Check the new WhoseFlorida for updates

Anti-war groups vow to bring Britain to a halt 

by Paul Harris

Anti-war campaigners are planning massive civil disobedience and direct action protests to try to bring Britain to a halt on the day any bombing of Iraq begins. Activists from the Stop the War Coalition, which organised the huge London march yesterday, intend to hold a series of demonstrations and actions within hours of news breaking that the first bombs have been dropped.

They will be joined by other protest groups, including anarchist cells and organisations linked to the annual May Day protest movement and anti-globalisation campaigns. While the overwhelming majority aim to be peaceful there are fears that some protests may turn violent.

Action to be organised across Britain will include strikes, blockade main roads, attempts to enter government buildings and sieges or invasions of military bases. Events where Ministers appear will be targets for sabotage and disruption.

The Observer has learnt of planned protests from major cities to small towns, including London, Bradford, Cambridge, Huddersfield, Hull, Lancaster, Newcastle upon Tyne, Portsmouth, Scarbor-ough and Oswestry, Shropshire.

One anarchist group in Hereford plans to block local roads the morning after any bombing starts to try to make 'business as usual' impossible, said one local member. Other activists plan 'Stop the City' campaigns in Bristol and Brighton.

Protests are being organised through the internet and at meetings. A particular focus of demonstrators is likely to be both British and American military bases, airfields and naval facilities.

'People are coming to realise that politicians are not listening to them any more and that the only way to make public opinion understood is to act. Our political leaders have forgotten what real public opinion feels like, and we are going to give them the shock of their lives,' said a Stop the War spokesman.

Police sources said they had been monitoring the protest groups for months and had developed plans to cope with any protests that accompanied the outbreak of a war. 'This will not come as a surprise to us. We have put everything in place to keep public order,' a police spokesman said.

Any protests will almost certainly come when the security forces would be on a heightened state of alert for potential attacks by Islamic terrorists to coincide with the beginning of any Anglo-American-led war.

Police sources said, however, that they could deploy enough manpower to fight terrorism and cope with the protests simultaneously. 'We are prepared for the terrorist threat and we are prepared for the protests as well,' a spokesman said.

There have already been a series of direction action protests around the country in recent weeks. Last month, in the first such incident in more than 80 years, two Scottish train drivers refused to move a goods train carrying ammunition destined for British forces in the Gulf. More than a dozen colleagues at their depot now support the men's action.

Several peace activists have been arrested after attempts to enter key American-run military bases at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire, RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire, where US bombers are based, and RAF Feltwell in Norfolk, which activists claim is an American tracking base.

Last Friday five protesters were also arrested after locking themselves to the gates of No 10, Downing Street. In Ireland peace protesters are facing criminal charges after breaking into Shannon Airport and damaging US military aircraft stationed there. 
.... Sunday February 16, 2003 The Observer

Top

Get Up, Stand Up 

by Robert Jensen

Last week at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, I talked with dozens of people from around the world. I learned a lot about the struggles for justice in their countries, but the most important lesson I brought home was about my own country.

The question I thought people at the Forum would ask me is, "Why does the U.S. government follow such brutal policies of economic and military domination around the world?" I thought they would want me to explain the United States to them. But they didn't -- because, I came to realize, they already knew the answer to the question.

In one session I listened to a man who works with the MST, the landless movement in Brazil that is widely considered to be the biggest and most important social movement in the world today. He told us that the people he works with often are lucky if they get a fourth-grade education; many are illiterate. "But I don't have to tell them about imperialism," he said. That they understand. They live with it.

The question that people in Porto Alegre did ask me was simple: What are people of conscience in the United States -- what am I -- doing to stop the U.S. government, especially in its mad drive to war in Iraq?

Those of us organizing in the United States are in a strange situation. Our task is to work to educate the people of our own privileged and affluent culture about what the rest of the world already knows: The United States is an empire, and -- as has been the case throughout history -- empires are a threat to peace and life and justice in the world. There is no such thing as a benevolent empire.

It is crucial that we in the United States who have so much unearned privilege that comes with living in the empire face their question: What are we willing to do to stop our government? What are those of us in the heart of the beast doing to tame that beast?

The United States is preparing for a war in Iraq that virtually the entire world opposes. No matter how brutal the regime of Saddam Hussein, the world understands that even more threatening is the empire unleashed and unrestrained.

The cynical among us say that it is clear that Bush and his boys want this war, and that the war will come. That may be true; there's no way to see the future. But I know that no matter what will come, our task is clear:

We are the first citizens of the empire. In the past, empires had subjects. But we are truly citizens, with freedom of expression and rights of political participation that aren't perfect but are real. With those freedoms comes a responsibility, to use them to stop our government from pursuing a war that will kill and destroy innocents while further entrenching U.S. power in the Middle East and U.S. control over the strategically crucial oil resources there.

We have a choice. We can hide from our responsibility. Or we can stand up, speak up, organize, and join the people of the world in movements to challenge the powerful, to resist the empire.

It may seem safer to avoid that choice, to hide from that responsibility. But I learned one other thing in Porto Alegre: The people of the world do not accept the American empire. All over the world there are movements for social justice that are strengthening, gathering support and challenging power. They are the future. History is not on the side of the empire.

To take the side of the empire is to give into our fear, to cast our lot with the past. To resist the empire is to grab onto hope, to cast our lot with the future. It is literally a choice of empire and death, or resistance and life. This is not about liberals v. conservatives or Republicans and Democrats; both parties are on the wrong side of this struggle right now. This is about a far more fundamental choice.

There is much work to be done on many fronts. One thing we can all do is come out on Saturday, Feb. 15, when people in New York City, Austin and around the world will rally to oppose the U.S. drive to war. Information is available at http://www.unitedforpeace.org/ 

If you doubt the importance of this, think back to September 11, 2001. On that day, we got a glimpse of what it will look like if the empire is dismantled from the outside, if the empire continues to ignore the world. But we have a choice. We, the first citizens of the empire, can commit to dismantling the empire from within, peacefully and non-violently, in solidarity with those around the world struggling for justice.

Let me leave you with one image from Porto Alegre, from the floor of the arena in which the closing ceremonies took place. As the conveners of the World Social Forum delivered a final declaration and stood on stage, the sounds of John Lennon's "Imagine" came over the loudspeakers, and the 15,000 people in the arena stood, held hands, moved with the music and sang of a world with no countries, a world living life in peace, a world without possessions and greed.

When the song was over, I turned to an older man sitting next to me. I had told him I was from the United States and we had exchanged nods and smiles throughout the event, but he spoke little English and I spoke even less Portuguese. At that moment, language mattered little. I extended my hand to him. But he rejected it.

Instead, he reached out, grabbed me and enveloped me in a hug as big as that song, as big as Brazil, as big as the world.

"Peace," he said. "Paz," I replied.

We are Americans, but if we choose to resist we are not the American empire. And if we do resist, there is a world we can join, a world that is waiting for us.

Perhaps I am investing too much symbolism in one simple hug. But that moment with that man, that hug in Porto Alegre, was for me the promise of life outside the empire. It was the feel of a future that we can all imagine. It is easy, if we try.

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, a member of the Nowar Collective www.nowarcollective.com  and author of "Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream." He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu . 

.... Z-magazine commentary, www.zmag.org , 2/4/03

Top

Shock troops for Bush By Michelle Goldberg 

Partisans of the extreme right gathered outside of Washington this weekend to cheer on Cheney and Coulter -- and vent their rage at the liberals who rule America.

Feb. 4, 2003 | Before Vice President Dick Cheney gave the opening address at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a three-day gathering of the right-wing faithful outside of Washington, D.C., organizers asked vendor Gene McDonald to put away his "No Muslims = No Terrorists" bumper stickers.

