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Three Little Words: Newt, South Carolina, and Beyond by Steve Jonas |
February 1, 2012
South Carolina. The first state to pass an Ordinance of Secession, on December 20, 1860. Lincoln had been elected President. He would not be inaugurated until March 4, 1861. He had frequently declared during his campaign that he had no intention of attempting to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states in which it then presently existed, for it was Constitutional, in them. He made it clear that he not an abolitionist in any sense of the term. He was, however, opposed to the unlimited expansion of slavery into the Western Territories. That was enough for South Carolina. On April 12, 1861, the shots that began the First Civil War were fired at the Federal Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.
South Carolina, where off and on the Confederate battle flag has flown above the State Capitol since 1962, when it was put there by the state legislature as part of their organized resistance to the growing civil rights movement.
South Carolina, whose junior senator, Jim DeMint, said, during the dragged-out debate on President Obama's health care reform initiative, that the GOP would "break him" over it. In the South, the term "break him" has a special meaning. It was what the slave masters would do, physically, to slaves who resisted the lash in any way, up to and including attempting flee. It was commonly used to punish the periodic attempts at slave revolt. The term meant literally taking the slave in question and breaking him or her, sometimes into pieces, more often breaking their will to resist in any way, through the use of physical and mental punishment.
And so Newt Gingrich came to South Carolina, behind in his race with Mitt Romney. What does he do then but utter three little words, now very well known to come from his mouth because they do so often: "food stamp President." Now Newt is from the neighboring state of Georgia. One does not often think about that because for reasons unknown he doesn't speak with the classic Georgia accent. But he is from the South and it does take a lot of conscious work for white Southerners of his age to lose their racial prejudices. Newt may or may not be personally prejudiced. That is not the question and in fact it is really immaterial. What is material is that he plays the race card openly and makes no bones about it.
The food stamp program is of course a national one that was created many years ago by Congress. Although the proportion of non-white persons on it is probably higher than the proportion of white persons on it just because of the socio-economic inequalities in our country, it happens that there are considerably more whites receiving food stamps than non-whites. Further, the reasons that the food-stamp program has expanded in recent years has nothing to do with President Obama personally but with the fact that increasing numbers of persons, unfortunately, qualify for it because of the shape the economy is in for lower-paid workers.
It should be noted that it is not only the recipients that benefit from the program. The food industry, growers, transporters, wholesalers, and retailers, benefit from it because they are able to sell food that they would otherwise not be able to sell. Of course, in classic GOP fashion, where politics and policy comes down to sloganeering, not programs aimed at solving problems, Gingrich, the "great thinker of the Republican Party" (sic) offers no alternatives to it, apparently thereby, being willing to let people starve. But none of this makes any difference to Gingrich or to his listeners. "Food stamp President" is just a great code phrase for him. This is especially so since for obvious reasons he cannot use the code words developed just a few years ago by one of his biggest fans, Sean Hannity (and his clones), to totally falsely cast the blame for the housing-bust/financial-disaster on African-Americans: "Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac."
It remains to be seen how far Gingrich will go, and will be able to go, with this one. Because of his very public prejudices, he is already trouble in Florida where a significant proportion of Republicans happen to be Hispanic (primarily Cuban immigrants and their off-spring). Following up on his "English-only" demands (which Romney shares, by the way), he has referred to Spanish as a "ghetto language." I'm sure that Cervantes would be interested to hear that one.
Of course Gingrich is an equal opportunity hater. As I have noted previously (1), in 1985 he addressed the issue of AIDS, saying: "AIDS is a real crisis. It is worth paying attention to, to study. . . . . [For] AIDS will do more to direct America back to the cost of violating traditional values, and to make America aware of the danger of certain behavior than anything we've seen. For us [Republicans], it's a great rallying cry." And there is his Islamophobia, which he has carried to very interesting, contradictory lengths: "I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time [my grandchildren] are my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists."
And so, this is what the GOP primary campaign in Florida is about, on one side at least. Gingrich does attract a lot of votes with his positions (and it ain't just rhetoric, folks). It remains to be seen if A) he can actually win the nomination with them, and B) if he fails and Romney does win it, just how much further will the latter, he of slogans, not of programs, find himself being pulled to the Right than he already is (2, 3). It all comes down to this: will the GOP of 2012 be the Party of Hate or will it be the Party of Slogans?
Post-script, Feb. 1, 2012: Well Newt did lose, big, in Florida. Except that he won big in the Florida Panhandle, which is the most “Southern” part of Florida in the Old-Jim-Crow and flying- the-Confederate-battle-flag sense. And so, he has pledged to continue his battle with Romney. It is very difficult to understand just why Newt is staying in, given that, as is well-known, A) he has virtually no chance of winning the delegates battle for the nomination, B) the GOP establishment, along with some VERY big money (4), is almost totally aligned against him, and C) in the process, he is in the process of tearing the GOP apart. But what they call “Super Tuesday” is coming up on March 6, 2012. And most of the states in which primaries will be held on that day were in the Confederacy that South Carolina led into the First Civil War, in nature much like the aforementioned Florida Panhandle.
So guess which message has a really good chance of working in them. You got it! Newt’s not Mitt’s (as reactionary as he really is). Newt will be politically done after this one. But his speaking fees for far-right, racist audiences will sky-rocket, along with his book sales in similar venues. That and an apparently limitless ego are apparently enough to drive him onwards, even at the expense of the party for which he professes to be a member.
References:
1. Ask Newt Gingrich, http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/13203.
2. Mitt's Army of God, http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/13064.
3. The Imperative of the Republicans' Rightward Imperative, http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/13269
4. “Romney Gains Strong Backing in Rich Patrons,” The New York Times, Feb. 1, 2012, p. 1.
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The Rightward Imperative by Steve Jonas |
January 24, 2012
A Republican candidate for
his party's nomination known as "moderate" would abolish Medicare as we
know it, adopting something very similar to the infamous Paul Ryan plan
(which happened to sink any presidential aspirations Ryan himself might
have had) (1).
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Bad Moon Rising: Why the Republicans Want the Presidency by Steve Jonas |
January 5, 2012
So why do the Republicans want the Presidency? They seem to be doing so well without it. They have the majority in the House of Representatives. Through the use of the never-ending use of the filibuster (by just saying “we filibuster,” courtesy of Harry Reid not actually having to do it) they control the legislative process in the Senate. They have a lock on the majority of the Supreme Court. They have a President who, for whatever reasons, simply does not fight or fight back, even when the leader in the Senate announces that his number one goal for the current Congress is to insure the President’s defeat.
Indeed, this President gives in with very little if any fight on almost every major issue. Consider, for example: abandoning cap-and-trade and any other means for dealing with climate change; undercutting the EPA on air pollution standards; agreeing to the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy; not going after the banksters; failing both close Guantanamo and go after the law-breaking torturers in the US “intelligence” establishment; and then, on more recent matters: the morning-after-pill-for-females-under-17 ban (one question he has not yet dealt with here is: does the rapist father of his daughter’s child have to pay child-support?); establishing 50 different state plans for the "Affordable Care Act" (sic), making it much more unwieldy than it already is; abandoning his threat to veto the US version of the 1933 German “Enabling Act” which laid the basis for Hitler’s dictatorship: the provisions for the arbitrary arrest and indefinite imprisonment without trial of US citizens (which has always been there since the Patriot Act, but is now re-affirmed); the giveaway on the "millionaires' tax;" the likely giveaway on the Canada-US oil pipeline; and who knows what’s next.
But at the same time, as the economy stagnates, as the gap between the very rich and the rest of us continues to increase, as the percentage of US citizens living in poverty increases, as the army of the permanently unemployed expands, the GOTP is able to blame it all on Obama. After all, he is the president, you know. So I (1) and others have speculated that they really do not want the presidency at all. Most of their policies get implemented and most of those that would start to pull the country out of the recession, like the desperately needed national infra-structure construction/reconstruction program, don’t.
But it is now becoming increasingly apparent that they do want it, with the rallying around Romney from Rove’s group (the real Republican Party, most of whose figures we don’t’ know about) to (gasp) the former Gingrich lapdog Sean Hannity (except when he is sidling up to “No Sex” Santorum). Romney is the only current GOTP candidate with a chance of beating Obama, and he is “getting tougher” in the GOTP sense. On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Dec. 20, 2011, in referring to the need to defeat Obama Romney actually used the Gingrich-Tea Party term “take him out,” which of course has a meaning beyond electoral politics. Of those potential candidates not running with a chance for victory, Mitch Daniels has a wife problem, Chris Christie has something in his background that he wouldn’t want to come out (coming from New Jersey who knows?), JEB Bush, for all the current talk has obviously decided to wait until 2016, Paul Ryan hung himself out to dry with his proposal to abolish Social Security, and Rudy Giuliani, like Gingrich, has lots of baggage. So they have settled on Romney.
So what is it they want that they don’t have now? Well, a lot that the Republicans and the Corporate Power who they represent, cannot get even with Obama in the White House. What they want all revolves around the decline of the US manufacturing base, caused by the Corporate Power, of course, but which decline has caused them to shift to other sources and potential sources of profit, such as massive expansion of natural resources exploitation, the financial services industry, and then some new ones that they have their eyes on. First and foremost would be massive deregulation, for the environment, labor practices, and financial markets. Second, if you listen carefully to what certain leading right-wing figures, not necessarily elected ones, say, they do recognize what terrible shape the US infrastructure is in. They want to fix it all right, but they want to privatize it at the same time. I am not talking about the construction, which of course would be privately done. I am talking about the running of it, from the roads, to the water supply systems that are not already in private hands, and everything else in between.
Next, they want to be able to destroy the US Postal Service, both to privatize it and to put one of the last national labor unions out of existence. They want to destroy what is left of the US labor union movement, especially in the public sector, as they are doing, for example, in Wisconsin and Ohio, so that they can further depress wages (otherwise known as “increase productivity”). If they had full control of the Executive and Legislative branches, I would not put it past them to repeal the National Labor Relations Act, once again outlawing collective bargaining, as Scott Walker has done for public employees in Wisconsin. Finally, they want full control over foreign policy. On the one hand they want to resume the pursuit of Cheney’s dream of permanent war. For if Obama gets a second term, the US will indeed likely pull out of Afghanistan by 2014 (I didn’t say the man is all bad), and might even try to get some modest cuts in military spending through Congress (although a major piece of them would come from cuts in pay and veterans’ benefits). On the other hand, the GOTP wants not only to not cut military spending; they want to increase it. After all, it is one of the most profitable sectors of the US economy.
So yes indeed. Even with Obama sitting in the White House, there are plenty of reasons why the Republicans want the presidency. Given the national Republican voter suppression program and their well-known vote-count cheating programs, regardless of what the real count would be, if they want it, they will have it.
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Nazi anti-Semitism and GOP Islamophobia: Similarities and Differences by Steve Jonas |
January 2, 2012
The esteemed
Editor/Publisher of The Planetary Movement, Michael Carmichael, recently
circulated the following statement on the rapidly developing GOP
program of political Islamophobia:
“GOP=NSDAP. In their remarks before the Republican Jewish Coalition,
Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Rick Perry called for the global
censorship of Islam and war against Iran and her allies, in effect, a
third world war focused on the Middle East and targeting Muslims.
“All the people of our planet, but especially those living in the United
States and the Middle East as well as all Islamic nations, need to
understand that the American Republican Party (GOP) is the most powerful
Islamophobic organization in world history.
“From this unique perspective, the American Republican Party/GOP equates
with the National Socialist German Workers Party (National
Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei - NSDAP) aka the Nazi Party, the
political party of Adolf Hitler.
“In the 21st century, Islamophobia is emerging as the most dangerous
threat to international security on our planet, just as anti-Semitism
became the greatest threat to international security in the last
century.
“When the Republican/GOP seizes power in the USA, it is a virtual
certainty that they will launch a military misadventure that will be
tantamount to a global war against Islam.”
I sent my good friend Michael the following reply (much expanded here).
You made some excellent remarks. But actually, Republican Islamophobia is
far more dangerous for the people of the world than was Hitler's
anti-Semitism. Indeed it is the case that the Nazis did adopt the
political anti-Semitism that was first developed in Austria in the 1880s
to their own purposes.
Religious anti-Semitism has of course existed since the early days of
the Catholic Church when it was organized around the “The Jews Killed
Christ” doctrine and was used for the purposes of religious persecution.
But political anti-Semitism, that is the use of anti-Semitism for
partisan political purposes in elections in parliamentary democracies,
is a modern invention. And in the beginning, that is just how the Nazis
used it until they took power, in part because of the appeal of their
doctrines to Catholics and right-wing Protestants in Germany. Once in
power, they moved fairly quickly of course to turn their rhetoric into
policy, and we all know the eventual outcome of that development.
However, Nazi anti-Semitism was not a cause of World War II. Neither
the Western capitalist Powers nor the Soviet Union would have gone to
war to protect the Jews. The former offered few havens to Jewish
refugees before the war and few European Jews would have sought haven in
the very under-developed Soviet Union before the war. In the West, in
fact, there were many open or covert anti-Semites who thought that
Hitler’s polices against the Jews were just fine, or at least they
didn’t object to them in becoming friends and even financial supporters
of the Nazis before 1933 and in certain cases after that date. Among
Hitler’s friends, anti-Semites or no, were George Herbert Walker
(grandfather of George Herbert Walker Bush) who started funding the Nazi
Party in 1923, Prescott Bush (who had to be threatened by Roosevelt in
February, 1942 with prosecution under the “Trading with the Enemy Act”
if he did not cease providing banking services to Hitler), the UK Prince
of Wales (whose pro-Hitler stance was much more of a reason that he
never became King of England than was his infatuation with Wallis
Simpson), Henry Ford (who traded anti-Semitic tracts with Hitler in the
1930s), and Joseph Kennedy, US Ambassador to the Court of St. James, who
turned firmly anti-Hitler only when the Battle of Britain began in the
summer of 1940. It is very well known that the Western Powers did very
little to even try to protect/rescue the Jews of Europe once the war was
underway.
Political Islamophobia is being developed by the Republican Party in the
United States just as political anti-Semitism was developed by the
Nazis, for partisan political/electoral purposes. But it far more
dangerous for the world as a whole than Nazi anti-Semitism ever was. In
the end, of course, what is now known as the Holocaust killed about
6,000,000 European Jews, slightly more than 10% of the total deaths due
to Word War II. However, Islam is the national religion in numerous
countries (Judaism was the religion in none before World War II). It is
estimated that there are somewhere between 700 million and 1.5 billion
Muslims in the World, with the “Islamic Belt” stretching almost half way
around the world from Morocco in the West to Indonesia in the East.
One of these nations already has nuclear weapons and another is trying
very hard to get them before the pre-emptive and highly destructive war
advocated by almost every current Republican candidate for the
Presidency as well as many strong voices on the Right in Israel can come
to pass.
It is this latter eventuality that strongly differentiates political
anti-Semitism from political Islamophobia. A War on Iran, much less a
War on Islam (as if there were such unified thing), if it turned nuclear
which it clearly could, could mean the end of civilization as we know
it, although I suppose that nuclear winter is one way to deal with
global warming. Even without nuclearization, such a war could kill
millions of people directly and indirectly, and lead to such
consequences as the total diplomatic and economic isolation of the
United States, the destruction of the State of Israel, and the
destruction of the oil economy as we know it.
An excellent summary of the range of possible consequences of a War on
Iran that the GOP candidates are so cavalierly endorsing by Ray
McGovern, who works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the
ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington, and who
served a total of 30 years as an Army infantry/intelligence officer and
then as a CIA intelligence analyst, and Elizabeth Murray, who served as
Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East in the National
Intelligence Council, before retiring after a 27-year career in the U.S.
government, where she specialized in Middle Eastern political and media
analysis, and is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity (VIPS), can be found at:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30122.htm. See also By
Michel Chossudovsky’s “World War III: The Launching of a Preemptive
Nuclear War against Iran,”
www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28026.
Many Right-wing Christians and Jews in the United States who believe in
the Armageddon Myth support the Republican Party and engage in political
Islamophobia. Actually, if they succeed in implementing their
Islamophobically-fueled desire to make War on Iran, except for the
Rapture part they may very well succeed in making that myth into a
reality. Thus does political Islamophobia differ from political
anti-Semitism.
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Ask Newt Gingrich by Steve Jonas |
December 15, 2011
So Newt is all of a sudden No. 1. Even though a few months ago, while he was off on a Mediterranean Cruise with his darling Callista, his staff summarily left him. But he is back, without much of a "ground game," although he does seem to have gathered some new (old?) staff around, because he has just recently opened offices in Iowa and New Hampshire. Thom Hartmann thinks that he is simply pulling a Herman Cain, that is running a book tour and trying to run up his speaking fees (what, Newt, $60,000.00 per isn't enough?), although not pulling a Cain in the sense of the latter, but not Newt, trying to keep virtually all of his previous female dalliances, or otherwise, secret.
