you suffered for your sanity,
How you tried to set them free.
They would not listen, they're not listening still.
Perhaps they never will..."

From Don McLean's "Vincent", 1971.

New Rule: Sometimes Partisanship is OK

2007-03-19T14:42:00.000-07:00

Here's my new rule, and I especially mean this to apply to the dismissed prosecutors case that is sure to dominate the news this week, and may lead (if there's even a vestige of justice left in the world WILL lead) to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto 'Abu' Gonzales. - The Repuglicans don't get to use the word 'partisan' in any of its forms to describe Democrats any more. And I'll tell you why.

Democracy cannot function without partisanship. In order to have a choice, the electorate MUST have at least two, and preferably more options to chose from. Therefore it is not only appropriate but desirable and even essential that a political party present its policies in a clear and distinct voice, ESPECIALLY when those policies differ from the opposition. For the last few years, it is exactly this type of 'partisanship' that the Republicans have been criticizing the Democratic party of at every possible opportunity. The portable public chorus of the mainstream media has seen no reason to object to this totally unworthy ploy.

There is a kind of partisanship that is completely unacceptable, in many countries criminal, and that type of partisanship can only really be carried out by the party in power. That is partisanship from within the government apparatus. Even though an appointment to the civil service may be a political reward, once in office, the appointee has an obligation to serve not only the party and/or individual who appointed him or her, but the whole country.

In Canada, I daresay we have as many political appointees serving in government as you do in the US. There are a couple of differences though. First, there are fewer, short-term patronage appointments of the type that seem to beg for an increase in the index of corruption. Most civil servants in Canada are long-term professional bureaucrats. They are sworn to be apolitical, and the vast majority do an admirable job of maintaining an arms length relationship with the government currently in power. One could hardly avoid the mention of Canada's Auditor General, Sheila Fraser in this context. A Liberal appointee, she nonetheless led to that party's ouster from government when she uncovered the federal sponsorship scandal - a scandal which centered on some other Liberal appointees who illegally used government resources and money to further an agenda that was not aimed at the good of the country, but at the success of the Liberal party. This scandal and the way it played out does our system of government proud, in my opinion.

The outing of Valerie Plame is an example of unacceptable partisanship. The removal of perfectly good federal prosecutors for not abusing their positions to further a Republican agenda is another good example. Contracts to Halliburton, Diebold, ES&S, The Carlyle Group, Blackwater, etc., etc., etc., are all examples of partisanship corrupting government in an unacceptable and harmful way. A way that threatens democracy itself.

Not surprisingly, the issue of partisanship and the strange use of that word by the Republican party and their media parrots came up today in this New York Times article about Patrick Leahy demanding answers from the White House. While this whole story is redolent with bullshit as it is, one statement from Senator John Cornyn (R - Texas) has a fetid pungency acrid enough to overwhelm the general stink.

None of the Republicans who took to the airwaves on Sunday offered a spirited defense of the administration, but Mr. Cornyn and others did take exception to the Democratic vow to subpoena White House officials and accused some Democrats of trying to turn the issue to their political advantage.

“I’ll join Senator Leahy in getting to the facts and following the facts where they may lead,” Mr. Cornyn said. But he accused some Democrats of crossing a line “into basically a political witch hunt,” citing the role of Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, as head of the subcommittee running the investigation into the dismissals of the prosecutors.

Yes, Mr. Cornyn, if the Democrats reap a political advantage by exposing Republican corruption, that is not partisanship - it is just the Democrats fulfilling their obligation of governmental oversight. An obligation, by the way, that has not been carried out by the Republicans in the Senate or House of Representatives for over six years now. Any political advantage accrued by the Democrats is an advantage your party handed to them.

Corruption within government and covering up for corruption are partisan acts, Senator. Exposing corruption is not. Got it?

TAGS: Dismissed Prosecutors, Patrick Leahy, Partisanship, John Cornyn

The New Cold War

2007-03-16T01:53:00.000-07:00

George W. Bush claimed to have gazed into Vladimir Putin's eyes and saw his soul. Eleanor Clift of Newsweek reckons that Bush's remark set into motion a chain of events that will lead to a new cold war.

Certainly, Putin has betrayed his pique of late. Attacking US policy under Bush, Putin, in effect, accused Bush of aggression. He claims the US has exceeded its borders numerous times. The Bush Doctrine, Putin claims, makes the world a more dangerous place, increases terrorism, and inspires a renewed arms race to include nuclear proliferation.

Amid much un-focused hand wringing, Putin's remarks have alarmed the pundits who see in them a reborn cold war. Some dismiss Putin and question his timing. So what? Putin is not running for office in the US. More thoughtful journalists believe Putin has a put a chill on warm US/Russia relations. Still -a new cold war is unlikely.

