Category: Politics

Do something.
Together with tomorrow and just possibly the day after, these may be the most fateful days in modern American history. Some day they will ask, “Where were you?”
Be ready to tell them, if you survive the days ahead.
Congress is about to sign-on to the unelected Bush Administration’s free pass for, effectively, by unique precedent, the concept of unilateral pre-emptive war against whatever element, sovereign nation or otherwise, the American regime of the day deems to be an appropriate target for elimination.
Whether of not we think we can make a difference to the outcome, there is still time to register dissent, for our own integrity, and for the ultimate record of mankind.
Please, please, please contact your own congresspeople and anyone else in Congress who might be able to use your encouragement to pursue the right course in these hours. There is talk of a Senate filibuster, led by the estimable Senator Byrd, to prevent the vote now expected to result in the Senate’s capitulation to this regime’s folly. He and others of good will need your encouragement.
You can go to Common Cause for direction to the people you wish to contact.
The world thanks you, even if it doesn’t yet know it should.
If you have any doubts about the power and the will of the enemies of this Republic, look at the media at this moment. Barry and I spent four hours in the East Meadow of Central Park today in the midst of a diverse, very noisy, extraordinarily enthusiastic group of (perhaps twenty thousand?) other people of conscience, in an anti-war rally organized by “Not In Our Name.” Up to this moment at least, there appears to be a complete blackout on any information about the event in the commercial media.
We saw absolutely no sign of the presence of any of the American commercial news media. Maybe their Republican patrons forgot to tell them about it.
The lead story on NY1, New York’s own all-news television station’s website, at this moment (Sunday, 11:30 PM), over six hours after the end of the protest, is the description of a “mock ticker-tape parade [and torch-bearers which the City is preparing to send] through Manhattan streets this week to show the U.S. Olympic Committee what the 2012 Summer Games would look like in New York.” Yuck. I see no mention of this, or of any of the other rallys held in 24 cities throughout the nation today, anywhere on the site, or on the sites belonging to any of the major U.S. news organizations.
As far as the print and electronic press are concerned (and therefore the people of the U.S. as well), it just didn’t happen.
But it did, and someday people may know–if we live to tell about it.

A great orator, and perhaps the last of his kind.
I don’t often see eye-to-eye with the senior Senator from West Virginia, but Democrat Robert C. Byrd did amazing work in the halls of Congress this week.
[the following quotes are excerpted from the complete text printed in the NYTimes]
The Senator begins with a characteristic reference to the Roman historian Livy, who was familiar with republics and dictatorships both.

Titus Livius, one of the greatest of Roman historians, said all things will be clear and distinct to the man who does not hurry. Haste is blind and improvident. Blind and improvident, Mr. President [the remarks are addressed to the president pro tem of the Senate], blind and improvident.

Byrd feels the White House pressure and knows the reason for it.

The newly bellicose mood that permeates this White House is unfortunate, all the more so because it is clearly motivated by campaign politics. Republicans are already running attack ads against Democrats on Iraq. Democrats favor fast approval of a resolution so they can change the subject to domestic economic problems.
Before risking the lives, I say to you the people out there who are watching through those electronic lenses, before risking the lives of your sons and daughters, American fighting men and women, all members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, must overcome the siren song of political polls and focus strictly on the merits, not the politics, of this most grave, this most serious undertaking, this most grave, this most serious issue that is before us.
Mr. President, the resolution S.J. Resolution 46, which will be before this Senate, is not only a product of haste, it is also a product of presidential hubris. This resolution is breathtaking, breathtaking in its scope. It redefines the nature of defense. It reinterprets the Constitution to suit the will of the executive branch. This Constitution, which I hold in my hand, is amended without going through the constitutional process of amending this Constitution.
S.J. Resolution 46 would give the president blanket authority to launch a unilateral, pre-emptive attack on a sovereign nation that is perceived to be a threat to the United States. A unilateral, pre-emptive attack on a sovereign nation that is perceived to be a threat to the United States. This is an unprecedented and unfounded interpretation of the president’s authority under the Constitution of the United States, not to mention the fact that it stands the Charter of the United Nations on its head.

He warns of the horrible prototype which the rush to war will establish, both within the U.S. and without. (But why should this Junta care?)

