4,484
dead
March 20, 2003 - December 15, 2011; the war in Iraq is over.
Returns begun—all U.S. troops to be out before 2012.
Amen.
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In 2006, when the Democrat-majority, 110th Congress was sworn in, election-
mandated to end the Iraqi war, the toll of U.S. soldiers, killed, stood at 2,994.
Two years later, as Barack Obama took office, with a promise to bring an end to
Bush’s special-interest, Iraqi occupation in 16 months, the toll of U.S. soldiers
killed there, on the say of a minority of Republicans in Congress, rose to 4,227.
As President Obama announced, “end of combat,” on August 31, 2010: 4,416.
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What justification or accountability for
those children of the soldier parents,
brothers and sisters of the 4,484 dead
for whom there’ll be no homecoming?
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Here, for every 100 deaths Bush has brought to the families of soldiers in Iraq, is a casket and a funeral.
Is it the price of freedom, visible here, or that of a Constitution, subordinated?
Direct responsibility is now shared by Republicans in Congress, without excuse or equivocation, for
more spilled blood and lives lost in an occupation harmful to the nation, unjustifiable, and unjust.
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than 100,000 Iraqi collateral innocents.
The censorship of Iraq-war images by the Bush administration, beginning early on with bans against photography of flag-draped coffins, which continued until President Obama halted those restrictions, is still in practice to this day, as embedded reporters and photographers are kicked out of their units when pictures of casualties are published, and increasingly-impossible restrictions are placed upon the images that are approved for release. The picture, above, taken by Stefan Zaklin, then with the European Pressphoto Agency, was widely published in Europe and was in a group of casualty photos subsequently, much later, published in a Web slide show by the New York Times.Publishing of such photos is not motivated by any sort of sensationalism, but rather because there is nothing like such graphic images that can relate the bare truth, invoking thought of the consequences of war and an assessment of the worth of the costs, whatever the level of casualties, under whatever circumstances, surge or otherwise. In Vietnam, where there were few restrictions on photographers, the graphic photos of casualties helped to arouse the massive, public outcries that eventually forced that illegitimate war to an end.
Is America, as Bush and his Republicans claimed, and as President Obama endorses, by retaining the troop presence in Iraq (the promised full pull-out remains to be seen) and adding to Afghanistan, really any more secure for the life this young soldier and his family had taken from them? As victories in the Afghan and Pakistani provinces and on the streets of Europe and America are won by special operations, intelligence, and law enforcement, not troops who, in trying to fight a ghostly, population-embedded enemy, continue to kill civilians and grow that enemy, the answer, which daily unfolds to ring ever-more true, is... no!
Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., April 3, 1968.
From before language . . .
From before the short-lived days of Plato and Aristotle,
And the hopeful, professed, civil-enlightenment
Conception of Thomas Jefferson and the Founders,
Through the latest protestations of cloned diplomats,
The search for peace on Earth has been expressed, spoken,
Attached to every necessary and unnecessary conflict
Like a torn, headless, rag doll, betrayed and dangled
In the hand of an inimical, mischievous child.That search for “Peace on Earth,”
Is there really any such prize?
War and the greed that drives it
Is a feted flatulence that will return, unrelenting, until,
Following the spirit . . . the body dies.
The chance of finding extra-terrestrials is better,
And that is nil, the likes of
The late, Lord of Neverland notwithstanding.Peace on Earth exists only six feet beneath and
Just beyond the dark, distant horizon of mankind’s history.
That rotted deep and the future void,
The only escape from war’s constant reign
Over every averse generation, passed and present,
Piled one atop the other, as the pale, withered corpses,
Screaming silently a horrid holocaust in unanswered prayers.
Or, an escape of blinding, insulating, self-induced apathy,
Contributing as much to the blight as to any relief,
Or more so.m.l.k.
Where within the Bush administration was there visible any scar of this enduring weight of loss and pain, so recklessly and casually wrought by Bush and Cheney upon a peaceful nation?Where within Bush, as he strutted campaign stumps making jokes about West Wing movers, and drum-danced in the Rose Garden, could be found the shroud of these deaths, the kinds of which history has recorded so darkened the daily lives of Lincoln
Before Bush invaded Iraq, he said of Saddam, “I’m sick and tired of games and deception.” And that’s all Bush has shoved down the throats of Americans and the rest of the world since before he began his premeditated, callous, thoughtless, criminal trek of misery and destruction in Iraq. If his statement wasn’t just P.R.—a line for show and for the crowd, Americans would at least have the satisfaction of knowing that he knows how it feels to be lied to and deceived. The revelation by the New York Times, of the Bush administration’s Pentagon/media-propaganda program, established before the war, is further proof the invasion was preordained by the administration, and that it was, and remains, an illegal propagandizing of the American people and Congress to conceal and distort the truth in order to prosecute a hidden, special-interest agenda through a criminal abuse of U.S. resources and military lives and blood, for which the deserved impeachments, which never came, except in the judgement of history, can hardly begin to answer.
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Obama seems poised to endlessly continue the Bush-Cheney-Republican Iraq occupation
President Obama, a mere two months into his presidency, agreed to a three-month extension of the promise to withdraw troops from Iraq in 16-months; however, the New York Times reported that, even after 19 months, as many as 55,000 troops could remain there as a “residual force,” assigned to training, security, and anti-terrorism tasks, and that number turned out to be 47,000, there after more than two years into the president’s first term. That amounted to nearly half the force total before the surge and nothing less than a broken promise and a continuation of the Bush occupation. The only acceptable residual force would be the minimal security forces of no more than several hundred which would be necessary to protect the world’s largest U.S. embassy. If the promise to withdraw is to be broken again to accommodate training, as is still likely, then there must be a specified, constricted term and force limit for such duty, and there should be no force extension for anti-terrorism, which should be an Iraqi security responsibility, except for the availability of special forces to employ weapons and tactics unavailable to the Iraq military, but on an on-demand basis, and only when the opportunity presented provides for the attainment of a significant military objective.The permanent force of 47,000 troops, and the stated condition of the president, made during his stop-over to visit troops there on his way home from his first visit to the region, that there cannot be a backslide into violence as troops depart, if that still holds (since it was never withdrawn), it means the U.S. occupation would be permanent and ongoing, and those forces would remain in a mission of supporting a regime that has been less than democratic, and where they continue to be a magnet for terror and violence, and as a continuing source of sorrow and loss for U.S. families and the military. It would also make all Democratic efforts to halt the war during the Bush administration a complete hypocrisy, extend the term and consequences of that criminal invasion, and serve as a reenforcing signal, post-Libya, that, in the most important of ways, the Obama administration is anything but a force for real change in the way the United States applies responsibility and constitutionality to the use of force throughout the world, and that the president has taken the banner of the military-industrial complex, to advance its agenda ahead of the national interest, and to do it despite the Constitution and the directed, specific warning of the last, great, Republican president, General Dwight Eisenhower.
The Constitution requires the express authorization of Congress for the president to deploy armed forces, except in defense against an attack (invading ships’ masts on the horizon in the Founders’ day). Presidents, especially since Eisenhower, have taken that authority on their own with increasing regularity, and Congress, lacking the courage to take responsibility that is theirs, has allowed them to, effectively, silently ceding war power to the executive. And with Libya, President Obama has attempted to create a precedent that defines an exception to the constitutional ban on unilateral, executive military initiatives, that being: if there are no “boots on the ground,” then there is no constitutional requirement to have congressional approval! It’s like saying if the noodles in your soup are shaped like letters, then you do not have noodle soup. This would mean that the president could, on his own, at any time, attack anywhere, with ships, missiles, aircraft, and drones, which clearly would have the Founders rolling in their graves—except that they already are. And further, raising private armies (like Blackwater/XE Services security forces) without the authority of congressional legislation is also unconstitutional.
Despite the newly resurrected promise of a complete withdrawal from Iraq by 2012, President Obama did not define the promised withdrawal, and with the past as a guide, to include his unconstitutional deployment of the military in Libya, and the sickening attempt to sidestep the legality of the issue by claiming the lack of “boots on the ground” took the constitutionality of unilateral, executive initiative out of the equation, in the end, only the deed will bring confirmation to the words, and for a newly re-elected president, another extension and broken promise will not be a political consideration, and if the Republican is seated, then the further expansion of the military is in the platform and war is a promise to be kept.
In April, 2011, as Iraqis die almost daily in ramped-up sectarian violence, which continues to this day, then Defense Secretary Gates, making his last visit to Iraq, announced that, if the al-Malaki regime wanted the remaining troops to stay, past the one-year term which the president promised would mark their pull-out, that the U.S. would agree...
A major goal of that special-interest agenda is near being realized, for which the families of more than 4,400 dead American soldiers and uncounted thousands of Iraqis will receive nothing, as reported on June 19, 2008, by Andrew Kramer for the the New York Times: An oil field in Rumayla, subsidized with U.S. soldiers’ lives. — DoD Photo
BAGHDAD — Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.The Times article also points to Saddam Hussein’s ultimately fatal mistake (besides threatening to make gold the currency for oil sales): nationalizing the concessions held by the consortium of four American oil companies that were developing the resources there, now all poised to return under the terms of the new service contracts.Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat.
The deals, expected to be announced on June 30, will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentially lucrative country for their operations [the playing field for resource and infrastructure exploitation of the Bush-Cheney/McCain Mid-East industrial Monopoly game].
In mid-October, 2007, only weeks after the lackluster report on the surge by Gen. Petraeus, the former commander of Iraq forces, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, joined the growing list of retired generals who have condemned the Iraq war and occupation and the Bush administration for its responsibility in bringing about the disaster, and Sanchez added his voice to warn of the inevitable outcome of failure, of the surge and the entire enterprise. This general’s statements are of no surprise whatsoever to readers here, since his remarks are a repetition of the anger over unnecessary losses, the abuse of power by Bush, and the failure of Congress to exercise its constitutional power to end that abuse that has been the driving force behind this site over the last four years. As the new British prime minister joins with Japan, South Korea, and others, by withdrawing his support and troops from Bush’s Mid-East debacle, American lives and the future of the nation continue to be squandered by the Bush-Cheney special-interest invasion and occupation of Iraq, and history will rightly join the outcry of enraged, enlightened citizens who damn Bush as the most incompetent, most backward-dragging president to which this nation has ever been chained.
Bush and Cheney will live in denial of their crimes, or in ignorance of them, as was the case when Bush, in a speech to a private gathering, in July 2010, admitted authorizing torture and said he would do so again, or when Cheney repeatedly surfaces to claim all crimes are justified. No matter how often and to how many crimes they admit, they consider themselves immune from justice, and apparently, at least in America, they are. Both are in a state of arrogant, psycho-preservationist self-denial, believing and defensively claiming that history will record them as leaders of vision and determination, saving the nation, when in fact, they, and the congresses that facilitated their abuses, will forever be remembered as raising the curtain on what are among the darkest years ever to pass over three centuries of American life, the blackest of the modern era, to include disastrous events that will turn in the wake of their passing for decades more. Instead of impeachment, a library of self-delusion will be Bush’s temple to his legacy of propaganda, abuse, death, and national dismemberment, when by all that is just, that presidential library should be denied public resources and instead be a 1 x 3-foot bookshelf on the wall of a 6 x 8-foot room, with locked door and bars on the window, where Bush and Cheney spend the rest of their days in the dark, disgraced contemplation of the light of scores of tens of thousands of lives they dimmed and extinguished under the stolen claim of America’s flag and honor.
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explosion after burning for hours in the quake’s aftermath.
Natural disaster, a never-ending fact of life — a future preview for American citizens.
When you do the simplest things, like turning on the tap to wash your face, or shower, or brush your teeth, or fill a coffee maker or a pan to boil an egg, don’t take it for granted. Think of hundreds upon hundreds of thousands in Japan who have no tap... no nothing.Then, think about the Americans who will join them, suffering as they do, losing their place and their loved ones, as they have, victims in future disasters, sure to come, soon, in the lifetimes of our generations, even more catastrophic than Japan’s Earth-jolting, Great Quake of March 11. Think, also, how on the very week of this disaster, newly elected Republicans in Congress led the fight to remove tsunami-warning systems from the federal budget, in the name of their special brand of austerity, the paltry savings to be paid for with the equally paltrily-valued lives of many who would otherwise be saved.
Then, in that coming, American disaster, think of how many could have been saved, how the damages could have been reduced, the relief made more speedy and comprehensive if the money that could have accomplished all of that wasn’t squandered to line the pockets of government parasites, or thrown away by politicians, behind the facade of building the infrastructures of other nations as America’s go to waste, to instead fill the pockets of those corrupt, foreign governments and finance fighting their wars for them, as Republicans have started and then, throughout the decade, fought and blocked every effort to end or shorten their war in Iraq and Afghanistan, or cut the $trillions spent on the military by returning America’s sprawling, global, military footprint to a deployment reflecting a more truthful, peacetime reality.
Then, cherish that tap all the more, while you still have it, because there are a multitude of threats beyond these that, not confronted, will eventually slow its flow or completely dry it up.
The “tap,” representing one of the most elemental commodities in life is, of course, symbolic for all of those things that are necessary to live a long life, with dignity and opportunity. Most of them, for most Americans, depend upon a viable democracy. The ways in which America’s democracy is at serious risk of being surreptitiously swept away, with a duration of adverse affect upon most Americans that can extend beyond that of any earthquake, are all addressed somewhere below:
March 14, 2011
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The most destructive interest group?
If asked to name the interest groups that have done the most harm to America and to the preponderance of its citizens, most would say the financiers, who brought down the economy and profited with impunity as they did so, and after; some would say the corporations which place profit above community responsibility, above all else; some the oil companies, which fix prices and bleed citizens of spending power when they and the economy most need it, as they make record profits; some would say the health-insurance industry, which along with drug companies and providers are mostly Wall Street companies with the Wall-Street mandate to grow profits, not quality service at affordable, stable prices; and on and on, from the military-industrial complex, which promotes America’s chief export: war, to any number of lesser-impacting segments.But, the truth is that the interest group which has done more to harm America and its citizens, more than all of the others combined, is the two-party system in America, an interest group of self-interest and accommodation to the wealthy and powerful few who provide the influencing tender which fuels the election machine that powers it all: campaign contributions. The two-party interest group, once an effective mechanism for placing the Peoples’ imprint upon their government, composed of legislators and party officials, has become a corrupted organism, traitorous to the body politic, which now, in its dark shadow, retains only the right to choose from candidates able to compete within the controlled election system that interest group created and jealously protects, providing little more than, effectively, a choice of the lesser of two evils.
All the other problems, blamed on all the other interest groups, are merely symptoms of the disease that is America’s corrupted two-party system.
Nothing that is done to attack the symptoms will cure the disease, which has remained below the radar, out of the sights of most protests, its legislators encouraging attacks against the various entities—divide and conquer—even willing to give up a few garnets to protect the diamond without which it cannot survive as an antithesis to Democracy: the election industry and its lifeblood of campaign contributions. To restore America’s lost Democracy, the disease must be attacked and eradicated, and to do so, its lifeblood must be dried up by instituting a complete ban on all contributions, of any kind, to any campaign for office or any issue.
The task, then, for all the splintered groups and third parties, is to first break down the walls of their own self-interests and ambitions which divide them and come together, with the sole purpose of ending the flow of dollars into the election industry, after which, some immediate gains for Democracy and the People will be realized, which will then facilitate achieving the goals of all the other issues, including the economy, tax code, infrastructure, healthcare, education, etc., etc.
The first step is to put the Democratic and Republican parties and the party officials, the unelected powers that work in the shadows, on notice, that the bullseye is not on the bankers, or the corporate CEO’s, or any of the other groups that have their fangs sunk into America’s government, but that the metaphorical bullseye is on them, on the forehead of each and every senator and representative who has stood by, aided and abetted the corruption of their offices and their constitutional oaths and obligations (almost all), placing party and contributor interests ahead of the nation and their constituents, eventually allowing a spate of disasters, one after another, to afflict the nation—putting them on notice that the harsh spotlight of public anger and disdain is focused upon them as the prime perpetrators of the political and economic decline now gripping and threatening most Americans!
Then, the pressure: legislators must be convinced by the strength of the demonstrations and calls and letters that if they do not act to end campaign contributions—not control, not reform, no half-measures or corruptible remnants, but end—and immediately, that they will not get votes, that in this time of crisis, for our nation, for our democracy, and for our lives and our children’s lives, nothing is more important, and let them know we are watching them, and will be watching them, and they will be held accountable if they do not act with their advocacy and their votes to put an end to all campaign contributions in America’s federal elections.
The spotlight and pressure on legislators and candidates is important because legislation is the quickest path to ending campaign contributions and replacing the Plutocracy (which now defines America) with Democracy, and to restoring economic and political balance, and reversing the collapse of the Peoples’ prosperity and paths to opportunity. Because if legislators won’t turn away from the corruption they have fostered, then constitutional amendment is the only other path, a far more difficult and lengthy solution.
Immediate gains?
When campaign contributions end:
...all of it, not a minute to be spent on anything related to fundraising, which is good, since even all of their time isn’t really enough for them to do the three jobs they each have (work related to passing or blocking legislation, committee responsibilities, and constituent relations) as well as they should be able to, as well as America needs them to, but nonetheless, America’s government will become immediately more effective and productive, to serve all the Peoples’ interests, and no interest group above them.
- the also-corrupted Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United, giving to corporations the rights defined for citizens in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, will be made moot;
- bribery will be removed from the election process;
- the power of the political parties—the two-party system—to control districting, agendas, and elected legislators, to take priority for itself above the People, will be greatly reduced;
- the election machine and the endless, time-and-money-consuming industry it supports will be cut down to size;
- political gridlock will be gone;
- public funding and reduced legislator, fund-based competition will force shortening of insane campaign terms;
- campaigning upon one’s record will again be in vogue, ahead of party propaganda and lines.
- the influence of lobbyists will be diluted;
- and, very important, legislators’ time will be returned to the People...
More must be done after this great, first step, or in conjunction with it, to make government more effective and turn the focus of government upon longer-term problems and solutions, of which there are many, and away from elections, and allow lawmakers to become more knowledgeable or even expert in the activities the committees on which they are seated are chartered to oversee, including extending the terms of office of House by one year and Senate legislators by two years, with local-district-recall provisions, if needed, for House representatives after two years. And to return government to the level of responsiveness to the People intended by the Founding Fathers for the House of Representatives, the Founders’ error of not constitutionally mandating increasing House seats in proportion to population must be corrected.
With these measures in place, Democracy in America will be restored and assured to remain enduring for the generations to come, with government better able to meet the daunting challenges that America and the world will have no choice but to face together in this and the next century.
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Rules/systems designed to preserve and extend party power and influence at the expense of democracy and popular sovereignty must be removed.
Wall Street’s greed-driven profit motives guarantee that healthcare will NEVER be affordable or contained if providers are public companies.
cc (via web forms) November 10, 2011: White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Sen. Rob Portman, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Steve Chabot, Sen. Carl Levin, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Rep. John Boehner, Rep. Barney Frank, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Rep. Zoe Lofgren; Rep. Ed Markey, House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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Problems posed by offensive-drone deployments have a constitutional answer.
One after another, issues arise for question and protest, seemingly unrelated; yet, there is a common thread: the unraveling parchment of the Constitution.Regarding this evening’s Newshour-show debate on the use of drone technology to wage war, the means to eliminate concerns about the “ease of waging war” factor and other concerns attendant with drone and other technologies, is to enforce the constitutional limitations on presidential war power and observe the Constitution’s absolute requirement that decisions on war policy, initiating and ending conflicts, rest with the combined minds and hearts of “the many,” that is, Congress, and never with one person, the president, where “Commander in Chief” is only a title, endowed upon the president for the purpose of acting as the civilian commander of the military, only after authorization for its use is provided by Congress! The fact is that, absent an attack or other authorization from Congress, the only authority the president has to act as Comminder in Chief is to maintain the readiness of the armed forces, as they are deployed, according to the laws set by Congress.
The greatest problem created by ignoring the Constitution on war power (Congress silently ceding the power to the executive) is that the “ease of engaging in warfare” is greatly increased, and aside from the example suffered upon the Founders by England’s King George III, they knew, as expressed in their writings, that abuse is a reality that requires the constitutional limitation to assure the executive’s isolation from decisions on waging war. The Founders fully intended, with the sole exception of responding to defend against attack, that the decision to wage war be difficult to achieve, through the deliberative consensus of the many in Congress, and that it remain out of the reach of the executive. They employed the constitution’s separation of powers to do it, designating all war powers (except mounting a defense against an attack) to Congress within Article I, and there is no consultation involved, after the fact, or before, because the power is not the executive’s on the basis of “advise and consent” or any other basis outside of specified congressional authority.
The nation will be the better when the members of Congress grow a spine to uphold their individual oaths, to defend the Constitution and take back its war power, and when they have the courage (and the additional time banning campaign contributions would save from fundraising) to be responsible to make the decisions on war the Constitution requires of them, rather than take the easy way out (for them, hard for the nation) of deferring to the executive’s exercise of the power. Abiding by the Constitution solves many problems, across the board.
War Powers — In the promised, new Washington, crows still gather. — http://popularsovranty.org/index.shtml#tcg
Popular sovereignty, political liberty and political equality are the foundation of democracy—guaranteed by the Constitution, when followed.
cc (via web forms) October 10, 2011: White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Sen. Rob Portman, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Steve Chabot, Sen. Carl Levin, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Rep. John Boehner, Rep. Barney Frank, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Rep. Zoe Lofgren; Rep. Ed Markey, House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011
Wall-Street protestors’ anger against financiers is off-target.