But anyway, one measure of whether he is serious or not will be his willingness, unlike Romney so far, to offer himself up for real interviews, not those like the mutual-admiration-society-colloquies he has been having with Hannity and such for years (and yes, taking my Dramamine first, I have listened to a few of them). So here is a list of serious questions one might ask of the Newt man, especially considering his claims to qualifications for the nomination and the presidency based at least in part on his long experience in government and running election campaigns.
1. In 1995 you proposed executing "drug smugglers" (1). Do you still hold to that view?
2. In 1994, before the election returns were in, you referred to the President and Mrs. [Bill] Clinton as "counterculture (sic)." You said that you would seek to portray Clinton Democrats as the "enemy of normal people," and in a speech during the campaign you described America as a "battleground" between men of God, like yourself, and the "secular anti-religious view of the left" (2). You also blamed a tragic murder-suicide by a young mother in South Carolina on the “values” of the Democratic Party. Do you still hold to those views?
3. In 1995, you said: "We are the only society in history that says that power comes from God to you . . . and if you don't tell the truth about the role of God and the centrality of God in America, you can't explain the rest of our civilization. I look forward to the day when a belief in God is once more at the center of the definition of being an American"(3). There are many other similar statements of yours on the record over the years (as above). Do you still hold to them? Where do you place the concept of "God" in relation to the Constitution? Do you agree with, for example, Rick Santorum, who regards God as standing above the Constitution when it comes to such matters as abortion rights (3a)? What do you say to the 30,000,000 or more secular citizens of the United States in this regard and to the tens of millions of US citizens of faith who do not believe that "God" stands above the Constitution?
4. In 1985 you addressed the issue of AIDS, which at that time appeared to be a disease that would affect only homosexuals. At one point you said: "AIDS is a real crisis. It is worth paying attention to, to study. It's something one ought to be looking at. . . . [For] AIDS will do more to direct America back to the cost of violating traditional values, and to make America aware of the danger of certain behavior than anything we've seen. For us, it's a great rallying cry"(4). Do you still hold to that view?
5. Tom DeLay is one of the primary organizers and fund-raisers of the Tea Party. It is well-known that when you were in Congress you crossed swords with DeLay from the beginning, even though your politics were (and are) very much the same. DeLay tried to usurp your power when you were Speaker and then helped to ease you out, when your "little office problem" surfaced. How do you feel about Tea Party leader DeLay now? Would he have a place in a Gingrich Administration?
6. It is well-known that you converted to Catholicism in 2009. Many tenets of your new religion are at odds with those of the Protestant Evangelical Christian Right which provides much of the electoral and organizational base of the Republican Party. You don't seem to be talking much about your new religion on the campaign trail in the two predominately Protestant states of Iowa and New Hampshire. Where do you stand on the Catholic doctrine of Papal Infallibility? Where do stand on the fact that the version of the Bible in common use among Catholics is other than the supposedly "inerrant" King James version (notably created by a committee of 52 religious/scholar translators), used by the Rightist Evangelicals? Which one is right, or Right?
7. Last March, in discussing the possible imposition of (Islamic) Sharia Law in the United States that so many of your Republican colleagues seem to perceive as such a real threat to or polity, you said: "I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time [my grandchildren] are my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists" (5). Two questions here. The most essential element of "Sharia Law" is that religious law, as interpreted by ruling clerics, stands above any written Constitution. Openly or covertly using a doctrine known as “Dominionism,” according to such authorities as Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Clarence Thomas, and Michelle Bachmann, this is the case, at least in certain circumstances, for the United States and our Constitution. So, leaving aside the differences in the content of the Sharia Law and Dominionist doctrines (not so great on actual examination) how are the two theories different on the process of government and the role of elected democratic organs? Perhaps more importantly, in terms of understanding how you think, one has to wonder how a nation living under Sharia Law doctrine of religious supremacy in civil matters would become a "secular atheist country." Would you explain how that could happen?
8. I have not read your counter-factual U.S. history which had the South winning the Civil War. The War was about the institution of slavery and its expansion into the Western Territories. Why would you write such a book? As a Georgian, still seething over Sherman's March, perhaps? In your book, did slavery survive as an institution? If yes, for how long, and how then was abolition finally achieved? If not, why not, since that is what the South was fighting for?
9. If you are elected President, which of your political opponents in Washington, whoever they might be at the time, would you banish to the back of Air Force One?
10. If Palestine and the Palestinians are artificial creations (although they were recognized as real, not artificial, by such international bodies as the League of Nations and the United Nations, and by previous Israeli governments that negotiated with them), what does that make of other Arab nations and their peoples, from Morocco and the Moroccans, through Egypt and the Egyptians to Saudi Arabia and the Saudis?
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References:
1. New York Times, "Gingrich Suggests Tough Drug Measure," August 27, 1995.
2. Quindlen, A., "The Politics of Meanness," New York Times, Nov. 11, 1994.
3. This was a quotation from a Gingrich fund-raising letter, circulated by the American Humanist Association (Amherst, NY), Summer, 1995.
3a. Bacon Jr., Perry (from The Washington Post), “Courting Christmas,” Newsday, 12/5/11
4. Freedom Writer, "Inside Glen Eyrie Castle," August, 1994., p. 1.
5. thestatecolumn.com, March 28, 2011.
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Occupy Wall Street: The Agent Provocateur’s Guide by Steve Jonas |
December 8, 2011
You’ve heard of Wikileaks? Well, this document comes from an old Richard Nixon playbook called “Trickileaks.” I received it by a route that I cannot reveal, and indeed I cannot attest fully to its veracity. But it sure sounds like it might be genuine, don’t you think? On the other hand, it is awfully conversational in a way, which does make one doubt its provenance. Maybe it’s just an agent provocateur from the Left making up something about agents provocateurs from the Right. But be that as it may . . .
To: Our Provoking Agents (cannot use the customary French term for you, now can we.)
From: The Defenders of all that is good and true, and Exceptional, about the U.S. of A., and its truly exceptional occupiers of the Top Drawer.
As unorganized as it is right now, this “Occupy Wall Street” thing does present a real threat to us, for two reasons. We can read the data on us rich getting richer (which we deserve, down to the very last penny, of course, just because we are so much better than everyone else) just as well as those who aren’t getting rich (and are actually getting poorer, which is why we are getting richer, but that’s another story). And the last thing we want is to become un-rich. Second, as unorganized as they are now, who knows what might happen if they ever do get organized. So, better to go after them now than later.
So why do we want you folks? First, because the last thing we want to do is take them on the merits of the case that they claim to be raising. To argue with them that the policies that we just love, that have made us rich and have given our political, economic, and media lackeys so much power, are really good for everyone is something that is becoming less and less good at holding water. Second, because if somehow or other they, or some significant chunk of them, do manage to get organized and get into the political arena, say by becoming the Democratic Party’s Tea Party, or worse yet, take part in a split of the Democratic Party producing a party that would really fight us, then we might very well have a real battle on our hands. That’s something we don’t want.
So what do we want you to do? Three things. First, most if not all of the OWS groups seem to have played into our hands by adopting a “consensus rule” for doing anything. In effect that means that just one person can stop an action. Like if a street-wise Democratic politician (and there are some) wants to get involved, at the street level, and begin organizing something that could become political, he/she needs to be turned away. So that’s one task. Make sure that anything that would really be against our real interests really gets stopped, in its tracks.
Second is to make it very difficult for any of the OWS groups to come up with any kind of “manifesto” for a real political program of change. Washington, DC OWS, led by someone named Kevin Zeese, actually did this (1). And certain other total Lefties, like Robert Reich and Michael Moore, are coming up with their versions. Very dangerous. We’ve got to do everything we can to divert and distract, to make the “movement,” or whatever you want to call it, focus on the side issues of “free speech” and “free assembly,” as if they are rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Well they aren’t. The First Amendment only talks about “Congress shall make no law . . .” But as long as they are fighting on these issues of process, they are not fighting on issues of substance, like what Zeese wrote about. So let’s make sure that they stay there, on the process side of the street.
Third, just as we had our propaganda channel (oops, we mean our Fox”News”Channel) screaming for the Tea Party 24/7 so do we have the propaganda channel out in force screaming against OWS, 24/7.
Hey, you know, protest is fine, just as long as it’s our kind of protest. So, we’ve got to give them some raw meat, the more of it the better. So go to it, guys and gals. Defecate in the street. Work to keep the camp-sites messy. Bring in some druggies if you can find them (making sure to give them their drugs for their trouble) and if you can’t, just make the stuff up. Have sex and enjoy it, loudly. Pass around rumors about rape. So what if none are ever reported to the police. Just as long as you-know-who on our side can yell ”rape,” that’s all we need. If you can stir up violence, especially anti-police violence, without being too obvious about it, the more the better (although our police are starting to do a pretty good job of that themselves in certain locations). In some locations OWS does have their own security details. If you can get on them and mess them up, go to it. Start fights, again without being too obvious about it. Even though there are plenty of employed people participating on a rotating basis, advertise yourselves as unemployed. That just gives more ammunition to our men Newt and Sean. And then, just use your imagination.
Winter is coming. If they have any level of organization and if they or some faction of them starts to get politically organized, they will make it through the winter and come out in the spring in a position to really influence the 2012 elections, nationally, regionally, and locally, by focusing on what we just don‘t want them to focus on: how we got where we are, what we will do to stay here, what this country really needs to use taxpayer money for, and why it really needs a lot more of it, not a lot less of it, if anyone but us is going to make out OK. We have got to keep them for now focusing as much as we can on the “free speech” stuff and the “no, we aren’t dirty druggies” stuff and by all means, the “rule by consensus” stuff. Then we will have them just where they want them. So just go to it.
References:
1. “The 99% Deficit Proposal Published: Occupy Washington DC Shows How to Create Jobs, Reduce the Wealth Divide and Control Spending,” by Kevin Zeese.
Author’s Note: Of course I wrote this as part speculation, part satire. Now, in a widely circulated piece, the GOTP phrase-maker/cover-up-our-real-intent evil genius Frank Luntz has actually prepared a guide for right-wing attackers of the Occupy Wall Street movement. He delivered it at a recent meeting of The Republican Governors Association in Florida. Likely for at least some the reasons outlined above, he actually said: “I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death. . . . They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.” In his message he in no way talked about sending in agents provocateurs. But he did talk very much about distorting language to make it play into GOTP hands.
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In God We Trust: Historical and Definitional Issues by Steve Jonas |
November 27, 2011
According to Politics of Nov. 1 (1) “The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday [Nov. 1] passed, 396-9, a concurrent resolution reaffirming ‘In God We Trust’ as the national motto.
The resolution was introduced by Rep. J. Randy Forbes (R-Va.), co-chairman of the Congressional Prayer Caucus. It is a concurrent resolution because the Senate already passed a similar resolution in 2006 for the 50th anniversary of “In God We Trust” as the nation's motto.
Resolutions do not carry the force of law and do not require the president's signature. ‘Tomorrow, the House of Representatives will have the same opportunity to reaffirm our national motto and directly confront a disturbing trend of inaccuracies and omissions, misunderstandings of church and state, rogue court challenges, and efforts to remove God from the public domain by unelected bureaucrats.
As our nation faces challenging times, it is appropriate for Members of Congress and our nation – like our predecessors – to firmly declare our trust in God, believing that it will sustain us for generations to come,’ Forbes said in a statement Monday.” Forbes also said “without God, there could be no American form of government. Nor, an American way of life" (2).
Now there are a series of questions that could be raised about Rep. Forbes’ statement. For example, let us for a moment take a look at its history. According to Wikipedia (3), “The phrase was conceived by Salmon P. Chase, the U.S. Treasury Secretary under President Abraham Lincoln.[1] Chase wrote in an 1861 letter to James Pollock, then Director of the Mint in Philadelphia, that no ‘nation can be strong except in the strength of God, or safe except in His defense. The trust of our people in God should be declared on our national coins.’[3]
Aspirations for the motto arose surrounding the trauma and heightened religious sentiment that existed during the Civil War. ‘Both [sides] read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other,’ echoed President Lincoln during his Second Inaugural Address, as the Civil War continued.[4] The Reverend M. R. Watkinson, in a letter dated 13 November 1861, petitioned the Treasury Department to add a statement recognising ‘Almighty God in some form in our coins.’[5] However Treasury Secretary Chase did not submit the motto with the words ‘In God We Trust’ until December 9, 1863.[1]”
First one might point out the nation did just fine, except for the scourge of slavery and the ever-increasing genocide against the Native Americans, without “In God We Trust” on our coinage, from the time of the Founding until 1861. Indeed, unless one is mistaken, we did have an “American form of government and an American way of life” during that period.
Then there is the problem that President Lincoln raised that in the Civil War both sides prayed to the same God. One side won and one side lost (at least for the time-being). One wonders just which side God was on in that case, and how could the other side have any trust at all in him, her or it.
Then, it wasn’t until 1954 that the phrase was incorporated into the Pledge of Allegiance (which of course has no official standing itself), and until 1956 that the Congress made it into the national motto. One must wonder just how the nation got along not “under God,” for all of the years preceding. Then there is the further little matter of the Constitution, which, one should think, defines what the “American form of government” is. The word “God” does not appear in it, Article VI prohibits any religious test for candidates for office and there is the First Amendment’s prohibition of the establishment of religion by Congress. Ah well, these are such troublesome details.
Now let us turn briefly to the matter of definitions. One might spend some time discussing exactly what is meant by "in" when it comes to "God," which, for example, might or might not, be corporeal. Then one might concern oneself with the matter of "trust." For example, given what Lincoln himself had to say about the matter, during the Civil War, as noted above, as the fortunes of the two sides waxed and waned, why should either of them have trusted "God," or for that matter why should the victims of Katrina, the Great Depression or the current one (whatever you want to call it), 9/11, the Holocaust, Curtis LeMay’s firestorm raid of Tokyo on March 9, 1945 (120,000 dead), or the opponents of the major US political party that routinely labels them as "Godless."
But the most important definitional problems concern "God" and "We." When it comes to religions the United States is a polyglot nation. Just whose "God" are we talking about? Within Christianity alone there are many different concepts of God, very tripartite, not-so tripartite, uni-partite. A God who/which appears before some Christians embodied in a wafer and wine, not so for others. And so on and so forth. Then there are the other two main religions in the U.S., Judaism, and Islam. Each has its several denominations, and each of those has a rather different concept of God. (For Secular Humanistic Jews, of which I am one, there is no concept of "God" at all). Then there is a major world religion, Hinduism, which counts about 900,000,000 adherents, with 1.5 million of them in the U.S. (4). Its concept of God/Gods pre-dates in form that of the three major monotheistic religions. Who is indeed to say that there is not a group of Gods, and that perhaps, if there is, they are not the Hindu group, but rather the Greco-Roman or the Egyptian one. One might ask how can one put one's trust in any non-substantive being if one cannot be sure just which one or one's one is talking about.
Finally, there is the “we” problem. To just which “we“ does the phrase refer? There are an estimated 30,000,000 people in the United States who do not believe in any the forms of divinity listed above, or any other for that matter.
References:
1. The Christian Post, Politics, Nov. 2, 2011
2. Secular Coalition for America, Letter, Nov. 15, 2011.
3. Wikipedia, “In God We Trust,” Notes, References: 1.U.S. Department of the Treasury. (2011) "History of 'In God We Trust'" www.treasury.gov. 2. As shown on the Córdoba (bank notes and coins); see for example Banco Central de Nicaragua. 3 Duncan, Ann W. (2008). Religion, Rhetoric, and Ritual in the U.S. Government," Church-state Issues in America Today. Westport CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, pp. 77., 4. Wikisource. "Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaguaral Address"; http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln's_Second_Inaugural_Address. Retrieved 18 October 2011; 5. United States (1897). Congressional Serial Set. US: Government Printing Office, p. 260.
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The Triumph of Cheneyism by Steve Jonas |
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November 7, 2011
I have just finished a book by John Grisham entitled The
Broker, published in 2005. "The Broker" in question is not a real
estate or stock-broker, but rather one of an ilk that when I was a boy many
years ago was called an "influence peddler." They now go by the more
polite name of "lobbyist." Anyway, this larger-than-life Jack
Abramoff-type had been caught dabbling in some very highly sensitive
security-stuff (which Abramoff himself was apparently smart enough never to
have done). The plot revolves around the determination of the CIA to have him
dead, for a variety of reasons. They have two problems. A) He is in Federal
prison and B) US government agencies cannot, under the law, just go around
murdering US citizens. And so, the CIA arranges to have him paroled by a
neer-do-well outgoing President and then ships him off to Italy where, they
hope, one of several nations interested in achieving the same end will find him
and do the job themselves.