The "old" cold war was a face off between only two super powers -the US and the Soviet Union. The world today is more complicated. The nuclear club has been joined by nations more populous than either the US or Russia. Those nations are China and India. Moreover, the old "Soviet Union" no longer exists. Whatever his intentions, Putin has his own agenda, his own set of priorities. Primarily, Russia is in need of regional allies. Will he find one in Iran?

The Soviet Union was, arguably, a check on US power in the post World War II world. For all its horrors, the cold war may have kept the peace by restraining would-be DC warlords drunk with the recent victory over Hitler's Third Reich. Some may have used the term "new world order" to describe America's new position in the world.

The timing is interesting. Putin's remarks coincide with Bush allegations against Iran. Has Putin looked into President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's eyes. Only time will tell if Iran will side with either Russia or with China, also seen to be courting a regional ally. More importantly, what will such a powerful regional alliance mean for the ambitions of George W. Bush and the NEOCON base that saw in Bush a world ruler.

Russia has come far since the break-up of the Soviet Union. Iran might not have been susceptible to Russian overtures had not Bush demonized the entire country -a process that Putin singled out for harsh criticism. Clearly, both Iran and Russia have need of a strong, regional ally. Has Bush driven them into one another's arms.

-The Existentialist Cowboy

War Crimes, Iraq

It's Time to Make the Criminal Case Against Bush

2007-03-15T02:25:00.000-07:00

As Bush continues his slide into oblivion -the object of derision and ridicule -it is time to start thinking about how best to bring the miscreant to justice at the International Court of Justice in The Hague

For a start, there is abundant probable cause that Bush conspired with members of his administration to defraud the American people and the United Nations about various pretexts for the U.S. attack and invasion of a sovereign nation -Iraq. The aggressive nature of the attack is known prima facie.

Unfortunately, it was not until the damage had already been done that a debate broke out over whether or not the Bush administration deliberately manipulated and misused intelligence in making its case for war against Iraq. The "outing" of Valerie Plame as retaliation against Ambassador Joe Wilson argues persuasively against the highly partison GOP position.

The Plame scandal and the conviction of Scooter Libby on perjury and obstruction of justice charges undermines the Bush position that it was not alone in its position that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and other active weapons programs. What Clinton might have believed is utterly beside the point and cannot excuse Bush.

Briefly, the case can be made that Bush intended to invade Iraq and seized upon the tragic events of 911 as the pretext for war. Early on, a decision was made to blame Al Qaeda and invade Afghanistan. But one lsuspects this was a sop to pacificy Colin Powell. Indeed, it was Powell nevertheless, who took to the United Nations a case that most surely fabricated, plagairized, or, in other ways deliberately concocted. (See: Was Colin Powell Prepared To Lie To The UN? ) Pointing an accusatory fingers Clinton does not exculpate Bush. Clinton, after all, did not act upon his beliefs and there is certainly no evidence whatsoever that Clinton deliberately fabricated evidence as Bushco most certainly did. There is, likewise, no evidence that the Clinton administration deliberately "outed" any CIA operative in retaliation as the Bush administration most certainly had.

It was not until after the Bush administration had attacked Iraq did the administration resort to yet another bogus cover: Iraq, already named among the Axis of Evil, had become a part of the greater "War on Terror".

The administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to
justify a decision already made.
-Foreign Affairs

Recently, even the mainstream media, including network news, has referenced various "reports" to the effect that the Bush administration deliberately mislead the nation about the rationale for the attack on Iraq. So much has, at last, come out, it is difficult to summarize them all. Additionally, several networks have published polls indicating that a majority of Americans believe the Bush administration deliberately lied to the American people about Iraq.

When the American Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, agreed to prosecute the case against Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, it was hoped that the principles established might prevent future atrocities. That's why it is so important that Bush not be let off the hook. Letting Bush go unpunished for heinous crimes amounting to mass murder makes of justice a mockery and of this world a very, very dangerous place.

How serious are the charges that might be made against members of the Bush administration and, indeed, Bush himself? Consider the following Nuremberg Principles:

Principle VI. The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:

(a) Crimes against peace:

(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;

(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).

(b) War Crimes:

Violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation of slave-labour or for any other purpose of the civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.

(c) Crimes against humanity:

Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds, when such acts are done or such persecutions are carried on in execution of or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime.

Clearly, Bush may be prosecuted in the International Court. But his troubles do not stop there. By violating the treaties and conventions to which the US is bound, Bush finds himself in violation of US Criminal Codes:

US Codes, Title 18 § 2441. War crimes
Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a war crime, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.

I found the following among the papers of Gen. Telford Taylor:

There is confusion about the meaning and relation of 'Crimes Against Humanity' and 'Outlawing War'. As to the outlawing of war, the Nuremberg concept most directly related was 'Crimes Against the Peace', embodying a criminal prohibition against the planning, preparing, or waging an 'Aggressive War'. In legal terms, this was the most adventurous of the Nuremberg concepts and has also been most criticized on the basis that making war had not previously been considered a crime and that therefore punishing people on this ground would violate the principle against ex post facto trials. Whereas 'Crime Against Humanity' was the phrase that was used to indicate crimes such as racial extermination and other mass atrocities against racial or national groups.