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.”“...don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”— Steve Jobs, CEO, Apple Computer and Pixar Animation Studios
June 12, 2005 Stanford commencement speech.
For the 4,477 soldiers who have died in Iraq (32,159 wounded), and after ten years, the 1,802, and also still counting, who have perished in Afghanistan (with 11,917 wounded), the worst kind of waste has been realized: losing arms and legs, and dying for someone else’s life, usually foreign and corrupt, for someone else’s voice, imposed with wealth and privilege to form slithering policies of wrongful entanglements that have brought death to the thousands of soldiers and their families, and in bits and pieces for the nation, as well, as the defense industries of the military-industrial complex grow their profits and wealth.
President Obama, marking the 10th anniversary of the Afghan war, the longest in American history, said, “we are closer than ever to defeating al Qaeda and its murderous network;” this, as Afghanistan’s president says bringing security to his people (read, his government) has been a failure of the U.S. and his (Karzai’s) administration. And, like Nixon and Johnson before him, the president looks to the future involvement based upon responsibly ending wars in Afghanistan and Iraq “from a position of strength.” Thousands of U.S. soldiers died in Vietnam as those presidents prolonged the war that they could not win, should never have started, looking for the unattainable “position of strength” or “peace with honor,” before finally ending the conflict and the ever-mounting deaths. This is the deadly “noise of others’ opinions” that repeats, today, as government “speak,” echoing the hollow, future promises of yesterday, where history holds no lessons for the arrogant and the proud, or those fearful of confronting mistakes and their consequences, as the bloodletting continues... to no worthwhile end. At least, the stubborn stance of the Iraqi regime has forced the president to honor his promise for a near-complete pull-out of troops from that latest national killing ground, provided courtesy of the Bush/Cheney administration, the military-industrial complex, and a Republican party that still proposes spending blood for motives of capitalist expansionism and profit.
“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.”
That noise is also manifest in the voices Americans hear in their politics, and those they do not, the voices bought and paid for, imposed upon the nation in sound-bites, party lines, and propaganda, through unbalanced leverage of wealth and position, detached from any sense of community or social responsibility and spread through the biased, constraining control of vast media consolidations, to limit voices, to quell regulations, to narrow opportunities, to channel prosperity, to buy votes and perpetrate travesties like turning corporations into political entities, empowered to overcome the many voices of the individuals who are the solitary, collective “People” for whom the Constitution, now so contorted by the Roberts Supreme Court, was penned to promote and protect.
Nothing will change for the better, no measure taken will make a difference, unless first, above all else, the election machine that spits out a corrupt, insulated, bought-and-paid-for government is detached from the tender of greed and avarice that fuels it: campaign contributions.
Protestors rant against multiple ills, all symptomatic of one abuse — campaign contributions poisoning democracy.
The Wall Street protestors are on the wrong track when they focus anger on bankers and the wealthy. You don’t blame the bear for killing the man who gets too close to the cubs—you blame the man. Those financial “takers” are being human, doing what opportunity allows and greed compels for them, doing what comes naturally, succumbing to human weakness and vice, the very characteristics of which the Founders so clearly recognized as unchangeable and dangerous, and against which they knew only a “democratic government,” with checks and balances, serving and responsive to the common good, could prevail. What they could not foresee was a society so fraught with diversions aside from work: TV, games, malls, clubs and other avenues for self-indulgence and distraction of citizens in matters of no consequence to the foundation of their lives. The activities of citizens in the Founders’ time were centered upon occupation, neighbors, government and learning. The protestors should be angry at themselves, for not paying attention to things that matter so much, for paying too much attention to trivia, for waiting so long to see and to object, for letting it go this far, get this bad. And they should be angry at their legislators, most for not having the intellect to see the problem and/or the strength of character and ethics to turn away from the system or change it and uphold the Constitution.But the seemingly, awakening sight of the demonstrators on Wall Street, growing to other cities, points out how all democratic governments are vulnerable, especially to apathy and ignorance, heightened when the unwritten branch of government, the “Fourth Estate” press, is swept from the streets and airways into a very few, towering centers of control, killing objectivity, repressing the reporting of independent investigation, limiting the inputs and outlets. The Federal Communications Commission, politically staffed by Republican presidents, accomplished most of this reduction during the Reagan and Bush terms. The tentacles of control writhed out from the few electronic-media conglomerates, spread with the growth of cable, the internet, and the means to access it, and are made all the more powerful as, at the same time, the market forces of media change began to diminish and eventually strangle many of the independent providers of the airwaves and printed page.
Party control of the fund-raising and election process, from districting to post-election committee appointments, is separated from the view or control of the People, forming a government that is built in cloakrooms and behind closed doors, upon favors and the cash-and-carry success of legislators and their mini-machines, an industry that creates and reenforces extremism and gridlock while robbing the People of their representatives’ most important asset: the time that is spent on fundraising, from strategy meetings to time spent with donors, pursuing donors, servicing the desires of donors and looking to the future, not to secure the long-term policies needed by the nation, but rather to acquire the campaign funds and promises that will assure the next election’s continuation of the entire, abortive process.
“I only have two years,” think the House representatives, “and I have to make sure I put in the time and effort required to win the next election, above all else.” This is the situation facing the People, and what chance is there for productive, constituent-responsive government to address complex, long-term problems when the highest priority is to do whatever, twist whatever, say whatever, half-truths or outright lies in the rush to get re-elected, and to spend the working hours of at least six months of the two-year term working toward that end?
When the Constitution was framed, the population and the challenges and diversity of America’s interests and needs were such that elections every two years for representatives was not a burden and was effective enough for government’s purposes. But times have changed, and as the population has grown, the number of representatives has not increased in proportion, which contributes to the unresponsive government in two ways: reducing constituent accountability through increased difficulty of access as the number of constituents for each representative increases, and increasing the power of representatives, through the increased number of constituents they represent and from whom they are inherently more insulated. And since the Founders erred in not providing a Constitutional mandate for a per-capita increase in House seats, no member has incentive to initiate a change that will reduce his or her power by providing additional seats to make representative government as close and accessible and responsive to the People as the Founders intended it to be for the House.
But more than population has changed. The complexity of life, and of all the attendant prerequisites of government responsibility to provide for public liberty, welfare, and safety have increased as well, and two years is no longer a sufficient period for representatives to become familiar with and effectively carry out their committee assignments, let alone meet their legislative and constituent-relations responsibilities (fund-raising time is not included because it should and must be eliminated), or to be able to look ahead to the nation’s future and develop policies meant to address problems and challenges extending over the horizon.
Just think of committees. They are created to divide the focus of the total membership of the House and Senate on individual problems and goals, to provide a means by which legislators can become expert in the industries and activities that fall within the scope of their committees’ charters and thereby guide their colleagues in passing useful legislation. This is how a legislator’s committee-responsibility time is supposed to serve the People, by developing the expertise to provide effective legislation to provide for safety and promote prosperity—a balance in which safety must always carry the greatest weight, but often has not, as one tragedy after another in every decade of American modern history attests. Often, legislators, especially in the House, have not become knowledgeable enough about the complexities that exist within the activities their committees are intended to oversee, and just as often, they have only turned an ear to the interests of the lobbyists for those industries, always at their ears, and often on their staffs, sitting at their right shoulders in hearings. This is how disasters, like Gulf oil spills, sub-prime-loan-deflation recessions, commuter-airline crashes, profit-motivated drug unavailabilities, and drug and food illnesses and deaths, and mining explosions, and Shuttle disasters, etc., etc., happen, and why government is mostly reactive to these disasters instead of proactive to prevent them. This will improve, if and when legislators’ ears are ever freed of lobbyists and their time freed from fundraising, and the revolving door of legislators, turned by two-year elections, is slowed—a revolving door that is self-serving to the election machine, not the People.
Today, policies are designed to meet the needs of what will get a representative re-elected 24 months after the oath of office is taken, or a president in four years, all eyes on the next election after three. America’s future depends upon better governance than has been serving the privileged and wealthy in this generation, and legislators, even free of fundraising, need more time to master their responsibilities serving America, and everyone needs fewer elections. A constitutional amendment extending the terms of office of the House of Representatives to four years, the president to six, and to preserve the Founders’ intent for overlapping stability, the Senate to eight, must be included with the ban on campaign contributions. And to insure that the behavior and performance of representatives is not separated by longer terms from the people, to whom the House chamber is intended to be closest, or left to the ineffective, internal rules of the House, a district-level recall procedure must also be specified which provides the people of a representative’s district reasonable means by which to stage a recall election at any time.
These are the first changes upon which Americans must focus. When accomplished, other necessary changes will more easily follow, like ending the income-tax code in favor of a value-added tax, with fixed exclusions for medical products and services, most food, and some non-food-derived fuels, and percentage levels within categories of goods to insure fair-share payments for all and loopholes for none; and unwinding the knot of media consolidation that muffles voices and constricts the oversight of investigative journalism; and also reining in the dangerous and unnecessary military expansionism and unconstitutional, presidential military authority that has been allowed by Congress to develop, and which has cost America so much in this generation and which is irrevocably bleeding into the next.
In that commencement address, Jobs also said:
“...you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”Looking back, the connected dots form a clear enough picture of how government in America has changed for the worse. The underlying causes are often less clear, hidden in things like secret, pre-war, vice-presidential “energy” meetings. But Jobs wasn’t entirely correct when he said that the dots of our futures can only be derived through trust, at least, where our political futures may lead. That’s because we have a precious gift to guide us, one that was fashioned by minds as great as any this nation has ever produced, men with sharp insights into the pitfalls of human nature and interaction, and who, through times of the greatest possible danger and uncertainty, and divisive discord, devised a system that would both protect against the worst abuses of man’s nature and preserve the greatest opportunity for realizing the hopes for future and liberty and prosperity, for themselves, their children, and for generations to follow. That is the Constitution, defining a system of government, nonetheless so reviled by the “dogma” of Republicans, which the Founders made for the preservation of their heritage, and ours, if it is not spit upon or relegated to be a relic, encased in gas and glass and displayed to tourists, as it has been with the power grabs of presidents, the failures of Congress to jealously guard its powers, and the axe-swings taken by the conservative-Republican majority on the Supreme Court, which have chopped two of democracy’s three foundations, popular sovereignty and political equality, into splinters.
For this purpose, of following and connecting the dots to restore a bright future for America, all that need be done is to follow the Constitution, and the money, to purge it from all influence in government activity.
Why is democracy dying? Think of gov’t/conservative-court effect on its framework: popular sovereignty/political liberty/political equality.
If any one leg breaks, democracy falls. Each leg has been under sustained Republican attack since Nixon was president—a generation of decay.
cc (via web forms) October 7, 2011: White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Sen. Rob Portman, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Steve Chabot, Sen. Carl Levin, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Rep. John Boehner, Rep. Barney Frank, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Rep. Zoe Lofgren; Rep. Ed Markey, House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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But, things are as they have been.
“Things are not as they have been,” proclaimed President Obama, today, at the United Nations; yet, in addressing the Middle-East rise against totalitarianism, the president’s policies of defending Bush-administration officials against prosecutions for crimes stand in stark contrast to his high-sounding words, muting them and making them meaningless—do as I say, not as I do. When and if President Obama leads America into the new world of accountability for leaders, recognizing that they are just people who, when committing crimes, deserve no special immunity as a consequence of their office, but rather require harsher punitive measures because of the greater scope of affect inflicted by their crimes, then the president’s words will have meaning, and America will begin to step up to the line of advance that has been set by Egypt’s attempts and intent to prosecute, at the highest level, the criminal acts of Hosni Mubarak’s regime.
In early August, 2011, a federal judge removed Donald Rumsfeld’s immunity
cloak, advancing a civil proceeding on his instituting state-sanctioned torture.
Today, in America, the only trials for crimes in execution of office faced by the highest public officials are held in the media, the verdicts determined by the propaganda and sound bytes the offenders create in the books they publish trying to salvage their legacies, the sentences being the revenues those books and their paid appearances produce. Immunity of high officials from criminal or civil prosecution as a standard must end, and the end to special (no) justice for those with power and privilege in America should begin with the prosecution of those who initiated and advanced criminal and unconstitutional acts in the Bush administration, including George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzalez, David Addington, and others who are tied to the path of immorality upon which America was set in the Bush era.
Obama’s policies defending Bush-administration officials from prosecutions only extend the immoral image of America those officials created.
Leadership that is corrupt, criminal, and immoral deserves no protections, no immunity, no sympathy, no honor, and no entertainment outlets.
cc (via web forms) September 21, 2011: White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Sen. Rob Portman, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Steve Chabot, Sen. Carl Levin, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Rep. John Boehner, Rep. Barney Frank, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Rep. Zoe Lofgren; Rep. Ed Markey, House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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Triple-down on Rick Perry’s ignorance.
Republican-dominated Texas is the union’s most politically rigged state—elect Gov. Perry at risk of U.S. soldiers, prosperity and integrity.At the Republican debate, on September 7, 2011, Perry, when challenged on his snubbing of science and global warming, said, “The idea that we would put Americans’ economy at jeopardy based on scientific theory that’s not settled yet, to me, is just nonsense. Just because you have a group of scientists that have stood up and said, ‘Here is the fact...’ Galileo got outvoted for a spell.”
That statement is a double-down on Perry’s ignorance, because Galileo wasn’t outvoted, and not by other scientists, he was repressed by the Catholic reining order at the dawn of the “Age of Enlightenment.” And the contribution of carbon emissions into the atmosphere, and the destruction of carbon-containment forests and jungles, and their affect to increase global warming, are not in dispute by science, only by scant men who were trained in science, not authorities or leaders, and who are paid by industries that want to avoid regulations to limit or end their industries’ contributions to the problem.
And make it triple-down on Perry, when you consider that science and technology are a large part of what made America an industrial leader in the world, a lead that has been slipping over the decades of Republican cost-cutting and program degradation in education and science research, and the strength of America in the future, its competitiveness, will depend on maintaining a high level of educational and scientific achievement and resources, which will not happen under the misguided leadership of someone as ignorant as Rick Perry. And the argument that such programs, including health care, should be left to the states, in so geographically fluid a population, is equally ludicrous.
Ron Paul, in the debate, nailed the problem on the head when he said that government programs fail because of lobbyists’ influence. But his solution, to abolish federal authority in favor of the states, is the wrong solution. The solution is to end all campaign contributions, neutering the power of lobbyists to buy the votes of legislators and turn government regulation into a tool for industry instead of a safety mechanism for all the people.
Jon Huntsman and wife look on as President Obama announces China-ambassador appointment.
The fact is that, of all the candidates fielded in the debate, former diplomat and Utah governor, 51-year-old Jon Huntsman is the one who put in the appearance that was the most sane, the most like a Republican candidate of the pre-Nixon era, and the most palatable for the must-be-silent majority of sane Republicans, independents, and Democratic conservatives. Fortunately, for the president and Democrats, the powers that be in the Republican party have no interest in anyone who’s off the fringe. Based only on that debate, the only Republican who could possibly be good for America is Huntsman, in a field where Rick Perry is undoubtedly among the most fringed, singed, and the most dangerous.
Shame on those who say,“I'm not political,” because aside from one’s decisions, politics most directly affects the quality of all our lives.
The greatest threat to democracy has always been the danger posed by the double-edged sword of public ignorance and apathy.
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PopularSovranty.org’s Tweets for a Republican Hold-up.
The biggest problem America has is a government based in and prioritized upon the party and the dollar, decimating democracy’s foundations.The biggest facilitator of America’s biggest problem is the bribery of election campaign contributions—the root of evil, bleeding democracy.
Rating firms (shown in recession to be bedded w/banks, investment firms) are working w/Republicans, shielding loopholes/rich from debt-cuts.
The Republican economic position of no revenue increase is unbalanced, like a world without spin—rich in the sun, everyone else in the dark.
As Republicans build an enduring history where “rich” and “corporation” are dirty words, the rich would be ashamed—if not for their wealth.
Dems saying Soc. Security/Medicare are untouchable is same as Reps saying any tax increase is dead water. Obama’s age-67 deal is reasonable.
But, any cut to COLAs or decrease in benefits for either Social Security or Medicare would be burying the poor under the upper-class wealth.
Closing loopholes benefitting millionaires and billionaires, having them pay more, is still NOT approaching their fair share or a sacrifice.
True or reality TV brings trailer trash to Americans; Republicans, keen on manufacturing, seek to make most Americans into trailer trash.
America will suffer until the obstructionist, my-way-or-the-highway Republicans, whose idea of democracy is a dictatorship, are thrown out!
Republicans just took their knives from your throat and folded them into their well-to-do pockets. Only cut voters can take the knives away.
August 2, 2011
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Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp would be a disgrace to journalism—if it was in journalism.
Sent to Rachel Maddow:Broadcast on your Thursday night, July 14, Rachel Maddow Show, the referral, and that of others in the media, to News Corp employees who participated in, or who knew and did nothing about News Corp’s illegal privacy violations, as “Journalists” is a mistake, bestowing upon them an honorable title to which they have, by their actions, no claim and do not deserve.
Journalists are first, ethical, and second, truthful and objective. The News Corp employees who call themselves and are called journalists are particularly lacking in any ethical standard that is the framework within which honorable journalism operates. They are sensationalists, akin to gossip hounds, but with criminal intent, and their parent company, News Corp, involved at the highest levels in the unethical and criminal activities of its employees, is no longer primarily a news organization, if it ever was. News Corp and its employees should be distinguished to be apart from legitimate journalism, particularly by journalists who report on their transgressions. Calling them “journalists” both ignores their transgressions and disgraces the profession, as well as those, past and present, who have created and contribute to its distinguished standing and heritage.
July 16, 2011
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Defense Secretary Gates’ interview answers reveal fatal flaws in thinking.
In an interview with journalist Jim Lehrer, broadcast on the PBS Newshour, Sec. Robert Gates, “the Soldiers’ Secretary,” who was a breath of badly needed fresh air, replacing Donald Rumsfeld, and who has done a good job, overall, in the difficult four years of his term in office, nonetheless revealed fatal flaws in his thinking on two points: first, when he said it is up to the president to determine the nation’s security needs, i.e., make decisions on troop deployments; and second, that the U.S. has an obligation to assist, with military assets, France and Italy, or any other nation, in pursuit of their national interests in Libya as payback for their assistance to the U.S. in Afghanistan.First, the U.S. Constitution, as well as ancillary writings of the Founders, are clear in specifying that the power of warfare, its use and goals, rests exclusively within Congress, not the president. The silent ceding of war powers, predominate since WWII, to the president must end because it has caused mistaken, costly involvements in conflict after conflict, the latest being the president’s unconstitutional, unilateral decision to deploy forces in the “matter of days” Libyan conflict. Secretary of State Clinton’s defense of the president, today, addressing critics in Congress who wish to exert their authority over the president in the Libyan issue, that America is “on the right side” in helping to overthrow the Libyan regime, is beside the point and irrelevant to the issue, which is that the president had no legal authority to put the U.S. on any side, that he did usurp the constitutional power of Congress.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff testify before House Armed Services Committee.
This was not the first time Gates expressed this faulty belief. In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, on hearings addressing the military action in Libya, on March 31, 2011, he said that the decision as to whether or not Congress should be included in decisions for military operations is “up to each president, depending upon the nature and scope of the operations.” Obviously, a secretary of defense is not an authority of the Constitution, because within the Constitution there is not written any exclusion, at all, not on any basis, not scope, not nature, not anything, except to defend against actual attack. The president is required to obtain congressional authorization in all cases of deployment of military forces, except that single, constitutionally-specified exception! The opinion expressed by Secretary Gates reflects a creation out of thin air, an unconstitutional past-practice, an interpretation that, other than the wishful thinking of modern presidents and the military-industrial complex, has no basis in fact, or in the Constitution, or in the historical documents of the Founders that support the Constitution’s war-power designation to be, except in an ongoing-attack defense, entirely within Congress.In that hearing, Gates also tried to justify attacking Libya based upon all the other authorizations obtained (U.N., Arab League), aside from Congress! Rep. Mike Conaway (R-TX) took Gates to task on the exclusion of Congress in this justification, calling it a “brag” on the part of Sec. Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen, who also testified, when in fact, it was really a slap in the face of Congress, and a knife tip to the parchment of the Constitution, subordinating both to the will of those international organizations and the executive.
And on the second flaw, revealed in Sec. Gates’ answers to Lehrer’s questions, make no mistake, the U.S. should never employ military resources where national security is not directly affected, and the war (not in the sense of the post-invasion-victory occupation) against al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and everywhere else, is necessary to protect all Western nations, particularly European nations, and particularly Great Britain, Spain, France and Italy, which are all targets for terrorism, easier targets than America, many of which have been attacked and targeted more than the U.S. Those European/NATO nations are in Afghanistan to protect their own national security, and if their leaders think otherwise, someone should hit them up side the head with a flat hand and straighten their thinking, beyond the straight talk Sec. Gates delivered to them, and which they needed so badly to hear, regarding their slacking support of their own NATO obligations and missions.