The story is told with Grisham's usual panache, but if he
were to try to write it today he could not use the same plot. For, as is now
well-known, the US can, and does, go around murdering (or executing or
assassinating [from the Arab word for political murder]) US citizens that it
has in its sights. And it does this without the benefit of physical capture,
indictment, trial, or what-have-you, as prescribed under the fourth and sixth
Amendments to the Constitution. The death of Mr. Anwar el-Awlaki at the hands
of a US drone aircraft in Yemen on Sept. 30, 2011 is just one piece of evidence
that what might be called "Cheneyism" has triumphed over traditional
constitutional democracy in our nation.
Dick Cheney, self-nominated for the position and accepted,
apparently without question, for it, was easily the most powerful Vice-President
the U.S. has ever had. His hand, either openly with is name on it, or covertly
without, was on virtually every major foreign and domestic policy decision made
during the Presidency of George W. Bush. And many of them, in one way or
another, continue to be followed under the presidency of Barack Obama. But the
essence of Cheneyism is its assault on U. S. Constitutional government,
embodied in his totally un-Constitutional concept of “Unitary Executive Power.”
Let us count the ways.
1. The famous "Energy Task Force." Despite his
claim in his recent memoir that one of the reason he was writing it was he
wanted "to be clear" and "to set the record straight," he
did not discuss its deliberations and to this day its minutes, official
government papers though they may be, have remained secret. Thus we can only
guess what was decided but surely the agenda included: as much de-regulation of
the extractive industries as possible; as much expansion of domestic oil
drilling as possible; a total shut-down of research on energy alternatives; and
perhaps a guarantee that war would be declared on Iraq with the objective of
getting hold of its oil reserves. Then there is the unconstitutional bit that
has followed Cheney's departure from office: the claim that the Vice-Presidency
is not part of the executive branch and therefore his papers are not subject to
public disclosure. That Article II of the Constitution, on the executive
branch, is the one that describes the office, to the extent it is described, is
apparently of no consequence. That it is mentioned in passing in article I, to
Cheney is.
2. The declaration of full-fledged war on Iraq without
engaging in the bothersome step of securing it from the Congress is a major
element of Cheneyism. There is no way that this could be fit under the
Presidential War Powers Act, as the Republicans never failed to point out about
Clinton's actions in the former Yugoslavia (which happened to have been carried
with no "boots on the ground" and no US casualties, but was still of
dubious constitutionality. Of course there were no weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq, which the Bush Regime knew full well because the UN WMD inspector on
the ground, Hans Blix, told them so, over and over again. But
Presidential/Vice-Presidential lying, done over and over again, by both
Democrats and Republicans, is not unconstitutional.) Furthermore, since
unprovoked, or “preventive,” war by individual UN members is prohibited by
Chapter VII, especially Articles 39 and 51, of the UN Charter, to which the US
is a treaty signatory, engaging in such is also a violation of the
Constitution’s Article VI, which states: "all treaties made, or which
shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme
law of the land. . ."
3. And then there is the whole use-of-torture thing. Cheney
set up the policy, despite the fact that virtually every intelligence-gathering
expert says that it is useless for gathering intelligence from operatives with
any training to resist it (1, 2). That means nothing to Cheney who, perhaps
influenced by the earlier iterations of "24," has always insisted
that it is effective, and on his recent victory lap for his book continued to
do so. It does have many other uses for which it is known to be effective (3).
However, both points are irrelevant to the matter of its unconstitutionality
(4). Torture is prohibited by both the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention
against Torture, both treaties signed and ratified by the United States. Thus
the use of torture, no matter what contortions Cheney and his henchmen, Woo,
Bybee, and Addington, went through to try to redefine what Cheney had
authorized, also is a violation of the Constitution, Article VI.
4. Finally, since Guantanamo is functionally part of the
United States (no US government would ever claim that it is part of Cuba), the
whole operation there, for persons not prisoners of war (and since the US never
declared war, they couldn't be) violates the fourth and sixth Amendments.
There are of course many governmental policies of Cheney
that stay with us, for example: the creation of permanent war; the creation of
what can be called the Resource-Based Economy (the increasing reliance on the
discovery, use and export of fossil fuels for fueling capitalist profits); the
creation of the Patriot Act which, on paper at least, justifies the creation of
a total authoritarian state; and refining and expanding the use of the big lie
technique, which now underlies all of GOTP policy and politics. A number of
these governmental policies remain very much alive, in one form or another,
under the current administration.
But the principal legacy of Cheneyism is to make a reality
of George W. Bush's claim that the Constitution is "nothing but a piece of
paper." To the extent that the Obama Administration follows this dictum,
it is saying the same thing.
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References:
1. Jonas, S. "A Torturous Debate,"
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/jonas/081
2. Jonas, S. "The Torturous Debate, Revisited,"
http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/12725
3. Jonas, S. "Why Torture?"
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/jonas/082
4. Jonas, S. "Why 'It Doesn't Work' Doesn't Work,"
http://blog.buzzflash.com/jonas/156
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The Decline of the American Left: Now That’s Class Warfare by Steve Jonas |
October 28, 2011
In the New York Times
"Sunday Review" of Sept. 25, 2011, Michael Kazin, a co-editor of Dissent
magazine, published an article entitled "Whatever Happened to the
American Left?" It is drawn from a new book of his entitled American
Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation.
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Mitt's Army of God by Steve Jonas |
October 11, 2011
So there was Mitt, addressing the cadets and faculty at The Citadel, in Charleston, SC. You know, that Charleston, the capitol of the first state to secede from the Union, on December 20, 1860. Why those South Carolinians were so concerned that the spread of slavery into the territories might be slowed or even stopped that they couldn't even give Lincoln the courtesy of waiting until he was inaugurated the following March before seceding. You know, that Charleston, which celebrated the 150th anniversary of that day just last year, as if it were a national holiday, not a mark of the start of a rebellion. You know, that Charleston, from whence in the 2000 Presidential GOP primaries Karl Rove spread the rumor that Sen. McCain had fathered a black (ohmygosh) baby. You know, that Charleston, where the debate as to whether to fly the rebel battle flag over the State capitol is still ongoing. That's where Mitt took the opportunity to tell the world, that "God created the United States," has in the past led the world, and that under his presidency, in the 21st century, the US was going to continue to lead it, whether "the world" liked it or not.
He would do this by, in his first hundred days, among other things "review" the timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan (and it would not appear that for him shortening it would be a considered option), restore cuts in missile defense, permanently deploy carrier groups off the coast of Iran, increase military spending over all, and increase the armed forces by 100,000 men. (He apparently didn't mention how he would go about financing these measures or how he would recruit the additional troops, but that's another story.) And he told the assembled throng that yes indeed, God created the United States, to be a world leader, not a follower. It is on these latter two points that one might in particular raise some questions.
First as to God creating the U.S., if that were the case he/she must have done so behind the backs the Founding Fathers. For almost to a man (no women involved back then) they were either deists or atheists. But if God did so nevertheless, he was really clever, making sure that he/she was not mentioned by name in the Constitution, and neither was either Christianity or any of its specific variants existing at the time. And then, one might say, he/she was fiendishly clever (if one can use that term about God) to determine that the references to religion in the document, say in article VI and amendment I, provide for keeping it out of the affairs of state, not including it. But, as they say, God does move in mysterious ways! Second, as to God creating the US to lead the world, that surely would have come as a surprise to Pres. George Washington, no less a Founding Father than first president of the United States, from whose Farewell Address the most referenced part is the one warning against "foreign entanglements."
Third, one must go on to ask just which God is Romney talking about. The founding account to which he adheres as a Mormon is rather different from the one that the non-Mormon Christians at The Citadel adhere to. In fact, one might fairly assume that at least some of them would agree with the Perry-supporter Pastor Jeffress that Mormonism is a "cult." (Gov./Rev. Perry [1] disassociated himself from that position. Were he to get the GOTP nomination in the end, guess who his most likely pick for VP would be.) So we've got a few problems here. But let's say all of the above could be sorted out. According to Romney, just what sort of a USA would God be in favor of, or at least, through Romney as president, be associating him/herself with?
Well, first of all, God, according to Romney, would be entirely against the "Occupy Wall Street" movement, which Romney has described as "class warfare." Then God would be entirely for "cutting the budget," which of course means cutting the budget for everything the GOTP does not like while, presumably, under Romney ramping up military spending significantly. God would likely support the recommendation of at least some Romney advisors to launch an article-51-of-the-UN-charter-violating and therefore Article-VI-of-the-US-Constitution-violating preemptive war on Iran (2). Romney's God would approve of the ever-widening gap in the US between the ultra-rich and the rest of us which spawned Occupy Wall Street. God would approve of the increasing dependence on fossil fuels which, through climate change, threatens the very existence of an increasing number of the species God, as Romney et al, cultists or not, tell us, created, including ours. Romney's God would presumably approve of letting the US infrastructure continue to crumble. Romney's God would approve of destroying Social Security and letting the US health care delivery system continue to go to hell in a hand-basket. Finally, Romney's God, according to Romney, has established a "unique destiny" for America, in that "the 21st century should be an American century, in which America has the strongest economy and the strongest military" (3).
Ah well, there you have it. It's all in perception. The US is strong, the US should lead the world whether the rest of the nations like it or not and will willingly follow or not, whether the US has the personnel, political, and financial resources to this or not, and God had somehow or other told Romney that this is the case. And this man could be the next president of the United States. God's honest truth.
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References:
1."Ask Governor Perry," Published on BuzzFlash@Truthout on Fri, 08/12/2011, URL: http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/12934
2. http://thinkprogress.org/security/2011/10/07/338979/romney-advisers-war-iran/#.To9Vzl6sN84.email
3. Cornwell, R., "Robust Romney says ‘unique US' should be ready to act alone," The Independent (UK), Oct. 8, 2011, p. 33.
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What the Gunners Want: What’s in Rick Perry’s Pocket, Unlimited by Steve Jonas |
Your current leading
candidate for the GOTP (read Grand Old/Tea Party, they are inseparable)
nomination for President is Gov. (Rev.) Rick Perry of Texas. Among many
other things, the preacher (1) is also a "carrier." In Tex-lingo
(actually in southern/southwestern lingo generally) "carrier" means that
the person is carrying, or might be carrying, a concealed weapon
(usually loaded). The governor has stated (boasted) that he "carries" a
.380 Ruger pistol (2) decorated with the etching of a coyote to
commemorate the little member of that species that the governor shot
last year while out on a morning jog. The gun is described on its
website as "one of the best concealed carry firearms for anyone needing a
small-frame semi-automatic pistol that can easily fit in a pocket,
purse, briefcase, etc." The governor's has a laser sight (you know, the
one you see in the movies that puts a dot of red light on its targets)
and is loaded with hollow-point bullets (designed to do maximum damage
to human flesh, if it encounters some).
The governor is a strong supporter of "Second Amendment rights," the
version that distorts the literal meaning of the Amendment to mean the
unlimited individual "right to bear arms" without any limitations
whatsoever. (This could in theory lead to the private ownership of tanks
(3), but no one ever seems to want to engage the NRA on that one.)
That's an interesting argument when one examines the plain language of
the Amendment (3): "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the
security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms,
shall not be infringed." Along with Justice Scalia, you might be
surprised to know, I happen to be a big fan of strict constructionism
when interpreting the Constitution. (Of course Scalia honors that
commitment only in the breach, but that's another story.) The Amendment
is somewhat ambiguous to be sure. But in reading its plain language, it
is quite obvious that it can mean only one of two things. One, it
provides a right to the people, in the protection of the free state, to
form well-regulated militias. Or two, it provides to individuals the
right to bear arms, in a well-regulated system for the protection of the
free state.
At any rate, and Scalia's court goes along with this, Governor Perry is a
big "2nd Amendment guy." It is interesting to examine what that
actually means. One way to do so is to look at the current list of "gun
rights legal actions" being supported by an organization called the
"Second Amendment Foundation." According to Wikipedia, "The Second
Amendment Foundation or SAF is an educational- and legal-defense
organization which describes its mission as ‘promoting a better
understanding about our constitutional heritage to privately own and
possess firearms. To that end, SAF carries on many educational- and
legal-action programs designed to better inform the public about the
gun-control debate.' “It is very informative to take a look at the legal
actions that SAF is currently supporting (according to a list of them
sent by mail in September, 2011).
- It wants there to be broad license to carry assault rifles (California).
- It wants very strict
limits on what can be limited in states and localities that have gun
permit laws (e.g., New York City, New Jersey, San Diego).
- It wants there to be no limitation on sales of guns in any one state to out-of-state residents (Virginia).
- It wants there to be no limitations on the ownership of guns by legal alien residents (Massachusetts).
- It wants no limits on gun ownership for persons convicted of non-domestic violence (Georgia).
- It wants no limits on gun shows being held at county fairgrounds (Alameda Count, CA).
- It wants gun ranges open to the public to be allowed just about anywhere Illinois).
- In gun permit states it wants there to be no "good cause" standard to be applied to applicants (New York).
- In gun permit states,
it wants there to be no limitations on the types of handguns an
applicant may be permitted to carry (California).
And so on, and so forth. Just "no limits," folks, know what I mean?
If you think things are bad now (about 35,000 handgun-related deaths per
year on the US), just think how bad they might be under a President who
"carries." (Funny enough, if he were to become President, the Secret
service probably would not permit him to carry. Much too unsafe for the
President of the United States to be walking around with a loaded
handgun, don't you think?)
There is very little "outcome of gun ownership and use" research going
on in the US now, especially federally-funded research. The latter has
been virtually shut down by the NRA, through its Republican and
Democratic allies in Congress. As to where the NRA derives its support,
they aren't telling. Polls show that about half of the NRA membership
thinks that there should be some regulation of gun ownership, especially
handguns. However, neither of the other major NRA funders, the gun
industry and the gun dealers, agrees. One must wonder, then, if the
NRA's real interest is not the right to bear arms, but the right to sell
them, of any type, to anyone and everyone.
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Vengeance is Mine, Saith the Lord by Steve Jonas |
From the Huffington Post, August 26, 2011:
“Televangelist Pat Robertson suggested Wednesday that cracks in the
Washington Monument caused by the August 23 (Virginia) earthquake could
be a sign from God, and the natural disaster ‘means that we’re closer to
the coming of the Lord.’ To explain the rare east coast quake,
Robertson pointed to the Biblical prophecy of the end of the world,
which claims there could be potential devastation from natural disasters
leading up to Jesus' return to Earth. On his television show, ‘The 700
Club,’ Robertson said: ‘I don't want to get weird on this, so please
take it for what it's worth, but it seems to me the Washington Monument
is a symbol of America's power. It has been the symbol of our great
nation, we look at that monument and we say this is one nation under
God. Now there's a crack in it. Is that a sign from the Lord? Is that
something that has significance, or is it just the result of an
earthquake?’"
This was rather less definitive than his statement on the Haitian
earthquake (and much less definitive than his “it’s the fault of the
gays” declaration made with the late Jerry Falwell following 9/11).
Maybe he is getting a bit sensitized. At any rate, consider this one:
"NEW YORK (CBS,
1/12/10) Pat Robertson, the American Christian televangelist and host
of 'The 700 Club,' said that Haitians need to have a 'great turning to
god' while he was reporting on the devastating 7.0 earthquake that shook
the island nation . . .'Something happened a long time ago in Haiti and
people might not want to talk about. . . They were under the heel of
the French, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got
together and swore a pact to the devil. They said 'We will serve you if
you will get us free from the prince.' True story. And so the devil
said, 'OK it’s a deal.' And they kicked the French out. The Haitians
revolted and got something themselves free. But ever since they have
been cursed by one thing after another.' "
Well, Pat, actually it was not (Louis) Napoleon III (1852-1870) against
whom the Haitian slave revolt took place but the Emperor Napoleon
Bonaparte (1798-1815). But when you are making up stuff like you do,
what difference do the facts make? There was a huge amount of
controversy, not about him getting his facts wrong, but about the
content of what he said. While many including myself regard what he
said as an outrageous slander against the Haitian people, another
question occurred to me: how does he know? How does he know that in
fact the Haitian people made a pact with the devil, whenever they did
it, and that because of that pact, made however may years ago, they
suffered this horrible earthquake now.
