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Learning from history: Deregulation does not work

2008-09-26T08:05:00.000-07:00

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. -- George Santayana quotes (Spanish born American Philosopher, poet and Humanist who made important contributions to aesthetics, speculative philosophy and literary criticism. 1863-1952)

This housing market debacle that has occurred under George W. Bush's watch can be traced back to many of the same causes as the Savings & Loan debacle during Reagan's watch on October 1987: it's about how deregulation sets the market up for failure.

This problem goes back to Carter. And every administration and every Congress since then has been complicit in this mess. The reason they waited until it was too late to put it off is that they are ALL in bed with the financial contributors. This year, Dodd, our Senate Banking Committee chair, got the most from the investment houses, Obama was second. (http://www.opensecrets.org/). But, none of them are blameless. James A. "Jim" Johnson, a close friend of Richard Daley and the Chicago Daley political machine, Franklin Raines, Jamie Gorelick and Penny Pritzker are Obama advisors, and McCain had Rick Davis as his campaign manager.

In 1990, [Jim] Johnson [the head of Obama's VP search committee] went to work for the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and quickly became its $5 million-a-year chairman. His compensation rose to a reported $21 million by his final year, 1998....

When he left his job at Fannie Mae, which long has had a reputation as a cushy landing spot for the political class in Washington, he was serenaded by 16 members of the Benson High band, which had been flown to D.C. at Fannie Mae's expense. He also received a number of perks, including a $600,000 annual consulting fee….

It should be noted that Johnson got out of Fannie Mae while the getting was good. since his leaving, the massive, quasi-public home mortgage organization has been buffeted by negative headlines. Accounting scandals, dating back to Johnson's era, have been followed by recent news that Fannie Mae has lost more than $3 billion in the housing slump. (http://www.minnpost.com/stories/2008/06/03/2078/obama_turns_to_trusted_political_insider_jim_johnson_for_key_campaign_role)

Franklin Raines, CEO of the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) from 1999-2004 [an Obama advisor], is the individual most responsible for the subprime mortgage crisis. It was on Mr. Raines' watch that Fannie Mae went bankrupt.

He was accused of manipulating earnings statements so he could be paid bonuses to which he was not entitled.

Mr. Johnson and Mr. Raines aren't the only figures in the subprime mortgage scandal to be connected to the Obama campaign. Jamie Gorelick, rumored to be an attorney general candidate in an Obama administration, was vice chairman of Fannie Mae from 1997 to 2003. Penny Pritzker, Mr. Obama's national finance chairman, has been described as "the Michael Milken of the subprime mortgage crisis" for her pioneering of the packaging of bad loans with good ones at her now defunct Superior bank in suburban Chicago. (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/09/how_close_are_raines_and_obama.html)

Senator John McCain's campaign manager [Rick Davis] was paid more than $30,000 a month for five years as president of an advocacy group set up by the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to defend them against stricter regulations, current and former officials say.

… several current and former executives of the companies came forward to discuss the role that Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s campaign manager and longtime adviser, played in helping Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac beat back regulatory challenges when he served as president of their advocacy group, the Homeownership Alliance, formed in the summer of 2000. (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/22/us/politics/22mccain.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&ref=politics&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin)

As long as times were good, nobody complained too hard because you "don't fix what ain't broke." (Will Rogers) The markets were great, the bubble hadn't burst yet. But, then the bubble burst.

This is not the first time de-regulated markets have posed a problem. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 was passed to protect homeowners.

Bad Government Policies
Economist Robert Kuttner has criticized the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act as contributing to the subprime meltdown. A taxpayer-funded government bailout related to mortgages during the Savings and Loan crisis may have created a moral hazard and acted as encouragement to lenders to make similar higher risk loans.” (Wiki -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis)

Banking deregulation started in earnest during the Carter admin in 1978. Interest rate ceilings on deposits were phased out in the early 1980s, during Reagan's watch. Next came the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000, HR.5660, also passed by a Republican Congress and signed by Clinton.

Additionally, there is debate among economists regarding the effect of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), with detractors claiming it encourages lending to uncreditworthy consumers and defenders claiming a thirty year history of lending without increased risk. Amendments to the CRA in the mid-1990s, dramatically raised the amount of home loans to otherwise unqualified low-income borrowers and also allowed for the first time the securitization of CRA-regulated loans containing subprime mortgages.

Some have argued that, despite attempts by various U.S. states to prevent the growth of a secondary market in repackaged predatory loans, the Treasury Department's Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, at the insistence of national banks, struck down such attempts as violations of Federal banking laws.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's mortgage policies fueled the trend towards issuing risky loans. Like the second link says, HUD and the Community Reinvestment Act are major culprits. After their accounting scandals in 2003 and 2004, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac committed to increased financing of "affordable housing." They became the largest buyers of subprime and Alt-A mortgages between 2004 and 2007, with total GSE exposure eventually exceeding $1 trillion. They greatly grew the subprime mortgage market, leading to a housing bubble and its subsequent collapse.

Among banks and the regulatory agencies, there was a consensus that data collection, recordkeeping, and reporting requirements imposed a heavy burden on small community institutions. As a result of a 2002 review of the CRA regulations, and revision of an initial Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) proposal following a public commenting period that was largely negative, the FDIC, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Reserve Board (FRB), made substantive changes to the implementation of regulations for the CRA for banks (not thrifts).

Previously, all institutions over $250 million in assets were subject to a three-part CRA test that covered lending (including community development loans), qualified investments, and services (including community development services) to their assessment areas. Institutions less than $250 million were subject only to a lending test.

However, as of September 1, 2005, only those institutions with more than $1 billion in assets were subject to the three-part test. Institutions below $250 million remain subject to only a lending test, and a new CRA test was created for institutions with assets between $250 million and $1 billion. This latter category, referred to as Intermediate Small Banks, is subject to the same lending test to which institutions under $250 million were subject, along with a new combined community development test that covers community development loans, qualified investments, and community development services. The $250 million and $1 billion asset thresholds also were indexed to the consumer price index and could change annually. Thus, all institutions remain subject to the CRA test. These substantive changes were intended to be a compromise between changes advocated by banks and community groups.

However, the changes were not received positively by all community groups. Changes to tests conducted on the Intermediate Small category were viewed by some as decreasing the institutions' obligations to meet lending requirements of low and moderate-income households. Racial inequities in mortgage acceptance rates (as reported by Inner City Press, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, ACORN and other groups) are cited as a primary reason to maintain or even increase the scope of the CRA. (Wiki -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act)

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, passed in 1999, and the Commodities Futures Modernization Act, passed in 2000 "broke down the firewalls between Wall Street and commercial banks and banned regulation of credit default swaps, an insurance-like product bought by financial services companies to cover their risky subprime mortgage investments." (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0908/13683.html

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, also known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act, Pub.L. 106-102, 113 Stat.1338, enacted 1999-11-12, is an Act of the United States Congress which repealed part of the Glass-Steagall Act, opening up competition among banks, securities companies and insurance companies. The Glass-Steagall Act prohibited a bank from offering investment, commercial banking, and insurance services.” (Wiki -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm-Leach-Bliley_Act

American International Group (AIG), rescued by the Federal Reserve on Tuesday [September 16, 2008] is one of the biggest sellers of these swaps." Barney Frank commented to reporters that he had been sitting on a bill (S.190, then S.1100 refiled), tabling it until after the presidential election. Clinton had tried to get legislation through during his administration that modified some of this. Even Bush tried to do the same. McCain even raised the cry.

Relaxation of geographical restrictions on bank expansion proceeded historically, and this resulted in the history of state-level regulation being completely abandoned. Over a period of 20 years, Glass-Steagall was pecked at and undermined and weakened. It was finally killed altogether in 1999 with the Graham-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, signed by Clinton, but passed by a Republican-dominated Congress.

Triggering the financial implosion on Wall Street were the problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which had its legislative roots in the Congressional Black Caucus. The concept for these institutions was a good one -- to break down the barriers of institutionalized racism in the financial and housing market. But the implementation and de-regulation made for a situation is which widespread fraud and abuse and far-too-relaxed lending practices created an unstable situation. These firms were not properly leveraged, and their impending collapse should have been easy to predict. These firms, fostered lax lending practices and covered up their own financial deficiencies. And these two institutions have their tentacles in the 2008 presidential campaign in the forms of Jim Johnson, Franklin Raines, Rick Davis, Jamie Gorelick and Penny Pritzker.

Although I am not a fan of GWB, it is only fair to say that, going back to the beginning of his administration, President Bush warned of the problems at these institutions and the consequences if Congress did not bring them under control. Seventeen times, Bush publicly called for reform of both institutions. But Democrats and Republicans in Congress ignored the warnings and denied there were any problems. What follows is an administration chronology of efforts to achieve reform:

At the beginning of 2005, a bill was introduced by Chuck Hagel to deal with the need for regulating Fannie and Freddie, among other investment banks. John McCain was a cosponsor: (http://uppitywoman08.wordpress.com/2008/09/21/john-mccains-fannie-maefreddie-mac-warnings-may-2006/). And Barney Frank (http://www.house.gov/apps/list/press/financialsvcs_dem/press092308.shtml) and Chuck Dodd had a bill in the last Congress that was filed as S.190 and refiled as S.1100 that they have been sitting on until after the presidential election was over, only the economy wouldn't wait

As with most idealistic theories, Adam Smith and his concept of a free market works very well in a laboratory setting, where all the factors are carefully controlled, much like any utopian philosophy. But in real life, with real people who have real greed and real problems with ethical behavior, it simply does not work. It works no better than its polar extreme socialism, which does not motivate people to work and to strive for excellence. That's why we need regulation of the markets. Because markets deal with real people and real temptation and real greed must be controlled.

The next problem that is happening today is both a symptom of deregulation and a cause of the resulting debacle, and that is lack of transparency. It is a particularly strong trait of this administration. And this administration has set the tone for the entire country, especially the business world. Lack of transparency makes it impossible for real oversight or regulation to occur. People who hide things usually have something to hide. We have found this to be true of this administration, and now we see the same trait is both a cause and a symptom of this deregulated market and its result: the biggest market failure requiring the biggest bailout in history.

The same applies to our other regulatory agencies which have been decimated during the Bush administration. We need environmental, labor and consumer protection regulation both at home and as it applies to our imports and trade agreements.

We know from our own experience as children that rules work. Rules that are reasonable and that are fairly and consistently enforced make society work for everyone. It also applies to markets and to business.

So, how do we fix it? The administration is pressuring Congress to move quickly. But I hope Congress realizes that there is a difference between moving quickly (and knowing what you're doing) and moving irresponsibly and imprudently. Rash behavior will only complicate the existing mess and create an even bigger mess. And U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's "Chicken Little" presentation before the Senate Banking Committee did not inspire confidence.

When you are reacting, you are not in control. We must get control of these markets, and that requires thoughtful, deliberate action that requires controls and oversight tools to be included in the pending legislation, which, in its current form, is a prescription for a larger disaster, but it basically writes a blank check to Secretary Paulson, who helped oversee the making of this mess in the first place, and makes him an unregulated and uncontrolled God of the market economy. Paulson was Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs since the firm’s initial public offering in 1999, and this, plus his $500M fortune earned by the very excesses and abuses that have cause this market to fail, tends to further erode my confidence in his ability to objectively oversee this recovery and select firms to bail out. All this leads me to believe that this legislation in its current for is a prescription for disaster.

There are also some punitive actions that must be included, not the least of which is that the golden parachutes of the executives who got their company in this mess should not be permitted. And, most of all, there must be provisions within this deal that protects the American taxpayers in such a way that the funds they are lending these institutions are recoverable, at least in part. Otherwise, we will be encouraging the same behavior to happen again. If Uncle Sam bails you out every time you screw up, then why should you change your behavior?

One of the most disturbing aspects of this bailout legislation in its first incarnation is that it provides for American taxpayers to bail out foreign firms that had business transactions in the United States. Since we are in a global economy, shouldn't the entire globe -- any nation that was involved with these transactions -- be participating in the pain? After all, it is their firms who did not observe good lending practices when buying these instruments. Why should the American taxpayers be held holding the bag for any of it? There must be some real controls and deliberation on bailing out a foreign-owned institution. What do we do if we can't recover our investment in bad paper? Invade the country where the firms originates? There is much about this bailout that gives me pause.

The American taxpayers will be experiencing significant pain in this deal. They are taking on, with the recent deals already done, over $1.3T in bad debt that may not be recoverable. Remember, all the wonderful plans for healthcare, education and many other factors have been flushed down the toilet once this deal is signed. There will be no money for any of those programs.

And if we are willing to take over the banking industry, we must also take measures to control the rising costs of commodities that has already occurred and will continue to occur with investors moving their money to this market. Just today oil went up $25/barrel. And rising food prices are already increasing starvation in third-world countries. The American taxpayer must have some protection with temporary price controls. Otherwise, other markets will start to fail as rising costs put small businesses out of business. And the next problem will be all the other industries that have been hard hit during this economic downturn. Who do we bail out next? The auto industry?

The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 or CFMA (H.R. 5660 and S.3283) repealed the Shad-Johnson jurisdictional accord, which had banned single stock futures in 1982. The legislation also provided certainty that products offered by banking institutions would not be regulated as futures contracts. This act was incorporated by reference into HR.4577 (see below). The legislation thus became law as a part of HR.4577 - Public Law 106–554, §1(a)(5) signed by Bill Clinton December 21, 2000….

The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 has received criticism for the so-called "Enron Loophole," 7 U.S.C. §2(h)(3) and (g), which exempts most over-the-counter energy trades and trading on electronic energy commodity markets. The "loophole" was drafted by Enron Lobbyists working with Senator Phil Gramm [one of McCain’s financial advisors] seeking a deregulated atmosphere for their new experiment, "Enron On-line."

Several Democratic Legislators introduced legislation to close the loophole from 2000-2006, but were unsuccessful.

In September 2007, Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) introduced Senate Bill S.2058 to specifically close the "Enron Loophole." This bill was later attached to H.R.6124, the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008, aka "The 2008 Farm Bill". President Bush vetoed the bill, but was overridden by both the House and Senate, and on June 18th, 2008, the bill was enacted into law. One specific reason behind its introduction was to address the record high oil prices of the 2000s energy crisis. Since it was enacted, average gas prices of regular unleaded gasoline in the U.S. have dropped $0.357, from their record high of $4.114 on 7/17/2008 to an average of $3.757 as of 09/21/2008.

The prohibition on single-stock futures and narrow-based indices that had been in effect until the passage of this act was known as the Shad-Johnson Accord because it was first announced in 1982, as part of a jurisdictional pact between John S.R. Shad, then chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Phil Johnson, then chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The act specifically banned regulation of credit default swaps. These unregulated instruments, insurance policies against default on risky investments like mortgage backed securities, necessitated the government bailout of insurer AIG. (Wiki -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_Futures_Modernization_Act_of_2000)

Next, if we protect the investors in these institutions, we must also take measures to protect the American taxpayers and the good homeowners who are struggling to pay their mortgages. I suggest that all homeowners be allowed to adjust their loans to current market value and refinance with fixed rate loans based on that value since the market has devalued their property so greatly. This strategy worked well during the Great Depression recovery. In fact, most banks following this practice made money. Keep these good homeowners who are paying their mortgages in their homes.

This crisis could have been averted by practicing reasonable regulation and oversight. The market, big business and our government failed us on every level.

Ours is a system of corporate socialism, where companies capitalize their profits and socialize their losses...in effect, they tax you for their accidents, bungling, boondoggles, and mismanagement, just like a government. We should be able to dis-elect them. -- Ralph Nader

But we must also include our own culpability in this problem. Many people became speculators during the housing bubble. They were speculating on the fact that the market would be good and the value of the investment homes would increase so they could sell them at a profit. And then there were the folks living well above their means who entered into interest-only payments with a big balloon at the end of three- or five-year period, etc., living at the edge of their income and banking on their ability to sell their home for the balloon price or better, then doing it all over again with a new house. The market failed, the value of the house dropped, and they had no savings to cover the balloon, so they lost their home and ruined their credit.

And one final note: The administration's view is that they are bailing out the "market," not just a few key firms. But the greatest beneficiaries ARE the few key firms. Granted, anyone who has investments, whether it be stock, money market accounts, 401Ks or other retirement or savings vehicles, and anyone who needs credit (especially businesses) will be impacted by this failure. But there must be some real controls and an objective bipartisan oversight -- a deliberative body who decides on what actions should be taken and with which firm.

So, here we are again. Will we learn from history this time? Will Congress have the balls to face this crisis without giving into the "Chicken Little" panic-atmosphere that the administration has created to push this bill through without the necessary controls and oversight? We shall see. But, whatever, the outcome, we know the American taxpayers will get stuck with the bill. And, although life is not fair, this is particularly unfair, because it has to do with unbridled greed and mismanagement of private industry due to our elected officials rolling over and playing dead when deregulating the markets and then failing to perform their oversight duties.

There is a record of legislation going back to the Clinton administration that addressed this problem, but could not get passed.

The largest contributors in all the campaigns came from these same failed firms. If that does not wake us up to the need to get money and corporations out of our political campaigns, I don't know what will. It's our fault, too, because we did not demand better from our government.

And then there were the honest folks who dealt with predatory lenders -- fraudulent real estate brokers, mortgage brokers, etc., that were encouraged to enter into mortgages with variable interest rates or graduated interest rates and hidden costs that caused them to be unable to pay their mortgage. These real estate brokers and mortgage brokers that falsely represented to their clients their ability to afford these homes, and fraudulently submitted false information about the client's income or down payment or the value of the home in an effort to put the deal through. Then they turned around and sold this bad paper to other investment firms. And the homeowners are left with an unmanagement mortgage payment that they can ill afford or a home beyond their means when they were told they could afford it. These conspirators must be brought to justice.

Capitalism will always survive in the United States as long as the government is willing to use socialism to bail it out. -- Ralph Nader

Bibliography
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass-Steagall_Act
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm-Leach-Bliley_Act
http://www.house.gov/apps/list/press/financialsvcs_dem/press092308.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_Futures_Modernization_Act_of_2000
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0908/13683.html
http://www.newsmax.com/kessler/gse_financial_timeline/2008/09/22/133234.html
http://uppitywoman08.wordpress.com/2008/09/21/john-mccains-fannie-maefreddie-mac-warnings-may-2006/
http://www.ofheo.gov/about.aspx?Nav=73
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/09/24/politics/washingtonpost/main4473574.shtml
http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/fannie-mae-ex-ceo-ousted-from-obamas.html
http://news.aol.com/political-machine/2008/09/20/ex-fannie-ceo-raines-not-obama-advisor/
http://www.nysun.com/blogs/latest-politics/2008/09/fannie-mae-slips-from-obama-litany.html
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2003023671_fannie28.html?syndication=rss
http://phoenix.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories/2008/09/15/daily81.html
http://www.cftc.gov/files/ogc/ogchr5660.pdf
http://www.allbusiness.com/finance-insurance/credit-intermediation-related-activities/577783-1.html?yahss=114-2974554-577783&siap=1
http://www.fdic.gov/bank/analytical/banking/2004nov/article1/
http://www.ecs-limited.com/download/Challenges%20facing%20Banking%20Industry%20in%20India.pdf
http://fic.wharton.upenn.edu/fic/papers/02/0239.pdf

This is how it starts…..

2008-08-10T16:09:00.000-07:00

Anyone who knows the history of Hitler and how he built the Third Reich or of the U.S.S.R. and how Russia built the Soviet Union, piece by piece, knows where Russia’s attack on Georgia is going.

But this time, It will be different. Putin has learned from the former U.S.S.R.’s mistakes. He also does not trust China, because China, although Communist, is a threat to Russia both territorially, economically and militarily.

So, what is a poor leader of Russia to do when trying to reconstitute the Soviet empire? He looks south to Iran and the “oil belt.”

China is becoming even more addicted to oil than we are. China will need oil well into the future and is not likely to jump on the bandwagon of green energy at the cost of retooling its factories that are so productive now. The U.S. needs oil and is at the mercy of the oil-producing nations until it gets its green energy industries up and running and its renewable and alternative fuels in distribution.

And there’s that pipeline that so conveniently runs through Georgia. And Iran, who is a “friend” in need of Russia’s. Iran depends on Russia keeping the U.N. off its back with its veto power in the U.N. Security Council. Iran depends on Russian weapons to wage its wars and fund its terrorists and their activities. Iran is a pseudo-puppet of Russia already and won’t be able to buck Russia when the time comes for it to need to do so.

We must learn from Hitler’s takeover (http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/ww2time.htm) of Austria, the Rhineland, Czechoslavakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, France, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Greece, Ukraine and parts of Russia, not to mention most of Africa and the Middle East. A side note, the definition of fascism as defined by the AntiFascist League (http://antifascist.socialistforum.net/):

How did the word “fascism” originate?
Word “fascism” was first coined Italian fascist sictator Benito Mussolini. In Italian language, word fascio means bundle of iron rods. Mussolini and his party used to kill communists and socialists by torturing them with iron rods. So, they named their party as fascist party. Benito Mussolini upheld corporatism (a system of capitalist government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership). Racial hatred against Asians and Africans also includes in Mussolini style fascism.

Hitler’s rise to power gave the U.S.S.R. an opportunity to expand after the war (although some expansion had occurred earlier on). The Nazis and Soviets divided up Poland:

“…the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, which made possible the occupation of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and the invasion of Poland in 1939. In late November 1939, unable to force Finland into agreement to move its border 25 kilometres back from Leningrad by diplomatic means, Stalin ordered the invasion of Finland….”

“…the Battle of Stalingrad, lasting from late 1942 to early 1943, became a major turning point of the war, after which Soviet forces drove through Eastern Europe to Berlin before Germany surrendered in 1945 (see Great Patriotic War).”

“The Soviet Union aided post-war reconstruction in the countries of Eastern Europe while turning them into Soviet satellite states, founded the Warsaw Pact in 1955, later, the Comecon,…”

“Soviet military force was used to suppress nationalistic uprisings in Hungary and Poland in 1956.” (Wiki)

And that is how you build an empire — piece by piece, territory by territory, country by country, until you reach the point of diminishing returns and can no longer support your occupation expenses.

Putin is former KGB. He is not a part of the new Russia, and never has been. His goal is to restore the Soviet empire to its former glory, but he intends to do it in a much smarter way — by controlling the oil and pipeline from Russia down to Iran. And how will we stop him?

Iran will cooperate in the near term because they hate the U.S. and want to see us brought down. In combination with Russia’s military backing, they can do so without significant fear of any serious reprisal. Russia will use Iran to help bring us down until such time as the mission shifts to “imperialist” mode and Iran will get gobbled up by Russia and the New Soviet Union.

And America and its allies will not be able to do very much about it, since we have oil-based economies. Unless we get smart and start a Manhattan-Project-level effort to convert to green, renewable resources now.

It really is a matter of our own national security.

“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” — George Wilhelm Hegel

Silenced

2008-08-07T16:36:00.000-07:00

United States of Communism
Our freedoms are slowly being taken from us. Don’t believe it? Just take a look at what is happening within a major political party of this country.

In April of 2008, I joined a blog called Democrat Party Builder (http://www.democrats.org/page/community/members). In the heat of the primary, passion was running high for most bloggers, no matter who their candidate of choice was. Mine was Obama. It took some time, but I eventually made friends with many, if not most of the most passionate of these bloggers, even those who supported Clinton.

Around the time of the last primary, a member of the Party Builder (hereafter known as PB), invited several Obama supporters from Barack Obama’s campaign blog site, to join the PB blog in an effect to drown out the unhappiness of Clinton supporters. Instead of working with the “dissenters”, or those who refused to fall in line with the Democratic nominee, these bloggers repeatedly insulted and goaded them. Even going as far as throwing around homophobic slurs and harassing specific bloggers.

As a supporter of Senator Obama, I was disgusted by the behavior of those other “supporters”, who I believe are an embarrassment to him, and I am ashamed to ever be lumped into their “group”.

Complaints were ignored.

Until August came along a new moderator came onto the blog.

Then something strange happened. Suddenly, Clinton supporters were silenced. My latest count is eight, but since I don’t have a way to contact many of those people outside of the PB site, I can’t confirm more. I was furious. People I had made friends with, good and decent Democrats and AMERICANS were banned from participating in the blog. All their past blog entries and comments were deleted. None of them received any warning or notification so that they could make copies of their work. It was just destroyed in the span of a few minutes.

I knew who was responsible for Clinton supporters being silenced. She came to the blog with the purpose of silencing dissenters. When she couldn’t do it herself, she bragged that she had connections within the DNC and would get the public blog straightened out. So in my anger, I stuck out at this person. I told her to “shove it”.

How dare I use such foul language! Within minutes, my account at the site was condemned. Hours of work that I had put in towards getting Barack Obama elected, were deleted. My account was banned. I was silenced.