McDonald complied, and for the rest of the conference the jolly white-haired Floridian peddled his popular anti-Islam wares from under a table. As the leading lights of conservatism, including some of the most powerful figures in the Republican Party, gave speeches to a packed house, McDonald did a brisk trade, despite official condemnation by CPAC staff. He offered T-shirts with the words "Islam: Religion of Peace" surrounding a photo of a bomb with the word "Allah" on its timer. A towering linebacker of a man attending the conference with his elderly parents bought a mug saying "Islam" in red Nazi-style block lettering, with the "S" replaced by a black swastika. "They're going to love me at work," he chortled.

It was another year at CPAC, ground zero of the vast right-wing conspiracy, the place where in 1994 Paula Jones was first introduced to the world. This year marks CPAC's 30th anniversary, but not since the Reagan presidency has its agenda meshed so easily with that of the White House, which honored the event by sending both Cheney and Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao to speak. Republican National Committee chairman Marc Racicot, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay of Texas, Senate Whip Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and a bevy of other Republican congressmen were also there, cheered by hordes of college boys in blue blazers, soignée blondes in short skirts, and portly Southerners in T-shirts with slogans like "Fry Mumia" and, above a photo of the burning towers of the World Trade Center, "Clinton's Legacy."

Held at Gateway Marriott in Crystal City, Va. from January 30 to February 1, CPAC drew a crowd of 4,000, 1,700 of them college students. Most of the action took place in a ballroom on the second floor, where speakers lambasted liberals from a stage draped in red, white and blue and backed by 18 American flags and two enormous video screens. It was like a right-wing version of a Workers World rally, with one crucial difference. Workers World is a fringe group with no political power. CPAC is explicitly endorsed by people running the country. Its attendees are Bush's shock troops, the ones who staged the white-collar riot during the Florida vote count and harassed Al Gore in the vice presidential mansion. Bush may not want to embrace them in public, but they are crucial to his political success and he has let them know, in hundreds of ways, that their mission is his.

Heralded by the power chords of Survivor's 1982 hit "Eye of the Tiger," Cheney got things off to a roaring start at about noon on Thursday. "CPAC has consistently championed those ideas that make America great," he said, before essentially repeating President Bush's State of the Union address. In the days that followed, one had to wonder exactly which ideas Cheney was talking about.

Yes, CPAC explored some crucial questions. One panel asked, "Islam, Religion of Peace?" (Short answer: no.) There was a 40-minute talk on tort reform and 35 minutes on "Safeguarding Civil Liberties in a Time of War," which included a speech by veteran lefty civil libertarian Nat Hentoff, who was treated respectfully by an audience that largely fears big government and holds its privacy sacrosanct.

Yet Hentoff aside, one theme overwhelmed all others: a quaking, obsessive hatred of the liberals who are still believed to rule the world. CPACers exemplify what historian Richard Hofstadter called "the paranoid style in American politics" in the 1964 essay of the same name. "Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated -- if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention," Hofstadter wrote. "Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes." And George W. Bush has harnessed their obsession and rage for his own political gain.

The conference was packed with events devoted to denouncing the perfidious left. There were panels titled "Modern Feminism: The Bilking of the Taxpayer," "Real Stories of Real Liberal Bias on Real College Campuses," "NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus and other Professional Victims" and "Myths, Lies & Terror: The Growing Threat Of Radical Environmentalism." Dan Flynn, author of "Why the Left Hates America," was on hand to sign his book. Ann Coulter, there to push her own book, was greeted with a thunderous standing ovation, after which she ripped into the "treason lobby" -- the Democratic Party -- whose platform "consists in breaking every one of the 10 commandments."

To attend CPAC is to crash through the looking glass into a world where passionate worship of the president is part of a brave rebellion against government, where Sweden is a hellish dystopia and Tom Daschle a die-hard Marxist. It's to realize that, despite the conservative hold on the White House, the Congress and the Supreme Court and the utter dejection among Democrats, right-wingers still fancy themselves an embattled minority facing an army of wily, ruthless leftists, who they hate with the righteous fury of the downtrodden.

At the "What Are We Fighting For?" talk, Elaine Donnelly, a veteran of the Reagan and Bush I administrations, cautioned that the "destructive legacy of Bill Clinton" remains in the Pentagon and "could still make a comeback. We have to be vigilant." She made the horrifying consequences of such a resurgence clear. Hillary Clinton, she said, is now a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, where "she will have more power than we may think." For example, she may tell the military, "If you want those Apache helicopters, you have to put women in combat ... think about 'Black Hawk Down,' the soldier being dragged through the streets. Do we want to see that on a gender-neutral basis?"

Of course, for decades the conservative movement has been defining itself in opposition to the specter of an amok liberalism that, among other depredations, leaves American women vulnerable to ravishment by savage black men. The right needs liberal power, no matter how illusory, as a foil.

That may be why there were so many college students in attendance, since university campuses are perhaps the only places left in America where conservatives might legitimately feel marginalized. Many students spoke of being radicalized by the hostility they face as Republicans at liberal schools, much as David Brock did in his book "Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative." Given the p.c. hysteria that has choked the intellectual life of so many institutions, it's likely they really have been mistreated. Still, some of the examples they proffered suggested something rather less than an epidemic of college Stalinism. At the panel on campus liberal bias, for example, Roger Custer of Ithaca College's Young America's Foundation spoke of the oppression he suffered when his group advertised a speech by Pat Buchanan's sister Bay with signs saying, "Feminazis beware: Your Nuremberg has come."

"We received a barrage of criticism," Custer said indignantly. "Leftists said they felt physically threatened."

The issue of environmentalism shows much about CPAC-style politics. For CPACers, standing up to environmentalists isn't merely a matter of opposing regulations seen as onerous. Rather, they've framed it as a creationism-style holy war. Speakers at CPAC were livid even at businesses that adopted green models out of self-interest. Nick Nichols, CEO of the crisis management group Nichols-Dezenhall, railed against British Petroleum's attempts to cast itself as environmentally friendly, calling it a "new and improved Neville Chamberlain." David Riggs, who runs the anti-environmentalist GreenWatch project at the Capitol Research Center, took the stage to the sound of jungle roars and declared that environmentalism "has nothing to do with bunnies and bambies. It's about destroying free enterprise and eliminating private property." Floyd Brown of the Young America's Foundation announced, "A lot of people who used to claim their color was red now claim their color is green."

Of course, CPACers are ebullient about the Bush presidency, and they have no doubt that Bush will do their bidding. Their understanding of Bush is very similar to the conventional wisdom on the left: He's seen as a man whose language and image pander to moderates while his actions serve the far right. Tim Weigel, who was manning the Free Republic booth, described compassionate conservative initiatives like Bush's plan to address AIDS in Africa as, "throwaways, put out there to keep the left quiet while he takes care of Iraq." Behind him hung a picture of Hillary Clinton's head Photoshopped onto the body of a pig.

The lobby behind Bush's social agenda was on full display. Austin Ruse of the Catholic Families and Human Rights Institute told the audience about his success working with Population Research Institute, which opposes family planning in all forms, to pressure the White House to withdraw the United States' $34 million contribution to the United Nations Family Planning Fund. Population Research Institute did this largely by fabricating evidence that the Population Fund supports coerced abortion in China, a charge that the administration's own investigators found to be baseless. Ruse offered advice to the crowd about how the U.S. could fully extricate itself from all its international treaties. His was the moderate position; another man on his panel wanted to pull out of the U.N. altogether.

In the exhibitors' hall, Freedom Village USA, an upstate New York-based Christian drug-treatment center hoping to get federal money under Bush's faith-based initiative showed just what faith-based drug treatment really means. "Other programs teach you relief," said Robert A. Neu, assistant to Freedom Village president Fletcher A. Brothers. "Freedom Village offers a cure. It's a one-step program of getting on your knees and accepting Jesus Christ." Neu claims a 75 to 80 percent success rate, which he says measures the number of Freedom Villagers who have become born-again Christians. In addition to literature about drug abuse, the booth was selling videos titled "Harry Potter, Witchcraft Repackaged: Making Evil Look Innocent."