Secretary Gates, in this interview, and other U.S. officials, as well, in other venues, when referring to the Afghan army and police that are being built up, have said it is their country for which they are fighting and dying, in greater numbers than Americans or the coalition. But what is never said, never mentioned, swept under the carpet and perhaps forgotten by the American people, is that Afghanistan is also the country belonging to those many who oppose the U.S.-made establishment there, and that they are fighting, not for al Qaeda, but for their past, their culture, their heritage, and their vision of their future, against the American-seeded order that would sweep it away. That fact lends a perspective to the waste and fruitlessness of this occupation and conflict that should not be ignored or so avoided, for the sake of lives and futures on both sides, but particularly American. The failed Soviet occupation still stands, along with the last ten years, as a strong reminder of the hardened strength that lies within that unmentioned, also-Afghan faction of that land’s people, and the harsh reality of the limits of power to overcome their homeland-fired determination, particularly given the many inherent weaknesses of the externally introduced structures. America can only begin to really win in Afghanistan by ending the occupation and the war that goes with it.
The issue in Libya isn't being on the right side, as Sec Clinton argues against critics in Congress, it’s how Obama unilaterally led us in.
"Constitution" is not a dirty word, except to those who wish to avoid employing the wisdom and democratic necessity of its provisions w/war.
cc (via web forms) June 23, 2011: White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Sen. Rob Portman, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Carl Levin, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Rep. John Boehner, Rep. Barney Frank, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Rep. Zoe Lofgren; Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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President Obama’s tactic to end the Afghan war is to fence-walk.
President Obama, with his announced plan to draw-down the troop presence in Afghanistan, with complete transition to “support,” of the Afghan forces by 2014, is walking the fence with the lives of American soldiers as his balancing pole. It is a strategy that is failed in advance, because the Afghan army will never stand on its own within three years, and if the unstated-but-implied objective is for the Afghans to be able to govern securely on their own, America will be in Afghanistan for another ten years before finally withdrawing to see the same weeds grow then as would now.The president said, “...the hard work of ending the war is just beginning,” and that America will build a “partnership with the Afghan people,” when in fact, America’s partnership with Afghan President Karzai has no hope of being anything other than like the Lone Ranger riding with Geronimo, and after ten “hard” years, and more than 1,600 lives, the end should be a priority above all others, not a promise for another three, or another ten, or an indefinite entanglement! He also said, “We have to do the hard work of keeping the gains that we’ve made.” How wastefully impractical. The Afghan war is a liquid, and “keeping the gains we’ve made” is like not allowing the swirl of the stirring to end. House Speaker Boehner (R-OH), Sen. McCain (R-AZ), and other Republican hawks, including Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum, also have no sense of reality, at all, when they criticize the president’s announced withdrawal (of just the surge) on the basis of statements like the one Boehner and the others made after the speech, warning that a close watch would be made to insure that “...the draw-down does not undermine the progress made thus far.”
Remaining in Afghanistan more than a year after the war was really won, after the Taliban government was toppled and al Qaeda was scattered to the borders, was a blunder, a faulty assumption of unattainable objective: to nation-build—a mistake, except to the segment of the military-industrial complex and the corrupt Afghan regime and infrastructure/contracting bureaucracy which, as a result, has seen obscene profits at the expense of the U.S. soldier, taxpayer and the Afghan people.
Beyond the enriching of the Afghan corrupt and the American defense industry, there has been very little progress in Afghanistan to fear undermining, with the exception of building an armed, corrupt, Afghan ruling structure, which will never hold the nation against the radical political elements that comprise the Taliban unless they are supported by American lives and resources. On the battlefront, the Taliban is like electricity, following the path of least resistance, attacking on their terms, fading away when the odds are against them, and they will outlast us, because the goals of eliminating a political order and culture, spanning generations, and making a quasi-democratic/quasi-dictatorial nation, the likes of which has never existed before, has never been an achievable goal, has been a completely unrealistic expectation.
America should only be concerned with its security, that whatever government rules Afghanistan does not shield terrorist organizations and their activities, removing that regime, again, quickly and easily enough if it does, not remaining to build, control or support the structure of the government that replaces it. After the invasion and removal of the Taliban regime, America’s ongoing involvement should only have been, and should now only be in the intelligence, law enforcement, and special operations areas of Afghanistan’s scattered al Qaeda presence.
It is not possible to afford the lives and debt-cost of putting cherry-picked regimes into power. That is why statements like, “preserving the gains,” or “responsible withdrawal,” are non-sequitur. Extending the draw-down is only wasteful of more American lives and the $billions that will be lost every year that the occupation is extended for the sake of a gradual transition to mask a perception of loss. America doesn’t lose by leaving. It wins, by saving many lives and much money, and leaving now would be merely admitting that it stayed too long then, after the quick victory, with the hubris of a misguided, unobtainable, post-victory, Republican (Bush-Cheney, now Obama) political objective.
The president should get off the fence and quickly remove every boot, worn and tired, that marks the sands of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. And if he does not, and if enough members of Congress are finally, clearly seeing the light the president describes as “distant,” they should remember the constitutional responsibility and power for calling the shots on military goals in Afghanistan, and everywhere else, still rests with them, not with the president!
With a quick Afghan withdrawal, in late 2002, after quashing the Taliban, fatalities, now 1,633, would have been 61. — http://popularsovranty.org/index.shtml#owfoa
America’s partnership with Afghan President Karzai is like the Lone Ranger riding with Geronimo. — http://popularsovranty.org/index.shtml#owfoa
The Afghan war is a liquid, and “keeping the gains we’ve made” is like not allowing the swirl of the stirring to end. — http://popularsovranty.org/index.shtml#owfoa
cc (via web forms) June 22, 2011: White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Sen. Rob Portman, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Carl Levin, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Rep. John Boehner, Rep. Barney Frank, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Rep. Zoe Lofgren; Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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The shame of Sri Lanka
Called the pearl of the Indian Ocean, Sri Lanka literally means “the island of delight,” an obscene notion, considering the ugliness that lies only skin deep, beneath the beauty of its many flowered jungles, seascapes and resorts, after more than 25 years of war and atrocity, never again to be called “unspoiled.”
This YouTube picture’s link and the link on this text are only two of dozens of extremely graphic
Tamil-victim images and videos that undeniably refute any claims Rajapaksa can put forth to try
denying the holocaust of cruelty, rape, and murder his regime inflicted upon his nation’s people.
A woman and her child, killed together. While the Tamil holocaust of the first half, 2009, pales in scope to the sheer number, millions of Jews, who were murdered by the Nazis, the brutality and inhumanity brought upon the tens upon tens of thousands of Tamil people by Sri Lanka’s leaders was no less abhorrent and unjustifiable.
Sri Lanka’s president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, and some of his top
generals; his inner circle is referred to by many as “gangsters.”
Rajapaksa, from a family in the upper caste of the island society, after winning the election proceeded to end democracy in Sri Lanka and solidify his grip on power by jailing his opponent, a general who led the victory against the Tamil Tiger separatists, and then jailing the general’s campaign staff. He then went on to get parliament to eliminate term limits for the president, and then the parliament was dissolved.Rajapaksa has a leash on the press and resists independent inquiries into his regime’s atrocities, and for some un-Godly reason, is said to be immune from any prosecution for crimes committed against the Tamils, despite that initial evidence seems to point to his direct orders. But his brother, who is alleged to have directly overseen the massacres, is vulnerable.
WWII Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals.
The post-WWII Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals is obviously a history that was never in the schooling of the Rajapaksa brothers or others of the Sri Lankan leadership who perpetrated the Tamil holocaust.Or, considering Nuremberg’s largely wrist-slap outcomes, perhaps it was...
Can the legal weight of world courts ever bear heavily enough to surmount politics and impose a certainty of accountability, for crimes against humanity, that will serve to protect the innocent, who otherwise, are like the lambs?
Running the regime is a family affair for President Rajapaksa, one of his brothers, Gotabaya Rajapaksa (second row,
left, in the dark suit), who strategized the offensive against the Tamil separatists, is the defense secretary, while two
others and his son are seated in the new parliament, one brother, the speaker. A cousin is also a parliament member.
A small, resort-island nation with so many generals, such a large military, is an atrocity in and of itself. It always seems that, the more like peacocks the uniforms of the generals, the more atrocious their behavior and dissipated their morality, a trait Sri Lanka shares with Burma.So, how does the always-compromising octopus of U.S. policy reach out a tentacle to affect the glittering bunch of prima donnas that runs this island’s bloody regime (the generals should go for more red and less gold on the uniforms) and the outrages they have visited upon their own people? The U.S., during the Bush-McCarthy-like, rabid state of terrorism search-and-destroy, may have been too quick to label the Tamil Tigers as a terrorist organization, which provided Rajapaksa with all he needed to act harshly against them, in a manner of having left his humanity in the womb, at the conclusion of their long civil war. And he now has the old “terrorism” excuse in his pocket to justify it all, as he is has been doing in trying to counter the growing evidence of the massacres, which is one factor, along with the regime’s human-rights record, that is straining relations with the U.S. But, the verdict is still out on that... on the terror labeling, not on the missing humanity of the Rajapaksa brothers or the rest of their inner circle.
Sri Lanka’s Paradise Island resorts.
It might seem appropriate to recommend against vacationing at the once-popular, resort-island nation, its beautiful locations now available for fun, frolic, and romance, since its 25 years of ethnic warfare has ended. But that would only hurt most the people who now find themselves face-down in the political and ethnic dirt, under Rajapaksa’s ruthless heel. He and his cohorts in crime and mass-murder will remain an ugly stain upon the island’s beauty, a shadow of the dead men, women, and children—many dead and maimed children—darkening its sun-drenched resorts and blue waters for as long as they remain in power.
The post-WWII Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals was history never schooled to the Sri Lankan leaders who perped the Tamil holocaust...
Or, considering the largely wrist-slap outcomes at Nuremberg, perhaps it was... — http://popularsovranty.org/index.shtml#slthJune 16, 2011
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Speaker Boehner cries for legality of war on the basis of an unconstitutional, 1973 resolution.
House Speaker Boehner (R-OH) has called on President Obama to provide the legal basis for operations he instituted in Libya.Talk about stones and a glass House. The Speaker should know that the 1973 congressional War Powers resolution, which effectively grants the executive a 90-day period to start and engage in offensive military operations before getting congressional approval, is unconstitutional. The Constitution allows the executive absolutely no authority, during any period of time, to conduct military operations without first receiving or having the direction of congressional authority, except the single, specified exception of mounting a defense to confront an attack against America. The only path to alter that requirement of congressional authority, that is, to shift war power from Congress to the executive, or, to reduce the branch separation of powers, is through the intentionally difficult, constitutionally specified, Article V process of amendment. No law or resolution can stand to replace the amendment process or to make military actions initiated by the executive constitutional.
Period!
Until congressional authority is granted for the ongoing military operations in Libya, the U.S. involvement there stands not only as another mistaken, and in the case of Libya, hypocritical employment of America’s military power, it is a naked violation of the Constitution and a blatant usurping of the war powers of Congress.
Past-practices, of “Presidentialists” to grab and Congress to cede power, do not “constitutionalize” unilateral, executive, military action!
Speaker Boehner cries for war’s legality on the basis of an unconstitutional 1973 resolution — http://popularsovranty.org/index.shtml#73wpau
cc (via web forms) June 15, 2011: White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Sen. Rob Portman, Rep. John A. Boehner, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Carl Levin, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Rep. John Boehner, Rep. Barney Frank, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Rep. Zoe Lofgren; Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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Politicians are digging the grave of America’s democracy and future.
For too many citizens, America has become a nation of freedom without opportunity, of liberty without voice, of justice without equality, of strength without reserve, of short-term goals prioritized to elections, of purpose without patience or foresight, of wealth without prosperity, and one that spends, spends, spends without building.America is in decline, and it will fall further into the abyss of its self-destruction and despair until four changes are accomplished:
1) the election system is purged of influence and bribery through banning of all contributions and establishing a system of wholly public funding, and national redistricting is accomplished, according to statistical geo- and demographic data, separate from party affiliations, control, and influences (to dismantle the apparatus of party extremism and gridlock), and mandatory term limits must be placed upon campaign operations, not to exceed two months prior to the election date;
2) the tax code, that tool of exclusion for the wealthy and corporations, and a yoke of stress and inconvenience on all working Americans, is thrown out and replaced with a value-added tax that is scaled to weight on the high end, paid by everyone and every business, for everything, except to exclude, for all, the necessities of medical products and services, food and clothing items priced less than $25, regular-grade gasoline, diesel, and algae-based (not food-commodity) hybrid fuels, and educational expenses for trade and technical schools, junior colleges, and graduate programs in universities;
3) regulatory authorities are removed from the influence and interference of political appointments and elected officials, operations to be prescribed by law, shielded from executive order, oversight and enforcement to be by the Inspector General’s office and OMB, and leadership positions to be filled, not by the appointments of elected officials, but by professional panels composed of representatives of the insurance companies underwriting the regulated industries, appropriate scientists, and economists, appointments to be made on the basis of background, experience, and performance to fit the needs of the post, not to be subject to Senate confirmation until after the beginning of the third senatorial-election cycle following redistricting that was done apart from party involvements (Senate confirmations of regulatory heads to be reinstated 18 years after party-free redistricting is completed);
and 4) the constitutional authority of Congress over the executive in all matters of warfare, except immediate defensive response to an attack, must be reinstated, in practice, and a congressional rules/structure mechanism, a joint committee, be established with full authority of both houses to independently make swift initial decisions on matters of military deployments and withdrawals, and to approve, modify, or disapprove recommendations and requests for actionable military authorities by the executive, to include temporary, conditional treaty modifications or confirmations, all actions to be subsequently put before the appropriate full houses for approval, modification, or reversal, in a timely manner. The committee should be constituted by the Senate majority and minority leaders, or their appointees, the Speaker of the House and the House minority leader, or their appointees, the chairpersons and minority leaders, or their appointees, of the appropriate standing committees on armed services, foreign relations, and intelligence (16 representatives and senators), and the non-voting but otherwise fully participatory, mandatory participation of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, or their appointees, the committee to be chaired by the Vice President, who has no vote except in the case of a tie.
Politicians have effectively destroyed the government’s democratic mechanisms, have folded to the expansionism of the military-industrial complex, turning the United States’ military into a costly and multi-leveled industry of domestic and international operations, a tool of NATO, and a seed of complicit foreign corruption, and the politicians must be removed from influencing the mechanics of constituting the government and applying political influence to its operations until the process of elections has been purged of political manipulation and abuse.
If these changes are accomplished, Americans will have reclaimed their government and their basis of hope for a future prosperity for themselves and their children.
Each day of violent death in Syria accents the wrong of President Obama’s unconstitutional rush to a war of European mollification in Libya.
cc (via web forms) June 10, 2011: White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Sen. Rob Portman, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Carl Levin, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Rep. Zoe Lofgren; Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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Sarah Palin crashes Rolling Thunder, exploiting POW/MIA for photo-op.
Thanks to a mainstream media that won’t ignore Sarah Palin, as she likes to have everyone believe she ignores them, or as much as we would like her to be ignored, her uninvited splash at the annual, Washington D.C. veterans’ memoriam, Rolling Thunder, for POW/MIA, was agog with reporters covering what was a vanity appearance, a distraction stealing the thunder from the cause. Event leaders said she was not welcome to participate, other than to ride through, as anyone can.This Newsblaze article, along with the open letter, below, which has been circulating on the internet since her appearance, sum up the sentiments, as do the pictures, where vets in the background are hardly cheering.
It is horrifying to think that any group, let alone any one, would want this thing in the Oval Office, the fate of us all in her flapping hands, selfish heart, and empty head.
On left, Palin, showing what it’s really all about; and on the right, “Sorry,” says security, “nix on any speech here.”
A VIETNAM VETERAN’S INTERNET OPEN LETTER TO SARAH PALIN
For some time now, you have been an amusing, albeit mostly incoherent annoyance. But today you crossed a line. With that high cut helmet, carefully designed to allow your professionally coiffed hair to flow freely, you have tried to hijack a moment that you can't even begin to understand. You decided that an event that has for years been intended to call attention to our POW/MIAs would make a really cool photo-op, as well as a great kick-off for your next get-rich-quick scheme.Well, Sarah, you picked my war this time. I had several buddies, two of whom died within a couple of meters of me, and you zoomed right past their names on The Wall today; winking and smiling all the way. You weren't invited, you weren't welcome, but when has that ever stopped you?
Did you make a few extra bucks for your PAC? If so, I hope that helps you sleep tonight. Because you see, Sarah, my buddies have been sleeping for 40 years; and if they knew that a two-bit grifter like you would one day be making money off of their sacrifice, they might not be resting as easily as I hope they are tonight.
I'm a Christian, Sarah, and I don't say this lightly... God damn you, Sarah Palin.
Sarah Palin’s exploitation of a veterans’ event, honoring POW/MIA, for the sake of vain self-promotion, excludes her from any public office.
Sarah Palin tarnishes POW/MIA vets’ event by grandstanding; she was the only real hog there — http://popularsovranty.org/index.shtml#palinrtJune 1, 2011
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Death of Osama bin Laden proves Pakistan is no friend to U.S. or West.
A rocket-shot, aimed at the shrouded head of Osama bin Laden, is an actual nebulous object which resides in the Orion Helix, a small segment of a much larger image captured by Hubble, discovered by Malcolm Kantzler. What message would this image relay on God’s view of radical Islam? The “rocket shot” is, actually, material from a proto-star that is being blown off by the strong stellar wind of a young, nearby star that is out of the frame.While Osama bin Laden’s fate, death to the head, was predicted in the stars, and his death will have little effect in reducing the threat of terror from al Qaeda, the circumstances surrounding bin Laden’s death: the location, in a million-dollar, closed, high-walled compound, an hour from Pakistan’s capital and only thousands of yards from Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point, prove that the regime in Pakistan is an enemy of the U.S. and the West, not only for sheltering him, but also for continuously shielding the tactical elements of the Taliban and al Qaeda along the Afghan border. If the Pakistani regime didn’t hide and assist bin Laden, then they are of such astounding stupidity and incompetence that they should never be permitted control over nuclear weapons or materials—that is true in either case, collusion or stupidity. The Pakistani regime, wanting to keep the $1.5 billion flow of U.S. aid it receives alive, can do nothing else but deny, deny, deny, try to spread the blame, and make out as though the result of the U.S. operation was a good thing. Only fools will believe this, and unfortunately, it has been made clear over the years that Congress is full of fools, members who have responded by saying there must be more transparency with Pakistan, when the fact is, the success against bin Laden, planned and carried out entirely without Pakistani participation, shows no transparency with that corrupt regime is the only posture that insures success for U.S. operations against terrorism in its lands and along its border.
The “renewed resolve and doubling of efforts” against terrorism, of which Secretary Clinton spoke in response to bin Laden’s death, should be focused on law-enforcement and intelligence in infected regions, the military turned from Iraq and Afghanistan toward Pakistan’s regime, which should be removed, its nuclear capability destroyed, instead of wasting more lives, time, and money for no U.S. security gain in Afghanistan. Instead, the snaring political games continue, Pakistan being called one of “America’s strongest allies”—public-relations talk—when the only reason it has any real relevance, whatsoever, is the fear of its nuclear weapons falling into the wrong hands, which is an ultimate assuredness, regardless of perceived “stability” of the regime. It would hardly be surprising, given that it is obvious bin Laden had many supporters in the Pakistani military, if the key-note effect of his killing is that it incites one or more of the Pakistani-militant military or, as was the case in India, a physicist, with access to nuclear stores, to get a workable supply of it to a terrorist group.
The Pakistani regime, with its militant-Islamic, military component and unsecured nuclear arsenal, is a clear and present danger to the U.S.
If Pakistan’s regime aided bin Laden, it is an enemy, if not, it is one of stupidity, and in either case should be stripped of nuclear arms.
cc (via web forms) May 2, 2011: White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Sen. Rob Portman, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Carl Levin, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Rep. John Boehner, Rep. Barney Frank, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Rep. Zoe Lofgren; Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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Libyan street fighters break down doors in Misurata... on our side? Only when interests briefly coincide.
Obama falls into NATO’s trap as wars benefitting Islamic radicals expand.
If you were President Obama, you would have to be asking, “What to do, now?” as Syrian-regime massacres are poised to eclipse any Libya’s Gaddafi might have committed, emphasizing the folly of President Obama’s newly defined, unconstitutional, humanist military policy, or the spring-ice thinness of the humanist excuse.Oh, what to do, now, as the CIA tries to figure out who and what the Libyan rebels are, as Libya was supposed to be a “matter of weeks” commitment? Just over a month later, the CIA is still scratching its head and top U.S. military commanders say the struggle in Libya is now a stalemate and will become increasingly more difficult, mimicking what they’ve said about Afghanistan.
Oh, what to do, now? Unconstitutional commitment of the military to action in Libya restrains the president’s hand for additional unconstitutional actions in Syria, where the mortal threat faced by the demonstrating population is far greater than any that was ever possible in Libya, and Syria, with its more advanced, economic culture, and its ties to Iran and Hamas, is far more relevant to America’s interests and the security of its most important Mid-East ally, Israel. No doubt, had the president a choice to launch an unconstitutional military operation in either Libya or Syria, he would choose Syria, a difficult, if not impossible choice to make now that the trigger has already been pulled in Libya. One mistake preventing a larger mistake? In fact, the only way the president could dare to involve the U.S. in another military operation in the Mid-East, against Syria, would be to do it constitutionally, by making the case to Congress and allowing them to debate all the risks and possibilities of the proposed war, as the Founders intended, and then, with the influence of debate and home-district, constituent inputs, have a majority-vote either denying or granting authority for the president to act. But then, maybe Obama’s mistake becomes two, big, shared mistakes?
