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.  Whether or not he has or will change his mind about that, 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 achieved.  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 4,400 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.

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, Harmid 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 that causes presidents to appoint unqualified individuals to serve at the head and upper levels of government agencies.  It’s the 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 Deepwater-Horizon eruption in the Gulf, along with the Buffalo commuter-plane crash, the Massey coal-mine explosion, the Mr. Peanut salmonella contamination, the GSK/Avandia and Purdue Pharma/OxyContin deaths, Bernie Madoff, Enron, the Lehman/AIG/Fannie-Freddie collapses, etc., etc., ad-infinitum... it all demonstrates the need for America to break its addiction to a politically structured, influenced, and greed-manipulated government, which is the sole product of a money-raising driven, corruption-enticing election process, which harms America much more than does oil consumption.  That’s the bottom line on the big picture of America’s dark history of avoidable disasters:  money, buying-off regulation and lawmaking, and the buck really only stops with reforming the process to eliminate the influence of the money.

The president is aware that his administration is not responsible for the shape of government’s agencies as he inherits them and criticizes them in addressing the Massey mining and BP drilling-platform disasters, only that corrections must be applied quickly as the breeches are discovered, as he has done by using executive order to split the Minerals Management Service in order to strengthen its regulatory function and protect it from future, overt political manipulation.  The same should be applied to other agencies that suffer the same dualities of promotion and regulation, and which also are and have been objects of questionable leadership appointments, because the nation is still suffering those abuses and will continue to suffer them in the short-term future—forever, if the underlying cause is not eliminated.

That cause is, put another way, the political priority afforded to industries that fund the election-campaign coffers and then watchdog legislative offices with legions of pressuring lobbyists, resulting in exclusions, loopholes, and regulations not being enforced, ending up with crashes, disasters, deaths, and ruined livelihoods and futures that all should have been prevented.  This political manipulation of government, supported through campaign funding and party control of the election process is the core cause, not the government of the Founders, which has been largely abused, in defamation and practice.  Contrary to what Sara Palin, the Tea Party, and Republican-conservative extremists keep on telling anyone who will listen, the government is not a bad, evil thing, and it is necessary.  And more, the government America’s Founders risked life and fortune to put together more than 225 years ago is still the best mechanism that can be devised by free men, in compromise, who more often than not are working to serve opposite ends, to eventually provide the structure and controls that allow a society to function within the safeguards of the rule of law.

That structure of government is a gift that is unappreciated, wrongly defamed, and wasted, and it is not the problem.  The problem is the way those who are elected to office, and those who are never elected, and who head party apparatuses, have played to make or break those laws to serve their ends, with the advantage of an apathetic, uninvolved, and difficult-to-mobilize public as opposition, who no longer have a strong, diversified Fourth Estate free press as a watchdog of government’s three “estates,” because those same political processes and players, through partisan FCC appointments, rule changes, and Senate confirmations, also in the Bush era, have consolidated journalistic diversity into a conglomerated, more controllable, interest-serving industry.  And the impetus that has moved the actions most harmful to the People and the nation, especially in the modern era, is money.  And the money corrupts through the election process, from which it spreads to varied forms of influence buying and reciprocal exchange, through earmarks and laws, particularly tax laws, that only serve as payback to the wealthy and powerful, to further enrich and preserve the status quo.

End campaign contributions, replace them with public funding (treasury) of elections, and the regulations, most already in place, to prevent so many disasters will have one less distraction and one less master to serve, placing the People’s interests in the forefront.  And without fund-raising, legislators will have more time to spend on the oversight which is now, so often, so accommodating or lacking and after-the-fact.  And that’s only one immediate benefit of many that will move government and its elected officials back toward the People, while also bringing better, more comprehensive service to bear upon their needs and the national interest.

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, when what is really needed to bring costs under control 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 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...

With President Obama’s decision to send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, the voices of the warmongers have prevailed, like John McCain and Joe Lieberman, whose Sunday news-show statements prove that, for him, every year is another year for war:  “last year’s war was Iraq, this year’s war is Afghanistan, and tomorrow’s war has to be Yemen.”

