“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.  Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.  Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.”

— Steve Jobs, CEO, Apple Computer and Pixar Animation Studios
     June 12, 2005 Stanford commencement speech.

“...don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

For the 4,486 soldiers who have died in Iraq (32,223 wounded), and after ten years, the 1,912, and also still counting, who have perished in Afghanistan (with 15,322 wounded, rapidly climbing), the worst kind of waste has been realized:  losing arms and legs, and dying for someone else’s life, usually foreign and corrupt, for someone else’s voice, imposed with wealth and privilege to form slithering policies of wrongful entanglements that have brought death to the thousands of soldiers and their families, and in bits and pieces for the nation, as well, as all along, the defense industries of the military-industrial complex grow their profits and wealth in a bloody occupation where the defense obligation of 9-11 was won in the first 20 months, more than eight years ago, with only 53 dead and 138 wounded U.S. soldiers.

President Obama, marking the 10th anniversary of the Afghan war, the longest in American history, said, “We are closer than ever to defeating al Qaeda and its murderous network;” this, as Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, said bringing security to his people (read, his government) has been a failure of the U.S. and his (Karzai’s) administration.  Only months later, after incidents of shameful reflection, unfairly cast upon all occupation troops, of urination on the dead, burnings of the Koran, the Blackwater (now XE Services) massacre of civilians, now compounded by the latest, 16, mostly children and women, dead, at the hands of a single, maddened soldier, Karzai claims, “This is the end of the rope,” and orders U.S. troops be removed from villages, killing the U.S. multi-year plan of “winning the hearts and minds” of the Afghan people, who are regularly “collateralized” by the U.S. as damage.

Still, America’s military chiefs and politicians resist the withdrawal call, and despite the stains of America’s own, unintended, “murderous network,” like Nixon, and Johnson before him, the president looks to the future involvement in the Afghan despair based upon responsibly ending the war “from a position of strength... and stability.”  Fifty-eight thousand U.S. soldiers died in Vietnam as those presidents propped up another corrupt, ineffectual government, and prolonged the war that they could not win, should never have started, looking for the unattainable “position of strength” or “peace with honor,” before finally ending the conflict and the ever-mounting deaths, and with no promised cascading of the dominoes.

This is the deadly “noise of others’ opinions” that repeats, today, as government “speak,” echoing the hollow, future promises of yesterday, where history holds no lessons for the arrogant and the proud, or those fearful of confronting mistakes and their consequences, as the bloodletting continues... to no worthwhile end.  At least, the stubborn stance of the Iraqi regime has forced the president to honor his promise for a near-complete pull-out of troops from that latest national killing ground, provided courtesy of the Bush/Cheney administration, the military-industrial complex, and a Republican party’s hawks and extremists who still propose spending blood for motives of capitalist expansionism and profit.

“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.”

That noise is also manifest in the voices Americans hear in their politics, and those they do not, the voices bought and paid for, imposed upon the nation in sound-bites, party lines, and propaganda, through unbalanced leverage of wealth and position, detached from any sense of community or social responsibility and spread through the biased, constraining control of vast media consolidations, to limit voices, to quell regulations, to narrow opportunities, to channel prosperity, to buy votes and perpetrate travesties like turning corporations into political entities, empowered to overcome the many voices of the individuals who are the solitary, collective “People” for whom the Constitution, now so contorted by the Roberts Supreme Court, was penned to promote and protect.

Nothing will change for the better, no measure taken will make a difference, unless first, above all else, the election machine that spits out a corrupt, insulated, bought-and-paid-for government is detached from the tender of greed and avarice that fuels it:  campaign contributions.

The Wall Street protestors are on the wrong track when they focus anger on bankers and the wealthy.  You don’t blame the bear for killing the man who gets too close to the cubs—you blame the man.  Those financial “takers” are being human, doing what opportunity allows and greed compels for them, doing what comes naturally, succumbing to human weakness and vice, the very characteristics of which the Founders so clearly recognized as unchangeable and dangerous, and against which they knew only a “democratic government,” with checks and balances, serving and responsive to the common good, could prevail.  What they could not foresee was a society so fraught with diversions aside from work:  TV, games, malls, clubs and other avenues for self-indulgence and distraction of citizens in matters of no consequence to the foundation of their lives.  The activities of citizens in the Founders’ time were centered upon occupation, neighbors, government and learning.  The protestors should be angry at themselves, for not paying attention to things that matter so much, for paying too much attention to trivia, for waiting so long to see and to object, for letting it go this far, get this bad.  And they should be angry at their legislators, most for not having the intellect to see the problem and/or the strength of character and ethics to turn away from the system or change it and uphold the Constitution.

But the seemingly, awakening sight of the demonstrators on Wall Street, growing to other cities, points out how all democratic governments are vulnerable, especially to apathy and ignorance, heightened when the unwritten branch of government, the “Fourth Estate” press, is swept from the streets and airways into a very few, towering centers of control, killing objectivity, repressing the reporting of independent investigation, limiting the inputs and outlets, channeling the rainbow of thought into extremes of black and white.  The Federal Communications Commission, politically staffed by Republican presidents, accomplished most of this reduction during the Reagan and Bush terms.  The tentacles of control writhed out from the few electronic-media conglomerates, spread with the growth of cable, the internet, and the means to access it, and are made all the more powerful as, at the same time, the market forces of media and technology change began to diminish and eventually strangle many of the independent providers of the airwaves and printed page.

Party control of the fund-raising and election process, from districting to post-election committee appointments, is separated from the view or control of the People, forming a government that is built in cloakrooms and behind closed doors, upon favors and the cash-and-carry success of legislators and their mini-machines, an industry that creates and reenforces extremism and gridlock while robbing the People of their representatives’ most important asset:  the time that is spent on fundraising, from strategy meetings to time spent with donors, pursuing donors, servicing the desires of donors and looking to the future, not to secure the long-term policies needed by the nation, but rather to acquire the campaign funds and promises that will assure the next election’s continuation of the entire, abortive process.

“I only have two years,” think the House representatives, “and I have to make sure I put in the time and effort required to win the next election, above all else.”  This is the situation facing the People, and what chance is there for productive, constituent-responsive government to address complex, long-term problems when the highest priority is to do whatever, twist whatever, say whatever, half-truths or outright lies in the rush to get re-elected, and to spend the working hours of at least six months of the two-year term working toward that end?

When the Constitution was framed, the population and the challenges and diversity of America’s interests and needs were such that elections every two years for representatives was not a burden and was effective enough for government’s purposes.  But times have changed, and as the population has grown, the number of representatives has not increased in proportion, which contributes to the unresponsive government in two ways:  reducing constituent accountability through increased difficulty of access as the number of constituents for each representative increases, and increasing the power of representatives, through the increased number of constituents they represent and from whom they are inherently more insulated.  And since the Founders erred in not providing a Constitutional mandate for a per-capita increase in House seats, no member has incentive to initiate a change that will reduce his or her power by providing additional seats to make representative government as close and accessible and responsive to the People as the Founders intended it to be for the House.

Representation, the vital function of democratic process, has been under attack far longer than the generation which began with the Nixon administration. In 1913, Congress raised the number of House seats to today’s 435.  But in 1921, the newly elected, Republican-majority Congress failed to reapportion the House membership after the census, as required by the United States Constitution, politically motivated, because the effect such a reapportionment would have on future Republican electoral prospects was feared.  Then, in 1929, Congress (with Republican control of both houses and the presidency) passed the Reapportionment Act of 1929, which capped the size of the House at 435, a step to control representation, and power, which has since become a bipartisan objective.

Districting is so important because it determines representation, and the lack of strong representation is a big part of the reason why government is unresponsive and unaccountable to citizens.  Gerrymandering, as Republicans did to the Ohio 1st District this year, among others, further damages representation, in Ohio-D1, giving Republicans a better-than 2:1 ratio of registered voters over Democrats.  Where is the political equality in that?  And any good government scholar will tell you, without political equality, which is one of three pillars supporting the foundation of democratic government, you have no viable democracy.  In that district, the whole of Butler and Warren counties were swapped, and a part of Hamilton County was cut out, immediately disenfranchising the voters in three counties, with voters, incumbents, and candidates suddenly unfamiliar with one another.  Districting should strengthen and broaden the ties of representation, not tear them apart to provide unfair political advantage, which is both un-American and undemocratic... and unneighborly.

Districting is also important as it affects apportionment of House seats.  223 years ago, on March 4, the First Congress convened with about 65 House members, each representing about 75,000 of today’s-suffrage-adjusted voters.  Now, with only 435 House members, the number in place for the most part since 1913, the representative for most districts will stand for more than 470,000 voters—more than 700,000 citizens, and that is far too many for effective representation in the House, and most significantly, with fewer representatives over which to gain control, they are made more susceptible and accessible to the influence of wealthy and powerful special interests, including political parties.

Career politicians have become complacent about what voters think and are happy with the system the way it is, keeping them wrapped in comfortable districts and in office, serving their interests before the People’s and the nation’s, and they won’t alter the system and reduce their power by voting to increase the number of House representatives and provide more responsive and accountable representation.  It does not require a constitutional amendment, so put the light on your representative to ask why he or she allows the dilution of representation (and the reduced government responsiveness and accountability that comes with it) by keeping the 435 cap?

And adding representatives will also result in an increased number of smaller districts, making it easier for states to provide equality with more contiguous district mapping, improving representative government.  A bonus is that no new office buildings would have to be built to house the new representatives, even if the number were doubled, because of the glut of empty federal buildings within a quarter-mile of the Capitol.  This is one of the fundamental changes that must happen if democracy is to be restored, government improved, and the gulf of disparities and unfair advantage raging within the nation narrowed.

But more than population has changed.  The complexity of life, and of all the attendant prerequisites of government responsibility to provide for public liberty, welfare, and safety have increased as well, and two years is no longer a sufficient period for representatives to become familiar with and effectively carry out their committee assignments, let alone meet their legislative and constituent-relations responsibilities (fund-raising time is not included because it should and must be eliminated), or to be able to look ahead to the nation’s future and develop policies meant to address problems and challenges extending, beyond the next election, over the horizon.

Just think of committees.  They are created to divide the focus of the total membership of the House and Senate on individual problems and goals, to provide a means by which legislators can become expert in the industries and activities that fall within the scope of their committees’ charters and thereby guide their colleagues in passing useful legislation.  This is how a legislator’s committee-responsibility time is supposed to serve the People, by developing the expertise to provide effective legislation to provide for safety and promote prosperity—a balance in which safety must always carry the greatest weight, but often has not, as one tragedy after another in every decade of American modern history attests.  Often, legislators, especially in the House, have not become knowledgeable enough about the complexities that exist within the activities their committees are intended to oversee, and just as often they have only turned an ear to the interests of the lobbyists for those industries, always at their ears, and often on their staffs, sitting at their right shoulders in hearings.  This is how disasters, like Gulf oil spills, sub-prime-loan-deflation recessions, commuter-airline crashes, profit-motivated drug unavailabilities, drug and food illnesses and deaths, mining explosions, and Shuttle disasters, etc., etc., happen, and why government is mostly reactive to these disasters instead of proactive to prevent them.  This will improve, if and when legislators’ ears are ever freed of lobbyists and their time freed from fundraising, and the revolving door of legislators, turned by two-year elections, is slowed, a revolving door that is self-serving to the election machine, elected officials’ post-legislative careers, and special interests... not the People.

Today, policies are designed to meet the needs of what will get a representative re-elected 24 months after the oath of office is taken, or a president in four years, all eyes on the next election after three.  America’s future depends upon better governance than has been serving the privileged and wealthy in this generation, and legislators, even free of fundraising, need more time to master their responsibilities serving America, and everyone needs fewer elections.  A constitutional amendment extending the terms of office of the House of Representatives to four years, and to preserve the Founders’ intent for overlapping stability, the Senate to eight, must be included with the ban on campaign contributions.  And to insure that the behavior and performance of representatives is not separated from the people by the lengthened terms, to whom the House chamber is intended to be closest, or left to the ineffective, internal rules of the House, a district-level recall procedure must also be specified which provides the people of a representative’s district reasonable means by which to stage a recall election, if desired, at the mid-term.

These are the first changes upon which Americans must focus.  When accomplished, other necessary changes will more easily follow, like ending the income-tax code in favor of a value-added tax, with fixed exclusions for medical products and services, most food, and some non-food-derived fuels, and percentage levels within categories of goods to insure fair-share payments for all and loopholes for none; and unwinding the knot of media consolidation that muffles voices and constricts the oversight of investigative journalism; and also reining in the dangerous and unnecessary military expansionism and unconstitutional, presidential military authority that has been allowed by Congress to develop, and which has cost America so much in this generation and which is irrevocably bleeding into the next.

“Things are not as they have been,” proclaimed President Obama, today, at the United Nations; yet, in addressing the Middle-East rise against totalitarianism, the president’s policies of defending Bush-administration officials against prosecutions for crimes stand in stark contrast to his high-sounding words, muting them and making them meaningless—do as I say, not as I do.  When and if President Obama leads America into the new world of accountability for leaders, recognizing that they are just people who, when committing crimes, deserve no special immunity as a consequence of their office, but rather require harsher punitive measures because of the greater scope of affect inflicted by their crimes, then the president’s words will have meaning, and America will begin to step up to the line of advance that has been set by Egypt’s attempts and intent to prosecute, at the highest level, the criminal acts of Hosni Mubarak’s regime.

In an interview with journalist Jim Lehrer, broadcast on the PBS Newshour, Sec. Robert Gates, “the Soldiers’ Secretary,” who was a breath of badly needed fresh air, replacing Donald Rumsfeld, and who has done a good job, overall, in the difficult four years of his term in office, nonetheless revealed fatal flaws in his thinking on two points:  first, when he said it is up to the president to determine the nation’s security needs, i.e., make decisions on troop deployments; and second, that the U.S. has an obligation to assist, with military assets, France and Italy, or any other nation, in pursuit of their national interests in Libya as payback for their assistance to the U.S. in Afghanistan.

First, the U.S. Constitution, as well as ancillary writings of the Founders, are clear in specifying that the power of warfare, its use and goals, rests exclusively within Congress, not the president.  The silent ceding of war powers, predominate since WWII, to the president must end because it has caused mistaken, costly involvements in conflict after conflict, the latest being the president’s unconstitutional, unilateral decision to deploy forces in the “matter of days” Libyan conflict.  Secretary of State Clinton’s defense of the president, today, addressing critics in Congress who wish to exert their authority over the president in the Libyan issue, that America is “on the right side” in helping to overthrow the Libyan regime, is beside the point and irrelevant to the issue, which is that the president had no legal authority to put the U.S. on any side, that he did usurp the constitutional power of Congress.

Called the pearl of the Indian Ocean, Sri Lanka literally means “the island of delight,” an obscene notion, considering the ugliness that lies only skin deep, beneath the beauty of its many flowered jungles, seascapes and resorts, after more than 25 years of war and atrocity, never again to be called “unspoiled.”

Since House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) literally sheds tears over important public issues and is incapable of going deeper than party sound bites using speech, his criticism of the president for not addressing issues with an “adult conversation” is only laughable.

