Category: Politics

John Bender tells us, sort of courtesy of Apple Computer, why he switched.

“… patriotism is the rohypnol of the American public … I heard people say if you don’t love the United States of America, then get the hell out — I did.”

He’s done little enough to keep us out of the mess we’re in now, since he voted for the new Department and for the office, but at least Chuck Schumer knows what kind of “big brother” he doesn’t have in mind, even though it’s too late now to do anything about it.

CHOICE FOR ‘BIG BROTHER’ IS ALL WRONG, CHUCK SAYS
By KENNETH R. BAZINET
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU
WASHINGTON – Sen. Chuck Schumer slammed Iran-Contra figure John Poindexter yesterday as the wrong man to head the Pentagon’s new “big brother” program, saying the retired admiral barely escaped jail.
“If we need a big brother, John Poindexter is the last guy on the list that I would choose,” said Schumer (D-N.Y.).
He demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld replace Poindexter, who is overseeing a Pentagon anti-terrorism project, Total Information Awareness, charged with developing a vast database allowing unprecedented access to Americans’ electronic transactions, from banking business to video rentals.
Poindexter, who was national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan, and Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North were convicted in 1990 of lying to Congress in the weapons-for-hostages scandal. The convictions were overturned on the grounds their right to a fair trial was violated.
The conviction “was overthrown on a technicality that had nothing to do with the facts of whether he lied to Congress,” Schumer said yesterday on ABC’s “This Week.”

He “demanded?” Doesn’t he realize who he’s talking to?

Sound vaguely familiar? But don’t draw too many parallels, even if the picture is incredibly grim.
Early twentieth-century fascist and totalitarian states were created in milieus which included strong leftist parties and the regimes were not even partly driven by fanatical religionists, but their party dictatorships were successful nevertheless. In the U.S. we currently have conditions in many ways even more favorable to the emergence of our very own, American fascism.
If we want to understand what’s taking place in the country today we have to realize that the Democratic Party is the American conservative party and the Republican Party is the party of reaction. This means of course that there is no significant center, no progressive party and certainly no left, contrary to the amazingly successful propaganda of the right (the Democratic-Republican coalition) and of its loyal media.
Adding to the tragedy for our clueless and disempowered citizens is the fact that, unlike conservative or even reactionary parties in other countries, our own equivalents do not offer their supporters even the most minimal protections of a traditional democratic socialism or of the more capitalist “economic safety net.” Even historical fascism, the apparent model for the gangs in Washington, accepted the need for certain forms of socialism.
Finally, even our very real liberties, which were once probably the only fair boast of the American system, are now being removed, with the apparent approval of the citizenry, on the specious argument that these freedoms interfere with our security.
We get an enormous, intrusive, reactionary police state backed enthusiastically by the very largest corporations and the most fanatical religious elements, and we get perpetual war, but we get no security, no assistance and a wounded environment. This government asks everything but gives nothing, and yet we cheer loudly and sign up for more of it. How did we get here? Will we ever escape?

Part of The Left, of the 1960’s, of New York City, of our very conscience, Mark Rudd hasn’t retired altogether.

Mr. Rudd, 55, lives in Albuquerque, where he teaches mathematics at the Albuquerque Technical Vocational Institute, a community college.
“I’m involved in local antiwar demonstrations,” he said last week, “and I’ve been involved in marches for peace in the Middle East.”
His view of the American government is still bluntly negative. It is pursuing “world domination,” he charged. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 were a “terrible crime,” he said, and “I’m not justifying Saddam Hussein.” But of the American plans for military action in Iraq, he asserted, “There are ways to deal with threats to peace other than murdering people.” Then, with the kind of phrasemaking that once rallied the ranks to the campus ramparts, he added: “Saddam Hussein, very bad, very bad. George Bush, very bad, very bad.”

Most Americans still believe they live in something close to a meritocracy, and most believe in the family, whatever they mean by that. It turns out that most Americans are half right.

It has always been good to have a rich or powerful father. Last week my Princeton colleague Alan Krueger wrote a column for The Times surveying statistical studies that debunk the mythology of American social mobility. “If the United States stands out in comparison with other countries,” he wrote, “it is in having a more static distribution of income across generations with fewer opportunities for advancement.” And Kevin Phillips, in his book “Wealth and Democracy,” shows that robber-baron fortunes have been far more persistent than legend would have it.

But it’s probably gonna get worse, before there’s a revolution.

The official ideology of America’s elite remains one of meritocracy, just as our political leadership pretends to be populist. But that won’t last. Soon enough, our society will rediscover the importance of good breeding, and the vulgarity of talented upstarts.
For years, opinion leaders have told us that it’s all about family values. And it is — but it will take a while before most people realize that they meant the value of coming from the right family.

The Houses of Parliament are talking.
And once again.

[describing the imminent establishment of a “Department of Homeland Security”]
“ESTABLISHING NEW AGENCY IS EXPECTED TO TAKE YEARS AND COULD DIVERT IT FROM MISSION”
Even if the NYTimes relegates it and the entire story to page 14, reservng the front page lead story to a glorious account of the overwhelmingly successful passage of the bill through the Senate.
Ooops! The paper just altered/censored itself. The headline which now appears on their website article reads, “ESTABLISHING HOMELAND SECURITY AGENCY IS EXPECED TO TAKE YEARS,” making a subtle distinction from the original, much more alarming text.
So, why is this thing being done in Washington. I think we know. Senator Byrd has the words.