If American policy continues to be driven by these corrupted, hair-line visions, the U.S. will find itself fielding armies all over the world and sending home greater numbers of caskets, indefinitely, its soldiers to become targets of terrorists who strike at will, at their advantage, only to evaporate into the cloaked safety of their indigenous populations.  The wisdom of the president’s Afghanistan strategy to prevent another 911, or of Lieberman’s to add Yemen to the list of occupied nations, is repeatedly countered by the facts.  Aside from proving that intelligence and law-enforcement anti-terror efforts, though effective, are still falling far short of where they need to be, the Christmas-day bombing attempt against a Detroit-bound Delta-Northwest Airlines jet, by the self-professed al-Qaeda Nigerian, Abdul Mutallab, is yet another example of how shortsighted it is to wage a military campaign in Afghanistan or anywhere else on the basis of defense against another 911-type al-Qaeda attack, which can and will originate from anywhere al Qaeda or any organized terror exists.

This global terror threat can only be successfully met, as it has been, with intelligence and strong, aggressive, cooperative international law-enforcement efforts, backed by government change and economic improvement in rogue and failed nations, and an agile, appropriately equipped, mobile special-forces component, to be called up for intelligence- and enforcement-developed circumstances of military offensive opportunity and advantage.  Many in government, led by Vice President Biden, have come to realize this, but they have been unable to prevail over the military-industrial complex that feeds itself and the views of the likes of McCain and Lieberman, whose path will only strengthen al Qaeda and other terrorist groups as it bleeds American government into greater fiscal, moral, and institutional decay which, thanks in great measure to the military and other abuses of the Bush administration, has been government’s hallmark in the first decade of the 21st Century.  Another decade must not be painted in the free-flowing red of loss and sorrow, marked with no other gain but the pain.

The more Connecticut’s Senator Joe Lieberman speaks, the more he reveals the Republican insensitivity to suffering and need that lies beneath his changeable, Independent feathers.  Over the weekend, he said there’s no reason to push health-care reform as a large program until the recession is history.  President Obama, months ago, countered that cold-hearted line of 21st-century Republicanism when he said that he’s in a hurry for change because too many people are in dire need.  People are actually suffering needlessly, and dying, at the Lucy-swift, disappearing and invisible hands of the insurance industry.  But, Republicans of today don’t care, and no health-care reform in the world will ever mend the sickness of the heart that plagues Lieberman and his Republican ilk, who defiantly refuse to accept any change that doesn’t leave the profiteering, Wall-Street prioritized insurance companies and providers on top and in charge.

Only those with no conscience can live without care or in blindness to the fact that among them, in their community and nation, are those who are denied health and, eventually, life because of the difference in the sizes of their purses.  Health care should be an entitlement for all, denied to none, denying home, happiness or opportunity to none who need it.

The Republicans and so-called Democrats who object to healthcare becoming an entitlement must be ignored, pushed aside, because a progressive democracy within a civilized society has no room for them or their kind, and must overcome their lack of conscience or hard-hearted, ignorant blindness to the need and suffering of those around them with the bludgeon of law that equalizes the freedom of economics whose first masters are greed and self-service.

For public companies, with Wall Street mandates, delivering compassionate health care is an oxymoron, and to expect them to find a way to do it at a fair price is an enigma wrapped within a conundrum, because the Wall Street mandate is for profits, ergo prices, to climb as though they are passing through a black hole’s event horizon.  And after America comes to its senses and provides a competing, non-subsidized public option, within reform, the fallout may well be that publicly-traded companies will be eventually, over years, eliminated, leaving the field to public and non-profit operators and providers, and that would be a very good thing for patients, doctors, hospitals, and the government.  After all, those legislators who are so concerned about insurance companies and providers are the same Republicans who blocked health-insurance supplementals for children no less than three times during the last four Bush-administration years.  No major reform was involved there, just getting care to more kids who needed it.  During that time, Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell (KY), who led the spending splurge of the Bush era, and who, forgetting that, is now so quick to scourge any spending for heath-care reform, found it was more important to earmark public money for the steeplechases of horse owners in his high-poverty state, at the same time that he was repeatedly pushing children’s health-care needs aside with his votes.