And then Michelle Bachmann tells us that Hurricane Irene was the result
of God’s wrath for too much Federal spending (that is on items that
Michelle doesn’t like spending on, like repairing bridges like the one
that collapsed in her home state a couple of years ago). She later
claimed she was joking, but from what I have heard from the likes of her and
the Rev. Perry, God is not someone one should joke around with. We will
not get into the seeming illogic of God punishing the US for
Federal overspending by committing an act that requires more spending,
actually on matters she really doesn’t like money to spent on. For I
assume that as a “Tea Partier,” as she likes to tell us even when not
looking into the camera --- see, I do pay attention to details even if I
don’t deign to interfere with them --- she is following the lead of her
Tea Party House Majority Leader (and luster after the Speaker’s job,
but that is another matter). That is unless you are Rep. Cantor and
want to find every possible excuse, including natural disasters, to rip
out of the Federal budget spending you happen not to like, too.
Of course then there is the Rev. Perry (or is it Gov. Perry, he does get
one confused, donchaknow), who tells us that the BP gusher disaster was
an “Act of God” (pretty mean guy/gal/it for all of these GOPers it
would seem), prays for rain for his totally parched State of Texas while
authorizing the use of billions of gallons of available Texas water for
fracking for his friends in the natural gas industry, and tells us that
both evolution theory and climate change theory are likely myths. Next
he might be telling us that it is simply not yet proven that the Earth
is round, that it revolves around the sun, and what most other people
call the Law of Gravity is “just a theory” (he means “hypothesis” but
likely doesn’t know the difference). After all, you can’t see it, now
can you?
And so I decided to go to the source about all of this God stuff, and
God doing this and God doing that to punish the US for doing things that
this group of Right-wing GOPers happen just not to like. I decided to
consult the Higher Authority directly. After all, if doing so is good
enough for Pat Robertson, Mayor Nagin of New Orleans, George Bush (as
well as Iran's President Ahmedinejad), Michelle Bachmann, and the Rev.
Perry, it is good enough for me, I reasoned. (As to which “one true
God” any of us is communicating with, mine, of course, is, for the
purposes of this essay, my Him [or Her, as the case may be], not any of
theirs. Actually, I am a secular humanist Jew, and I know that there is
no God to call or call upon, but heck, I’ve got a good story going here,
or so at least several friends and admirers have told me. So we’ll
just go with it.) And so I gave God a ring.
He (and there was a male voice at the other of the line when I called)
was not in a particularly good mood. “What is going on down there?” I
was asked. “Things are really getting out of hand. I am truly wroth.
In fact, to quote myself ‘Vengeance is mine.’ In case you haven’t
heard,” the voice intoned, “that is one of the most famous sayings from
the Bible, you know, from Hebrews 10:30. I will repeat the quote for
you, for it has such a nice ring to it: ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the
Lord.’ And I do invoke it. But not about the issues with which those
folks you are asking me about are concerned. Do they really think that
I, God, the Almighty, would deign to get involved with such issues as
homosexuality, which just naturally comes with your species, as well as a
number of others, or such matters as the details of your Federal
budget? And how much time do they think I have, anyway?"
God continued:
"The single current issue on Earth with which I am truly concerned is
the matter of human-caused global warming and its related climate
change. And why, you might ask? Well, I’ll tell you [and here I am
worrying about who is going to pay for this call to the heavens, which
is getting longer and longer.] Your species is currently knocking off
large bunches of the whole raft of other species that I created way back
when (actually a few billions, not 6000, years ago as lunatics like
what's-his-name, oh yes, Robertson, and the Rev. Perry like to
proclaim). This is a looming disaster, for I value all of my species
equally. Let me tell you, if something is not done soon to right the
ship, as they say, there is going to be hell to pay down there, and not
the kind of hell that Robertson person is talking about. It will be
real hell.
"I don't do things like control earthquakes and hurricanes and such. I
set up the system those billions of years ago, and those things occur
naturally. But I, and my consort Mother Nature (who, unlike me, has no
consciousness of what she is doing --- she instinctively focuses on
maintaining balance), we do look after all of our species. If yours
continues to do what it is doing to my whole creation, Vengeance will be
mine. I will interfere, even though I am loath to do so and do it very
infrequently. If you keep going the way you are going, we will make
sure that Thou shalt go first, before you have the chance to destroy
every single one of our creations. We do love you all and hope that you right the ship of Earth, soon."
There is a devil about, but he doesn't interfere in the way that
Robertson would have had him do. He actually lines up with people like
Robertson, Bachmann, Perry, Cantor, Cheney (now boasting about the evil
he has committed) and their political ilk to bring more war, more
pestilence, more drought, more famine, more destructive climate change,
as the result of human activities. In fact, it might interest you to
know that when Robertson's close buddy, that Falwell guy, appeared at
the Pearly Gates, Peter looked him up, took one look at that record of
sowing discord, hate, and fear whenever and wherever he could, and said,
'You know, bud, you will be much happier spending the rest of eternity
in the other place, where the man in charge does just the same kinds of
things you like to do.' We never heard from him again."
"And so, my friend," God said to me, "I'm glad you called. Forget about
that false prophet Robertson and all of his kind. I know that you
write for The Planetary Movement. Yours are the kinds of folks who are
going to save all of my creation, if anyone can. So give my very best
wishes to all of your friends and colleagues, but do tell them also to
redouble their efforts to save the Earth. There is not much time left,
and I won't wait forever if I do in the end have to take drastic action
to protect all of my other species that you haven't managed yet to
eliminate."
And with that, he hung up. So the Robertson/Bachmann/Perry thing was
good for something. I got to talk to God and He told me and all of my
like-minded friends to redouble our efforts to save our species, and the
Earth itself.
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The Lesser of the Evils: Hindsight is 20/20, but McCain Shudda Won by Steve Jonas |
August 24, 2011
The Great Debate on the Left about whether to support President Obama for re-election had been building already, even before the debt limit debacle. And now it is on in full force and will be with us right up until Election Day, 2012. You can tell from the title of this commentary which side I am on. Except for the election of 1980, when I supported and actually did some work for John Anderson (until for reasons to this day entirely unknown to me he finked out right after Labor Day), I have been a “lesser of the evils” guy. But not this time around.
The arguments on both sides are pretty well-known and I am not going to retail them here. Neither am I going to go into the details about why I think that the debt limit debacle was a debacle for our side, except to say that if Grover Norquist and Paul Ryan view it as a victory, if Mitch McConnell has the biggest smile on his face I have ever seen, if John Boehner says “I got 98% of what I wanted,” if Nancy Pelosi makes it very clear that she would have voted against it if she were not Minority Leader, if 95 House Democrats did vote against it, if respected moderate left-wing commentators like Bob Scheer and Paul Krugman say that it’s bad stuff, that’s enough for me.
In previous commentaries, I have made it clear that I understood that Obama was a DLCer from the git-go. I have also revealed that on a few occasions, early on, I was taken in by the rhetoric. And he is good at it. But, taking the long view of what is happening to our nation and how we might, if we are very, very fortunate, before the true GOP night descends squeeze our way out of it, I do have to tell you that A) I will not be voting for Obama in 2012 regardless of who the GOP candidate is and B) admittedly with 20/20 hindsight I now fully believe that over the long haul our nation would have been better off had McCain won in 2008, yes, even with that nit-wit of a running mate that was forced upon him.
Why? Well briefly, as James K. Galbraith has laid out very clearly, on issue after issue Obama has been following GOP or GOP-lite policies or not getting into contentious issues, like doing something real about climate change, by just letting them drop. Why, according to the Right-Wing Rag NewsMax the Austen Goolsbee, formerly of the Obama White House and still consulted by them, recently entertained the author of the infamous “Laffer Curve,” the basis of the even more infamous “Reaganomics,” otherwise known as “Voodoo Economics” (George HW Bush’s term for it before he was offered the Vice-Presidency by Reagan). The economic fantasies that this man is still peddling 30 years later, that are fully responsible for total economic mess we find ourselves in, were given a respectful listen. And so we have the outcomes of the GOP policies they have spread all over us since the Reagan Presidency while at the same time the GOP is able to blame all the ills of the nation on Obama, as if the policies were his and/or Democratic ones, not those of the GOP .
But suppose the barons of the Fed and Wall Street had been able to do just a bit more of their behind-the-scenes legerdemain (which, we continue to find out, goes on all the time) and had postponed the September 15, 2008 Lehman Brothers meltdown until, let’s say, November 7, 2008. That would have been a couple of days after the 2008 election and, funnily enough, on the Gregorian calendar the 91st anniversary of the Russian Revolution. As it happened, McCain had overtaken Obama in the polls by mid-September 2008, when the bankruptcy did occur, with the subsequent collapse of the real estate bubble, the subsequent collapse of the economy, the Paulson/Bush first bank bailout, and so forth and so on.
But if the collapse had not occurred then, if it had somehow been postponed until after the election, if McCain had maintained the momentum that he had had in mid-September, Obama’s best rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding the aging cancer survivor might actually have become President. (And guess who would have been Vice-President.) And so, let’s look at a list of what might have happened in that alternate reality of a McCain Presidency, comparing it to what has really happened under the Obama Presidency. Has to be a big difference, no? After all, the (remaining) Obama supporters and the (supposedly defunct) Democratic Leadership Council tell us so.
Consider, then, if McCain had been elected President: The War of Afghanistan would have been expanded, with no firm withdrawal date; the bank bailout would have happened, but with even fewer requirements set for the banks; the Minerals Management Service of the Department of the Interior would have been allowed to go on its love-the-oil-industry-let’s-not-do-anything-to-upset-it way and a huge BP gusher disaster would have occurred in the Gulf of Mexico; Guantanamo would have stayed open; “Don’t ask/don’t tell” would remain on the books until now; there would be no real progress on settling the Israel/Palestine problem; plus, plus, and most importantly plus, given that there would not have even been the Obama weak-at-the-knees so-called “stimulus package” the economy would be mired in an even worse massive unemployment/continued export of jobs/no-growth mess. True, General Motors and Chrysler would have been allowed to go bankrupt and there would have been no "health care reform" legislation (otherwise known as the Private “Health Care” Insurance Industry Subsidy Act). But the main features of the Obama Presidency would have been very much in place, with one big exception: The Republicans would be getting the blame for them, as they should.
Guess who would not be speaker of the House. Guess which GOP Front organization you would have never even heard of. Guess which Minority Leader of which House of Congress might not even have the 40 votes he would need to continue governing-by-just-saying-no. Guess which wing of which party would be preparing to take it over for the 2012 elections. And it ain’t the Blue Dogs. Of course, hind-sight is 20/20 and if McCain had won we would be bemoaning what-might-have-been, given the Obama rhetoric. But what we need to do now is face the Obama reality.
If the GOP and the corporate power it represents are not stopped soon, this country is headed for fascism and civil war. Obama is only helping to pave the way, both by his actions and by his inactions. The only way to stop this mad dash to hell is for a truly organized, mass-based party to be formed by splitting the Democratic Party, just as the Whig Party was split in the 1850s. Yes, it is very unlikely that anything like this will happen in time for next year’s elections. But if Obama is re-elected, the GOP/corporate power will continue to have their target-of-blame for the negative outcomes, one after the other, of their very own policies, and will continue to use that target just as they do now, every day in every way. And then they will roar into the Presidency in 2016, and good night, USA.
Our only hope is for a truly progressive party to rise for the elections of 2014 and 2016. But the only way that can happen is if Obama and the Right-Wing Democrats he represents are out of the picture and do not continue to give the political cover to the Republicans that they just love having. Yes indeed, taking the long historical view, the lesser of the evils for 2012 is anyone-but-Obama.
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Ask Governor Perry by Steve Jonas |
August 11, 2011
According to an article in The New York Times
by Manny Fernandez and Daniel Cadis (1): “Standing on a stage
surrounded by more than 30,000 Christians on Saturday morning, Gov. Rick
Perry of Texas called on Jesus Christ to bless and guide the nation’s
military and political leaders and ‘those who cannot see the light in
the midst of all the darkness,’ in a brief but rousing sermon-style
spiritual address at the controversial prayer rally that he sponsored at
the same time that he is weighing whether to run for president. ‘Lord,
you are the source of every good thing,’
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The Coming Second Civil War by Steve Jonas |
August 1, 2011
History never repeats itself exactly. But it makes some pretty decent copies.
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The GOP’s Presidential Dilemma by Steve Jonas |
July 18, 2011
At the turning point of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta “Trial by Jury” The Judge announces: “A nice dilemma we have here, That calls for all our wit, for all our wit.” The public face of the GOP often seems witless (other than to their devoted, Fox”News”Channel indoctrinated followers). But privately, the true leadership of the GOP, seen very little by the general public, has a great deal of wit in the defense and promotion of the agenda of their patron, the US Corporate Power. In fact they have much too much of it for the long-term good of both our nation and the world at large. It is this private face of the GOP, its true leadership that faces a major dilemma in the upcoming US presidential election.
The private face of the GOP does not include most of their public figures. Their elected officials for the most part are bought and paid-for employees of those who run the Party. They have neither an independent voice nor independent power. (As much as certain Tea Party GOP front men and women may think they do, this is not the case). Second, the GOP is not the Propaganda Channel - otherwise known as the Fox"News"Channel mentioned above - nor is it its order-giver, Roger Ailes. For Ailes takes his orders from those above him too. Third, the GOP is not their raft of paid political consultants and celebrity figures like Sara Palin, Donald Trump and the Christian Reconstructionist Mike Huckabee. (Want to know why he didn't run this time around? He has close, although private, connections to that replace-the-Constitution-with-Biblical-Law-the-way-we-see-it organization. Those connections certainly would have come to light this time around and even some the GOP voters would have had a hard time stomaching it.) No, the true GOP leadership is on the other hand, for the most part a highly secretive group.
Two of the true GOP leadership's few public figures are Karl Rove and Reince Priebus. Rove is of course a major fundraiser and he is also the developer of the goal he intended to be achieved under the GW Bush Presidency of a "Permanent Republican Majority." He failed in this attempt. However, he appears to be on this way to achieving a "Permanent Republican Government," at both the federal and state levels. This state of affairs is one of the bases of the GOP presidential dilemma. Reince Priebus is the recently appointed Chair of the Republican National Committee. One of his major claims to fame is his drafting of model state legislation aimed at significantly reducing minority, youth, and working-class voting by significantly reducing access to the voting booth. This legislation has been passed and is on its way to being enacted in many of the states in which the GOP took control of both the legislative and executive branches in the 2010 elections. And then there are the Koch Brothers, the poster boys, willingly or not, for the Right-wing Corporate Power that has taken control of major parts of the US economy and is milking it for every last dollar of profits that they can lay their hands on.
However, the bulk of the real leadership of the GOP is to be found in highly secretive groups. One of them is the National Council for Policy. According to Source Watch: "The Council for National Policy is a secretive forum that was formed in 1981 by Tim LaHaye as a networking tool for leading US conservative political leaders, financiers and religious right activist leaders. The group, which meets three times a year, promotes, ‘Educational conferences for national leaders in the fields of business, government, religion and academia to explore national policy alternatives.’ Weekly newsletters are distributed to all members to keep them apprised of member activities and public policy issues. A semi-annual journal is produced from membership meeting speeches. In 2001, ABC News reported: ‘The CNP describes itself as a counterweight against liberal domination of the American agenda.’ Others are not so kind to the organization and its motives. Mark Crispin Miller states that the CNP is a 'highly secretive... theocratic organization -- what they want is basically religious rule' (A Patriot Act). Barry W. Lynn, the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told the New York Times about the CNP meeting ahead of the 2004 Republican National Convention: ‘The real crux of this is that these are the genuine leaders of the Republican Party, but they certainly aren't going to be visible on television next week.’ “Another secretive group is the Koch Brothers' fundraising machine, which seems not to have a name, publicly at least, although it could be called “Citizens United's Little Boys.” One can be certain that there are a number of other GOP backroom organizations that are indeed truly secret.
And so, what is their dilemma? In a sentence, who would they rather have sitting in the Oval Office just after noon on January 20, 2013 - the present White House occupant or one of the not-quite-ready-for-prime-time-bunch who have declared their run for the GOP Presidential nomination. Consider this. If Rove wants a permanent Republican government in terms of true GOP policy he is well on this way to getting it. Current government foreign policy, for, let’s say, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Pakistan, China, Russia, the European Union, and last but certainly not least, Israel, runs pretty much along GOP lines. On taxes, they are screaming for more cuts, but they already have had a bunch under the current Administration.
What they call "big government" is miniscule compared to that of virtually every other advanced capitalist country. The 19th Century Prussian Chancellor Bismarck, who created the world's first national health insurance system in the 1880s, would himself be appalled at what passes for national health care policy in this country. As for the "safety net" and the so-called "welfare state," again by comparison the former has many more holes than net and the latter doesn't exist in the same sense that it exists by any measure of comparison elsewhere. Adolf Hitler, probably the greatest practitioner of Keynesian economics ever to hit the world stage, would be scratching his head over the dismal level of government investment in the US economy. So that's what they've got.