Congratulations to the Egyptian people, who have removed the figurehead of a corrupt dictatorship, taking a step toward a possible democracy.  With the exception of slow-coming words of support, and doubtless, extreme background pressure from President Obama, they did it with no help from America, the administrations of which, for 30 years, have chosen to support a dictator and remain on the wrong side of history.  It is mistaken, economic-driven policies of convenience and facilitation that, nonetheless, continue beyond Egypt, with aide and other support to corrupt, authoritarian regimes around the globe, helping to preserve the rule of fear that suppresses their people’s freedoms, robbing them of their wealth and opportunities, and where the major rewards go to a few U.S. corporations.  President John F. Kennedy said, of the ambitious goal of landing men on the Moon, that “[America] chooses to do it because it is hard.”  It is tragic that American foreign policy constantly chooses not to do the right thing because to do so would be hard and inconvenient to whomever profits otherwise.

Praises, also, to the Egyptian army, which stood with the people it is supposed to defend instead of assaulting them as the tool of an authoritarian government.

But the future remains uncertain for Egypt so long as the government remains in the hands of officials who have been a long-standing part of the self-serving Mubarak regime.

One can only wonder when and how George Bush or Dick Cheney will twist reality to somehow claim credit, that the Iraqi invasion contributed toward the apparent Egyptian revolution for democracy, events for which they and their criminal Iraqi invasion have had no part in bringing about, whatsoever.

What awaits for Egypt now is the denouement of free elections to create a civilian government, and a practical demonstration as to the validity of domino theories... will populist movements soon displace other Mid-East, authoritarian regimes?

December 26, 2010, the last day of a holiday weekend, and there will be no Sunday Night NFL Football on NBC or anywhere else... postponed until Tuesday because of the weather in Philadelphia, where the Eagle’s stadium is uncovered.  And the weather placed to blame is not lightening, or flood, or hurricane, or tornado, just cold and gusty snow, yet nothing to compare to the famed Packer Ice Bowl, or winter games played at Soldier Field in near white-out conditions.  The would-be announcers for the game say that the postponement was “not because of the weather, per se, because there have been games played in worse weather with more snow and wind, but that the game was postponed because of public safety... travel concerns.”

Well, one might wonder whose travel concerns, because the teams and coaches are there, and in all those other games, where the weather and the snow were worse, where the very same public safety issues still existed but were not ever considered or offered as an excuse to postpone a game, the fans with the exposed seats always showed up.

So what’s the reason the game was postponed?  The real reason?

Because America has gone soft as the falling snow, in so many ways, from abdomens to detached, and therefore more easily carried out, unnecessary wars where with no public sacrifice there is no public outrage.  The postponement is because the NFL has finally caught up with the public... and with many of its players, and gone soft too.  Easier, on the very day of the game, for the NFL to postpone rather than take the difficult turf, and assume everyone else will postpone to join them later in their softer, mid-week exhibition.

It takes a hard-core football fan, perhaps even one who has played the game at some level beyond the Pee-Wee League, to understand why enduring bad weather is not to be too easily avoided:  when fans who love their teams get into the elements with the players, suffer through the freezing cold and blowing snow with the players, there is never any other time that the bond between them, through that shared sacrifice, is greater.  The players know it, and they appreciate the foul-weather fan who stands with them, apart from the protection of sky boxes and living-room HD TV, for it.  That was needlessly taken away from those fans by the NFL tonight.  And for everyone, there has been a chink cut into the softened armor of the NFL’s once brutally defiant roboman.

Once upon a time, in a game that was set apart by shrugging-off weather, it is quite probable that Vince Lombardi, a hard man who was master when football was a harder game, would have agreed, cursing into the wind.

• Does not provide sufficient economic stimulus.
• Does not add significant jobs.
• Adds significantly, unnecessarily to the debt and the leverage of China and Mid East bond buyers.
• Many of America’s most wealthy people of conscience have said that the taxes they pay compared to middle- and lower-class people is an abomination.
• If anyone believes the pressure to repeal will be less significant in the election year of 2012, they’re wrong, and Republicans will properly suffer if taxes are allowed to increase because they would not forgo the unnecessary and ineffectual tax-break for the wealthy.
• The decision not to pass a continued tax break for the wealthy is an obligation to our children, contrary to the millionaires or even the middle-lower class at the expense of their children.
• It is immoral to give the wealthy tax breaks when prices and opportunities are all heavily leveraged exclusively in their favor.
• The time to get serious about economic equality and reducing the divide is now, not later.
• Failure to pass a continuance of the cuts including the wealthy will focus more pressure on making the changes to the tax laws that are overdue and necessary to simplify and spread the obligation more fairly to the wealthy brackets.
• The tax break is unfair to those who are among the long-term unemployed and low-income pensioners who have so far received no benefits or consideration during the recession except a single, $250 Social-Security payment!

Any elected official who is not ignorant should know, above all, that tyranny begins in the assertion by those in power that the end justifies the means.  This is where Bush and Cheney crossed the line, by again and again subverting the Constitution, in addition to their moral and legal trespasses, for which, whether or not they ever admit to wrong, they are both guilty and should have been impeached and more... jailed, annuities repealed, and all revenues from speaking and publishing redirected to families of the dead who fell on their coat tails.  No biography or memoir can re-write the history that will forever mark the Bush administration as one of the blackest and most unjustly-killing in America’s history.

This new Bush book does nothing to justify or apologize for anything.  It is merely an attempt to change, or at best, soften history and attempt to pull a legacy out of quicksand.  Even if his ghost writer used perfect grammar and spelling, the book could only rate one or two stars because it has little substance and little that historians either do not already know or would not find out for themselves.

From the interviews and snippets from public appearances since leaving office, it is clear that both Bush and Cheney laugh too easily and share a too-smug satisfaction with themselves, unaccountable for having brought death and misery to so many for so unjust reasons, which are not at all related to the defense of the nation, returning the Department of Defense to a War Department, an effective overlord of fear and aggression.  That is undeniable from the standpoint of those unfortunate enough to have been and who are under the muzzles of the guns of American soldiers and unconstitutional private armies as they pass in streets and break-down doors in the dead of night, and as they have, do NOT forget, also murdered.  If that is not terror, even if one cannot place one’s self and family in other shoes, than what is?  Can anyone be so obdurate not to see how Bush has grown the enemy at the same time he has decimated the image and war-power capacity and legitimacy of America?

The fact Bush says he has no regrets that he (and many others already gone, their blood on his hands) will not live to see the judgement of history on his conduct in office is a conscious rebuke of the global, widespread scorn with which his two terms are viewed, and his subconscious acceptance that the future judgement will be at least as condemning, that the history of his stretch in the office of president, and on many, many, many vacations, is eternally marked by the unjustifiable graves of more than 100,000 men, women, and children, including more than 4,400 U.S. soldiers, their fingers pointing to the decision on his deadly, nightmare legacy.  It is this enormous weight that drives him now, willingly or not, so adamantly to the side of the military members, that it may be forgotten he callously used their service and lives as a tool of industrial expansionism in Iraq.

Now, that is the case in Afghanistan, where the mission to remove the Taliban government, responsible for abetting al Qaeda, was accomplished within the first few years after invasion, al Qaeda also having been exiled and no longer a widespread, local force, the mission there morphing into an extended program of the military-industrial complex (MIC):  an occupation, its purpose to remove the Afghan tradition of tribal authority and control, eliminating opposition to commercial and resource development—no “defense of America” necessity in sight, except in lies and propaganda, tied to a struggle, “long” and “difficult” and “hard,” to prevent a vague, possible, maybe, future threat, trying to touch upon fear in the American people while orders for planes and tanks, like those recently made in Iraq, are the only things of major importance to the interests controlling the MIC that are really expected to cross America’s borders, targeting the defense plants of the MIC!  But the unnecessary extension of military operations in Afghanistan is a down-side part of the Bush legacy, now shared with President Obama as he is seduced by the MIC, and really is an aside to Bush’s memoir, if not a contributing factor in the accelerating, multi-faceted decline of America.

Is America really paralleling the Roman destiny of decline?  Bush’s book maps the outlines between the lines, and with the Bush “W” administration, never in the history of America has the military been so widely deployed around the American “empire of commercial and industrial influence,” the government so detached from the people and corrupted by wealth and greed, never has the populace seen a government so twisted in its purpose and execution placed into authority over them, to act in their name, disgracing them, and in the Bush-loaded, Republican-extremist Supreme Court, drowning out their voices with such scathing abuses.  That is the dire legacy of Bush, Cheney, Rove, and those who steered their crippled design of socio-political travesty into power.  It is a legacy to which many forces contributed and joined to create, but which only Bush could have prevented, had he the knowledge, ethic, and the courage that marks the heart of a patriot—the legacy that might have been would, then, have evolved, not the fiction Bush or Cheney would see ghost-written as memoirs of unfounded justifications and dubious truths, particularly on Bush’s feelings, regrets, and beliefs, for which there is no basis to judge the value, except the contradictory facts and consequences of his arrogant, usurping string of actions, and the harm done to the nation at the expense of the Constitution and those uncountable, irreplaceable, relinquished lives.

This book and its reviews, in whatever venues they exist, have become Bush’s third war—the war of the stars, where the one- and five-star reviews slug it out without much regard to the book on either side, the extremists of both sides, who have the time, frantically clicking “no’s” to rate the reviews of the other, not realizing the first rating is often the only one counted, even after reload.  Those looking for a more objective book review should start by ignoring all of those which are posted without the courage and assertion of a real name, and then just stick to the two- thru four-star comments, giving most weight to the three-star, which will probably turn out to be evenly split between those believing Bush is either a hero or a war criminal, and that the book reveals some truths among some obvious lies, deceptions and redirects, but still, giving it only two stars, those for putting heat on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on opposing the Iraq occupation.

But, a shiny jacket on a new book is not a change of skin... or anything lying beneath.

From this bad president comes a bad book, and neither it, nor any among the lunatic fringe who support its tired premises, openly, or with a secluded eye looking to 2012, will change the facts, bring back the dead or alter the history that will bury Bush’s legacy with them.  Bush has already said he is resigned to live and die accepting the judgement without regrets, though, one with no regrets, and wealth enough, hardly has the need or drive to supervise the writing of a memoir that isn’t a pure labor of love, so how could any book that attempts to paint a kind perspective on the eight years of war and terror and torture and kidnapping and domestic law-breaking and constitutional stomping by the chief perpetrator of the crimes be anything but an exercise in... vanity?

Regardless that he seemingly just says he has no regrets, providing another preview into the lack of credulity bound into the spine of the book, and the man, for not having the courage to finally accept accountability that the awful reality of the truth that buried the dead, and remains, still, for the living, is to be found in his failures:  personal, political, strategic, and economic, then maybe those who so quickly rush to defend the wreckage wrought by his wrong-headed, wrangling ways should begin to live with it instead of, like him, trying too hard?

Hope prevails that Bush’s book and its introductory accompaniments will, outside of a courtroom, at last mark his final goodbye and passage out of provoked memory.

In his 2010-published, memoirs book, re-framing history, George Bush wrote that cutting troop levels too soon was the biggest mistake in the war in Iraq.

That statement is another Bush mistake, demonstrating that he still doesn’t get it, through his obdurate, irrepressibly Republican-corporate-imprinted mind, which was trolled into office by his puppeteers, that INVADING Iraq was the biggest mistake.  And behind that disaster, only one among a galaxy of Bush blunders, would be failing to properly account for the aftermath, which by itself encompasses a slew of mistakes that were all more severe than premature troop-level decisions.

And Bush’s kind of thinking lives on under the skin in the extremes of the unenlightened Republican party, where the likes of John McCain and Sarah Palin believe in war, forever, anywhere there’s a buck to be made.

The Roman destiny, repeated in an American decline, has already begun and is assured to end in a fundamental collapse so long as parties and politicians act to define patriotism with self-interest and the dollar, which cannot be ended so long as elections are funded by contributions and parties control process, limits, and districting.

In 75 years, historians will look back at this election season and the Bush/Tea-party/Palin episodes, and they will conclude that al Qaeda tainted the national waters with neuropathogens.

To pave the way for rumbling over any deadline for a so-called, military withdrawal in Iraq, and keeping alive the military-industrial complex’s (MIC) operations there, Ryan C. Crocker, the former American ambassador to Iraq, who was instrumental in negotiating the agreement stipulating withdrawal before 2012, said, “For a very long period [read indefinite-to-forever] of time, we’re going to be on the ground, even if it’s solely in support of U.S. weapons systems.”

Lt. Gen. Babaker Zebari, Iraq’s chief military commander, who rightly expects sectarian violence to greatly increase, also spoke in the August heat to say that the U.S. forces should not leave Iraq until 2020, ten more years, until his army is able to guarantee internal security.

And finally, with the mid-August, weekend broadcast of NBC’s Meet the Press, the unified scope of U.S. military ambition was made clear, as Afghanistan U.S. forces commander, Gen. David Petraeus paralleled Iraq to Afghanistan in response to questions on the length of the U.S. occupation there, referring to the president’s earlier, West-Point message of “a substantial additional commitment... in troops, funding... and an increase in urgency,” which he said is the emphasis of the July 2011 deadline in Afghanistan, as “a conditions-based process, not an event...”  He then mirrored former Iraq Ambassador Crocker’s remarks about the term of occupation in Iraq by saying this for Afghanistan’s occupation:  “We will have an enduring presence here, in some fashion.”

Petraeus stressed the “urgency” to increase progress, describing “progress” as a building of small successes in different areas and linking and expanding them, but admitting that, “Progress only began [after nine long years] in late spring, in Helmand Province... a lot of progress still needs to be made and that will be a long-term operation.”  And he repeated, “Withdrawal will be “conditions based... the July 11, 2011 withdrawal date... is conditional.”

His remarks also demonstrated how far removed from defense the Afghanistan occupation really is, when speaking of the what-if’s:  “If we lose,” he said, “think of the repercussions for the country, and then the region,” which was the same “if we lose” justification that blanketed those questions in Vietnam.

On “if we win,” while qualifying his statement with a push-back on the use of the word “win,” as being an unlikely definable goal (which, in and of itself says a lot about the legitimacy of the extended occupation there), he mentioned security, of course, but the overwhelming emphasis of his answer, and of his statement of why the U.S. is in Afghanistan, fell far from the legitimate defense of America:  “There are $trillions in minerals development if we win.”  And Petraeus further described the markers of success, which, admit it or not, are objectives, as “like in Iraq... achieving a level of violence that is reduced sufficiently to allow commerce, business, and outside investment...”

It all has the undeniable ring of a capitalistic agenda vs. defensive, doesn’t it?

If it looks like a duck...

And the General, an exacting and well-versed politician who denies it, finally fell back on the same old generalization that has become the universal facade for claims of national security, which facts show do not apply, are not achievable, and are not critical to the operations of al Qaeda which, like electricity, takes the path of least resistance as it flows to the voids:  “We’re here so that Afghanistan does not become a sanctuary for trans-national extremists.”  As has been pointed out before, on that basis, the U.S. would be able to justify occupations in at least a dozen nations throughout the globe.  It is not a justification for what is, in reality, nation-building, as the General so much as said, to create a platform for commerce.