Bush is revered so intensely among CPACers that all successes seem to issue from him, while failures are the fault of others unworthy of the great man. Jason Crawford, a 23-year-old who works in business development in New York, formed his group Patriots for the Defense of America right after Sept. 11 to promote "moral clarity" in the war on terror. Now, convinced that moral clarity requires attacking North Korea and fomenting revolution in Iran, he's disappointed in the administration. Yet speaking along with Oliver North (who ranted against the "brie-eating, foie gras-sucking French") at the "What Are We Fighting For?" panel, he put the blame not on Bush, but on some amorphous "us" who failed to rise to Bush's challenge. "Today we can see from our actions that we lack moral clarity," he told the crowd. "We are betraying the principles of the Bush doctrine!"

Rev. Lou Sheldon, the founder of the Traditional Values Coalition and sworn enemy of homosexuality, put it best. Asked if Bush was in sync with his agenda, he replied, "George Bush is our agenda!"

But Sheldon, a plump, pink man with pale blue eyes, wasn't out celebrating the Bush presidency. Instead, the man who has pledged "open warfare" against all things gay, stood in the exhibitors hall before a makeshift carnival game called "Tip a Troll," in which players were invited to throw gray beanbags at toy trolls with the heads of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Hillary Clinton and Tom Daschle, or trolls holding signs saying, "The Homosexual Agenda," "Roe V. Wade" and "The Liberal Media."

Sheldon, like the rest of the right, isn't letting success distract from a monomaniacal focus on its foes. Indeed, the overwhelming message at CPAC was that it's time to toughen up.

At a Thursday seminar titled "2002 and Beyond: Are Liberals an Endangered Species?" Paul Rodriguez, managing editor of the conservative magazine Insight, warned that the liberal beast wouldn't be vanquished until conservatives learn to be merciless. "One thing Democrats have long known how to do is play hardball," he intoned, urging Republicans to adopt more "bare-knuckle" tactics. The next day, Frank Gaffney, assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, told a rapt crowd about the "well-financed media campaign against the Bush White House."

The rise of Fox News and talk radio has done little to assuage right-wing resentment toward the supposedly liberal media. "It's amazing conservatives ever win any victories at all with the left's hegemonic domination of the media," Coulter told her listeners. She spent most of her talk mocking antiwar arguments ("Why not go to war just for oil? We need oil") and antiwar protesters. "Scott Ritter, that's a liberal for you," began one bit. "Cleans up, cuts his hair and it turns out that it's to get underage girls." Bada-BOOM.

For speakers like Coulter, who performs her act as a kind of stand-up routine, much of this stuff just seems like cynical hyperbole, but among the rank and file, liberal-phobia is real and deep. Virgil Beato, a 25-year-old graduate student at American University, spoke of the "mean-spiritedness" of the left, much of which he'd learned about from David Horowitz (the former Salon columnist). "David Horowitz knows how the left thinks," Beato proclaimed. "He's trying to send out the message that sometimes we need to play hardball. That's the message we're getting from here."

Throughout the three days of CPAC, Beato, a gangly, smooth-cheeked blond studying public administration, sat rapt in the audience, sprawling on the floor when all the seats were taken and murmuring, "yes, yes" as people like Coulter hurled imprecations against liberal treachery. An evangelical Christian who proudly announced his virginity to me moments after we met, he was polite and earnest and seemed genuinely worried by what the Democrats have in store. "The liberal ideal is a collectivist utopia," he said gravely. "In essence, it's the same as communism. Tom Daschle won't get up there and say he's a communist, but ultimately that's what the left envisions." He invoked, as many at CPAC did, the Scandinavian hellhole of Sweden. "Sure, some people there might be happy," he allowed, "but how do you define happiness?"

Beato really believes that Coulter isn't cruel, only brave and battle-worn. "Ann's passion is a reaction to a lot of what she receives from liberals," he said. "She's had tomatoes thrown at her. She's trying to communicate with a sense of humor about the mean-spiritedness of the left."

It's a telling twist, this idea of Coulter as a victim lashing back at her tormentors. Writing of the paranoid, Hofstadter said: "He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish." It's a will that Coulter has, and that the right has. Over three days, they struggled with various degrees of sincerity to puzzle out why the left, as they imagine it, hates America. A better question, and one they'll never ask, is why the right hates so very many Americans.

About the writer Michelle Goldberg is a staff writer for Salon based in New York. 
.... posted by DaveG, 2/4/03

Top

Bush pushing for privately run national parks

Daytona Beach News-Journal editorial

Two weeks ago the National Parks Conservation Association released its annual list of the 10 most endangered national parks in the country. It's a grim, gray picture for a national treasure.

Everglades National Park again made the list, as it did last year, because of the lack of Park Service input into management plans for the park and the uncertainty surrounding future funding to restore the region's water flows. Yellowstone made the list (bison are being harassed by snowmobiles or killed by Montana officials when they stray off park lands). So did Joshua Tree National Park, where a city may soon sprawl between park boundaries and a nearby natural preserve. So did Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, where pollution is taking a toll on endangered plants and animals. And on down a list of perils damaging the nation's greatest lands.

It's about to get worse. Earlier this month, the Department of the Interior, which manages parks and preserves, announced plans to privatize up to 70 percent of the 16,470 full-time jobs in the National Park Service. Park rangers, archeologists, biologists, including all those specialists of the nature walk -- favorite of park visitors -- will be replaced by private contractors or volunteers. The department says that while 11,807 jobs have been slated for private contract, not all of them will actually go that way. Thin reassurance, considering the principle at stake.

Parks have been struggling for years from a combination of overuse (a sign of their popularity), lack of funding and increasing injury from pollution, mechanized recreation vehicles and exploitation. So the problem isn't the actual number of jobs that will be privatized or eliminated. Whether the number is 11,807 or 5,000, the parks' 385 sites, which include national monuments from Mt. Rushmore to Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, will suffer from yet one more government shrug-off, one more proof that the National Park Service' very existence, as a government responsibility, is eroding. Unless Congress takes a stand, gradual privatization today will only lead to the dissolution of the whole system down the road.

In his "Fresh Start for America," the 208-page policy book Bush circulated during his presidential campaign summing up his agenda, the environment gets no more than half a page. National parks get two lines -- a promise to "support alleviating the substantial repair and improvement backlog facing our national parks, wildlife refuges and other public lands." The promise hasn't been kept. The park service budget is about $2.4 billion, but actual park-based funding -- money that goes directly into maintaining parks the way education money goes directly into the classroom, as opposed to funding administrative overhead -- is $976 million, up only $21 million from 2002, more than half of which will be eaten up by new counter-terrorism measures.

So while the park police is seeing a $13.2 million increase in this year's budget, recreation and preservation programs are seeing a $19.2 million decrease. The historic preservation fund is falling by $7.5 million. And the construction and maintenance program -- the parks' most critical need that got an explicit Bush campaign promise -- is dropping by $44.6 million. That will only worsen a construction and maintenance backlog that had totaled $3.5 billion by 1999.

Privatization is not an improvement. It is a shift in irresponsibility. The government has been neglecting the parks for years. Hundreds of unaccountable private contractors will neglect them from here on, as it is far more difficult to hold that many independent entities accountable than it would be if oversight was in one place. At this rate, it is difficult to imagine that by 2016, when the National Park Service should be celebrating its 100th anniversary, there will be much left to celebrate.
 http://www.n-jcenter.com/NewsJournalOnline/Opinion/Editorials/opOP2013103.htm 

Top

Helen Thomas: "this is the worst president in American history"

By: John Bogert

As veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas signed my program Thursday evening at the Society of Professional Journalists’ annual awards banquet, I said, “First time I ever asked a reporter for an autograph.”