But, oh, what to do? If the president does take it to Congress, as the Constitution requires, then he will be setting precedent against the unconstitutional past practices that have abused separation of powers, and he will be neutralizing the claimed, inherent authority implied by his own humanist, policy-making reason for sending the U.S. into war in Libya; although, the same “European entanglements,” against which the Founders so strongly warned, played the greatest part, by far, in drawing America into the conflict in Libya, particularly Italy’s and France’s concerns for conflict-driven immigration and their own energy sources, not civilian safety, and not critical American interests, let alone defense. So, he cannot ask Congress for the constitutional authority, and in so doing, dilute the power Congress has allowed presidents, including himself, to take and run with, to act like kings and dictators, who need no other authority beyond their own to bring their nations into wars.
Will there be another Arab states’ and UN call for NATO/U.S. military action to “protect civilians” in Syria, where at least 300 (more than 850 on May 13) have already been gunned down by dictator Bashar al-Assad’s military? Not likely. The member nations would look at the 1,000-plus deaths in Libya, so far, since the UN chose to support the rebels. Russia is already making noises that demonstrate they regret voting for the UN resolution in Libya, ruling out any possibility they will give the mandatory vote required in the UN Security Council for a like abortion to be authorized in Syria, and the Arab states that matter are in turmoil and do not wish to see another regime toppled by popular revolt, or another Islamist nation engaged with Western power, and they might fear, this time, being asked to pay the costs for a change with their West-derived fortunes.
So, what to do... as the toll of civilians murdered by al-Assad grows?
What to do as, absent further, direct military involvement by America, Israel ponders actions that could help to defeat a Syrian regime, threatening to their security, but which would inflame Arabs throughout the region, likely creating a new, violent front? To stay any action, American diplomats can only offer Israel assurances, either to defend or take action in its stead if ultimately necessary.
And, oh, what to do about making a sound determination about the future of the Mid-East, and about what/who is driving the “Arab, or Mid-East Spring” of change that threatens regimes and stability across all of North Africa, and acts as a magnet for the U.S. military-industrial complex?
Is there a coordinated, underlying force behind the Arab Spring, in Egypt, in Libya, in Syria, in Qatar, and which has shown ripples in Saudi Arabia? Is a “connected generation,” moving with the sway of dominoes too simplistic an explanation? Aside from being Islamist, what do they have in common that might account for an answer? That, within the lifetimes of their peoples’ elders, they were all colonial outposts, subject to all of the attendant class and race discrimination of that era of exploitation? That since the end of colonialism they all have had totalitarian regimes propped-up by the West? That they all have energy reserves and resources the West needs? That they all have political systems being targeted and infiltrated by Islamist-radical influences, from al Qaeda to home-grown movements of the Shi’a- and Sunni-Muslim sects?
There were significant clues, in Egypt, revealing the Islamic militancy that was driving the leading demonstrators of the “Muslim Brotherhood,” evident enough in the organization’s history since its founding, in 1928, promoting traditional, Islamic, Sharia law, directing the confrontations during the demonstrations, coordinating affiliations with the Egyptian military, and taking marked actions to restrain their members from making statements or doing anything revealing radical or any other kind of Islamist background or motivation. Surreptitious involvement of Islamist radicals within the Egyptian demonstrations was obvious enough that it should not have been missed by U.S. intelligence, and it should not be ignored as being a linked section of a movement that extends across the Islamist nations of North Africa, as well as the Caucasus, and South Asia. This is the broad expanse awaiting the Arab Summer, and if the West continues to confront the changes with military power, the Arab Winter will be a long one, posing the prospect of an enduring, continental conflict against radical, Islamist revolutionaries, one which will be labeled by historians as the modern Crusades, by doomsday fanatics as the biblical Armageddon, but which, for the cost to economies and social structures, will be the Armageddon of the 21st Century.
From this perspective, it is clear that the West, particularly the U.S. and the NATO nations, by helping revolutionaries topple the regimes they once supported in their own self-interest, regardless of the regimes’ anti-democratic structures, plays into the hands of the Islamists and is a part of their plan for the spread and growth of their theology into political nationalism. The bombs dropped today are not an investment to prevent that future. They will either help to create it or extend the pain and loss that is endured before policies of social responsibility that can compete to defeat radicalism are finally supported by the West and made a reality to stand for the interests of people, not regimes, not ideologies, and not the capitalist profits of exploitation.
Freezing non-combat military pay for three years is suggested as one measure to cut excesses, based upon an evaluation that total military pay, with allowances and benefits, is $10,000 above comparable civilian levels. Combat pay is an allowance, and it would be wrong to cut base increases, because every soldier, sailor, airman and Marine lives with the commitment to risk life and limb upon a given order, and take on responsibility for their comrades, regardless of their specialities, and there is no comparable civilian job for that, except maybe a cop on patrol, in a high-crime, drug-ridden, economically-depressed city, and even there, cops are rarely targeted to be ambushed with the objective to kill or be blown-up. And soldiers don’t go through the risks and unknowns alone. There’s no parallel for the weight of worry that attaches to every soldier who goes out of reach and out of touch from his or her loved ones, and those sacrifices are unpaid, and disgracefully underpaid when the soldier comes home under a flag.
If politicians are prepared to mire the nation in wrong-headed wars, mixed in with justified ones, of which, at this time there are none, they must be prepared to fully compensate those who are put at risk. Military pay scales are top heavy, and there is only room to cut at the top, just as there is only room to raise taxes at the top of the country’s economic scale. Look hard everywhere else before looking to cut into the lives of soldiers, non-commissioned, and junior officers.
The suggestion to increase health-care premiums for retired solders, under retirement age, is unreasonable. Guaranteed access to health care for all veterans who need it, according to their ability to pay, or not, must not be disturbed. Highly affordable or free health care, for vets below means, is an essential part of the contract that once rewarded draftees and draws volunteers, and it is an appropriate benefit to the approximately one percent of the population who risk all and serve honorably. Best to look a lot deeper into taxing the upper crust of America’s economy much, much more fairly before even thinking about increasing health-care burdens for veterans!
Not mentioned is the serious level of double-dipping, and more, especially by high-ranking retirees who are receiving military retirements concurrently with high salaries in the defense industry, and those who are retired and draw generous retirement benefits and bonuses from post-service defense-contractor and consultant or GS government employment, and in many cases, Social Security as well as their military benefits—a great deal to cut into in this category, where retirees’ benefits exceed their salaries and benefits when last on active duty.
Syrian-regime massacres can eclipse any Gaddafi might have committed, adding folly to unconstitutionality of Obama humanist military policy.
cc (via web forms) April 24, 2011: White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Sen. Rob Portman, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Carl Levin, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Rep. John Boehner, Rep. Barney Frank, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Rep. Zoe Lofgren; Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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Sleep brings dreams, the only place where responsible, uncorrupted government exists.
The widespread occurrence of on-duty sleep by air-traffic controllers, across the country, and in both towers and en-route centers (ARTCCs), demonstrates that the problem is systemic, because many more controllers have dozed off than has been reported. Meanwhile, the FAA management, as usual, reacts, and does so with meaningless rules reforms, and in a case where its own system is at fault, penalizes controllers who have no choice but to comply with human physiology and the shift requirements of their facilities, which are built around a shortage of controllers ever since the 1981 strike, when the only solution for Republican union busters was to fire them all instead of implementing changes that were demanded, changes that could have prevented the loss of $billions of dollars by the FAA in attempting to upgrade the system, where in ARTCC facilities, the same radars are still in use that existed in 1975, and where the cost of finally making the upgrades will be hundreds of $millions more than if they would have got it right the first time!The attitude of the Secretary of Transportation, Ray LaHood, and the FAA’s administrator, Ranolph Babbitt, that to provide a 90-minute nap break, in cases of back-to-back rotating shifts, is an issue of moral hazard, is an obdurate, typical, FAA-management stance that flies in the face of proven, contrary, scientific evidence of human-rest requirements and nap benefits, and is attested to by the dismal record of their agency’s operations, where rest is a factor in a job demanding peak mental acuity. LaHood, Babbitt, and the system, say it is expected, or okay for controllers and their families to be subjected to that abnormal, unnecessary abuse, week after week, year after year, through the decades of their careers... no. It’s not okay, and it should not be expected. The deaths of innocent people have already attested to that.
God forbid that the unavoidable necessities of human physiology should be addressed to serve public safety with the result being that an employee sleeps for one hour on the clock, or that the answer to biology, triumphing over conscious desire to provide dedicated service (does anyone doubt that the desire and intent of the sleeping controllers was otherwise?), should be any less than suspension of the offending employees! If that’s to be the tack, then what about the managers who failed to monitor the performance and safety-readiness of their areas? It amounts to another case of prejudicial, punitive measures that are ineffective for resolution of the underlying problem, and which serve as a public deflection of the blame from its true source.
And the FAA’s lax regulation and enforcement of rest minimums also applies to the airline industry, where it failed completely to regulate the commuter industry, leaving it up to corporations (the large feeder airlines) to police themselves, which failed, as usual, most recently contributing to the crash and death of 50 people on a Continental commuter flight in Buffalo, or where in Lexington, pilot and controller fatigue/under-staffing contributed to a takeoff attempt on a wrong runway by a Comair flight, killing another 49.
Maybe knee-jerk, thoughtless critics, who blame the controllers and seem to have an antipathy for workers and the power and good of their collective voice, should wake up themselves and place the blame where it really belongs for a change. Probably, not even Babbitt would drink to that [Babbit was forced to resign, December 6, 2011, after being charged with driving under the influence].
Malcolm L. Kantzler
Commercial Pilot, SMEL, Inst.
Former CFI-II
Former ARTCC Full-Performance Controller (with a stack of FAA commendations and superior ratings)
FAA sleeps on the job w/lax management and regulation for scientifically proven, physiological rest needs, impairing safety, causing deaths.
cc (via web forms) April 17, 2011: White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Sen. Rob Portman, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Carl Levin, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Rep. Zoe Lofgren; Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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The political tug of war: a lift to the future or pull-back to the past.
Republicans, wealthier than ever, riding the coattails of a brainwashed middle class and poor into the saddle of only one horse of the three, pulling a government they seem to hate, would turn it from one “of, by, and for the People,” into a callous servant of their own self interest and greed.Through their proposed budget, Republicans have shown that they will trample that beguiled source of their power, the People, who are not wealthy, not powerful, except through the democratic process that Republicans have begun to strip away, through politically-driven Supreme Court rulings of the conservative-Republican majority, to governors uprooting the rights of the very same collective voice they promote for their corporations, cutting off the People’s avenues to education, opportunity, and health care, depriving them of all hope for a better life for themselves or their children. Republicans, who shield the wealthy and the corporations from their share of the yoke, those wealthy who have no concern for access to health care or education, or anything else, are intent to bleed the middle class and poor until they are finally left sick and dying, with drained vouchers, used up by profit-driven healthcare providers, leaving them with no other means of care or salvation—a revisiting of the class-cruel streets of waifs and beggars.
Without doubt, there is an unhealthy number of elitists in America’s upper class who wish the world would have been tilted back by the Great Quake to the time of Dickens, instead of the four inches it moved Japan, where, in that period of transition from the Victorian to Edwardian eras, they would be the pampered aristocrats, with their coaches and footmen, while all the rest would have their rags and swollen rats, and the privilege of begging, with lowered eyes, for whatever their “betters” might deign to throw at them.
In that coldly unjust era, the “haves,” in their fine silks and expensive, French scents, were on the morph from being called “Tories” to “Conservatives.” In America, they’re Republicans, morphing into Tea Partiers, and they’re taking America as far in the direction of the Victorian-class divide as they possibly can: first, through control of government to seize every economic advantage and remove the constraints of democratic regulation, growing the Great Economic Divide, monopolizing resources and separating them from the middle class and the poor; and second, through stripping-away of democratic mechanisms, such as unions, and diluting political equality by giving voice to their corporations, neutralizing the only means the People have to make their voices affect government to secure and preserve their rights.
Despite this despicable, oligarchical evolution of the Republican party, and its dictatorial trespass upon the traditional, vested, democratic values of America, there is no fear that the memory of those historic, American, Republican values will be compromised by the insane abortion of today’s Republican party, which was born of the Nixon administration, from which, key players continued to spread their stain through successive administrations to the George Bush presidency. And there is no semblance, whatsoever, between the great Republican party of the past or its leaders and those who represent, or wish to represent the party today. Today’s “Tories” should not ever be associated with those great patriots of the party’s better past, like Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower, or even Colin Powell. Those true patriots would all be ashamed of whatever it is that carries their party’s name today and, with the latter, have been shamed, and shammed, by the travesty the proud Republicanism they once built has become.
Thanks to Republicans, and contrary to all of their grandiose claims of “the great American this and that,” which they only invoke in order to a associate themselves with a falsely promised hope and brighter future, America is really no longer the best of anything in the world, except military power, and as a people, can really look forward to nothing better, and that is a sad state of affairs for all that gives a nation its social and civil conscience, from which true quality is derived. The Republican agenda, still a trickle-down into the gutter of the great wealth divide, has decayed America’s society, and will continue to do so, dissolving America’s prerequisite moral authority for leadership into a more civilized and compassionate world. Instead, Republicans are dragging America back into a dark and dismal past, where the spate of those who suffer will continue to grow, except within that insulated minority that holds monopoly on the wealth, resources, power, and the opportunity that can raise lives up from poverty and despair.
This is what an unenlightened electorate brings upon itself.
The political tug of class war: a lift to the future or a Republican pull-back to the past. — http://popularsovranty.org/index.shtml#towfp
cc (via web forms) April 15, 2011: White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Sen. Rob Portman, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Carl Levin, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Rep. Zoe Lofgren; Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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Penalize banks by making them Fed clones.
Penalizing big banks with fines for wrong-doing that led to the financial melt-down seems the obvious countermeasure, but it is the wrong one.Loan markets are still highly restrictive, holding drag against economic expansion, and instead of penalties, which would probably amount to a slap on the wrist, the banks should each be required to transfer a greater amount of assets into a special loan program, either separately administered or pooled, designated to provide loans to individuals, for mortgages, and small businesses, with fees and/or interest restricted to amounts only 0.25 percent above capital and administrative costs.
This measure would provide some commercial loan exposure and aid to the housing market where it is badly needed and also penalize the banks, through minor profit reduction, while still preserving their position for strengthening by preventing any loss beyond the loss-risks that may be realized by some portion of the loans they provide through the program.
Penalize banks for wrong-doing/negligence, not by fine, but through capital assignment to at-cost small-biz and consumer home-loan programs.
cc (via web forms) April 14, 2011: White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Sen. Rob Portman, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Carl Levin, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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The income and corporate tax codes belong in the trash heap of history.
Arguing for corporations to pay their fair share in taxes is a waste of time. Even if corporations are taxed, and taxed more heavily, that burden will only fall upon consumers. When you talk about more heavily taxing the top two or five percent of wage earners, in many cases, the same thing applies, since they are in positions to preserve their income, to make up for it, effectively passing the increases down to the consumer or to employees under them who would see fewer and reduced salary increases or bonuses, or to shareholders, whose dividends would be frozen or reduced as more of the corporate profit goes into higher, tax-offset salaries and bonuses for top-tier earners.The only way to get the fair share of every person with the ability to pay is through value-added (or sales) taxes, which should have a base, rent exclusion, and exclude food and clothing items below $25, as well as medical items and services, and which can be scaled upward for non-necessities and luxury items. Corporations, as consumers, should also pay the tax for goods and services they purchase. Everyone and every entity pays tax on purchases of non-excluded goods! And no one pays on excluded items/services.
With value-added taxes replacing corporate and income taxes, the wealthy pay more as they buy more, and buy more-expensive items, as they should, to support the mechanics of the legal state that insures and protects their greater interests. And the hateful, burdensome tax system, a double-edged sword against the People, created to endow government with economic leverage to exercise control where there is no political authority to do so directly, and to support the exclusions and loopholes for the wealthy, and which spawns an industry of tax-prep firms with increased consumer costs and rip-offs, can finally be put into the trash where it belongs and sent into history with other great mistakes, like prohibition and George Bush.
The wealthy and special interests strongly support the income tax and its ton of code books, which contain their golden linings. Only a strong and continuous, populist demand can make an issue of this tool that reinforces and pushes the growing economic divide in America, to finally end the discriminatory tax system, begin to shrink the historically wide gap that separates the wealthy from the poor, and to finally bring a manipulation-proof, undeniable fairness and effectiveness to the funding of government.
The tax code is a tool of interference for government, of wealth manipulation for the wealthy, and an “elephant” on the backs of the People.
cc (via web forms) April 8, 2011: White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Sen. Rob Portman, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Rep. Zoe. Lofgren, House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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burning incites an exchange of fear and hate, and is also always an undemocratic suppression of ideas.
Free speech is not absolute. It is a contextual right.
The point pressed by burning Korans is valid: that extreme Islam is a practice of little tolerance, much violence, and that any expression of free speech, that is not shouting “fire” in a theater, should not be repressed out of fear of that extremist violence and intolerance.But, burning Korans is not the same as burning a flag, and no criticism of any sect or group should be made in a way that is disrespectful of its religious book, be it Koran, Bible, or Torah, because that book is not what is represented by the various interpretations that are applied to the acts or practices of all sects derived of its followers. Choosing to burn a religion’s book is an extreme act, and one that is likely not to ever be constructive to the purpose intended. But whether the burning of the book has the same constitutional protections as burning the flag is a question that can best be answered in view of the context.
It should be asked if obtaining an injunction against burning of Korans would really be a violation of the First Amendment in the context of the fire. Shouting “fire” in a theater, when there is no fire, is not a form of protected speech because it can result in harm to others, and if the burning of a Koran has been demonstrated to cause harm to others, and threatens continued harm to others, and to those who might be called to intercede to end the violence stemming from the act, then it is rational to say that “fire” has been shouted when applied to the burning of the Korans, and in that circumstance, particularly knowing of the threat that is created by doing the act, that it is not a form of speech protected by the First Amendment, within the context of political realities of the time.
First Amendment protections are selective, and burning the book of a religion can be a protected form of speech in some situations, and not protected in others. The context is everything, and the protections are never absolute. The Department of Justice should seek an injunction against the burning of Korans by the Florida pastor on the basis of the violence and harm that it poses in the context of the politics and reality of the here and now, which is not to say that the threats of extremists curtail free speech in America. It only states that no one has the right to incite violence when the circumstances have been judicially reviewed against the harm threatened (caused in this case) and the democratic loss that might be suffered by the prohibition of the “speech,” which, in the context of the Florida preacher, is not sufficient to justify the harm it has created and continues to pose.
Free speech is not absolute. It is a contextual right, not applicable to burning Korans. — http://popularsovranty.org/index.shtml#bkgp
cc (via web forms) April 4, 2011: 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, Rep. Zoe. Lofgren, House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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In Congress, the passion’s in the paycheck.
On April Fools Day, the House of Representatives argued passionately on bills and amendments related to funding the government. One would prevent members of Congress and the president from being paid in cases when the government is no longer funded.If only those members of the House of Representatives who argued the constitutionality of, and voted successfully against this bill, were as vehement in defending the constitutionality of the president going to war without seeking congressional authorization; if only, then Americans could be more assured that the future of the nation is in the hands of those who prioritize that future above their own self interest.
The Roman destiny of American decline is assured so long as parties and politicians act to define patriotism w/self-interest and the dollar.
cc (via web forms) April 1, 2011: 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, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Rep. Zoe. Lofgren, House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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The CNBC “Trust” Poll.
On Friday, April 1, 2011, the CNBC financial network’s poll for the morning programs asked, “Should the individual investor trust the financial system?”The result: 84 percent, No; 16 percent, Yes, out of 1,243 respondents, is quite a kick in the stomach for the market and the investment industry, and implied, against the motives and truth of many who appear on CNBC programming, since all the poll respondents are viewers, which should give pause in that media quarter for some self-assessment.
The poll question, poorly constructed as often is the case, is indicated, through the term “investor,” to refer to the investment banking/trading system, not the usual banking operations of commercial banks or savings institutions, and the result indicates that is how most respondents took it, though not all, according to comments.
Though not a scientific poll, one has to wonder why those who watch CNBC programming, who one would think are also market investors, take risk in a market they distrust, until you realize that greed trumps caution, and most anything else, which is why it must be leashed by regulation.
One thing is certain: the percentage of those responding negatively who do not watch CNBC or trade would be higher, and those unpolled are not in the market—just desserts for the industry’s failure to regulate itself under the system of Greenspan and his Republicans. So why is Greenspan still payed so much attention? He was wrong, his system was wrong, for decades, pushing aside those who saw the fire in the basement, and he no longer has any validation for credibility, except with die-hard, conservative Republicans who insist upon deregulation, regardless of the destruction that comes with it. They always think they can “fix it” themselves, and history always shows that when the People are ignorant enough (by voting Republican extremists into office) to give them back the reins, they can’t. They always fall back on their greed.
The outcome of the recession can be measured in one way by the number of white-collar jail terms that have been imposed, which is none. Madoff stands apart, behind bars, because he stole from so many who were rich and powerful, not because of any direct criminal or negligent contribution to the economic fall through a position of trust and responsibility within the banking or investment system, which also should have included prosecutions of some so-called regulators.
This outcome, along with continued “glitches” in the system, from the unlikely-above-board, insider-stock buy of Berkshire Hathaway’s David Sokol, to market mechanics, and the refusal of regulators or the market (to regulate itself) to investigate or always remove those components of trading that provide advantage to segments over the whole, such as computerized flash trading and after-market trading, contributes to the entrenchment of distrust on the street. And it also reflects upon how tilted the balance between capitalism and democracy remains, which is mirrored by the historically-wide divide between the wealthy and the middle class and poor.