Unless it has happened to you, you can’t know how it feels. This is a political party that prides itself on inclusiveness, acceptance, and tolerance. Well, as I have seen, there is only tolerance if you have only positive things to say about the Party nominee and his supporters.

I was devastated to have been silenced. So I rejoined with a new name to post about my unhappiness and let my blog companions know how they could reach me. It was tolerated- until I posted a poll that showed Obama sliding in the polls. Within moments, the new account was banned.

It is ironic that just this week, the Executive Director of the DNC would send out an email inviting one of the banned members to join the PB. In the email, it states, that the site can be used to “empower Democrats”, and that you should “Speak Out”. Yet, when you do, if the moderator doesn’t like what you have to say, your account gets removed.

What a disappointment. I joined the Democratic Party officially just this spring. Previously, I had never voted for a Democrat for president. I had never donated money to a presidential campaign. I had never made phone calls and canvassed for a political campaign. Those things all changed for me, because I believed in Barack Obama. I became a Democrat because, like many other Republicans, I felt that Party left ME.

It’s funny… I watched the news on Monday afternoon, the day my blog was deleted, and I saw Chinese protesters being carried away by police in Beijing, and I felt like that was me. Not carried away in handcuffs, but silenced just the same. I feel betrayed.

In the past few days, I’ve gone through a myriad of emotions. Anger, grief, disappointment, disgust… but more than anything else, sadness. In this great nation of ours, it’s a travesty that anyone’s voice would be silenced for disagreement. The saddest part about it, is those that are responsible for it, think that there is nothing wrong with what happened. Well, I don’t live in the United States of Communism, where you’re not allowed to voice your opinion, and it’s not all right with me for this to be happening here.

Sadly, these actions are a reflection on the campaign of Senator Barack Obama, and I find that if Democrats are not allowed to voice their opposition on a Democrat Party website, I just can’t support the Democratic Party or any of it’s nominees. I just didn’t think silencing the opposition was part of the Democratic playbook, and that’s something I don’t believe in.

I had so much hope coming into this election in November. Now that hope has disappeared. I’m more afraid then ever of what this country is coming to.

Lady_Anne76@hotmail.com
Reprinted with the author’s permission. See her blog site: http://silenced.weebly.com/

My suggestion to the DNC platform for civil liberties, et al.

2008-08-06T13:31:00.000-07:00

A declaration of human rights and restoration of the Constitutional powers, accountability and checks and balances of the co-equal branches of the U.S. government.

We the people of the United States of America hold our citizens, resident aliens, foreign nationals and government, its elected and appointed officials, employees, contractors, agents and/or representatives accountable for obeying the rule of law as outlined in the Constitution of the United States, Federal acts, provisions of any treaties to which the United States is a signatory and for which the U.S. Senate has approved said treaty, and the provisions of the1998 Rome Protocol establishing an International Criminal Court (ICC), upon ratification of said treaty. In the event that any treaty conflicts with the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights or its amendments, the U.S. Constitution will supersede such said treaty.

The United States will not sacrifice its sovereignty as a nation to any treaty or International government or body of law, nor will it obligate its citizens to taxation by any supra-sovereign entity by treaty or International government or body of law. Neither may the POTUS or any member of the U.S. government negotiate any terms of agreement or enter into any such a commitment through any treaty or other instrument with any International government or supra-sovereign entity.

Equal opportunity and equal protection under the law are guaranteed to all human beings within the United States or its territories or under the detention or control of the government of the United States, and no exception will be given to these constitutional rights and protections regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, national origin or religion. Likewise, no government body or private entity shall be allowed to discriminate by denying equal opportunity or protection or inequity in compensation, benefit, termination or opportunity for advancement of employment based on an individual's ace, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, national origin or religion.

No human being in the United States or its territories or held in detention or under the control of the U.S. government will be exempted from or considered to be above the law, nor will any aforesaid human being be deprived of his or her Constitutional rights and protections as outlined in the Constitution, Bill of Rights, or other ratified Constitutional amendments.

Any provision of any Federal act which is found to contradict or violate the Constitution of the United States, the Bill of Rights or the other Constitutional amendments will be immediately null and void, and any other provision within said act that is not in said violation will be in full force and effect notwithstanding. Any president signing such a bill into law will be considered in violation of his or her constitutional duties, charged with high crimes and misdemeanors, an impeachable offense, which, once brought by the U.S. House of Representatives and tried and found guilty by the U.S. Senate, will result in immediate removal from office and imprisonment for life without the possibility of parole.

Executive Orders (EOs) do not have the full force and effect of law, nor do they supersede or replace, temporarily or permanently, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights or its other amendments or Federal Law. EOs are to be used strictly for administrative functions of the Executive Branch, and the force of their authority do not constitute, supplant or supersede existing Federal or state law. Executive Orders used for any other purpose will be considered illegal and unconstitutional and deemed immediately and permanently null and void.

Presidential Signing Statements are to be used strictly and exclusively for the purpose of setting forth the reasons why the POTUS vetoed a bill, as provided in the Constitution of the United States, and for no other purpose. Presidential Signing Statements do not have the full force and effect of law, nor do they exempt the POTUS or any other human being from accountability to the law.

Executive Privilege is not a constitutionally recognized, granted or issued privilege to the president or any appointed cabinet officer, employee or contractor of the Executive Branch. Neither the POTUS or any member of the Executive Branch or any individual working for or on behalf of the Executive Branch may use "executive privilege" to evade responsibility for accountability to Congress in its oversight duties, whether it be by subpoena for testimony or submission of requested documents. Any subpoena for testimony or documents by Congress must be complied with fully and without exception in the manner and at the time specified by Congress. Any failure to attend Congressional hearings at the appointed time specified in said subpoena or failure to provide all documents requested fully and without exception shall be considered "Contempt of Congress."

The POTUS may not pardon or commute the sentence of any member of the Executive Branch who is under investigation by Congress or under prosecution by Federal court for misbehavior in his or her official capacity as an appointed officer, employee or contractor of the Executive Branch inuring the tenure of the POTUS.

No government contractor or its officers, managers, employees, agents, representatives or subcontractors may be given exemption from prosecution of crimes committed in the United States, its territories, war theatres, foreign military bases, embassies or other property owned by the U.S. government in the fulfillment of a Federal contract for goods or services, whether current or expired. No government contractor or its officers, managers, employees, agents, representatives or subcontractors may be exempted from liability from civil litigation for damages to any property or person of any human being in the United States, its territories, war theatres, foreign military bases, embassies or other foreign property owned by the U.S. government in the fulfillment of a Federal contract for goods or services, whether current or expired. No government elected or appointed official who is authorized to sign contracts, waivers, or other legal instruments is allowed to approve or sign a waiver from prosecution or criminal or civil liability for any crime committed or damages incurred by victims of said crimes or negligence. All government contractors, their officers, managers, employees, agents, representatives or subcontractors are required to comply with the law of the sovereignty wherein they reside or visit during their tenure with the U.S. government and/or where they perform their duties of behalf of or in compliance with any contract with the U.S. government. Any such entity found in fraudulent violation of the terms of its contract or employment or in violation of any jurisdictional law described herein will have its contract or employment immediately terminated and will be ineligible for future employment or contract with the U.S. government or its agents or contractors

The United States government shall not create any alternate form of judiciary outside the Judicial Branch of the United States, headed by the U.S. Supreme Court and its court system, with the exception that military personnel shall be subject to the jurisdiction of courts martial. No detainee, regardless of classification, held by the U.S. government that is not a Prisoner of War, as outlined in the Geneva Conventions, will be held in any prison or detainment camp outside the Federal Bureau of Prisons, or tried and convicted or acquitted by any judicial body outside the Federal court system of the United States, or sentenced to serve in any penitentiary or confinement system outside the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

The United States of America does not torture any military detainee or captive, Prisoner of War, foreign civilian detainee or Federal prisoner, detainee, non-enemy combatant or any other designation or classification of detainee or prisoner under any circumstances. Torture is defined as any activity which threatens the temporary or permanent health, safety or normal capacity and physical and mental functioning of an individual. The United States of America will not enter into any extradition treaties or agreements with jurisdictions or governments that practice torture as defined herein.

The United States of America does not practice rendition or relinquish any military detainee or captive, Prisoner of War, foreign civilian detainee or Federal prisoner, detainee, non-enemy combatant or any other designation or classification of detainee or prisoner to any foreign government or supra-sovereign entity. The United States of America will honor any extradition treaties executed and approved by Congress and surrender any requested detainee to the appropriate jurisdiction or government upon submission of proper court documentation. Extradition treaties notwithstanding, should the U.S. government become aware of the requesting jurisdiction’s practice of or intent to torture or practice rendition, such extradition request will be denied and the transfer or prisoner or detainee to said requesting jurisdiction practicing torture or rendition shall not be executed, but the trial shall be conducted in the appropriate court jurisdiction inside the United States.

All Federal prisoners and detainees are provided due process according to the U.S. Constitution, its amendments and Federal Acts, as outlined in the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. No prisoner or detainee shall be arrested or detained without a warrant issued by the appropriate Federal Court Justice based on probable cause or upon proper execution of extradition documents, and any individual legally detained by the U.S. government shall not be denied due process.

No prisoner or detainee shall be denied access to an attorney or questioned without the presence of said attorney, nor shall any prisoner or detainee be questioned while under the influence of drugs or alcohol, illegal or medically prescribed, or while incapacitated by mental retardation, insanity or mental infirmity, sleep deprivation, starvation, dehydration or while legally prescribed medications are withheld. Food, water and legally medically necessary prescriptions and medical treatments shall be provided during and throughout detention and interrogation without interruption. The detainee shall not be deprived of medical care during detention or interrogation. Any confessions obtained without the presence of an attorney or while incapacitated will be deemed illegally obtained and inadmissible in a court of law.

The United States of America will not build or maintain concentration or detention camps. Any concentration or detention camps not currently licensed and utilized as Federal prisons will be dismantled or repurposed. Any refugee camps or disaster centers for victims of a natural disaster or as a result of military or terrorist attack or invasion will allow the occupants freedom of movement within the camp’s facilities and to and from the camp and its facilities without the inhibition of bars, locks, barricades or fences that prevent the occupants from leaving at will (in other words, not jails disguised as refugee camps or disaster centers).

The United States of America will not maintain lists of law-abiding American citizens for purpose of surveillance, denial of government services or preventing the daily transportation and activities of normal life without a warrant. Any individual maintained on a U.S. government “Watch List,” “Terrorist List” or “Fugitive List” must contain the person’s full name, social security number or other identifying number by which the warrant for the “suspected” individual can be cross-checked and verified (and obviously a warrant ID). Any warrant for an individual proven to be innocent of suspicion must expire immediately upon receipt of proper documentation and the individual’s name and identifying numbers removed by the U.S. government within three days of notification of the expiration of the warrant, with all Federal and linked databases updated within that three-day limit. Any elected or appointed government officer, employee, contractor, agent or representative who utilizes aforementioned lists for political or malicious purposes, intimidation or social ostracization will be removed from their position, criminally prosecuted and ineligible for future employment or contract with the U.S. government or its agents or contractors. Any individual whose warrant expires but is detained because the lists are not timely updated will be compensated for their time and inconvenience, including a punitive award.

Suggestion to Congress and the next president: Proposition for opening up more territory on the intercontinental shelf

2008-08-03T11:13:00.000-07:00

The oil companies have not explored or drilled 90% of the leases they currently hold. There are two alternatives:

1. They must exhaust the leases they already have, OR

2. They may SWAP territory from their leases for new territory.

This means they would relinquish the territory they currently hold that is not being explored or drilled with no possibility of getting it back in exchange for new territory, providing the new territory's ecology would not be adversely impacted by the new drilling or exploration.

No more of thie "Something for nothing" free ride the oil companies have enjoyed. If they maintain that the leases they currently hold are not promising, then they should give them up before getting more territory.

AND they must leave the leases relinquished the way they found it or better.

What do you guys think?

NEXT PROPOSAL:

The oil companies must give up their corporate welfare OR immediately lower their prices by $1.50 per gallon at today's current national average price..
Do you think that would be fair?

Blueprint for a dictatorship -- characteristics of a crumling democracy

2008-08-03T10:03:00.000-07:00

Talk by Naomi Wolf, author of “The End of America”, October 14, 2007
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjALf12PAWc

Blueprint for shutting down a democracy:

Leader manufactures or hypes a terrifying internal or external threat that doesn’t exist (WMD in Iraq).
Create a secret prison system where torture takes place and often establish military tribunals (Gitmo, FEMA concentration camps). Start with a segment of the population that most of the population does not identify with, then branch out – Niemõller’s poem.
Create a paramilitary force (Blackwater). President can also nationalize National Guard in Alabama to perform martial law duties in another state.
Create a surveillance apparatus spying on ordinary citizens (FISA). Security industrial complex was military industrial complex, shifted after Cold War. The watch list ensures that the security industrial complex will always have someone to surveil. This administration has put its enemies on the watch list – journalists, Code Pink, animal activists, etc.
Arbitrarily detain and release citizens.
Target key individuals (Dan Rather, Bill Maher, Dixie Chicks).
Infiltrate citizens groups.
Restrict the press. Bill Keller, NYT, Swift-Bacon – calls for him to be charged with treason. 1917 Espionage Act – last used to round up anti-war activists, etc., without warrants. Since these charges end in the death penalty, raises fear among dissenters. U.S. journalists seized and held without warrant for writing stories unfavorable to the administration.
Expand the definition of terrorist, traitor, spy. Last fall, definition of “terrorist” was expanded to animal rights activists.
Subvert the rule of law. Declare martial law.

When the U.S. Attorney’s scandal broke, I said at the time that I bet those attorneys are in swing states (they were). E-mails the White House isn’t turning over document the plan to fire all the attorneys – not used.

A closed society doesn’t look like Hitler’s Germany. A closed society still looks like an open society – still elections, just corrupted, like 2000 – remember Florida and the Republicans harassing the recount? There’s still a judiciary, but not free to adjudicate freely against the administration.

We must stand up for our democracy. That is our sacred duty as American citizens. We must do it now.

--------------------

That concluded the summary of her speech (which was much more in depth and well worth the time to view -- see first link).

So, what do we do now?

First, we must put enormous pressure on Congress to roll back the changes that have taken place during these last eight years:

Pursue impeachment of Bush, Cheney and others involved in the falsification of documents, fraudulent intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq, the outing of Valerie Plame, the abuse of executive privilege, etc.

Revise FISA law to require the administration to (a) submit a list of names of who the administration is investigating to a select group of intelligence committee members in both houses of Congress with a list of the probable causes leading to granting the warrant and the results of the investigation; (b) submit the complete watch list to the same committees, providing probable cause and investigation results for why each name is on the list; (c) require social security number (if an American citizen) or other identifying number (passport ID, etc.) to be a part of the list so that innocent people with similar or the same names can be cross-checked with the list to prevent them from undue hardship or punishment; (d) restore writ of habeas corpus completely.

Prohibit the administration from placing any legitimate journalist on the Watch List unless there is absolute proof that said journalist is guilty of aiding and abetting the enemy resulting in the direct deaths of Americans, American soldiers or allies' soldiers in any military conflict.

Prevent the administration from denying admission into any military theatre of legitimate journalists and prohibit the administration or the Pentagon from editing any journalist publication unless absolute proof can be provided that printing such information would directly and immediately compromise military operations or expose the troops to iimmediate and irreparable harm.

Prohibit the administration or the Pentagon from preventing jouranlists or news media from covering the arrival of coffins of dead soldiers from a war or military theatre. Prevent the administration or the Pentagon from preventing journalists or news media from covering the funerals of fallen soldiers unless so requested by the soldier's family.

Remove from the president the power to declare a national state of emergency (that could kick into action the Continuity of Government or martial law) without approval from Congress. Require that any national state of emergency must have an automatic expiration date of 30 days from the date of the declaration. Any extension must be approved by Congress.

In the event of a tragedy that causes COG to be activated, the majority of Congress or the U.S. Supreme Court to be killed, any extension of the national state of emergency resulting in COG being activated must be approved by the majorities in each State legislature until such time as new senators and representatives can be replaced.

Under no circumstances and in no event is the U.S. Congress to be disbanded for more than 30 days in the event a national state of emergency is declared and approved by Congress. No new law or "emergency law" may be passed, executed or implemented during the time Congress is disbanded without the majority of state legislatures approving such "emergency" law. Such laws will expire immediately upon the reconstitution of Congress.

Under no circumstances and in no event is the U.S. Supreme Court to be disbanded for more than 30 days in the event a national state of emergency is declared and approved by Congress. No cases shall be brought, decided or appealed by any other body during its absence. No federal inmates shall be convicted or executed by any other body except the U.S. Supreme Court during its absence. No state shall execute capital punishment of any prisoner during the absence of the U.S. Supreme Court. No military tribunals or other extra-judiciary bodies shall exist in the absence of the U.S. Supreme Court and the Federal court system.

Remove from the president the power to declare anyone a non-enemy combatant.

Disband existing military tribunals (since they are unconstitutional) and require all detainees to be tried in Federal Court. Any detainees that are determined to be held without probable cause will be immediately released and compensated for time served. Any detainees that are found innocent of all charges brought will be immediately released.

Outlaw rendition and torture and make it a capital crime to commit same by any U.S. government elected or appointed official, employee, private government contractor or other person acting under the advice and consent of the administration or any government entity.

Make it a crime for accessory before, during or after the fact for any government elected or appointed official, employee, private government contractor or other person acting under the advice and consent of the administration to withhold evidence or knowledge that such criminal rendition and torture has been committed.

Remove from the power of the president the ability to seize persons or property without a warrant and probable cause, detain them without arraignment within a 72-hour period, questions them without the presence of their attorney and hold them indefinitely in some secret prison without due process or possibility of release.

Require the administration to provide information to families of the whereabouts and course of action (arraignment dates, trial dates, etc.) of any person arrested and detained by this government.

Pass the Feingold-Whitehouse Executive Order Integrity Act, which limits the White House and its use of Executive Orders to create law or orders that have the full force and effect of law, not just administrate based on law.

Create a list of criteria that governs the use of military or intelligence forces or private military contractors (mercenary forces like Blackwater) without the prior approval by Congress.

Limit the president's power to negotiate treaties to commit military or intelligence forces or private military contractors (mercenary forces like Blackwater) to any foreign country without the prior approval of Congress.

Limit the use and scope of activity of private intelligence firms in the intelligence activities of this government to an "advisory" capacity.

Limit the use of private military contractors (mercenary forces) so that they cannot duplicate services that our government military forces already provide. If such forces are used, they cannot be paid more money than their government military equivalent.

Prohibit the exemption of legal (criminal or civil) accountability or liability of any private military or intelligence or other contractor who violates American law, International law or the law of the country in which it operates.

Prohibit the administration from distributing government funds to individuals without a written record, including receipts for any expenses or invoice for services or goods sold (i.e., no more distributing cash among the "civilian" populations of Iraq with no accountability for the funds).

Limit the use and scope of classifying documents as "Confidential," "Secret" or "Top Secret." No policy shall be allowed that automatically classifies every document generated by the administration as inaccessible by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) of 1966 (amended 2002). The amendments of 2002 must be reviewed by Congress to make sure that all documents not reasonably deemed a national security risk are resonably made available to the public.

Outlaw "executive privilege." No such privilege exists in the Constitution, and it cannot be used to delay or refuse to testify before Congress or provide documents requested by Congress in its duties of oversight and accountability. Any such refusal will result in immediate and qutomatic arrest and detention by Congress, where such individuals will be held pending any appeals in Federal court.

Outlaw "presidential signing statements" with the only exception being that the president will provide written rationale for vetoing a bill, as provided in the Constitution. No presidential signing statement or finding of law by the Attorney General shall relieve the president or his administration from accountability for obeying laws passed by Congress and signed by the president. The president and his administration is NEVER above the law.

Require the administration to provide a list of all the FEMA concentration camps throughout the U.S. and its territories, the reason and justification for their existence and maintenance, their capacity, any use or how many prisoners of what types that have been detained in them and release this information to the public.

Require the administration to release its Continuity of Government policy to the Congress for its approval and then, in turn, to the public. No Continuity of Government (COG) plan may exist and be executed without first being reviewed, revised and approved by Congress.

Well, that's probably not all, but that's the best I can do for now.

What do you think?

Milton Mayer: They thought they were free

2008-08-03T09:40:00.000-07:00

http://www.rense.com/general37/fascism.htm

The 14 Defining Characteristics Of Fascism
Free Inquiry, Spring 2003. 5-11-3

Dr. Lawrence Britt has examined the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14 defining characteristics common to each:

Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.
Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of “need.” The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.
Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.
Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.
Rampant Sexism - The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.
Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.
Obsession with National Security - Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.
Religion and Government are Intertwined - Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government’s policies or actions.
Corporate Power is Protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
Labor Power is Suppressed - Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.
Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.
Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.
Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.
Fraudulent Elections - Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

They thought they were free
By Milton Mayer

http://www.thirdreich.net/Thought_They_Were_Free_nn4.html
"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945", University of Chicago Press. Reissued in paperback, April, 1981.

As Harpers Magazine noted when the book was published in 1955 (U. of Chicago), Milton Mayerâsextraordinarily far-sighted book on the Germans is more timely today than ever·ä
This crucial book tells how and why 'decent men' became Nazis through short biographies of 10 law-abiding citizens. An American journalist of German/Jewish descent, Mr. Mayer provides a fascinating window into the lives, thoughts and emotions of a people caught up in the rush of the Nazi movement. It is a book that should make people pause and think -- not only about the Germans, but also about themselves.

But Then It Was Too Late

"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know it doesn't make people close to their government to be told that this is a people's government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing to do with knowing one is governing.

What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if he people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

"You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the universe was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was "expected to" participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one's energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time."

"Those," I said, "are the words of my friend the baker. "One had no time to think. There was so much going on." "Your friend the baker was right," said my colleague. "The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your "little men", your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about - we were decent people - and kept us so busy with continuous changes and "crises" and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the "national enemies", without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it - please try to believe me - unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, "regretted," that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measures" that no "patriotic German" could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

"How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice - 'Resist the beginnings' and 'consider the end.' But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have changed here before they went as far as they did; they didn't, but they might have. And everyone counts on that might.
Your 'little men,' your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better. Pastor Niemoller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing: and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something - but then it was too late."

"Yes," I said.

"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn't see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' Why not? - Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty."

"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, 'everyone' is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there will be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to you colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, 'It's not so bad' or 'You're seeing things' or 'You're an alarmist.'"

"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have."

"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to ö to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait."

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked -- if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in '43 had come immediately after the 'German Firm' stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in '33. But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D."

"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying 'Jew swine,' collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in -- your nation, your people -- is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way."

"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined."

"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done ( for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair."

"What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or 'adjust' your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not I, however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with your shame. This last is the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame. Many Germans became this poor kind of hero, many more, I think, than the world knows or cares to know."

I said nothing. I thought of nothing to say.

"I can tell you," my colleague went on, "of a man in Leipzig, a judge. He was not a Nazi, except nominally, but he certainly wasn't an anti-Nazi. He was just ö a judge. In '42 or '43, early '43, I think it was, a Jew was tried before him in a case involving, but only incidentally, relations with an 'Aryan' woman. This was 'race injury,' something the Party was especially anxious to punish. In the case a bar, however, the judge had the power to convict the man of a 'nonracial' offense and send him to an ordinary prison for a very long term, thus saving him from Party 'processing' which would have meant concentration camp or, more probably, deportation and death. But the man was innocent of the 'nonracial' charge, in the judge's opinion, and so, as an honorable judge, he acquitted him. Of course, the Party seized the Jew as soon as he left the courtroom."

"And the judge?"

"Yes, the judge. He could not get the case off his conscience -- a case, mind you, in which he had acquitted an innocent man. He thought that he should have convicted him and saved him from the Party, but how could he have convicted an innocent man? The thing preyed on him more and more, and he had to talk about it, first to his family, then to his friends, and then to acquaintances. (That's how I heard about it.) After the '44 Putsch they arrested him. After that, I don't know."

I said nothing.

"Once the war began," my colleague continued, "resistance, protest, criticism, complaint, all carried with them a multiplied likelihood of the greatest punishment. Mere lack of enthusiasm, or failure to show it in public, was 'defeatism.' You assumed that there were lists of those who would be 'dealt with' later, after the victory. Goebbels was very clever here, too. He continually promised a 'victory orgy' to 'take care of' those who thought that their 'treasonable attitude' had escaped notice. And he meant it; that was not just propaganda. And that was enough to put an end to all uncertainty."

"Once the war began, the government could do anything 'necessary' to win it; so it was with the 'final solution' of the Jewish problem, which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its 'necessities' gave them the knowledge that they could get away with it. The people abroad who thought that war against Hitler would help the Jews were wrong. And the people in Germany who, once the war had begun, still thought of complaining, protesting, resisting, were betting on Germany's losing the war. It was a long bet. Not many made it."