Think for a moment of a precedent that this resolution will set not just for this president — hear me now, you on the other side of the aisle — not just for this president, but for future presidents. From the day forward American presidents will be able to invoke Senate Joint Resolution 46 as justification for launching pre-emptive military strikes against any sovereign nations that they perceive to be a threat.
You’d better pay attention. You’re not always going to have a president of your party in the White House. How will you feel about it then? How will it be then?
Other nations will be able to hold up the United States, hold up the U.S.A. as the model to justify their military adventures. Do you not think, Mr. President, that India and Pakistan, China and Taiwan, Russia and Georgia are closely watching the outcome of this debate? Do you not think that future adversaries will look to this moment to rationalize the use of military force to achieve who knows what ends?

War is being invoked as a first resort, and we are not even allowed to ask why.

Mr. President, the Senate is rushing to vote on whether to declare war on Iraq without pausing to ask why. We don’t have time to ask why. We don’t have time to get the answers to that question why. Why is war being dealt with not as a last resort but as a first resort? Why is Congress being pressured to act now? As of today, I believe 33 days before a general election when a third of the United States Senate and the entire House of Representatives are in the final highly politicized weeks of election campaign

Once again, for Byrd and many others, there is the rhetorical question. Why just now?

It is now October of this year of our Lord 2002. Four years have gone by in which neither this administration nor the previous one felt compelled to invade Iraq to protect against the imminent threat of weapons of mass destruction until today, until now, until 33 days before Election Day. Now we’re being asked, now we’re being told that we must act immediately. We must put this issue behind us. We must put this question behind us. We must act immediately we are told before adjournment and before the elections. Why the rush? Why the rush?

–not that the media is going to report her statement, even if she is a celebrity (shouldn’t that be enough of a temptation?), when it refuses to cover the statements of (legitimate?) politicians who speak out against the Administration’s latest divertissement.
In a press conference at the San Sebastian film festival in Spain, where she received a lifetime achievement award, Lange did not mince words.

“Bush stole the elections and since then we have all been suffering the consequences. The Iraq plan is absolutely mad, but what I do not understand is that nobody tries to stop it – neither inside nor outside the United States,” the actress added.
“The atmosphere in my country is poisonous, intolerable for those of us who are not right-wing, so thank you for inviting me to this festival and allowing me to get out for a few days,” Lange said on receiving the Donostia Prize, presented by Spanish actor Jose Coronado.

Thanks, Jessica, for trying to stir up the waters a bit.

There really is an excellent reason for supporting war with Iraq, or at least for talking about such a war. If one is of the Republican persuasion and one wishes to maintain and even increase the Republican domination of the American polity, talk of war and the imminent danger to America presented by the imagined threat presented by a demonic foe will do the trick. Absolutely.
Any other justification is superfluous. In fact, any other justification may be impossible, even for many Republicans, since, aside from its immediate advantage for the politicos, this war is almost certain to be disastrous for all but oil and armament moguls.
The economic and political health of the country is in very real danger, but we are all being distracted by the Republicans’ manufacture and sale of this absurd sideshow adventure.
Almost two years ago, in the months after the 2000 elections, I bored or frightened my friends with my prediction that we would never have another Presidential election, and we would very likely be relieved of the messiness of another congressional election as well. I believed that the Republicans would never give up what had been so ill-gotten in the winter of 2000-2001.
I was certain that some pretext would be invented to distort the electoral process, or even entirely suspend the Constitutional niceties providing for the election of a Congress and a President, in order to protect us from enemies at home or aboad.
Absent any compelling case for Republican involvement in the events of September 11, we still have a case for a Republican conspiracy, one which is subverting the political process at this very moment, and it’s working very well indeed. Most of the Democrats have bought into the monstrous idiocy of this regime’s war arguments and practices, with disagreement only in the details, at best.
If they get away with it this fall, a Republican executive, a Republican Congress and a Republican judiciary will virtually guarantee their success with a frightened and gung-ho citizenry in 2004. Dictatorship accomplished.
As far as the current situation is concerned, I do not have an opinion about whether their war-thing is merely a political device, that is, a gambit for sabotaging what whould otherwise be almost certain victory for Democrats in November and a long-overdue accounting for the Republican executive, or whether the Administration is really serious about this thing.
I would like to think that it is the first scenario (which represents I suppose the greater cynicism) that we are dealing with here, especially since what is at stake is our own lives, our property (but not our sacred honor, which is already lost and perhaps irretrievable).
At this point I’m expected to ask anyone reading this to communicate with her and his senators and representatives, on the outside chance that they have not already performed the ritual, but I honestly believe that the demons are now beyond recall. It’s now summer, 1914, and the mobilization cannot be retracted.
But write anyway.
You’ll feel better in the morning, I think, especially if you realize that the next opportunity for nobility may not involve letters or emails.
To locate your member of Congress, use this.