And now, to block any reform that provides balanced competition and compassion in the access to healthcare in America, the Republicans are resorting to their best asset:  fear mongering, by writing horror-genre fiction for their propaganda machine, about death panels and illegal-immigrant welfare and government mandates replacing consumer choice, etc., when what Americans should really fear is that, in 2008, so many voted for Sarah Palin, who delivers the party line so convincingly that, given the revelations of her sub-par acumen, indicates she probably believes all the Republican lies are really true, and her former running mate, Sen. John McCain (AZ), who acts like he’s suppressing a gas attack when confronted with questions about the validity of her claims, claims that would throw his validity into greater question if he didn’t avoid answering them by repeating the same falsehoods, but with different, less horrific labels.

But, there is cause for concern, real concern, over illegal-immigrant access to the new reforms.  Although the proposed bills include wording that excludes anyone not legally in the U.S. from being enrolled, there is no requirement proposed for verification or a secure form of verification for eligibility.  Unless there is specific wording in the legislation requiring stringent verification for enrollment, the access to doctors, hospitals, and clinics will be as available to illegal aliens as has been their free run over American soil, heritage, and social-service dollars, and their inclusion will limit and make access to services more difficult for Americans, and the cost of servicing them will make any budget-constraint expectation for health care irrelevant, forever.  This is the time to issue some sort of difficult-to-forge health-access card to Americans, which wouldn’t be anything new, since veterans receiving VA health services have long been issued I.D. cards for access.

If healthcare is, in practice, reserved for Americans only, then reform, Obama-style, will mean, for most, increased coverage, lower costs, and for all, new rules, very much like those which must be followed by Government Employee Health Insurance providers, which prohibit the insurance industry’s favorite, profit-driving abuses of caps, pre-existing exclusions, and coverage withdrawals and refusals, not to mention the public-OPTION (NOT required for anyone) benefit of dooming their outrageous premiums.

One can only hope the rude town-hall shouting and curses of the fearful, uninformed, and mostly of the Republican and industry shills, will be drowned out by the votes of the majority in Congress this fall, because the debate over health-care reform is the sound of the tug of war that is being waged over where control will rest, over whether compassion and need will triumph over profit and greed.  That vote is the only thing that can shift the power, the choices, and the rationing decisions away from the clenched fists of the insurance industry to the caring hands of doctors and the outstretched, hopeful hands of their patients.

As Bernard Madoff begins the rest of his life in prison, justice still has not been served, because the Republican-era appointees, to the Securities and Exchange Commission and other, less-impacting regulatory agencies, have yet to face any personal or professional accountability for failing in their industry-oversight obligations, from preventing Madoff-like extremes to the monthly rash of trash stocks allowed to enter into markets, losing hundreds of millions of dollars for investors.

The negligent performance of the S.E.C. under Bush appointees William Henry Donaldson (deceased) and Christopher Cox, who should have applied controls to achieve mission objectives, objectives contrary to the present-day, neo-con ideology of the Republican party, made the S.E.C. into a functional partner to Madoff in his far-reaching fraud, and to countless other fraudulent operators.  Had those Madoff victims who cheered his 150-year sentence kept in mind these unaccounted, unpunished official partners, who flipped the Madoff victims’ coins on the S.E.C.’s mission and responsibility, they would be less inclined to feel satiated by Madoff’s punishment.  He could not have hurt them so severely, if at all, had the S.E.C. and the Republican administrations only made a cursory effort to regulate as they were supposed to, and if the Clinton administration had not bowed to Bank lobbies and repealed critical laws.  Another case of lousy Bush appointments, lobby money, and the consequent politics affecting government operation to the great detriment of the public welfare, all of it escaping any accountability.