America will not really recover from the recession, or have learned from it, until the greed of capitalism is brought back into balance with the regulation of democracy.
Progressive action means Democratic regulations to curb the greed-driven extremes of capitalism and prioritize the interests of the People.
cc (via web forms) April 1, 2011: 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, Rep. Zoe. Lofgren, House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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Discriminatory mortgage program benefits few, excludes far larger population, dangling in the wind.
Sent to: New York Times reporter Michael Powell
Re: Foreclosure Aid Fell Short, and is Fading, New York Times, March 29, 2011
By Michael Powell and Andrew MartinUnless I missed it in my read, your article misses on one very large point. But everyone else who addresses mortgage relief also misses the point, that it is a highly discriminatory program.
Homeowners and the recently unemployed have been showered with attention and relief, with initiatives from repeated unemployment extensions and the mortgage-relief program, but the long-term unemployed, renters, and the homeless have received nothing, unless they qualified for the single, measly (by comparison) $250 Social Security payment.
Why on Earth should the recently unemployed, many with banked assets, and those who have at least had a span of the rewards and benefits of home ownership be the only ones to be recipient of so much assistance and concern, to have their economic foundations preserved?
An aside, has anyone ever considered what it would have been like if, instead of a banking-bail solution to the recession, a democratic-bail would instead have been instituted? What if, instead of the $billions in TARP to the incompetent, greedy, and criminal who brought down the system, that amount would have been equally divided among all citizens, 18 and older, with a Social Security account, with income below, say, $350,000, assets below $500,000? What, some $180,000 - $200,000 per person? To spend as they wish, with the exceptions that between 15 and 20 percent go to some sort of savings device, besides U.S. bonds, and that none could be spent on foreign investment or transportation (cars, boats, planes) manufactured overseas?
Even in this case, the banks are singled out as beneficiaries, but that money would have repaired and financed add-ons to homes, bought and paid-off homes, and made a wide range of investments in future monetary and economic growth, sent people to schools and colleges, bought the aforementioned transportation, as well as the vast range of goods and services in America’s economic landscape, from luxuries to necessities. How would the effect of that kind of spending program turned out to be better or worse than the Bank-bail TARP program, other than that the worst banks, not receiving sufficient savings and home-mortgage payoffs, would have failed, as they should have? That certainly would have been a solution based in democracy, for the People.
Meanwhile, a highly prejudicial and discriminatory mortgage program is still causing such a stir and appeal for its slice of beneficiaries, as a far larger profile of the population dangles in the wind.
At least, for them, the silver lining is that they’re not in the Sendai region of northeastern Japan.
The American dream, consequent of manipulative economic and political control by the wealthy, is now mostly success of the American scheme.
cc (via web forms) March 30, 2011: 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, Rep. Zoe. Lofgren, House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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Obama took the “we” out of Libya when “he” unconstitutionally made war “his” one-man decision.
Tomorrow, President Obama will address the nation and spill his justifications for going to war in Libya, though he will not call it a war. He will make all the arguments he should have made to Congress in seeking its constitutional authority. Had he, tomorrow’s speech, where he will say there is a responsibility and obligation to prevent atrocities, would not be necessary. He will tell the nation that, with international accord, the responsibility he has to prevent atrocities supercedes the Constitution’s requirement that he have congressional authority, though he may not even give that such authority is required, as he once did, before he was president, jealous of his power, coveting that of Congress. More likely, he will try to re-write the Constitution, applying his own words and interpretation to its starkly plain, historically supported, black and white, English script.President Obama, aside from unilaterally directing troops without constitutionally required authorization from Congress, will be attempting to define a new and untenable standard for the use of U.S. armed forces, to prevent atrocities, which he and Secretary Clinton say negates the Constitution’s requirement for authority from Congress, as well as voiding their previous affirmation of that constitutional obligation, when, instead, deployment is in the context of an authorization by international consensus. This appalling and dangerous statement of Libyan-applied, and future-intended military policy practically guarantees a future of continual conflict for America, and it is an attempt to write an illegal amendment to the war powers authority, specified in the Constitution to rest within Congress. This “policy” also says, in effect, that foreign states have the power to declare participation of the U.S. military in conflicts they sanction, because the president has already stated, and will repeat, that such international consensus imposes an “obligation and responsibility” upon the U.S. to act, without congressional authority.
This is a profane abuse of power and trampling upon a Constitution already laying shredded by the heels of George Bush, and to lesser extent, presidents before him, since after WWII. It is an abomination of invited, international interference in the right of the American people to exercise self-determination through their elected representatives, trumping that right and ceding America’s constitutional process to international will... and the agreement of one man, with not even a bow to the more minimalist constitutional requirements of treaty ratification!
This new, unconstitutional military policy the president will define attempts to globalize America’s military might in the same way that the nation’s manufacturing power has been ceded away in the name of global free trade. It is a policy that, even if legitimate, can never be applied universally, and which, if allowed to stand, would place great power within the office of the president, and it would put the use of military force at the discretion of the whims and prejudices of whomever holds the office.
American families would see the lives of their sons and daughters put at risk in war for the priorities of the wealthy and powerful who control the military-industrial complex in the U.S., in accord with those who hold the same reins of control in the other nations of the world, which also maintain significant defense-production bases and a global military presence.
The Constitution, which has been in a decades-long state of war with the wealthy, and the influence peddlers, and the officials, elected, appointed, and career, who have been attacking its democratic mechanisms and foundation, is all that stands to prevent the nation’s structural processes—the legal system, tax system, police, military, all that protects the system of which the wealthy and powerful minority have such a stake—from protecting those few alone, instead of guaranteeing the “liberty” of all.
Think about it. The transgressions are many, but was the Republican-majority Supreme Court’s decision in “Citizens United” really one about the people’s “liberty” and “freedom,” or was it all about control and grip upon government by those wealthy and powerful who own those corporations, and who now can add the voice and vast resources of those institutions, paid for with the $3.75 you pay for a tube of toothpaste, to their own individual voices, turning elections their way?
Were the decisions made by the Federal Communication Commission over the decades of Republican appointees, from Bush to Reagan, that consolidated all media, contributing to cause the death of so many newspapers, that shrunk the once-wide base of outlets for opinion, expression of ideas, and investigation, to fall into the hands of so few, wealthy conglomerates, an exercise in expanding freedom and opportunity, protecting the government’s unspoken branch of oversight, democracy’s protectorate, the Fourth Estate? Or were the decisions deliberate efforts at tearing it down, minimizing oversight journalism, concentrating the control of the “thought” infrastructure for, again, the few wealthy and powerful who control it?
Can anyone ever believe that more than two decades of trickle-down was meant to do anything except raise the fortunes of the wealthy further up?
Have the actions of the new wave of extremist-Republican governors and legislatures in Wisconsin and Ohio, to strip democratic voice from a class of workers, been an exercise in Democracy, or one of economics, to cut government costs and services so that taxes and regulation can be reduced for, yes, the wealthy and powerful?
And in the federal government, is the imposition of cuts that take away health care, education, and opportunity from the poor and middle class, drying-up research and tax-money from necessary, developmental technologies, done in the name of austerity for Americans, or those few, most wealthy and powerful, who pay ever less for the structure of law and enforcement, represented by the industries of the courts, police, and the military, that protect their assets and their wealth-founded opportunities, from sea to shining sea and beyond?
If this outrageous act of President Obama is not met with the power of Congress to defeat it, and reassert itself, how many times in the next decades will America go to wars where political instability threatens atrocities, and oil wells, or rubber plantations, or rare-earth mines, navigational passages, or whatever is at risk that could affect the trade and pockets of the wealthy, who are either the beneficiaries or purveyors of whatever war, and who are guaranteed to profit, win or not, and as long as the money flows, the more drawn-out the better, like Afghanistan?
If the worst Gaddafi could have likely done to the rebel cities was done, it would not hold a candle to the massacres in Rwanda, or any of the worst mass-killings in just the 20th century, including more than a million lives in N. Korea, near two million in Cambodia, more than a half million in Yugoslavia, 400,000 in Angola, 300,000 in Uganda, and the many, many more destinations of death and despair, not to mention the near 100 million lives lost, attributed to China, the USSR, and Germany, under Ze-Dong, Stalin, and Hitler. If this policy of Obama’s is let stand, and applied with any semblance of equality, America will have a full-time career of war in Africa alone, and the only involvement of the American people will be the blood spilled in their families and the unrelenting higher share of the cost burdens they will pay, through their taxes and the cost of the goods and services they need, that are always inflated to maintain the gap for the high end.
The ball is in the court of Congress. But will Congress honor the Constitution and its obligation to it, and to the People? President Obama will not honor the Constitution, as he and his Secretary of State both wrote, very precisely, that it should be honored and followed, back when they were senators. And the Bush majority on the Supreme Court, representatives of conservative Republicans, who are representatives of the military-industrial complex, and the Presidentialists, will never rule in support of the Constitution it has already betrayed, not when halting the profits and opportunities served by continued usurping of war power by the executive is at stake.
Only the impeachment power of Congress, or the threat of it, can finally prevail to restore the Constitution and the voices of Americans to weigh on their nation’s use of deadly force. Are not the risks, costs, consequences, and unknowns of a king or dictator policy for military force so high that it is more than worth it to stand-up for the separation of powers in the Constitution that dictate and require that such grave decisions should be made by the People’s representatives, not just by their president? What in America ever sanctioned that such power, to spill the blood of Americans and collateral foreign nationals, as is always the case, to include women and children, should rest in the hands of any one person, let along the resolutions of other nations?
The president will say speed was important, to save lives, despite that no critical national interest was to be served, and despite that the Founders deliberately intended that the decision, by Congress, on use of force not be made too quickly. But he could have had a decision to authorize the action in time, if he had the case to make and was seeking authority of Congress at the same time he began the planning for the international negotiations and subsequent military operations. Then, the authorization might have been predicated upon specifying such things as the objectives and exit strategy that must be attained, all the question marks the president is now scrambling after the fact to answer in his address, when there is really only one word he can truthfully say about his constitutional trespass: “guilty.”
The president’s speech and post-speech explaining and justifications he has been making since he sent America into its third Mid-East war should have been made to Congress and the People before Congress voted to, or not to give him the authority to do so, and then had they, there would be no need for post-attack explanations and justifications, and it would be valid to say that “we” cannot allow... or “we” have an obligation... etc. There is no “we” in this war. It is all President Obama, and it is all about a Congress both ignorant and spineless to stand up for its constitutional powers and responsibilities, as it has continually been since WWII.
Congress has been busy investigating and supporting prosecutions against athletes for lying about drug use. What’s more important? That Congress initiate prosecution of Gary Bonds for lying about sports-related activities, or that it prevent presidents from violating the Constitution by going to war on their own initiative alone? The point is not whether or not America should have intervened with military force to prevent the deaths of demonstrators, or should use it to remove Gaddafi. The point is that it is unconstitutional for the president to do it without congressional authority, and by doing so, Obama made himself a king or dictator, and took away the voice of Americans, expressed through the debate and vote that should have happened in Congress, the branch of government that is closest to the People.
If impeachment of the president must be inaugurated to enforce the Constitution, to prevent all of the horrid consequences that come so much more quickly and easily if the decision of just one man (or other nations), apart from Congress and the Constitution, is all that it takes in a so-called democracy to spill blood, then doesn’t the worth of that blood, of all the lives, lost and mangled, hold considerably more justification for Congress to act, than did Bonds lying about taking steroids, or the spills that once stained a blue dress? The events subsequent to the NATO hand-over in Libya, where civilian deaths have continued to mount in a bloody stalemate, tempting even greater involvement, and the mass murders now ongoing in Syria, where the president’s new policy of self-proclaimed initiative to prevent such atrocities mandates that another war be started, say it is not, and that this trespass was another great mistake that will turn out to be both costly and unjustified.
The military-industrial complex militarists are toasting their 18-year-old Scotches as constitutional war powers are buried in Libyan sands.
King/Dictator Obama took the "we" out of Libya when "he" unconstitutionally made war "his" one-man decision by excluding Congress—our voice.
cc (via web forms) March 27, 2011: 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, House Financial Services Committee office, more...
ADDENDUM
President Obama’s address expands unconstitutional war-power shift away from Congress.
President Obama’s address offered no surprises, apologies or regrets. He made all the justifications expected in his address on his decision to use American military force in Libya. All of the justifications he enumerated and explained are valid, and he is also correct that the limited action he decided for America’s military were actions that should have been taken by America in support of its allies and, with proper evidence of genocide, as a defender of human rights.He cited the change of command to NATO, which is a smoke screen, having little consequence to any change in American involvement, since the U.S. is the largest part of the command structure in NATO and is never out of the process when American troops are involved. Most significant to continued, unilateral decisions on military action, he also defined his military policy as a shared, international participation “to protect interests and values that, while not critical, may be threatened” across the globe, from preventing genocide, keeping the peace, providing or insuring justice, to safeguarding the flow of commerce.
The Constitution and the war-powers authority of Congress were given not a single word, and that is where the underlying problem, which the president’s address did not alter, remains.
In America, if it is a nation of laws, the Constitution is supreme, not presidential policies or doctrines, and not international accords. No matter how the need might be justified, no matter how right the right, or how wrong the wrong, the core principle that America relies upon, and must demand of its leaders, is the integrity and respect of the Constitution, that its requirements will be respected and met.
The president did not do so when he ordered an air invasion of Libya to set up a no-fly zone and attack Libyan military facilities and armor, and he has not acknowledged any problem in having done so, and in fact, in defining his policy, he provided assurance that the Constitution’s requirement for congressional authorization would continue to be ignored, even though, in cases such as the current circumstance in Libya, authorization would, far more likely than not, be forthcoming. The point of this is that the president does not want to accept that constitutional obligation upon his office. No president has, since Eisenhower, and unless this stance is forced to change by Congress, America will continue to face military involvements that are disastrous, unexplained, not understood, and not justified, as well as those that are proper in motive and context for America, and would likely be properly authorized.
The president must get authorization from Congress to set America’s military might into motion, in all cases not involving direct or imminent threat of attack. Nothing, not since the Constitution was ratified by the Continental Congress has changed that, except the past-practices born of the bold and arrogant defiance of a handful of presidents.
The Constitution also has provided Congress and the American people an instrument of protection against the misconduct or abuse of power of the president: impeachment. It is a serious step, one that was abused by a Republican majority in Congress, as a political tool, the last time it was invoked for the lies behind the blue dress. Abuse of war power, where the democratically derived office of the president is distorted into the throne room of a king or the closed, authoritarian hall of a dictator, causing the spilling of blood, rightly and not, is the most serious instance of abuse where impeachment is justified to end it. If the president will not relent, and the Supreme Court will not intervene, there is no other way.
Unfortunately, despite all of the qualities that give President Obama the potential to be a great patriot in American history, serving the office with distinction in most ways, this abuse of war power has proven to be a vehicle of such harm and cost to the nation in other hands that it must be ended when he provides the opportunity to do so by deliberately abusing it with his own hand. The evil genie must be put back into the bottle, or in the case of the president, the bottle, spilling congressional power into his hands, must be plugged to insure that no future abuse can be contrived and repeated.
The American people want the decision for war to be debated openly by their elected officials, as the Constitution requires, before the nation is committed to violence. And, judging by the statements of congressional members, since the president launched the nation into another conflict, so do they; although, in most cases, they seem not to know the Constitution and that they alone have the collective power to make that decision, whether they want it or not.
The trespass against the Constitution continues, and the ball remains in the court of Congress, as a more peaceful, prosperous future for America weighs in the balance.
March 28, 2011; cc as indicated above.
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Columnist Nicholas Kristof tries to justify trespass across Constitution’s separation of powers.
Sent to: New York Times reporter, Nicholas Kristof, in response to his article, Hugs From Libyans
March 23, 2011Mr Kristof, your assertion that “a couple of days of dutiful consultation” would have fatally delayed intervention in Libya is invalid on two points. First, there is no “dutiful consultation,” on using military force. There is only constitutionally dutiful seeking and obtaining of authorization from Congress. And, second, if the administration had begun informing Congress of its facts, projections, and fears, which were buzzing around behind closed White-House doors for weeks before the forces were ordered in, authorization could have been obtained, even well ahead of time to act if certain “worst-case” scenarios materialized, and even if UN and Arab League authorizations didn’t come through in time. And if not, well, sell harder or find another way, like let the French and British do it all, for once. It is their oil source, as you wrote, and oil was the bottom line; otherwise, why no intervention in places like Rwanda?
There is no excuse for unconstitutional, unilateral decisions on war by presidents. Administrations always know well ahead of the fact when they are planning to deploy troops. Congress needs to begin being put in the front of that planning, on the basis that a war plan without constitutional authorization is counter to extending the popular sovereignty of a democracy with use of force, and it is worthless, except to a king or a dictator.
And more important, ignoring Congress when starting/ending wars has severely harmed the nation. It is a proven, past-practice of disaster, and it does no good to search for excuses to overlook or minimize or try to justify the trespass of presidents with respect to the Constitution, whether it’s war powers or First-Amendment rights.
Every end-run around the Constitution’s congressional war powers, or any other trespass across the separation of powers, or the First Amendment, by any well-intentioned president, enables the abuse of future presidents, and many among them will do, and have done great national and global harm through that enablement.
Every end-run around the Constitution’s congressional war powers, by any well-intentioned president, enables the abuse of future presidents.
cc (via web forms) March 20, 2011: 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, House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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To usurp congressional war power is an impeachable offense.
Sent to Rep. Dennis Kucinich
March 20, 2011It was reported on CNN (loose nature of its reporting considered) that you said, “the president should have consulted with Congress” before he pulled the trigger on Libya? Consulted?! You know he’s constitutionally obligated to get authorization from Congress, or you should, and you should be taking him to task for it, loudly, and with no quarter given on the emphatic nature of your claim for the powers that belong with your vote, not any president’s unilateral initiative! I like President Obama, but presidents going to war without congressional authority to do it is a continuing, dangerous practice that has to end, and it is an impeachable offense!
Grow a spine and stand up for yourselves! Be jealous of your powers as the Founders counted on you to be! Make a damn, loud noise about it and don’t let-up until a “Resolution of Trespass” is debated and voted on by Congress and, if passed, delivered to the president’s desk, condemning his violation of the Constitution’s separation of powers. Add to that (if more likely to get a trespass resolution passed) or send along with it, an ex-post-facto resolution restating Congress’s war power (and not just the purse) and granting the president authority to act according to the UN resolutions, with the exception of no manned attack aircraft (fighters, bombers, fighter-bombers) on offensive missions, only in defensive support of command-and-control, communications, refueling, and transport aircraft, no ground troops, a hard, one-year time limit, and a warning that the next time he or any president usurps Congressional war power that articles of impeachment will be brought up!
The Founders put war power within Congress for a lot of good and necessary reasons, all of which remain valid today, and the nation is far worse off because of Congress making a practice of allowing presidents to usurp its decisions on when to start and/or end military conflicts. And Congress, for allowing it, is just as responsible for the damage as the presidents who overstepped their authorities, even though responsibility is what congressional members have been trying to avoid, to their detriment and the nations’.
This is supposed to be a democracy, not the kingdom or dictatorship Congress and presidents are trying to turn it into with the unconstitutional, “one-man concept” of war power!
The Founders did not intend and the Constitution does not allow any one man to decide on matters of war—that power resides only in Congress!
Why do “analysts” and politicians keep saying “we” picked sides in Libya, “we” went in not knowing... anything. There’s no “we,” just Obama!
cc (via web forms) March 20, 2011: 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, House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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representing the man, represents the Office of President, as it is
transformed by excluding the Congress from decisions, exercising
military power constitutionally expressed to be in Congress alone.
In the promised, new Washington, crows still gather.
Making a decision of support for a policy or conflict in a poll is one thing. Making a decision that actually pulls the trigger on war, that comes down to the common denominator of America’s sons and daughters ending the lives of those in another nation, always including innocent ones, and of having their lives end or bodies torn is quite something else.A week after Japan’s Great Quake combined with a movement of self-determination in the Mid-East that marks this as a historic time for the world, President Obama, a constitutional scholar, the candidate who promised a different way for Washington to work, came up against his very first opportunity to make his own Great Quake in the modern history of America’s government when he was handed a U.N. Security Council resolution and the resolution of the Arab League, authorizing the use of force against the dictatorial Libyan regime. Acting on authority within those resolutions, he decided to send America’s soldiers into harm’s way, and not to take the path of change and revolution that would reverse past abuse and strengthen America’s democracy. He chose the old path, the transgressing path that leads to stepping on the Constitution by taking the decision on war and making it his own.
Despite the Constitution’s clear, unmistakable language, the supporting documents of the Founders, and the historical circumstances surrounding their evolution as builders of a new kind of government, declaring that it should never be the decision of the president to send America into war, President Obama decided to be another selfish president, another greedy president who, like a robber in the light, would take what power he could unto himself, another president that would just go ahead and take what Congress silently ceded and a lower-court judge once wrongly let the presidents before him take. He decided to be a president more jealous of the power he would be let wield than respectful of the instrument that he claims to so honor: the Constitution that defines the government he leads and the democracy that, through combined abuses, is slipping away from its people.