While I was speaking during intermission to the two women who sat next to us tonight at the theater, one of them said that she really liked my button (the slash “WAR” button I’ve worn now for exactly 360 days). She enthusiastically accepted the duplicate I offered her, but when I asked her friend if she would like one too, she declined, also enthusiastically, even chuckling, with, “I would wear the opposite — nuke em’ all!”
Barry insists the second woman represents the real America. I guess I’m so out of touch with this real America, perhaps partly because the version I grew up with no longer exists, that I really didn’t know that. In spite of my too obvious pessimism these days, I still don’t want to believe it could be the case.
Unfortunately we no longer have the luxury of not knowing what the real America looks like. I expect we will all find out very very soon.

Are there really people out there? Maybe there is still hope, but we’re going to have to let each other know we’re here. Don’t hide under a basket!

If you scratch the surface of the poll numbers about Bush and Ashcroft’s overwhelming support, you get down to a lot of people with a lot of questions. Some of them are afraid that they are alone in what they are thinking. What it takes to get them excited and to get them involved is for them to see someone standing up so that they will know they are not alone.”

A member of a Madison, Wisconsin, school board who took a supposedly very unpopular position and survived attests that Americans are ready for the debate being denied us by Washington.

“If the last year taught us anything, it’s this: Yes, of course, if you step out of the mainstream you will get called names and threatened. But you will also discover that a lot of Americans still recognize that dissenters are the real defenders of freedom.”

Some of you may not have heard, but in the last few years it’s become clear that she’s made what appears to be a 180 degree turn from her left-baiting personna. We can use her eloquence.
This morning Arianna Huffington describes the Bushies’ latest economic relief program: more tax cuts for the rich, or “Trickle Down Trickles Up Again.”

How did the free-market ideology of the Reagan revolution come to be the political consensus of our times? How did we get suckered by the fairy tale that as long as people kept shopping, the market could keep our prosperity going as far as the eye could see? And that by voting with our credit cards, we could spread the gospel of prosperous democracy to any corner of the earth where American products were made or consumed. Like all fairy tales, it’s a nice story. But it’s time to acknowledge that this one didn’t have a happily-ever-after ending.
….
It would take a while — and the fall of Ken Lay, Bernie Ebbers, Sam Waksal, et al — before the invisible hand was exposed as a pickpocket. But even after the free market parade had to be called off on account, not of rain, but of fraud, we have begun to hear the trickle-down marching bands warming up in the distance, ready to play their familiar siren songs. It’s time we resuscitated Mark Russell’s definition of trickle-down as “something that benefits David Rockefeller now and Jay Rockefeller later.” Or, to be a bit more current, George Herbert Walker Bush then, and George Walker Bush now.

Mark Morford begins his characteristically-restrained critique (just kidding!) of the appalling usurper of the office of U.S. vice-president,

We have a war-crazed vice president. An addict, a verifiable military junkie. Many of us perhaps do not fully realize this.
We are very unfortunately saddled with one of the least charismatic least interesting most intellectually acrimonious and most desperately hawkish, violence-hungry, soulfully inscrutable vice president in decades, and he wants this country at war, now and always. Oh yes he does.