“Thank you, dear,” she said, patting my arm. “Don’t lose heart.”

Those are words that should be engraved at the bottom of every journalism degree. That’s because I’m not sure that any business can cause a heart to be lost or broken faster than this. And Thomas probably knows this better than anyone because she began reporting in 1943.

Thomas, in case you’ve never seen a presidential news conference, is the woman who has haunted every U.S. president since JFK.

I can’t, in fact, recall a news conference where she wasn’t standing hawk-like, grilling men who clearly didn’t want to be grilled by anyone, especially a woman.

Thomas, by the way, is the woman who said, “Thank you, Mr. President,” at the end of her very first press conference in 1961.

That, I think, is a wonderful tradition that continues to this very day. It shows a little respect to make up for the kind of lack of respect we used to hear from shouters such as Sam Donaldson, the man Ronald Reagan could never quite hear.

I attended this Biltmore Hotel banquet for two reasons — Thomas and Jean Adelsman. Jean is the retired managing editor of the Breeze and the recipient Thursday evening of a Journalist of the Year award, along with Judy Muller of ABC News, Kitty Felde of KPCC’s “Talk of the City,” Sue Manning of The Associated Press and USC law professor Erwin Chemerinsky.

Odd how the world breathlessly awaits the Golden Globes while honors presented the people who watch the politicians or work for a cancer cure are as obscure as lice. In fact, there’s a joke about the Golden Globes and the foreign press that presents them. It’s said that on ceremony night you can’t find a waiter anywhere in town. Take this from someone who once sat at another banquet with the foreign press — a group composed of a dry cleaner from Pacoima, a large Eastern European woman in a turban and an Egyptian shoe salesman who spent the evening trying to cadge free drinks. Now that I think of it, they aren’t much different from domestic journalists.

Except when it comes to Thomas, who — to the 100 or so people in that room — is the very essence of celebrity, a woman who dedicated 60 years at United Press International and Hearst to afflicting the elected.

Keep in mind that Thomas came up in the bad old days. Unlike Thursday night, when four of five honorees were women, she spent decades proving herself to the male hierarchy.

As late as 1972 she was the only woman on the Nixon China trip. Still, she survives in a Washington press corps that she says has gone soft, accepting presidential spin without question.

There was a lot of that in her speech, this talk of devaluation in the character of leadership. Not surprisingly for an admitted liberal, she held her greatest praise for John Kennedy, the only president in her estimation who made Americans look to their higher angels.

Then came Johnson’s Great Society and Vietnam. Nixon, she said, was a man who would — when presented two roads — “always choose the wrong one.” He was followed by “healing” Ford, well-meaning Carter, Reagan’s revolution, Bush Sr.’s self-destruction and Clinton’s damaging of the presidential myth.

She seemed to have sympathy and affection for everyone but George W. Bush, a man who she said is rising on a wave of 9-11 fear — fear of looking unpatriotic, fear of asking questions, just fear. “We have,” she said, “lost our way.”

Thomas believes we have chosen to promote democracy with bombs instead of largess while Congress “defaults,” Democrats cower and a president controls all three branches of government in the name of corporations and the religious right.

As she signed my program, I joked, “You sound worried.”

“This is the worst president ever,” she said. “He is the worst president in all of American history.”

The woman who has known eight of them wasn’t joking.

 http://dailybreeze.copleypress.org/content/bog/thomas19.html 

.... AO, 1/31/03

top

The Emperor Has Spoken

Leave aside Bush's paean to compassionate conservatism in the first half of his speech. Forget about Karl Rove's and Karen Hughes's effort to triangulate the Democrats by having Bush denounce corporate crime and announce that he wants a job for every American, "high quality, affordable health care," hydrogen-powered cars, and help for AIDS victims in Africa.

Never mind that he's trying to privatize Medicare and sell his tax giveaways to the rich as a way to strengthen the economy.

And pardon the bad joke that Bush wants "spending discipline" after busting the budget with his $674 billion tax plan and a war with Iraq that could cost between $50 billion and $200 billion.

Instead, focus on the heart of the speech: a highly manipulative drum beat for war.

Bush used all the standard propaganda that he's been rehearsing for six months now.

First, the hyping of the threat.

Bush invoked "Hitlerism, militarism, and communism" to set the audience's temperature

at the fever line (though "militarism" is an odd triplet, since the United States is father of its own).

He then gave lurid testimony about Saddam's brutality, which is undeniable and grotesque, but similar torture techniques are common among such allies as Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, as well as other nations such as Burma, and Bush was silent about them.

Bush did give some indication about the hidden resource that lurks behind much of his Iraq policy: oil. "A brutal dictator, with a history of reckless aggression and with ties to terrorism and with great potential wealth will not be permitted to dominate a vital region and threaten the United States." But that's as close as Bush came to the three-letter word.

He downplayed the threat of North Korea, even though it is without question more real and harrowing than that of Iraq, since Pyongyang may already have nuclear weapons and has the long-range missiles to deliver them potentially to Alaska and Hawaii.

America, he said, must "not allow an even greater threat to rise up in Iraq."

He inexplicably repeated the charge that Saddam "has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production," even though, just the day before, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Association, said those tubes "would not be suitable" for making nuclear weapons.

Bush catalogued the possible chemical and biological weapons Iraq might have, and he called Iraq "a serious and mounting threat to our country," even though U.N. weapons inspectors are busy trying to hunt down those weapons.

He asserted, without evidence, that Saddam has been aiding and protecting Al Qaeda terrorists. ("One by one the terrorists are learning the meaning of American justice," Bush said, elevating frontier justice over our refined system of jurisprudence). And he conjured up September 11 to herd Americans into the war camp. "Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons, and other plans, this time armed by Saddam Hussein."

Bush neglected to mention that Saddam and Osama bin Laden (a name that won't pass Bush's lips) have long despised each other, one being a secular nationalist the other a theocrat. Bin Laden actually offered to raise an army to expel Saddam from Kuwait back in 1990. Plus, Saddam would have a strong incentive not to hand off such weapons to Al Qaeda, for if he were detected (and the U.S. intelligence gatherers are all over Iraq), the United States would destroy him.

Bush also whisked away the incontrovertible fact that the United States deterred Saddam from using chemical and biological weapons against U.S. troops back in 1991. Even the CIA believes he is still deterrable, but Bush responded with this rhetorical flourish: "Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option."

An applause line, for sure, but wait: Washington trusted in the sanity and restraint of Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev. Is Saddam crazier than Stalin and more of a threat?

Remember, the Soviet Union had the wherewithal, as Khrushchev was not shy about reminding us, to destroy the United States. Saddam doesn't pose one-thousandth of that threat.

Nor is the threat imminent, but that, too, is an argument Bush dismissed with heavy rhetoric. "Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent," he said. "Since when have terrorists announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late."

Bush is thus expanding his doctrine of preemption to allow for military action at any time against any country that may become a threat down the road. This overturns the entire system of international law governing war, as well as the U.N. Charter. No country is allowed to wage war against another country unless it is attacked by that country or just about to be attacked. Bush's precedent would allow almost any nation to justify an attack against another, leading to world chaos.

But Bush does not care about international law or the U.N. system or even the profound reservations of our allies. "America's purpose is more than to follow a process," he said. "It is to achieve a result. . . . The course of this nation does not depend on the decisions of others. Whatever action is required, whenever action is necessary, I will defend the freedom and security of the American people."

Note the royal "I."

Bush then resorted, as is his wont, to passive voice, to suggest that he is some reluctant, peace-loving warrior. Twice he said: "If war is forced upon us. . . ." This may be the most obscene use of the passive voice in recorded history. No one is forcing Bush to go to war. He's been forcing the war option from day one!

And the war that Bush promises is frightful to behold. "We will fight with the full force and might of the United States," he vowed, suggesting that nuclear weapons are very much on the table.