Neither dictator nor king be I? The Founders were well aware of the danger of too much power being vested in the executive branch of government, and so openly fearful of it that they wrote articles about it and took the power of war and placed it across the divide from the executive, into Article I of the Constitution, where through rule of law it is separated from the president and expressed as a power reserved only for Congress. The case for his unilateral action in Libya, which the president is repeatedly making and expanding upon in his public speeches now, is what he and his appointees and staff should have been presenting to Congress and its members’ staffs before he acted, to marshal their consent, to have passed a resolution authorizing him to carry out the military action called for in the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council and the Arab League.
Why does the president say it is mandatory to have UN and Arab-League authorizations to constitutionally go to war, and not have the authorization of Congress? Where is the logic in that? In effect, with or without Congress in the equation, it says that if the president believes it is necessary to use military force to defend America’s vital interests, that he would be prevented from doing so unless he had authorization from the U.N. Security Council and whatever regional, international, subset organizations exist.
That’ll be the day!
The fact is, the president is playing war-power two ways, seeking authorizations where it is convenient and ignoring them where it is constricting. Yet, the president tells America and the world that Gaddafi has lost his legitimacy to lead. Though that is true, and even though he lost it long ago, how can the president avoid the hypocritical label that falls upon him in the eyes of those in America and abroad who know the Constitution and know America’s military has been illegitimately deployed without the authorization of Congress, in some sense, moving America closer to that which defines a military dictatorship, or an absolute Kingdom, where in either case, the dictator or king sends forth his armies as he sees fit?
That’ll be the day? You say?
The Founders envisioned a nation of peace, to be separated by oceans from the politics and the entanglements of the nations of Europe that caused war to so frequently hobble the advance of their societies, just as America’s “president-decided” wars, sometimes decided when to start, to end, or both, have hobbled America. They knew that placing the power of war with Congress served more than the purpose of preventing the abuse of that power by one man alone, as King George III had abused it against them and their neighbors, and that it would require an unlikely conspiracy among a majority of those in Congress if the power of war were ever to be “abused,” and that the majority required to give specified authority to the president to execute its decisions on war would validate, for the people and to other nations, the projecting of that deadly power by the nation unto others, which they considered to be a nation’s most terrible instrument for imposing harm, domestic or abroad. President Obama validated his self-ordained decision by, in effect, performing quality control upon himself, saying that he recognizes the heavy responsibility of making decisions to go to war as “Commander in Chief,” which is quite the opposite of what either the Constitution requires of that decision, or what the Founders intended as the inherent justification of a openly debated and agreed-upon act by the peoples’ elected representatives.
The title President Obama invoked in his justification has no authority to decide on going to war attached to it. “Presidentialists,” those who advocate that it does, because they believe the president, not Congress, should have the sole power to decide whether to or not to use military force, include the likes of John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Ronald Reagan, and all the supporters of the military-industrial complex, or “militarists,” which President Eisenhower, the WWII allied commander who preferred to be called “General” after he retired, labeled as “dangerous.” The Presidentialists and military-industrial-complex militarists, from those in the ranks, to the industry contractors, to those in the think tanks, are toasting with their 18-year-old Scotches as a new front opened up for them in Libya today, and the constitutional war powers that limit their ambitions were buried more deeply, this time in Libyan sands. Still, with more than 100 cruise missiles launched on the first day of hostilities, defense contractors gain more than $60 million, just the opening payment, borne at the expense of the national-debt burden facing America’s children. Presidentialists/militarists also include most conservative Republicans, the same ones who strip workers of their collective voices, and who sanctioned crimes, including torture, kidnapping, and illegal domestic spying, and it includes most who have become president, since Eisenhower, regardless of party (President Carter might be the only exception), because presidents are stricken by human nature and tend to covet and seek to expand their power.
Militarists argue, ignoring all historical context and supporting documents, that the title “Commander in Chief” has the authority implied. But the Constitution is also very clear and specific that all powers not expressed fall to the states, not the president. The much-abused title is actually worn by the president as he facilitates the implementation of the will of Congress in commanding the military to attain of the goals and objectives specified in the authorization. There is no other way to constitutionally interpret it. Any other interpretation is tainted by politics or ill-purpose.
Or the militarists will argue that the president is not restricted if war is not “declared,” because the Constitution, in the terminology and according to the practice of the day stated “declare war,” instead of “deploy military forces,” or some similar but identical phrase. The Constitution only mentions sea and land forces, as well, but these militarists won’t argue that the Air Force is exempt from all constitutional constraints imposed upon the other military branches because it is not mentioned, since, of course, there were no airplanes or air force when the nation was founded. As in so many conservative arguments, they try to twist words and concepts to have it both ways.
The Founders recognized the nature of man would be realized in most presidents by coveting and seeking to expand the power of the office, and they recognized that in the government they devised, the People would be closer to the Congress than to the president, less isolated from their state- and district-elected officials, and that was a secondary reason for the power of war to be vested there. They also recognized that with the power to decide to engage in armed conflict, with military force, originating in Congress, that the decision would be arrived at through open debate and a vote that would be far more subject to the influence of the people upon their representatives, making the decision to go to war an extension of the nation’s democracy, of its popular sovereignty, not one made behind closed doors, without debate, as the plans to enter other wars, like Iraq, were derived, without public influence any more meaningful than an after-the-fact poll.
This intent by the Founders for war to be decided by Congress, with the transparency of its closer touch with people, and its debate, is expressed by the Founders in writings, as when the nation’s Founder and third president, Thomas Jefferson, wrote, “As the executive cannot decide the question of war on the affirmative side, neither ought it to do so on the negative side, by preventing the competent body [Congress] from deliberating on the question,” which is exactly what President Obama just did when he declared an ultimatum, backed by the use of military force, without the authority of Congress, without the transparency of its process of decision, without the compounded plurality of its place, closer to the electorate, from among whom the soldiers come, and most important, without the considered decision, made from within the collective hearts and minds of that “competent body [of Congress, not the president].” Instead, the president consulted only with what he considered to be (as George Bush did) “appropriate personnel,” as President Obama put it, when asked, before taking a step so dangerous, bringing war to the nation, before spilling the blood of its people, and in the name of ideals he set as justification for that great expense and its inherent, long-term risks.
How bold, how arrogant, for just one man to take unto himself all of that, in the name of all of us, and in stark, naked defiance of Congress and of all that stands in the archives of history and the Constitution to prevent it! It matters not if President Obama’s heart is in the right place or that his decision is right, or that it is the decision at which Congress would have arrived. Lyndon Johnson’s heart was in the right place, but his decisions prolonging the Vietnam war were deadly wrong and costly to the extreme. The decisions of the president’s predecessor, George Bush, were both deadly wrong and from a heart not in the right place, meaning that interests other than the national defense were being serviced. And therein is the great danger that the president keeps alive and invites successors to take unto themselves, with results that cannot be counted upon to be any better than those which have kept America hobbled in conflict for generations since the end of World War II.
If the president is bold and arrogant for his ex parte decision to take up the nation’s sword by his own volition, then Congress is just as apathetic, and weak, and cowardly for allowing him to do it. At the very least, it should pass a resolution to provide a defacto, ex-post-facto authorization, to at least preserve a semblance of constitutionality, a hint that its elected members acknowledge the power is theirs, not his, that they are giving-away—ceding the voice of their constituents to the president because they lack the courage to act on matters of such grave import themselves, or to confront the president when it is stolen from them, to at least leave a dropping of the authority that is theirs in the process they have allowed to wallow in the murky, swirling waters of the toilet that, because of this and other transgressions in governance and the courts, is about to further weaken America, more darkly shade its future, and swallow-up its democracy.
The polls that ask if America should use force in Libya are asking the wrong question. Instead they should ask of Americans if they believe they want their neighbors, friends, and family sent to war on the decision of just one man, or the decision of a majority in their Congress. If the results are the same, then Congress or the states should act immediately to amend the Constitution to move war powers across the great separation the Founders (who were far wiser and more intelligent than the collective populace and members of Congress today) created between the president and Congress. And then they should hope or pray that the power they formally, legally conferred on the office of president doesn’t loosen whatever constraints acting without that authority have provided, to bring upon them and their descendants the horrors of even more of the likes of Vietnam and Iraq, and all the collateral death and consequences that arose, because they will have sanctioned a great, new danger, the very one of which the Founders were most afraid.
And then, when this is done, be very afraid. Because the Founders also knew that bad, evil men, or gullible men, swayed by the deceptive evil around them, would eventually be elected or succeed to the office of the President. And, again, they were right. It has happened, and it will happen again. Hitler came to power because other powers were ceded to him out of ignorance, apathy, or fear. America is not invulnerable to so drastic a change of coat, particularly as the protections of its democratic freedoms and the foundations of its democracy are nipped apart by the agile, hungry, black crows that flap about, singularly, less significant, but of which there are always, like locusts, enough to strip bare those fields left unprotected or surrendered.
Why does the president say it’s mandatory to have UN and Arab League authorization to go to war, constitutionally, and not that of Congress?
Why does every new president start a new U.S. war? At the same time, to justify it, everything/anything is called critical to U.S. security.
cc (via web forms) March 19, 2011: 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, House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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Another president puts the muzzle on Congress in deciding war.
On the basis of stopping violence against civilians, preserving the security of the U.S. and its allies, and upholding the word of international bodies, President Obama laid down an ultimatum for Libya’s Gaddafi, much as George Bush did to Saddam Hussain, to cease fire, pull back from the rebel areas it has retaken, and reestablish utility services.The president assured that there would not be any deployment of ground troops, and that no further objectives beyond preventing violence against civilians would be pursued.
The president invoked the title of “Commander-in-Chief,” saying that as such, sending the military into conflict is one of the most difficult decisions he has.
Point is, HE DOESN’T HAVE IT! The title “Commander in Chief,” ascribed to the president in the Constitution, carries with it NO authority to make any decision to send soldiers into conflict situations... none!
Further, Gaddafi fighting against armed rebels is NOT fighting civilians, an important distinction that it seems will be completely ignored in another rush to involve the U.S. in yet another conflict, even pushing the situation, perhaps for the president to show strength, because hours before he made his announcement, Gaddafi announced a complete cease fire being immediately put into effect, showing that he still has the backbone flexibility to back down, as he did with WMD after the invasion of Iraq.
And the U.S. has no obligation, and the president no authority to give weight to the words of international organizations with the blood of its soldiers, one of the justifications the president cited for taking military action if Gaddafi doesn’t abide by the conditions of the ultimatum.
It appears that the only way this continued abuse of power will ever end is when either a member of Congress takes an injunction against the president to the Supreme Court, which is a step either side is reluctant to take, because the current majority on the Court has already demonstrated that its politics are more important than the Constitution, and they would be more likely to affirm the stripping of constitutional war power from the Congress. Another way would be if any member of the military refused to follow orders to participate in actions against Libya without congressional authorization, in which case, the process would begin with a lower court, and if ruled against the president, the case would still eventually wind up in the hands of George Bush’s Supreme Court majority.
It is inconceivable to see in what way the abused war-power authority is viewed as ever having been beneficial to the United States. Sadly, it seems there is no interest in restoring the Constitution’s separation of powers, not from Congress, from which the power is being abducted, and not the people, from whom the decision to commit the country to violence is farther removed when snatched from their elected representatives, and certainly not from the founders, who were specific enough about it in the Constitution, and also in their “side-bar” statements on power.
“Listen” to the words of Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” and think of how they apply to today’s evolution of his government. He begins with multiple expressions regarding the abuse of power, and then goes on to address the careless relinquishing of power in trying times, an issue hotly alive with the concerns of the Patriot Act, the continuing attempts by presidents to grab power with legislative sign-offs, particularly pronounced with George Bush, the use of fear to gain support for accumulating ever greater and farther-reaching powers, as with the Patriot Act, and attacks against the judiciary, supported by George Bush and Republicans during his administration, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who, along with John Boehner and Steve Chabot, have been Pavlov-reflexed to salivate the Bush line on Iraq and carry it into this century, ignorantly claiming enthusiastic support for all the harm that war has imposed and will impose, and also continuing to claim that the war there has prevented attacks in the U.S., when, in fact, it has not.
The president stated that, somehow, Gaddafi, a mouse in a desert region of ally cats, threatens the security of the U.S. and its allies, an obligatory statement, not a truth, for presidents to invoke as they step beyond the power of their office to commit the nation to conflict.
Madison mistrusted so much power in the hands of a single man, and rightly so, writing:
“All men having power ought to be mistrusted.”
“I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”
“If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”
By “tyranny,” Madison refers to the more subtle abuse of the minority by the majority—not so much a Nazi or Genghis Kahn or al-Assad type of violent repression and control, though that would be the possible result of an excess allowed to go too far. Today, it’s tyranny in reverse, with the minority abusing the majority through internal voting rules that establish unconstitutional majority-vote requirements affecting passage of legislation (the Senate’s 60-vote rule to cut-off filibuster). Nip it in the bud would be Madison’s strong warning. Nip it in the bud would be Madison’s strong warning. He goes on:
“The loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or imagined, from abroad.”
“The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.”
“No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
These quotes of Madison are a stern warning and a justification for the separating of war powers from the office of the president, except in cases where immediate defense against attack must be mounted, and all have bearing upon today’s choices for citizens, Congress, the courts, and the unfounded claims of presidents that the power to decide on war in their hands will keep America safe, or in any particular case, keep fighting away from U.S. streets.
On war power, specifically, and the intent to keep it far from the president, as written in the Constitution, the Founders were clear and direct:
Madison: “The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.”
Thomas Jefferson, the third president, before Madison, wrote to reaffirm this undeniable intent: “As the executive cannot decide the question of war on the affirmative side, neither ought it to do so on the negative side, by preventing the competent body [Congress] from deliberating on the question.”
Founder Alexander Hamilton wrote to say how the other side of the coin also stays the president’s hand with respect to war power: “[It is] the duty of the Executive to preserve peace till war is declared.”
The Constitution’s Articles cannot be altered or sidestepped with legislation or by presidential directives. They can only be changed or removed by the purposefully difficult process of amendment. The War Powers Act is unconstitutional, and the cost of allowing presidential discretion with war powers beyond constitutional limits has cost Americans dearly, most recently, the cost of more than 4,400 lives in Iraq; it has set back American foreign policy, has created more hatred and more opportunity for enemies to gather the forces to be launched against America that will cause irrevokable harm to American society and the American way of life. The harm it has done could fill an encyclopedia.
It is time for Congress to put presidents on actionable notice that when they make decisions about sending military forces into conflict that they have overstepped their authority. The time for political games and adventures must be ended, because the allowances they assume have for too long strayed to quash the guidelines and restraints which constitute America’s heritage, contained within the Constitution and its associated wealth of documents and written history. It has already been proven it is foolhardy to continue to ignore them.
America stands on the precipice of another exclusion of Congress from debating and deciding upon an issue that invokes their most significant responsibility and authority, its muzzling hastened by another president insistent on expanding the power of his office across the boundary set for it in the Constitution.
If one man decides on use of military force, it cannot be an extension of power representing the popular sovereignty of a democratic nation.
cc (via web forms) March 18, 2011: 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, House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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End America’s age of perpetual war by resting a decision to begin another in proper hands.
The vote of the U.N. Security Council, within the last few hours, to authorize all action necessary to prevent the slaughter of civilians in Libya does not authorize the president to bring U.S. military force to bear there because:1. There is no evidence of genocide or the slaughter of civilians by the Gaddafi regime. The regime is fighting armed rebels.
2. The president knows and Secretary of State Clinton has already said that the U.S. has insufficient knowledge to know who the factions are, and if they defeated the regime with outside help, if they would be another case of Palestine, where Hamas won elections, or Iraq, where al-Maliki is showing strong anti-democratic intentions, or worse, if Islamic radicals akin to Taliban might take control. The U.S. just does not know.
3. The repercussions of U.S. military involvement are unknowable, as are how or when the military might be disengaged.
4. The U.S. is involved in two active military adventures and doesn’t need another. Defense Secretary Gates has advised against use of force there primarily because of an overstretched military, and the budget is also overstretched.
5. There is NO THREAT to U.S. security posed by either the victory or overthrow of Gaddafi, or by the fighting. Committing troops and risking their lives would NOT be in defense of the United States.
6. The only beneficiary of any military action in Libya would be the components of the military-industrial complex, where the borrowed tax dollars to buy arms and equipment and fuel, and to hire private contractors would have to be borrowed as a burden upon the next generation, with the lives lost there a burden now.
7. There would be lives lost, mostly civilians... there always are, and civilians of all ages and sex always carry the greatest burden of casualties.
8. Engaging with Libya is not the way to begin disengaging the perpetual state of U.S. conflict that has been engineered by the military-industrial complex and the radical Republican party, of which the former Republican President and WWII Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower specifically, and with the strongest possible words, warned. His warning has been ignored, to the detriment of America’s present and future. It is time to end foolishness and any sense of modern-world superiority, and begin heeding the warnings of America’s greatest leaders and following the structural dictates of one of the world’s greatest documents, describing a government of free men and women, forged through conflict, controversy and compromise on a foundation of democracy by America’s greatest patriots.
9. Democracy is a harsh taskmaster. It didn’t come easily to the colonists and it still hasn’t come to Iraq or Egypt. If enough of the people do not want it badly enough to fight for it and take it, it will not succeed by intrusion of external forces. A new regime will be created that either acts in its own interests, as Gaddafi does now, or as a corrupt partner with external powers that funnel vast sums of money to support it, as is the case in Iraq and Afghanistan. The people of Libya have shown neither the intensity of resolve or design of structure necessary to bring about the birth of a democracy. More of them have shown an inclination to hide, switch sides, and immigrate than stand up for themselves with the rebels, and American soldiers cannot be ordered to stand up for them, risking their lives to force the creation of democratic environments anywhere. That’s the mission of the military-industrial complex, not the American people, and not the Constitution.
10. CONGRESS HAS PROVIDED NO AUTHORIZATION FOR MILITARY ACTION AND ANY TAKEN WITHOUT IT WOULD BE UNCONSTITUTIONAL, even with a U.N. Security Council resolution to use force. To allow a foreign body to dictate the deployment of U.S. forces would be UNCONSTITUTIONAL, and it cannot be done through treaty or any other means, except to amend the Constitution so that it no longer vests/expresses the sole authority for use of force to be within Congress. Congress must pass a resolution to authorize the president to execute military action authorized by the U.N. Security Council. President Obama cannot act on the U.N. resolution alone. If any conflict is truly vital to America, a majority of its peoples’ representatives in Congress will see it, or can be made to see it, but it is their explicit right to agree in majority to or not to authorize the president to unleash that force.
President Obama has been absolutely correct to refrain from military action in Libya, to ignore the war-calls of the militarists, like Sen. McCain and presidential hopeful, Rudy Giuliani. Secretary Clinton explained the reasons why not very well, and the president has only failed in specifying a recognition that he needs more than just the U.N. Security Council resolution and the approval of the African Union. He has not said that he knows he must get authority from Congress. As a student of the Constitution, he surely knows this. As a president, he may be tempted to forget it and extend past-practice of silent ceding and taking of power. As a Presidentialist, who creates interpretations and authorities that are not written and do not exist (therefore would defer to the states), that are not expressed, he would ignore the Constitution’s Article-I requirement that the collective minds and hearts of the people’s representatives make the decision, after debate, on when to deploy deadly military force, putting the lives of their soldier-citizens at risk, never any one man, never the executive; otherwise the decision to use military force becomes corrupt and cannot be an extension of power representing the popular sovereignty of a democratic nation.
The President, as Commander in Chief, is the facilitator of the will of Congress in matters of war, and is subordinate to that body.
cc (via web forms) March 17, 2011: 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, House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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Always knew cold-heartedness was true, but never thought it would be so plainly revealed.
The capitalist-extremists at CNBC never showed their naked callousness as well as “The Call’s” co-anchor, Larry Kudlow, when he delivered his situation summary on the markets’ mid-day upturn at the close of the show, saying of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, “The human toll seems to be a lot worse than the economic toll, and we can be grateful for that.”His words, falling like cubes from the tray, were unchallenged by his two co-hosts, and one can only guess that all the capitalists puritans who work at and watch CNBC, and who tie their de-regulatory hopes (to shed costly rules protecting public safety from reckless, corporate profiteering) to the Republican party, that they are thankful one of their kind, a caring guy like Larry, is there at CNBC to make sure they have their moral compasses pointed in the right direction (Hades) and their humanity locked away there in the basement safe. That’s what Mr. Kudlow showed to be the really true intent, no slip of the tongue, and how effortlessly it was delivered, from just under the skin.
The world according to Kudlow, without apology: Better that people suffer a hit than investors take a loss.
The death toll from the tsunami, climbing all morning, had reached at least 300 before Kudlow cut loose with his black-hearted [1,500 the 3rd day after], but truly Republican (as the party has devolved since Eisenhower) sentiment, the goal of which is burned into their platform, to strip regulatory funding and enforcement (reduce the size of government) in every industry. And if you don’t care about the people, regulation (democracy) is just an annoyance that gets in the way of more profit, ergo, the market/corporate/personal profit is what comes first, a point many co-anchors at CNBC reveal in their banter, though never with quite the blatant, casual stab to the heart with which their peer delivered it in this day of tragedy upon tragedies.
Postscript:
On Monday, March 14, during a late-morning ad-spot for his evening, CNBC-show interview with House Speaker Boehner, Mr. Kudlow, the above-referenced co-host for CNBC’s The Call, apologized for what he described as his “slip... out of context,” and went on to offer obligatory sentiments about the loss of life in Japan that should have been spoken when he originally said that it was gratifying the human toll of the quake and tsunami was a lot greater than the economic one. His quote (above) certainly was not taken out of context, as Kudlow didn’t quite say, but implied while including the word “context” in his apology, and there was no stutter, or hint, or pause (except the dead silence that followed his remark) to indicate it was a slip on his part. And if you didn’t see it, you can’t decide for yourself either, because Kudlow’s closing remark is—shades of Nixon—cut-out from the stream of the show segment that’s posted on The Call’s web page.