-- Milton Mayer

The dangers of privatizing government intelligence and military functions

2008-07-30T14:31:00.000-07:00

The Republican mantra of privatization has mission creeped its way into some surprising areas of government. Intelligence, once thought to be the last bastion of government, has now become increasingly privatized. The problems with this are numerous, not the least of which is that privatization has proved to be more expensive, not less, and there is a loss of organizational memory when contracts are bid from one contract period to another, with private firms potentially changing with each contract.

I recommend you follow the link and read the following article before continuing:

The Vast and Dangerous Transfer of American Spying to Mercenary Companies
By Chalmers Johnson, Tomdispatch.com. Posted July 28, 2008.
http://www.alternet.org/audits/92933/the_vast_and_dangerous_transfer_of_amer

Johnson considers just how incompetent and unscrupulous a thoroughly privatized intelligence 'community' has turned out to be.

AlterNet Editor's note--

Chalmers Johnson has produced a superb new article on what privatization has meant to the U.S. Intelligence Community.

Focusing on Tim Shorrock's new book, Spies for Hire, Johnson traces the history of "the wholesale transfer of military and intelligence functions to private, often anonymous operatives" from Ronald Reagan's day to the present, reminding us of just how crucial the Clinton administration was to this development. He also lays out just what can happen when the intelligence budget soars and startling amounts of it are placed in private, for-profit hands. Not only, he claims, has the privatization of intelligence made it easier for enemies to penetrate American intelligence and greased the slippery slope to the loss of professionalism within the community of intelligence analysts, but, perhaps most serious of all, it has ensured the loss of the most valuable asset any intelligence organization possesses -- its institutional memory.

Johnson concludes: "The current situation represents the worst of all possible worlds. Successive administrations and Congresses have made no effort to alter the CIA's role as the president's private army, even as we have increased its incompetence by turning over many of its functions to the private sector. We have thereby heightened the risks of war by accident, or by presidential whim, as well as of surprise attack because our government is no longer capable of accurately assessing what is going on in the world and because its intelligence agencies are so open to pressure, penetration, and manipulation of every kind."

This is a serious issue. We have already seen how Blackwater is usurping the military in Iraq, being paid many times more than the comparable soldier to perform the same function. We now are aware that Blackwater has ordered fighter jets. Why would a security firm need fighter jets?

New Embraer Jets Poised For Take Off Miriam Marcus, Forbes.com, 06.06.08, 6:10 PM ET

http://www.forbes.com/equities/2008/06/06/embraer-aircraft-closer-markets-equity-cx_mlm_0606markets37.html

Slowly, but surely, we are seeing our intelligence and military operations privatized. It started in the Reagan administration and has picked up speed in GWB's administration, going full out with the goal of achieving a totally privatized army and intelligence.

Blackwater is not the only culprit that is laughing all the way to the bank. There are other companies as well. Halliburton, for one. But you have to ask yourself, "Why?" Why is the U.S. government forfeiting its institutional intelligence and institutional memory that is an important part of an organization's functioning -- to be able to learn from the past from those who have been there before?

I find it to be of grave concern. Below is an excellent article on Blackwater:

Checkbook Imperialism: The Blackwater Fiasco
Robert Scheer, Truthdig.com, Sep 18, 2007

Please, please, I tell myself, leave Orwell out of it. Find some other, fresher way to explain why “Operation Iraqi Freedom” is dependent upon killer mercenaries. Or why the “democratically elected government” of “liberated” Iraq does not explicitly have the legal power to expel Blackwater USA from its land or hold any of the 50,000 private contractor troops that the U.S. government has brought to Iraq accountable for their deadly actions.

Were there even the faintest trace of Iraqi independence rising from the ashes of this failed American imperialist venture, Blackwater would have to fold its tents and go, if only in the interest of keeping up appearances. After all, the Iraqi Interior Ministry claimed that the Blackwater thugs guarding a U.S. State Department convoy through the streets of Baghdad fired “randomly at citizens” in a crowded square on Sunday, killing 11 people and wounding 13 others. So the Iraqi government has ordered Blackwater to leave the country after what a government spokesman called a “flagrant assault ... on Iraqi citizens.”

But who told those Iraqi officials that they have the power to control anything regarding the 182,000 privately contracted personnel working for the U.S. in Iraq? Don’t they know about Order 17, which former American proconsul Paul Bremer put in place to grant contractors, including his own Blackwater bodyguards, immunity from Iraqi prosecution? Nothing has changed since the supposed transfer of power from the Coalition Provisional Authority, which Bremer once headed, to the Iraqi government holed up in the Green Zone and guarded by Blackwater and other “private” soldiers. They are “private” in the same fictional sense that our uniformed military is a “volunteer” force, since both are lured by the dollars offered by the same paymaster, the U.S. government. Contractors earn substantially more, despite $20,000 to $150,000 signing bonuses and an all-time-high average annual cost of $100,000 per person for the uniformed military. All of this was designed by the neocon hawks in the Pentagon to pursue their dreams of empire
while avoiding a conscripted army, which would have millions howling in the street by now in protest.
Instead, we have checkbook imperialism. The U.S. government purchases whatever army it needs, which has led to the dependence upon private contract firms like Blackwater USA, with its $300-million-plus contract to protect U.S. State Department personnel in Iraq. That is why the latest Blackwater incident, which Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki branded a “crime,” is so difficult to deal with. Iraqis are clearly demanding to rid their country of Blackwater and other contractors, and on Tuesday the Iraqi government said it would be scrutinizing the status of all private security firms working in the country.

But the White House hopes the outrage will once again blow over. As the Associated Press reported on Monday: “The U.S. clearly hoped the Iraqis would be satisfied with an investigation, a finding of responsibility and compensation to the victim’s families—and not insist on expelling a company that the Americans cannot operate here without.” Or, as Ambassador Ryan Crocker testified to the U.S. Senate last week: “There is simply no way at all that the State Department Bureau of Diplomatic Security could ever have enough full-time personnel to staff the security function in Iraq. There is no alternative except through contracts.”

Consider the irony of that last statement—that the U.S. experiment in building democracy in Iraq is dependent upon the same garrisons of foreign mercenaries that drove the founders of our own country to launch the American Revolution. As George Washington warned in his farewell address, once the American government enters into these “foreign entanglements,” we lose the Republic, because public accountability is
sacrificed to the necessities of war for empire.

Despite the fact that Blackwater USA gets almost all of its revenue from the U.S. government—much of it in no-bid contracts aided, no doubt, by the lavish contributions to the Republican Party made by company founder Erik Prince and his billionaire parents—its operations remain largely beyond public scrutiny. Blackwater and others in this international security racket operate as independent states of their own, subject neither to the rules of Iraq nor the ones that the U.S. government applies to its own uniformed forces. “We are not simply a ‘private security company,’ ”
Blackwater boasts on its corporate website. “We are a professional military, law enforcement, security, peacekeeping, and stability operations firm. ... We have become the most responsive, cost-effective means of affecting the strategic balance in support of security and peace, and freedom and democracy everywhere.”

Yeah, so who elected you guys to run the world?

It is a question of accountability. It is very difficult to apply the "sunhine" law to anonymous employees in private industry, as we have found in the last seven years. Accountability is the cornerstone of the checks and balances in government. When the government brings private industry into the mix, the lines of accountability are obfuscated.

We must get a handle on this now.

On Darwin's evolution: Why Science and Religion can live together in harmony

2008-07-30T14:22:00.000-07:00

Let me say a word or two about this very important issue of the political agenda of the religious right to replace science with religion. In the National Center for Science Education Defending the Teaching of Evolution in the Public Schools, May 21, 2008, http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/news/2008/US/861_united_methodist_church_adopts_5_21_2008.asp, the efforts of this group to add creationism to the SCIENCE curricula are discussed:

At its General Conference held in Fort Worth, TX, from April 22 to May 2, 2008, the United Methodist Church adopted three resolutions relevant to the teaching of evolution in the public schools.

First, and most directly concerned with education, the UMC expressed its opposition to "the introduction of any faith-based theories such as Creationism or Intelligent Design into the science curriculum of our public schools," noting that "the United Methodist Church has for many years supported the separation of church and [s]tate" and that "[t]he promotion of religion or any particular religion in the public schools is contrary to the First Amendment."

Second, in the course of a statement on science and technology, the UMC affirmed, "We find that science's descriptions of cosmological, geological, and biological evolution are not in conflict with theology.... We find that as science expands human understanding of the natural world, our understanding of the mysteries of God's creation and word are
enhanced." And third, the UMC revised its resolution on "God's Creation and the Church," to endorse the Clergy Letter Project (founded by Michael Zimmerman) and "its reconciliatory programs between religion and science," in which it urged its clergy to participate.

The text of the resolutions -- 80839, 80050, and 80990, respectively -- is available by using the Legislation Tracking feature of the UMC's website for the General Convention. he UMC's General Conference is the denomination's top policy-making body, which periodically revises church law and the "Social Principles" (related to a wide range of
social and economic concerns) and adopts resolutions on various current moral, social, public policy, and economic issues. With over eight million members in the United States served by over forty-five thousand ministers, the United Methodist Church is the third largest religious denomination in the United States.

It’s no mistake that I was raised United Methodist. We were taught the interpretation of Genesis was allegorical in nature, and, consequently, there was no real “clash” with evolution. Since the term “day” was invented by man and has changed in its meaning over time (day used to be the time from sunrise to sunset; now it is a 24-hour period that includes the traditional day and night).

To a United Methodist, Darwin’s scientific theory of how the world began and the “Big Bang” theory are only scientific ways of explaining how God created the universe. Likewise, the concept that God’s “days” could last eons or literally billions of years would not be illogical, given that He is supposed to be infinite. How irrelevant is time to an infinite being?

The bigger issue here is the political one. There has been a systematic attack on science by the so-called Christian Right against science, this being only one of the areas of contention. The administration of GWB has declared a war on science within his administration, allowing political editing of scientific documents:

Andrew C. Revkin, “Bush Aide Softened Greenhouse Gas Links to Global Warming”, NYT, June 8, 2005, (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/08/politics/08climate.html?ex=1275883200&en=22149dd80c073dd8&ei=5089).

Dan Vergano, “Science vs. politics gets down and dirty”, USA Today, Updated 8/7/2007, (http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2007-08-05-science-politics_N.htm).
Council on Foreign Relations, December 2007 (http://www.cfr.org/publication/15079/political_interference_with_climate_change_science_under_the_bush_administration_december_2007.html). Full report: United States House of Representatives: Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, December 2007 (http://oversight.house.gov/documents/20071210101633.pdf).

Jonathan Adler, “Bush Appointees Blocked Health Report Release”, The Volokh Conspiracy, July 29, 2007 (http://volokh.com/posts/1185724235.shtml).

Written Testimony of Francesca T. Grifo, Ph.D., Senior Scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists; Director of the Scientific Integrity Program, Before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works: Subcommittee on Public Sector Solutions to Global Warming, Oversight,and Children’s Health Protection, “Oversight Hearing on Science and Environmental Regulatory Decisions”, May 7, 2008, (http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/scientific_integrity/Written-Testimony-for-5-7-08-EPW-Hearing.pdf).

Daniel Smith, “Political Science”, NYT, September 4, 2005 (http://www.cspo.org/Political_Science.html).

And there are many more articles like these. We know what the agenda of the Christian Right is: they believe that science usurps their beliefs and decays their children’s thinking (a sad statement on religion in our country, I must add). But what is the Bush agenda in his war on science?

I submit that it is the need to control information. Much like the Roman Catholic Church during the times of Galileo (when they tortured him to make him recant about discovering a new planet), Bush has appointed himself Keeper of the Truth. That is, the “truth” according to Bush. This is one of the most powerful tactics used by Karl Rove on behalf of Bush in controlling the political message by obfuscation.

So, what do we do?

Well, we need to take action, and fast. As is evident in the article I quoted here, if Texas is able to muddy the line between religion and science in the classroom, textbook editors will soon follow. Their agenda is to sell textbooks.

We cannot allow this administration to poison the minds of our young people for generations to come with regard to science and the importance of objectively seeking the truth.

The difference between science and religion

2008-07-30T14:18:00.000-07:00

The religious right is luanching a full-scale effort to hijack science and teach creationism, starting in Texas.

Let me be clear. There has been an effort on the part of the religious right and the Bush administration to blur the lines between religion and science and political ideology and science for some time. They are mutually exclusive.

Creationism is a religious belief. It cannot be proven irrefutably with hard evidence and facts. It should be taught, if ever, in pulic schools in a religion class that examines all the world's religions and all their theories of how the world began and how it will end and where we go when we die.

Science is science. Science is about postulating theories, testing and evaluating, and proving facts with hard evidence. The scientific theory is a process of discovering facts, and ultimately, truth in our physical world. There is speculation that someday we can eventually extend this to what we now consider our metaphysical world, but that is not the case now.

Teaching creationism in science class is the first big step down a slippery slope to a place where BELIEFS trump FACTS and RELIGION trumps SCIENCE. Where we think, not logically and in terms of facts and evidence and what can be proven true, but substituting what we want to be true -- what we believe -- for facts. That is a dangerous road to travel. It leads to undisciplined thinking and squelches creativity and curiosity, because to challenge a religious belief is to challenge "God," whoever you believe that to be.

I do not, under ANY circumstances, support teaching creationism as a valid scientific theory, because it is not. It is a religious belief and should be taught as such -- in religion class.

The word for today is "liberty"

2008-07-30T14:02:00.000-07:00

A blogger asked the question: "Whose side would our founding fathers be on today?"

The answer is that they would be on the side of liberty.

"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it" -- George Bernard Shaw

It is the responsibility of our Democratic Party to see that our Constitution remains sacred and is not corrupted by the momentary desire to win an election. If we cannot do this, then we do not deserve to be in power.

Now, let's discuss why I answered his question that way:

Our constitutional framers were concerned about democracy and corruption. It is about how money and power have captured our government for their own self-interest. The following link is a discussion with Walter Mondale and others on the Church Committee about government corruption and the committee's investigation of the intelligence agencies and their abuses
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zejpx_1Fs5w
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee

"The Church Committee is the common term referring to
the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with
Respect to Intelligence Activities, a U.S. Senate committee chaired by
Senator Frank
Church (D-ID) in 1975. A precursor to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the committee investigated intelligence gathering for
illegality by the CIA and FBI after certain
activities had been revealed by the Watergate affair." (Wiki ,
above)

The Church Committee reports can be found here:
http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/contents/church/contents_church_reports.htm

"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -- David Hume

"He
that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression;for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."
-- Thomas Paine

What does this mean?

In his Farewell Address (http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Washington%27s_Farewell_Address), George Washington wrote an open letter to the American people warning them of letting political parties become too powerful and dead-locking the government as well as the agencies of the bureaucracy (as bureaucracies are wont to do) encroaching on other agencies, consolidating power and causing an imbalance in the checks and balances provided for in the Constitution. The outline of the address is as follows (Wiki):

"Outline paragraph topic
1-7 Impending retirement from public life
8-18 Importance of unity, danger of factions, authority of the Constitution
19 Strict construction of the Constitution
20-25 Danger of political parties
26 Checks and balances, strict construction of the Constitution
27-28 Religion and morality
29 Education
30 Sparing use of government borrowing
31-42 Foreign relations, avoiding permanent foreign alliances
43-44 Closing thoughts
45-49 American neutrality in European war
50-51 More closing thoughts

"9. The unity of Government, which constitutes you one people, is also now dear to you. It is justly so; for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquillity at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very Liberty, which you so highly prize. But as it is easy to foresee, that, from different causes and from different quarters, much pains will be taken, many artifices employed, to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth; as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously)
directed, it is of infinite moment, that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national Union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the Palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion, that it can in any event be abandoned; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts....

15. In contemplating the causes, which may disturb our Union, it occurs as matter of serious concern, that any ground should have been furnished for characterizing parties by Geographical discriminations, Northern and Southern, Atlantic and Western; whence designing men may endeavour to excite a belief, that there is a real difference of local interests and views. One of the expedients of party to acquire influence, within particular districts, is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts. You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heart-burnings, which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend to render alien to each other those, who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection....

16. To the efficacy and permanency of your Union, a Government for the whole is indispensable. No alliances, however strict, between the parts can be an adequate substitute; they must inevitably experience the infractions and interruptions, which all alliances in all times have experienced. Sensible of this momentous truth, you have improved upon your first essay, by the adoption of a Constitution of Government better calculated than your former for an intimate Union, and for the efficacious management of your common concerns. This Government, the offspring of our own choice, uninfluenced and unawed, adopted upon full investigation and mature deliberation, completely free in its principles, in the distribution of its powers, uniting security with energy, and containing within itself a provision for its own amendment, has a just claim to your confidence and your support. Respect for its authority, compliance with its laws, acquiescence in its measures, are duties enjoined by the fundamental maxims of true Liberty. The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their Constitutions of Government. But the Constitution which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all. The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish Government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established Government.
17, All obstructions to the execution of the Laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels, and modified by mutual interests.

18. However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government; destroying afterwards the very engines, which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

19. Towards the preservation of your government, and the permanency of your present happy state, it is requisite, not only that you steadily discountenance irregular oppositions to its acknowledged authority, but also that you resist with care the spirit of innovation upon its principles, however specious the pretexts. One method of assault may be to effect, in the forms of the constitution, alterations, which will impair the energy of the system, and thus to undermine what cannot be directly overthrown. In all the changes to which you may be invited, remember that time and habit are at least as necessary to fix the true character of governments, as of other human institutions; that experience is the surest standard, by which to test the real tendency of the existing constitution of a country; that facility in changes, upon the credit of mere hypothesis and opinion, exposes to perpetual change, from the endless variety of hypothesis and opinion; and remember, especially, that, for the efficient management of our common interests, in a country so extensive as ours, a government of as much vigor as is consistent with the perfect security of liberty is indispensable. Liberty itself will find in such a government, with powers properly distributed and adjusted, its surest guardian. It is, indeed, little else than a name, where the government is too feeble to withstand the enterprises of faction, to confine each member of the society within the limits prescribed by the laws, and to maintain all in the secure and tranquil enjoyment of the rights of person and property.

20. I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the state, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally.

21. This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.

22. The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.

23. Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind, (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight,) the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.

24. It serves always to distract the Public Councils, and enfeeble the Public Administration. It agitates the Community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.

25. There is an opinion, that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the Government, and serve to keep alive the spirit of Liberty. This within certain limits is probably true; and in Governments of a Monarchical cast, Patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favor, upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular character, in Governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency, it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And, there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be, by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume.

26. It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution, in those intrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart, is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position. The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power, by dividing and distributing it into different depositories, and constituting each the Guardian of the Public Weal against invasions by the others, has been evinced by experiments ancient and modern; some of them in our country and under our own eyes. To preserve them must be as necessary as to institute them. If, in the opinion of the people, the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way, which the constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for, though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed. The precedent must always greatly overbalance in permanent evil any partial or transient benefit, which the use can at any time yield."

Washington was dead on with this. We are suffering the consequences of the acts he warned us against -- imbalance of power, consolidation of power, deadlocked government, etc.

So, if hundreds of years ago, a man was smart enough to predict the results of such future mistakes, why are we not able to see the errors of our ways and fix this problem?

Why? Because of the consolidation of power in the political parties, which are financied and run by the most wealthy and most powerful, whose interests are in direct conflict with the majority of the American people. The answer is to get the undue influence of money out of politics and make sure that Washington, DC, is no longer for sale.

But this is not something we can depend on our elected officials to do, since they are products of the corrupt money system we want to dismantle. It is up to us, the people, to make it happen. We must be vigilant with our elected officials who are not up for re-election and run and vote for candidates who represent our real interests.

That is the only way we can get back to the original intent of our Constitution.

The imperial presidency of George W. Bush is exactly what the First George (Washington) of our country's leaders warned about. Our elected officials have passed acts and other tools like presidential signing statements and Executive Orders to erode the power of the Constitution and consolidate the power in the hands of a very few.

It's up to us.

As Rabbi Tarfon said, "The day is short. The work is long. We are not enjoined to complete the task. Nor are we free to desist from it altogether."

And Rabbi Hillel said: "If not now, when?"
(http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0311&article=031149)

A few interesting Executive Orders issued by GWB

2008-07-30T14:00:00.000-07:00

For a full list of all EOs issued by GWB:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/orders/

July 8, 2004
Executive Order Delegation of Certain Waiver, Determination, Certification, Recommendation, and Reporting Functions

Sec. 6. In carrying out sections 1 and 2 of this order, officers of the United States shall ensure that all actions taken by them are consistent with the President's constitutional authority to: (a) conduct the foreign affairs of the United States; (b) withhold information the disclosure of which could impair the foreign relations, the national security, the deliberative processes of the Executive, or the performance of the Executive's constitutional duties; (c) recommend for congressional consideration such measures as the President may judge necessary and expedient; and (d) supervise the unitary executive branch.

December 17, 2003
Executive Order Appointments During National Emergency

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code, and in order to further respond to the national emergency I declared in Proclamation 7463 of September 14, 2001, I hereby order as follows:

Section 1. Emergency Appointments Authority. The emergency appointments authority at section 603 of title 10, United States Code, is invoked and made available to the Secretary of Defense in accordance with the terms of that statute and of Executive Order 12396 of December 9, 1982.

September 17, 2003
Order Designation Under Executive Order 12958

Consistent with the provisions of section 1.3 of Executive Order 12958 of April 17, 1995, as amended, entitled "Classified National Security Information," I hereby designate the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy to classify information originally as "Top Secret."
Any delegation of this authority shall be in accordance with section 1.3(c) of Executive Order 12958, as amended

What should guide a Commander-in-Chief when declaring war?

2008-07-30T13:54:00.000-07:00

A blogger made the observation that, given that today's military is all voluntary, should they not expect to be sent to a war like Iraq. The answer to that question is an emphatic NO.

Why? What's different about Iraq from all other wars we have fought? There is a HUGE difference. What is it? Iraq was a war of choice.

Any Comander-in-Chief (CIC) has an obligation to the troops to do several things:

Not to send them into battle until all reaceful means of settling a dispute have been exhausted.Send them into battle with a clear mission and a clear exit strategy, i.e., what does "winning" and "success" mean, how do we know when we get there.
Send them into battle with the proper training and equipment (proper body armor, proper vehicle armor, anti-IED protection, etc.) to provide them with the greatest protection possible and all the equipment they will need to accomplish the mission with the least amount of damage and casulaties.
To give them the best possible care and treatment for the physical and mental wounds, including rehab, PTSD counseling, PTBD treatment, etc., they suffer from their service.
To cut all the red tape in getting them access to the medical treatment they need.

Those are the absolute requirements for a CIC to send troops into battle. Unless attacked unexpectedly, there are no excuses for a president to do otherwise.

It's the integrity of the system that counts

2008-07-30T13:39:00.000-07:00

The important thing to remember here is that the current situation with regard to our civil liberties applies to ALL future presidents, not just Obama or McCain or Paul or Nader, etc., in this election. We cannot depend on the "rule of man" insomuch as it depends on which [hu]man may or may not abuse the power that has been given. That is why our founders insisted on the "rule of law" to govern this country.

Men are capable of corruption. Even the strongest, most ethical man can be corrupted under the right circumstances. Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. What has been given here is something very close to absolute power. We must make the changes in our Constitution and laws to apply and protect us evenly whether a good man or a corrupt, evil one is in power.

I guess because I am an old systems analyst, the system preoccupies my attention. I know that when you set up a good system, it does not matter who is using it or running it, it will work consistently.

That is the goal with our body of law and Constitution. No matter who is running the show, the rule of law will prevail. If that is not secure, then our fate lies at the feet of a [hu]man's folly and our system will eventually fail.

On becoming intelligent voters

2008-07-30T13:34:00.000-07:00

"Democracy depends on having a sustained conversation about our weaknesses as well as our strengths." -- Rick Shenkman

Historian Rick Shenkman is the author of Just How Stupid Are We? This quote was taken from the interview in "The Ignorant American Voter" by Bret Schulte , June 3, 2008 (posted today on the DNC website by Sandi: http://www.democrats.org/page/community/post/PAM/CCNJ).

-------------

This particular quote is truly profound. It encapsulates the very nature of the problem within our country and this party. We have met the enemy and it is us.

"I don't think you can have a democracy without people trusting their government, but if the last half century has shown anything, it's that healthy skepticism about our leaders is probably warranted, if not a wholehearted cynicism.... What I argue in the book is we have to reform ourselves.... What I argue in the book is we have to reform ourselves." -- Rick Shenkman

Shenkman points out the glaring fact that we have not been a responsible electorate. As voters, we have been seduced by the superficial campaign slogans and pretty photo ops and 30-second soundbites that do not inform, but rather just spread propaganda. We chant the slogans and wave our signs with religious fervor (on both sides), but we really do not have a deep understanding on the issues or the policies each candidate has to confront our problems and solve them.