Throughout his speech, Bush plucked the chords of religious, nationalistic nonsense. "We are called to defend the safety of our people," he said, and, "This call of history has come to the right country," and, "We must also remember our calling, as a blessed country."

Bush seems to believe that he and the United States are carrying out God's will. "We Americans have faith in ourselves but not in ourselves alone," he said. "We do not claim to know all the ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, and all of history."

So here we have a single man, unconstrained by Congress, contemptuous of the United Nations, backed by the strongest military ever assembled, and emboldened by the notion of divine will, plunging the United States into an unnecessary and extraordinarily hazardous war.

The emperor has spoken. It is now up to us subjects to disobey.

-- Matthew Rothschild, http://www.progressive.org/webex/wx012903.html 

Top

The actual state of the union: The rich get richer 

By Molly Ivins

CREATORS SYNDICATE

The state of the union is that money talks and public policy is sold to the highest bidder. Those who give money in political contributions - less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the U.S. population gave 83 percent of all campaign contributions in the 2002 elections - get back billions in tax breaks, subsidies and the right to exploit public land at ridiculously low prices.

This system in turn costs ordinary Americans billions of dollars, not to mention the costs to health, safety and the environment, and the cost of not having enough money for good schools.

Public Campaign, the group working for public financing of political campaigns, has put together some of the salient information in the form of a poster, available at www.publiccampaign.org - and perhaps the most depressing thing about it is the size of the payoffs for relatively small investments in political campaigns.

For example, the top corporations that paid zero taxes from 1996 to 1998 - including AT&T, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Chase Manhattan, Enron, ExxonMobil, General Electric, Microsoft, Pfizer and Philip Morris - gave $150.1 million to campaigns from 1991 to 2001. Public Campaign reports they got $55 billion in tax breaks from '96 to '98 alone, perennial legislation to gut the alternative minimum tax and billions in rebates to select corporations. Public Campaign also notes that we paid with a huge shift in who pays more into the federal treasuries: Three times as much money now comes from working people's payroll taxes as from corporate tax payments.

The entire system of taxation is regressive. The only way the spinners of damn lies and statistics can get away with claiming that the rich pay more in taxes is because they count only the income tax, which is progressive. (That's why it's called the progressive income tax.) But sales taxes, excise taxes, import tariffs, payroll taxes and the whole burden of state taxes, which are notoriously regressive in states like Texas, give an entirely different picture.

The Consumer Expenditure Survey prepared by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which I found in the Jan. 21 New York Times, shows that the burden from nearly all forms of taxation - income, excise, sales, property and payroll - is spread fairly evenly up and down the scale. The poorest fifth, with an average income of $7,946, has a cumulative tax rate of 18 percent (those are the folks so memorably referred to by The Wall Street Journal as "lucky duckies"). The richest fifth, with an average income of $116,666, now pays 19 percent in cumulative taxes - and that of course goes down under the Bush plan. The percentages for the three middle quintiles are 14, 16 and 17.

There is double taxation throughout the system, yet President Bush is concerned only about the "double taxation" of dividends. The poorest fifth of Americans have an average of $25 in dividend income; the richest fifth has $1,188. Yet $364 billion out of a $674 billion "economic stimulus" plan is for ending taxes on dividends.

The big winners in our cash-and-carry system of government are corporate special interests. Public Campaign finds that for a mere $48.9 million in campaign contributions, from 1989 to the present, the managed health care and health insurance companies got protection from lawsuits by patients who have been denied medical care, and defeat of proposed laws that would make it easier for patients to choose their own doctor and would get their emergency room visits reimbursed. We pay with over 41 million Americans lacking health insurance, billions in wasted premiums spent on advertising, duplicative paperwork and insurance company bureaucracies - and with unnecessary death and suffering when HMOs overrule doctors.

For a lousy $318.7 million in contributions, the resource-extracting industries (oil and gas, mining, electric utilities, chemical manufacturers and timber) got $33 billion in tax breaks in pending energy legislation; a weakened Superfund toxic clean up law; freedom to remove the tops off mountains, and dump the waste in valleys and streams; lax regulation of energy markets; and other regulatory relief, such as not having to close high-pollution smokestacks. Public Campaign points out we pay with dirtier air and water; despoiled national parks, forests and wilderness; high rates of childhood asthma; millions in price-gouging; and heavily polluted toxic waste sites, whose clean-up has been put in jeopardy.

As Kevin Phillips reports in "Wealth and Democracy," the entire top 1 percent, over 1 million families, increased their average net worth by 75 percent during the 1990s. The net worth of the middle quintile, adjusted for inflation, declined 10 percent between 1983 and 1995, and rose briefly in 1998 and 1999, only to slide back after 2000.

"Wage earners in the United States collectively ended the decade with less pension and health coverage, as well as with the Industrial West's least amount of vacation time, shortest maternity leaves and shortest average notice of termination," says Phillips.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the typical American worked 350 more hours per year than the typical European, the equivalent of nine work weeks.

That's the state of the union.
from the Tallahassee Democrat, http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/democrat/news/opinion/5051027.htm 
.... posted by AbigaileR, 1/29/03

top

Kurt Vonnegut vs. the !&#*!@

Kurt Vonnegut vs. the !&#*!@ In November, Kurt Vonnegut turned 80. He published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952 at the age of 29. Since then he has written 13 others, including Slaughterhouse Five, which stands as one of the pre-eminent anti-war novels of the 20th century.
As war against Iraq looms, I asked Vonnegut, a reader and supporter of this magazine, to weigh in. Vonnegut is an American socialist in the tradition of Eugene Victor Debs, a fellow Hoosier whom he likes to quote: “As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

—Joel Bleifuss

You have lived through World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Reagan wars, Desert Storm, the Balkan wars and now this coming war in Iraq. What has changed, and what has remained the same?

One thing which has not changed is that none of us, no matter what continent or island or ice cap, asked to be born in the first place, and that even somebody as old as I am, which is 80, only just got here. There were already all these games going on when I got here. … An apt motto for any polity anywhere, to put on its state seal or currency or whatever, might be this quotation from the late baseball manager Casey Stengel, who was addressing a team of losing professional athletes: “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

My daughter Lily, for an example close to home, who has just turned 20, finds herself—as does George W. Bush, himself a kid—an heir to a shockingly recent history of human slavery, to an AIDS epidemic and to nuclear submarines slumbering on the floors of fjords in Iceland and elsewhere, crews prepared at a moment’s notice to turn industrial quantities of men, women and children into radioactive soot and bone meal by means of rockets and H-bomb warheads. And to the choice between liberalism or conservatism and on and on.

What is radically new in 2003 is that my daughter, along with our president and Saddam Hussein and on and on, has inherited technologies whose byproducts, whether in war or peace, are rapidly destroying the whole planet as a breathable, drinkable system for supporting life of any kind. Human beings, past and present, have trashed the joint.

Based on what you’ve read and seen in the media, what is not being said in the mainstream press about President Bush’s policies and the impending war in Iraq?

That they are nonsense.

My feeling from talking to readers and friends is that many people are beginning to despair. Do you think that we’ve lost reason to hope?

I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka “Christians,” and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or “PPs.”

To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. Read it! PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country, and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And so many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick.

What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!

How have you gotten involved in the anti-war movement? And how would you compare the movement against a war in Iraq with the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era?

When it became obvious what a dumb and cruel and spiritually and financially and militarily ruinous mistake our war in Vietnam was, every artist worth a damn in this country, every serious writer, painter, stand-up comedian, musician, actor and actress, you name it, came out against the thing. We formed what might be described as a laser beam of protest, with everybody aimed in the same direction, focused and intense. This weapon proved to have the power of a banana-cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-feet high.