Maybe it was a slip. Maybe that can be the Squawk’s next poll. But, sometimes people in the public eye just let the truth pop out there to lay naked on the stage; think Mel Gibson, Michael Richards (Kramer), and Kudlow, their true priorities, feelings, or lack thereof showing, apart from what is widely acceptable, like Gov. Walker, but without the fake Koch brother on the phone, and then, when called on it, unless they’re Charlie Sheen, they apologize, offering excuses, like it was a slip, or heard or said out of context, or that they were misunderstood, or they didn’t understand what was said that preceded the remark, therefore the remark is invalid, or it didn’t come out the way it was intended, etc., etc., and then they say all the things they know to be the right things to say, even if they can’t really feel them. This not only seems to be the case with respect to Kudlow’s original remarks, but it also seems to fit in with the air that hovers above his social indications, which can be inferred from some of the comments that accrue to form the image of the man, and that seemed to be so well reinforced by what he now calls his “slip.” The fact he also says his remark was not in context, which it most definitely was, and that he chose to offer the apology on a call-out segment, during a commercial break where it is less likely to be heard, yet, nonetheless said, rather than during the show he co-hosts, where the comment was made, makes his apology seem all the more disingenuous.
But whether Kudlow’s apology is really genuine or is provided as a job-keeper can only be known by Kreskin and those who really know Kudlow. Regardless, he is now more suspect than ever, as wearing the same shoes as the 1800’s industrialist who drank rare Scotch paid for with the labor of the sweat shops he owned, holding the noses of children to the grindstone, letting women go up in his burning factories, most of which abuses came to an end as the result of the unions and democratic reforms of which he and so many at CNBC seem so often to refer to with such disdain, as must be expected, it seems, from those who serve the “capitalist” investment community. And it is the investment community that is served by Kudlow and CNBC, because most everyone else is working (and not in banks or investment firms) and not watching or listening to the occasional inhumanities that spring forth, floating through the airwaves on that particular, soiled feather of the peacock’s once proud and more brightly-colored tail.
Was CNBC co-anchor, Larry Kudlow’s apology, for remarks about Japanese lives lost genuine? — http://popularsovranty.org/index.shtml#cnbclk
cc (via web forms) March 14, 2011: House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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War-power constraints gassed and glassed.
Sent to: Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA)
Chairman, Personnel Subcommittee, Senate Committee on Armed Services
March 11, 2011Senator Webb, you replied to my letter about military involvement in Libya by writing: “I have strongly cautioned against unilateral U.S. military action in Libya.”
Your reply was a form letter, and I doubt any letters are read by you, because whether your sentence, above, means unilateral, executive, military action or unilateral, national, military action, the entire point of my letter, which was unmistakable, was that you should know the president cannot constitutionally do anything militarily in Libya without congressional authorization. So why are Senators McCain and Kerry urging him to take such actions, when they should be talking to their peers to get a majority vote on a resolution to direct the president to act, if that’s what they want. Apparently, because they are “Presidentialists.” Again, you say, “strongly cautioned against,” as though you believe the president can unilaterally go ahead and deploy troops or other military assets without a majority of senators’ approval, and that you must plead for him to abstain!
I am not aware of any treaties or resolutions of Congress, or law that provides prior authorization for the president to deploy military assets, which would be an unconstitutional device, significantly changing the Constitution without amendment process. And even with a U.N. Security Council resolution in his hand to, say, establish a no-fly zone, the president would still be required to at least get the Senate to ratify it before troops could be sent in. Otherwise, the Congress would be placing the authority to put U.S. lives at risk, to deploy deadly force against another people, in the hands of the president alone or foreign nationals! Either circumstance would be blatantly against the intent of the Founders, as written in the Constitution, and by several of the most influential of them, including Madison, in other letters and publications, all of which you should be aware, as should every senator and representative.
None of the statements made by Secretary Clinton or the president over the last several weeks allude to the congressional-authorization requirement, and I am sure they, as all modern presidents, wish it to be otherwise, but it is not. Military force should only be decided upon by the collective minds and hearts of elected members of Congress, never by any one man, as was the case when the Founders and their neighbors were the subjects of abuses and imprisonment and death at the hands of King George III’s troops. Collective agreement is the Founders’ intent, and that is how they wrote the war powers into Article I, reserving ONLY the power of the president to respond to a precipitously imminent or on-going attack on his own, in Article II. All other powers relating to the military are vested in Congress, in Article I.
The designation of “Commander-in-Chief” is just a title, overused in inappropriate venues, worn by the president as a facilitator for achieving the goals and objectives specified and authorized by Congress, not an empowerment for any authority to initiate military actions of any kind, except the aforementioned defense against attack. Failure to abide by this restriction of exclusion costs lives, imposes great costs, and hastens a darkened future for us all. It is a failed policy, to silently cede military power to the executive. I hope you will begin to assert the will of the Founders in your responsibilities as a U.S. Senator.
I don’t believe President Obama would ever use military power unwisely or brashly. But the Founders specified military power to be projected from within Congress because, besides their personal experience at the end of the sword of a military ordered upon them from afar by one man, they recognized a bad president could be elected, and they intended that separation of military power from the executive would protect the nation from a power-drunk, or otherwise deviant president, like George Bush. If the protections the Founders built into the Constitution are going to be effective, then they must be universally respected and uniformly followed. Otherwise there will be more unnecessary, criminal, or misguided abuses of military power that leave our budgets depleted, our global perception stained, and our men and women and many more innocent foreign nationals maimed and dead, as has always been the case.
The Constitution is not a relic to be encased in gas and glass and displayed to tourists. It is the framework of American government and law, and it cannot be permitted to be contorted, distorted, mal-interpreted, propagandized, or ignored any longer. This past practice of the “Presidentialists” to grab congressional power in military matters, and the tendency of the Congress not to jealously guard its expressed powers, as the Founders counted upon, as a trait of human nature to preserve the separation of powers and limit the power of the executive, must end. And with your distinguished military background and influence, you should be the one who strives to be like Eisenhower, when he warned of the dangers of the Military-Industrial complex, and be the leader in Congress, to warn and claw-back and stand against further ceding of congressional war power to the executive, before you retire from office, to make the point that the war power is to be construed with the broadest scope and that it resides within Congress, according to the Constitution, not with the president, and make going to war/battle/police action—no matter, it’s all subject to the war powers in Article I—make it, the committing of American lives, make it the collective decision of elected men and women that it must be if conflict is to be an extension of popular sovereignty, and not the campaign of a unitary, closeted collective, as it is if the president acts on his or her own to deploy, only consulting with cabinet officers and “appropriate personnel,” like Dick Cheney did when he had his secret meeting with energy executives to plan the deployment of oil-drilling and storage equipment and personnel to Iraq, to arrive within a week after troops invaded and secured the fields—certainly, no implication of Cheney’s actions or character upon this president should be derived.
If the resistance of Congress to exercise its constitutional authority and responsibility has been because of the time it takes to get authority the constitutional way, well, first of all, that is the idea, when not responding to an attack, which is expressed to the executive in Article II, and there is also a constitutional method to compress the process of authorization, to greatly speed a decision of denial or approval, to get the ball rolling quickly in seemingly consensual situations. But if the resistence is in order to avoid congressional responsibility for decisions of military involvement, then shame on you all!
The president, in his press conference on the day of the Great Japan Quake, talked about taking careful action before engaging in any military action, “with international participation, after consulting with the secretary of defense, the Joint Chief, and other appropriate personnel,” when the first entity he should be talking about getting together with is... Congress! Is the “other appropriate personnel” of which the president spoke supposed to be you—Congress? The Constitution specifies the derivation of war powers, in Article I, as Congress. The president’s implied designation is, himself, and his expressed designation of participating authorities, appropriate personnel, is extremely vague, and where in the formation of the United States did the Founders ever specify that the executive can “conspire” to deploy the military with whatever vague counsel he may wish to engage? It’s not in Article II, and the president can’t cross over to Article I. The president’s specification is only valid when he is acting upon congressional authority as Commander-in-Chief, consulting with whomever he chooses regarding the tactics, composition, and coordination of forces, equipment, and allies he must direct to achieve the goals he has been authorized to pursue. It’s all very clear-cut, except in Congress and the Oval Office.
You and the rest of the chamber need to start doing what is necessary so that presidents begin thinking and speaking with the proper priority about who makes military-policy decisions and decides about initiating engagements. If you let presidents take the power, they will, for good or ill. Again, the title “Commander-in-Chief,” is nothing more than the cap the president wears in order to facilitate the will of Congress in directing the military when so authorized by Congress, to achieve goals and objectives authorized by Congress! Nothing more. And within that authority, it is the president’s discretion as to how (not if) to deploy force to achieve the authorized objectives. That’s the way the Constitution requires it be done. And McCain knows this, but he is a facilitator of the military-industrial complex, and as such, he recognizes that a constitutionally-defined chain of war-power authority would mean that it would be much more difficult to precipitate campaigns, and I suspect he still dreams of being president and wants the power within that office, free of any obligation to Congress or subordination to its authority.
Other than the specified, Article II authority to unilaterally defend against ongoing or immediately precipitous attack (the modern-day equivalent of seeing the masts of the King’s approaching frigates appear over the horizon), the Constitution only permits the president to make his case for military action to Congress for approval, to sell it, if he believes it is necessary to initiate use of deadly force of the military anywhere in the world. It is never his or her decision to make unilaterally. There is no “go” button in the White House to initiate aggression. Further, if the majority in Congress votes a resolution to withdraw all troops from Iraq, or establish a no-fly zone in Libya, the president must carry out those authorizations, even if he does not agree. With war powers, the Constitution doesn’t even afford the executive a veto, which speaks to how important the Founders believed it to be that the power be excluded from that branch. The nation has suffered greatly, still suffers, because of the abandoning of this important constitutional constraint. You, at least, can begin the process of restoring it.
Obama took away the voice of Americans when he decided on his own to attack Libya, excluding Congress—the branch closest to America’s voice.
cc (via web forms) March 11, 2011: White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Rep. Zoe. Lofgren, House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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Isn’t it odd...?
Isn’t it odd that the offspring of Germany’s Nazi soldiers are today exercising freedoms that have been stripped from their freedom-fighting, conquerors’ children by Wisconsin Republicans, democratic freedoms which are soon to also be ripped away from descendants of Ohio’s WWII-soldiers by Ohio’s Republican majority? Germany’s war descendants now enjoy membership in public-employee unions and are striking over their employment conditions.This is hardly representative of high-sounding, Republican sound-bites and promises, or a result expected from votes cast in the alleged interest of democracy. And the suppression of democratic freedoms by these states’ governments has little if anything at all to do with budget crises, which in public negotiations require responsibility on the part of government negotiators, which has been absent, not addressed by Republicans who, since they’ve been mostly in charge, are also largely responsible, and for which those irresponsible have not been held to account. Abolishing democratic freedoms does not accomplish that or save taxpayers’ purses from negligent elected officials or their hired, often over-compensated administrators/managers in any level of government. It is just another sign of American democracy in decline.
cc (via web forms) March 10, 2011: 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, House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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George Bush, as president, claimed he was “the Great Decider.” BUNK!
The Constitution is clear: Congress has the war powers, not the president.The Founders did not intend and the Constitution does not allow any one man to decide, or to, as George Bush claimed, stand as “the Great Decider” on matters of war—that power resides only in Congress!
Think of it this way: the Constitution bestows the title of “Commander-in-Chief” over the military to the president, but Congress is empowered as Commander-in-Chief of the president!
The president, as Commander-in-Chief, is the facilitator of the will of Congress in matters of war and is subordinate to that body, to the exclusion of command intrusion or micro-management by Congress in the direction of the military to achieve authorized goals/objectives.
Past-practices of “Presidentialists” to grab power and of Congress to silently cede power does not make constitutional the initiating of military action by the executive without the express authorization of Congress! Such abuse has contributed to the unnecessary, global militarism of the U.S., to the detriment of its future and at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.
With no U.S. lives at risk, President Obama can take NO military action in Libya without the explicit, constitutionally-required authorization of Congress.
Unless previous, congressionally-ratified treaties exist, authorizing the president to act on U.N. resolutions to take military action, Congress must ratify U.N.-approved military actions in Libya.
Congress has constitutional authority to direct the president to execute a no-fly zone in Libya, or to take any other military action, anywhere.
Bottom line: if a majority in Congress wants military action taken, it can direct the president to do it. If the president wants to take military action, he or she must solicit the Congress, sell a majority on the plan to get a decision made granting the authority to proceed. Unless Congress has authorized military actions through law, resolution, or ratification of treaties triggering military action, the president has no authority for any unilateral military action in Libya or anywhere else; with or without U.N. resolutions—Congress must authorize!
And elected government officials must start following the Constitution.
Constitutionally the president is TITLED as military’s Commander in Chief but Congress is EMPOWERED as Commander in Chief of the president!
cc (via web forms) March 7, 2011: White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin
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Democracy cannot be bought with intervention, but it can be given away with apathy.
America can thank its lucky 50 stars that Arizona Senator John McCain was rejected by a slim popular majority in his bid for the presidency in 2008. Not just because it kept Sarah Palin out of the heart-beat chair, but because otherwise, America would at this moment be at war in Libya, risking American lives in the same way that they were wasted in Iraq, not for national defense, but for an unproven assertion, in this case, that genocide is being carried out by Libyan dictator Gaddafi, through the use of military aircraft to bomb citizens.McCain is a leading supporter and propagator of the military-industrial complex, the objective of that entity being to initiate and maintain military involvement throughout the world, spurring the growth of the military, the entrenchment of military activism in American life, and the sales of military hardware to “allies,” as has been done in Iraq with orders for tanks and F-16 Falcon fighter jets, and where its prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is acting like a dictator, insulated with a private army, paid for with more than 4,400 American lives and billions of homeland-needed dollars. At least half of America’s citizens cannot remember a time when they would watch the TV news and not see a report on American troops in conflict. For them, war has long ago become like a constant, distracting noise that the brain tunes out, but nonetheless absorbs. This militarism contributes to the decline of America through an imposed sense of gloom and death, at home, where a nation in constant conflict can only be perceived as a nation falling deeper into failure, and in the occupied nations abroad, where the constant presence of troops inflicts a sense of oppression and external reformation of culture, instilling hated, sustaining and growing the spread of those who choose to join together to inflict harm upon America in return. President Obama is right to ignore the likes of McCain and heed the strongly worded advice of his Defense Secretary, against any new military action, because a no-fly zone is an expensive and risky undertaking that America cannot in any way afford, and the outcomes and consequences are indeterminate.
McCain hasn’t learned the lessons of Iraq, probably because he was on the inside of the planning and deceptions, and there is no evidence of genocide in Libya. It is to be expected that some demonstrators and rebels will claim atrocities and air strikes against them, but American lives can never again be carelessly put at risk on the basis of unsubstantiated claims. A few pieces of shaky film contain the sound of jets and the rising smoke that resembles a bomb having gone off, but there is no proof that the sound of the video wasn’t altered to add the jet, or that the jet wasn’t just a fly-over, or that the smoke comes from bombs dropped by an aircraft, or that if there were, that they weren’t dropped on munitions or weapons armories to keep them from falling into rebel’s hands, which is not genocide. Indiscriminate, widespread killing of unarmed civilians is just cause to impose military force to end it, but if that is the case, it would be recognized by multi-national observers, and America would be able to proceed with at least the cursory consent of international forums if not with their participation.
The kind of thinking about military activism with which McCain and the dominating fringe of the Republican party is ingrained must end. President Obama recognizes that there can also be no impulsive reaction with military force to solve problems in international situations. In previous Republican administrations, America’s military has sprawled to cover the world, and the president should do more to roll-back that reach, including closing of many military bases around the world, a total withdrawal from Iraq, and complete withdrawal of ground troops from Afghanistan, where the war was won more than eight years ago with the defeat and ousting of the Taliban regime and the scattering of al Qaeda to the four winds, where the core of America’s strength, democracy, is drifting as well.
Democracy is “People” generated and sustained. If democracy is to succeed in any revolution, the people must want it so badly that they are willing to sacrifice in great numbers to obtain it, not flee to other nations or cower in their homes while the military of another nation confronts their oppressors for them. This is why democracy is failing to take hold in Iraq and is not yet even a plausible hope in Afghanistan. And it is also why public ignorance and apathy is the greatest factor contributing to the crumbling of democracy in America, with serious intrusions into the mechanics of popular sovereignty, political equality, and political liberty—democracy’s foundations.
America’s most important fight for democracy is in its own backyard, and the choking grip of the weeds on the once-grassy lives of its people is alarming and must begin to be met with the gravest attention and resolve.
cc (via web forms) March 6, 2011: 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. Max Baucus, House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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Bachmann contrives party rhetoric to attack democracy’s mechanisms, disguise motivations of greed.
Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (R-MN) statement, in a speech in Massachusetts, placing the revolutionary battles of Lexington and Concord in New Hampshire, has demonstrated that she doesn’t really know or understand the pivotal events that cumulated in the formation of the country and its Constitution, that her qualifications for government office and knowledge of American history are only what’s worn on the skin, tucked away from view beneath the cloth. Her level of ignorance gives pause to consider a requirement for senators and representatives to pass tests in American history and civics before they can be placed on the ballet. Elected officials, like Congresswoman Bachmann, who do not know America’s history or understand the Constitution and their obligations to it, lead America into further and accelerated decline of its democracy.She is also a hypocrite, receiving more than $225,000 in unneeded government farm subsidies for her claimed farm residence, while complaining that the “welfare” Americans in real trouble receive is “socialism,” and that subsidies should not be provided to homeowners who could otherwise make their adjusted payments to stay in their homes, failing to understand or care about the democratic intents of specified homeowner aid: that aside from the loss of the home for the homeowners and payment revenues for the banks, the defaulted homes also devalue the neighborhoods for other residents and add to the loss of municipal-level revenues, increasing the burdens for remaining homeowners. Bachmann, like other extremist Republicans, opposes measures that provide benefit to broader swaths of people and institutions if it might cost wealthy taxpayers another cent, despite her readiness to take those benefits for herself, disguising the push-back against the wealthy paying more of their fair share as being instead based in opposition to “socialism” and “big government.”
While some Republicans, and others who are also abusers of the government’s democratic benefits, may see no wrong in or forgive Bachmann’s abuses and hypocrisy, not knowing history is an invitation to repeat its mistakes. Voters, especially those who voted for Republicans who are not striping democratic rights from workers, should ask themselves if America really needs another shallow, show-business, anti-democracy political figure in office, much less to be elevated beyond a seat in the House of Representatives that she has already demonstrated she is unqualified to hold by virtue of her lack of knowledge, morals, or democratic appreciation and value?
Minnesota’s voters have a history of bold, electoral experimentation, with the verdict still out but winking in favor of the former comedian, Al Franken. But Minnesotans should do themselves and the nation a favor by throwing Bachmann out where she belongs, into the failed bin, to lie in the wreckage of Minnesota’s political history, along with others for whom the demands and requirements of government service proved to be beyond the scope of their capabilities, like Jesse “The Body” Ventura, though Jesse is wronged by sharing that bin of failed service with Bachmann, since she lacks the quality of his good intentions.
March 15, 2011
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a President Hucklebee?
Huckabee the wannabe shows he thinks low.
Leading Republican presidential wannabe Mike Huckabee is to politics what Tonya Harding is to figure skating: classless, making knee-whacking, personal attacks with his incorrect comments about the president’s past, his father, Kenya, and the Winston Churchill bust in the Oval Office that Obama replaced with one of Lincoln. It all demonstrates that he is incapable of meeting the president or a presidential campaign on the issues.In another case of Huckabee’s mispoken criticism, his hypocrisy shows through loud and clear, as well as his “Bermuda Triangled” moral compass, when he points out actress Natalie Portman for her decision to have children out of wedlock, while he strongly praised the same situation in the case of cohort Sarah Palin’s daughter. And if there was ever a good reason why he is unqualified to be president, it’s because he can’t, at this time, decide if he wants to give up his well-paid media career to endure the burden of running for office! How about the burdens of the office itself, which any dedicated candidate would feel and embrace with the passion to do something worthwhile, passion which is obviously lacking in Huckabee, who only wants an easy path to celebrity attention and power—to abuse, in support of the socially-intrusive and highly-selective ideals embraced by his weak democratic (i.e. democracy) character.
President Huckabee? America can do better... is doing better than the likes of him, much better.
March 5, 2011
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Trump as U.S. president is as scary as this to consider.
Trump plays TV, plays real-estate games into bankruptcy, must not play the White House.
Donald Trump wants to become one bullet in a Derringer pointed at the national head, as an expert speaking in oxymorons to create conundrums. He said he is seriously “considering running for president” (of the United States) because, he said, “I hate what’s happening to the country... it’s being ridiculed.”“I work all the time.” This was the reason Donald Trump gave, in a April 16 speech, for his two divorces, and as another qualification for being president.
What it really shows, and what his continual harping on the non-issue of President Obama’s birthplace, is that he doesn’t know how to bring balance to his life and his priorities. America doesn’t need a president who works all the time as much as it needs a president who understands the necessity for balance and strong family values, because balance and family values are the cores of structural strength that extend into business and government as qualities that weigh on success.