Then consider that they've got in the White House, someone who in the end, goes along with them on most things. He may make some liberal/"progressive" noises now and then, but over and over again: on health care reform (which ended up simply as a major Federally-mandated subsidy for the private health insurance companies); on repealing the Bush tax cuts; on withdrawing from Afghanistan; on closing Guantanamo’ about doing nothing serious about climate change (except to some extent over at a courageous EPA); on nuclear power (big subsidies, but minimal for renewable); about being serious about rooting out the evils of Wall St. and sending at least some of the perpetrators of the 2008 collapse of finance capitalism to prison; about going after the torturers and more importantly the ones who wrote the rules they followed; and so on and so forth. When push has come to shove, for the most part it is the President who has been getting shoved. (What he does in the end about the debt ceiling, GOP-let's-drown-what's-left-of-the-Federal-government-that-we-don't-like-in-the-bathtub, al la Grover Norquist blackmail attempt remains to be seen.) In all of this, Obama has been generally following the policies of the old Democratic Leadership Council, whose former Director, Al From, recently came out with a statement generally praising GOP policies.
So what is the kicker for them with Obama in the White House? When all of their policies produce the predictable negative results, they can just turn around and blame him, and blame him, and blame him. Then predictably he responds with, for the most part, "we've got to change the way Washington works." He hardly ever says anything like "you know, folks, it's Republican policies that are to blame, and let me tell you why.” Then the “blame Obama” tune first hits the echo chamber of the propaganda channel. Then it hits the equally damaging, for real people suffering from the real problems created by GOP policy, "on-the-one-hand-this-and-on-the-other-hand-that” position taken by most of the other major news outlets.
So, given the available talent, knowledge, and skill level of their potential candidates, there is a strong temptation among the true GOP leadership to stick with what they've got until 2016. By that time, the country will be in much worse mess, which they would blame of course entirely on the President, and they could then triumphantly bring in the next Bush, who would win and then make things even worse. But that's another story.
Given all this, why would they want the Presidency in 2012? Three primary reasons: First of all, to get control of environmental regularity policy (financial regulatory policy having changed not very much).
Obama, particularly with his oil-industry connected man over at the Interior, Ken Salazar, has not been outstanding on environmental regulation (mountain-top removal continues unabated, as does fracking --- poison the New York City water supply, anyone?) But, any GOP Administration would be even worse, which is just what the Corporate Power wants. Second of all, they could cement their control over the federal judiciary. For 2 ½ years they have blocked countless Obama nominees to the District and Circuit Courts and will continue to do so (of course with little criticism from the White House on the matter). Most of those vacancies will all still be open in 2013, as well as, most likely, at least one liberal seat on the Supreme Court (Justice Ginsburg). Third, they would get all their hacks back into the various powerful, non-career positions in the federal bureaucracy.
One prime example? The former lobbyist for the beef and dairy industry who wrote the last (totally fake from the nutrition/health point of view) “food pyramid” for the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services that has been, thankfully, replaced by the dinner plate.
However, and it a very big however, if the GOP gets the presidency they would almost certainly retaining their majority in the House. On the Senate side, whether or not they regain a majority, they would retain effective control of the Senate, which they have had for most of the Obama Presidency. Thus they would eventually be blamed for all that would eventually go wrong. Savagely Le-vinitating O'RHannibaugh would be able to blame it all on Obama for just so long, even though they would try to do so forever.
So there's the dilemma for the real GOP leadership. Through voter suppression and vote-tampering Rove/Priebus can make the election turn out pretty much way they want it to. That will indeed be a tough decision for them. Stay tuned, folks. This one will be fascinating to watch.
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The Legalization of Gay Marriage in New York State: There's Good News and Bad News by Steve Jonas |
July 7, 2011
The legalization of marriage between partners of the same sex in New York State has special meaning for me. After my mother and father divorced in 1946, my mother lived with my "aunt" until 1959 (when the latter walked out on her to join a much younger, much prettier woman - this sort of behavior being found not just among heterosexual couples). We were members of an upper middle-class left-wing set in New York City (and I do include myself in the group because I was very political from a very young age - I can remember discussing his work with Howard Fast in my mother's living room when I was about ten, and joined my mother and 'aunt' at many of the parties and other events). No one said boo to a goose about their relationship. They were as 'out-of-the-closet' as one could be back then. As for me, I thought nothing special of it either. I saw my Dad about once a month and during vacation time becoming very close to him only as an adult. The rest of the time it was Mom, Hanna, and me.
The new New York State law was finally passed with the help, I must say, of four very politically brave Republican state senators. Mine from the First Senatorial District on Long Island, Ken LaValle, who, as an attorney should know better, sadly was not among them. Indeed, I had thought that the bill would not make it through to passage. But it did. Just think, Mom and Hanna could have married if they were still with us and still together. Of course, back then no one even thought of such a thing. But, they could have now.
At the present time, I have a second personal reason for being thrilled with the law's passage. Late in life I have come to have a gay step-son, one who blesses my family with his presence as both my own son and daughter will tell you. So now, in my state and his too, should my step-son meet a suitable partner, they will be able to get married, just like any other loving couple. And, fortunately in my state we do not have 'Initiative and Referendum' as they do in California.
Originally, over a century ago, "I & R" was set up by progressives to overcome an entrenched reactionary state legislature run by the then equivalent of the Koch Brothers and their ultra-right wing clones. But, in the modern era the system for the most part has come to be used by the very reactionary forces that it was originally designed to combat. And so came California's infamous Proposition 8, adopted after a stealth campaign funded primarily by the Mormon Church, operating from its home-base of Utah. Well, that cannot happen in New York State. And it would be extremely difficult for the Republican Christian Right to amend the state's Constitution, since that is not subject to change by referendum either; and going the legislative route is very cumbersome. Such an amendment would never get through the State Assembly as it is now constituted anyway. So, good news all around. Well, not all around, but we'll come to that below.
The good news is that the proposed change in the law passed in New York, and it passed with the votes of legislators who were voting for it on Constitutional, not necessarily political, grounds. Yes, same-sex marriage bans are not fair, are unjust, and are dog whistles for homophobia. But, the primary reason for the legalization of same-sex marriage has nothing to do with fairness and justice. It has everything to do with the bimodal nature of marriage in our country and the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. (It happens that the case challenging Prop. 8 is being made on Constitutional grounds, but the argument predates its adoption by the revoke-Prop.-8 legal team.) It also has to do with the provisions on freedom of religion of the First Amendment, which the 14th applies to the several states: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Gay marriage bans, which their supporters always tell us are based on biblical-religious law, on their face violate both the Establishment clause and the free exercise clause.
Every religion in the United States has a system for marriage under its own rules. But, how odd it was that the Mormon church is one of the most prominent proponents of the, "marriage is between one man and one woman" mantra. The Mormon Church led and heavily funded the Proposition 8 campaign in California. But, oddly enough the fundamentalist Mormons, who trace their heritage, and rules, directly back to the founder of the Church, Joseph Smith, Jr., have a quite different form of marriage. It is, on paper, illegal throughout the United States, but in their home state and certain counties in neighboring states it is openly tolerated. You know the rule of this particular group of Latter-Day Saints: "marriage is between one man and whole bunch of women." You can bet your sweet pitootie that no one would ever go after Mormon polygamy under the infamous "Defense of Marriage Act." But consistency has never been prominent among Rightists either of the religious or non-religious type, and hypocrisy is one of the prominent trademarks of the GOP.
Of course, any church is entitled to formulate and abide by its own rules for marriage, and if they don't want to countenance or recognize same-sex marriage, under the First Amendment they love to denigrate so much, that is their right. And then again, any individual who firmly believes that marriage should be only between persons of opposite genders should definitely not marry someone of his or her same sex. That is their right too.
But, then there is the institution of marriage, with provisions for its legal dissolution, that is found in the law, extensive and sometimes quite dense, that exists on the books of every one of the 50 states. That's civil marriage. This institution has absolutely nothing to do with religion any more than state motor vehicle laws do. In every state a couple can walk into the office of an official endowed by that state's law to perform a marriage ceremony and certify that it is licensable under the law, and get married. Unless, that is, in most states, they happen to be of the same sex.
But, then we come to the clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that states, "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; . . . nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Open and shut, one would think. Why, it's right there in the Constitution: equal protection under the law. But not so fast. Not open and shut at all. And why? Because unique among nations in the advanced capitalist world, ours is the one in which one of the two major parties runs in part on political homophobia, the dog whistle for which is the issue of gay marriage. That the GOP runs on homophobia is the main reason that we have the problem of the illegalization of same-sex marriage in most of the states, despite the clear provision of the 14th for equal protection under the law. And so comes the bad news.
First, it is that we have such a party, a party that runs on homophobia and uses homophobia politically, just as it uses racism and Islamophobia and the promotion of religious persecution on the abortion issue (You don't believe that life begins at the moment of conception? Well, we are going to criminalize your belief. This latter, fact by the way, should also be regarded as a national disgrace. But there are few, if any, opposition political figures who will come anywhere near that one with even a 100-foot pole.) The second piece of bad news is that while we can say, "Hooray, New York has become the sixth state to legalize same-sex marriage," there are forty-four others that have not. Twenty-nine of them actually have state Constitutional bans against it (New York Times, N. Confessore, "Beyond New York, Gay Marriage Faces Hurdles," June 27, 2011).
A significant number of those came into being when Karl Rove led a campaign to place proposals for such Constitutional amendments on the ballot in those states where the Constitution can be amended in such a way -- in the 2004 Presidential elections in order to get as many right-wing voters to the polls as he possibly could. Another twelve have laws against it. Yes, folks, that's forty-one out of the remaining forty-four in the NG column. Bad arithmetic. Bad news.
The Proposition 8 case is obviously of huge significance. For if the legal challenge to it as unconstitutional is upheld then the pro-14th Amendment forces will be able to go after every one of those homophobic State Constitutions and State laws that make second-class citizens of the homosexual members of our nation's population, on 14th Amendment grounds. But that's a very big if, given the right-wing, and Catholic, majority on the Supreme Court, which just loves to ignore "Original Intent" or "Amendment Intent" when in a given case paying attention to either one would go against the grain of their reactionary worldviews and projected policies. So we shall see.
But for now, in New York State at least, we can celebrate the passage of a law that brings us into adherence to the 14th, and I can celebrate for the memory of my Mom and my 'aunt' and for the very present reality of my step-son Mark.
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American Exceptionalism: A GOP Mantra by Steve Jonas |
June 27, 2011
Ah, Newt Gingrich, how you have disappointed me. The moment that I heard that you had decided to enter the race for the GOP Presidential nomination a few weeks back, I started planning this column. After all, based upon what you had been saying about President Obama for the last few months, I was certain that I would have a very nice fat target to shoot at. (Fat indeed, Newt, for you have gotten rather heavy in recent years, no doubt due to the fact that you are spending much less, if any, time chasing after women. Rather, you seem to be being pulled around by the ear by just one.) And it would be an exceptional one, not built around substance, like programs designed to pull the US out of the foreign and domestic mess it is in, but around the process arguments you love so much, like the first eight components of your famous "Contract on America" (oops, sorry, "Contract for America") http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_with_America.
But then you went and spoiled it all by making a mess of your campaign right from the git-go (on which mess, upon your return from your vacation in the Greek Isles with the current Mrs. G., you seemed to have doubled down). First you were for US involvement in Libya, then when the President undertook to do that you were against it. Then you were for an individual mandate for the President's something-short-of-national health insurance program. Actually, you have been for such a thing going back to your days in the Congress. After all, no health insurance program, public or private, can work if people can sign on just when they get sick and have not paid premiums during the time they were healthy. That's why the for-profit health insurance companies refused to cover pre-existing conditions. But then you were against the individual mandate (or tried to appear to be). First you were for preserving Medicare as we know it and actually called the Ryan "Plan" radical "social engineering" (a term GOPers apply to any proposed national domestic legislation they don't like), and then you seemed to be for it. At any rate, you were the talk of the political humor shows and etc. and it remains to be seen where your campaign goes, other than into the toilet.
But you did leave us with this gem Newt, apparently indicative of your legendary (sic) genius (sic) for thinking “outside the box,” “so creatively,” “like a true historian.” Yes, Newt, you actually said: “I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time [my grandchildren] are my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially on dominated by radical Islamists (thestatecolumn.com, March 28, 2011).” What an incredible concept. It’s a political slogan that binds his two principal enemies, the secularists and the “radical Islamists,” into one package. The only problem with it is that, as a secularist, I would hardly build a state “dominated by Radical Islamists” (or Newtonian Republican Christian Rightists either, for that matter). At the same time, I doubt that “Radical Islamists” would want to set up a “secular atheist country.” But then again, there is Newt, definitely thinking outside the box. Yes indeed, he is truly an Exceptional American, managing the kind of truly exceptional thought he, and not many others, can manage to manufacture (for his own political purposes).
But back to "American Exceptionalism." The other potential GOP candidate even dumber and more ignorant than Sara, Trump was the flash-in-the-pan many thought him to be, so heeeere's Sara. And if she does get in, what she calls "American Exceptionalism" will be a major theme of hers. Herman Cain is very quickly going in that direction too. That is, the US is just different from everybody else, so much better, donchaknow, that it just doesn't have to play by anyone else's rules, neither at home nor certainly not abroad. And, she will tell us, President Obama just doesn't somehow, realize that, and that's why he must be replaced. To be fair at this point, one must point out that Tim Pawlenty, "T-Paw" to his friends, an announced candidate, is moving in the direction of the "US exceptionalism" theme too. He focused his opening advertising salvo on his claim that the President "lacks courage" (the point made about four times in a one-minute ad) you know, he's different from us, he is somehow just an unexceptionalist.
Now neither Sara nor Newt (nor T-Paw nor Herm) has yet given us a detailed list of just how exceptional the US is. So (and you may be surprised to read this, coming from me), I am going to help them by giving them a starter list on the subject. It's especially for Newt and Sara, but if T-Paw or Michele (who has made some American Exceptionalism noises herself) wants to use it that's fine with me.
Not necessarily in order of importance here's a list of some outstanding ways in which the US is indeed exceptional among the nations of the world.
1. The US simply ignores treaties to which it is a party, like the Geneva
Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture without so much
as a by-your leave.
2. In the US, Administrations can ignore its own Constitution, as in the case of its Article VI and the above-mentioned torture policy, without anyone in a position of authority saying boo to a goose.
3. The US is the only advanced capitalist country without a national health insurance system, to say nothing of a national health service.
4. The US has the largest military empire in the world, bar none.
5. Among the major Western democracies, it is the only one in which one major party runs in major part on right-wing religious bigotry, homophobia, Islamophobia, and climate change denial.
6. It is one of very few capitalist countries that has no civilian population with a personal recollection of war and its consequences.
7. Of the advanced capitalist countries it has the lowest proportion of workers who are unionized.
8. Of the advanced capitalist countries it is the one with the highest degree of corporate control of election outcomes, and the lowest level of citizen participation in elections.
9. Unlike every other advanced capitalist country, it has no high-speed rail system.
10. It has the highest proportion of government expenditures on the military of any nation in the world.
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The Tortuous Debate by Steve Jonas |
June 14, 2011
I have dealt with the subject of the use of torture by US "intelligence/military/security" forces on three occasions in the past (1) most recently a little more than two years ago. Since President G.W. Bush officially (at least) banned the use of torture, however one might define it, in 2005, the subject seemed to have disappeared from the political agenda after the time of that most recent Commentary (2009). But then comes the bin Laden killing (or whatever it was that happened in that compound in Abbotabad, Pakistan (2). The US Right can hardly give Obama credit for whatever it was that happened there.
Bush had had eight years to find bin Laden and deal with him in one way or another. In that very first National Security Council briefing on Jan. 21, 2001, Richard Clarke tried to tell Bush that bin Laden was the US' no. 1 foreign enemy. Clarke was thrust to the side by Bush and Condoleezza Rice. Then there was the famous August 6, 2001 CIA memo about "bin Laden determined to strike in the US," delivered at the Crawford "Ranch," and totally ignored. And then there was the use of torture (as defined by the UN Convention Against Torture, to which the US is a signatory) torturously redefined by the infamous Yoo and Bybee as "enhanced interrogation techniques" (and most of the media, pro- and anti-, persists in using that term). In the meantime Bush launched those two well-known wars and perhaps a bunch of not-so-well-known others. No bin Laden. The "I'm not interested in him" clip has been run countless times on television since the raid.