"What unites us are our ideas, and that creates a far different set of challenges for our democracy than for another democracy in the rest of the world." -- Rick Shenkman

This is what makes our form of government unique. We were united not by tribe or one leader (monarch or dictator), not by the rule of man, but by ideas and the rule of law. We forget how unique this was at the time our founders framed the Constitution.

"We have a vibrant democracy today, and that's a good thing, but we need to simply acknowledge that the ordinary voter is not as smart as they should be. They are susceptible to manipulation and being conned, and once we admit that, we have to figure out how we can have a country of smarter voters." -- Rick Shenkman

If anyone doubts this passage, then they haven't been paying attention since 1968. Starting with the corruption of Nixon and Watergate to the conservative revolution led by Reagan with the illegal Iran-Contra, the HUD scandal and the S&L debacle to the too-numerous-to-mention corrupt activities of GWB, we have seen our democracy erode and our confidence in government -- all parts of government -- betrayed. Whether its the politicization of the Justice Department and their illegal litmus test hiring practices or the appointment of U.S. Supreme Court Justices based on ideology rather than judicial temperament, we have reason to mistrust our government.

But we somehow fail to connect the dots and blame ourselves for this mess.

"My #1 suggestion that is easily implemented is to ask every college student their freshman year to take a current events quiz weekly. I think that would have an enormous effect on the country." -- Rick Shenkman

This is an excellent suggestion we can all put into everyday practice. Why not give ourselves a quiz every day? This was the family practice at the Kennedy's dinner table when Joe, Jack, Rosemary, Kathleen, Eunice, Patricia, Bobby, Jean, and Ted would discuss and argue passionately the issues of the day. This practice produced three senators and one president. If it had been today, Eunice certainly would have joined the ranks of the family's elected officials.

Those of us who have children could incorporate this into our lives in the same way. Educate ourselves and our children. An easy solution to a difficult problem.

The Biblical interpretation of the meaning of "authority" was "knowledge." This makes a great deal of sense, because knowledge is power.

He who controls the information, controls destiny. Let's put ourselves in control of our own destiny by becoming more intelligent voters and citizens.

Learning from the history of Iraq: How we could have avoided this debacle.

2008-07-30T13:25:00.000-07:00

First, like Yugoslavia, there never was a real country formed by nationalism named Iraq in the sense that Americans understand national identification. Iraq was a territory inhabited by warring tribes, religions and cultures united by a powerful dictator through force.

We can’t win militarily because there is no military solution.
We can’t win politically because we don’t control all the actors in this debacle and we have no viable political solution.
We can’t win in Iraq financially because we can’t afford it.It’s not our country — most Iraqis don’t really feel like it’s their country either — and we can’t “liberate” them, then tell them they are free so long as they vote for whomever we quietly back and run for political office, do what we want them to do, and like whom we tell them they can like. Then we chide them for not being aggressive enough in fighting for their national self-reliance. We can’t make them fight for their country if they don’t believe it is in their greater interest over and beyond their tribal or religious interests and connections.

When you don’t learn from history, you are doomed to repeat it. Most Americans know very little about Islam and have no idea who Imam Ali (ra) is (“ cousin of the Prophet (pbuh – to us, Mohammed), husband of his daughter Fatima, father of Hassan and Hussein and the second person ever to embrace Islam. The term Shia or Shi'ite derives from a shortening of Shiat Ali or partisans of Ali.”).

“Ali is the central figure at the origin of the Shia / Sunni split which
occurred in the decades immediately following the death of the Prophet in 632.
Sunnis regard Ali as the fourth and last of the "rightly guided caliphs"
(successors to Mohammed (pbuh) as leader of the Muslims) following on from Abu
Bakr 632-634, Umar 634-644 and Uthman 644-656. Shias feel that Ali should have
been the first caliph and that the caliphate should pass down only to direct
descendants of Mohammed (pbuh) via Ali and Fatima, They often refer to
themselves as ahl al bayt or "people of the house" [of the prophet]” (The
Origins of the Sunni/Shia split in Islam, by Hussein Abdulwaheed Amin, Editor of
IslamForToday.com, http://www.islamfortoday.com/shia.htm).

Christians should be able to relate to the “people of the house” concept by our understanding of Christ’s lineage being of the “House of David.”

Why didn’t the Bush administration do their homework? Well, actually, they did, long ago – they just ignored it this time. Cheney, in a broadcast public interview in the early 1990s, defended HW’s decision not to take over Baghdad and bring Hussein down in the first Iraq war, listing all the reasons why (which, incidentally, is why we shouldn’t have done it this time with George W). The reasons were still valid and the conditions had not really changed. We could have studied the British occupation of Iraq during the first part of the 20th century:

(http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060301faessay85203/joel-rayburn/the-last-exit-from-iraq.html)

and known exactly what would happen to us, should we have forgotten the lessons of Viet Nam (which apparently George W.’s administration had – I know, poor George W. wasn’t there – in Viet Nam, that is).

The United Kingdom seized the provinces of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul from the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I and formally took control of the new country in 1920, under a mandate from the League of Nations.

"Christopher Jones recalls the 1914-18 fighting in what was then called
Mesopotamia: Americans would be well advised to remember the conditions
surrounding the British occupation of Iraq. The US incursion looks like a
complete repeat of that ill fated war. The campaign to invest Baghdad took
place against the backdrop of the First World War. It seemed to have had no
clear strategic objectives except the fulfillment of the new prime minister's
desire to capture the fabled city of the Arabian Nights. In retrospect, the
invasion of Iraq gave the government of Lloyd George the opening to invade
Palestine, Syria and Lebanon.According to Boston University historian David
Fromkin, it proved difficult to govern Iraq, and General Maude was put in the
awkward position of having to preach self-rule while discouraging its practice.
He cabled London that local conditions did not permit employing Arabs in
responsible positions, "Before any truly Arab facade [sic] can be applied to
edifice, it seems essential that foundation of law and order should be well and
truly laid." What General Maude had discovered was that Mesopotamia was a
place where 75 percent of the population was tribal "with no previous tradition
of obedience to any government," and a place with a long history of power
struggle between the Shias and the Sunnis. Eventually, vague rumors, constant
unrest, and repeated killings took their toll on British nerves. Three
young army officers were killed in Kurdistan in 1919. An experienced official
sent by the Government of India to replace them was killed a month later. Six
British officers were killed in the spring of 1920. Later, two political
officers were abducted and murdered. The Iraqi desert was full of raiding
parties, and one British officer was led to believe that the only way to deal
with the disaffected tribes was "wholesale slaughter" (The British in
Mesopotamia, World Association of International Studies (WAIS)

http://wais.stanford.edu , Ronald
Hilton, Hoover Institution, 2004).

"A number of pundits have recently noted the parallels between the United Kingdom's experience eight decades ago and the United States' today. The comparisons, however, have generally centered on the early and middle phases of both occupations. Too few have focused on the ignominious end of the United Kingdom's reign in Mesopotamia and the lessons those events hold for the United States today. In fact, Washington's current position bears a strong resemblance to London's in the late 1920s, when the British were responsible for the tutelage of a fledgling Iraqi state suffering from immature
institutions, active insurgencies, and the interference of hostile neighbors. Eventually, this tutelage was undermined by pressure from the British Parliament and the press to withdraw -- forces quite similar to those in the United States now calling for a withdrawal from Iraq. Building a better understanding of the United Kingdom's mistakes -- and of the consequences of that country's ultimate withdrawal from Iraq -- could thus help illuminate the present occupation and provide answers to when and how to end it. If the British record teaches anything, it is this: costly and frustrating as the fostering of Iraqi democracy may be, the costs of leaving the job undone would likely be far higher, for both the occupiers and the Iraqis. This is a lesson the British learned more than seven decades ago, when their premature pullout in 1932 led to more violence in Iraq, the rise of a dictatorship, and a catastrophic unraveling of everything the British had tried to build there" (The Last Exit From Iraq, Joel Rayburn, From
Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006).

Now that we’re bogged down in this debacle, we’re in the same situation as we were prior to leaving Viet Nam. We can’t win militarily, we can’t broker a political solution and we don’t have the American lives to sacrifice (the military depth) or the money to continue for eternity. Assuming that continuing for 100 years or so could actually change the outcome. Most people who have studied and know the region know full well that this tribal split since 633 or so cannot be resolved by Americans, if it can be resolved at all, short of cultural cleansing, which has already taken place in Baghdad (one reason why the surge “worked” in the sense that some violence was decreased – there are less and less bodies left to kill. – they’re either already dead or have sought refuge in Syria or Lebanon or Jordan, etc., to avoid the violence). As divided as our own country is and as much strife as values and our own cultural wars cause between American conservatives and American liberals, what on earth made us think we could solve Iraq’s tribal or religious conflicts? And we have the nerve to appear shocked when they betray us by abandoning their posts during a fight.

The Sunni and Shia are going to have a civil war between and among themselves when we leave – no matter when that is – tomorrow or next century. They will fight for power. They will fight for the caliphate (their religious sect to predominate). They will fight and fight and fight – until they kill each other down to the last human being or another dictator grabs enough power to take over the country, only this time it will probably be an Islamic fundamentalist – worse and far less controllable than Saddam. We cannot prevent this from happening -- It cannot be avoided, only our losses increased and our occupation and misery prolonged.

Just as there were more racial and cultural connections between the Vietnamese and Chinese (who we were really fighting in Viet Nam by proxy), there are more racial and cultural connections between Shia Iraqis and Iran. There are more racial and cultural connections between Sunni Iraqis and Syrians. Americans are an occupying foreign force, predominantly a different race, religion and culture to Iraqis. They do not perceive us as representing their values or their interests and, frankly, we don’t. We say we want to help them be “free,” but George W.’s administration perceives our real national interest as being control of their oil. Even the protection of Israel is second to our lust for oil. There is no basis for Iraqis to believe that they have more national or personal interest in common with Americans than with themselves and their neighbors. We don’t live “on their block.” American objectives are not Iraqi or Shia or Sunni objectives. And until we acknowledge this, we haven’t got a prayer in positively influencing events in Iraq on any kind of a permanent or lasting basis.

We have seen it happen over and over and over again. Whatever miniscule gains we make militarily or even politically, we soon see slip through our fingers like sand through the hourglass. We cannot undo the damage of centuries of history of war and strife between these tribes and religious groups, if for no other reason than we don’t know how. We can understand the struggle for power between various Shia factions, though, we know about struggle for power. Unfortunately, we have already lost the ability to be a broker or even a player in that conflict: Shi’ites consider Iran to be the honest broker there.

Sure, the surge is "working" -- at least for now. It will continue to work as long as our military is there in force. Once we leave, either one of two things will happen: chaos will ensure or a strong man will rise to take over the country as dictator. The only question is will that dictator be a Sunni strong man or a Shia mullah. The sooner we get our troops home and let Iraq get on with their own lives, the better off the entire world will be.

Why are caucuses antiquated?

2008-07-30T13:21:00.000-07:00

The original purpose of the caucus was to inform and educate in rural areas back when newspapers did not circulate into those areas and there was no access to radio or, later, television. The caucus in its original inception was a means of informing and discussing, not just casting votes.
Today, where virtually everyone who chooses to has access to radio, television, Internet and printed news, there is little need to inform or educate. Caucuses are simply an antiquated, party-controlled means of voting.

So, why do I say it is antiquated? The need to inform no longer exists. Further, the caucus disenfranchises many voters. Why? Let's examine that:

1. Caucus voters must be present at the beginning of the caucus and stay until the end of the caucus. Many caucuses are held starting in the afternoon and extending into the evening hours, splitting shifts. This means that working class shift workers cannot even swap shifts with someone in order to attend, since the caucus cuts across two shifts.
The length of time a caucus takes place is difficult for the elderly and the infirm to sit or stand for that length of time.
Arranging for transportation is also difficult, since the event starts in the afternoon and extends through evening. Unless a caucus goer volunteers to transport those without transportation, it would require the caucus goers without a car or the ability to drive or the ability to use public transportation (in some cities this does not extend into the late evening, but ends after the workday), to arrange for transportation with someone who would be required to wait for hours while the caucus is taking place. Or for two people to provide transportation -- one to bring them and one to pick them up and take them home. This is awkward and/or costly.
Voters with babysitters will have to go to the added expense of not only hiring a babysitter, but arranging for transportation to and from their house.
Unlike primaries, where absentee voting is allowed and convenient, caucus goers must be "present to win" as the saying goes. Those travelling or in hospice, nursing homes or other confined situations cannot be present and cannot vote absentee.
Unlike primaries, which have some form of paper ballot or receipt that can be recounted, there is no way to "recount" a caucus.

I'm sure there are many other reasons, but I think I have provided enough to prove the point. If any of you have some other reasons or ideas, I would welcome your input.

Elections and our republic: How do we avoid political gamesmanship?

2008-07-30T12:32:00.000-07:00

We do not actually live in a democracy, we have a representative form of government. Our founders lived in a world where there was a very small middle class, only the rich had access to an education, and the working class was virtually illiterate. They were afraid to allow wholesale democracy under the circumstances.

Today is different because:

Most of our citizens are literate (even if we don't necessarily agree with them or how they think, they can read the ballot),
We have the technology to count each individual's vote, and (c) statehood does not have the same meaning it did in 1789.

Back then, states were like little nations that did most everything independently with only the military, the foreign service, trade policy and some small administrative functions for the Federal Government. Now, the state governments are in many ways almost irrelevant to daily functioning.
There is a considerable amount of redundancy (and unnecessary bureaucracy) because of it. Republicans would like to see 1789 again, because it concentrated power in the hands of a few. Democrats know that issues such as human rights (civil rights, women's rights, etc.) and enforcing same impact each of us so completely that the only place where we can depend on equal rights, opportunity and protection under the law is at the Federal level. If you doubt it, move to Alabama, where I live, or Mississippi or any of the Southern states.

I promise you slavery would not have been abolished without a Federal government led by Lincoln and integration would not have been abolished without Robert F. Kennedy heading the Justice Department. If you doubt the importance of the role, just remember what a disaster Gonzales has been to the Department of Justice, along with Karl Rove, et al., politicizing the department and using it for politically motivated prosecutions (i.e., Gov. Don Siegelman).

I think our voting system should be completely revamped and the national popular vote should determine national elections. Likewise with the primaries -- a regional primary system where states were grouped according to their region and congruity of population and needs would be useful.

It would eliminate a lot of bureaucracy and political gamesmanship that goes on now for both election types.

Putting a human face on a technical war

2008-07-30T12:27:00.000-07:00

One of the problems with modern warfare is that we view the death and destruction from a video game perspective. Seeing a bomb hit its target on a TV screen does not show the mangled bodies and precious lives destroyed.

I remember in the first Gulf War, when CNN and others were covering the actual events in real time, watching the videos released by the military of planes launching bombs and seeing them hit their targets on a screen. it looked just like a video game.

But the reality of war is that it is about death and destruction and tattered lives and desperation and hopelessness for the victims of the war.

This is one reason why I object to this administration's decision to block the media from showing the flag-draped coffins coming back home from war. It hides the human suffering and the true cost of this war -- our sons and daughters and fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters and cousins and friends.

I can imagine both the pride and the grief that these families feel. I have seen that pride in friends and family who have service members serving in combat. One of the things I am most grateful for is that our country (and my generation) learned from Viet Nam that you don't punish the soldier for the war. We are proud of our soldiers and contractors who risk their lives to protect us.

It is both enraging and sad to see the sacrifices that our soldiers, their families and the victims of this war and all that they have suffered.

We must end this war.

Stock Buy Backs: The Smaller Pie Theory on Steroids

2008-07-30T12:18:00.000-07:00

I have, in the past, written about my economic theories based on pies:

Democratic/Distribution:

The "bigger pie theory" states that if we all want a bigger piece of the pie, we have to make a larger pie (grow the economy).

Republican/Consolidation:

The "fixed pie theory" states that the pie is only so big, so in order for me to get a bigger piece, someone else's piece has to be smaller (consolidating wealth).

The oil companies use of stock buybacks (also called repurchases) takes this fixed pie theory to the ultimate extreme. By buying back its own stock, the company consolidates (concentrates) the wealth of the company to a fewer number of investors, which makes the dividends paid by the company larger for each investor. The smaller the number of investors, the larger their share of the profits (the amoung of profit in total remain the same).

To be fair, there are some positive aspects to buybacks.

Stock buybacks are considered to be a good thing to investors, because they make an investor's portfolio grow:

http://beginnersinvest.about.com/cs/newinvestors/a/060401a.htm

They are also considered to be effective in preventing takeovers:

http://news-releases.uiowa.edu/2008/may/050508buy_backs.html

"The Why of Stock Buybacks

There are several reasons a company may want to buy back shares of its own stock, some of them for the benefit of stockholder, while others have less altruistic purposes.
Here are some of the reasons, both good and bad that a company might do a stock buyback:
If a company is sitting on a large sum of cash and must decide how to invest it, one of the options is to distribute part of it to shareholders. Companies can do this either of two ways: as dividends or buy buying up outstanding shares.
If the company chooses to buy up shares, stockholders benefit even if they don’t sell by the reduction in outstanding shares.
If a company’s stock is suffering from low financial ratios, buying back stock can give some of the ratios a temporary boost. Key ratios like earnings per share (EPS) and price earnings ratio (PE) look better because they are based on the number of outstanding shares. Reduce the number of shares and even though earnings don’t change, the EPS looks better.

Another reason companies buy back stock is to cover large employee stock option programs. The effect of these programs, which were out of control during the tech boom of the late 1990s, was to dilute the stock and shareholder’s equity. Buying back shares reduces dilution and increases shareholder value.

Some companies buy back shares as protection against unfriendly takeovers from other companies. By gathering outstanding shares off the open market, the company makes it more difficult for a raider to take control.

Conclusion

Stock buybacks can be great for stockholders if done because that is the best use of cash and the price is right. However, watch out of financial slight of hand that seeks to cover up weak ratios or poorly managed employee stock option plans."

http://stocks.about.com/od/understandingstocks/a/Stockbuyb122204.htm

But it's not all good news. You must do some homework and find out why the executive management wants to buy back stocks. Do they have stock options? If so, they may be wanting to raise stock prices rather than pay their stock holders higher dividends.

http://www.incomeinvesthome.com/growth/dividends/decreases/buybacks.htm

"Company management that likes to receive
dividends instead of dumping its shares for the capital gains are people working
hard to keep those dividends high and increasing."

http://www.incomeinvesthome.com/growth/dividends/decreases/options.htm

Framing the economic debate

2008-07-30T12:15:00.000-07:00

Republicans love slogans -- they're short and they, therefore, cannot be substantive.
John McCain has resurrected the "liberal" and "tax and spend" slogans in this campaign. We cannot take this lightly. These are ingrained in the consciousness of middle Americans -- and much of it is our own fault (see my blog entitled "Elephantizing").

So, how do we frame the truth in slogan form -- something, as Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Carribbean would say, "It's short, it's easy to remember...."

What is the truth?

The truth is that Democrats are fiscally responsible. We believe in "pay as you go." We also believe in "paying down the national debt" and "balanced budgets." We believe in small, streamlined, but EFFECTIVE government. If balancing the budget and paying down the national debt require raising taxes, Democrats will do so as a last resort rather than be fiscally irresponsible. Democrats focus on labor as the backbone of the economy.

Democrats believe in the working man and woman. We believe in fair wages and benefits. We believe in investing in the American people through social programs as a means of growing the economy. It is much easier to grow an economy where the populace is educated, healthy and has a sense of empowerment and purpose in their lives. If you have lived in an areas where the public school system is less than adequate to meet the needs of the community, you know it is harder to recruit businesses to that area. They want educated workers. They want good schools for their managers' and executives' children. They don't want to spend tons of money re-educating their workers because the public schools are inadequate and are not doing the job.

The truth about Republicans is that they are the "borrow and spend" party. During my lifetime, every Republican administration was marked by a burdeoning bureaucracy, incompetence, a exponentially growing national debt and a "credit card" mentality. Republicans have tried to convince us we can "spend our way to a good economy," and, if that doesn't work, we can "borrow our way to a good economy." Republicans focus on investors as the backbone of the economy. They believe in an exclusive economy that only allows the wealthy to play and enjoy the fruits of your labor.

Republicans believe in lower taxes -- but not for everyone -- just for big business and the wealthy. They try to convince middle America that giving tax breaks to the rich will stimulate the economy, but they put no conditions on their tax breaks to ensure that this will happen. Theirs is a trickle-down economic philosophy, but the trickle never seems to make it to my level or the level of most middle class Americans. Consequently, they don't like social programs. They believe that education, health and other social safety nets are an unnecessary expense (at least for them). Republicans also favor ideas such as the so-called "fair" tax or the "flat" tax, which gives everyone the same tax rate, but it disproportionately penalizes the poor and middle class and gives the upper class more money to burn.

For Republicans, it's all about profit. It's the fixed-pie theory. The fixed-pie theory says our pie is only so big, so, if I want a bigger piece, or if you want a piece at all, it means everyone else has to take a smaller piece. It's about consolidating wealth among a few supra-sovereign elites who run the show. No sharing allowed -- no sharing power, no sharing wealth, no sharing opportunity.

For Democrats, it's all about people. Democrats believe in the bigger-pie theory. We say, if the pie is not big enough for everyone to have a good piece, then let's bake a bigger pie. In other words, let's grow the economy to include everyone. Democrats believe in the Progressive Tax, which has a floor to protect the poorest in society, and graduates as the income increases, with no loopholes to allow the wealthy and corporations to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

So, how do you say this in a slogan? We need to figure this out before the GE gets too far underway. The unfortunate fact is that most Americans have been programmed to have a short attention span and like to be spoon-fed. We can either accommodate this or ignore it to our detriment.

How Republicans will increase your taxes without increasing your taxes

2008-07-30T12:12:00.000-07:00

Sound like a paradox? Well, it's not.

Republicans found out several decades ago that they could perpetuate the myth that they lowered taxes by simply accomplishing what I call "back door" taxes.

These back door taxes include raising other fees and licensure, taking away deductions or raising the requirements for deductions, raising earmarked taxes like FICA and Medicaid (not "technically" considered income tax), making other income subject to taxation (like unemployment insurance, social security benefits and disability), taxes on energy, communications and other "luxury" or "use" taxes, passing on most Federal taxes that would be required to finance Federal programs to the states in unfunded mandates, and borrowing money to pay for programs, increasing the national debt and its corresponding interest, which takes up a huge chunk of the Federal budget.

If you will check back on all the unfunded mandates like healthcare, welfare and education (No Child Left Behind), you will find that, although the Federal gtovernment might have legal requirements that the states perform certain functions, the Federal government does not fund these functions. The states have to come up with the money. And the place they go to get it is the taxpayer.

So, although the Federal government may not actually, technically, spend any money for these programs, do not be fooled into thinking you aren't having to pay for them. Your taxes are going up at the state level to pay for them -- your property taxes go up to pay for education programs that are unfunded and your municipal sales taxes, luxury taxes and use taxes go up.

Add it all together, and your are taxed at a higher rate than before, it just doesn't show up on your W-2 or 1099 form that you paid all those taxes to the Federal government. The bottom line is there is less money in your pocket on pay day.

So, don't be confused when you hear the Republicans talk about how Democrats raise taxes. Democrats believe in responsible fiscal policy -- "pay as you go" -- and paying down the national debt, not making more debt. After seven years of irresopnsible fiscal management, Republicans have left the country with a staggering debt that Democrats will most likely have to deal with. In the meantime, our tax money is going to pay the interest on that debt, which compounds daily, and can't even touch the principal to pay it down. Not when we are borrowing billions daily from the Chinese to pay the Saudis, et al., for more oil. And, of course, inflated gas prices also are a kind of "back door" hidden tax.

This happens every time a Republican president leaves office -- at least during my lifetime. And this does not even include the "taxes" that inflation cause. The money is devalued and therefore does not buy what it used to. And you, the taxpayer, are left holding the bag for all this mismanagement.
Finally, there are the true "golden pork awards" for no-bid contracts for Halliburton at non-competitive prices, pork barrel projects hidden in other expenditures like war spending, and special interest exclusions often handed to military contractors who do not meet the contractural requirements they bid or bid inflated prices for services that were already extant within the government at lower prices (like Blackwater and many of the war machinery manufacturers) like privatizing government programs to the highest bidder for the most profit (i.e., Blackwater security at 5+ times the pay of comparable military). And the famous Medicare Rx drug law that PROHIBITS Medicare from negotiating for lower drug prices with pharmaceutical companies or going outside the U.S. to Canada, et al., to lower the price of prescriptions.

Not only do we pay more taxes (just distributed over state and local levels), but we get less for the tax money we do spend. This is the Republican system. Don't let them bully us into silence about this.