And so it is with anti-war protests in the present day. Then as now, TV did not like anti-war protesters, nor any other sort of protesters, unless they rioted. Now, as then, on account of TV, the right of citizens to peaceably assemble, and petition their government for a redress of grievances, “ain’t worth a pitcher of warm spit,” as the saying goes.

As a writer and artist, have you noticed any difference between how the cultural leaders of the past and the cultural leaders of today view their responsibility to society?

Responsibility to which society? To Nazi Germany? To the Stalinist Soviet Union? What about responsibility to humanity in general? And leaders in what particular cultural activity? I guess you mean the fine arts. I hope you mean the fine arts. ... Anybody practicing the fine art of composing music, no matter how cynical or greedy or scared, still can’t help serving all humanity. Music makes practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without it. Even military bands, although I am a pacifist, always cheer me up.

But that is the power of ear candy. The creation of such a universal confection for the eye, by means of printed poetry or fiction or history or essays or memoirs and so on, isn’t possible. Literature is by definition opinionated. It is bound to provoke the arguments in many quarters, not excluding the hometown or even the family of the author. Any ink-on-paper author can only hope at best to seem responsible to small groups or like-minded people somewhere. He or she might as well have given an interview to the editor of a small-circulation publication.

Maybe we can talk about the responsibilities to their societies of architects and sculptors and painters another time. And I will say this: TV drama, although not yet classified as fine art, has on occasion performed marvelous services for Americans who want us to be less paranoid, to be fairer and more merciful. M.A.S.H. and Law and Order, to name only two shows, have been stunning masterpieces in that regard.

That said, do you have any ideas for a really scary reality TV show?

“C students from Yale.” It would stand your hair on end.

What targets would you consider fair game for a satirist today?

Assholes.

From In These Times, http://inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=38_0_4_0_C 
....posted by Jack, 1/29/03

top

Preemptive rituals enshrining an organized perversion of war

by Pierre Tristam

Win or lose, war's aftermath is filled with nauseating rituals, as if the stench of the dead must be out-stenched by the triumphalism of the living. Think of the parades, the monuments, the medals of honor, the ostentation of "EX-POW" or "purple heart" license plates, the "Patton"-like movies of carnage-ennobled patriotism. Think of the "unknown soldier" ceremony, that worldwide fetish of wreaths and grief dangled around an empty tomb by the very men who would not hesitate to shovel anonymous soldiers by the battalion into death's maws at the next opportunity.

Reverence for soldiers returning in one or many pieces shouldn't be trivialized, much less reverence for the memory of fallen soldiers. But even the focus on soldiers conveniently denies the overriding fact of modern warfare -- that civilians suffer, sacrifice and die in incalculably greater numbers than soldiers, who are at least equipped for atrocity. There are no tombs for the "unknown civilian" because they're everywhere underfoot, no more remarkable than history's landfill.

War may be necessary those rare times when willful aggression can't be defeated any other way, just as the rituals may be expressions of gratefulness and sorrow as genuine as the sound of a lone bugle playing taps. Less explicitly, the rituals enshrine the organized perversion of war into something honorable, therefore doable again. They burn, not like the eternal flame at the unknown soldier's tomb, but like the pilot light for the next war even as the last one is preached as the war to end them all.

This is true most of all in the United States, a peace-loving country in lore and lies only. Aside from its vibrant domestic market for violence -- Indian genocides, slavery's peculiarities, the Civil War, a penchant for riots and homicide -- the country hasn't known a single decade without war. It intervened militarily 20 times just in the first 20 years of the 20th century in Latin America and the Caribbean alone. Paradoxically, it is a country that knows war only tangentially, because in warfare (as in so little else anymore) it has always maintained a healthy trade surplus: It exports war overwhelmingly more than it imports it.

So most Americans know war as an entertainment on par with the thrills of a Jerry Burkheimer flick or the artificial mush of "Saving Private Ryan." Whether or not GIs are involved in a war somewhere around the globe, cities may be razed, whole populations decimated, American bodies may be dragged down a bedraggled street. But as long as the mall keeps its regular hours and cheap gas is keeping the SUV happy, the off-shore mayhem is all part of the day's mass of information, a hierarchy of trivia to be sorted between the "amazing," the "terrible," the "sad," the "I-gotta-tell Mom about this," and so on until the next cycle of news refills the stimulus tank. None of it is real. Not in the way that a rocket shattering the neighbors' living room and stunning you awake in the middle of the night is real, not in the way that the daily dance with snipers, car bombs and sudden air raids is real, not in the way that a world of orphans more numerous than Barbie dolls in American closets is real.

A big-screen rendition of war on CNN is no more real than those third-degree emotions rustled up for a photo-op ceremony. In a nation that has rarely known the true cost of war beyond the luxuries of protest and the byte-size reckonings with repatriated body bags, that kind of simulated renditions are worse than unreal. They're the formal preparations for war by other means. They keep the warmongering mindset oiled and ready like those strategic bombers that were kept on alert during the Cold War, engines humming and warheads polished for their destinations. Those displays of war's after-burn are what make America so quick on the trigger of war and what allow the imminent war with Iraq to be framed as rational policy.

For all their numbers, the peace marchers have been a featherweight in the balance of war's choreographers. Congress, the White House and the media are spoiling for war in rituals of their own, because a preemptive war requires its preemptive rituals. The tear-stained parades of departing soldiers kissing wife and kids, the soldiers themselves barely past childhood, are in full swing. TV news is drooling war programming like pre-game shows ("Countdown Iraq," one cable network calls it). Newsweeklies pander to the Pentagon's unvarnished propaganda. And of course schools are getting in on the act by making kids write letters to soldiers, so "support our troops."

Writing letters to peace marchers (for lack of worthy Congressmen), to support them at least until all else has failed, seems to be a reflex strangely alien for an avowedly peace-loving, Christian nation. In any case kids are always war's first draftees. Might as well warm them up to the fact in grade school, get them used to the stench and inoculate them against the more dangerous subversions of peace.

They're not lacking for role models. German officers in World War II used to call the stench of the dead "the perfume of battle." To hear President Bush and his junta's officers talking, they can't wait to inhale and douse the rest of us with it.

Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. He can be reached at ptristam@att.net . 
.... from the Daytona Beach News Journal http://www.n-jcenter.com/ColEssays.htm , 1/28/03

Top

When the Tax Man Comes 

by Rita Weinstein

Lying awake, sick to the depths of heart and soul over what the criminal gang in the White House is about to unleash on the world, my mind lurches to the question of what to do on April 15—tax day.  The question has popped up before, and I’ve shoved it aside because it wasn’t time yet.  But now that the W-2s are arriving in the mail, it is now a nagging moral issue that demands I make a decision. “Where your heart is, there shall your treasure be.”

I am someone who believes that government, the orderly addressing of the needs of the populace by common agreement on the allocation of resources, is a good thing.  I’m certainly not capable of paving the streets of my city, maintaining a system of interstate highways, funding a school, keeping clean water flowing, etc., etc. by myself. Good government addresses the common good, and I wholeheartedly support it.

On the other hand, bad government steals from the people, renders their sweat and hours into gold for those whose survival is assured many times over by corporate welfare and by tax cuts for the wealthiest.  It rewrites the rules in favor of those whose color and privilege opens doors automatically. Bad government cuts heating and housing subsidies for the poor, underfunds public schools, rewrites policy to help its corporate masters at the expense of ordinary people, undercuts funds for homeland security at the state and city levels, sucks up the public treasury in order to wage endless wars of domination on the world, etc., etc.

I am someone who has led a law-abiding life.  I don’t steal, I don’t cheat, I obey the traffic laws, I respect all forms of democratically placed authority.  But the thought that, by some awful reverse alchemy, my hard-earned dollars will be turned into terror, trauma, chaos, and death for tens of thousands of men, women, and children who have never lifted a finger against me is completely unacceptable.  My values and morality cannot allow that to happen.  As an American, as a human being, I cannot give the fruits of my labor to support the commission of unspeakable crimes against humanity.