On the heels of these summer, 2010, MIC-prep statements, and those of President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, in the same period, intended to direct the public communication and acceptance of Afghan- and Iraqi-military policies, the “non-government” in Iraq has filled-in Crocker’s statement (and Petraeus’s image of Afghan end-game success), by ordering 140 tanks for $200 million, in addition to naval ships, small arms, F-16 fighter planes, and supporting vehicles, armaments, munitions, and spares—the entire spectrum of the MIC’s conventional-arms-manufacturing-establishment showroom.

Ka-ching!  The money flows, blooded by more than 4,400 dead and near 6,800 wounded U.S. troops.

Operation Enduring Freedom?  More like enduring pain (except for the MIC), and it is time to let the Iraqis live in the stew they make for themselves.  And, yes, it is their situation and circumstance now.  The U.S. has paid with the lives of its soldiers more than long enough and painfully enough to both atone for the Bush-Cheney crime and give them the real chance they need to get past their prejudices and historical strife to make a new start, and America can no longer be held responsible for their future, nor should it be, not by the Iraqis, not by U.S. elected, appointed, or career officials, and certainly not by the MIC.

Yet, it is clear that the Iraqi occupation will not end, as President Obama falsely promised, because it has entered the phase of end-game payoff for the industrial component of the MIC:  the establishing of another armed state where, despite whatever form of leadership evolves to rule Iraq, instead of a defense treaty (and the history of the Iraq-Kuwait invasion outcome) to protect against foreign invasion, the U.S. build-up, maintenance, and involvement with another military nation-state will be perpetuated indefinitely, with the benefits to fall only into the pockets of that industry which has been the only entity to continuously profit from the deaths of the tens upon uncounted tens of thousands of people since Bush invaded.  And that’s just Iraq.  Only a liar would say this is not the very same future envisioned by “officials,” elected or otherwise, for Afghanistan, and then for Iran, and then the rogue nations of North Africa, one by one, keeping America at war and the money flow to the MIC intact beyond the lifetimes of anyone’s children.

Or, sanity may prevail, at least where taking the tactical fight to al Qaeda is concerned.  The covert approach, basically, the focused, limited-force, intelligence/special-operations approach favored by the Biden camp, has been a component of the occupations in both Iraq and Afghanistan, but is now the core of a quietly built-up engagement composed of intelligence gathering, accelerated drone attacks, and special operations in North Africa, described by administration officials as using a scalpel instead of the hammer of troops.  This covert conflict is dubbed the “Shadow War,” and whether the focused cut of the “scalpel” is a holding action for the later “hammer” of troop invasions, or will be established as the means by which troops will be replaced, to properly engage “shadow” enemies, remains to be seen.  But the tactics are being applied, with local-government permission, by the expanded military-operations capacity of the CIA, and by expanded military-intelligence derived, special-group operations against al Qaeda in Yemen and other N. African locales.  It represents an important step in the right direction, despite the concerns of oversight and blurred military-rights/protections legalities, because officials have finally conceded that the use of intelligence, law enforcement, and special operations is effective while avoiding the kinds of cost and waste that have been endured (again, except by the MIC) and which are the future with troop operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Speaking on the shadow war in Yemen, a former United States ambassador to that nation, Edmund J. Hull, warned that American policy must not be limited to using force against al Qaeda, saying, “I think it’s both understandable and defensible for the Obama administration to pursue aggressive counter-terrorism operations... I’m concerned that counter-terrorism is defined as an intelligence and military program.  To be successful in the long run, we have to take a far broader approach that emphasizes political, social and economic forces.”

But there is danger here, in an “approach that emphasizes political, social and economic forces,” non-defensive terms coming from a civilian official, which are also primary MIC precursors to increasing military presence—build-up, as was done in Vietnam, or invasion and occupation, to establish the security and/or train the local forces to eventually, after another “long-term, hard” struggle, with “conditional” withdrawal criteria, provide the security that is required to grow desired “political, social, and economic” environments, or... to nation-build.

It begins with what Obama administration officials say they already are doing:  increasing Yemen’s foreign-aid budget and proposing advice (advisors, military, primarily, which is how the build-ups begin), which was emphasized, by unnamed administration officials as the core of America’s effort, along with equipping, and establishing coordinated intelligence exchanges.  How quickly and easily this stirring phase of the shadow war can turn into another inflated, unnecessary, perpetuated military presence, with all the attendant casualties and costs, is alarming.

Shadow wars have no commercial or capitalist objectives or rewards.

But the vastly more effective, far-less costly shadow war remains only a second front until it is applied in Afghanistan and Iraq without the presence of occupying troops.  But there is a more relevant, critically important difference to note between shadow wars and wars fought with occupations, which reflects the justification of purpose:  shadow wars are legitimate defense because, by their nature, they can have no commercial or capitalist objectives or rewards.

Defense Secretary Gates is only scratching at the surface of the MIC’s sprawl with his announced plans to cut into the bloated top ranks of the military’s personnel and parts of its flow-chart components and proposed systems.  Much, much more needs to be done, because when a nation that is, by far, the greatest military power on Earth spends decades in war or occupation of third-world nations, that nation is not acting in its defense, but is instead acting out its warfare-derived business plan, where defense (and al Qaeda) is only the initiative excuse.

While the legacy of the Obama administration will be to have turned the steep, domestic-prosperity down-slide, initiated by a string of conservative-Republican, trickle-down, deregulate administrations, it will also be one of propagation of the MIC grand plan for unnecessary, extended war and death, for profit, for a national-security intent that is as much a facade now as it was in Vietnam or Korea, but with a different kind of underlying truth, where the real fear is the nuclear arsenal that is scattered throughout a politically unstable Pakistan, and where, rather than spend 3,000 troops over two years, tops, to eliminate that grave threat to the fabric of America’s society and the lives of every demographic of its citizenry, the U.S. is determined to instead spend decade upon decade, at least 15,000 soldier’s lives, or more, and unlimited national debt to support neighboring nation-building and occupations for some kind of misguided “stability,” and to do it indefinitely.

Tactics to encourage an endless occupation in Afghanistan have lately targeted strongly emotional issues, relating to the abusive treatment of women, which is hardly an Afghan novelty.  Most recent, the story from the cover of Time magazine’s issue of a year ago, August 9, 2009, has had new light put upon it.  Aisha, the disfigured girl on the cover, was then a beautiful, 18-year-old who had the misfortune of being the niece of a custodial uncle who killed a man and, under Pashtun tribal custom, atoned by giving her and her younger sister to the dead man’s relative, who made her his bride when she reached puberty.  When she was caught, after fleeing years of abuse, her owner-husband cut off her nose and both ears, since tribal custom sees a man whose wife dishonors him as having cut off his nose.  It was a perverted eye-for-an-eye retribution, leaving Aisha as she appeared in the controversial Time magazine cover (she has since been secretly smuggled out of Afghanistan to the U.S. for reconstructive surgery), a picture difficult to look at, confronting those who are civilized with a window into the incomprehensible, cowardly brutality of one selfish, unfeeling man, whose savage assault stands with those of many others to represent a society of, by civilized standards, deeply perverse values.

The presence of an American occupation in Afghanistan is not preventing these atrocities, and they will continue, in this decade, if and when America leaves or if it stays, and, the evidence shows, Taliban government or not.  Aisha’s is only one among uncounted cases of familial/religious punishments, derived from religious or tribal customs, that are carried out daily in Afghanistan and many other nations whose customs, by Western, civilized standards, are hideously barbaric, most of which are never reported.  But among those that are, in Afghanistan, it is clear that the local acceptance and enthusiasm for the practice of these customs is widespread, beyond the clique of those labeled as “Taliban fighters” or “clerics,” like the crowds in the Deep South celebrated lynchings of African-Americans, or the frontier bounties for “Indian” scalps, or like Salem’s settlers stoked the witch-burning fires.  Time (not soldiers) will also succeed to evolve Afghanistan’s violent cultural practices.

One such reported case, of note, which would make the stories of the defunct soap, The Guiding Light, seem tame, was the stoning to death of a young, Afghan couple who eloped, the woman already engaged to marry a relative of her lover, who himself was already married and had two children.  When they were induced by family members to return home, they were seized by the Taliban and tried before a religious court, under Shariah law, presided over by local mullahs.  Being found guilty, they were taken to the village bazaar, where they were circled by a crowd (women were prohibited) and stoned to death by some 200 of the men, with an even-larger, non-participating crowd looking on and cheering.  Of course, Taliban spokesmen supported the punishment, as did members of the crowd who were interviewed.  And among those throwing the stones were the man’s father and brother, and the girl’s relatives, including her brother.  Similar and less-serious village-participatory-punishment practices are regularly reported from every Afghan province.

Atrocities are not only part and parcel with the Third World, they are exported with immigrants.  In the U.S., the practice of Shariah law has not ended, any more than cock fighting has for Cuban immigrants.  Honor killings and other practices are continually reported.  If the United States cannot prevent these and the barbaric culture-practices of other immigrants within its borders, how can anyone expect that the U.S. can succeed in doing so in other nations, or that it should endure the cost of lives and fortune it takes to act as the world’s cultural policeman to try?  The U.S. will not end these practices in Afghanistan, or anywhere else, with occupations, despite if the occupations have industrial ambitions at their end, though, occupations are far less likely if they do not.

The way to accelerate time’s change of culture on Afghanistan’s and other primitive societies is the way missionaries spread Catholicism throughout the world, but without the religious proselytism, through education and diplomatic and economic incentives and sanctions, by bringing to bear the penalties of deprivation and isolation, and the carrots of aide programs and international participation, not with the lives of American soldiers, and governments should help organizations engaged in this, non-religious kind of work.  The wide community acceptance of cruel punishment that has been shown to exist must be handled civilly and changed into disdain, beginning with the local leadership, then leading to criminality.  It won’t be easy, because even U.N. sanctions to prevent nuclear proliferation are routinely sidestepped by many nations, making them less effective or useless.  But the worth of American soldiers’ lives is only justified in giving over to the defense of the nation, nothing less, not to any other cause that does not reach the scope of genocide, or any capitalist/military-industrial facade that has the label of defense hung upon it.

Otherwise, where, and with what afflicted group, will the wars shrouding the American people ever end?

There is so little time that sweeps past the life of a generation that no policy of war should be permitted to fill large segments of it.  Baby Boomers are experiencing their 30th year of life in a nation at war, and that’s the least of any post-WWII generation, on a percentage scale, with most of it illegitimate, with at least another decade as much as promised, but “Oh, yes we can,” Mr. President... militarize the world, enslave the souls of our children in a climate of continuing conflict, not change the way Washington fails or end the throat-grip held by any of the influences that control and profit from the carnage that afflicts the flesh and the spirit of soldiers, “collaterals,” their families, and the span of generations that bear the pain as a constant affliction in their news and their psyches, and who will pay for it.

“For a very long period of time, we’re going to be on the ground, even if it’s solely in support of U.S. weapons systems.”

“We will have an enduring presence here, in some fashion.”

Expect “a tough fight with difficult days ahead.”  Your words, among the others’, Mr. President.

Was that the promise... or the goal?

Shake out order from the chaos, and there is the big picture:  despite all of the lives and money spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, and military aide, “stability” $billions sent to Pakistan, part of which ends up paying border interests hostile to the U.S., and parts of which support a dangerous nuclear arsenal, there will never be any chance for unilateral nuclear disarmament by Pakistan, not as long as America is unwilling to begin confronting that nation with the fact that it, Pakistan, is the real threat that is currently unacceptable in the region, through the nuclear weapons it tenuously holds and the force of propagation they impel to other nations, like Iran.  And there will never be any guarantee that somehow, someday, a weapon in Pakistan’s questionable control will not find its way to some form of detonation on Western soil, where the U.S. is the prime target.  The objectives of the MIC prevent that confrontation of truth and the shorter conflict, or ended conflicts that would result.  There has been enough of the drawn-out-for-decades military aid and war games, with the U.S. footing most of the bill and the blood as all risks remain evermore ominously on the table.

The value of the Founders, the Charters they left to America, is not only in their wisdom and applied knowledge of human behavior, it is that those traits were a critical component in the equation to formulate a structure of government, tied to individual value and participation, based upon their first-person experience of the oppression and dangers of autocracy which seek to eliminate individual freedoms.  Their experience, and the gift to successive generations of Americans that they wrought from that experience, has shielded America from that danger ever since.  And, so departed is America today from the tug of those chains they cast aside, the ability to recognize the threats has diminished, and the framework of the government they handed down for the protection and growth of subsequent generations has been diminished and pushed aside, and in some cases, as with the Bush administration, arrogantly countermanded.

Americans must recognize that their own vision of freedom is far less acute than those who wrote the nation’s Charters, because today’s Americans, native Americans, or immigrants from other democracies, the vast majority never lived under the burden of restriction and compelled obedience like that which, in this generation, in Iran, killed Neda Soltan, and that, with the founding generation, created the anger and desperation born of those conditions, making it possible that the Founders and their townsmen and neighbors would choose to risk everything against formidable odds too change it, for themselves and their “posterity.”  As the memory of those desperate days has faded with every passing generation, and become farther removed from the mechanics of managing and overseeing the conduct of that government, today, the danger has returned, a danger with a different face, but no less threatening and no less capable of eroding the freedoms intended to be the guiding and primal principle of the government, through which all power should be filtered.

The path back to a strong democracy, to reasserting freedom, accountability, and responsiveness to the Will of the People, is to elevate the Constitution out of the lifeless archive of historical decoration to which it has been subjugated, and demand that its limitations and enumerated powers be returned to the life of the nation, in this generation, by being observed, no matter what it takes to do it, including Congress revolting against an activist majority in the Supreme Court, who have forgotten that their first responsibility is to that Constitution, not to the wishful and aborted interpretations and arguments offered by lawyers for industry, or their individual politics.  Given that responsibility, those rulings stand as a violation of the good behavior that justices are granted as the sole condition of their service and privilege, and that majority should be impeached and convicted, not left empowered to destroy political equality through subversive edict!

That is the recent crime of one branch.  For the Congress, it has failed to jealously guard its enumerated powers, allowing government to be transformed to more of an oligarchy than a democratic republic, placing greater distance between the people and the decisions that are made for the most critical policies in national life.  The Founders addressed the Congress in Article I because it is one representation indicating that Congress is the branch they intended to be the primary source of power in the republic, not the president.  The Senate has twisted the constitutional authority to set rules of its proceedings into an aberration by altering the criteria intended for governance, which is a simple majority, except where the Constitution specifically provides for a greater, two-thirds criteria.  The 60-vote rule is as much an abomination to popular sovereignty as the ruling of the Supreme Court in Citizens United was to political equality, which combined, is two legs of the tripod supporting democracy that have been axed.