The value of currency and how it impacts our national debt

2008-07-30T12:10:00.000-07:00

The Gold Standard is where our currency is backed up by actual gold (remember Fort Knox, where we used to store our gold?). Inflation is the difference between the actual amount and value of gold we have in comparison to the amount of money we have printed and in circulation. If we have more money printed and in circulation than gold to back it up, we have an inflated dollar (one that is not actually as valuable as it, on its face, is supposed to be).
We abandoned the Gold Standard in the 1960's.

Johnson abandoned the Gold Standard during the Viet Nam war. What happened is that the administration printed money trying to keep the economy going without us really knowing how much money was being spent in Viet Nam (because of all the opposition to the war). Hiding the expense of the war worked temporarily, but, just like charging the payment of one credit card to another credit card, it catches up with you eventually.

By the time Nixon took office, inflation was so high until there was no way to correct the problem (by the government "buying" back the dollars it had circulated and destroying them to even out the rate of actual dollars circulated to the value of the gold we held in Fort Knox) without sending our economy into a major recession or depression. So, Nixon abandoned the Gold Standard permanently.

Since then, we have been on a market standard, where currency markets determine the value of our dollar. The problem with this is that other nations can manipulate the value of our currency by not purchasing it at fair rates of exchange.

This is how the Chinese inflate our debt to them. We borrow X amount of dollars from them at a lower rate of exchange, then they manipulate the currency so that we have to pay X + % more dollars to them for the same exchange. The rate of exchange changes, and, as a consequence, it changes the value of our money.

That's why our national debt is even more dangerous now than in the past. That's why abandoning the Gold Standard was in some ways the beginning of the end of our stable economy.There is some interesting history to this. Gold was not always the prevailing standard. In fact, in the 1800s, silver miners joined together to try and influence the government to adopt a silver standard for our currency.There are a number of reasons why Silver was not a viable. One is the chemical composition and properties of gold. Gold (chemical symbol Au) has a 0 valence. It does not need to combined with other elements to achieve equilibrium. That means it does not oxidize in its pure form. Silver (Ag, atomic number 47) has a valence of +1. Silver has the most contact resistence of any metal (it is harder than gold), but it tarnishes in the presence of ozone or hydrogen sulfide.Search the Internet for Horace Tabor and you will find an interesting American story of a silver

miner.http://www.babydoe.org/horace.htmThe story of Horace Tabor was actually portrayed in a grand opera composed by Douglas Moore entitled "The Ballad of Baby Doe," the title role of Baby Doe was sung by Beverly Sills and is recorded. You should look it up and listen. It is a beautiful opera on Americana with some lovely music.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ballad_of_Baby_Doe

I was in the chorus of this opera in college. it was a wonderful introduction to history. Far more fun than reading a stuffy history book!

Achieving unity and motivating others

2008-07-30T11:58:00.000-07:00

How do you unify groups and build consensus? Finding common issues and interests, for one.
Concentrating on substantial issues that the two groups share. This is the place to start.

Why does this help? Because it emphasizes what we have in common. It brings us together in a non-confrontational, non-threatening way to discover how much there is for us to work on together rather than emphasizing our differences. Real enthusiasm is contagious.

What makes enthusiasm real or superficial? Whether or not it is based on ACTION, not just words. Give people something concrete to do and get them involved. When you get them involved, they become a stakeholder in the project. Over time, this will inspire them to feel a sense of belonging and produce the level of enthusiasm you desire to see from them.

To be honest, I feel enthusiastic when I feel my actions are based on a sense of purpose.

If the evidence of my experience indicates anything, it indicates that, when we concentrate on common issues and goals, the tension between two groups has lessens and the two groups come ogether. When we let our egos do the talking and get distracted into the "power" game of whose group is controlling the agenda, we fall into the "us" against "them" negative spiral and do worse than get nowhere, we drive ourselves further apart.

Let's achieve unity by actively seeking common ground. Let's focus on what works. Let's do our jobs and focus on our agenda in positive, productive ways.

Leading by example

2008-07-30T11:42:00.000-07:00

Remaining focused is one of the secrets to success.

Focus on what you need to be doing, not on what others are doing. If you are focused on your own job, you get it done. If you let others divert your focus from what you are supposed to be doing yourself to start playing hall monitor and focusing on what they want you to do in response, you are reacting to them, and they are controlling the (that means your and their) agenda.

The best way to handle criticism or divisiveness is to REMAIN FOCUSED on the job at hand and ignore those who want to distract you from getting your job done. If you do that, the nebulous "they" who are trying to break your focus will either fall in line or go away over time. So the reactive tactics of attack and respond -- does it work? No. Will it unite your group? No.

So, the first criteria in determining what should we do is to ask ourselves, "How is what we're doing now working for us?" And, if it is not working, then we know that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result, so doing the same thing again won't change the result. That means we have to do something different to get a different result.

Politics is the art of compromise. That's why leaders do not have the words "should" and "ought" in their vocabulary. Why? Because those words are judging words. They separate, they do not unify. They do not influence people, they invalidate people. When you use those words, you are talking AT someone, not talking WITH them. Those words are not words of respect.

So, I am suggesting that the knee-jerk responses to divisive tactics do not work, and there is no indication that it will produce any different a result next time. We have to change our own attitudes and behavior and reactions to get a different result. I'm not claiming that this will be any more successful, but at the very least IT WILL DO NO HARM.

Let's choose to LEAD instead of REACT. You lead by example. Or, at least, good, successful leaders do.

If you want your group or environment to reflect a certain agenda, focus on what you're doing, not on someone else. You cannot control the actions or others, the only thing any of us can control is ourselves -- our own attitude and behavior. When we do that -- it seems miraculous, but it happens often -- we find that others will begin to respond differently.

Remember, positivity and negativity move in spirals. You can be positive and set things in motion to spiral up in a positive direction, or you can be negative and watch things spiral down and out of control in a negative direction. It becomes something of the nature of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is a question of personal choice -- YOU DECIDE whether you want to be in control of the agenda and LEAD by your own conscious choices and action or FOLLOW someone else's lead by your own unthinking negative reactions.

We are always responsible, even when we are not in control. Because our being in control or not is a conscious choice in and of itself.

The politics of fear: A renewed assault on the American people

2008-07-30T11:38:00.000-07:00

I was watching all the news shows this morning and came acorss the rehash of Charlie Black's statement about how another terrorist attack would help the McCain campaign, then they proceeded to discuss the subject. The reality of what he said may be true, which would be disturbing enough, but the fact that he would say it out loud is disgusting. We have let the Republicans ride the fear horse through two elections to victory now. Are we really stupid enough to fall for it AGAIN?

Pundits apparently believe that voters would flock to McCain if something like this happened based on the fact that the only poll issue where he dominates Obama is on national security and terrorism. I find this both depressing and discouraging, but even more so, I find it alarming. Have we really learned nothing from the last seven years of corruption and incompetence? If Al Quaeda were to attack us, shouldn't the first finger we point be at Osama bin Laden, then GWB for diverting resources from bin Laden and Afghanistan to Iraq?

And what, may I ask, has McCain done to earn this confidence? The war is still not won (we won a world war in four years). The surge has not worked (if it had, we wouldn't be there now). Al Quaeda recruitment is up thanks to the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The Talliban and the warloads have REcaptured a significant area of Afghanistan that was under NATO control at one time. And then, again, there is "the strategy is working" nonsense. If this is a strategy working, then spare me -- I don't want to find out what happens when the strategy isn't working.

Also, increasing troop strength is not a strategy, it is a tactic. Strategies involve comprehensive plans for diplomacy and economic and military tactics to achieve a broader goal. We haven't even bothered to define what "success" is in Iraq. So, how do we know when we've gotten there?

I have read McCain's position papers, and I do not find that he speaks with all that much authority, in spite of his street cred in military and foreign affairs. So what am I missing?

He has lost his integrity. The maverick has died and the panderer has taken over. He has flip-flopped on taxes, immigration, FISA, the environment, drilling in ANWR and the continental shelf, free trade, and, most of all, TORTURE. How can anyone trust a man that will obviously do anything, including abandoning a principle of such high moral value, as WAS his stance on torture. And they called Kerry a flip-flopper.

Can someone please explain to me why the American people would flock to the incompetent, corrupt party that brought us 9/11, Katrina, Afghanistan and Iraq with any illusion that they could keep us safer? Iran is now playing in limited theatres now, or so the movie trailers indicate, if you watch CNN.

I just don't get it.

Immigration, punishment and border security: How effective is it?

2008-07-30T11:20:00.000-07:00

Comments are providing me with much inspiration today (at least to argue with!). One comment has to do with enforcement and punishment being the answer to illegal immigration. In one of my blogs on immigration, a poster commented:

"If laws are not enforced then chaos results. It doesn't matter if it drugs,
immigration, whatever...Punish those who violate the laws and order returns.The
problem isn't immigration reform it's immigration enforcement, starting with
punishment of employers who hire illegals and exacerbate the problem.So stop
whining and get on the right side of this issue."

OK, let's examine that. First, with respect to crime, then as it applies to immigration enforcement (of existing laws).

First, crime has risen almost at the same rate as have punishments become stiffer. Deterrence is not achieved by harsher punishment, according to many scientific studies. The following link examines crime rates by states and designates those states that do not have capital punishment statutes during the years surveyed:

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?scid=12&did=169

Surprisingly enough, at least to those proponents of stiffer sentencings and the death penalty, stiffer penalties and increased enforcement do not, in and of itself deter crime. Crime in states with NO death penalty were significantly lower than crime in states that did have the death penalty. We can only assume from the statistics that stiffer penalties and capital punishment do not deter crime as their right-wing conservative proponents would like us to assume.

"In his Scientific American magazine article entitled, "The Case of the Unsolved Crime Decline," criminologist Richard Rosenfeld examines why U.S. crime rates dropped more than 40% in the 1990's and what lessons current policy-makers can learn from this decline. Rosenfeld provides an overview and evaluation of previous research showing a link in the crime rate decline and factors such as changes in demographics, law-enforcement practices, economic conditions, incarceration rates, domestic violence and firearm policies, and the use of guns by young drug dealers. He concludes that while each of these may have contributed toward the decline in serious violent and property crime rates, some of the policies also produced unintended policy effects that could have been avoided if research-based policy experiments had been conducted. For example, stiffer sentences for adult drug offenders, a policy designed to deter crime, may actually facilitate the criminal careers and shorten the lives of the youthful drug sellers who take their place. Based on his research, Rosenfeld provides three lessons that he believes society can draw that may help anticipate and even head off the next crime rate rise. These lessons include dividing crime trends into their component parts, looking for unintended policy effects and engaging in research-based policy experiments before new programs are implemented. (Scientific American, February 2004)"

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?&did=2374

"Death and Deterrence Redux: Science, Law and Causal Reasoning on Capital Punishment: In an article in the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, Dr. Jeffrey Fagan of Columbia University describes numerous serious errors in recent deterrence studies, including improper statistical analyses and missing data and variables that are necessary to give a full picture of the criminal justice system. Fagan writes, “There is no reliable, scientifically sound evidence that [shows that executions] can exert a deterrent effect…. These flaws and omissions in a body of scientific evidence render it unreliable as a basis for law or policy that generate life-and-death decisions. To accept it uncritically invites errors that have the most severe human costs.” Since the landmark Supreme Court decision in Furman v. Georgia in 1972, dozens of studies have been performed to determine whether future murderers are deterred by the death penalty. In the past five years, Fagan writes, a “new wave” of studies has emerged, claiming that each execution prevents 3-32 murders, depending on the study. Some of these studies tie pardons, commutations, exonerations, and even irrational murders of passion to increases in murder rates. While many of these studies have appeared in academic journals, they have been given an uncritical and favorable reception in leading newspapers. Fagan takes issue with this lack of serious and adequate peer review by fellow researchers. He analyzed this research and found that "this work fails the tests of rigorous replication and robustness analysis that are the hallmarks of good science."(4 Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 255 (2006))"

"Deaths of Children in the US: New Report - Apparently, the US's use of the death penalty is not improving its standing in the world community when it comes to the deaths of children. In a February 7, 1997 Report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (part of U.S Dept. of Health and Human Services), from 1950-1993 child homicide rates in the U. S. tripled. CDC compared the U.S. with 25 other industrialized countries and found that "the United States has the highest rates of childhood homicide, suicide, and firearm-related death among industrialized countries." Almost all of these other industrialized countries have stopped using the death penalty.

The report found that: .The overall firearm-related death rate among U.S. children less than 15 years of age was 12 times higher than among children in the other 25 countries combined. The firearm-related homicide rate in the U.S. was nearly 16 times higher than in all of the other countries combined. The firearm-related suicide rate was nearly 11 times higher.

The report noted that previous studies have shown an association between rates of violent childhood death and low funding for social programs, economic stress related to participation of women in the labor force, divorce, ethnic-linguistic heterogeneity, and social acceptability of violence. (Rates of Homicide, Suicide, and Firearm-Related Death Among Children - 26 Industrialized Countries, 46 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 101 (Feb 7, 1997)) In comparing the rate of death by handguns in eight industrialized countries, the United States stands out with a rate of death by handguns that is much higher than the rate of other countries. The United States is also the only country of the eight to retain use of the death penalty. In most foreign countries, gun control laws are more restrictive and gun owners are assigned more responsibility. (Washington Post, 4/4/98) "
The plethora of studies providing evidence that stiffer penalties and capital punishment do not deter crime is significant.

So we can see that stricter enforcement and stricter penalties do not necessarily deter crime. Why not? Because there is no real causal relationship between the consequences of punishment to the motivation to commit crime, at least not in violent crime, drug abuse, dealing or trafficking and petty crime. A criminal doesn't get up in the morning and say to himself, "Hey, self! Now that there are stiffer penalties for crime, I guess we won't be commiting crime anymore. It's time to reform!" Nor does a criminal say, "Now that the penalty for comitting a crime is lighter, let's go do it!" The fact is that the consequences of crime do not significantly impact the motivation to commit or not to commit a crime. It is part of the criminal mindset that (a) they won't get caught in the first place, and (b) they don't think that far ahead. They do not "look before they leap," if you will. Or they view the potential rewards worth the risk.

Now, as for how this impacts illegal immigration. What causes a person to leave their home and extended family and to risk life and limb to sneak into a country illegally? It is only rational to assume that the person views the risk worth taking -- that the cost-benefit analysis indicates he would be better off somewhere else NO MATTER WHAT THE COST. So, that means you can't stop illegal immigration by enforcement and punishment alone. The root causes of immigration must be neutralized. All those causes produce a state of desperation in the illegal immigrant that make that person willing to risk it all for nothing more than hope. Those root causes are poverty, lack of opportunity, lack of safety, lack of hope, lack of education and jobs, corrupt government in his home country, etc. More police on our border won't fix that problem.

This is why a comprehensive immigration package must address the root causes of illegal immigration in order to really stop it. A robust diplomatic and economic relationship with the home countries causing the majority of the problem must be included in any strategy that really addresses this problem.

Enforcement and punishment in and of themselves will not do the trick. We couldn't build enough jails or hire enough border guards or build fences tall enough or thick enough or long enough. The problem is bigger than that.

We've got to get real about this problem and quit hiding behind worn-out ideological myths.

Comprehensive immigration reform: The next step

2008-07-30T11:09:00.000-07:00

Regarding my post about immigration, I received a comment I would like to share with you and then discuss some more of the details:

"Nice speech, but....immigration laws are not exclusionary they are
necessary and fair. Your post is full of inconsistencies and conveys a
message of naive sympathy without the realization of consequences. Do us
all a favor and do your homework before you come here with this type of weak
diatribe."

My reponse:

"I have done my homework.... This is not a definitive view of the
immigration problem by any means, nor was it intended to be. I was addressing
the societal attitudes that feed not only the immigration problem, but erect
barriers to its solution. I will expound on this in some future posts."

Now, for a further discussion. Let's make an assumption: the current conflict of approach to this problem is getting us nowhere fast. The current political environment where the two parties have adopted positions that allow for no compromise, no "wiggle room" in attempting to come up with a comprehensive plan have produced exactly that -- no compromise and no plan -- in other words, nothing.

We are still in, at best, the same place we were last year, five years ago, 10 years ago, etc., except the reality is that the longer this problem goes unresolved, the greater it grows. The number of illegal aliens is growing, the years of assimilation into American culture is growing, and the number of natural born citizens to illegal immigrants is compounding and complicating an already difficult problem.

Even more important, because of our real concern for terrorism, drug trafficking and organized crime -- concern for border integrity is growing. Our social systems -- healthcare and education, in particular, are carrying a huge unfunded burden in caring for some of these individuals. All this happens at the expense of the American taxpayer. And worse, because we have condemned these people to a shadow existence, they are not included in our tax base and do not bear their fair share of these expenses. All this contributes to the atmosphere of hostility and antipathy felt by some Americans toward these people, and some of the tactics used in previous history to turn societies against, for example, Jews in Nazi Germany, are being used against immigrants toward the same end. It is easier to demonize, reject and abuse beings that are dehumanized -- not quite like us, and therefore, not quite as good as us. It is not effective, it is not humane, it does not represent the best of America and what it stands for, but it is and has been happening for some time.

Comprehensive immigration reform must provide solutions for a number of problems simultaneously: national security, border control, drug interdiction, reducing crime, tracking and management of visas and foreign nationals inside the U.S., a clear path to legal immigration, raising the quotas on visas so that legal entry is a viable alternative, a viable means of providing a legal path for temporary foreign workers inside the U.S., and a humane, rational means of handling illegal immigrants already inside the U.S. that does not destroy families and communities. That's a tall order. But to try to accomplish a real solution in piecemeal fashion does not work either. It must be comprehensive.

The goal of my original post ws to address the social attitudes that are preventing us from solving the immigration problem. Whenever our country undergoes an economic downturn, it is customary to look away from the real issues and turn our attention to those that are different from us when looking for blame -- that's a much easier target. But it is neither accurate or effective. Just as NAFTA has inaccurately become the poster child for all that is wrong with our economy and the loss of jobs and industry, illegal immigrants have become the scapegoat for Americans living in an increasing difficult economy.

So, knowing all this, what do we do? The first step is to acknowledge that what we have been doing is not working. When you find yourself in a hole, quit digging. Hopefully, we have reached a point, or are quickly approaching the point, where we will be willing to admit this and become more open to compromise and focused on real solutions.

The biggest sticking point is what to do with the approximately 12 to 20 millions illegal immigrants in the U.S. today. Even the ones that initally entered into this country with a visa that has now expired cannot be found, as discussed by NPR on June 14, 2006:

"Many immigrants who are in the United States illegally never jumped a fence,
hiked through the desert or paid anyone to help them sneak into the country.
According to a recent study, 45 percent of illegal immigrants came here on a
legal visa, and then overstayed that visa."

This was confirmed by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The Center for Immigration Studies, in a March 2008 report by David Seminara, reported the following:

"Mention the words 'illegal immigrant' and most Americans conjure up images of
desperate migrants sneaking across the Mexican border. There is another side to
America’s immigration problem, however, that most know very little about — those
who come with valid, temporary visas and do not return home. According to a 2006
Pew Hispanic Center study,1 nearly half of the 12 million-plus
illegal aliens in America arrived legally with temporary, non-immigrant visas.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) estimates that a 'substantial'
percentage of America’s illegal population is made up of visa overstays — their
estimates range from 27 to 57 percent. The Government Accountability Office
(GAO) noted in a 2004 report2 on visa overstays that DHS may be
significantly underestimating the magnitude of the visa overstay problem —
noting that the DHS study only quantified the number of visa overstays in the
illegal population — whereas many who overstay visas are later able to legalize
their status."

"The United States Citizenship and Immigration
Services (USCIS), a bureau of the United States Department of Homeland Security DHS), is the primary federal agency tasked with enforcing the Immigration and Nationality Act of the United States of America. Illegal immigration to the United States is a criminal[1] and civil[2] offense sanctionable by fines[3], imprisonment[4], and deportation[5].

In March of 2006 the Pew Hispanic Center (PHC) estimated the undocumented population ranged from 11.5 to 12 million individuals[52], a number supported by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO)[53]. Using data from March of 2004, PHC estimated[54]
Country of Origin/Percent of all illegal immigrants:

Mexico-57%; Central America (and to a lesser extent, South America)-24%; Asia- 9%; Europe and Canada-6%; Other-4%
According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security[55], the countries of origin for the largest numbers of illegal immigrants are as follows:
For 2005: 28%, 9%, 28%, 133%, 21%"

Dangers

There are significant dangers associated with illegal immigration. Aside from the possibility that they may be intercepted and deported, some considerably more dangerous outcomes have been known to result from this activity.

Slavery. Indian, Russian, Thai, and Chinese women have been reported brought to the United States under false pretenses to be then used as sex slaves. “As many as 50,000 people are illicitly trafficked into the United States annually, according to a 1999 CIA study. Once here, they're forced to work as prostitutes, sweatshop laborers, farmhands, and servants in private homes.” US authorities call it “a modern form of slavery.” [74] [75]

Prostitution. The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women has reported scores of cases where women were forced to prostitute themselves. “Trafficking in women plagues the United States as much as it does underdeveloped nations. Organized prostitution networks have migrated from metropolitan areas to small cities and suburbs. Women trafficked to the United States have been forced to have sex with 400-500 men to pay off $40,000 in debt for their passage.” [76] At least 45 thousand Central American children attempt to illegally immigrate to the United States every year and many of them finish in brothels as sex slaves, according to Manuel Capellin, director in Honduras of the humanitarian organization House Alliance[77].

Death. Death by exposure has been reported in the deserts, particularly during the hot summer season. [78] “Exposure to the elements” encompasses hypothermia, dehydration, heat strokes, drowning, and suffocation. Also, illegal immigrants may die or be injured when they attempt to avoid law enforcement. Martinez, points out that engaging in high speed pursuits while attempting to escape arrest can lead to death. [79]" (Wiki)

The human tragedy of all this is the realization that conditions in the home countries of these illegal immigrants is so bad that they are willing to risk everything just for a chance to come here and make a better life for themselves and their families. The human shame of all this is that so-called legitimate businesses use and abuse these workers with low or no pay (indentured servitutde in exchange for the cost of their passage and entry into this country), no benefits, poor living conditions, poor working conditions -- all in the name of easy profit. Then there are criminals -- human traffickers (coyotes), drug traffickers, brothel pimps and madams, and many more scum from the underbelly of our American society that profit from their misery and suffering. To compound this, the social structures that would normally protect and defend them and us from this abuse and crime are unaccessible to them because it would mean compromising their secrecy and put them in a position where they would be deported back to the country that was so horrible until they were willing to endure all of this just to stay here.

This post is not an attempt to discuss the finer points of an immigration policy. Reading the proposed bills that already exist will familiarize the reader with some of the proposed options. Rather, it is the intent of this post to confront the real issues that serve as social and political barriers to a real solution to this problem.

I invite you to enter into this conversation and propose your own set of solutions. How would you "fix" this? How do we get past the prejudice and political grandstanding to really face this problem once and for all with a real, long-term solution that works for everyone?

As Dukakis said, there is such a thing as redemption of the soul

2008-07-30T11:03:00.000-07:00

On the DNC blog site, we have instituted a tradition called the Friday Forum. Each Friday, we pick a general subject and everyone posts blogs or research on that subject. We recently had a Friday Forum on "racism." I was reading over some of the comments about the blogs on racism and ran across some comments made on one of mine. One poster made a comment that our job was to register more voters to basically outnumber the racist ones in order to win the election. That certainly may be a short-term solution, but not the long-term or best one. I commented as follows:

"The problem I have with your assumption is... that you appear to believe that there is no redemption of the soul, that no one is capable of enlightenment or a change of heart in the face of new evidence or more facts or a better argument or the wisdom gained from experience.I do not accept that. The job is not trying to make racists be in the minority just by registering more voters who don't believe as they do, it is to actually change their hearts and minds to learn how to think and live a better way."

Another poster followed with a comment that I would like to publicly respond to:

"If we as a nation have not accomplished this in the last 200 years; I seriously
don't see us accomplishing it in the next 5 months."

I found that disheartening, because it shows a level of apathy and acceptance of what clearly should be unacceptable and lack of faith in humanity that is, frankly, truly depressing. And not the democratic (small "d") or the Democratic Party way.

The title of this blog was taken from a 1988 presidential debate where Dukakis and GHWB were discussing the subject of enlightenment and political party. It made for a great joke, but, as is true with much humor, it was also a profound statement of what Democrats believe. Not just in religious terms, necessarily, but in terms of their faith in the ultimate goodness of humanity and the power of the people to work together and overcome the challenges that face us.