I’ve read about the military’s  “shock and awe” theory of terror--the proposed 48 hours of missile strikes at 4-minute intervals--against a city of millions of ordinary people, the use of nuclear materials in the weapons we’ll use against them, and the willingness to use preemptive nuclear strikes on the ground in Iraq.  I’ve imagined myself and my own precious children and friends in their position--as targets of the U.S. war machine.

On April 15, the government will have its hand out, demanding my check so it can continue to fund this horror.  My only answer will be: no way. No freaking way.

I care about my country. I am devoted to the principles framed in our Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Reflection on the sacrifices of unnumbered and unnamed millions of all walks of life who went before us to secure our principles moves me to tears.

I care about my fellow citizens and the next generation.  I care that we are, indeed, leaving them behind as we feed the war machine. I care that environmental destruction is being hastened by the withdrawal of regulations we once all agreed upon.  I care that roads and bridges and sewer lines are crumbling, because we’ll be in huge trouble when they become unusable.  I care that our veterans are now being betrayed in the areas of promised pensions and healthcare.  I care that our seniors and our working families are being painfully squeezed economically, when not too long ago there was enough to take care of the needs of all. 

There are a lot of things we once agreed our government—OUR government—should be doing with OUR  pooled money for OUR common good.

So here’s what I’ve decided to do on April 15.  I’m going to fill out my tax forms, and I’m going to write a check for the full amount Uncle Sam says I owe. And I’m going to enclose a letter with my payment. In that letter I will tell the IRS that I’m more than happy for my money to be used by my government for the common good. I’m grateful for the opportunity to share the results of my labor with my fellow citizens so life can be better for us all. But they will note that I have made my check out to the U.S. Department of Education, to help buy some books or help fix a leaking roof in an inner city school. And I will tell the IRS they can have my money, but I will not give one penny to help my government commit crimes that have me lying awake, weeping tears of shame and horror for what it is already doing to us and to the world.   I haven't consulted a tax lawyer on this, so I don't know what to expect, but I have consulted my heart, soul, and conscience, and I can do nothing else.

... Rita Weinstein is a Seattle-based freelance writer and playwright. You may contact her at rwineskin@juno.com.  

Top

The system can't be fixed. Our future is a dark age of vicious guards and powerless prisoners, unless ... 

By John Kaminski

Our president is a criminal, if not surely guilty, at least chargeable for the following offenses:

Military desertion, cocaine smuggling, conspiracy to destroy Aerican landmarks, conspiracy to commit mass murder in New York, Washington, Pennsylvania and Afghanistan. And treason, for sure. Willful and deliberate destruction of the U.S. Constitution. Accessory to the theft of billions of dollars in the savings and loan debacle engineered and/or condoned by his father. Corruption for making repeated and continuing governmental decisions to enrich his relatives and friends. 

Obstruction of justice, innumerable counts, for blocking investigations into crimes that cost the lives of thousands of American citizens. Kidnapping and torture, for putting thousands of innocent people in jail without trial and denying them their Constitutional rights, as well as killing some. Illegal persecution of racial and ethnic minorities.

Accessory to obstruction of justice for allowing the U.S. vote system to be commandeered by criminals who can rig the vote without being detected. 

Complicity in the assassination of a political rival.

If we had a real attorney general who represented all Americans rather than only the rights of the wealthy, he would investigate these charges, and convene a legitimate invesitigation into the suspicious atrocities of 9/11/2001. But as he was appointed by the same man who is charged with committing all these crimes, no investigation is likely. In fact, the attorney general himself is probably guilty of many of the same charges as the president, as he is conspicuously involved in so many of the instances of obstruction of justice.

So there is no chance that the sitting government is going to act on these obvious crimes, since the entire government is polluted by conspirators of the same political party who are beholden to the criminals who gave them their jobs. 

This deadlock also applies to virtually all of the judges in America, since most of them have been appointed by the same manipulators and their like-minded predecessors, who must promise to condone this corruption before they are ever appointed to the bench in the first place.

And even the legislative branch is subject to the same polluting influences, since it costs millions to achieve these posts and once elected, collusion in the secret and criminal activities of the power elite is essential to advancing one's career.

As preposterous as it sounds, the entire Congress (excepting a dozen or so idealists) needs to be dismissed and indicted for its corrupt actions. That says something about the direction our future must take if we are to actually be free.

We are supposed to have a two-party system in America, but it has been apparent for some time that the differences between the two parties are wholly cosmetic. An analysis of the recent vote on making war against Iraq is instructive, as only eight senators opposed it, despite the complete absence of hard evidence that Iraq should be invaded at all (something the rest of the world knows well, but that the American people choose not to know). 

The opposition included seven Democrats and one Independent, but the vast majority of Democrats supported the Republican president's position, even though it was clearly a lie. The situation is identical when it comes to the Israelis' continuing theft of the Palestinians' homeland.

Similar outcomes were recorded in the votes for the Patriot Act and Homeland Security bill, two legislative monstrosities which effectively curtailed most of the privileges recorded in our Constitutional Bill of Rights, which had remained essentially unmolested for two centuries.

These votes clearly indicate there is no genuine opposition party in the United States, only a false opposition whose differences with the party in permanent power are pretty much meaningless.

This is evident in the opposition party candidates who speak not of changing the current criminal system but only of modifying procedures in trivial ways that would give no relief to the beleaguered citizenry but only enrich their corrupt friends instead of the other guy's. 

Look hard at the principal candidates for the 2004 opposition presidential nomination: a member of the same college fraternity as the current president, and two partisan advocates of immoral support for a foreign power that is a principal abettor of tyranny in the world. This is no opposition, only another flavor of the same oppression. Thus, there is no reason to expect any kind of change after the next election. To put it more clearly, there is no reason to vote at all.

In short, there is no place for the average American citizen to turn for relief. This terminal disease of political corruption extends downward through the states, counties and muncipalities, where all elective offices are occupied by people able to pay their way into the ruling system, through alliances with corrupt judges and party bosses, with all machinations based on bribery and deception. Perhaps this is what America has always been--that's a long argument--but there is no argument that this is what America is now: a perverted cesspool of political payola.

Members of both parties were involved in the pivotal decisions of the past half-century that allowed the destruction of America's manufacturing base and the widespread practice of financial deception to cheat legitimate investors out of their hard-earned money. The coming impoverishment of the United States is a bipartisan achievement, but only insofar as the policies of both parties have been consistently to take the short-term profit and feed it quickly to elite investors and their political minions rather than to invest it prudently in the continuing well-being of the American economy. 

The flight of industry beyond our borders is chief testament to this policy, and the reason why, when this country goes broke beyond any solution the fast-talkers can fabricate, there will be no fixing the problem, and no ready solution to a chaotic poverty that will sweep the land.

This is the real reason why Ashcroft is talking internment camps, why people are fearful of boxcars with seats in them, and new, barbed-wire enclosures that are supposedly springing up all across the land. The current president is trying to blackmail us into war by insisting the economy needs the boost of a military extravaganza to replenish its treasury with the varied industrial activity that wars always bring. 

Since World War I, this is a tried-and-true method of reinvigorating the economy. But once we realize the principle means trading millions of foreign lives simply to resuscitate our bank accounts, the true cost of this political principle will surely be our souls.

And, judging by America's stances in the world today, this is a price that we--willingly or unconsciously--have already paid. America has lost its soul. Once a beacon of freedom, justice and equality, it is now a blinking neon sign on Skid Row advertising high-interest loans to Third World countries that can never finish repaying them.

We traded our soul when we bribed all those other countries to let us obliterate Afghanistan. There was no real reason to do it, other than to add another layer of deception to the 9/11 caper, to improve political conditions for an oil pipeline, and to put us in better position for when we decide to invade Iran, or Russia, or Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan, or all of the above. 