As to the House, withdrawals from the Treasury are only to be made in accord with appropriations made by law, and an account of all expenditures must be published, which would include full details of each and every earmark.  And, earmarks are doubtful to fall as a proper appropriation by law, since lawful appropriations are named in accordance to their purpose, and all appropriations have a purpose, which is not served by the earmarks attached.  The Constitution intends that expenditures be required to go through the difficulty of discreet lawmaking and passage for a reason, which, as a consequence of “expedient spending,” most of it during the Republican years, looms dark over America’s future now.  In addition, the Constitution’s Article I, Section 8 prohibition against providing preference with revenue to the port of any state over the other can be applied beyond ports, just as surely as the Air Force, which didn’t exist at ratification, is included as an extension of the Section’s military powers.  The earmark funding the Bridge to Nowhere could be ruled unconstitutional simply on the basis of providing revenue to the road system of one state over another, if not that it was not a lawfully appropriated expenditure.  But, these transgressions almost pale when compared to the greatest failure by the House of Representatives to carry out constitutional power and responsibility since the founding of the nation:  its failure to bring articles of impeachment against Bush and Cheney.

And both houses of Congress are guilty of providing ratification and oversight with the incompetence and disregard that BP conducted drilling operations on the Deepwater Horizon, or that Minerals Management has regulated that drilling, or mine safety, or that any of the array of financial-regulatory agencies policed Wall Street and the banks, or that the FAA looked after the degradation of safety and pilot-workplace quality as major carriers clawed against hairline margins by growing a flimsily managed and regulated commuter network, or that the Consumer Protection Agency kept dangerous Chinese products from reaching citizens’ homes and children... and all of these failures, and more, compound the oversight failures of Congress, too many of its members sooo busy raising money for the next election, and figuring out how to give it back to the contributors, instead of doing the full job within their committee assignments that good service to the nation and their constituencies demand, ransacking access to office, choice, and political liberty for the People, the third leg of democracy, in the process.

Presidents, from at least Lincoln to Obama, have taken their pound of flesh from the body of the Constitution, from initiating deployment or extensions of military actions, unilateral raising of armies, engaging in foreign agreements or activities requiring treaty, violating individual liberties, to signing statements, which are a pure usurping of Article I, where Congress alone has the power to formulate and pass laws, the president designated specifically to either sign or veto, or let lay, never edit, redact, or annotate with signature.  As Congress has failed in oversight, presidents have also failed to prioritize national good over politics when making appointments, administering their agencies, and executing the laws, most blatant and harmful today in the case of illegal immigration.  And, the history has been that, to date, every president, of either party, has sought to use and protect and expand the unconstitutional powers and authority that have been gained through successive administrations through precedent, by virtue of the wrongful silence or cooperation of Congress and the Court.

The dangers today are subtle, and are primarily, at the lowest common denominator, due to the fraud and bribery and party control that are at the heart of campaign contributions.  But the danger is all around and, if let to continue, just as capable of wrecking the nation as the masted warships in the harbors and Redcoats who threatened the colonies in the years before the Constitution became the backbone of America’s laws and freedoms.  The Founders would tell us that the warnings, written in the history of their words, can still speak out to those who will see, and they are just as applicable today.  They would tell us that, in this strange, instantaneous, news-funneled, high-paced, complex world in which America is militarizing over horizons at every point of the compass, that time is running out, and that, since the Civil War, the Great Experiment is in the gravest danger it has ever known, from forces internal and, as a consequence of America’s excessive military proliferation, external.

Would they be listened to?  If they could appear on television and speak the warnings they’ve written and left behind?  Would that be a call to action, a rake to apathy?  Or, are the Founders no more than historical tokens for political catch-phrases?  Despite that human nature hasn’t changed at all, and that the selfishness of man they balanced with the Constitution hasn’t diminished, have they and their works become, today, as irrelevant to us as the dangers they faced and acted to conquer in their distant time?

America needs a leader to speak for the Founders and to act according to the limitations and priorities they wrote into the Constitution, to stand against those who say the Constitution is outdated and individual freedoms must be subordinated to larger interests and entities in a world of global threat and competitiveness, or that the government of the Constitution is too cumbersome in a quick-response era, and changing it even more so—better to quietly pidgin-hole it and unbalance the separation of powers.  Or more dangerous, those who claim constitutional protection and adherence to preserve freedom and reduce the size of government, the same ones who say spending to help the unemployed hurts the deficit, but keeping the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy in place does not, whose real purpose is only economic self-interest, paraded behind a facade of promoting business.  They make the government of the Constitution, of the Founders, out to be an evil instrument, when it is really all there is that balances self-interest and greed, “capitalism,” with regulation, “democracy,” to stand between any hope of public safety and self rule on the one hand, and something more akin to the law of the jungle that those wealthy and powerful want to bring about on the other.  If America’s government is as big and bad as they claim, why would they wish to be a part of it?  And why would their constituents want them to be?  Those who appreciate the value of America’s heritage, its constitutional government, are those who can best work to serve both it and the People (not corporations) it was designed to benefit.

President Obama knows the works of the Founders as well or better than any modern president.  If he is unappreciative of it, or overcome by the entrenched system, or isolated by the walls of the office into performance compliant with the career professionals and bureaucrats who surround him and wrongly interpret or carry-out his intent, there may be no hope for the necessary change, or future for the republic that was envisioned and set into motion by Madison, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams and the rest.  Their diminishment to the past can only mean the diminishment of every individual in the future, to become as lost and feeble in the eyes of their government as it is to be invisible and muted within the systemic sprawl and the numbing, monotonous mass.

Therein is the danger.

A footnote point to this story is that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, among President Obama’s banking clique of appointments and advisors, is said to oppose the appointment of Warren to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, along with numerous conservative Republicans who oppose strong enforcement of the new financial-regulatory law.

To the members of Congress, the President, and their families and staffs, wishing them the best on this day celebrating the birth of our national identity, which was passed into their hands through the ephemeral portals of history, hoping that America shall find the path to return to the framework of the Constitution that followed, from which it has strayed, especially in terms of the Founders’ standards for military engagements and the source of that grave authority they intended for America:  to be the combined voices of Congress, not that of the president, which silently-ceded authority now strangles the nation, miring it in two occupations and staining its ideals and identity of power for just cause and shield of freedom with shadow, mercenary armies which, with no constitutional authority, real consequence or accountability, have brought murder and massacre to again be written into America’s legacy.

And hoping elections shall be rid of the influence of campaign contributions, instead funding elections solely through the treasury, where qualified candidates will receive equal resources, free of party control, reducing the insane costs and duration, increasing the field, and freeing them of the influence peddlers and the time and resources wasted on fund raising, and most important, returning political equality to the framework of America’s weakened democracy.

The national identity is also challenged by the granting of citizenship and the vote to unassimilated immigrants, and that loss of identity is already harshly characterized in many ways, in many states along the Sunbelt, and many towns and cities beyond, throughout the nation.  The heritage of America, born on this day, 234 years ago, now rests in your hands.  It is your responsibility to prioritize guarding it as you necessarily deal with the future of the tens of millions of illegal immigrants who are now changing the character of the nation, and who seek, through the sheer mass of their presence, to become a voice in shaping its future, but mostly in their interests and proclivities.  Those who break America’s laws to come here have no claim on citizenship and the vote, ever, and any means that provides for their absorption into the national life must recognize the value of guarding the right to vote by making full and comprehensive assimilation a mandatory prerequisite, and abandon the multiple-choice, flash-card tests and processes, with no oversight, that now grant citizenship to those who have no real understanding of America’s history or government, no appreciation of its culture and heritage, and in many cases cannot speak or read its language.  Granting the right to live within America’s borders does not impose any right or obligation for citizenship to follow.  The mere presence and growth of unacclimated immigrants is already a significant force affecting change and community resources, and whether given residency or not, with or without citizenship and the vote, it is a force that will continue to grow exponentially to change American neighborhoods, their cultures and heritages, and eventually the nation, forever, which is reason enough that the real solution should be that all who are here illegally and have not developed family ties with citizens should be found and deported, that armored I.D. mechanisms be instituted, that harsh penalties and equally aggressive, proactive enforcement against offending employers and landlords be initiated, and that the citizenship-birthing incentive driving illegal immigrants to America be eliminated.

“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance;  and a people who mean to be their own
governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” — James Madison

President Obama, in a speech regarding the decision to follow former U.S. Afghan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s urging for a troop surge in Afghanistan, said that the Afghan war is not the same as Vietnam.  Beg to differ.  At least, with respect to the manner in which the U.S. installs autocratic, corrupt, ineffective regimes that lack popular support, resulting in disaster, Afghanistan is exactly like Vietnam, except, in Vietnam, the same mistake was made twice.  But sadly, that too could still become a match.

The narrative of the histories of Hamid Karzai, in Afghanistan, and Ngo Dinh Diem, in South Vietnam, and then, in 1965, General Nguyen Van Thieu, are eerily interchangeable, if the proper names are omitted.  They are histories of commonalities of corruption, power lust, regime dependence upon American forces, failure, and repeated mistakes, each costing the lives of U.S. soldiers and each taking hefty chunks of U.S. cash, where the only question is how Karzai’s end will be written.  In 1963, Diem was assassinated by the CIA, resulting in near two-and-one-half years of chaos, hosted by nine inept and corrupt regimes before the U.S. installed Van Thieu, who took the despot’s more traditional path out of power, skipping into exile, in 1975, taking much of the treasury’s gold with him and leaving the RVN Army, loyal only to the cash from diminishing U.S. aid, to quickly dismantle itself, as the stages of the U.S. withdrawal were complete and the Viet Cong army prepared to take Saigon.

The world did not come to an end.

U.S. national security suffered only self-inflicted pain.

Iraq and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki are different chapters of the same, sorry story, the denouement, though predictable, also still to be written.

Whether or not the president has or will change his mind about the similarities, of which the foul play of leadership is just one, the fact is that the outcome is heading for the same fruitless end, except that, early on, the primary objective of removing a government that sanctioned attacks against the U.S. was long ago achieved.  It was, in 2003, a victory, and since that early-on, successful attainment of the mission objective in Afghanistan, when Bush should have followed his father’s lead, in the first Iraq war, and just withdrawn the troops, the parallels to the misplaced confidences and assertions regarding the war in Vietnam have become unmistakable, and there is no doubt that if America remains any further to prop up governments and nation-build, the outcome will be another failure, compounded by the deaths of new thousands, heaped on the backs of the 4,486 dead in Iraq and those 58,000 soldiers who died in Vietnam, and whose only worthwhile legacy, aside from their immortal valor, turned out to be that the cost of their lives would prevent any future government from ever repeating that tragic mistake.

Wrong.

And wrong again.

At this writing, July 4, 2010, as America observes its 234th Independence Day and the brightly colored bursts and smoke clouds of celebratory fireworks, there is no independence from the dark clouds of military occupations and their loses, because it is already long, long past any legitimate duration for the military response to the Afghan role in 9/11, where U.S. fatalities have reached 1,150 (including those who died in hospitals in other places due to wounds sustained in Afghanistan), with the climb fast accelerating.  At the end of 2003, when the Taliban had been gone for more than a year, and when America should have also been gone, the fatalities to achieve the legitimate objective of removing the government that supported the attacks leading up to and including 9/11 stood at 109; if a really quick withdrawal would have been made at the end of 2002, one like the first President Bush ordered after Iraqi troops were pushed out of Kuwait, ending the Gulf War, that count would have been 61...  the disparities are even greater for Iraq, which proves that, be it for the criminal, capitalistic, Bush-Cheney goals in Iraq or the initial, legitimate, national-defense response in Afghanistan, the hard cost of applying military force is not in achieving the objective of regime change, but rather in remaining to nation-build afterwards.  Added to the lost lives, the per-year, per-soldier cost, living and dead, has been placed by the White House at $1,000,000, not insignificant, especially considering that it is borrowed money and the interest paid is not included in that official and widely-accepted estimate.

With every life that is now lost in Afghanistan, and with all those that have been and will be lost in Iraq, the futility of the 58,000 lives lost in Vietnam is irrevocably deepened.  From this point, at least, this Congress and the ones to follow, along with the Obama administration, will carry the full weight of the lives that are unnecessarily lost in Afghanistan, and both will share with the Bush administration the stain of further blood spilled in Iraq.  And as the Afghan resistance increases and coalition casualties begin to mount, the administration has already moved to minimize the impact on public awareness by starting to impose restrictions on the press in Afghanistan, in Kabul, which is an old, adverse-condition tactic and an early sign that the situation is not what it is painted to be, that transparency on the flow of the occupation is being eliminated, and that “public opinion be damned, if not blinded,” will be the policy there until the costs and inability to eliminate the Afghan fighters cannot be concealed or justified with the same, tired rhetoric, not even through a closed curtain on press and public access to the truth.

Over the last week, as more than a half-dozen new deaths were reported from Afghanistan, e-mails were received from two U.S. senators and a representative, all Democrats, responding to concerns which were directed to them about the unfolding path for America in Afghanistan.  Their responses share the same components, defining the political line that is being drawn to support the continuing occupation there, and taken together, they clarify the ways in which complex issues are simplified and shaded and reduced to terms that obscure the realities:

From Rep. Steve Driehaus’s June 22, 2010 e-mail:

“Since 2001, the United States has had a military presence in Afghanistan to stabilize the region through counterinsurgency operations.

“My preeminent concern is the safety of Americans.  In the long-term this requires a stable Afghanistan so that they can work with their regional allies to combat terrorism and protect their citizens.”

From Sen. Charles E. Schumer’s June 24, 2010 e-mail:

“We can achieve victory in Afghanistan when we have an environment that is conducive to economic development and most importantly when the Afghans have a security infrastructure that permits them to independently fight off and neutralize the Taliban insurgency in that country. I am committed to working with the President and my colleagues in Congress to ensure that we pursue a strategy in Afghanistan that brings stability to Afghanistan and defends our nation against terrorism.”

From Sen. Al Franken’s June 24, 2010 e-mail:

“The Bush Administration’s misguided war in Iraq led us to neglect Afghanistan, which harbored Al Qaeda prior to 9/11.  While they were ultimately driven from Afghanistan to the nearby Pakistan border region, they remain a threat to the stability of the region and directly to this nation.

“President Obama has followed the advice of his top military leaders by temporarily increasing the number of troops on the ground in Afghanistan to implement a counterinsurgency strategy.  I support this strategy, but am insisting on full congressional oversight of the war.  In particular, I'll continue to push for greater attention to the civic and economic development of Afghanistan.

“...the President’s announcement [date to begin withdrawal] sent a strong signal to the Afghan government that our commitment is serious but not open-ended.  That should enable us to move more quickly toward a responsible withdrawal from the country.”

In their e-mails, Senator Franken’s assurance of “full congressional oversight of the war” is not very comforting, because the Constitution places much greater responsibility with Congress for the conduct of war than just oversight, and it would be of great benefit to the nation if the ceding of that power to the executive branch was ended, particularly given how the conduct of warfare has aborted into massacre by obscenely paid (compared to U.S. soldiers) mercenaries with the likes of profiteering private contractors like Blackwater/XE Services.  It is Congress that actually has the final and only word on the goals and limits of America’s military involvement, anywhere, not the president, and that power is not restricted to exercise only through the purse.  Those who would argue, given how ineffectual and grid-locked Congress is, that it’s a good thing Congress has allowed the executive to assume so widely its war powers, should weigh that assumption against the fact that the result of no action would have been no invasion of Iraq and, being less insulated from the ire of the public, a quicker exit from Vietnam, and Afghanistan, too, the invasion of which and mission of regime removal Congress would have quickly given the executive the authority to execute, since when there is just cause for war, and wide public support, as with 9/11, Congress is as quick to respond as it is to do nothing, otherwise.