To look back over the last 200 years and see no accomplishment, no forward movement and no hope for progress in the future does not acknowledge the reality of how far we have come as a society (regardless of how far we have to go). It renders moot all the sacrifices of the abolitionists, suffragists, Gandhi, Lincoln, Roosevelt, JFK, LBJ, RFK, MLK, and all the civil rights leaders of the '60s on, many of whom gave their lvies in an effort to move our society and their people forward.
I know better from my own life experience. I was born in 1953. When I entered grammar school, all schools were segregated. It was not until I was in junior high school that integration took place where I lived. I remember feeling so sorry for the first handful of students that were bused to our all-white school. Then, in high school, a neighboring black high school was closed and all the students were transferred to my high school. We were called the "Rebels," complete with Confederate Battle Flag and "Dixie" as our fight song. Can you imagine being a black student -- a senior in high school -- and having your school closed to be sent to such a place? Oddly enough, though, the kids, for the most part, got along. It was the parents that were the problem. This, even back then, is a sign of hope. I remember the first time black teachers were transferred to teach in white schools and vica versa.

Now, all those "firsts" are a part of distant history. Kids go to school where both teachers and students are a mixture of races and ethnic backgrounds. It is taken for granted.
I remember when I was little girl, my grandmother would take me downtown on the bus. We would dress up in our "Sunday best" with hats and gloves, ride the bus to town and go shop at Sears and Gayfers and Penneys and, for the big finale, we would get a hot fudge sundae at the Kress' lunch counter. Back then, bathrooms and water fountains and even lunch counters were segregated.
Once again, this is a distant memory of the past. Kids for several generations now have not had that experience.

Another blogger posted a comment wherein we were discussing the true story of the film Mississippi Burning. Her (I think) nephew (who was black) watched it, but didn't believe it had really happened. He couldn't imagine it was really true. Given our country's racist history, how wonderful is that?

When I was in college, one of my sorrority sisters was dating a black college student. An incident involving one of the campus security guards attacking the black boy because he kissed his white girlfriend in public ended in a three-day demonstration by students and the security officer being placed "on leave" briefly.

Now, there are as many children of mixed race attending schools as there are racially pure students, and many parents of mixed race as well. Celebrities of mixed race such as Jessica Alba, Mariah Carey, the Rock, Derek Jeter and many others have joined the ranks of individuals who have distinguished themselves with little emphasis or attention placed on their racial background. Both white kids and black kids and every other color of kid wants to play baseball like Derek Jeter and look like Jessica Alba and sing like Mariah Carey (hell, so do I!).

Now we have not just the first "black" candidate, but a man who is racially mixed as well vying for the most powerful position of Leader of the Free World as POTUS with a real chance of winning.
So, all I can say is, don't tell ME that we haven't come a long way and that there is no hope society can change. It already has. We may have a few miles to go before we sleep (as Robert Frost would say), or put this issue to bed, more accurately, but we have, indeed, come a long way, baby!

The original meaning of the term "road block" -- A true story

2008-07-30T10:57:00.000-07:00

When I was about four y/o, I was riding in a car with my grandparents and great-grandmother headed to my great-grandfather's cabin on Fowl River (where our permanent home now stands). It was about 1957. My grandfather's father (Big Daddy) lived on a piece of property on a fresh-water river with no air conditioning, no indoor bathroom (an honest-to-God outhouse) and an old-fashioned ice box that was actually cooled with a block of ice each day. He cooked on a kerosene stove. There was no electricity in the cabin at the time. But I loved to go there because I could swim and play in the river with my grandfather's dog, Betty.

On this particular trip, we were in my grandfather's un-air-conditioned Ford with the windows down and Mother Nature providing what little air conditioning was available in the 90-degree heat of summer. As we approached an intersection where we turned off to go to the river, I saw some men in white robes with white hoods standing in front of each lane of cars in every direction.

Well, I may have been only four, but I knew it wasn't Halloween, so they weren't pretending they were Casper the Friendly Ghost. Before I opened my mouth to ask the flood of questions that my grandmother knew would come, she pulled me close to her and "shshed" me. I could immediately tell she was scared, as was my grandfather and great-grandmother. When we got up to tthe front of the intersection, two men in white robes with their faces covered by hoods stood in front of the car at "attention" with rifles in their arms. Another of the men in one of the white robes came up to the car and pushed a bucket at my grandfather saying, "Good morning, Louis." My grandfather reached in his pocket and pulled out some money and put it in the bucket. The men moved aside and let us through the intersection.

Well, as you can well imagine, the minute we got through the intersection, all the adults breathed a sigh of relief, and I started in with a barage of questions. My grandmother tried to explain that these were bad men. I wanted to know why Pappaw gave them money, then. My grandmother explained that they had to or the bad men would beat Pappaw up and might even hurt us. Well, it didn't make any sense to me at all, but I was only four.

Later, when I was a teenager and long after my great-grandfather had passed on, my grandfather and I were talking about the event. I asked him, "Why did you give them money? Why didn't you just report them to the sheriff?" My Pappaw smiled sadly and looked me in the eye and said, "Honey, that WAS the sheriff with the bucket in his hand."

He then went on to explain how the KKK used fear and intimidattion to operate under the cloak of secrecy. He was worried about his elderly father at the time. With no running water, no telephone and very few permanent residents on the river, if Pappaw has pissed the KKK off, they might have taken it out on Big Daddy. He said that the way it worked was, if you pissed the Klan off, they would burn a cross in your yard in the middle of the night as a warning. You would wake up to the racket and see the burning cross in your yard with a bunch of trucks lined up, their bright lights on, just to let you know you had better "straighten up." If you really pissed them off or didn't take the first warning, the would set your house of fire, he called it "burning you out." Since Big Daddy had no running water, just a hand pump, and there was no fire department to save his house, if they had set the house on fire, it would have burned to the ground and Big Daddy would have been unable to do anything about it. Then, he said, if that didn't straighten you up, they would set your house on fire, surround it, and shoot at you when you tried to escape. I looked at him in horror. It was hard for me to belief a sheriff would do that, and, for that matter, COULD do that and get away with it.

Later, my father, who was an educator and administrator, was involved in a disagreement with the School Board (his employer) about the Bertie Mae Davis case. Ms. Davis had sued the public school system regarding segregation. My father recommended to the board that they could either elect to meet the demands of the judge and have some control over how they integrated the school system, or they could waste money by fighting the court case, which they would eventually lose, then be forced into busing or other measures to achieve integration. The board stubbornly refused to listen to my dad, who was absolutely right. History proved him so. At that time my family lived in a nice middle-class suburb in Mobile. That night, we were awakened by a gun shot that went through our living room window. When we woke up and my dad looked outside, there was a burning cross in our front yard.

Sure, we called the police, but, of course, the culprits were never found or arrested.

That is my experience with the KKK. The moral of this story is that our homegrown terrorists operated in secrecy and were able to get away with it because they instilled fear in everyone -- not just the black community.

--------------------

I will leave you with a repost of one final thought:

This is probably the most quoted statement attributed to Edmund Burke, but bears a striking resemblance to the narrated theme of Sergei Bondarchuk's Soviet film version of Tolstoy's book "War and Peace", in which the narrator declares:

"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."

And in the words of MLK:

"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence
of our friends."

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that
matter."

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

What is it really like to live in a hurricane zone?

2008-07-30T10:51:00.000-07:00

I have heard some very unsympathetic attitudes expressed regarding the victims of Katrina and Rita, and this has great personal meaning to me. I was born in New Orleans and most of my dad's family still lives there. I live in Theodore, AL, in the delta south of Mobile, AL, near Bayou La Batre, which was also devastated by Katrina, and the year before that, Ivan.

The condemnation spewing out of conservative talking heads regarding the victims of Katrina and other natural disasters is an example of how ideology gets in the way of truth and compassion. The idea that what happened in New Orleans, Mississippi and the affected areas of the Gulf Coast was somehow the fault of the people living there is ridiculous.

Many people who don't live on a coastal area where hurricanes are common don't realize the expense of fleeing from a hurricane. Not only do you have to spend the money and labor to board your house up and secure it (along with the rest of your extended family's homes), unplugging computers and phones and appliance, and moving anything on the bottom floor that might flood up the stairs, including any furniture that you value. You also have to stock up on food, water, ice and other supplies, including gasoline (which always raises about 50-100% in value right before and after a storm) to fuel both cars and electric generators (electricity and phone service were out for about six weeks after Hurricane Frederick and about four weeks for Ivan and Katrina). Businesses usually don't open for a few days to several weeks or months (depends on the level of devastation), including gas stations -- anything that requires power won't work. So, no work, no gas, no take-out food, no grocery stores. Things like drinking water, ice, refrigeration and air conditioning are better than gold. Kitchens become little more than a coleman stove, fireplace or bonfire. Most of the time the larger hurricanes occur during the hottest part of the summer when temperatures reach over 90 degrees.

If you evacuate (and living on the water, it is necessary), you have the expense of gasoline to get to and from wherever you're going, hotel bills, restaurant and food, water, ice, Rx medicine, etc. One hurricane and evacuation can run up from $700 to $1000 dollars a pop per person. And in the last few years, our area has been hit with two or three major hurricanes a season (one season there was about one a week for a couple of months), so that's about $3000 out of your regular income (if you get paid during the hurricane at all, some don't). In fact, when Katrina came, I was tapped out of extra cash and stayed in our home on the water because I really didn't have other options, including the fact that I couldn't find a place to board my cats or to take them with me. Luckily, the flooding and water from the river only got to the bottom floor of our house.

While all this is going on, if you work, you have to prepare your office for the storm, including securing the computer equipment and files, not just boarding up the outside. The biggest problem with hurricanes is flooding, as most of the rest of America found out during Katrina. While all this is going on and until power has been restored to the office building, no one is able to work. That means those who work for an hourly wage often don't get paid for several weeks, and when I say don't get paid, I mean they can't work to earn it and never get paid for the weeks their business is not operating. The bills, however, have no problem getting to your mailbox. Gasoline to run generators can cost over $1000 in a couple of weeks, and this just keeps the refrigerator and freezer going and maybe a fan or window-unit air conditioner.

Now, this is what it is like for someone of working age who has a decent job, at least some credit or savings, owns a car and has the ability to evacuate. What about those who are elderly, poor, unemployed, without transportation, who don't have a credit card to use to make a hotel reservation or pay for an airline or bus ticket, and who can't afford $1000 cash per person about three times a year? Keep in mind, if you don't have a car, you have to arrange for transportation and have enough money for bus fare or plane fare, etc. And most transportation companies in the affected area are trying to get themselves and their families out, too. How do you do all of that on an unemployment check that pays $212/week at the most? Or on a welfare check? On a social security check? And what about your pets? These are all the problems that faced not just the poor, but working class and middle class Americans during Katrina and Rita. And, as we know now, the devastation was over a large area, so you had to evacuate a much further distance than is usual.

And that dpesn't even begin to cover the expenses of cleaning up your yard and home, assuming you have a home to come home to. In disasters like Katrina, people weren't allowed to go to their homes for weeks. Mold and mildew in carpet, furniture and drywall could have been avoided if they had been able to get back to their homes and begin taking all that stuff out immediately. But the decision was made to lock the city down in order to prevent looting and crime, so the residents could not take care of their homes for almost a month. By that time, mildew and mold had ruined everything inside the house. Anything that might have been salvaged was beyond repair, increasing the cost of damages and repair. Most homeowners had to gut the inside of their houses and treat the framing with mold and mildew killer before they could even begin to have their homes repaired. My cousin waited six months for a FEMA trailer. He applied the day after the storm. The trailer was reclaimed by FEMA this past February, but he is still living with his Mom in her house because he couldn't find construction companies to work on the house. He waited six weeks to get an estimate for the repairs. He finally got someone to fix the roof, and he is now doing most of the work himself rather than wait any longer. But he still has to pay property taxes and mortgage payments on a house that is uninhabitable. And he was an upper middle class homeowner with insurance, a decent income and good credit.

To hear conservatives talk about how it was the responsibility of the individuals to get themselves out is just nuts. How? How were they supposed to do that? Most bus lines weren't running. Planes are grounded within a certain time before and after the storm. Taxis don't keep operating up to the last minute, assuming you could afford one. Rental cars are depleted very quickly once a storm has been declared to be headed your way. And all of that requires money in advvance or a credit card with a decent credit limit. The poor people in the Ninth Ward did not have the resources to just pick up and drive away. Nor did many middle class residents. And many of them paid for their poverty and/or lack of options with their lives or the lives of family members, friends and neighbors.

There was an "enlightenment" experienced by many Americans after Katrina in that most realized their government was not capable of handling a large disaster. If we can't handle a natural disaster that gives us days of warning, how in hell would we respond to coordinated multiple terrorist attacks affecting a large region or multiple metropolitan areas with no warning whatsoever? Katrina showed us just how unprepared and incomptent our government truly is.

But it also showed how the American people themselves without any government coordination will rise up and help their neighbors. People from my church and other churches in Mobile and the surrounding Gulf Coast area were in Bayou La Batre, Mississippi and New Orleans the minute after the storm armed with chainsaws, food, water, tents, clothes, medical supplies, etc. The government couldn't get to those people (or so they said), but our church did. For months, we provided these services free of charge and without government compensation, using volunteers to clean up, rebuild, cook meals, provide transportation to stores, doctors, etc. No one was worried about what race or economic class or religion the folks they were helping were. The only criteria was based on the fact that they needed help. This is what America is truly about.

The conservative talking heads who were chastising those devastated by these hurricanes were quick to judge and offer hostile criticism, but you didn't see them out in those communities in the heat and humidity and mosquitoes and devastation doing anything to help, did you?

As Rose Kennedy once said, "God's work must truly be our own."

Learning to argue effectively

2008-07-30T10:44:00.000-07:00

I have seen some expression of judgmental attitudes on political blogs (specifically here, the DNC blog) and rejection of posters who support controversial opinions (and that is a nice way to say it) and whether standing up against THEM is the same as standing up against THEIR ARGUMENT.

My father said it best: I have never lacked an opinion or the adequate wind to voice it!
So, let me offer this suggestion:

You cannot influence people who you summarily reject. Rejecting their fallacious argument is one thing, not agreeing with their opinion as well. But if you reject their very existence, you render yourself useless in any effort to persuade them of their incorrect thinking or opinions.

Unity is not about being in perfect agreement, if it were, then no one group of individuals, no matter how similar they were, would be able to unify.

Unity is about accepting people for who they are and where they are in life and in their own attitudes and beliefs. And appreciating their good traits and contributions along with their failings and less helpful actions or words. We must truly listen to each other with open ears and open hearts and open minds. From there, you can develop a relationship and try to improve each other's arguments with respectful dissent.

I have heard almost every one here on this blog say something I considered supremely stupid or inane at one time or another -- including myself. We are human. But, if we expect others to give us some slack when we fall short, we earn that privilege by offering to others first.

You earn respect by showing respect. If you find a post or an opinion you find offensive, attack that post or offense with facts and solid argument. Allow the poster to focus on the facts and let the facts speak for themselves. To do this, you must restrain yourself, remain objective and first actually read and think about what they say and why they are saying it. You do not have to agree with someone to understand them or accept where they are coming from.

I suggest that this judgmental sense of exclusivity is not going to work to unify us. Nor will it change anyone's mind. Much less will it contribute to solving the issues we discuss. Let's keep talking respectfully and really listen to each other.

After all, the Democratic Party is about the people. Our party is about love and acceptance. Our party is about accomplishing the greater good.

Love is not what you do when everything is great and convenient and when you feel like it. It's the conscious choice you make to do what is loving when it isn't convenient and when you don't feel like it and, even, when it requires sacrifice for the greater good.

My thoughts on welfare

2008-07-30T10:37:00.000-07:00

Welfare comprises only 1% of the Federal budget. The issue always comes up when our country hits hard economic times. It is easier to blame those less fortunate than ourselves rather than deal with the real problems that are causing the economic downturn.

Now, that is not to say that welfare is a perfect solution. But, as Bill Clinton said in the '90s, if it's not working perfectly, fix it, don't scrap it.

Reagan and the Republicans were very successful in selling the image of the "welfare mom" with a dozen illegitimate children by multiple fathers, sitting on her ass in a housing project with her Cadillac parkied outside, watching her big screen TV while sipping martinis. It wasn't real, but there were many people who were so angry that they were working so hard and achieving so little, so the diversion of this false image worked well for Republicans. Our society has never completely given up on that "fantasy." That's why welfare and welfare recipients are viewed with such antipathy by many of those who are more fortunate. I believe that part of it is that the fortunate look at the impoverished and become fearful because deep down inside they know it could happen to them. So they react by convincing themselves that they are different -- smarter, harder working, more moral, whatever -- and it consequently could never happen to them.

They are wrong. Many Americans lives on the edge of financial disaster. Especially now, since the housing market has devalued and most Americans' wealth is invested in their homes and real estate. We are just one illness, one accident, one loss of job, one death in the family, one natural disaster away from financial ruin. And that scares the hell out of most of us.

Predatory lenders have been able to practice their fraud with no regulation or restriction for years now. Credit card companies extend credit to those who really can't afford it, then hike up the interest rates the minute they go over their limit or are one day late on a payment.

The loss of a job can start a negative spiral that ends with ruined credit, the loss of a home or car or both and ends up with a previously middle class family living off the streets with their kids.

But, having said all that, there is a problem with welfare in that it does instill a sense of entitlement (the world or the government OWES me), does not require individuals to practice personal responsibility, does not instill independence and self-reliance and doesn't reward those who try to work. It is still often better financially for a parent to stay on welfare rather than take a minimum wage job with no benefits or health insurance, no child care, etc. To do so, she forfeits Medicaid for herself and her kids, public housing assistance and food stamps. So her paycheck has to be large enough to compensate her for all those losses in order for work to be better for her than welfare (cost-benefit analysis). And most minimum wage or low-wage jobs do not do so. We, in effect, punish those on welfare for going back to work.

We still have many aspects of welfare that need fixing. But we can't begin to do anything without jobs.

People can't get off welfare if there are no jobs. Fathers can't pay child support if there are no jobs.
We can't save for retirement, send our kids to college (to break the chain of poverty) or even pay our bills and maintain our credit without jobs.

The first order of business is job creation. When we create jobs, people work, our tax base grows and the burden of the cost of government is shared among a greater number of us, making our individual loads a little less. It helps everyone.

How global warming may destroy the Earth sooner than we think

2008-07-30T10:33:00.000-07:00

The polar ice caps are what cool the earth's atmosphere for the entire planet. They are composed of ice and permafrost. Because melted water is actually darker than ice, it absorbs more heat, raising the temperature of the water, compounding the warming exponentially.

Permafrost is actually more than just pure ice. It contains plant and animal material that, when warmed decompose and emit methane gas. This melting process is exponential. The warmer the atmosphere is, the more permafrost we lose. The more permafrost we lose, the warmer the atmosphere becomes. It becomes a vicious cycle that is not easily reversed and that has catastrophic consequences to our planet.

Once we lose the permafrost, we will lose the majority of the polar ice caps and the earth's air conditioning.

Link

"The scientists found the expansion of the lakes
between 1974 and 2000, fueled by a period of regional warming, increased methane
emissions by 58 percent. The melting permafrost releases carbon-rich remains of
plants and animals. These remains sink to the bottom of the lakes, decompose and
produce methane that bubbles up to the surface and into the atmosphere.Although
nowhere near as prevalent or long-lasting as carbon dioxide, methane is a far
more potent greenhouse gas, with more than 20 times the heat-trapping effect of
carbon dioxide. Methane is released by humans through burning of grasslands,
forest and wood fuel as well as by intense livestock activity, rice cultivation,
and industrial sources - and there is little doubt these activities have boosted
methane levels in the atmosphere. A study released Monday by the British
Antarctic Survey found that in the past 800,000 years methane had never tipped
750 parts per billion (ppb), but is now 1,780 ppb."

--------------------

We always thought that Armageddon (the earth on fire) would be the result of global thermonuclear war. It may very well end up being caused by the buildup of methane gas in the atmosphere ignited by a lightning storm that finally burns the earth's atmosphere into hell fire. Scientists have theorized that the initial blast could be greater than a combination of the strongest nuclear warheads or as devastating as a large meteor hitting the earth.

I have seen two specials on this problem. This is not something to take lightly.

The atrocity of Gitmo -- further horrors revealed.

2008-07-30T10:28:00.000-07:00

The writ of habeas corpus (requiring a warrant to search or take someone into custody) and due process (fair trial) are two of the most basic of democratic (small "d") principles. No government, no society can expect to last long that does not have as a fundamental principle of its existence to be justice. Injustice breeds revolution and chaos. With the exception of an orderly transfer of power, there is not much else that is as important to ensuring liberty as are these two principles.

The president has been given the authority to have anyone in this country arrested without warrant and declared an enemy non-combatant. Also, our military and the CIA can pretty much do the same in foreign countries. Many of these enemy non-combatants are detainees at Gitmo (nickname for our detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba). Most Americans don't know that the Gitmo detainees are not allowed to even see or speak to an attorney until they sign a confession of guilt. The attorney is not allowed to know the charges until then, and he often is denied access to the information against his client under the guise of the excuse that it is classified information of a national security nature.

So, how do you defend a client that you can't meet, that must sign a confession before they are even assigned an attorney, that the evidence against them is top secret and unavailable to you, that the administration does not even have to prove it had probable cause to arrest you in the first place?

This is what the detainees and their attorneys have been dealing with.

And before you make the assumption Bush's administration wants you to make about these prisoners -- that they're all very bad characters, too dangerous to be released or tried through our normal court system -- let me suggest a thought:

Anyone captured by our military (on or off American soil) and anyone on American soil can be arrested without a warrant or probable cause, declared an enemy non-combatant, tortured through rendition (secretly exporting them to a foreign intelligence agency that can legally torture in their country or to a CIA "warehouse" in a foreign country) or at Gitmo, stay in captivity indefinitely, never see a lawyer, never be told why they were detained -- all without the administration even having to inform their families of where they are, what is happening to them, why they were detained or what their future holds. All under the cloak of secrecy.

One of the reasons the administration chose to house these detainees at Gitmo is because they have total security and control over the facility. No visitors, reporters or even attorneys or other court officials are allowed on the island without express written permission from the Gitmo commander. And you can rest assured that whatever news reporters are shown is only what the administration wants them to see.If you were an innocent man and this potentially happened to you, would you trust the Bush administration to give you a fair trial under these circumstances?

If it can happen to anyone else, it can happen to you. And there is no one holding the administration accountable for any of it. This is crimes against humanity, the likes of which we have supported the death penalty when it applied to Slobodan Milosevic, the former president (dictator) of Serbia and Yugoslavia, who was indicted for war crimes.

So, why isn't Bush being indicted and arrested by the Hague for war crimes and crimes against humanity?

He should be. As should Cheney and others who created, promoted and followed this policy.

The story about gorillas...

2008-07-30T10:24:00.000-07:00

This is not an original story by me. I have seen it published on the Internet, but I can't remember where or by whom. It is a great illustration of change and change management:

There were a half-dozen gorillas in a cage. The keeper put a ladder in the middle of the cage and hung a bunch of bananas from the ceiling right above the
ladder.

The first gorilla approached the ladder, and when he touched it a strong stream of cold water hit all the gorillas. When he backed away from the ladder, the water stopped. This left the gorillas confused. What had they done wrong?

So, the next gorilla summoned up the courage to approach the ladder. The same result happened.The next time a gorilla approached the ladder, the whole group attacked him.One by one, the gorillas were replaced in the cage. As each new gorilla tried to get the bananas, the group attacked him.

Finally, all the original group of gorillas had been replaced. None of the gorillas remaining in the cage had any idea why the group attacked a new gorilla for approaching the ladder. None of them knew exactly why they participated in the attack.
The reason?

It had always been that way....

Changes in law regarding States of Emergency, COG and martial law

2008-07-30T10:16:00.000-07:00

In case of an emergency in the United States, Congress has long had the power to declare an emergency and set in motion all the U.S. provisions that deal with emergencies. There are the Patriot Act and the War and Emergency Powers Act of 1933 and more. Presidents over the years have assumed more and more power by issuing a multitude of Executive Orders, many of them secret. There is nothing in the constitution to authorize these, but they are “the law” none-the-less. There is also a National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/05/20070509-12.html) and a Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/05/20070509-12.html) which assigns all power to the executive branch in case of a catastrophic emergency.
The outlook for our democracy in case of emergency has always been bleak.

Our democracy is in danger with all the above lurking. Once an emergency is declared, we will live in a dictatorship. The situation today is MUCH WORSE than even the above would indicate. Prepare to UPDATE THE HORROR!

Congress has given Bush himself blanket authority to declare an emergency. Today the president can himself declare an emergency any time he wants to for ANY reason at all. We will live in the military dictatorship that follows. Congress can do nothing about it — ever. There will be no Congress.

There is no Act with a name for U.S. to look up. Bush got his new power in a way more devious than that. A few paragraphs giving such authorization were slipped into the massive defense bill, the 591-page Defense Appropriations Act of 2006:

On September 30, 2006, the Congress modified the Insurrection Act as part of the 2007 Defense Authorization Bill.