--Telford Taylor Papers, Arthur W. Diamond Law Library, Columbia University Law School, New York, N.Y. : TTP-CLS: 9-3-3-64 [TMs] (December 20,
1957).

Taylor was commenting on the planned Playhouse 90 episode to be entitled "Judgement at Nuremberg".

Several issues are raised. With regard to the ex post facto issue, it must be pointed out that war itself is a violation of "common law". Otherwise, it war would never be opposed and those perpetrating it would never have to answer for their crimes even in the court of what Hermann Goering called "Victor's Justice".

The Nazis broke almost every relevant written law in the book with every land grab and every invasion. Nuremberg was, perhaps, the first attempt to codify, in a single set of principles, the basic concepts that are now associated with the Nuremberg war crimes trials. Those principles now clearly form the basis for the international tribunal at the Hague.

If these principles are to have teeth, if Goering is to be effectively repudiated, then Bush and his gang must not be allowed to walk. The Nuremberg precedents must stand, they must be actively, resoundingly affirmed. Justice cannot make arbitrary exceptions for American presidents.

I urge everyone reading this blog to support in any way possible a growing movement to bring the Iraq war criminals to international justice.

-The Existentialist Cowboy

Terrorism, Imperialism, Bush, War Crimes, Iraq

New Lamps for Old? "Think what could be achieved if Arabs were free!"

2007-03-14T02:35:00.000-07:00

Scottish politician, MP, George Galloway was on the BBC's "Doha Debates" with Tim Sebastien recently. The topic was whether or not it will take another dictatorship to pull Iraq out of chaos and quaqmire "apres Bush". Galloway was among two panelists opposing two who supported the idea. Not surprisingly, it was a former CIA agent who supported the idea of another dictatorship for Iraq. Galloway countered that dictatorship was responsible for the present situation. He does not consider the US to be a model of democracy desirable for Iraq.

It is absurd to think another dictatorship will morph into Democracracy. When the WMD cover story collapsed, "bringing Democracy to Iraq" was among a string of ex post facto rationales for war. None were true. All were resorted to ex post facto, but only when it was clear that everthing else had been bald faced lies. Like the WMD fraud, no subsequent "cover" had proven true -even by accident.

Galloway challenged the audience: "Think what could be achieved if Arabs were free!"

My version would specifiy freedom from western oil imperialism, freedom from radicalism, freedom from theology of all sorts.

Western imperialism has produced the most pernicious blowback, a trend that traces back to Richard the Lion Heart. Oil has driven western ambitions since whale blubber heated chilly northern homes. Pennsylvania crude changed the world but the fields soon ran dry. As an oil producing state, PA was replaced by Texas when Spindletop gushered in a new oil age.

Oil is an unbridaled, unchecked genie -a force for good or evil. Lately, evil. An Iranian diplomat told me recently that oil was a curse. Readers of "1001 Arabian Nights" will know the truth of that. Ambitious nations will do anything to get oil. Hitler, for example, cited various pre-texts to invade Poland but all were lies except his malignant thirst for energy at any price. Poland did not have oil. It did have coal from which synthetic fuels could be derived. Hitler needed that fuel for his Panzers and Messerschmitts.

Kegan tells us that Hitler's biggest blunder may have been his failure to supply Rommel who was poised to strike from across North Africa into the rich oil fields of the Middle East. (see: John Keegan, "How Hitler Could Have Won the War: The Drive for the Middle East, 1941") Hitler's biggest blunder still haunts the modern world. But is the Middle East better off for having escaped enslavement by the Third Reich?

It's easy to imagine Bush and his neocon, radical cabal vowing in private never to repeat Hitler's mistake. There is no cause for concern on their part. They have promptly made their own mistakes and worse. If I were an average citizen in the Middle East, what difference would it make to me whether I am enslaved by Hitler or by Bush and the American corporate apparatus?

It's easy to make the case that Bush has made terrorism worse by continuing to enslave this region for the oil profits. There's a lot of blame to go around. The term "Bush" must include his Saudi partners and others throughout the region who have literally lined up for bribes and booty. I cannot look at the absurd architecture that is now Dubai without thinking of the human price that paid for it all.

But what if Arabs were truly free? The likes of Saudi royals -among the first to line up for the booty -might be out of a cushy job. The Saudis might find it more difficult to partner with Bush ilk whenever it suits them. On the flip side, radical Islam might find it more diffult to exploit western stupidity in order to sell middle eastern stupidity.

Fat chance. Both sides (or many) are enthrall to an evil genie which opens the oil spigot upon an imperial command: open sesame!

New lamps for old, anyone?

--The Existentialist Cowboy

Hey Gang What's Up?

2007-03-11T19:20:00.000-07:00

What do you all think of the idea of starting a NEW blog called the Existentialists' Corral? It could be fun.