Eight years. Nothing. Now I have stated in my commentaries on more than one occasion that I thought that bin Laden, once trained by the CIA and definitely a CIA asset in the 1980s Afghanistan War, the last stage of the "75 Years War to Destroy the Soviet Union, 1917-92," might still have been a CIA asset at one level or another. I have also surmised that he might have been a Bush Family asset, given the decades-long business association between the latter and the bin Laden family, one of the wealthiest in Saudi Arabia outside of the Royals. So there might have been reasons why Bush did not catch him, apparently let him go at Tora Bora, and said that he "wasn't interested in bin Laden" (to possibly throw interested parties in this country and our allies off the scent for who knows what reason[s]). Yet here they are, from Beckoning Savagely Levin-itating O'RHannibaugh on up stating categorically that it was Bush policy, including, actually featuring, torture, that lead directly to locating bin Laden, with the subsequent events, whatever they were, occurring. Yes, torture is "good," "torture works," donchaknow?
And then our side, the US "left," gets sucked into that "does torture work?" argument. All the intelligence experts, both those who have actually done interrogations and those who have seriously studied it, are lined up and say, to a man and woman, "no it doesn't." The conclusion of course is that its use didn't help find bin Laden and therefore, the implication is that that is the reason it shouldn't be used: it doesn't work. Then on the other side, are a whole bunch of "experts" who just happen not to have direct experience in interrogation of trained hostiles but who "know," "have been told," that it does work. "Well," the response from our side to that goes, "Bush himself stopped its use in 2005. Obama got him in 2011." "Torture, thus, is obviously not needed." And aye, ladies and gentlemen, as I have said before (see the references at the beginning of this Commentary), there's the rub.
The real argument is not over whether "it works" or not. Our side says it doesn't and has all kinds of experts to back up that claim. But suppose it did work (and it actually does, for a whole bunch of purposes other than intelligence gathering; see the last paragraph of this commentary). Would that make it OK, justifiable, legal? Well, no. And that's my argument. To summarize, the United States is a party to both the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture, both signed and ratified international treaties. The authors of the Geneva Conventions just assumed that everyone "knows" what torture is so they didn't bother to define it any detail. The UN Convention defines it in general terms as "Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession . . ." Bybee/Yoo tried to define their way out of the quagmire, but no one outside of themselves and the US Right would agree that what was done to numbers of prisoners of the US was not torture.
Then comes the truly inconvenient truth that the use of torture by US authorities is actually unconstitutional. Under article VI of the U.S. Constitution, as treaties signed and ratified by the U.S. government, both Conventions are part of "the supreme law of the land and [further] the judges of every state shall be bound by them." Unfortunately, instead of focusing on the Constitution and what it says about the use of torture, our side for the most part has gotten caught up in the "it doesn't work" argument. But that torture is illegal under the Constitution is the primary point. Bush, Cheney, Bybee, Yoo, Mukasey, et al, violated the Constitution. This is the point. The U.S. is either a country that is under the Rule of Law or it isn't. That's what our side should be hammering away on, not whether "torture works" or not. And oh by the way, it does, in a whole bunch of ways other than intelligence gathering from captured combatants. Just consider them.
First and foremost, it is a major instrument of terror against one's own population: it is a really good repressor of dissent. A principal tool of Gestapo control in Nazi Germany was to pick up someone who had been making mildly anti-Hitler remarks, give them a good session or two of torture downtown, and then send them back to the neighborhood. You can bet the neighbors got the message. Second, it is indeed very useful in extracting information from politically active civilian regime opponents who have no military training or training in resisting torture, such as the civilian opponents of the Pinochet Regime and the civilian targets of the Argentine "Dirty War." Third, it is a very good tool for extra-judicial punishment, just as long as the regime using it makes sure that its details leak out, in a totally deniable way of course, to its own citizens. Fourth, it is a very useful tool for civilian repression in military-occupied territories. Just ask the Japanese Kempeitai that operated in Korea and Occupied China. Fifth, it is very helpful when a regime is out to change the culture of its country, and to wipe out historical memory of anything that went before it came to power. Doing so was perhaps the principal long-term goal of the Spanish Francoists, once they had restored corporate-clerical control of the country. Torture was one of their stocks-in-trade to achieve that goal. Sixth, it is really good at extracting false confessions, then to be used in show trials, such as those of the Soviet Union of the late 1930s that killed off so many of the good Communists who were already challenging Stalinism as the way not to try to build socialism.
Seventh, in countries that use it but try to re-define their way out of it convincing no-one but themselves (guess who?), it helps to establish a record of lawlessness, of total disregard for the rule of law, as long as the government says things like, "We are doing what we are doing to keep our people safe and fight terror." This was likely a major objective of BushCheney, et al: to change the culture here. "Torture [except of course we don't call it torture, just 'enhanced interrogation'] is OK, that is as long as we are doing the Deciding as to who gets it." No rule of law, no adherence to international treaties or our Constitution of which they are a part, just as long as they say there's a good reason for it. Finally, to have torture as a useful instrument of national policy, there has to be a cadre of torturers, another reason for the BushCheney torture program. Until they came to power, Americans didn't do such things, officially at least. So there weren't very many, if any, trained torturers amongst our armed and intelligence forces. But now they are, or at least were. And you can bet your sweet pitootie, once you learn how to be a torturer, you don't forget what you learned. So, don't tell me torture isn't useful. It's just not useful for what the torturers tell us it's useful for. And whatever it is, in the US its use is unconstitutional.
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Race is the Trump Card by Steve Jonas |
April 28, 2011
Not so long ago in a land not at all far away part of it was ruled by a tiny oligarchy of very wealthy large landowners.
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Grover Norquist's Wet Dream by Steve Jonas |
April 20, 2011
Comes to a climax. You
know Grover Norquist. He's the Washington insider who figured
prominently in the movie about Jack Abramoff, "Casino Jack."
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The Ongoing Supremacy of White Supremacy by Steve Jonas |
April 4, 2011
The South had six principal war aims in the First Civil War:
1. The preservation of the institution of African and African-American
(the latter the courtesy of the slave owners and slave masters) slavery
and its uninhibited expansion into the Territories of the Great Plains,
the Rocky Mountain region, and the Southwest.
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Legislated Dictatorship: Coming to a State Near You? by Steve Jonas |
March 22, 2011
Modern dictatorships have
been established in a variety of ways. In 1919, in response to a
short-lived communist revolution, the King of Hungary appointed the
first modern civilian absolute ruler, Admiral Nicholas Horthy, who
became the first fascist dictator in history.
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Fascism in the U.S.: Are We there Yet? by Steve Jonas |
February 25, 2011
On February 21, 2011, Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman published on article on The Free Press entitled "Fighting the 5 fascisms in Wisconsin & Ohio." They began the article by saying: "The escalating confrontations in Wisconsin and Ohio are ultimately about preventing the United States from becoming a full-on fascist state. The stakes could not be higher---or more clear."
At about the same time, a friend sent me a note in which he said: "[The] decline [of the United States] will be in the form of a 'downward spiral.' There may be push-backs at intervals, but in the long run our nation will succumb to fascism." So maybe now, maybe later, although if it's later, we still have a fighting chance of preventing its onset. Nevertheless, in considering the argument of Messrs Fitrakis and Wasserman, the question arises: are we there yet? Borrowing from the Propaganda Channel (pardon me, but they [very] occasionally get something right): we report, you decide.
A commonly accepted definition of fascism (and there are many) goes as follows:
"Fascism is a politico-economic system in which there is: total executive branch control of both the legislative and administrative powers of government; no independent judiciary; no Constitution that embodies the Rule of Law standing above the people who run the government; no inherent personal rights or liberties; a single national ideology that first demonizes and then criminalizes all political, religious, and ideological opposition to it; the massive and regular use of hate, fear, racial and religious prejudice, the Big Lie technique, mob psychology and mob actions to achieve political and economic ends; and total corporate determination of economic, fiscal, and regulatory policy."
OK, so let's see. As of now, there is certainly not total executive branch control of both the legislative and administrative powers of government. However, one party, the GOP, has been able to provide the executive branch with very broad powers when it had control of that branch. At the same time, with little real opposition from the present Administration, the GOP has been able to severely limit what President Obama could do (even if he wanted to) when it controlled the Senate, through the use of the filibuster. That reality would be largely reversed were the GOP to regain the presidency in 2012, so the Executive Branch would once again be in the driver’s seat. Further, even under a Democrat, the executive branch has retained and used some very broad powers, in terms of the interference with personal liberty in a variety of arenas, especially spying on private communications. They also have been happy to have potential powers to do much worse than that, under the so-called "Patriot Act," extended.
There is indeed a semi-independent Federal judiciary, although the GOP in the Senate has been able to prevent the Obama administration from filling many vacancies on the Federal bench. However, at both the higher and lower Federal levels, the judiciary is becoming ever-less independent. A District Court judge with a direct financial interest in the operation of the private health insurance industry rules the present (very limited) reform of the US health care system unconstitutional. Two Supreme Court Justices who will be voting on that constitutionality are darlings of the GOP front "Tea Party," and the wife of one of them works directly for such an organization. One of the top GOP/Tea Party goals is to get the measure declared unconstitutional, that is if they cannot repeal it or thoroughly defund its implementation.
The previous GOP administration flouted many provisions of the Constitution, from:
- Article VI, which makes treaties like the Geneva Conventions and the UN Charter (which prohibits "preventive" war, see Article 51) part of the "supreme law of the land," to the
- Fourth Amendment which guarantees the "probable cause" protection from arrest, to the
- Fourteenth, which guarantees equal protection under the law.
Some of the present GOP leadership, inside and outside of the legislative branch, are proposing repeal of the Fourteenth either in whole or in part (that which specifies that persons born in the US are citizens of the US).
On the Right there is also strong interest in repealing the 16th (income tax) and 17th (direct election of Senators) amendments. With an increasing number of state legislatures in GOP hands, that would give the GOP a virtual lock on a veto-proof/filibuster-guaranteed Senate, forever. The more states the GOP gains control of, with redistricting, the more possible it is for such amendments to actually make it through the heretofore rather tedious process.
As for the separation of church and state guaranteed by the First Amednment, it is going fast as, for example the GOP is pushing hard at various levels to criminalize the religious belief that life begins at the time of viability.
Moving right along, the media voices of the GOP certainly engage widely in demonizing its opponents, both individually and by group. "Democrats must be squashed underfoot like cockroaches," says one GOP talk show host. "Liberals must be gotten rid of," says another. There is the wide and active political use of both homophobia and Islamophobia .
There are many threats of personal violence coming from the Right towards liberals and progressives, and even President Obama, which have already led to several tragic murders and attempted murders. The Big Lie technique is widely used on the Right. Tune into any rightist on the media, and you can usually hear one within two-three minutes. I know. I've done it many times. And of course, the strength of the Corporate Power is very well known, in both the economic and political spheres.
On the economic side, the current events in Wisconsin show the Corporate Power's next target, the trade unions, and not just those for public employees. Once they get rid of them or most of them, should they regain full control of the Federal government you can bet that one of their first aims will be to repeal the National Labor Relations Act, which legalizes collective bargaining in private industry.
On the political side, as is well known the power of the Corporate Power was significantly expanded by this century's equivalent of the 19th century’s Dred Scott decision. That one was intended to firmly ensconce the Slave Power across the nation not just in the South. It was one of the principal immediate causes of the Civil War. Citizens United, of course, is intended to firmly ensconce Corporate Power control of the electoral process. From it, the Second Civil War may already be underway.
But - and this is a big but - it is not a unified right-wing system. There is no dictator on the horizon (yet). There is no one-party system on the horizon (yet), although the Democratic Party, largely through the machinations of the now-defunct Democratic Leadership Council has offered less and less resistance to the ever-rightward moving GOP. The Constitution is still in place. But aye, there's the rub. The GOP likes to talk about "American Exceptionalism." This country could conceivably become quite exceptional in the following way: the trappings of the Constitution are maintained and the parliamentary forms are as well.
But through the use of money and the fixing of elections which seems to be coming more and more widespread, the GOP controls more and more of the governments at the Federal, state and local levels and institutes many fascist-like policies. The US could become indeed the first fascist state to operate without a formal dictatorship and with the maintenance of parliamentary forms. The sort of development is exactly what was predicted in the 1996 book, The 15% Solution: A Political History of American Fascism, 2001-2022, a book based on what the GOP and the Christian Right were telling us even back then what they would do if they ever took full power or something close to it.
Will that happen? We report; you decide.
Sources
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey
Wasserman, "Fighting the 5
fascisms in Wisconsin & Ohio," The Free Press.
John Pilger, "Behind the Arab Revolt is a word we dare not speak."
Paul Craig Roberts, "Incipient Fascist State," Reader Supported News.
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Welcome to the "Christian Nation" by Steve Jonas |
February 21, 2011
The "Christian Nation"
folks, led by David Barton and Phyllis Schlafley among others, are once
again in full stride with the GOP takeover of the House of
Representatives plus a number of State Houses and state governorships.
You know the drill.
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It's Time to Whig It by Steve Jonas |
February 18, 2011
Following the initial
Federal Period and then until less than ten years before the first Civil
War there were two major political parties in the United States: the
Democratic Party and the Whig Party.
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Let's Hear it for the Gipper! Oh, really? by Steve Jonas |
February 13, 2011
On February 3, 2011, three days before the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ronald Reagan, one of the AOL News headlines went: "Why We Still Love the Gipper." It led to a lengthy gush by one of the well-known Reagan hagiographers, Lou Cannon (can Peggy Noonan be far behind?). It does seem appropriate, doesn't it, that the headline reference to the man who began the full-blown development of the modern Republican Alternate Reality that has now almost completely taken over the GOP is not to the man himself, but to a fictional character that he played in the movies. It would seem appropriate then at this time to return to a theme that I have dealt with before: who was the real Ron Reagan (the Elder)?
A couple of years before his death another AOL News headline (June 6, 2002) stated: "'Leaders Say Reagan Left His Mark on the World." He sure did. Here are some of the things most of the mainstream media didn't put on their lists at the time of his death and very likely won't be putting on their lists now either. But you can bet you sweet pitootie that you will be hearing the one about how he used to go have a beer with then Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill over and over again.
1. Reagan firmly established racism as the center of the modern Republican electoral strategy, confirming that the Nixon "Southern Strategy" of 1968 would be permanently ensconced there. This initiative was symbolized exquisitely when he began his 1980 Presidential campaign at Philadelphia, MI, the site of the Cheney-Goodman-Schwerner civil rights murders of 1964. Reagan, the master of the "wink and the nod" means of communicating, did not have to say anything more.
2. Reagan firmly established anti-choice as the Republican position of choice in the matter of belief as to when life begins. This was something new for mainstream Republicans who up until then had made much about keeping government out of private matters to the largest extent possible. In fact, Reagan's choice for Vice-President, George H.W. Bush, and his wife, had been long-time members of the Board of Directors of the Texas branch of Planned Parenthood. Of course, that highly principled mainstream Republican, and his wife, quickly resigned their positions to take an openly anti-choice stance during the election.
3. The Reaganites introduced ahistoricity into American politics for good. The right wing has made much hay out of this trend over the years, by frequently referring to the period of "American decline since the 60s," tracing it back to the "outbreak" of feminism and the anti-Vietnam War movement. They of course do not note that until 2009 for all except 12 years since that time, the President has been a Republican. And when it has been a Democrat, it has been one of the right-wing, DLC variety, up to an including the present occupant of the White House (URL: http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/12012).
4. "Reaganomics" created the myth that tax cuts can lead to prosperity and reduced federal deficits. Reaganite tax cuts, which went to the same folks who benefitted so much from the GW Bush tax cuts and will for at least another two years under the Obama extension of them, lead to massive Federal deficits (which of course they will continue to do), to a mini-recession in the mid-80s that the Reaganites managed to ignore, eventually to the Bush I recession that lead to his defeat, and to the Bush II Great Recession which Obama has managed so far only to slow down a bit.
5. Related to "4," Reaganite electoral strategy built upon the success of the anti-tax Proposition 13 in California in 1978. That strategy succeeded in changing the political discussions about what government should be doing with tax revenues, in other words about government programs, to the amounts of the revenues themselves without reference to what the money was paying for. Goldwater himself had realized that when he talked about government programs he wanted to get rid of he always lost. The Reaganites figured out how to do it by making the focus tax cuts not government revenues and their purposes. Now under the guise of the fellow-travelling "Tea Party," "battling the deficit has come front-and-center of the GOP agenda (except of course for those deficits produced by further tax cuts for the rich). The DLC-Democrats still have not come up with an effective means of dealing with that one.
6. Related to "5," Reagan established the modern Republican approach to federal spending: cutting it on everything they possibly can, except that which directly benefits the Corporate Power. They are well on their way to achieving the climax (if I may use that term) of Grover Norquist's Wet Dream (and he really did say this once upon a time, folks): "Shrink the federal government to the size of a bathtub and then drown it in the tub."