Section 1076 of the new law changes Sec. 333 of the “Insurrection Act,” and
widens the President’s ability to deploy troops within the United States to
enforce the laws. Under this act, the President may also deploy troops as a
police force during a natural disaster, epidemic, serious public health
emergency, terrorist attack, or other condition, when the President determines
that the authorities of the state are incapable of maintaining public order. The
bill also modified Sec. 334 of the Insurrection Act, giving the President
authority to order the dispersal of either insurgents or “those obstructing the
enforcement of the laws.” The new law changed the name of the chapter from
“Insurrection” to “Enforcement of the Laws to Restore Public Order.”
(Wiki)

The 2007 Defense Authorization Bill, with over $500 billion allocated to the military, and which also contained the changes to the Insurrection Act of 1807, was passed by a bipartisan majority of both houses of Congress: 398-23 in the House and by unanimous consent in the Senate. (Wiki) They amended U.S. martial law statutes. Maybe most in Congress have no idea what they did. There was no public debate or media attention. They were rushed through the Republican-controlled Congress before the 2006 elections and enacted into law.

Those paragraphs almost destroyed two acts which were obscure bulwarks of our liberty. One is the Posse Comitatus Act. The entire text of the Posse Comitatus Act is as follows:

18 U.S.C. § 1385 -
Use of Army and Air Force as posse comitatus

“Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances
expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any
part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute
the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years,
or both”. (Wiki)

The other is the Insurrection Act of 1807:

The laws are chiefly contained in 10 U.S.C. § 331 - 10 U.S.C. § 335. The general aim is to
limit Presidential power as much as possible, relying on state and local
governments for initial response in the event of insurrection. Coupled with the Posse Comitatus Act, Presidential
powers for law enforcement are limited and delayed.

Throughout U.S. history the latter had limited the president’s domestic
use of the U.S. military against the American people in case of lawlessness,
insurrection and rebellion. In order for military forces to be used under
the provisions of the revised Insurrection Act, the following conditions must be
met:

(1) The President may employ the armed forces, including
the National Guard in Federal service, to–
(A) restore public
order and enforce the laws of the United States when, as a result of a natural
disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack
or incident, or other condition in any State or possession of the United States,
the President determines that–
(i)
domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted
authorities of the State or possession are incapable of maintaining public
order; and
(ii)
such violence results in a condition described in paragraph (2); or
(B) suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence,
unlawful combination, or conspiracy if such insurrection, violation,
combination, or conspiracy results in a condition described in paragraph (2).
(2) A condition described in this paragraph is a condition that–
(A) so hinders the execution of the laws of a State or
possession, as applicable, and of the United States within that State or
possession, that any part or class of its people is deprived of a right,
privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law,
and the constituted authorities of that State or possession are unable, fail, or
refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity, or to give that
protection; or
(B) opposes or obstructs the execution of the
laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those
laws. (Wiki)

Accordingly, actions taken under the Insurrection Act have
always been exempt from the Posse Comitatus Act.[1][2]
(Wiki)

Now after 2006 the president can use the military as a domestic police force. That is the first critical point.

The second is he can do it by declaring an “emergency” in response to a natural disaster, disease outbreak, terrorist attack, and “any other condition.” A blank check!! For any reason! Under the newly amended statute, Bush does not even have to notify Congress of his intent to use military force against the American people. He just has to notify Congress after he has done so.

Bush would take over by declaring a state of emergency, starting all the administrative procedures already in statutes and in the often secret Executive Orders and Directives. It will be a military dictatorship. Google “martial law.” The Constitution will be suspended overtly or in effect. The Bill of Rights will be null and void. Congress and Federal courts will have no power. There will be no rules, no protections, AND NO ELECTIONS.

In countless practices for responding to such an “emergency,” practices by Cheney as well as others in government, there was never any plan for reconstituting Congress. An “emergency” will end even the appearance of the United States as a democracy.

I greatly fear that those planning to demonstrate at the Conventions in August could precipitate a state of “emergency.” Or a terrorist attack somewhere in the US could precipitate same. Bush could declare an emergency for that or any other reason. There is some speculation that he might find an excuse to do so - to cancel the November 4 election if Obama looks like the winner.

Continuity of Government (COG)

2008-07-30T10:13:00.000-07:00

The laws are already in place for the president to declare a national state of emergency, after which the Congress and the Judiciary would be disbanded and a group of administrators would take over the government.

If you read my blog on the state of emergency and the various acts that created this, you will see that the original act required Congress to declare an emergency, but it also required Congress to officially declare the emergency over. The original act was in, I believe, 1939, and that state of emergency was not officially called off by Congress until 1952. Under that act, there are several states of emergency still in effect, including one from 1971, that have never been declared over. Because of that, the president could effectively and legally establish a dictatorship now under COG.
A later amendment expanded national emergencies to include insurrection, natural disasters, etc., not just acts of war on the homeland. Katrina could have set the COG in motion should the president have decided to do so.

This blog is right. We are in much greater jeopardy of losing our republic than anyone imagines. The FISA law was just another nail in the coffin of democracy. There are several blogs I have written that apply to this (one is not an original article, but another’s work — credited properly):

http://www.democrats.org/page/community/post/lauraschneider/CNWl
http://www.democrats.org/page/community/post/lauraschneider/CRGP

The subject came up about the Patriot Act provisions, so I scanned the Patriot Act again and War and Emergency Powers Act of 1933. Since the War and Emergency Powers Act, every president has usurped lawmaking powers. Their ‘laws’ are called Executive Orders (EOs). These EOs, not our Constitution, are what is governing America today. The War and Emergency Powers Act enables … the president to declare a national emergency, and thereby become a dictator. (Wiki)

http://epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.html Link
http://www.sourcewatch.org/ind ex.php?title=State_of_national _emergency Link

Martial law, COG, states of emergency and the law that defines them

2008-07-30T10:02:00.000-07:00

The subject came up about FISA, the Patriot Act, et al., provisions, so I scanned the Patriot Act again and War and Emergency Powers Act of 1933.

“Since the War and Emergency Powers Act, every president has usurped lawmaking
powers. Their ‘laws’ are called Executive Orders (EOs). These EOs, not our
Constitution, are what is governing America today. The War and Emergency
Powers Act enables … the president to declare a national emergency, and thereby
become a dictator.” (Wiki)

http://epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.html Link
http://www.sourcewatch.org/ind ex.php?title=State_of_national _emergency Link

The National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive (National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20)” also known as the “National Continuity Policy” (Continuity of Government/COG) was signed May 9, 2007, by President George W. Bush. This assigns all power to the executive branch in the case of a catastrophic emergency.

In the original War and Emergency Powers Act of 1933, once a state of emergency is declared by Congress, the Constitution is effectively thrown out the window. The bad part is, we have state of emergency declarations that are still in effect from 1971. The state of emergency of 1933 was not ended by Congress until ~1952. As long as there is a state of emergency in effect, no matter how old, the president can effectively bypass Congress whenever he wants. At the point the Congress issues a state of emergency, we effectively live in a dictatorship. What's worse, Congress gave this power to declare a state of emergency to the president in the Defense Appropriations Act of 2006, which means that the president can unilaterally declare a state of emergency without Congress advice and consent.

The best part is that, once the president had asserted this power, the Congress and the Judiciary are defunct and can no longer impeach him or declare the acts upon which his dictatorial power based unconstitutional. This is an issue that we must address now in Congress. Along with presidential signing statements and executive privilege, we have given GWB all the tools he needs to seize control of our government.

Then there’s Blackwater, a mercenary army that has tens of thousands of troops serving in Iraq at twice the pay of our military and with legal immunity to commit murder and mayhem, accountable to no one. This firm has now purchased FIGHTER JETS. Why would a security firm need FIGHTER JETS? Begs the question, does it not?

So, in short, Congress must move to rescind these acts and end the states of emergency that are currently in effect. At this point, if the Congress tries to impach Bush or Cheney, all Bush has to do is declare that he is asserting his executive power under the state of emergency, and Congress, for all practical purposes, no longer exists.

Please DO NOT TAKE MY WORD FOR THIS. Read it for yourself at the links provided above!

Lovely thought, no?

My thoughts on torture, national security and patriotism

2008-07-30T09:58:00.000-07:00

I am a proud Democrat and supporter of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Given this context, it would seem that I would be happy to see any tactic that would help a Democrat win the White House put into play, but I do not subscribe to the Rovian tactics of smear politics -- not even if it helps my candidate.

There has been a raging debate about John McCain's performance as a POW. I was alive then, and I remember seeing him arrive back in the U.S. on national TV. I also remember that he had an opportunity to get out of the Hanoi Hilton, but refused to leave unless his men came with him.
Now, I have been criticized for thinking this way by some military folks, but I do not hold anything a soldier says while captive and tortured as being unpatriotic or treasonous. We don't really know what goes on or how valuable the information they provide is once they are broken. I just can't bring myself to judge anyone else on that score, because, although I am a very spiritually strong person, I don't believe I could withstand torture, regardless of how so-called "expert" the training given to me was.

First of all, there is a difference between training and real life. With training, you can always get out or make them stop. You don't have that option in real life. Most people I know would be singing like a canary if someone waterboarded them -- they would be willing to tell their captors virtually anything just to make them stop.

Which is the best argument AGAINST torture -- it is not effective. It has been found time and time again to not provide reliable information. Most military experts I have read or heard in interviews will assert that this is true. Most of the information we obtained from our terrorist non-combatants that was worthwhile and reliable was obtained through befriending them and winning their trust. This is not my opinion, there are several articles from reliable sources that have established this to be true.
So, our national security is not enhanced when we torture our prisoners. Worse, we no longer have the moral authority to protest the torture of our own soldiers. We have lost our moral standing in the world. And we violate the terms of the Geneva Accord when we do.

Another issue with breaking under torture is that once prisoners are taken into custody, they usually do not have access to the outside world or current information. This means that any information they give is, at best, historical and not necessarily relevant to what is happening right then (then being the moment of torture). So, even if the prisoner does sing like a canary, it may not be a new top-40 hit, but an "oldy goldy," so-to-speak.

So, in short, I have a problem with anyone -- even military personnel -- criticizing McCain for his performance under torture. Unless they have actually been tortured themselves -- in real life -- they can't really know, be really be certain of what they would do under those circumstances.
It's like listening to someone who has never been raped before talking about how they would have stopped the guy or it would never have happened to them. You just don't know until you've been there. What seems so clear from a safe distance or from hindsight is lost in the moment of panic and surprise when the event is actually happening.

I just can't condone this trashing of McCain as a POW. It is not helpful to the conversation. His policies are of poor enough quality that we have plenty of ammunition to use against him based on that alone.

And, finally, I can respect him for refusing to leave without his men. I'd like to think that I would do the same -- I know I would want to in my heart -- but, would I have the courage to refuse freedom in the face of what surely seemed like continuing torture and captivity with no sure end in sight? What about you? How could we be sure if we've never been there?

We need a comprehensive Energy policy -- short-term and long-term solutions to our energy crisis

2008-07-30T09:55:00.000-07:00

Bush's current streategy regarding opening up ANWR and offshore drilling is based on the "assumption" that demand for oil is high and, according to normal market fundamentals, this would raise the price. To lower the price, you would have to increase production (supply).

The problem is that demand is actually lower right now. Therefore, increasing production would not really impact the price. What is raising the price is the way speculators are manipulating the price to raise their profits, not a reaction to higher demand.

All the oil exploration in ANWR, offshore drilling, shale fields, will not have an impact on the supply for at least 5 to 10 years or more. It takes that long to begin drilling and get a new well into full production. The oil companies currently hold leases of which they have only explored or attempted to drill in less than 10-20%. That means there are 80% of the property (land and offshore) that has not even been explored yet. However, we won't really know the extent of the impact on the pristine wilderness in ANWR and the incalculable effect it will have on the destruction of habitat, which is already at crisis level for brown bears, polar bears, Arctic wildlife, etc., until it is too late to fix. Remember, oil wells require equipment and roads and bridges and pipelines and trucks and manpower. Manpower requires houses and stores and medical facilities. It's not just a little oil well sticking out of the ground in an otherwise unaltered wilderness.

Bush and his oil buddies are using this crisis to break down the restrictions on ANWR and offshore drilling for the purposes of continuing the big profits and extending our oil-based economy for many more years to come.

Why do you think the Saudis called the conference? They realize that Americans are waking up to the fact that their dependency on foreigh oil is a national security issue. If the Saudis don't do something to lower the price of gas, they will lose their best customers. And the resulting power over our economy and our foreign policy that they can exert now.

The only real answer to this crisis is to regulate the oil futures market to prevent speculators from artificially manipulating the price, stop the corporate welfare in tax breaks to the oil companies and impose a windfall profits tax on the oil companies.
A windfall profits tax will not cause the oil companies to increase their prices. Why? Because the more profit they make (above the threshhold for the windfall profits tax), the more they will have to pay in windfall profits taxes. It is an incentive for them to make a REASONABLE profit, but not a usurious one (windfall).

Releasing oil from the strategic petroleum reserves will have only a small effect and will not be enough to impact prices. It will, however, make us more vulnerable to oil embargoes from the OPEC countries (as in the '70s). So, that is not the real solution.

The only short-term, temporary solution is to have the Federal gas tax holiday funded by a windfall profits tax on the oil companies. It's only $0.18 per gallon, but that's a lot for your average working class American. And if this tax is offset by a windfall profits tax, it will not cause any disruption in the maintenance of our infrastructure, which is what the Federal tax on gasoline primarily goes to fund.

It is the long-term lack of a comprehensive energy policy that moves our society and economy from oil-based economy to renewable energy sources that will make the biggest difference in the long term. It is truly an issue of national security.

Accountable or Above the Law: Where's the line?

2008-07-30T09:52:00.000-07:00

When we start holding some people accountable for breaking the law and others not accountable, where do we draw the line? Who is in the privileged class?

The Constitution of the United States explicitly prohibits any class structure. There is no nobility or ruling class or privileged class in the eyes of the law.

The use of executive privilege by the Nixon administration to exempt his administration from being held accountable for their criminal activity has been pushed to new extremes by GWB. Now, his administration simply ignores Congressional subpoenae -- they don't even bother to show up and say they are claiming executive privilege. They simply ignore Congress as if it doesn't exist. Because, in their eyes, it might as well not exist.

The use of signing statements by GWB -- over 750 times in less than 7 years -- has overtly stated that Bush did not intend to obey or be held accountable for the law he just signed.

This is a dangerous precedent to set. It will only be pushed farter and farther. The next corrupt administration will aver that, since we have terrorism or some new national security crisis, they have a right to completely throw the Bill of Rights out for the sake of national security. Then they will enlist private companies toward this end who will expect to be exempt from prosecution -- criminal or civil, just like the telecom did in this instance.

The new FISA amendment exempting telecom companies OR ANYONE ELSE from any criminal or civil punishment for disobeying the Fourth Amendment must be removed from FISA in the next Congress. In addition, other provisions that weaken the Fourth Amendment must be changed. If they get away with it this time, next time will be even worse.

We cannot let this stand.

Immigration reform as a moral imperative

2008-07-30T09:49:00.000-07:00

The only natives here are Native Americans, and we slaughtered them and put them in concentration camps called reservations. Picked out the most inhospitable land we could find, slaughtered buffalo by the millions to take away their primary food source, then acted as if we were doing them a favor to let them live.

Our nations prejudices against immigrants is based on ignorance. For centureis, it is the immigrants who have worked at the most demanding and lowest paying jobs, working themselves up from poverty to the middle class and even higher. The Kennedys came off the boat and within a few generations had achieved the White House.

To diminish their humanity and maximize their suffering by our indifference or even hostility is immoral. We need real immigration reform. But we won't get it until we change the public's attitudes about immigrants themselves.

Not one of the bigots who turn their heads to the suffering of these people would do anything different themselves if put in the same situation. All these people are trying to do is live and make a better life for themselves and their families.

Desensitized Americans and the new threahhold of tolerance re: corruption in government

2008-07-30T09:40:00.000-07:00

I was a young adult when the Nixon administration committed all its crimes, including the cover up, and was finally sent packing. Over time, I have seen our country's threshhold of tolerance pushed further and further away and our citizens become more desensitized to the corruption.

First, it was Nixon, then Reagan and the Iran-Contra (arms for hostages and the illegal war in Central America ran out of VP GHWB's office), the the S&L debacle, then the HUD scandal, then GHWB first Gulf War, the GWB used the U.S. Supreme Court to steal a presidential election with little protest or violence, then the Iraq war and all the corruption that has gone on in this administration (which I won't bother to detail, because most of you here already know about that).

With each succeeding administration, the bar was pushed a little further down the road of corruption. If GWB had tried to pull any of the stunts he pulled in the last eight years during the early 1970s (Watergate time period), there would have been blood in the streets. Impeachment would have been a sure thing, and he, Cheney, Rummy, Armitage, Libby, Gonzales, Rice, Wolfowitz, et al., would be in jail.We have become desensitized to corruption in government. We have come to accept the power for power's sake of illegal executive privilege and how it is used to put the president and his administration above the law. We have become numb to the use of signing statements that blatantly and boldly assert that the president does not consider himself subject to laws he himself signs.

What is it going to take before we have finally had enough?

Niemöller's poem about the Nazis says it all, doesn't it?

First They Came for the Jews
First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak outbecause I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak outbecause I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one leftto speak out for me.

-- Pastor Martin Niemöller

My stint in Manila, Philippines -- surviving a revolution and series of terrorist attacks

2008-07-30T09:36:00.000-07:00

It's all far more dramatic sounding than it actually was, but it was real and a real eye-opener, as well.
In 2000, I was an IT consultant troubleshooting a project for Asian Development Bank in Manila. I went in November and left at the end of April of the following year. The year I was there was marked by a terrorist attack and hostages taken by Abu Sayyaf, a Filipino terrorist group linked with Al Qaeda. The first was in May 2000 before I got there and the second was in May 2001 right after I left.
While I was there, Philippine President Joseph Estrada (nicknamed "Erap") was deposed and the current president, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who was Vice President at the time Erap was deposed took over.
Estrada had started out as an actor who was supposed to be the "man of the people." He ended up being corrupted by the power and money, getting in bed with organized crime and stealing billions from the poor people of the Philippines.
When I arrived at the airport in Manila, I was greeted by miles and miles of rubble that looked like it was the aftermath of a nuclear bomb going off. It was actually the result of multiple very powerful cyclones, after which there was no money to clean up, much less rebuild. Children scurried through the rubble like mice. Bands of little children roamed the street begging for money. These gangs were managed by adults who would maim the children just so they would get more sympathy and, therefore, more money.
Asian Development Bank is a development bank much like the World Bank which was created by a multilateral treaty among 157 member countries. The facilities are like Fort Knox. They have their own private army. Several thousand people work at the bank -- many of the executive and upper management are appointed by their member countries while the lower level management and administrative staff are often local residents. They fund economic development projects like infrastructure -- roads, bridges, dams, docks, telecom systems and wiring, power grids and wiring, etc. -- the kinds of things underdeveloped countries need to attract commerce.
There is a large contingent of Americans and Europeans who live there. Like most third-world countries, there is a very small middle class. Most folks are either very wealthy or very poor. The economy had been bad for decades. Back when Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Emelda, were in power, the exchange rate of Philippine pesos to the U.S.dollar was 8 to 1. By the time I got there, it was 55 to 1 (sometimes higher). Unemployment was very high, and there were no social programs to combat poverty and disease.
I was assigned a driver/bodyguard (Jose) and one of his friends (Danny) that drove me wherever I went. I got to know them and their families very well. This is a strategy I recommend to anyone visiting outside the U.S. Make friends with your drivers, maids, waitresses, etc. They will be able to show you parts of the area you are visiting safely that tourists never see. You will also get a better feel for who the people really are.
Jose, his wife Lenora and his two sons (at the time, his wife was pregnant with a third son) lived in two rooms -- each no more than 10x10, with no doors. There was one bed room for everyone (parents and kids) and one "living room" where everything took place. No dining area or kitchen. The bathroom, shower and only sink in the complex was shared by everyone. They collected water in a barrel and you had to use a dipper to flush the toilet by hand. The shower was over the toilet and drained onto the concrete floor. No bathroom door -- just a curtain. The only sink was outside in a covered patio with no doors. All the dishes and other "sink activities" were performed there. No one had a stove, only crock pots/electric pot cooking. Neighbors would cooperate at meals -- one would cook the rice and another the vegetable. The only refrigerator was built into the wall (a "bar height" with no freezer). People grocery shopped everyday because they could not store much in the refrigerator.
I was invited to their house for Lenora's birthday. It was a big treat for them to have cake and ice cream, which I brought. When I got there, Lenora started crying. I asked her, "Why?" She said she didn't think I would really come. I said "Why not?" She said, "Because we are so poor and you are so rich." She was ashamed of their tiny apartment. I told her that I wasn't rich in America, I was only middle class, like them. In Manila, however, my Mitsubishi Eclipse, which I paid $20K for, would have made me a millionaire there. A low six-figure salary in dollars was unthinkable to them.
Jose had a B.A. in Business Management and Lenora was a LPN. There were well-educated. But jobs were scarce and there was little business investment from the outside world because of the corruption and instability of the government. The way Filipino law worked, anyone hired for more than six months had to receive benefits, so companies would hire employees as temporary for five months at a time, lay them off for a month, then rehire them -- just to avoid paying benefits. That meant that Jose and Lenora had to save every extra dollar they had to pay for their expenses when Jose was laid off.
The healthcare system there was excellent. I went there with a severe case of bronchitis, so I had to avail myself of their medical services. A doctor's visit with no appointment caused me to wait about 10 minutes and cost about $10 total. And it was an excellent doctor. My medications -- full price -- cost less than my co-pay here with my insurance (BC/BS). My insurance, of course, did not cover anything abroad.
While I was there, they had a revolution -- Filipino style. One night I was in bed (about 3 a.m. -- no phone call) and was awakened by what sounded like Rod Stewart in concert at the foot of my bed, and my suite was on the 11th floor. I was startled at first, so I listened for a while. Then the political speeches started. There would be speeches, then a 30-minute rock concert and repeat. This went on for three weeks. But that night, after a few minutes, I called downstairs to the hotel lobby to find out what was going on. The desk clerk (a cute young Filipino girl) said in a voice breathless with excitement, "Oh! Ma'am Laura, we are having a revolution!" Well, I saw the film The Year of Living Dangerously (about a Filipino revolution) and, although this was before 9/11, terrorism in Asia was much more common, so I was concerned. They told me not to worry about it.
The next morning, I went downstairs and out the back door of the hotel, which was across the street from ADB to find a four-lane boulevard packed with cars bumper-to-bumper for miles. The cars were so close you couldn't get a sheet of paper between them. Some Filipino gentlemen were self-appointed traffic cops. They came up to me and asked me what I needed. I told them I needed to get across the street. So, they picked me up by my elbows and walked me across the tops of the cars from one side of the street to the other. They then told me that they would get me back across that night when i was through with work.
The site of the revolution/rock concert was around a business area and six-lane interstate-type highway with two sets of roads -- one on ground and one above (like San Francisco). When I looked out my office window at the scene, you could see nothing but a sea of people for miles and miles -- as far as the eye could see. They left one lane free for traffic, but most everybody had stopped work and was demonstrating. During the entire three weeks, businesses opened up their bathroom facilities to the people. The people would bring toilet tissue, hand towels, soap, etc. and donate to the businesses for their kindness. There was absolutely no violence except for one brief attempt by the Abu Sayyaf, but the people ran them off. Of course, this was the film clip that made it to the U.S. news, so my mother and father were freaking out. But it was actually very peaceful. The Filipino people are a very gentle, nurturing people, and this was just an extension of their nature.
While I was home for vacation, several bombing took place around Manila. I was still sick with bronchitis, so i had delayed my return trip to Manila by two days. Had I taken the originally scheduled flight, my plane would have arrived and I would have been in the elevator going up from the tarmac to the concourse floor when the bomb when off in the elevator in the airport that day. But, I was two days later arriving. You never know.
All in all, it was an interesting trip. I met some wonderful people with whom I am still corresponding.
So, that's my personal experience with revolution and terrorism.

Elephantizing

2008-07-30T09:34:00.001-07:00

Elephantizing refers to the process of training a baby elephant to stay tied to a stake with a rope.
When they first do this to the baby elephant, they use a thick, heavy chain. The baby struggles and struggles, but can't break free. He finally gives up in exhaustion, convinced he cannot break the chain.

Over time, they replace the chain with smaller and smaller chains and ropes, until the elephant will stay tied to a stake by a very small rope. By the time he is an adult, he could easily break the small rope, but, because as a baby he was convinced he could not break free, he accepts his confinement without question.

That is what they call elephantizing. Convincing someone they are powerless to break free of the chains that bind them.

How does this apply to us today?