While his colleagues have debated the fine points of the domestic security bill, he has been virtually alone in asking the larger question: Why is this new department suddenly so necessary? What will the largest and hastiest reorganization of the federal government in half a century do besides allow politicians to claim instant credit for fighting terrorism?
“Osama bin Laden is still alive and plotting more attacks while we play bureaucratic shuffleboard,” Mr. Byrd told the Senate. “With a battle plan like the Bush administration is proposing, instead of crossing the Delaware River to capture the Hessian soldiers on Christmas Day, George Washington would have stayed on his side of the river and built a bureaucracy.” Mr. Byrd imagined Nathan Hale declaring, “I have but one life to lose for my bureaucracy,” and Commodore Oliver Perry hoisting a flag on his ship with the rallying cry, “Don’t give up the bureaucracy!”

Do we feel safer yet?
By the way, the comments of one Democratic Senator who didn’t have the courage of his (conviction?), declining to be named, should be enough to explain why there are virtually no principles still visible in that body.

“More and more of our members feel he’s dragging it on and on ad infinitum, which is not necessary,” that senator said. “Make your point. Have a vote. And move on. He’s not willing to do that. He’s from a different school. At some point you have to say, `Enough is enough.’ “

But the issues at stake in Congress are not those of a club or prom committee, and we should expect some people to take them very seriously.

Sure, the Europeans have a better understanding of the world, but can they make a difference? Edward Said observes the scene with intelligence, and an objectivity impossible for most Americans.

The second major difference I have noticed between America and Europe is that religion and ideology play a far greater role in the former than in the latter. A recent poll taken in the United States reveals that 86 per cent of the American population believes that God loves them. There’s been a lot of ranting and complaining about fanatical Islam and violent jihadists, who are thought to be a universal scourge. Of course they are, as are any fanatics who claim to do God’s will and to fight his battles in his name. But what is most odd is the vast number of Christian fanatics in the US, who form the core of George Bush’s support and at 60 million strong represent the single most powerful voting block in US history. Whereas church attendance is down dramatically in England it has never been higher in the United States whose strange fundamentalist Christian sects are, in my opinion, a menace to the world and furnish Bush’s government with its rationale for punishing evil while righteously condemning whole populations to submission and poverty.
It is the coincidence between the Christian Right and the so-called neo-conservatives in America that fuel the drive towards unilateralism, bullying, and a sense of divine mission.

Said insists that this crusading impulse is without an equivalent in Europe.

The ideological position common to nearly everyone in the system is that America is best, its ideals perfect, its history spotless, its actions and society at the highest levels of human achievement and greatness. To argue with that — if that is at all possible — is to be “un-American” and guilty of the cardinal sin of anti- Americanism, which derives not from honest criticism but for hatred of the good and the pure.
No wonder then that America has never had an organised Left or real opposition party as has been the case in every European country. The substance of American discourse is that it is divided into black and white, evil and good, ours and theirs. It is the task of a lifetime to make a change in that Manichean* duality that seems to be set forever in an unchanging ideological dimension.

In an earlier paranthetical aside, we had been reminded:

Incidentally, I know no other country [than the U.S.] where the adjective “un” is used with the nationality as a way of designating the common enemy. No one says unSpanish or unChinese: these are uniquely American confections that claim to prove that we all “love” our country. How can one actually “love” something so abstract and imponderable as a country anyway?

Sigh.
He concludes with the hope that “…Europe will come to its senses and assume the countervailing role to America that its size and history entitle it to play. Until then, the war approaches inexorably.”
* (seeing things in good/evil, black/white terms)

Did we ever think we would see such a headline describing events in the land of the free?
The headline is from yesterday’s Reuters story, covering developments little noticed and less remarked upon by those people once described as free.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – In a victory for the Bush administration, a secretive appeals court Monday ruled the U.S. government has the right to use expanded powers to wiretap terrorism suspects under a law adopted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The ruling was a blow to civil libertarians who say the expanded powers, which allow greater leeway in conducting electronic surveillance and in using information obtained from the wiretaps and searches, jeopardize constitutional rights.
In a 56-page ruling overturning a May opinion by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the three-judge appeals court panel said the Patriot Act gave the government the right to expanded powers.

Horrible. Secret appeals court overturns secret court ruling in secret hearing and there is no appeal. The decision threatens, or rather wipes out, some of the most fundamental constitutional rights of citizenship.

The appeal hearing was not public, and only the Justice Department’s top appellate lawyer, Theodore Olson, presented arguments.
Although the court allowed “friend of the court” briefs to be filed by civil liberties groups and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, since the Justice Department was the only party the ruling can likely not be appealed.
“This is a major Constitutional decision that will affect every American’s privacy rights, yet there is no way anyone but the government can automatically appeal this ruling to the Supreme Court,” [said Ann Beeson of the American Civil Liberties Union].

How else do we account for the silence and obvious indifference of the overwhelming majority of the U.S. population in the face of the Republicans’ radical refashioning of the American economy, society and state?

November 19, 2002
Low-Turnout Mandate
To the Editor:
Re “Orwell Was Right” (letter, Nov. 16):
Decrying the continuing assault against our civil liberties, the letter writer asks, “Does a 40 percent voting turnout give the government a mandate to invade our privacy this way?”
The answer, of course, is yes. That low turnout is precisely what gives the government the mandate to act as if no one cares and no one is looking.
WILLIAM F. BENNETT
Somerville, Mass., Nov. 16, 2002