The point, which the Founders considered extremely important, is that the decision to go to war, and to end it, should not be one made by any single person (there should be no “great decider”), but should come from a consensus that is reached within the branch of government that is closest, most responsive, to the people—Congress.  It is unwise to change that ingenious mechanism, which is a protection against the worst kind of abuse governments can commit, of which the Founders were victim.  Validation of the consequences of that mistake can be affirmed by the families of dead soldiers, dead Iraqi and Afghan co-lateral-damage civilians, and the victims of Blackwater/XE Services mercenaries, not to mention the uncountable wounded and incapacitated.

In their replies, both Senators Schumer (D-NY) and Franken (D-MN) have prioritized “an environment conductive to economic development” as a goal for troops remaining in Afghanistan.  Economics is never a reason that justifies military operations, even as a backstop, and even if Afghanistan does have the richest mineral deposits in the world.  “Economic development,” meaning the enriching of American companies able to gain access to exploit the opportunities in the occupied lands, was the basis of British colonialism, enriching British coffers, and the Founders would have a scalding throw of words directed at these legislators and the current government on that reasoning and on the folly inherent in pursuit of those ends through military force.

When national security is not threatened or cannot be convincingly feigned, a favorite excuse of the military-industrial complex, to sustain itself, has always been the promised reward of rich resources to be exploited in foreign lands.  The military-industrial complex has been, along with, to a lessor extent, energy and infrastructure companies, the only beneficiaries of the occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the last, great, Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, went to great extreme to warn, as he (and the last remnants of a sane Republican party) was leaving the scene, that the military-industrial complex was, then, becoming a dangerous influence on government policy which he warned must be strictly controlled and minimized.  Strange to hear from a president who was allied commander of Europe in WWII, but the West Point graduate and career Army officer was a perceptive patriot, first, and a military man second, and his warning, given in a speech dedicated to that purpose, has been ignored and the threat of that complex of industries (not the military branches, per se, except Blackwater/XE Services, which has become an illicit military branch) is now an oppressive force for international aggression, where at least one occupation is always in order.

The “economic development” reasoning expressed by these senators, and Representative Driehaus (D-OH) in his expression of “stability,” a term also shared with Sen. Franken, is the beginning of a morphing of the argument for the use of military force away from national security to economics, to justify biased nation-building in Afghanistan, benefitting the military-industrial complex, first, and others to follow, along with its paid (contributed) supporters, at the cost of thousands of American lives that will be spent in decades of selfish conflict.  Rep. Driehaus noted that America has been fighting an occupation in Afghanistan since 2001; yet he went on to say that his “preeminent concern” is for “American’s safety” through “long-term stability.”  After nine years and counting, and the example of Vietnam in hindsight, how much longer-term does it have to get?  If politicians think America can outlast the resistance for the prize of resource exploitation, or to achieve a political dream, then what ever has happened to the lesson of history, written into the wall of the Vietnam memorial, the duration of pain suffered there, then, for dominoes, already being exceeded now, in the foreshadowing terms on the expectations ahead for a “long,” “hard,” and “difficult,” struggle?  How safe can America be if it has to see its soldiers killed week after week, year after year, and decade after decade, and for what?  To kill small numbers of fighters and more civilians over time, in repeated skirmishes, generating repeated local reprisals of fear and control, where no victory is ever apparent and no end brought nearer, except through the increasing futility of it all, as America slides on the downside of the curve, which is now being turned in Afghanistan?

Rep. Driehaus also wrote that the sacrifice of American troops is necessary to secure “a stable Afghanistan so that they can work with their regional allies to combat terrorism and protect their citizens.”  This statement commits the U.S. to war in two instances, where there is no ratified defense treaty, and where the only threat to national security is because the politicians, as they always do, say it exists:  1) to prevent terrorism in foreign nations and 2) protect from terrorists the citizens of another nation.  If the spending of the lives of American troops and the deepening of American debt, to be paid by its children can be justified for those ends in Afghanistan, then those justifications will be applied globally, leaving a sorry future for America, boiling with unending occupation, one after another, overlapping and interminable, going after one group or another that is no closer to obtaining nuclear materials than the next, or more properly, than the readiness of someone who is well-placed and sympathetic or well-paid enough to give it to them.

“No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” — James Madison

Just a few months short of the start of the 21st Century’s second decade, the Bush administration’s former “puppet,” Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, had severed the strings and has been increasingly, openly critical of the U.S. as it works to influence the balance a democratic government should have.  He again faced sharp criticism himself, from Col. Henry A. Arnold III, commander of the U.S. First Infantry Division’s Fourth Brigade, from State Dept. Reconstruction Team officials, and from Iraqi officials for his use of the Iraqi military to enforce his disqualifications of district-council appointed governors and then to illegally block district governor appointments.  Maliki has in other ways also disregarded the democratic principles of the rule of law and separation of powers, including pressuring the judiciary for reversing the disqualifications of several hundred candidates for provincial-legislature positions.  His disregard for the Iraqi constitution, forged under the oversight of the Bush administration, has become so pronounced that criticism he now invokes mirrors that pointed at the Bush administration for its many unconstitutional activities.  A former prime minister of a growing Maliki-opposition bloc said of his attempts to end-run the court rulings, “A prime minister who should be the first defender of the Constitution, the first defender of the supremacy of law and law and order in the country, should be the first person to defend a decision of the court and the judiciary.”

Twenty-eight months into the Obama presidency, and with more than 4,400 U.S. military deaths in Iraq, this is what the Bush-Cheney, grand, criminal plan to create a capitalist bastion in the Middle East has brought.  And worse, this is what is still being protected by the continued presence of the troops still there, beyond a 16-month withdrawal guarantee by President Obama, and which, despite President Obama’s firm campaign promise to remove them, are still at risk for the sake of just another corrupt and self-serving regime that looks like, sounds like, and has the same foul taste of the Karzai regime in Afghanistan, where its president, Hamid Karzai, has privately said the West cannot beat the Taliban, accused the U.S. of staging the early-June 2010 rocket attack against the peace jirga in Kabul, and whose primary policy in dealing with the Taliban is one familiar to dealers in corruption:  buy appeasement using American taxpayer money, and where the dying of American troops is escalating on the thin promise of attaining very questionable goals, and where, again, the mere presence of troops feeds conflict and blocks any possible, meaningful diplomacy to achieve America’s legitimate objectives.

While it is true that the Iraq and Afghan invasions and occupations are two entirely different catastrophes, they are both headed for the same unproductive, costly end, so long as troops remain any longer in either nation with irrelevant purpose.  Iraq was illegitimate from before the start, while Afghanistan was an answer to an act of extreme violence, carried out on American soil, against U.S. citizens as well as those of many nations throughout the world, sanctioned and made possible by the aid and protection of the Taliban-controlled “government” of Afghanistan at the time.

Since the invasion there, the U.S. and its allies has removed that so-called government, many of its leaders have been killed, the organization that planned and carried out the New York attack under Taliban protection has been routed, decimated, many of its highest and front-line leaders killed and its surviving leaders in permanent hiding, tens of thousands of countrymen of both the Taliban and al Qaeda have been either captured, wounded, or killed, and it has been made plain that any authority that either attacks or backs an attack against the United States will not profit by doing so, but on the contrary, will suffer far greater losses.  The idea that more must be done, that all traces of the Islamic extremism that drives the Taliban and, presumedly, al Qaeda, must be wiped out, is ludicrous, and following that tenant will lead to only a greater waste of lives and resources, and it will transform an apt reprisal into a drawn-out exercise of failure that will erase the gains of the initial response.  The U.S. military is very well equipped and trained to topple regimes, and that mission has been accomplished in Afghanistan, and without regard to America’s security or defense, also in Iraq.  And, if America leaves, it can just as easily return to again remove any regime that is foolhardy and suicidal enough to support terrorism, commit genocide, or dabble with weapons of mass destruction—three rules easy enough to follow... and to enforce.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top allied military commander in Afghanistan, 90 days into the surge to reign-in the Taliban in Helmand Province, calls Marjah, its key district, a “bleeding ulcer.”  To deploy more troops and remain in occupation with no organized army to fight is to step backward on a path that leads to eventual defeat, and eventually, the toll of torn and dead there will start to become as illegitimate as in Iraq.  Without an army on the ground, the Islamic radicals are just criminals.  Give them an army in opposition and they are transformed from the organized criminals they are into soldiers of God, with a holy war to fight against the “infidel” occupiers from the west.  It’s an old trap in a cycle of conflict with Islamist extremists that traces a bloody trail through centuries of history, where those who have fallen into it are a warning of failure, written in that history, penned with blood both ancient and modern, and America should know better than to take that bait, especially given all the harm and little good caused by soldiers in force, after the offending regime has been removed, compared to the successes gained from the deeply organized and coordinated, law-enforcement/intelligence/special-operations alternative, which is the method with the record of striking effectively against the militants and thwarting their plans for aggression.

Freedom and the democracy that it makes possible cannot be bartered like commodities or imposed upon unprepared societies.  No outside nation aided America in its revolution because it believed freedom should be spread, and America could not have won its independence and freedom if its people were not ready to risk life to fight for it, no matter if the French and the Spaniards joined hands with all the Indian nations to help.  Clearly, neither the Iraqis, the Afghans, nor the Iranians, for that matter, are prepared to stand on their own to make freedom theirs, and until they are willing to face-down their own oppressors, no one can properly help them or reasonably sustain them.  Trying to make the Afghan nation a modern civilization as a means to prevent attacks against America is a costly and futile path.  The president should listen to his vice-president and join the camp that wants to fight the Afghan/Pakistan militants as criminals, where law and justice have been winning, not oppose them as an enemy army, where America can only continue to lose.

President Obama is, so far, allowing Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran to be the thorns in the flower of America’s future prosperity.  There is sufficient history to cast aside any fear that, in the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan, withdrawing from these backward nations will dent the armor that cloaks America’s future.  Remaining, to uselessly bleed, year after year, will rust that armor, widening the chinks already opening that future to uncertainty and peril.  Rather than spend thousands of lives, trillions of dollars, and decades to fight Taliban and al Qaeda elements in Afghanistan and the border region with Pakistan, America would be far better served to invade Pakistan, eliminate its nuclear weapons stockpiles and infrastructure, which is the only threat to America’s, Europe’s, and Russia’s security in Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Iraq, since those weapons have a real possibility of finding their way into the hands of Islamic radicals, and then just leave those nations to wallow in their barbarities until such time, if ever, that their peoples free themselves of the oppression inflicted upon them by their own countrymen and their readiness to accept it.  Perhaps the real threat of such a move, based upon the resolve to carry it out, combined with an offer of a mutual-disarmament pact and non-aggression treaty between India and Pakistan, both partnered with America’s guarantee to stand against any aggression initiated by either nation would bring a non-violent end to the nuclear threat in both nations.  Certainly, nothing else other than force, if not the threat of it will.

For the same reason America should use force to strip Pakistan of its nuclear capabilities, or persuade a mutual outcome with India, the same will have to be done in Iran, and the obdurate nation-building in Afghanistan distracts and detracts from the resources and resolve that will be needed to do the job, where it is a necessary job to be done.  The failure to rid Pakistan, Iran, N. Korea, and India of nuclear-arms capability will be a guarantee that, someday, one or more of the weapon components in those nations will find its way to be unleashed in one or more U.S. cities or one of the cities in Western Europe or Great Britain, or even Russia.  Any such occurrence, anywhere, would wreak sustained havoc on Western economies, at the very least, while bringing an immutable shroud of fear and gloom over the lives of everyone.

While there is still hope that sanctions, regime change, and pressure from China can combine to have N. Korea peacefully give up its arsenal, and India, if no mutual step-back with Pakistan materializes, may also be persuaded to do so peacefully after Pakistan is stripped of its arsenal and development capability, there will be no means other than force to clear the nuclear threat America faces from Pakistan and Iran, and America needs to be prepared to do so with conviction, speed, and unrelenting aggressiveness.  The only positive aspect of America’s current deployment in Afghanistan and Iraq is that the forces there can quickly be directed across the Pakistani and Iranian borders as an element of the combined forces from European jump-off points that will be needed to quickly overcome the military and then locate and remove the nuclear capabilities, to include the physicists and technicians critical to the development and manufacturing processes.  These are bold steps, but while casualties would be elevated over the losses sustained in meaningless occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the objectives would be clearly defined and achievable in the short term, resulting in a better, safer world, and boldness is what is needed to confront this growing, and without bold action, unrelenting threat to America’s security and future, and that of the rest of the civilized West, and Russia.

The removal of Pakistani nuclear weapons is not now a real public option that is being pressed, but it should be, beyond the president’s ephemerally hope-based, broad, multi-generations-distant, disarmament aspiration.  But those who believe in ignoring Pakistan, or using paid diplomacy to keep intact its government, and thereby safeguard its nuclear arsenal, are acting on false presumption that the one follows the other.  And those who believe in sanctions, U.N. foot-dragging, and playing against the delay tactics of Iran, they will find the answers to their ultimate folly in either mushroom-shaped or irradiated clouds over Western cities, spread as the funeral pyres of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of men, women, and children, which is a horror the Islamist radicals, including Iran’s clerical regime and president, see as both a necessary and inevitable passage on their unalterable path to reaching their so-called, God-given ordainment, and in the case of Iran, to reclaiming its ancient, historical greatness.  In the history of civilization, such falls and rises from distant ash are not uncommon.

The point to realize is, if that history is repeated, now, it will be at the expense of the welfare of the United States and a consequence of its errant courses and accommodative refrain to act in time to prevent it.  Whether that change ever happens is still, but not for too much longer, within the province of America to determine.  If it does occur, either in some city, or in the desolation of an Iranian desert, it will be marked with an explosion that will be the opening of the door to a far more dangerous future, and since any Iranian explosion would likely be of a weapon already produced in at least one copy, it will mark the onset of a darker future with a far, far greater cost to reverse.

Catastrophe, as with the BP-Gulf disaster, often turns out to be far worse than first perceived, and as the oil erupts, deepening the destruction and claiming the attention of all, the planning and work to bring about this new history of nuclear cataclysm also goes on, also unabated, continuous, but out of mind and with the intentioned goal and resolve to bring its dark stain to the surface to cover the world.  From that, there will be no need to investigate to find out how, no easy fixes, alternatives, or remedies in law or regulation, and no restitution.  And from there, as Defense Secretary Gates said, in a post-D-Day-anniversary, weekend statement about the future of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, also forecasting the discarded promise of a president, the road ahead will really be necessarily long and unavoidably hard.