There was no real reason to kill all those people except to facilitate additional revenues for military support companies owned by Bush's friends. That's how he's improving our economy, by improving HIS economy and letting a few pennies trickle down here and there.

By allowing this criminal president to get away with his antisocial behavior, the American people don't realize that they are only bringing on for themselves what they are now approving for inhabitants of less fortunate countries like Iraq. Sooner or later, the petronazis are going to run out of foreign patsies to bomb, and are going to turn their guns inward. It's inevitable, and to some extent, it has already happened, in terms of the abolition of the most of the civil rights we have been accustomed to all our lives.

By acquiescing in the criminal bullying of the rest of the world by the mega-might of the American military machine, we are sending a clear signal to the tyrants in Washington and Tel Aviv that we will tolerate any atrocity as long as our gas prices stay low and our TV schedules are not interrupted. 

Any day now, you'll begin to notice that the criminal atrocities of the power elite are creeping closer and closer to home. But don't worry. There'll be TV in the camps, I'm told. But only one channel. And guess who'll be on. 

The current system absolutely cannot be fixed. No amount of petitioning, protesting, having meaningful conversations with the few remaining compassionate members of Congress (an endangered species if there ever was one), or writing letters to newspapers that don't care will have any effect. 

They have no effect now, other than to massage the egos of the deluded activists making the effort. No amount of maverick candidacies, third party movements or political-issue crusades is going going to stop this military juggernaut from turning the world into an armed camp (it is already, in case you haven't noticed) where citizens will be herded into "debtors" camps.

Many will be eliminated by vaccination programs, although as the insurance industry collapses, medical care will no longer be available to anyone but the super rich. Already, our schools are assuming the appearance of military indoctrination centers that preach that the poor are evil. 

Drugs and electronic conditioning will make it easier to turn these elite students against their fellow human beings. The world is devolving into a universal system of guards and prisoners, and you get to choose which one you will be on the basis of how steadfastly you adhere to the party line. 

Already, there is nowhere to escape as satellites can access every square inch of the planet, and gun-toting politicians in every single country are ready and willing to turn you in to the thought police because the bounties for such apprehensions are already very lucrative.

This is what will happen if the current system is allowed to remain in place. The alternatives are almost as scary. Whatever happens is going to involve massive dislocation and death, because people in all the industrialized countries are simply not equipped to survive when their support systems break down. 

People who live in underdeveloped countries are actually better equipped to survive, because they live closer to nature and are less likely to lose their livelihoods in the event of worldwide economic collapse, which, by the way, is imminent.

Yet, breaking down the support systems is exactly what must happen if legitimate freedom is ever to be regained. It is the support systems that enslave us and keep us dependent on our corporate keepers. We need to eat food we grow in our backyards, not buy from supermarket chains.

We need to be able to complain to our government face-to-face, not have to write a letter to Washington, or some other capital that doesn't care. We need to be able to teach our children what we think is important, not what some overpaid consultant in a big city deems is necessary to turn our kids into the next generation of corporate slaves.

We have, over the last century, traded our freedom for that illusory curtain of security that we thought would allow us to live our lives in peace and freedom. Little did we know that this curtain was wholly predicated on the ability and willingness to make war. And now we are beginning to learn that our freedom, all this time, was really a kind of slavery.

Now we find ourselves in a situation that is little better politically than landless serfs were in the Middle Ages at the mercy of their whimsical lords. We have our own lords, and they don't mind killing us and anybody else if we interfere with their moneymaking operations.

If we keep the system, we keep our chains, we keep our right, if we're lucky, to have lucrative job as long as we say the right thing, and ignore it when our government decides it must slaughter a large bloc of hapless peasants because they are interfering with access to a valuable natural resource. 

We can't keep the system and remain free. The price of either path will be painful. Assuming you ever get the chance, which will you choose?

In regard to the charges against George W. Bush listed at the top of this article:

Military desertion? See http://www.awolbush.com/  or http://www.wearepower.org/pipermail/natlpower/2002-October/000556.html 

Cocaine smuggling? See http://www.umsl.edu/~skthoma/offline9.htm 

Conspiracy to destroy landmarks and commit mass murder? How about http://emperors-clothes.com/indict/indict-1.htm  to pick the best of many stories like this.

Treason: http://bush-treason.blogspot.com/ 

Accessory to the theft of billions of dollars in the savings and loan debacle: See http://www.thetip.org/art_146_icle.html  and http://www.campaignwatch.org/more1.htm 

Enriching his friends: http://www.bushnews.com/bushmoney.htm  , http://www.bushwatch.net/bushmillions.html   and http://www.nrdc.org/bushrecord/other_more.asp 

Obstruction of justice: http://members.tripod.com/~RedRobin2/index-93.html 

Illegal jailings: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/may2002/pows-m31.shtml  and http://www.newsandevents.utoronto.ca/bin2/thoughts/comment020128.asp 

 Computerized election vote fraud: http://www.talion.com/vote-rigging.html 

Assassinating a political rival: http://www.democraticunderground.com/duforum/DCForumID43/5351.html  and  http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/oct2002/well-o29.shtml 

John Kaminski skylax@comcast.net is a writer who lives in the coast of Florida and is waiting for the water to start rising.  

Top

Bush planned Iraq 'regime change' before becoming President 

By Neil Mackay 

A SECRET blueprint for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure 'regime change' even before he took power in January 2001.

The blueprint, uncovered by the Sunday Herald, for the creation of a 'global Pax Americana' was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice- president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), George W Bush's younger brother Jeb and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, was written in September 2000 by the neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says: 'The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.'

The PNAC document supports a 'blueprint for maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests'.

This 'American grand strategy' must be advanced for 'as far into the future as possible', the report says. It also calls for the US to 'fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars' as a 'core mission'.

The report describes American armed forces abroad as 'the cavalry on the new American frontier'. The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document written by Wolfowitz and Libby that said the US must 'discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role'.

The PNAC report also:

l refers to key allies such as the UK as 'the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership';

l describes peace-keeping missions as 'demanding American political leadership rather than that of the United Nations';

l reveals worries in the administration that Europe could rival the USA;

l says 'even should Saddam pass from the scene' bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently -- despite domestic opposition in the Gulf regimes to the stationing of US troops -- as 'Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has';

l spotlights China for 'regime change' saying 'it is time to increase the presence of American forces in southeast Asia'. This, it says, may lead to 'American and allied power providing the spur to the process of democratisation in China';

l calls for the creation of 'US Space Forces', to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent 'enemies' using the internet against the US;

l hints that, despite threatening war against Iraq for developing weapons of mass destruction, the US may consider developing biological weapons -- which the nation has banned -- in decades to come. It says: 'New methods of attack -- electronic, 'non-lethal', biological -- will be more widely available ... combat likely will take place in new dimensions, in space, cyberspace, and perhaps the world of microbes ... advanced forms of biological warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool';

l and pinpoints North Korea, Libya, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes and says their existence justifies the creation of a 'world-wide command-and-control system'.

Tam Dalyell, the Labour MP, father of the House of Commons and one of the leading rebel voices against war with Iraq, said: 'This is garbage from right-wing think-tanks stuffed with chicken-hawks -- men who have never seen the horror of war but are in love with the idea of war. Men like Cheney, who were draft-dodgers in the Vietnam war.

'This is a blueprint for US world domination -- a new world order of their making. These are the thought processes of fantasist Americans who want to control the world. I am appalled that a British Labour Prime Minister should have got into bed with a crew which has this moral standing.'

.... ....  Top article from Sunday Herald http://www.sundayherald.com/27735 ; Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century (link to the original document referred to in this article)  
see also www.Cooperativeresearch.org for more information 
....referred by Andy, 1/26/03  

Top

  (Top)  (Home) (Rants 2002) (Rants Fall 2002) (Rants Older)