Yes, he’s supposedly the second most powerful man in the world, but he essentially controls every decision made by the most powerful man in the world [Morford cautions, “which hence makes him the de facto most powerful man in the world shhh don’t tell Geedubya or he might have a tantrum”]

And we have to realize there is no one in the upper Bush administration who is acting as a balancing voice, who is calling for peace, perhaps urging a major rethinking of our oil and military policies, someone of significant intellectual depth and compassion who understands the nuances of our voracious foreign policy and if you said Colin Powell you haven’t seen the pictures, all slumped shoulders and vacant eyes and impotent trips to Israel, emasculated and exhausted. Powell is Cheney’s favorite footstool.
So here is Dick Cheney, howling into a vacuum, calling for more and increased violence and major expenditure and further stirring of anti-US hate in the face of almost unanimous global opposition. And Rumsfeld is grinning like mad.
And Bush, well, he’s on the horn to his dad every night, slumping in the Oval Office chair as the old man advises and snickers and grumbles about old grudges against Saddam and how we need to rip him a new one dag-nabbit. Poor Dubya is getting it from both sides, his two main puppeteers, urging war, as the world frowns, shakes its head, sighs.

We lost. We didn’t know we were at war. We didn’t even think there was an enemy. The weapons were all in the other side’s hands, but since we were thoroughly brain-washed before hostilities began in earnest, we wouldn’t have raised a hand against the enemy even if we had been armed.
Incredibly, the victors still want more even now.

Some days, you have to believe right-wing ideologues have lost touch with reality completely. Their latest proposal to prevent future Enrons is — ta-da! — cut the capital gains tax.
And exactly what does that do to prevent future Enrons? Nothing. Except Ken Lay won’t have to pay taxes on the stock he sold while his company cratered and his employees watched their life savings disappear.

Molly Ivins is mad as hell!

It’s amazing to me that only populists are ever accused of class warfare. Talk about losing a grip on reality. I’ll tell you what class warfare is:
When the Gingrich Republicans mandate that the IRS spend more of its resources auditing working-class people who get the Earned Income Tax Credit than it does auditing millionaires who use countless tax evasion schemes.
In 1999, the average after-tax income of the middle 60 percent of Americans was lower than in 1977. The 400 richest Americans between 1982 and 1999 increased their average net worth from $230 million to $2.6 billion, over 500 percent in constant dollars.
By 1999, over one decade, the average work year had expanded by 184 hours. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the typical American worked 350 hours more per year than the typical European.
Less than half of all Americans have any pension plan other than Social Security. Wage-earners in the United States collectively ended the decade with less pension and health coverage, as well as with the Industrial West’s least amount of vacation time, shortest maternity leaves and shortest average notice of termination. Among the Western nations, the United States has the highest levels of inequality.
From 1980 to 1999, the 500 largest U.S. corporations tripled their assets and their profits, and enlarged their market value eightfold, as measured by stock prices. During the same period, the 500 corporations eliminated 5 million American jobs.
This is class warfare. (All these figures are from Kevin Phillips’ excellent book, Wealth and Democracy.)

There is, unfortunately, almost no precedent for the kind of attack this former President today directed against the current White House occupants.

Fundamental changes are taking place in the historical policies of the United States with regard to human rights, our role in the community of nations and the Middle East peace process — largely without definitive debates (except, at times, within the administration). [President Carter here describes “a core group of conservatives who are trying to realize long-pent-up ambitions under the cover of the proclaimed war against terrorism.”]
….
Formerly admired almost universally as the preeminent champion of human rights, our country has become the foremost target of respected international organizations concerned about these basic principles of democratic life. We have ignored or condoned abuses in nations that support our anti-terrorism effort, while detaining American citizens as “enemy combatants,” incarcerating them secretly and indefinitely without their being charged with any crime or having the right to legal counsel.
….
While the president has reserved judgment, the American people are inundated almost daily with claims from the vice president and other top officials that we face a devastating threat from Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and with pledges to remove Saddam Hussein from office, with or without support from any allies. As has been emphasized vigorously by foreign allies and by responsible leaders of former administrations and incumbent officeholders, there is no current danger to the United States from Baghdad.
….
We have thrown down counterproductive gauntlets to the rest of the world, disavowing U.S. commitments to laboriously negotiated international accords.
….
Tragically, our government is abandoning any sponsorship of substantive negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis. Our apparent policy is to support almost every Israeli action in the occupied territories and to condemn and isolate the Palestinians as blanket targets of our war on terrorism, while Israeli settlements expand and Palestinian enclaves shrink.
….
Belligerent and divisive voices now seem to be dominant in Washington, but they do not yet reflect final decisions of the president, Congress or the courts. It is crucial that the historical and well-founded American commitments prevail: to peace, justice, human rights, the environment and international cooperation.
Former president Carter is chairman of the Carter Center in Atlanta.