Even as the oil erupting from the BP well flows onto pristine beaches and marshlands, spewing its destruction of the Gulf ecology and economy, Wall Street analysts, among others are objecting to the imposition of the moratorium on deep-water drilling, citing the increase in fuel costs that will result, and the loss of jobs, both consequences likely to harm the economic recovery.  This is no surprise, because speculation and distribution looks for any excuse to raise prices, en masse, regardless of the real supply-demand situation.  And that claim is also no reason to lift the moratorium because until the oil-producing industry can prove that it is capable not only of drilling, but of preventing catastrophe, and until the government is prepared to properly and effectively regulate, the world cannot afford to access the deep-water wells.

And, as the Gulf turns ever-more brown, some deep-drilling companies have already begun to rile against the moratorium, threatening to sue the Department of the Interior for breech of contract.  Good luck to them, because no contract they hold can supercede the responsibility and authority of the United States to protect its lands and waters or prevent them from being destroyed.  And further, a minimal investigation will likely uncover that all of the deep-water-drilling companies either violated the law through fraudulent application process in obtaining their leases, or in the actual conduct of their operations, and in either case, if they want to sue, the government can always counter by opening its jail cells to them.

As the millions of barrels of oil and gas erupting from BP’s Deepwater Horizon well begins killing birds, marshlands, fishing, and tourism along the Gulf coast, spreading to threaten the Atlantic, President Obama marked the 32nd day of the unrelenting disaster by repeating that BP will be held accountable.  He also said that it is important to remember that Washington is also responsible.  That was a very vague statement, because Washington is defined in many ways.

The president’s statement is most interpretable to mean “the government.”  This may be political, since government bashing has been made popular by Republican conservatives and seems to be affecting elections.  But the truth is that the killing BP disaster in the Gulf (11 dead) shares the same point of blame with the deadly coal-mine disasters in West Virginia (25 dead, last one), the commuter-airline crash in New York state (51 dead), the financial crash on Wall Street, spread to Main Street (millions of dreams for home, retirement, and education:  dead), and FDA approved drugs and food poisonings that sicken and kill untold numbers throughout the nation, and that point of blame is far removed from the Constitution that defines America’s government.  The tragic truth is that the Constitution has been sidestepped, if not stepped on, with constant and growing violations, like signing statements, executive military initiatives, Senate voting rules, and partisan Supreme Court decisions, making the Constitution more of a ceremonial document seen under vaulted glass, rather than a structure of law and limits, adhered to by presidents and lawmakers, and no matter who says otherwise, the truth is that the government of that Constitution cannot be placed at fault in either fermenting these disasters or for the responses to them.

The fault is the politics that rule the day for those who are elected to take up the reins of government in Washington.  The fault is the politics emerged from campaign contributions that causes presidents to appoint unqualified individuals to serve at the head and upper levels of government agencies.  It’s the election-machine-derived politics that causes presidents to appoint and the Senate to confirm those who are in bed with industries that the agencies they head are chartered to regulate.  George Bush and Dick Cheney spent eight years gutting energy regulation, and no president only a year into his service can be expected to burrow so deeply into the multi-segmented depths of government structure that all the links that have been broken by decades of political expediency will be corrected.

The president says, “I am responsible... the buck stops with me,” when referring to stopping the eruption of oil in the Gulf of Mexico.  The fact is, that’s a political sound bite, because responsibility cannot really be designated unless the ability to act is also available, and the president has neither the means for a method or the resources to stop the eruption.  The buck stops with ending the buck as the start-all and end-all of government purpose and process.  All that government or the president can do is direct the best people and resources of others to the problem, which has been done on an ongoing basis.  He has also claimed the responsibility to investigate and prosecute any criminal charges that may materialize.  It seems that finding criminal negligence, on the part of BP managers who sidestepped safety for speed, and Minerals and Management Service regulators whose job performances have already been found to be corrupt, would be a certainty.

The president doesn’t claim responsibility for the disaster, and he isn’t responsible for it.  Americans have fallen into the lazy habit of looking to the president in any crisis for either responsibility, solutions, or both.  Government, with the broad reach of demands and responsibilities for services it shoulders, through the administration of numerous, multi-level agencies, is far too large for any president to tightly control, even if there was no awesome force of special interest at work, at every level, to distract, divert, and block its legitimate actions.  The best any president can do is to appoint the best-qualified people for the tasks to the leadership positions in the government’s sweeping executive branch, and even with the obdurate roadblocks of Republicans in the Senate, and the polluting political propensity of the appointment process, President Obama has done a better job of doing that than most—a day-and-night difference from the incompetent and totally political appointments that dominated the Bush administration, many of whom set up their own disasters and those confronting America today and in the past two years.

The fact that Mexico, through its president and its organized spokespersons, are making judgements and demands regarding U.S. laws only makes clear that Mexico, with some historical merit, considers access to the U.S., by whatever means, as a right that should not be abridged.  It seems that Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s first words on visiting the U.S. should have been to apologize to America for the violence his nation’s drug culture spews across the border.  Then Obama could have apologized for promoting the Mexican market by making a cultural choice to smoke pot illegal, while permitting the more harmful cultural choice to drink to be okay.  Then, the president could have gotten a leg up on Calderon by apologizing for letting all the guns get across the border.  And Calderon could have leveled the field by thanking America for supporting so many of his citizens, often at the expense of its own, with its jobs, schools, welfare programs, hospitals and clinics, and jails.  At least they would have been talking issues that need more than talk to fix.  Instead, both presidents whine about immigration and how Arizona, whose citizens live in the thick of the fear, is trying to do what President Obama and Calderon and their predecessors should have been doing all along.

The fact is, by not enforcing immigration law and by allowing dozens of Mexican-counsel offices to be established throughout U.S. states where illegal immigration has made inroads, to provide assistance and aid to those illegal immigrants, the U.S. government is executing a policy of cooperating with the Mexican objective of relieving its own inadequate economic and social structure with the help of border transgressions.  The immigration policies carried out by the Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations are contrary to the wishes of a majority of citizens and to the national good.  The policy of these administrations is such that promotes non-enforcement of immigration law and allows American heritage and custom to be displaced at an ever-greater rate and across an ever-increasing span of states and communities.

Santa Ana attacked the U.S., wiping out the militia assembled at the Alamo in an effort to finally rid Mexico of the American settlers.  He eventually lost, then, and America took Mexican lands that became Texas, and which, now, have already been returned, in effect, to Mexican culture and occupancy, in many places, English being set aside and streets renamed for the players in past, foreign cultures who never set foot on American soil.  As this “sanctioned” invasion progresses, cities throughout the nation, far north and far removed from the Sunbelt, now see Hispanic Heritage events where there really is no Hispanic heritage.  Hispanic or any kind of heritage celebration is good, except when it preempts or subordinates American heritage.  It is clear that the objective of Mexico, and to a lesser extent of nations throughout Central and South America, is to infuse and reduce American society, and without invitation, due process, or clearing real hurdles for language and culture acclimation, make it their own:  The Hispanic States of America.

Immigration policy and law should be designed to meet economic needs while preserving heritage and culture by assuring acclimation.  Yes, end the illegal-immigrant exploitation and stop the fear of separation of families, but do not give away citizenship and the vote without mandating that every immigrant who seeks to move up to citizen responsibility and benefit meets STRONG acclimation measures on language, history, culture, and government, not the poorly administered/monitored, multiple-choice, joke test that is learned by rote with flash cards now.  Whether mandating strong acclimation requirements for citizenship is called creating a disadvantaged class or something else, that’s just political grandstanding, because there is a legitimate distinction between being qualified to become a citizen and not, regardless of how a person gets to U.S. soil, and regardless of their socio-economic status.  It’s a real distinction that reflects directly on the quality of the electorate and the decisions that determine America’s future, and it cannot be ignored on the basis of a prejudiced claim of political correctness or discrimination.  Immigration is necessary, but not at the “give me your poor” standard of the last century, and it should not be casually tied to citizenship, and the terms should never be dictated by just the economics or the mass of those who broke the law and seek to overshadow that law’s preservation of a distinctively American way of life.

Under relentless pressure from state and national lawmakers, on May 25, 2010, President Obama announced that he would order 1,200 National Guard troops to the Arizona border; however, they will act as before, in limited support roles, not enforcement.  Maybe 1,200 would be enough... if they were empowered, and if they were the ancient Spartans.

Preventing illegal immigration is a guardian measure to preserve community and national custom and heritage.  The president’s sending of 1,200 National Guard troops to the Arizona region of the border with Mexico seems a positive step, but in such small numbers, and without authority to confront and turn-away violators, it is really an obvious ploy to use a high-profile, but minimalist response to quell a concerned and legitimate demand for overdue enforcement action.  The president must do more to enforce the law and to significantly toughen the testing requirements for knowledge of American history, custom, and language that must be met to achieve citizenship and the ability to influence America’s direction with the vote, particularly if the intent is as it seems to be:  to again legitimize the presence of the tens of millions of illegal immigrants already on U.S. soil.  Whatever arrangement may be made that may ultimately allow illegal immigrants to again remain in the U.S., it must not include the current, simplistic path to citizenship that leads to the subsequent vote that will be cast in ignorance, self-interest, and with third-world perceptions of governance, because that is the kind of vote that made the difference to elect Bush and Cheney to office and which will again prove to be highly detrimental to America’s future.

Only real enforcement of the law (I.D. cards, out of business and into jail for job providers and landlords, and removal of the birthright carrot so any child born of an illegal immigrant in the U.S. retains the mother’s nationality) not walls or window-dressing troop deployments, can keep American heritage and culture, such that it is becoming, intact within its own skin.  And it must begin now, because this next effort at “immigration reform,” of allowing citizenship and the vote without strict acclimation requirements (language, culture, and history education and proficiency at the high-school grad level) for the tens of millions of illegal immigrants now in America, if allowed to succeed, will be to wave a white flag and surrender not only Texas and the Sunbelt, but America’s national identity forever, in every state.  It will mark the consensual beginning of the end for the flag of our fathers.

Rand Paul, the Republican (Tea Party) U.S. Senate nominee for Kentucky, was exposed, again, as soft on racism, this time during an appearance on the May 19, MS-NBC, Rachel Maddow Show.  Leading Republicans who were questioned the next day about Paul’s position:  that the 1964 Civil Rights Act should not have been passed to allow intrusion into business decisions on clientele (that private-property rights should trump equal rights and the blind eye of social justice), distanced themselves by either pleading ignorance of Paul’s position or, in the case of Arizona’s Republican Senator Kyle, minimizing its significance.  By evening of the next day, after repeating his position again and again, Paul finally reversed himself, saying he would have voted to pass the 1964 bill.  Too late, though.  Cat’s out of the bag, Paul’s cat, and the screechers of those Republicans who failed to condemn him.

Maybe this will be enough to get that Democrat state that always votes Republican to finally see the light?  Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader from Kentucky, who supported Paul’s opponent in the primary, congratulated Paul on his victory, saying “Kentucky needs Rand Paul in the U.S. Senate.”  McConnell later said he was glad to hear Paul changed his position and would vote for the bill ending segregation... and that the Healthcare Reform Bill has 2,700 pages.

Germany’s or any other nation’s reluctance to bail-out Greece is quite understandable.  With Greece’s heavily socialist-biased economy in conflict with its democratic, cook-the-books-to-hide-debt (previous) system of government, providing three-week vacations and full-salary retirements at age 55, other Euro-nations have to see throwing money at them the same way Americans see their TARP funds going to pay obscene Wall-Street salaries and bonuses.

The riots, while criminal, given the basis, are tantamount to an obese, brat kid screaming and throwing toys after its candy bar is taken away, and the behavior does nothing to soften the international view of the Grecian’s self-made predicament.  The more the Greeks scream and kick, the better it is for the economic outlook, because it means painful austerity is being imposed where irresponsible exuberance has been the generational norm, and that’s good for markets, especially banks, which make money on the movement of money in any environment.

With this understanding, it’s hard to see the market downturn of the first week of May as being anything more than the exercise of a pent-up desire to take profit, executed on the basis of the excuse provided by the Greece-Euro conflict, as an emotional response fueled by fear and excessive caution.  The proof of the U.S. recovery’s legs is in, the value basis of U.S. companies is not moving in the down direction of investor response to Europe’s debt remedies, and the wrenching away of Greece from the unsupportable, playground economics of Leninism marks a buying opportunity in a short-term, knee-jerk, market pull-back.

The Supreme Court, in its ruling favoring corporate campaign contributions, in Citizens United, in its recent, stomach-turning ruling overturning the law banning dog-fight videos, and in numerous other issues, including pornography, has hopelessly convoluted the intent of the First Amendment, thereby making prosecution of crimes and protection of democracy more difficult than should be the case.

The First Amendment’s prohibitions address “speech” and the “press.” And there were no videos or even photo-picture magazines in existence at the time the Amendment was adopted, so it does not follow that these “media” forms should be construed, within any context, as representative of “speech” (the spoken word) or “the press” (the written word) within the context of the Constitution, especially when the intent was obviously a literate protection of free expression of thought, and particularly, political thought affecting the business of governance.  As well, at that time, after the Revolution, most political speech was not through anonymous means, where the person generating the speech or print was difficult or impossible to identify, a factor for greater concern against prosecution for expression of ideas through speech or the press, the only outlets of the time.

“Ideas,” is a key word which has escaped the Supreme Court’s rulings over history, and particularly, recently.  Dog fighting is not an idea; nor is pornography.  These are “actions.” or “practices,” neither of which falls within the bounds of protecting “speech” or “the press.”  Even though pornography or dog-fight promotion in magazines could at first glance, by literal, mechanical means of production and distribution, be categorized as “press,” when taken in context with the expression outlets at the time the First Amendment was appended to the Constitution, and the forms of editorial speech of the day, it is clear that these “practices” were never intended to fall under the protections afforded “speech,” or the written form of speech published in the “press.”

The consequences of these rulings are clearly troubling, but are possible to occur only because modern (at least modern in the sense of being in the public eye) practices conveyed through modern media have been wrongly included within a constitutional concept of “speech” that was never intended or realized by the Founders to be afforded constitutional speech or press protections.  The casual folding of “practices” of any kind into the protections of speech and the press are the root of the problem.  And if the practices were properly separated from considerations of speech, there would be no doubt that laws could be passed to prohibit corporate campaign spending, the promotion of cruelty to animals, or pornography, within the constraint of community standards, without any constitutional violation, and without any affront to common sense.

The real reason for the vitriolic conflict during and after the health-care bill’s passage is because the measure represents the first, meaningful confrontation between the class priorities of the Democratic and Republican parties in a half century, and because, in its lawful form, it marks the first step in making a major redistribution of wealth while also cutting into what has been a prime engine of Republican wealth and financing:  the health-care industry’s profit machine.