7. Reagan established meanness, every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost, as an acceptable attribute. Did people get it? They sure did. Just listen to Savagely Beckoning Levin-itating O'RHannibaugh.
8. With Iran/Contra, Reagan established the precedent that (Republican) Presidents can break Federal law and they will get away with it. The Iran/Contra scheme directly violated a piece of federal legislation called the "Boland Amendment." It prohibited any US-government direct or indirect interference with the democratically elected Sandanista government of Nicaragua. The Congressional hearings were a sham. Reagan clearly committed or at least clearly presided over the commission of an impeachable offense. But when it came time to form the Joint Committee to investigate the mess, the then-obscure junior Senator from Massachusetts who had gotten the ball rolling, John Kerry, along with Kennedy, Leahy and any other progressive Democrats in the House and Senate, were kept off the Committee by agreement of the Democratic leadership. "Couldn't have another impeachment, coming so soon," they said.
And so, Democrats like then-Congressman Democratic-Fixer-for-the-GOP Lee Hamilton (see his role on the 9/11 Commission) made sure that the hearings were relatively benign. Further, by giving Oliver North immunity from any prosecution based on his testimony, they provided him with a nationwide platform on which to make speeches justifying the whole action (that just happened to violate the law).
9. One of Reagan's first acts when he became President was to cancel, to the extent he could, all Federal government contracts for the development of energy sources alternative to fossil fuels. Thus the United States is now about 30 years behind where it could have been if this top extractive industry policy matter were not at the top of Reagan's action list. Did anybody say Cheney's energy task force? Or Obama's "Energy Policy," which just happened not to get even one mention in his 2011 State of the Union Message.
10. As to personal attributes, Reagan showed that a not-very-smart, mildly educated, and generally ignorant man who first became a leading Grade-B movie actor, can become an Acting President if he is a Right-Winger who can command big campaign contributions from corporate special interests, is telegenic, speaks well from cue cards, and has the right agents, managers, and promoters. He also showed that a man with a serious mental illness can be maintained in the Presidency if he is a Republican and has the right agents, managers, and promoters (see the new book by Ron Reagan, Jr.).
11. Oh yes, he did win what will someday be called "The 75 Years War (1918-1993) Against the Soviet Union by Western Capitalism," spending into the ground an arteriosclerotic governmental system that was well on its way to collapse anyway, while creating massive Federal deficits at home to do it. This is of course all now airbrushed into “he ended the Cold War.” He did indeed, by putting into motion the final act of the Ending of the Soviet Union.
12. He significantly accelerated the de-unionization of American labor by firing the Air Traffic Controllers. Following a brief respite after the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1938 and the subsequent need for labor during World War II, the war against American labor on the part of the Corporate Power that had commenced coincident with industrialization in this country following the end of the Civil War, had been renewed in earnest with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, over the veto of President Truman, by the Republican Congress in 1947. Reagan gave it a very strong push onwards to the point now where only 5% of non-governmental American workers are represented by a union. Is it any wonder that the gap between the ultra-rich and the rest of us continues to grow at a remarkable pace and that we now face the prospect of a Permanent Army of the Unemployed which, among other things, guarantees that there will be no resurgence on US trade-unionism for the foreseeable future? Oh yes. It is now obvious that the public employee unions are squarely in the sights of the Corporate Power.
What a record! What a man! Let's hear it for the Gipper!
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Big Government Versus Small Government by Steve Jonas |
January 25, 2011
And so, the "small government" folks are now firmly entrenched in the House of Representatives. As they were in the last Congress, through the filibuster rule they will never be too far from the levers of power in the Senate either. But boy, since the last election they have become more vocal than ever. First and foremost they tell us that the "American people" demand "small government" and told us so in the last election. Well, they hardly ever tell us precisely what it is they mean by "small government" other than "cutting taxes" (especially for the wealthy), "down-sizing" government functions (of the type they don't like), and de-regulation (of many corporate activities for which of course they don't supply specifics). Indeed, not too specific all around.
Further there is this "the American people demand" stuff. Well, about 42% of eligibles voted in the last election and the GOP numbers amounted to somewhere around 22% of the eligibles. But those are numbers no one seems to bring up. Of course with a media that characterized the GOP win in 1994 as "the Gingrich landslide" when 37% of the eligibles voted and the GOP got slightly more than half of them, what do you expect, except that would it be too much to expect that a Democrat or two would do so? Well, I guess so. And so we are subjected to the “the American people demand small government” bombardment, which also includes the claim that "the American people want repeal of the health care reform" when poll after poll shows that they do not.
But let's get back to this "small government" stuff, first raised when Reagan claimed that "government is the problem, not the solution." Of course, Reagan wasn't the only one. I remember cringing in my seat when in his first State of the Union Address, Bill Clinton, Chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council before he became President of the United States, said "the era of big government is over." Of course when the GOP/Tea-Party/Paulite (as in Ron and Rand, not Saint) uses/re-uses and over-uses the phrase, they are referring only to a certain particular set of Federal government functions, not just any or all of them.
These include: taxation (without bothering to tell us taxation for what), regulation of such things as financial markets (which most Tea-Partiers just don't seem to be able to get, so they are just viscerally against it when you-know-who is for it) and the environment (which right-wingers are against until something happens to THEM, like a railroad tank-car spill or a ground pollution event or a BP blow-out disaster that could have been prevented if there had been regulation); of course health insurance reform (which they have been convinced by the Sean Hannitys and Mark Levins of their world means a "government takeover of health care" when the whole operating system remains in private hands just as it is now, except for those chunks which are now in public hands, like the VA health system from which one can be sure a goodly number of Tea Partiers get their health care), and just about anything that might help the "undeserving poor" (especially if they are not white), however that term might be defined. It is absolutely fascinating that the new GOP/Tea Party Senator from Utah, Mike Lee, has actually called for the repeal of national child labor legislation. One wonders just how that would help solve the unemployment problem for so many of the nation's adults, but that's another matter.
So, "government," yuck. Let's just get rid of it and go back to "abiding by the Constitution." Of course these folks seem to forget that the Constitution is a document that sets up a national government and gives it a whole bunch of functions to achieve the purposes set out in the Preamble with a whole bunch of powers spelled out in Articles I and II. But hey, why should they confuse themselves with facts. But then, is the debate really about "big government vs. small government?" Isn't it more about what the proper functions of government are without referring to its size? After all, protestations and the wishful thinking of a few lefties to the contrary notwithstanding, polls show that the majority of Tea Partiers are GOPers. Ron and Rand are GOPers, and the former has voted with his party in Congress on most issues other than the last President's foreign war-making. The GOPers in the Congress and those voters who identify themselves with that party, not with the Tea Party, are certainly GOPers. And they all say that their common interest, at least with this President in office, is "small government." A nice, sort of libertarian thought, no? Well, no.
These folks are not for "small government" across the board. They are only for "small government" when it comes to certain kinds of issues, like the ones reviewed briefly above. But boy, these folks are for Big Government, VERY Big Government, in a bunch of other arenas, all of which just happen to deal with personal belief and personal behavior. Let's see now, what might they be? Well abortion rights, for one. They want to criminalize choice in that matter. But actually that issue goes way beyond abortion, per se. Rather it goes to the matter of one’s religious belief as to when life begins. Forget about abortion, per se. They want to criminalize any belief other than that which holds that life begins at the moment of conception. That sounds like pretty big government to me.
Then there's the matter of gay marriage. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution that they profess to hold so dear (except of course for the part of the 14th that provides citizenship to anyone born in the United States) guarantees equal protection of the law "to any person within [the] jurisdiction" of each State. It happens that each state has a set of civil laws that applies to the institution of marriage. Yet these "small government" folks want to deny access to that civil law to same-sex couples wishing to marry. They would thus deny them that guaranteed "equal protection of the laws," just because the GOP/Tea Party/Christian Rightists' religious beliefs say "no" to gay marriage. Pretty big government there, wouldn't you say? Again, they would place one set of religious beliefs above all others. Oh yes, let us note here, that one of the three (so far) members of the Senate "Tea Party" caucus, Jim DeMint, in both of his Senate campaigns called for banning gay teachers from the classroom. DADT for teachers, Jim?
Then there is the right to die, a pretty personal matter wouldn't you say? Attorney General Ashcroft, you know, the one who put a drape over the bare breasts of the statue of Lady Justice in the lobby of the Department of Justice, went out of his way to try to interfere with the democratically adopted law concerning that matter in Oregon. And then there was the likely 2012 GOP Presidential nominee, JEB Bush, and the Schiavo case. These "small government" folks would deny terminally ill people the right, under very carefully controlled conditions, to obtain medical assistance to end their lives at a time of their own choosing or that of their closest family member.
Then there is the use of recreational mood-altering drugs (RMADs) and drug-carriers. Certain ones, like the two major killers, tobacco products and ethyl alcohol, are "OK." They are subject to taxation and certain civil limitations on place and time of use, and of course criminal prosecution for otherwise criminal acts committed under the influence of alcohol. Other RMADs, like marijuana, cocaine, and heroin, are subject to blanket prohibition of both sale and use, totally limiting personal choice of exactly which RMAD's to use or not, at the risk of criminal prosecution. Sounds like pretty big government once again, no?
These folks are thus very much for big government in a whole bunch of arenas. But they all have to do with personal beliefs, especially religious ones, and behaviors even when they directly harm no one else. They are for "small government" when it comes to dealing with economic issues and VERY BIG NATIONAL PROBLEMS like the crumbling infrastructure, the failing educational system, and the future supply of energy. The favorite right-winger of certain lefties (because he happened to be against the Iraq War), Ron Paul, gets caught up in this contradiction right from the git-go. It happens that this physician is as against abortion rights as anyone else on his side of the aisle in Congress. And his son Rand is a leader of the Association of Physicians and Surgeons, a tiny (3000 members out of 800,000 US physicians) but well-funded and very vocal group, which has opposed just about every liberal-progressive advances in medicine and health care since they originally organized to oppose Medicare right along with Ronald Reagan. And oh yes, they too would criminalize abortion.
This all is, of course, dictated by the Corporate Power that the GOP/Tea Party represents, without happening to let the nation as a whole in on that fact. Our side would be well-advised to indeed begin to do just that.
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Corporate Power versus National Interest Capitalism by Dr. Steven Jonas |
January 20, 2011
Otto von Bismarck was known as the "Iron Chancellor," first of Prussia, then after 1871 and the Prussian victory over the French in the Franco-Prussian War, of the unified German state. Shortly after the bourgeois revolution of 1848 had swept through a number of European countries (and succeeded in a few of them, like France), he said: "The social insecurity of the worker is the real cause of their being a peril to the state” (Sigerist, H.E., On the Sociology of Medicine, New York: MD Publications, 1960, p. 127). In 1881, Kaiser Wilhelm I, in a speech to the German Reichstag (parliament) written for him by Bismarck, said: ". . . the healing of social evils cannot be sought in the repression of social-democratic excesses exclusively but must equally be sought in the positive promotion of the workers' welfare" (Sigerist, p. 129). Building on this view of the social structure and how to best preserve its control by the then German ruling class, in 1883 Bismarck succeed in ushering through the Reichstag the world's first national health insurance plan, built on various existing bits and pieces of “sickness insurance” and adding major new ones.
Imagine that! The first instance of that commie menace, national health insurance, appeared in Germany when it was an imperial monarchy. Just goes to show you. The Kaiser, and Chancellor Bismarck too, must have been secret commies, probably not born in Germany, either of them (and we won't get into whether East Prussia was actually part of Germany: millions of lives were lost over that one over the years). Actually, what we had there was an early appearance of what can be called National Interest Capitalism. In it a wing of the capitalist ruling class figures out that in order to keep social peace and to keep the workers working rather than striking or worse, they do have to do some sharing. Indeed they may have to even borrow certain pieces of various programs that various center and left-wing parties of various hues may have been championing.
In doing so, especially in a nation that has the democratic process, that wing does on occasion gain power. They are not socialists and they are certainly not communists. They are certainly capitalists. But they think that they have a better chance of remaining in power for the long run by seeking "the positive promotion of the workers' welfare" than by seeking "the repression of social-democratic excesses exclusively." This approach to maintaining political and economic control can be called National Interest Capitalism. It is in the interest of the capitalists who support it but also in the interest of the nation in which it occurs because it leads, for some period of time at least, to a broadening of prosperity and advances in health, education, research, science, technology, and the national infra-structure.
Opposed to National Interest Capitalism is the Corporate Power. It sees that the only good is to be found in advancing the interests of the corporations, which under capitalism means growing profits, the singular goal of capital if it doesn't take any other interests than its own into account, by whatever means necessary. It also means less and less sharing of the financial resources and productivity of the nation in the pursuit of profits and a larger percentage ownership of the wealth of the nation and a larger percentage of its national income, for the Corporate Power and its owners and operators. If this means exporting national capital from the home country abroad to earn higher profits, they do it. If this means reducing taxes on the wealthy that could be used to provide certain benefits for the workers and even for themselves, they do it. If this means . . . . well you know the drill.
In the 20th century at various times National Interest Capitalism took control in many of the advanced capitalist countries, not only in Europe and Japan, but to a lesser extent in the United States. It happened to a greater extent in those countries with strong labor movements, like Germany still has, to a lesser extent where the labor movement was relatively weak and then further weakened by the ruling class over time, as has happened here. National Interest Capitalism reached its peak of power in the U.S. of course under the New Deal. But the U.S. Corporate Power never gave up battling against NIC, from fighting every piece of New Deal legislation in the courts at the time, to the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 which began the process by which they have crippled the trade union movement, to the appearance of their first open Presidential candidate in 1964, Barry Goldwater. When the last National Interest Capitalist President, Lyndon Johnson, got himself waist deep in the Big Muddy of Viet Nam, it was essentially over. Nixon and Ford were to some extent National Interest Capitalists, but the next Democratic President, Jimmy Carter, didn't know what he was and he paved the way for Ronald Reagan. Corporate Power was in the driver's seat and has remained there, through both GOP and DLC (Democratic Leadership Council) administrations.
With the advent of full GOP control of the Congress (the Democrats having controlled the Senate in name only during the first two years of the Obama Administration: Mitch McConnell has really run the show as he said he would as far back as December 2008), we will now see the Corporate Power in full flower, even more so than under GW Bush. And they are taking the nation downhill just as fast as their ideology and total self-interest can carry them: ever-increasing debt, ever-decreasing social services, an ever-crumbling infra-structure, an ever-increasing export of capital, ever worsening climate change due to its retrograde but highly profitable energy policies, the creation of a permanent army of the unemployed, and the evermore open use of anti-African-American and anti-immigrant racism, and homophobia, to maintain its power among the dwindling white population.
The current Democratic leadership does little to stop this headlong dash towards major national decline and the Corporate Power is so full of itself and so full of its successes, that it cannot see beyond the end of its nose. It will just keep on going, following its ideology of total self-interest over the cliff without ever looking back. The only possible way out of this mess, at least in the short time, is for the National Interest Capitalists to make a comeback. The first thing they have to do, as I have been saying on these pages for some time now, is to split the Democratic Party. "Primarying" (boy, have Americans never met a noun they would not like to verb or what?) President Barack JPM Chase Goldman Sachs Obama won't do the trick. He would win. And then if he went on to win a second term we would just have more of that neat DLC cover for GOP policies on the important matters.
No, the Democrats have to split over the issue of Corporate Power just as the Whigs did in the 1850s over the issue of the Slave Power. At that time the National Interest Capitalists of the Whig Party decided that they could no longer work with the pro-Slave Power elements of that party and established, you guessed it, the Republican Party. Indeed it became the National Interest Capitalist Party of its time (although after the end of Reconstruction, it quickly became the party of Corporate Power. But that's another story.)
I will be dealing more with this and related issues in upcoming commentaries. In the meantime, I wish everyone a Happy New Year and hope for better days ahead.
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Peace in Our Time: Obama's Munich III by Steve Jonas |
January 2, 2011
We have examined what
really happened at the famous Munich meeting between the British Prime
Minister Neville Chamberlain and the German Chancellor Adolf Hitler that
concluded on September 30, 1938.
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Peace in Our Time: Obama's Munich by Steve Jonas |
December 17, 2010
In the first part of this
series, I presented "what really happened" at the famous meeting in
Munich, Germany between the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain,
and the German Chancellor Adolf Hitler. As revealed in the 1995 book by
Clement Leibovitz and Alvin Finkel, In Our Time: The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion
(New York: Monthly Review Press), based on British government documents
released under the British Official Secrets Act and related materials,
the real story was rather different from the "appeasement" tale that has
been the standard treatment in the Western press since that time.
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Obama & the DLC - Post-Election 2010 by Steve Jonas |
December 10, 2010
On the day after the 2010
national elections, Evan Bayh, retiring Senator from Indiana, laid out
very clearly the current political and policy program of the dominant
power in the Democratic Party, the Democratic Leadership Council.