In the 1980s, Reagan and the neocons redefined the word liberal to be a derisive term. Because the movement had caught hold and we lost the election, Dems showed no political courage and did not stand up for who they were. In fact, they fought the label and were afraid to use the term "liberal."
We allowed the Republicans to define who we were by intimidation.

Likewise since the Viet Nam war. The Democratic Congress paid a heavy political price for stopping the war. The Republicans turned this into a picture that the Dems were weak on defense and anti-military. We cowered with fear of further political reprisal and are still fighting that battle and that label even now.

After 9/11, Bush used this to intimidate the Congress into caving on some legislation very important to the protection of our Constitutional rights-- the Patriot Act, the FISA Amendment, etc. The Republicans' portrait of Democrats having no core values came from the political cowardice of our politicians, who sat silently by, cowering in fear over being called "liberal" or "weak on defense" or "unpatriotic," etc.

The Republicans said we lacked core values because, if we had any, we would stand up for them. And we didn't. So, to an extent, we cooperated in giving them the unearned label of the "values" party -- put it in a box for them, wrapped it up in pretty paper, tied the ribbon in a nice bow, put it on a silver platter and served it to them with our compliments and well-wishes, so-to-speak. Then slunk back to our corner and rolled over in submission.

All of this can be traced back to the Dems being elephantized by the Republicans decades ago. We must find the political courage to stand up for who were are and what we believe once again. It's time to take "liberal" back and define it accurately and proudly again.

Voting values issues and where the Democrats should stand.

2008-07-30T09:28:00.000-07:00

It's about tolerance.

Religion should not, in and of itself, be a litmus test for presidential candidates, but personal philosophical outlook, world views, ethnics and morality are valid considerations. And a person's theology, ideology and psychology do impact a person's behavior and decision-making process and determine values and criteria by which arguments are either validated or verified.

Observing who a person associates with, where they go to church, what clubs they belong to, what activities they participate in -- all of these are evidence of who that person truly is. You can tell more about what a person really values if you observe what they do with their time and money than if you simply listen to what they say. Do they practice what they preach?

Bush and the extreme right-wing concservatives use religion as a litmus test (and do so illegally in their hiring practices) and replace FACTS with BELIEFS and SCIENCE with IDEOLOGY. That is why their decisions are flawed and end in disaster. To say we should completely ignore the impact of a person's religion on their point-of-view, management style and decision-making process is not reasonable, either. There is the possibility of a reasonable balance between the two, where all the factors are considered and weighed appropriately.

To exclude religion and religious beliefs (and the morals and world view they influence) from the presidential election process or public forum completely is not wise. To overemphasize the importance beyond what is reasonable is not wise either. It's about Balance.

So, should there be a litmus test for elected officials? Not exactly. But should we be able to examine all the evidence of who they are in making our selection for president? Certainly.

The other area of concern is that the Democrats have unfairly been labeled as having anti-religious attitudes based on their opposition to religion as having any place in the public forum. This is an extreme reactionary view to the right-wing social conservatives. It further polarizes, and it leaves Americans with the mistaken impression that Democrats do not represent their values. To counter this, we must be tolerant of others' religious values without being so purist that we exclude them from the public forum based on their religion or social values alone. This is the other extreme that our forefathers never intended.

It is important that we redefine our party and "values" voting to include tangible evidence of values like environmental protection (stewardship of the earth), human rights ("Do unto others..."), healthcare and maintaining the dignity of all. These are not just Republican values, they are American values.

In short, what a person believes to be true is their reality. We must know what the "reality" of a presidential candidate is if we don't want to repeat the mistake of electing another GWB.

Proposing an economic solution: the green economy, progressive taxation and free trade

2008-07-30T09:24:00.000-07:00

The best way to improve our economy is by looking to the past to see what worked FOR EVERYBODY, not just the wealthy and well connected. Clinton's economic policies as implemented by Rubin provide us with a model. Progressive taxation in concert with a truly free and fair market economy that does have the necessary tools for enforcement of environmental, labor and consumer protection standards are two tools we can utilize now.

We must create new jobs. Right now the wealthy and corporations are into consolidation, not distribution of wealth. Therefore, the only way we can start job creation is to invest in the Green Economy and our failing infrastructure.

All the evidence we need about how this would "kill several birds with one stone" are in front of us: Katrina and the failed levies, the current Floods in the Midwest where the damage is due, in great part, to failing levies, collapsing bridges, crumbling roads, antiquated water and sewer systems, a system of electrical grids that cannot meet current demand for energy with brownouts and blackouts occurring regularly, etc. -- all can be easily remedied with investment from the Federal government that would also increase jobs and truly stimulate the economy with the corresponding ripple effect. The Green Economy will also have the added benefit of addressing damage caused by Global Warming. It's a win-win situation for our country.
This is not a new solution. FDR used a similar solution to grow us out of the Great Depression. But, there is a difference between growing profits and growing the economy.

I believe in the "bigger pie" theory. Hamiltonians believe in consolidation of wealth and power -- that the pie is a fixed size -- only so big -- and if I want a bigger piece, or if someone else wants a piece that didn't have one in the past, everyone else's piece of pie must be smaller. That is not Jeffersonian and it does not support Rubin's economic philosophy. The real answer is that everyone can have a piece of pie and/or increase the size of their piece by baking a bigger pie -- growing the economy (distributing wealth), not just growing (increasing) profits (consolidating wealth). Progressive taxation promotes a growing economy by strengthening the middle class. After all, it is not how much PROFIT you make, it's how much money you make. If you can increase your sales by 50% and make 2% less in profit, you still make more money -- it approaches or becomes Pareto Optimal. Prices are lower, which creates a larger market for your goods or services (until you reach Pareto Optimality), demand fro production increases, job growth occurs and the economy grows and benefits everyone.

This is the only long-term equitable answer to our country's economic woes. I urge you to participate in the writing, sponsorship and passage of legislation that will accomplish our goals with the solutions outlined in this letter.

Many Americans misunderstand what free trade and NAFTA really are. They believe that NAFTA has something to do with jobs going overseas to China and India. Of course, it does not. It may have something to do with jobs moving to Mexico, but if we remove the tax loophole from our tax code that reward businesses for taking American jobs overseas, we can slow down the flow of jobs out of our economy to any other country, and free-trade will no longer be the scapegoat for the economic woes of the working class. This is another aspect of how we can change our tax code to be more progressive and stimulate economic growth in our own country without damaging or diminishing free trade principles.

Most working class and middle class Americans are choosing between food, gasoline, healthcare insurance and medicine. They need gasoline to get to work, so food and/or physician's care and/or medicine are not in the budget, and the result will be poorer health and nutrition for every individual and higher healthcare costs for every American, even those that are insured and can afford all these expenditures at present. There is a "trickle-up" aspect to these costs. The wealthy and well-connected may be only negligibly impacted now, but as time goes on, the effect will move higher and higher up on the economic ladder to include us all.

We are already in an environmental, healthcare, energy and economic crisis. Waiting any longer is going to exacerbate the fallout, broaden the impact and lengthen the turn-around time required. Although I am a Democrat, I would be willing to support LIMITED drilling in the Gulf and in Anwar and even nuclear power plant expansion, on the condition that solid, fail-safe environmental and hazard plans were adopted and enforcement tools were provided in said legislation. The technology now exists to control and contain the possibility of leakages from nuclear power plants that did not exist when the safety event at Three Mile Island occurred in March 1979. But what most Americans don't realize is that any new construction of nuclear power plants or any new drilling will not have an immediate impact on energy supply or prices. In fact, I am told that there is about a 10-year lag time before this new drilling would begin to significantly impact our economy. A more immediate solution would be to raise the MPG requirements on all auto makers selling cars in the U.S., and either significant tax incentives or tax-free investment of significant capital into hydrogen-fueled cars and renewable energy sources with low or no environmental impact.

Please move quickly to address these problems. Waiting for the next president or the next Congress to act is too late. In fact, it is already later than necessary. It is your job to get busy and, as Larry the Cable Guy would say, "get 'er done!"Thank you for your time and attention in this matter. If you would like to contact me at laura.schneider@mchsi.com.

Restricting presidential signing statements

2008-07-30T09:19:00.000-07:00

http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=ask_this.view&askthisid=00211
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20060113.html
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/04/30/bush_challenges_hundreds_of_laws/

This practice allows the POTUS writing himself a blank check to break the law, violate the Constitution or perform any criminal act with impunity.

H.R.3045.IH -- (July 16, 2007) This bill by Rep. Shea Porter (forbids judicial reliance on presidential signing statements) has been referred to the Judiciary Committee:
http://www.thomas.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c110:1:./temp/~c110ZO9Y1v::

H.R.5993.IH -- (May 8, 2008) This bill by Rep. Jones (NC) (requires the POTUS to submit the signing statement to both houses of Congress and the AG or other pertinent reps to testify before Congress) has been referred to the Judiciary Committee:
http://www.thomas.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c110:3:./temp/~c110ZO9Y1v::

S.1747.IS -- (June 29, 2007) This bill by Senator Specter (forbids judicial reliance on presidential signing statements and provides the Congress with the ability to present a concurrent clarifying resolution) was read twice and referred to the Judiciary Committee -- similar to H.R.3045.IH:
http://www.thomas.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c110:2:./temp/~c110ZO9Y1v::

H.R.264.IH -- (January 5, 2007) This bill by Rep. Jackson-Lee (TX) (virtually outlaws signing statements and says no government agency can consider them and it acts as a line item veto) was referred to the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform:
http://www.thomas.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c110:4:./temp/~c110ztwSV5::

H.R.3835.IH -- American Freedom Agenda Act of 2007 (October 15, 2007) This bill by Rep. Paul (restoring the Constitution's checks and balances and protections against government abuses as envisioned by the Founding Fathers; The House of Representatives and Senate collectively shall enjoy standing to file a declaratory judgment action in an appropriate Federal district court to challenge the constitutionality of a presidential signing statement that declares the President's intent to disregard provisions of a bill he has signed into law because he believes they are unconstitutional.) was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary, and in addition to the Committees on Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, and Select Intelligence (Permanent Select), for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned:
http://www.thomas.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c110:5:./temp/~c110ztwSV5::

The problem with presidential signing statements is that it allows the president to change law without congressional approval. The Federal Court system has struggled with presidential signing statements in terms of their constitutionality and whether they can be used at all, or, if at all, to what extent. This weakens the separation of the judicial, legislative and executive branches, providing far too much power to and far too little accountability from the president and executive branch.

These are pending legislation regarding signing statements. None have made it out of committee, according to www.thomas.gov. We need to contact the Senators and Representatives responsible for these bills, along with Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid to make sure they are not tabled and buried in committee indefinitely.

And my real name is...

2008-07-30T09:15:00.000-07:00

WHen I got an e-mail from another blogger concerned that I was using my real name, I was touched by that person's concern that someone might harrass me, but I wanted to let you all know why I use my real name. This was my response:

Truly, thanks for your concern. But I use my real name because I have my own personal mission going on. I have done a lot of things in my life. I majored in college, sort of -- pre-med, music, graduate school in Music, Journalism, CIS.

While I was in graduate school in journalism (and I do not, by the way, imply that I have ever been a journalist), I became very disgusted with unnamed and unvetted sources, foundless allegations, reporting rumors and innuendo and doing it legally by saying "we have heard that" in front of it.

People often post to blogs without using their names for many reasons -- one is the concern you mentioned, but others because they can say things that aren't true from sources that aren;t vetted and know that is the case, but do it anyway because they can get away with it as a nameless, faceless pseudonym. [That's why I often post comments to blogs asking for sources.]
No doubt, there will be people who don't like what I have to say. Probably many people!

My father made the remark many years ago that I never lacked an opinion or the adequate wind to voice it!

And I have received some ugly stuff from this blog [and others], sadly. But I would rather stick up for my values and take the crap than not. Thank you for being concerned, though. I understand where you're coming from ....

Sometimes, being held accountable for what you say is a good thing.

A word about progressive taxation -- How can we create an equitable system for all?

2008-07-30T09:05:00.000-07:00

At some point our country has to come face-to-face with the realization that we cannot spend more than we earn. Likewise, our country's income (derived from taxation) must be earned equitably. Management of our economy must stimulate -- include an inducement to invest -- and promote economic growth.

Giving unconditional tax breaks does not help our economy. The assumption that investors will reinvest their capital gains in our American economy if there is no condition or penalty for taking the profits elsewhere is a faulty assumption. To assume this level of patriotism from participants in our economy is flawed -- just as we found out that assuming corporations would voluntarily do the moral thing by implementing pollution controls, quality controls, consumer protection and health and safety practices was flawed. Given the freedom to do so, corporations will not be good citizens in terms of labor health and safety, consumer protection and environmental protection unless forced or induced by profits to do so. We constantly hear the moans and rants from lobbyists and industrial advocacy groups about how our government regulations are killing their business. The alternative, however, is lack of governmental regulation destroying our environment, harming our labor force and even lowering the health and safety standards and protections for consumers.

Conservatives have an elitist-based "fixed pie" theory -- the pie is only so big, so, in order for me to get a bigger piece, you have to take a smaller one (retributive value). My "bigger pie" theory says we can all have bigger pieces if we bake a bigger pie (grow the economy).

In the words of Griffith Lighton, Jr.:

"Yes, we can bake a bigger pie, but as you say we have to deconsolidate capital
to do it, and that added liquidity is a progressive tax code.... A
progressive rate with no exceptions will eliminate the need for adjustments like
on the capital gains rate. The capital gains rate can be eliminated
because the inequity will be paid in the progressive rate. The progressive
rate does not need to discriminate the source of income, which is the source of
loopholes that make a progressive tax code regressive."

That's the kind of economic growth that is substantive, equitable and free-market driven.

Griffith goes on to say:

"Pareto Optimality is the technical measure on expanding the pie
equitably. If growth means that the average income invests proportionally
more than the top fifth through a regressive tax code, it is not Pareto Optimal
and that value becomes retributive (a retributive value that has to be managed,
usually with expensive government programs). The pie may have been
expanded but your fair slice was consolidated.... Expanding the pie is
typically not the case because that means there will be competition, and
pluralism is poison for consolidated entities. No-growth economic policies
are common faire. A progressive tax is code is strongly Pareto Optimal and
pro-growth, meaning it will get strong fallacious argument from virtually
everyone, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian.... Tough sell despite it
being so logically consistent and easily verifiable. So you see how
important it is to have a good grasp of philosophical and historical
underpinnings of why people believe what they do. Once a person realizes
why they believe something fallaciously, they tend to a cognitive dissonance,
but then have to choose to minimize the dissonance -- change micro and macro."

Supply-side economics does not work except in the most perfect circumstance of complete market fairness. Unregulated, the markets controlled by the supers/elites will not be fair and open without fraudulent manipulation by definition.

Using tax incentives to shape socioeconomic behavior is a tried and true tactic that has been used in our tax policy for decades. Investors tend to view their access to public trading as an intrinsic right of a capitalist society rather than an earned privilege. Sure, the risks are greater, but so is the reward. This is where the balance of good tax policy between Darwinian capitalism and economic redistribution must find equilibrium -- Pareto Optimality, if you will. As citizens of this country, we have rights, privileges and responsibilities as such to do what we can for the greater good of society. Finding that balance without excessive punishment (retribution) to the haves or the have-nots is the art of good tax policy.

To dismiss a progressive tax system based on graduated taxes correlative to increased income out-of-hand is rather short-sighted, given the fact that any taxes we pay should be considered investments in our society. A society that has no safety net for the poor and the disabled will breed crime and disease exponentially with each generation. The haves will find themselves and their property increasingly under peril of attack and revolt from the have-nots. If you need an example, look at Brazil or most third-world countries. The wealthy live in gated communities with guards armed with automatic weapons (a way of managing the retributive value). They have to have a team of bodyguards to protect them when traveling outside their gated communities. This is not the kind of society we want for America. But it is the society will we get if we keep going in the current regressive direction.

The state can contribute to the economy through investing in social programs for public education, job training or re-education and welfare. These are worthwhile investments from a socioeconomic standpoint, because it increases employability and, by doing so, increases our ability to create new jobs. This, in turn, increases the tax base, assimilating the once unemployed have-nots into the middle class, which proportionally decreases the tax burden for all taxpayers and, particularly, individuals at the top of the financial heap. "Trickle-up" growth instead of "Trickle-down" economics. Herein lies the truth that the ounce of prevention required is far better than a pound of very expensive cure.

Another role that the government can play in our mixed economy is Keynesianism in nature. In addition to the reduction in interest rates already underway to stimulate our economy, the government could also make significant investment in infrastructure and the green economy. This was FDR's solution to the Great Depression.

Griffith writes:

"While a progressive rate should and will be argued, the result will be closing
loopholes at first. The rate we have now is progressive with closing the
loopholes. For example, the capital gains and dividends rate is
flat. It is a regressive burden. Deductions also will be a sticking
point that will be traded for a regressive burden.... So... The
first step is just to very simply argue a progressive rate and the result will
be closing loopholes at first.... That [increasing the capital gains rate]
will need an adjustment for lower incomes to be equitable. That is the
opportunity to credibly argue for a simple regressive rate on all incomes
without exception. It is not going to be ideal, but progress will be
underway."

Thus, a progressive tax structure can provide the framework for equitable economic growth. We just need to bake a bigger pie!

A word about free trade -- What went wrong with NAFTA, et al.?

2008-07-30T09:02:00.000-07:00

President Clinton's approach to the economy in the '90s emphasized job creation and opening markets with NAFTA and other free-trade agreements. The reputation and wisdom of these agreements have suffered greatly from the public's misunderstanding of the real cause of the perceived deleterious effects of free trade. It is not free trade itself that caused us to lose jobs and have businesses move their facilities outside the U.S. in search of cheap labor, it is the tax loopholes that rewarded businesses for doing same.

The problem is that even free trade cannot really be free, much less free of management and enforcement. According to Griffith Lighton, Jr., "Much of the free trade benefit is to export expensive externalities and other costs, like pollution and labor costs (especially healthcare costs)." This is where we have suffered the effects of so-called "free trade" as managed by the GWB administration. These agreements, as originated during the Clinton administration, did have conditions and enforcement mechanisms to protect labor, the environment and the consumer. The problem is that the Bush administration has failed to enforce these conditions properly or consistently internally within the trade agreements or externally through agencies like the EPA, CPSC, et al. There must be conditions, remedies and enforcement mechanisms to any agreement that guarantee reciprocity when we open our markets to others. Also, enforceable health and safety labor standards, consumer protection standards and environmental protection standards must be the part of any trade agreement.
Originally, the sociopolitical goal of opening our markets to our political adversaries and competitors, such as Red China, the Soviet bloc and the third world was based on the assumption that we could use our economic relationships to impact their sociopolitical attitudes and governmental policies by taking advantage of their predictable greed (increased addiction to the fruits of capitalism -- personal profit) against their Communist economic and political system. The concept of income redistribution would predictably give way to priorities guided by this personal profit and greed.

It worked, sort of. However, just as with the Darwinian robber barons of the turn of the 19th to 20th century, in the absence of governmental regulations and watchdog groups to control quality, fair labor practices, health and safety issues, consumer protection and environmental protection within these countries, and a vigorous CPSC in our own country, we now have lead in the toys shipped to Wal-Mart from China, and toxic/contaminated pet foods and even toxins or contamination in food and products for human consumption. Not to mention regional and global environmental impact from China and India alone -- poisoned rivers that flow from China to the Indian and Pacific ocean, toxic air and contaminants carried by the jet stream across continents and oceans and an exponential demand for carbon-based energy, impacting the health and safety of entire populations and significantly global warming throughout the world.

With every freedom comes responsibility. And it is important to remind ourselves that access to our markets is not an intrinsic right, it is a privilege that we must protect carefully. This is not to say we should resort to isolationism or protectionism. Nor does it mean we should abandon efforts toward self-reliance in the areas of energy and other goods and services critical to our national security. Reciprocity and enforcement tools must be the vanguard of any trade agreement we strike. To do otherwise is to end up with the situation we have now under the management of the Bush administration -- a disaster for labor, consumers, our country and, ultimately, for our planet. And worse, a free trade structure that, in practice, makes us weaker economically and more vulnerable and dependent rather than self-reliant.

Thus, free trade can provide a framework for equitable economic growth. We just need to:

Write enforceable agreements and follow through with that enforcement vigorously, and
Change our tax code to end the loopholes that reward businesses for moving their operations abroad to avoid labor standards, environmental standards and consumer protection standards.

It's all about oil...

2008-07-30T09:00:00.000-07:00

The dangers of our oil-based economy have been growing for decades. We first saw the "writing on the wall" in the '70s during the oil embargo. Even before the fall of the U.S.-propped-up reign of the Shah of Iran in the '70s, anti-Americanism has dominated the Middle East. OPEC is a foreign monopoly that controls energy prices throughout the world, and out-of-control, unregulated markets have taken the ball down the field to the end zone. It is no mistake that Russia has aligned itself with Iran and tried to take over Afghanistan. The plan was to achieve world domination through controlling oil and access to oil.

The war between the Soviet Union and the U.S. and Red China, it satellites and the U.S. are the same, Khrushchev warned he would bury us economically, and, although the Communist system may have failed the first time around, Putin has revived a hybrid system with Russian mob influence that may finish the job.

It first became apparent when he took away the freedom of the press by executing journalists and closing newspapers and broadcast media. He who controls the information, controls destiny.The war in Iraq is having the same effect on our economy that the Viet Nam war had in the '60s and '70s. During LBJ's administration, he made the decision to abandon the gold standard in order to hide the inflation caused by the war. By the time Nixon got into office, we had such high inflation that the gold standard had to be abandoned altogether or cause a breakdown in our monetary system. By the time Carter took office, the damage had been done and our ability to recover from it was seriously limited. Reagan changed the focus of the American economy and its people by engaging in an arms race with the Soviet Union that eventually brought it down, but it also caused the U.S. to incur serious debt. Clinton turned the economy around and had us back on the right track, but the GWB took over and single-handedly destroyed our economy, got us into a war of choice that we could not afford and, consequently raised the national debt to unheard of levels. Since abandoning the gold standard in the '70s, we have been the victim of the unbridled, unregulated currency market where those who hold our debt manipulate the value of our currency to get us deeper and deeper into debt.GWB's war in Iraq and mismanagement of the economy has put the finish on us. We are facing a global depression the likes of which we have never seen in our lifetimes, and even our grandparents, who went through the Great Depression, will not have experienced. There are already food riots in Bangladesh, Africa, Haiti and the far east.The first order of business for America is to move from an oil-based economy to renewable, environmentally friendly sources of energy. Once we have freed ourselves from that slavery, we can control our own economy and manage our debt and monetary system. Until then, we have set ourselves up to be the greatest victim of our own greed and sloth.

We cannot help a starving world unless we can first feed ourselves, and that means facing the economic crisis created by our oil-based economy as if it were a national security challenge, because it truly is.

What can we learn from this primary season?

2008-07-30T08:56:00.000-07:00

First of all, after FL and MI and that debacle, we need to take a serious look at how we determine the primary calendar. The one positive purpose that whole mess served was to bring the issue of how we determine our primary calendar to the minds of all Democrats.

I live in AL, which is blood red,and my vote just cancels out my Dad each election, so I really don't have any input except in the primaries. Going in alphabetical order would not really accomplish anything but changing one bias for another. Same thing with going by the order in which the state was accepted into this union.

However, MI had a valid complaint. It cost them their full representation, but for party leaders to swipe their hands and think this issue has been swept under the rug is a mistake, I believe. We need to start now and come up with a way to determine our primary calendar that is not only fair to all the states, but to all the candidatez who are trying to campaign in either one state for months or over a dozen states from one end of the country to the other all at the same time. It does not give either the state or the candidate an opportunity to bring their issues or stances (as the case may be) to the national forum equally.
No disrespect to IA or NH Democrats, but being a Democrat from a red state I can get away with this more easily, it's amusing that we give preferential treatment to two states who are more often red than blue....

Anyway, I would like to propose that we consider the regional primary concept in that we schedule a number of contiguous/adjacent states together on the same day, rather than the all or nothing approach that we have had in the past. Super Tuesday and Super Duper Tuesday, et al., doesn't work well for either the states or the candidates.

The national primary seems like Super Tuesday on steroids to me, without candidates getting or voters being able to give any feedback until the end, when it's too late. It doesn't give the candidates a chance to develop over time or focus on a smaller group of states or for the media to preperly vet candidates over time, either.

I also propose that we have a debate in every state in the union, or at least by region, if we go that way. This would eliminate the use of debates in a political way. The front-runner doesn't want them and the others always do. For some of the lesser known candidates, it's about the only way they can get any media attention. It would "level the playing field" somewhat, which would be a good thing.

Every state has its own unique issues and voters. Likewise with each region. The guys at the end of the primary often get completely ignored. Granted, that didn't happen with this race, which is one of the real benefits of the close competition in this race.

Anyone else with any ideas?