Republicans express their viewpoint by shadowboxing with phrases like, “individual responsibility being supplanted by another entitlement,” and “a government takeover of health care,” while Democrats mark the passage as the establishing of a basic “human right,” and pushing back against the “inequality of wealth distribution.”  The facts, and the conscience, for those who have one, make clear which side speaks from the side of right and truth.  The implicit responsibility of any society that allows prosperity for some to reach the level of the “filthy rich,” with obscene wealth, is that no citizen should ever be denied the basic provision of preventive healthcare or suffer illness or pain without swift access to competent care, the cost of which never degrades anyone’s quality of life.  The Republican leadership of this age doesn’t get that or care to see the U.S. join with leading, socially-conscious democracies by bringing healthcare out of the capitalist dark ages, when considerations of profit and accumulation of wealth have no limits and come second to nothing, no matter the despair and hardship of the less fortunate, and when there is no balance of democracy to bring relief.

Of course, the secondary goal of reform, to lower costs to patients and the government, will not be realized until the missing piece to complete the transformation to a viable, socially-conscious health system is passed in later legislation:  either a single-payer system or a public, non-subsidized marketplace option, which Max Baucus, a health-insurance-industry stooge, made sure never saw the light of day when the bill left his Senate Finance Committee hearings.  That will be the next fight, and it can be achieved, unless the Democrats, who stood for the people and took the needed first step, lose more seats as a result of the extremist rhetoric and actions of the Republican party during the year of the health-reform bill’s debate and passage and in subsequent attempts to challenge and sidestep the new law, and as a consequence of the Supreme Court’s sanctioning of unlimited, corporate campaign spending.

As it stands now, the new law is an important first step only, representing insurance reform more than health-care reform, ending heartless, profit-driven abuses, but also affording the insurance industry greater profits through mandatory, greatly-increased participation, preserving their and the drug companies’ monopolies without price controls or a truly competitive, detached alternative or any requirement to maintain stocks of needed drugs that do not meet drug-company imperatives for obscene profit, when what is really needed to bring costs under control and assure quality services and uninterrupted supply lines is to separate the insurers and providers from the profit-driven priorities of Wall Street’s firms by confronting them with a public option or eliminating them in favor of a single-payer system that is not a part of the Wall Street corporate culture, and that has quality service as its first and major priority.

Reform without an insurance-company-separated public option is not true reform.  It signals a Congress and president still in the grip of lobbyists and money instead of the welfare-interests of their constituencies, and it leaves insurance companies and for-profit providers in charge, and they will always be ruled by the Wall Street imperative for ever-increasing profit and returns, above all else.

Daniel Mudd, the former CEO of Fannie May, testifying on April 9, 2010, before a congressionally-authorized committee, spoke the truth of profit-prioritized systems when he said that the goal of affordable housing is “impossible” to meet when it competes against that of profit-making, which he said was the priority of Fanny Mae’s board as it entered into the irresponsible risks that it hoped would increase shareholder returns, but which, instead, lead to the collapse that forced the government bail-out and the trashing of $trillions in American wealth as the executives who wrecked their firms and the lives and dreams of millions of families reaped unconscionable salaries and bonuses.  Publicly (investor) owned health-care boards and CEOs also have the priority for profit and investor returns set ahead of affordable service, making an affordable health-care system, owned and operated by Wall Street’s firms, impossible.

If anything, the public option or single-payer system will, at last, be the step that moves in the direction of acknowledging that health care should not be, primarily, a for-profit business, and that Wall Street’s firms are, by their nature and mandate, not suited to be properly motivated providers or financiers.  Not everything operating within a capitalist system must be structured to the form and priorities of corporations.  This concept was again proven, last month, as above-usual premium increases, some above 100 percent, were triggered by a combination of Wall Street’s pressure on the industry for better profits and the industry’s effort to establish increases before any reform was passed.

The problem is as obvious as the solution, which still eludes the government... and the people.

Right now, more than 22,000 mercenaries are operating in Iraq and Afghanistan without proper authorization.  Recent Congressional hearings have painted a dismal picture of military-contractor operations, particularly XE Services’ (formerly Blackwater) operations.  Employees stole hundreds of weapons meant for the Afghan national police, they billed the U.S. government for a prostitute, and they massacred innocent civilians.  After sullying (not really a good word for this context anymore since the Miracle on the Hudson) the Blackwater name, they then created a shell company called “Paravant” so they could keep getting government contracts.

It is important to note that the Constitution places ALL military authority with Congress, not the president (except raising a defense against an active attack), and a strict observance of the congressional authority to raise armies must be adhered to if the dangers feared by the Founders, which have already come to pass, are to be stopped and then prevented.  It is not enough to use funds appropriated for operations if those appropriations do not also specifically authorize the fielding of what is essentially a private army, such authorization also specifying strength, parameters of the objectives of their deployment, and oversight.  In fact, by strictest interpretation, Congress would have to specifically authorize the entering into each contract by the executive branch.

The use of private security firms, as it has been practiced since the Iraq invasion, is the raising of a private army without the specific authorization for doing so.  And without the objectives for that use of military force being specified by Congress, it is unconstitutional and another example of how the Constitution, by its provisions being sidestepped or stepped on, has become a ceremonial document, not the living document to guide the governance of a democratic society.  Raising and fielding private armies also makes it easier for the executive to extend military might where, without the supplemental armies, public and congressional pressures against additional, legitimate forces would introduce restrictions or even contribute to eventually terminate the operations.

This freewheeling creation and use of force by the executive, and through the executive, by the Department of Defense, must end, and the The Stop Outsourcing Security Act, introduced by Rep. Jan Schakowsky in the House (H.R. 4650) and Bernie Sanders in the Senate (S. 3023), would prohibit hiring private mercenaries like XE Services to perform tasks traditionally done by the military without specific congressional authorization.  Elected officials must be pressured to make this Act a priority for passage.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who embarrassed Vice President Biden by announcing new, Jewish settlements in Palestine during Biden’s visit, attempted to justify increasing the Palestinian settlements in his March 2010 AIPAC speech by restating an Israeli claim upon Jerusalem as its capital, not Tel Aviv, based upon 3,000 year-old history (a claim with which many map makers agree, though not the legal, international establishment):

The connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel cannot be denied.  The connection between the Jewish people and Jerusalem cannot be denied.  The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 year ago and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today.  Jerusalem is not a settlement.  It is our capital.

— Benjamin Netanyahu, 2010 AIPAC Policy Conference speech

Between the lines, Netanyahu is saying that there will be no cessation of settlement building, and further, that Jerusalem will rise above Israel’s historical claim to become, in fact, its legitimate capital again, and any two-state solution will have to incorporate that geopolitical reality.

President Obama realizes that this position makes any enduring peace between Israel and Palestine impossible, and further, that it will set back regional Arab concessions to the process and to Israel as Palestinian repression necessarily continues.  The reading of the “riot act” to Netanyahu, as it is put, by Secretary of State Clinton, after the speech, was part desperation to reverse the meaning of Netanyahu’s rhetoric, and part a knowing, frustrated parent scolding an obstinate child.  Clinton emphasized the responsibility of Israel’s friends and allies to point out inappropriate policies that hurt not only Israel, but the U.S. as well.  Great Britain, in objecting to Israel’s repeated use of forged UK passports, in the latest instance, to carry out an assassination against a Hamas terrorist after promising the UK never to forge passports again, used the same reasoning of responsible policy objection by an ally, which seems now to be a coordinated line justifying criticism by Israel’s feather-ruffled friends.

Israel must abandon the objective of Jerusalem as its capital and the unilateral decision to continue building settlements as a consequence.  The world, the region, and Jerusalem are not what they were 3,000 years ago, and that distant past cannot be a basis for setting the political realities of today, just as Iran’s epoch of ancient greatness cannot justify its reclaiming reach for nuclear arms today.  To attempt to make it so will only ensure continued violence and the continued growth of extremism and influence by Iran and other nations that will come to support greater extremism in the face of unrealistic Israeli intransigence.

Jerusalem is a supreme holy place for Jews, Moslems, and Christians, and as such, it has a significance beyond nationality and can never be held by any of them alone, and any nation tied to any of those faiths that attempts to control it will only face endless trouble in a hopeless cause.  Like the District of Columbia is separated from all the other states as a political entity, as the seat of the capital of the United States, or Vatican City from Italy, so too, Jerusalem must be separated from the geopolitical sphere of the nations that surround it, because all the nations and religions have a connection, past, present, and future, that is just as valid and undeniable as Israel’s, and all three religions, through their political faces, must equally share in the administration of the city’s life and determining the direction of its future, through some arrangement and structure that gives the parties equal voice and power.  Only then can peace in and beyond Jerusalem’s limits be secured and maintained.  President Obama knows this, and more than any other nation, Israel should also know the reality of its limitations and history’s limited reach to touch the future.

For Jews, the Torah defines a philosophy of life that is founded in morality and peace, which leads to the light—a relationship with God.  Despite that Israel was attacked, and despite that nations resorting to war risk loss without right of redemption, the people of Palestine, who did not make or participate in those decisions, have been displaced and are held beneath Israel’s mandated moral horizon.  Instead, fear and a more-recent, horrific past have prioritized an Israeli stance of survival through fiercely wielded strength which now also consumes its allies.  Until Israel recognizes that history is not the path to the future, no plan will ever bring the breath of lasting life to the light of peace for itself or with its neighbors.

The decision by Google to agree to Chinese government censorship restrictions in order to access its market was an abomination, not only because it came from the world leader in technological communications, and as such, provided the Chinese government a source of significant support and justification for continuance of its repressive policies, but because it represented a philosophy of greed that has come to overtake American corporatism, a philosophy that mandates profits will come first, no matter the consequences, which was Google’s conscious and unconscionable decision when it agreed to bend to the Chinese government’s terms.  Profits are important, and without them, no corporation can continue, but neither Google’s profitability nor its market dominance was ever at stake as a consideration for acceding to Chinese censorship and other demands contrary to privacy.  It is unfortunate that it took an act of Chinese government technical abuse, targeted against Google’s systems, to finally cause its boardroom to see the light and make the decision to remove censorship filters and relocate Google’s China service to Hong Kong.

That censored presence in China was a decision that never should have been made in the first place.  Now, there should be no turning back, not because of public relations or profits, but because Google should make the decision that, as a leading American company, it will act with priorities that are, or were once vested within American philosophy and heritage, that individual rights, liberties, dignity, and respect come second to nothing else.  It can be hoped that Google’s decision to remove its censored, search service from China, while overdue and not wholly, properly motivated, will nonetheless evolve into a change that becomes a new model for corporate self-discipline and moral character, a model that will lead the American, corporate sector into a new standard of priorities that once existed for all levels of their operations, as responsible, supporting community members.  But don’t hold your breath, because with the American electoral system funded by campaign contributions, and unlimited corporate participation to buy legislators sanctioned by the conservative-Republican majority on the Supreme Court, the temptations and benefits of acting on greed will never be overcome.

“The President’s Healthcare Summit,” or “Conference,” or the “Bipartisan Healthcare Conference,” whatever the official name, it certainly wasn’t the latter, since Republicans could have just sent a tape recorder with their stale, misleading, and untruthful talking points, turning the day-long conference into a futile bipartisan effort, accomplishing nothing, apart from the wrangling, except to demonstrate the president’s depth of knowledge, patience, gentility, and his long-awaited commitment to reform, which should bring home to Democrats that they need to swim together through the Republican cement, and that the president’s sterling performance in the public light will make it difficult for any of them to go against the Democratic reform measure when reconciliation nulls a Senate, Republican filibuster to block bringing it to a vote.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) both responded by demonstrating that they have the number of pages in the healthcare-reform bill down pat; or maybe not, since they repeated “2700” no less than three times.  On that basis, those two parrots should really be going macaws over the mega-War-and-Peace-sized tax code, made into the inflated, loopholed, exclusioned, block of Swiss cheese that it is by mostly Republicans looking out for the profits of big business and the accounts of the wealthy... oh, and the insurance companies.

The voters, who put the Democrats into power to bring change, who are becoming disillusioned and angry with the incompetence of gridlock, and who McConnell still insists are the ones demanding that insurance companies remain in charge of healthcare costs and processes, will be watching.

Sent to Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX)

It is difficult to know if your remarks, concerning last week’s flight of the Piper Dakota into the Austin, Texas, I.R.S. building:  “When you fly an airplane into a federal building to kill people, that’s how you define terrorism,” is sensationalism, ignorance, or another part of the ongoing Republican plan to play on fear of terrorism and eventually create a false perception that the Obama administration is partially to blame, while you wait for the successful, real terrorist attack to come, which you know eventually will come, regardless of which party is in the White House, so you can, if it is a Democratic administration, stand up and say, “I told you so.”  No doubt, Dick Cheney will be frothing at the mouth to be the one to say it.

Of course Joseph Stack’s suicide-by-aircraft was not terrorism!  He also probably had no priority to kill government employees, which detracts from his real objective of garnering attention to his obsession by flying into the building, and he probably believed his slow, fragile, lightweight craft would do minimal internal damage to the building.  So that you’ll know, which is important for you to know, since you are supposed to be serving as the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, not agitating on it, “terrorism,” is an act of political consequence, usually systemic, against government, tied to a movement of organized effort to attain political goals.  An objective investigation into Mr. Stack’s life will likely show a man who, though troubled, loved his country but hated the bureaucracy, not the employees of the I.R.S., which is probably the most-hated department of government, and which he identified as evil, separate from his “red, white, and blue” concept of the whole of government.  People and groups can and do make those kinds of distinctions, and their motives and wrongs claimed done can never justify or soften the blow to affected victims, co-workers, and families.

Mr. Stack is hardly the first person to risk or suffer loss of life in order to object about something in government, in the U.S. or around the globe, and he won’t be the last.  If he wasn’t a pilot, he would have probably rented a U-Haul and tried to drive it through the I.R.S. building’s front doors.  Other, like, criminal acts, wrought of similar motives are carried out by other disturbed people who walk into offices and classrooms with guns blazing.  Are you going to call all such acts “terrorism?”  Had he remotely piloted a plane into the building, then you might call it an act of terrorism.  But since he ended his life and any further opposition with his “statement,” with no one else or nothing to continue in his place, terrorism cannot apply, except when claimed as part of another, unrelated agenda.  You must focus if real terrorism is to be kept at bay, not game-play the politics, not-fear monger, not grandstand for every opportunity that can be distorted to touch your committee and state.  If anything, Mr. Stack’s suicide was a demonstration of opposition and consequence to an unfair tax code that is politically engineered to favor the elite at the expense of everyone else, as is so much of everything political in this generation.

His suicide and collateral-damage murder is certainly not in any way excusable or defensible, regardless of how detestable are the tax laws and the abuses of government, as a result of political corruption, of which I’m sure you cannot deny with a straight face, Texas Republicans, like Tom Delay, in every level of state and federal government, have proven themselves to be masters.  But Stack’s suicide is, nonetheless, a sign that the abuse in government favoritism to the elite, and the influence of money over government is reaching a kind of breaking point, and it would do you and other members of Congress well to address that, rather than cry fire in the theater with the use of “terrorism” as being what defines Stack’s act, and then attempt to punish civil aviation with more restrictions that even you admit will not be able to prevent another suicidal act of desperation and anger, or another act of terrorism.

cc via Web forms:  White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Sen. Russ Feingold, Sen. Arlen Specter, Rep. Steve Driehaus, House Financial Services Committee office, more...