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Reflections on 9/11 and American Patriotism by Steve Jonas |
November 15, 2010
The 9/11 remembrances and
memorials seem to have come and gone very quickly this year, except to
the extent that the GOP/Tea-Party led campaign for Islamophobia had
gained strength and will continue on, to what ends and endings no one at
this point can say with certainty.
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Rehabilitating the Bush Brand by Steve Jonas |
November 12, 2010
While President, Ronald Reagan did the following:
• Firmly established racism as the center of the modern Republican
electoral strategy, confirming that the Nixon "Southern Strategy" of
1968 would be permanently ensconced there;
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The Rightward Imperative of the GOP by Steve Jonas |
October 28, 2010
For most of its existence since
the end of Reconstruction following the election of 1876 the Republican
Party has been the party of reaction in the United States.
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Matt Taibbi Corrected by Dr. Steven Jonas |
The estimable Matt Taibbi recently published an article entitled "Miran-Duhhhhh!"
In it Taibbi wrote:
The reason I really respect the Ron Paul people is that they’re consistent on all of these things. If they don’t want the government telling you you can’t buy a gun, they also don’t want the federal government telling you not to smoke weed or patronize a prostitute. Paul understands that you can’t make appeals on general principle unless you actually believe in that principle across the board.
Except that Ron Paul, at least, doesn't " actually believe in that principle across the board." When it comes to abortion rights, Paul has said, when asked about his views specifically on the Constitution, that "speaking as a doctor" abortion should be banned, indeed criminalized. This is based on Paul's view that from the moment of conception the fetus is a living person, and thus abortion is murder. However, in so doing Paul would impose his religious belief about when life begins on those of us whose religious belief is that life begins at the time of viability. The real Constitutional question is that of the First Amendment, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," which is exactly what the "Constitutionalist" Paul would do.
As far as "Miranda rights" are concerned there are no such things. There is a required "Miranda Warning," but the rights themselves have nothing to do it. They are there and always were, before the Supreme Court ruling that simply required law enforcement personnel to inform arrestees of that fact. This is a very important point which Taibbi should have made clear. The warning is simply a requirement that all arrestees must be notified that they've got certain Constitutional rights, like that, under the Fifth Amendment, the right to not incriminate themselves, and, under the Sixth Amendment, in criminal cases the right to counsel. Any arrestee who happens to know that fact can simply assert their Constitutional rights if they so choose to do so, warned or not, as educated people have done since the beginning of the Republic. It is the Republican Right that has made up the fiction of "Miranda Rights," and for all of these years the liberals have gone right along with it --- Duhhh!
Steven Jonas, MD,
MPH is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University
(NY) and author/co-author/editor of 30 books. In his book The New
Americanism (1992, available at www.amazon.com), Dr. Jonas presented his
proposal for that “new vision and mission” for the Democratic Party
that so many, for so many years, have been urging it to find. A new
vision and mission were obviously needed with increasing urgency as with
increasing speed and determination the Georgites were driving our
nation towards frank theocratic fascism. In Barack Obama the Democratic
Party seems to have found an effective new voice to lead the nation back
to the re-establishment of Constitutional Democracy in 2009 and beyond.
President Obama represents a clear break with the policies of the
Democratic Leadership Council which, over the past 30 years, had driven
the Democratic Party, and the nation along with it, nearly into the
ground. In 1992, Dr. Jonas found what he considered to be the needed
vision and mission in the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution. He is hopeful that the Obama Administration has adopted
it.
Dr. Jonas is also the author of The 15% Solution: A
Political History of American Fascism, 2001-2022. Under the pseudonym
"Jonathan Westminster" this book was originally published in 1996. It
was republished with a New Introduction in 2004. Under Georgite rule,
major elements of the “fictional non-fiction” scenario of this work of
“future history” have, most unfortunately, become all too real.
Fortunately the book’s scenario departs from the reality that the 2008
election has now delivered. However, the similarities between, for
example, Sarah Palin, who will hardly be disappearing from the national
political scene anytime soon, and the book’s fictional first fascist
President, Jefferson Davis Hague, are all too real. With continuing
Republican efforts to make things as bad as they can for the Obama
Administration, the threat of a fascist future for our nation has hardly
disappeared.
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State of the Union by Barack Obama |
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THE PRESIDENT: Madam Speaker, Vice President Biden, members of Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow Americans:
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President Obama and the DLC by Steve Jonas |
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Many of us on the Left, whether
that’s the Democratic Party Left or the Real Left, are becoming
increasingly disturbed, upset, concerned, what-have-you, with the
behavior of President in office. We are surely concerned with his
Afghanistan policy which is distinguishable from that of Bush-Cheney
only in that he is sending more troops.
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What Cheney is Really About by Steve Jonas |
May 7, 2009
George W. Bush apparently really believes in the "alternate realities" that he presented to our nation and the world over and over again during his Presidency.
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The Persistence of Cynicism by Noam Chomsky |
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Barack Obama is recognised to be
a person of acute intelligence, a legal scholar, careful with his
choice of words. He deserves to be taken seriously -- both what he
says, and what he omits.
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Preparing for Civil Unrest in America by Michel Chossudovsky |
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The financial meltdown has unleashed a latent and emergent social crisis across the United States.
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Afghanistan is not a Military Problem by Michael Carmichael |
To the jubilation of millions of
his followers, Barack Obama announced the withdrawal of all US forces
from Iraq by the end of 2011 when he addressed the Marines of Camp
Lejeune, North Carolina. While Obama’s statement provided a jolt of
clarity about American involvement in Iraq, his policy for a surging
escalation into Afghanistan leaves many haunting questions.
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Elections 2008 by Noam Chomsky |
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The word that immediately rolled
off of every tongue after the presidential election was “historic.” And
rightly so. A Black family in the White House is truly a momentous
event.
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An Open Letter to John Edwards |
January 21, 2008
In the wake of the Iowa caucuses you managed to pinpoint the sentiments
of the American people better than any TV pundit.
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Caroline's Consummate Qualifications by Michael Carmichael |
America is transfixed. The world is transfixed. The Kennedy legend promises to open another chapter.
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Obama's Opening Gambit by Michael Carmichael |
To the dismay of many progressives, Obama named his centrist national security team: Hillary Clinton at State; Jim Jones at the NSC; Susan Rice at the UN; Janet Napolitano at Homeland Security; Robert Gates at the Pentagon and Eric Holder at Justice. Obama’s opening gambit led with the deliberate sacrifice of credibility with the antiwar left. Are Obama’s detractors right? Or, is there an underlying strategy to provoke a startling new diplomatic landscape that is driving Obama’s vision of America’s rolein the 21st century?
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Carolina Blue by Michael Carmichael |
It was a long and arduous journey, but the transition of power is now under way. George W. Bush received Barack Obama at the White House. America is moving toward a new period of change. The change promises to be dramatic.
For the past eight years, America suffered through one of the most turbulent and divisive periods in its history. The rise of neoconservatism violently propelled America and the rest of the world to the brink of global war. Designed by radical ideologues, America’s response to 9/11 backfired. Every move George W. Bush made enhanced the stature of Osama Bin Laden and increased the prestige and strength of Al Qaida. While the international response to Bush’s neoconservative ideology was frigid, the domestic response divided America more deeply than any time since the Civil War.
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McCain fizzles as Obama sizzles by Michael Carmichael |
McCain's big build-up promised a game-changing assault on Obama's credibility.
Led by the shrill Governor Sarah Palin, McCain's campaign shot a cannonade across the bow of the USS Obama to put them on notice of a historic showdown. Palin boasted that John McCain had the ammunition to redefine Barack Hussein Obama as a closet radical and a pliant pawn of convicted terrorists led by that dastardly villain of yesteryear, William Ayers of the notorious Weathermen.
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Biden devastates Palin by Michael Carmichael |
The Republican right touted the debate as a match-up between an old battle-scarred pro versus a highly talented challenger, and while the confrontation of the week did have its interesting moments -- in the ultimate analysis it was not a fair contest.
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Dear Colleague…this vote will be remembered By Dave Kelley |
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This is the letter that members of the House of Representatives should be sending out to their colleagues. They should remind them that friends don't allow friends to drive drunk. That this is a bill giving the drunk drivers of this economy new wheels. Remind them that voters will not forget this betrayal but the American public will. We must finally have a government which fears its citizens and not the other way around - to paraphrase a movie line.
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The McCain meltdown by Michael Carmichael |
The roller-coaster ride that is the US presidential campaign morphed from critical mass at the collapse of major banks to meltdown when Wall Street met Washington in the salon of lame duck President George W. Bush. Yesterday’s crisis meeting swiftly imploded following the verbal equivalent of political suicide by Senator John McCain.
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Memo to McCain: Be afraid, very afraid by Michael Carmichael |
Dear John,
Over the past few days, your campaign has taken a turn. Let’s go back
over some recent history to see what’s happening and what you can still
do about it.
Three months ago riding the crest of the wave of his message of change,
Barack Obama built up a commanding lead. Then you began running a
negative campaign criticizing him for his celebrity. Obama ignored
what you were doing, and your message worked. You intensified your
attack in August, and you drew even with him by the end of that month.
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McCain echoes Obama by Michael Carmichael |
John McCain is not renowned for his public speaking ability, but last night he bloviated more boldly and blustered more blatantly than he has ever done before.
Even with the bloated bloviations of his ill-advised acceptance speech, McCain fell flat on his face. McCain’s delivery was wooden, uninspiring, a pompous litany littered with clichés and empty promises that left the convention with nothing but broken dreams.
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Video - Former POW says McCain is not cut out to be President |
Dr. Phillip Butler knew McCain as a fellow POW, and he lived across the hall from him at Annapolis. Dr. Butler contradicts McCain's own account of his conduct as a POW, and he provides startling new evidence about McCain's reputation for explosive fits of anger and unprovoked volatility while at Annapolis. Dr. Butler states explicitly that McCain is not emotionally qualifed for the presidency. Please, watch the video and encourage others to watch it.
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They just don't get it by David Smith |
Obama's speech was cleverly crafted. By using the refrain "We are a better country than this" Obama succeeded in pointing out what is wrong with America, thanks to Bush, without running down the country and exposing himself to charges of being unpatriotic or unsupportive of America (i.e. a “nattering nabob of negativism,” to borrow the late unlamented Spiro Agnew’s phrase). Instead, Obama took the high ground by extolling American ideals tagging Bush/McCain with the failures to live up to them. That’s intelligent political oratory.
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The ticket that imploded by Michael Carmichael |
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The naked truth about the soft machine of the American body politic is that we are incessantly manipulated by invisible forces orchestrated by a conspiracy of strategists with vastly superior intelligences.
In recent months, weeks and days the American people have been programmed by the MSM to anticipate a Democratic presidential ticket that simply defies logic. Theoretically, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will lock themselves together in a strange and troubling political embrace under the time-honored captions, “Opposites attract,” and “Politics makes strange bedfellows.”
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The firewall: Obama wins NC primary by Michael Carmichael |
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During a week of reverberations over the sayings of Reverend Wright, the political calculus in Clintonland hopefully reckoned that white voters would swiftly abandon the good ship Obama in a flight of fear following a paroxysm of soul-searching racial uncertainty.
The highly paid strategists of the Clinton campaign sharpened their pencils and carefully calculated their arcane political equations. Following a series of deft tactical maneuvers designed to manufacture a withering crisis, the MSM would subject Obama to another week on the defensive against the phantasmagorical sayings of Rev. Wright following his madcap spreeof ill-advised press conferences manufactured to stimulate the undercurrents ofracial intolerance still roiling just beneath the surface tension ofAmerica.
The Clintonian rationale for this round of“strategy” was at once stark and simple.
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The Political Titanic by Michael Carmichael |
Less than one week ago, a scandal hit the presidential campaign of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. The Clinton campaign’s Chief Strategist, Mark Penn, was exposed in a searing conflict of interest between his position in the presidential campaign and his other job: CEO of the massive multinational PR giant, Burson Marsteller.
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Carter Picks Obama by Michael Carmichael |
Last year, I had lunch with Jimmy and Rosalind Carter who were in Oxford for Encaenia, the annual ceremony where the former president received his Honorary Doctorate.
As a Democrat, I am immensely proud of the Carter legacy - EPA, Affirmative Action, Human Rights, Camp David Accords, no US military interventions (the only US administration of the 20th century not to invade or attack a foreign nation); equal rights and many other progressive achievements. Carter’s presidency is certainly the high-point of social progress in America.
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August is the cruelest month for Democrats by Michael Carmichael |
August always marks the launch of tornado season, and today is especially poignant for it is the anniversary of the single most deplorable act in world history: the genocidal bombing of Hirsoshima – an event that incinerated over 100,000 people in one atomic instant. Ominously August is the month when Democratic candidates traditionally meet their doom in a wasteland of presidential dreams.
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Obama forces flip-flops to paralyze McCain by Michael Carmichael |
With a deft series of domestic political moves followed by vigorous international maneuvers, Barack Obama triggered a diplomatic revolution and forced flip-flops on one of his main rivals for the presidency -- incumbent President George W. Bush -- that have paralyzed the campaign of Senator John McCain.
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Michelle Obama: Simply The Best by Michael Carmichael |
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With Tina Turner’s vocals blasting out of the loudspeakers, six thousand North Carolinians filled the atmosphere inside Reynolds Auditorium with sizzling jolts of political electricity. The electric current was transformed into lightning bolts when Michelle Obama stepped onto the platform. She transfixed the audience and delivered a spellbinding speech that kept every eye and ear rapt for the next 68 minutes.
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Is the Clinton Dynasty Crumbling? by Michael Carmichael |
Limbaugh’s motives, however, have been perfectly clear from the start. “I’m asking people to cross over, and if they can stomach it and I know it’s a difficult thing to do, vote for Clinton,” Limbaugh said before the Ohio primary. The goal, he explained, was to ensure Barack Obama was “bloodied up politically” and to extend the Democratic primary “soap opera.”
-The Nation, March 25 2008
The annual convention of the Young Democrats of North Carolina (YDNC) scheduled for this weekend, appears as if it will be a vortex of political intrigue. With appearances by John Edwards, Chelsea Clinton and James Carville - there is a thinly disguised agenda operating at some level to create the impression of a pending endorsement of Senator Clinton by former Senator Edwards. However, the scene behind the arras is much more convoluted.
In actual point of fact, Senator Hillary Clinton’s bold campaign to become the first woman to be nominated for the presidency by a major party has already failed. The arithmetic of the nomination procedure no longer supports her endgame strategy. The Clinton campaign could be charitably described as the “walking wounded,” but the prognosis is actually quite grave. The political wounds Senator Clinton has sustained render her campaign untenable. The bottom line is now crystal clear: Senator Clinton is no longer viable as a presidential candidate.
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Reeling from polls -- Obama strikes back |
Reeling from a series of polls revealing a rapid slide in his popularity, Barack Obama struck back the way he knows best – a stunning speech on the urgent need for a new course in US foreign policy.
Over the past month, major polling organizations have published the results of their surveys of the presidential contest. One month ago, Obama held what appeared to be a commanding lead over John McCain. However, since his victory over Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, Obama made a number of statements that appeared to alter his progressive profile with a decisive shift to the center of the American political spectrum. Obama’s perceived shift to the center occurred immediately after his victory over Clinton in the final primary in Montana when he made several statements that clashed with his perceived image as a progressive ‘change’ candidate.
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Republicans Plan Double-Whammy by Michael Carmichael |
It has been a long Good Friday even though Easter arrives early this year. Today’s full moon coincides with yesterday’s vernal equinox to deliver a very early Passover and Easter.
This holiday weekend, elite political circles will be charged with talk of a Republican “Double Whammy,” the internal nomenclature for a top secret plan to deliver the White House to the hand-picked candidate of the Bush-Cheney junta.
While the media is filled with stories analyzing and dissecting the White House plans for war with Iran in the wake of the sacking of Admiral William Fallon, only a select few politicians and their minions will be privy to a plan that it is arresting in its boldness and predicated on the establishment of an ironclad pretext for the forthcoming US hard-power attack on the regime in Tehran.
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Obama's pivot by Michael Carmichael |
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In the closing minutes of his epic battle with Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama unveiled a brilliant new tactic: he pivoted and ran against John McCain. Obama’s focus on McCain rather than his primary opponent gave him presidential stature that led to the collapse of Clinton’s last vestiges of political support. Led by Rahm Emanuel, a stalwart Clintonian factotum and grandee of the now obsolete DLC, the exodus from Clinton’s campaign recalled the whoosh of gas escaping from a hot air balloon over the Grand Canyon.
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American Politics 