In what is called by drama-seeking news reports, “big news,” in the opening weekend of the Vancouver Winter Olympics, 6,000 U.S. troops entered the long-time, Taliban-controlled, Helmand Province village of Marja, a center of Taliban opium production, where neither the Taliban nor foreign fighters were to be found, as should have been expected, since the offensive was broadcast in advance.  Instead, U.S. forces find themselves targets of selective ambushes in the middle of a dangerous, IED minefield, set exclusively for their announced arrival, which has already claimed two U.S. soldiers’ lives.  Officials say that the idea is to drive out the Taliban, by whatever means, and then prevent their return.  Since the Taliban, like al Qaeda, will not fight except on their terms or when cornered, announcing offensives will hardly serve the objective of decimating or even demoralizing them.  Instead, two U.S. missile strikes in Marja have killed nine civilians, including five children, possibly three Taliban, and have given the Taliban and al Qaeda more propaganda ammo to use in winning hearts and minds and recruiting more fighters in the name of those civilians, a total of 13 killed over the offensive’s first weekend who are now the major casualties of the U.S. offensive.

What will happen now, for the U.S. and the Afghan government the U.S. tries to support, is that the adverse consequences of dead civilians will continue, since the Taliban fighters purposefully put themselves in proximity with the populace when they decide to fight, and since coalition troops cannot be everywhere and presumedly cannot stay forever, the Islamist radicals will strike where troops are not, and are not ready to face them, and they will wait until troops are gone to reimpose their authority.  Both cases mean that U.S. leaders, despite contrary public mandates, will resist ever removing the troops, or if they do, when the occupations are over, little will have been gained in return for the cost in lives and fortunes spent, the terrorists still in operation in their enclaves, spread around the globe.  Again, loosely organized, disbursed militant organizations are not effectively countered by fielded armies; they are aided by them.  When will U.S. presidents and the Congress, which should be the constitutional authority making military-deployment decisions, ever learn?  This ignorance is harming America more than anything else.

Republicans, unopposed by President Obama, are pressing for passage of a line-item veto, to place a front of legitimacy on the abuse of signing statements.  It is assured that they are not doing so to give greater latitude and power to a Democratic administration!  They know, as should the Democratic leadership, that while the line-item veto would be used by Democratic administrations to remove items of interest to them, it will be Republican administrations that will (ab)use this power the most to cut into the “intrusions of government” which they do not see as necessary for a responsible, compassionate, social posture in American society.  To the Republicans, the line-item veto is an investment that they know would incur some costs to their initiatives, but which they also know would provide them enduring profits over losses in the long term because they would be, by far, the most active “traders,” while the transaction fee would be paid by those of the American people who can least afford to be hurt.

In addition, and more relevant, as with signing statements, a line-item veto, since it would alter the procedure outlined in the Constitution for passage of legislation, would be unconstitutional unless it were put into effect as a constitutional amendment, and legislation for it has already been rejected by the Supreme Court.  The historical record makes clear that the Founders most feared government power being too strongly vested in the executive and the possibility for abuse of power by the executive.  Neither signing statements nor the line-item veto—the same coat of different colors—would have ever been written into the legislative process defined in the Constitution by the Founders for the very reason that it focuses far too much power upon the executive.  President Obama is advanced in knowledge of constitutional law, but in responding to the line-item-veto request in the Republican-caucus meeting, he regrettably supported the idea, but he also provided the necessary, valid solution: bills should not have funding measures attached that are not relevant to the purpose of the bill.

The line-item veto purports to be another measure to control spending abuse, when in fact it would be another abuse, more deleterious than any of the others.  The single step of eliminating campaign contributions in place of public funding would have the greatest cleansing effect upon all the monetary abuses in government, setting into motion a domino-effect to act upon the other abuses that stem from it, including lobbying and all other forms of influence peddling, earmarks, and the abuse of congressional leadership based on money raised, and returning the great amount of the people’s time that is taken from legislators, and their real purpose, to serve the cash cows funding their campaigns.

The president should be working to reestablish prohibitions and public-voice balancing limits upon campaign-ad spending by corporations and organizations and to completely eliminate campaign contributions in place of public funding, which would also achieve his aim of reducing Republican obstructionism, the effect of lobbyists and the instances of earmarks and add-on funding items in bills without the need for additional legislation, though these abuses should also be lawfully eliminated.  Campaign contributions and disbursements are a tool used by party leaders and “controllers” to keep legislators “in line,” promoting obstructionism and gridlock, blocking bipartisan passage of necessary legislation for the sake of extremist goals.  Without the influence of campaign contributions and election-advertising funding, beneficial laws and vital appointments would not be regularly blocked, and it really would not matter how much is spent on lobbyists, since they would have no pressure to bear upon legislators, other than the merit of their arguments, despite that they would still have the advantage of access to make those arguments more frequently and effectively than the average citizen or small organization.  But even so, corporations and unions would have much less incentive to fund massive lobbying efforts when they would no longer be backing-up or have the hammer of campaign contributions to hold over the heads of legislators, a hammer that would also be taken from the hands of the party elite to contain bipartisanship to achieve extremist goals.

The president argues that one of the big problems with the political system is that legislators are busy scoring political points rather than working the problems.  If Congress believed those political points were important to the people, there wouldn’t be a problem.  The problem is that it’s not important to score points for constituents.  Then, who, besides the media, which is an “echo chamber” the president notes perpetuates the false debates, and from which he advises legislators should turn away?

To answer “who,” a definition or clarification is required:  “Political points” is another of those Washington/political pseudonyms for “obligation points,” which are the points legislators get when they take positions, place votes, and get away with the explanations they give or facades they erect to justify those positions and votes, while actually bending to the pressure of vast campaign contributions they receive, reinforced by lobbying.  Those are the political points legislators must score and that have the highest priority in the present electoral system.

“This industry gave my reelection campaign hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I can’t ignore that, because if I do, I risk cuttin’ off the money and losin’ my seat, and maybe also goin’ against my party’s line, because they also gave a million bucks to the party!  I’m not going to let that happen, and I’ll do what I have to and explain it any way I can, or say nothing,” as is the policy of Democrat Sen. Max Baucus, who chaired the Senate committee working on the healthcare-reform, which killed the public option, and whose closest staff were former health-insurance industry executives.  “Or, I’ll just say, ‘I’m not influenced by contributions,’” as Independent Sen. Joe Lieberman responds to questions about the bags of money his war chest gets from his state’s insurance industries, headquartered there.

And for Republicans, the party platform is rife with good “explanations” to cover fronting for the interest groups:  “government takeover, inhibiting business and innovation, just bad [unexplained why] policy, not the right way to do it [no reason why, except the former],” are high ones on the list, or any lobbyist can be asked and will probably have a worksheet in his or her briefcase to hand out.

The unfortunate campaign-spending ruling of the Supreme Court, which the president rightly criticized in his State of the Union address, combines with a consolidated, corporate-influenced media industry that is in a dual crisis of constraint upon finance and journalistic independence and scope, and an evolved, long-standing, bipolar political climate, powered by party control of contributions to create gridlock, that propagates vast spending for propaganda more often than fact, to threaten the voices and influence of the men and women who make up the constituency to whom the government should be most responsible and responsive.  The system of elections, rooted in the campaign-finance machine, is at the heart of the threat to popular sovereignty, bipartisanship, the anger of voters, and the reason they feel they are out of touch with a government they can hardly call “theirs.”  This is where prompt and cutting remedies must be applied if there is ever to be a realization of the president’s promise to change the way Washington does business and restore a viable framework of democracy.

“We do not quit,” was the statement that is a hallmark of President Obama’s first State of the Union address.  I hope people were paying attention to the Republican side during the speech, because they were tipping their hand, sitting there like Supreme Court justices, a stone-faced wall, instead of joining with Democrats, standing and applauding on a lot of issues that are important to voters, showing that they, too, aren’t quitting, being obstructionists, being more concerned about defeating Democrats than the ills afflicting their constituents and the nation, of which they are proving to be big, green, mucus men and women, barraged and intransigent in the house of the People, perpetuating the suffering.

The president, not quitting, was talking about resolve to face and conquer problems, differences, enemies, and international competition.  But while he rightly chastised the Supreme Court’s ruling, which allows unlimited campaign contributions, and the bankers for sending armies of lobbyists to oppose needed bank-reform measures, he failed to put the needed emphasis on those latter items, because no matter what faces America from without, it will not be met with success while the core of America’s democracy is being relentlessly assaulted from within, by the entrenched election machine and its system of contributions and reinforced, paid influence.

Senior legislators, charged with reforming bank and healthcare law to benefit the interests of the nation and the people, are the targets of campaign money, rained upon them by the industries the laws they form will affect, and they have undeniably been forming those laws or blocking them to serve the interests of those who got them elected, not those of the people who elected them or the nation.  Campaign contributions invite corruption and the follow-up of intense lobbying, all of which also contribute to a host of related abuses, including earmarks.  The money-for-influence system cannot be effectively regulated.  To try and do so is like trying to quit smoking by slowly withdrawing, a method that almost always fails, compared to cold-turkey prohibition, which does work.  This is why campaign reform to end all contributions and replace them with full, public funding is required.  And it is the most important of all issues that face America, because the electoral system in America has devolved into an engine of corrupted influence that blocks and dilutes effective governance, and it will be the cause of the eventual destruction of America’s democracy.

The wall separating the People from their government is already well under construction.  It is a philosophy of the conservative-Republicans, and it is being funded by the influence of money, which is the tool of greed, and it has no place in a just government of the free.

Mr. President, tear down that wall!

“Bankers” is a loosely defined term that actually, nowadays, includes anyone or any entity having anything to do with activities normally associated with banking, or Wall Street’s investment types, and those who caused and/or contributed to the ongoing recession, and/or who act as though it either never happened or is long gone.  These bankers and those who, once their peers, have moved into related occupations, have little upon which to stand when complaining about popular uprisings or witch hunts, or when attempting to defend their professionalism or motivations in the wake of the economy they sank.  But these “bankers” also fall very neatly into another definition:

Superficially charming, tending to make good first impressions on others and often striking observers as remarkably normal, yet self-centered, dishonest and undependable, often engaging in irresponsible behavior [risk] for just the sheer fun of it.  Largely devoid of guilt, empathy [obscene compensation] and love, having casual and callous relationships, routinely offering excuses for their reckless and often outrageous actions, placing blame on others instead [regulators, consumers, the system, global factors], rarely learning from their mistakes or benefitting from negative feedback [more and bigger bonuses, getaways], and having difficulty inhibiting their impulses [more and bigger bonuses, getaways, risk].

This, not violence, is what has been the long-standing, accepted description of that which characterizes a “psychopath,” as first defined by psychiatrist Hervey M. Cleckley, in 1941.  Does it sound like psychopathic bankers are capable or inclined to police themselves, as former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan fervently believed?  Or that in the process of endlessly compromising their amorality they will adopt non-sociopathic, “learned behavior” on their own?  Is Congress listening, or can the truth be heard and the pain seen through the mountain of bankers’ cash in which legislators are buried?

In answer to their part in engineering the economic train wreck of the era, bankers with psychopathic traits prefer to do as most do who either are or have been aligned with the high dwellers in steel and glass:  testify and make media statements diluting the blame and responsibility, avoiding accountability, and remaining blind to the fact that they are leeches who still, for the most part, believe they are entitled to bonuses that dwarf the annual salaries of most working Americans (referred to as “they still don’t get it.”), not to mention the multitudes whom they primarily put out of jobs and homes.  These arrogant, high-and-mighty financial magicians pulled scorched and battered rabbits out of their hats and then bled money out of them while claiming that the hats in which the rabbits were assaulted were not theirs to either wear or control.

The rabbits—American citizens, governments, charities and companies, still suffering and, in the latter case, many gone, are still scarred, battered, and burnt, and they will continue to be all the while the bankers are pocketing their loot and marveling at the wondrous fortune of their chosen profession, where they control Congress, and accountability is less onerous for them than even for the politicians they own (who are quite willing to let their campaign paymasters get away with murder—same story with health-care reform) and where punishment is the comfort of bulging pockets, the opposite of what those they failed and hurt are destined long to suffer, and for whom no tax or penalty that can be mustered could ever be repayment.

Sure, some top executives were forced out or went down with their companies, but they were richly, life-term endowed with golden parachutes, and a few top CEO’s, like Citi’s Pandit, took no salary in 2009.  But that is a meaningless non-sacrifice in their far, far-away universe, where the tens upon tens, up to hundreds of $millions they’ve already been paid have seated them in the cozy lap of luxury for life, with no need to ever work again!  Even if these irresponsible banking elitists were all taxed and clawed-back into bankruptcy and ruin, as they should be, there would be not nearly enough to right the treasuries of charities and all levels of government that have been depleted in softening the blows to the people who have been made the jetsam of their wreck, or pay back a measure of justice for those who will never see a bonus or a year’s salary that equals the most modest of those bank bonuses, so rich that they draw easy attention to bankers’ greed and thoughtlessness.

Now, big-time bankers are taking extraordinary and, in many cases, record profits and pay while talking about lessons learned and revamped risk assessment.  But the fact is that there is no such thing as risk in an industry where those in the top floors maintain total separation between the losses of their firms and those in their wallets.  Nothing demonstrates the prevailing, obscene distortion of business and capitalist logic better than the contrast of the drained net worth of millions of Americans and thousands of businesses, charities, and governments against the burgeoning pay, bonuses, and multi-million-dollar homes and toys of the privileged few who brought down so many as their personal, financial umbilicals were and still remain severed from the dying and resuscitated bodies upon which they greedily feed through their professionally structured, investor-separated IV lines.

The worst cases are too numerous and painful to ignore, except for those who pocket the big bucks.  A parent holding a foreclosure ruling and a worthless front-door key knows that the party is over.  A single mom converting a pink slip into an unemployment claim that’s about to run out of its extension knows the tap is dripping dry.  A 65-plus year-old retiree who is forced to go back to what will be difficult, physically tiring work (if it can be found) or face impoverished subsistence or homelessness knows the cherished future, his or her slice of the American dream, has vanished.  A business owner who can’t get a loan to expand or provide for the next quarter’s needs knows where an “Out of Business” sign could soon hang and that severe cuts are not a matter of choice.

Meanwhile, these victims are invisible to the bankers who culpably failed and who now strategize bonus payments and buyouts with taxpayer windfalls, and who see horizons brighter than ever and don’t know about suffering or cuts, except those which they impose on others.  One firm after another has demonstrated that, for them, the party is bigger than ever, as the only concern about their payrolls is how to shuffle them while enlarging them so that they won’t draw any more ire than absolutely necessary.  If the stuffed pockets of the bankers could at least buy a pound of social justice from which to build a more responsible future, then perhaps one could say it is all worth it.  But the evidence seems to be that both bankers and government have learned nothing and will be poised to bring another disaster down upon us in the future, one from which, as it has been going, the bankers and blindly re-elected politicians will continue to not only be immune, but from which the bankers will, somehow, again find loopholes and exclusions in the rules from which they will greatly profit at the enduring expense of many others.

Business as usual...