The Donald was thoroughly lambasted at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner, and as C-SPAN cameras focused on him while jokes about him flew, he was clearly trying to kill the speaker with his stony stare, Saturday Night Live’s lead writer, Seth Meyer. Besides being called “The Donald,” there’s something about the character of a guy who can’t laugh at himself that makes him especially unqualified to be in any kind of political power, especially when he is as laughable as Trump.
Sarah Palin is the other bullet, and with the Trump revelation, one of the greatest dangers of Palinism is clarified: any clown with one foot in entertainment (or politics) who thinks about being president is no longer daydreaming, but actually believes it is not only possible, but that it would actually be good for the country.
It would be gratifying if the voters would set this sickly-comic thinking straight, but polls of November 2010 have indicated that Sarah Palin scored in the neighborhood of 40 percent among some groups, a long way from a majority as polls go, but a nonetheless alarming total that gives rational people palpable cause to fear the public as much as Iranian nucs or the image of Palin or Trump seated behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. One can only think that these unthinking or faulty-thinking voters don’t realize that, these days, electing a president is on many levels a life-or-death proposition, and that, to them, Russian Roulette would not be too dangerous, even if played with a Derringer.
Loading the likes of Sarah Palin and Donald Trump as presidential candidates is like playing Russian Roulette with a Derringer.
cc (via web forms) December 13, 2010: 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; House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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Is a nationally beneficial integration of democracy and capitalism the impossible dream?
Despite the assurances of American presidents that motives of conquest and political interference and control are not behind the policies and actions taken by government, capitalism, which is supported by American government and defines much of its history, is heartless and wants to conquer the world and the minds and purses of all its viable population.Capitalism is the doctrine of financial and resource control and exchange which demands that the avenues of profit dictate the priorities of the players, while corporatism is the structure of capitalism’s component pieces which defines and executes the operable concepts of growth and profit. These doctrines and structures exist solely, with the least expenditure of investment in the mechanics of the system (production and administrative machinery and operators) as possible, to bring as great a profit as possible, as quickly as possible to those who are shareholders of the enterprise.
In America, all of this must operate within a democracy, which is supposed to be structured upon popular sovereignty, political equality, and political liberty, which define the ability of “people” to participate in self-determination. Herein is set upon the nation the conflict, defined by the contrary interests of those who live within and work as component parts of the economic structure, with the power to set the laws defining the boundaries within which that structure must be constrained, and those who own and control the structure, whose purpose is to minimize constraints and operating costs to prioritize enriching themselves.
Democracy places restraints upon capitalism through laws and regulations, which in turn places the imperative upon selfish capitalism to seek control of democracy in order to preserve its operative freedom and minimize its costs, even if those costs are designed to protect capitalism’s operable components and the broader structure of its economic foundation. The history of America, particularly since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, has been the struggle to strike a balance between the interests of these two structures, capitalism and democracy, to merge the best characteristics of both into one system that is beneficial to the nation, its people, as well as its mechanisms of prosperity.
Today, there is little balance, the rich are richer, the poor poorer, the middle class, which has been at the core of America’s prosperity during the last half of the 20th century, is shrinking like the glaciers and democracy is in a terminal moraine at the leading edge of the down-slide, crumbling apart, all three components that define it under attack and structurally weakened. And, as the melting and caving of the glaciers is a self-precipitating process, hastening their destruction, so to is the subtle, furtive tearing-apart of democracy by the extreme capitalism favored increasingly by successive Republican administrations over the last 50 years.
Priorities of all government officials, especially Supreme Court Justices, should be nation- and Constitution-biased, not party or special interest of any leaning. Capitalism and free enterprise must be preserved, as the most efficient and successful means by which prosperity and growth can be achieved, but not to extremes, at the expense of democracy and its three, “people-centered” foundational components.
In the Supreme Court, the branch of government designed by the Founders to be the Constitution’s guardian, most recently, the unethical actions of Justice Thomas and the ruling of the Republican-appointed majority in “Citizens United” have contributed most drastically to place democracy deeper under threat, being severely weakened by a structural eroding of its foundations of: 1) popular sovereignty, through the Citizens ruling and special-interest control of legislators through campaign contributions—the flawed/corrupted election process, making American government more and more to be of, by, and for the wealthy, not the people; 2) political equality, again through the Citizens ruling and the flawed and corrupted election process, giving weight to special interests and the voices of the “haves” over the “have-nots,” and due to the process and costs that are barriers to prospective candidates for office — in America’s political system, money-talk is heard; and 3) political liberty, where while anyone can speak, how and where they can speak, and more important, how and where they can be heard is controlled by special interests, most severely, for democracy, through conglomerated control of the Fourth Estate, limiting the range of responsible voices and sources for opinion, reporting of fact, and oversight of government officials and their activities, which removes any wonder about why Republicans want to de-fund PBS and NPR, which leads all of that which remains as journalism in America in exposing abuses. And political liberty is curtailed through the party system of biased self-interest and control, through rules-setting in Congress and state/local legislatures, to gerrymandering, also responsible for promoting and preserving partisan gridlock.
The combined effect of the erosion of these three legs in the foundation of democracy is that America is, at best, a quasi-democracy that panders to the wealthy, encouraging the growth of the wealth divide between those who can afford boats and airplanes and those who can’t afford houses, health care, or food, diminishing the middle class, and through the corrupted election process, diverting legislators’ time from committee and legislative work to fund-raising and special-interest pandering, resulting in subverted regulatory and enforcement actions and failures of oversight that precipitate death and destruction, as has been the case since the Industrial Revolution, with mining disasters, factory fires, airline crashes, oil exploration and refining, environmental and economic disasters, lack of preparedness for natural disasters, and the growth and entrenchment of the military-industrial complex, resulting in the spreading of the American military footprint around the world, the addressing of political, intelligence, and law-enforcement problems with military-attempted-and-failed solutions, the callous imposition of American military and culture, to include offensively viewed sexual-advertising mores into the lands and cultures of other nations, through which the seeds of al Qaeda’s focus against America was born, and which, to oppose, further feeds an invalid expansion of military growth and operations, all of which has resulted in government-devised-and-sanctioned torture, kidnapping, private (unconstitutional) and uniformed army massacres, and further growth of hated and opposition to America and its occupations, not to mention the flawed policies of supporting authoritarian regimes around the world, against the interests of local democratic priorities, which is coming to roost in the Middle East today, and which has been a source and incitement of unrest and violence throughout the world. The evils of diluted and blocked regulation and destructive special-interest spending that are sprung from contribution-funded elections create a long, long string of deleterious effects upon democracy, the American people, the national welfare and future, of which these are only a few of the most obvious.
The attacks against “big government” and the unions—facilitators of collective, populist voice—by the conservatism of the Tea Party and the extremists of the Republican party mainstream are no more than guises for attacking constraints on capitalism’s unregulated, natively-destructive ambition, which is the real objective of government’s regulatory “evil largess,” with capitalism propagandized by the extremists into a victim that is never named, but instead masked, behind facades, as “initiative” or “self-determination” that is lost, or “uncontrolled debt” or “curtailing business expansion and jobs growth” as the woeful results. These are the arguments of the wealthy protecting the profits, interests, and the agenda of the wealthy. Where will be found among the informed middle-class or the poor a supporter of the already-failed, trickle-down, economic platform of the Tea Party or conservative Republicanism? Those who do are no different than brainwashed suicide bombers, punching ballots instead of bomb buttons, taken in to bring about their own demise by a deceptive, self-interested bunch who make a beneficial milk wagon out to be a charging chariot.
The extreme and ludicrous (like Palin, Trump) must be discarded and American democracy restored through, primarily, the banning of all political contributions in place of publicly-funded campaigns, which will remove bribery from legislation and oversight, bring political-campaign operations and time-spans back to the realm of sanity, release the grip of special interests upon legislators and free them to devote their time to their constituents and their constitutional obligations, and make it possible to begin to diminish and end the evils mentioned above that have all sprung from the sprawl of the growth of special-interest control of every aspect of government endeavor, in the name of unfettered capitalist profit and plain bloodsucking of federal revenues through making careers out of working government’s apparatus, integral and ill-constructed for just that purpose.
Where corporate failure and crime at the top has meant being ousted with a bonus and golden parachute, there must instead begin to be real accountability, beyond just Madoff, for wealthy, white-collar, financial terrorists, as well as for presidents, cabinet officials, and justices who break the constitutional covenant with no consequences, beyond to reputation and historical judgement, for anyone, except the real pain which falls upon America’s democracy and people, as has been ever-more common in the last 50 years, where abuses have been the most flagrant and damaging.
The ageless concept of criminal and ethical immunity for high-level political operatives must end, because it strips away the legitimacy of and public faith in government, chipping away at its underlying democracy and its authority. Look to the action being taken now against Egypt’s deposed president, Hosni Mubarak, whose illicit assets are being seized under direction of the Egyptian attorney general, or the prosecution of the former French president, Jacques Chirac, as exercises in accountability that should be standard practice in America, not a rare occurrence that, when pursued, is politically motivated. How hollow is Secretary of State Clinton’s proclamation that, in Libya, Muammar Gaddafi “must be held accountable” for his crimes against his people, when here, torture and kidnapping and illegal wiretaps were made a standard-operating practice, violating constitutional limits and those of international agreements, and those responsible at the top have been held to absolutely none. Therein is another cost of the persistent failure to enforce accountability within America’s government: it has made Sec. Clinton’s and the president’s calls for accountability from other leaders anywhere else illegitimate and hypocritical, and it is a failure, the trail of which runs through Bush, Cheney, leading cabinet members and advisors of that administration, down through the bureaucracy to the like of those agency regulators who bedded with big oil and the banks instead of enforcing regulation of their platforms and transactions.
Those elected and appointed to the highest offices in a true democracy must have the fear of real accountability for unconstitutional and criminal or criminally-negligent acts or performance, just as those beneath them who depend upon collective bargaining do. This will require a priority to prosecute above politicizing by the White House, conveyed down to the attorney general, and the resolve in Congress to cleanse and correct itself, and use the power of impeachment and (implied) withdrawn-confirmation that only it possesses to clean house and enforce ethics, showing a spine not tainted by party—and, in all of this, that seems to be the impossible dream.
cc (via web forms) February 28, 2011: 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, Rep. Zoe. Lofgren, Rep Henry Waxman, Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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Murder awaits the murderer.
Muammar al-Gaddafi is a dead man. Even if he had an invitation for asylum, his insane perspective would prevent him from giving up power. The hatred of the Libyan people for the murderer has been inflamed by the killings of the last two days, and combined with the successful throwing of the yoke in other Mid-East countries over the last month, and the success of demonstrators in holding the eastern region, the revolution will not go away, even in the face of the death of another 1,000 citizens, particularly with increased military and civil-government defections and stronger international opposition.As a consequence, Col. Qaddafi will be assassinated, probably by one of his sons, most likely, Saif, who has already become accustomed to sitting upon throne-like chairs, has shown his true colors in the current turmoil to not be as moderate as once believed, and who has been expecting to eventually take his father’s place. The sons know that if the father is toppled by any other source, they are also out of the palace, and the only chance any one of them has to remain in the throne of abuse and murder is if they take out dad and attempt to placate demonstrators sufficiently to quell the restlessness in the wake of the “Mad Dog’s” removal. The other possibility is that the shot fired will come from the high-ranking military, or someone coerced/paid by them, with the intent of establishing a military dictatorship, and that possibility extends to any of the sons who might assassinate the father to claim the throne.
Internationally, the worst effect of the violence in Libya and the upheavals throughout the Mid East has been inflicted by speculators, not OPEC, and not oil companies, but speculators, who never receive oil shipments, driving up prices through bets in the commodities-futures trade, bringing inflated prices to the pump which are completely severed from the actual state of reserves and production, and which, in the face of Saudi assurances that it will make up any shortfall because of the revolt in Libya, makes the pump and barrel prices nothing more than naked profiteering at the expense of the U.S. economy, greedily carried out without recourse of any kind in the production and retail markets. Thank you, Congress, for allowing this speculative-gambling abuse to further cripple the nation and its recovery from the economic crises, which Congress also facilitated, through lax regulation and no enforcement of criminal banking and investment activity, for which, only one man has been jailed, Bernie Madoff, and only because his theft touched so many of the famed, wealthy, and powerful.
cc (via web forms) February 23, 2011: House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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people who had a reason to cry at that moment were Democrats and progressives.
Crying about having an adult conversation?
Since House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) literally sheds tears over important public issues and is incapable of going deeper than party sound bites using speech, his criticism of the president for not addressing issues with an “adult conversation” is only laughable.
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February 11, 2011 - Mubarak deposed... a chance for democracy.
Congratulations to the Egyptian people, who have removed the figurehead of a corrupt dictatorship, taking a step toward a possible democracy. With the exception of slow-coming words of support, and doubtless, extreme background pressure from President Obama, they did it with no help from America, the administrations of which, for 30 years, have chosen to support a dictator and remain on the wrong side of history. It is mistaken, economic-driven policies of convenience and facilitation that, nonetheless, continue beyond Egypt, with aide and other support to corrupt, authoritarian regimes around the globe, helping to preserve the rule of fear that suppresses their people’s freedoms, robbing them of their wealth and opportunities, and where the major rewards go to a few U.S. corporations. President John F. Kennedy said, of the ambitious goal of landing men on the Moon, that “[America] chooses to do it because it is hard.” It is tragic that American foreign policy constantly chooses not to do the right thing because to do so would be hard and inconvenient to whomever profits otherwise.Praises, also, to the Egyptian army, which stood with the people it is supposed to defend instead of assaulting them as the tool of an authoritarian government.
But the future remains uncertain for Egypt so long as the government remains in the hands of officials who have been a long-standing part of the self-serving Mubarak regime.
One can only wonder when and how George Bush or Dick Cheney will twist reality to somehow claim credit, that the Iraqi invasion contributed toward the apparent Egyptian revolution for democracy, events for which they and their criminal Iraqi invasion have had no part in bringing about, whatsoever.
What awaits for Egypt now is the denouement of free elections to create a civilian government, and a practical demonstration as to the validity of domino theories... will populist movements soon displace other Mid-East, authoritarian regimes?
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Health-care ruling would nullify many federal authorities.
If the obviously political ruling by the federal-court judge in Florida stands, then how could the government ever have had the authority to draft citizens into the armed forces, or have that authority in the future? Where is the difference?In the cases of conscription and health-care payments, components of services which fulfill universal, compulsory needs, the common good is being served by making requirements upon citizens to contribute according to their ability. The health-care law requires participation through payments from those who can afford to pay in order that the provider system can exist to serve all citizens. The draft, when enacted, requires citizens who are physically able to serve to “pick up arms” (or provide other service if a conscientious objector) in order that a military system can exist to serve the defense of all citizens. Do away with one and you must scrap the other, because no constitutional law holds to a double-standard.
And then, if the absurd ruling of the judge is upheld by the Supreme Court, which has already made its contribution to constitutional absurdities in the case of “Citizens,” where would the government be in terms of liability for all the dead and wounded soldiers in the past who were drafted rather than volunteering to serve, and whose service would then be retroactively, unlawfully coerced?
Republicans just don’t want to pay for a conscionable health-care system that makes the United States a bit more socially equal to other, more advanced cultures which have accepted that health care is, like the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (wealth), a universal right—an entitlement to which no human being should be denied full access.
If the United States is to advance as a culture and as a democracy, it can no longer be all about the money.
cc (via web forms) February 1, 2011: 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, House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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President Obama’s underlying message: It can’t be all about the money.
Corporatism is not an “American” founding ideal; neither are capitalism and free enterprise. When you stop to think about it, as ideologies, they were far from the causes to which the Founders pledged their lives and fortunes: Freedom, Liberty, and Democracy... for the People, not to give competitive voice to any system or entity created by them.The closest concept to capitalism which concerned the Founders was the right of citizens to hold and control private property, mostly their farms and, unfortunately, slaves. The Dutch were among the greatest capitalists, before America declared its independence, and it wasn’t until just after the dawn of the Industrial Revolution that America created and began to grow corporatism, which as a system and philosophy has become entrenched as the controlling blueprint for operations in commerce, government, and the military.
If anything, the current recession has evidenced that American corporatism, in addition to leading the world in promoting production, growth, and preserving wealth for its participants, has bested all other nations in abusing its capitalist foundation, and by extension, the government and the American people. But that record of achievement, for the few who walked away from the carnage with stuffed pockets, was the culmination of a lot of practice over a long time, since capitalism in America began to show the ugly side of its head back in Andrew Jackson’s time, when he went to war with the banks, a struggle with populist presidents that deepened through to Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, and to Roosevelt’s, in the Great Depression, before capitalist excess joined with a string of Republican presidents to eventually create the nightmarish landscape onto which President Obama stepped when he entered office in the depths of the Great Republican Recession.
A large nation with a vast range of private enterprises that impact upon public welfare and safety requires a large government to guarantee that safety and welfare, because time and time again, capitalism and corporatism have demonstrated that left to their own devices, death and destruction follow the profits. Corrupted government, fueled by special-interest contributions to campaigns, contributes through regulation that is lax and criminally negligent, which the president’s announced plans, to streamline government, reducing its agencies, will help correct.
When Republicans who resist spending to create jobs that also keep America at the forefront of education, technology, and infrastructure try to propagandize capitalism, business, and corporatism as “American,” values that are diminished by government largess, as was expressed in Rep. Paul Ryan’s (WI) Republican reply to the president’s address, it is just code for expansion of wealth at the top through reduction of taxes and regulation on business—the discarding of democratic balance, where “free enterprise,” means free of government boundaries on behavior or accountability for consequences affecting others, where government spending means taxes cutting into a Niagara fall of funneled wealth. The primary core of the contending party philosophies has become wealth distribution, and those are the naked, but veiled objectives of the Republican party today, regardless of the effect upon the vast majority of citizens or the national well-being, which in that narrow, selfish view is just fine by them, thank you, so long as the economy and global profits can be exploited, the rule of law that protects the “haves” is preserved, and the national vessel of the law’s existence is protected by a strong, omnipresent military.
In his Tucson memorial speech, President Obama said the process of democracy is marked by cynicism and vitriol. How can there be anything else when Republican leaders resort to lies about policies, as when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (KY) said the problems of today are due to the policies of the president over the last two years? History knows the truth as well as McConnell truthfully does: that the problems of today are due to a conflict of philosophy, not policy, a conflict which has been won over more than two decades by the imposition of deregulated, trickle-down economics under conservative Republicanism, which has created the greatest economic divide between rich and poor in history, with the greatest reduction of the middle class and the greatest percentile of wealth in the hands of the fewest people, and which President Obama’s administration has only scratched the surface at undoing.
In his “State of the Union” address, the president said we are something more consequential than party, that we are a nation-family, and that what is important is “not that we sit together tonight, but that we work together tomorrow.” But the field where ideologies at war can meet is very narrow, sparking an economic divide that is hardly familial, and working together chafes many elbows and shoulders, especially when the focus of those ideologies is not prioritized upon the national prosperity and the vision of the future strived for is blurred by the sweeping range of influences that buy and have their interests adjudicated into the government’s structure and policy-making, silencing the voices of the powerless, stifling opportunities.
The president also said he wants America’s democracy to be as good as nine-year-old shooting victim Christina Green imagined it to be. It would have to be the imagination of an innocent child to be that good, because the reality is a cynical, vitriolic process of quasi-democracy which will never perfect the union, but rather, has been tearing it down, and with qualified reason. Forming a more perfect union is a building process, one that has been set back by illicit, politically-derived, Supreme-Court-majority rulings, extreme partisanship, the unaccounted-for breaking of laws by high officials, the grip of greed and materialism, and most of all, the manipulation of political influence through party self-interest and campaign bribery, none of which will be affected by symbols such as “State of the Union” seating arrangements, which Sen. McConnell was quick to trivialize only hours before the president’s speech.
Until these systemic mechanisms for abuse of wealth and power are eliminated, Christina Green will at least have been spared the destruction of idealism that America’s government now fosters and holds in waiting for the coming-of-age of her peers and all of America’s children. Republicans who place capitalistic and corporate values above all else should think seriously, and humanistically about how the cost of that failure balances against the bank accounts with which they measure their success.
cc (via web forms) January 25, 2011: 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, House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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Celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King by ending the American celebration of war.
President Obama’s lack of meaningful action to end the unnecessary conflicts, occupations, and deployments of U.S. military force throughout the world is unfortunate and would not garner the approval of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This day of celebration of Dr. King and his vision would be an appropriate time for the president to consider what Dr. King had to say about war during the Vietnam conflict:
“A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war: A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”More than 10,000 people died in the Afghanistan operations last year, and it has cost hundreds of billions of dollars, with another $107 billion slated for this year alone. If Dr. King could speak to the president today, he would undoubtedly repeat his warning on the responsibility of public officials to conduct the government’s policy of war, which, though correct in object, was not in its premise of tactical “initiative,” not for Vietnam or Afghanistan:
“The great initiative in this war [Vietnam] is ours [not true then and, with Afghanistan, that is also very doubtful]; the initiative to stop it must be ours.”If wars, unnecessary and unnecessarily extended, are to be stopped, the constant push of the military-industrial complex to create a public acceptance of military activism and sprawl must be stopped, a push which is designed to penetrate into every aspect of American life, including the prominent use of the “Commander-in-Chief” title for the president, even apart from military environment, and the object of the hundreds of thousands spent each time a flight of jet fighters is sent to overfly football games... to push the image and presence of militarism in American society.
America cannot and will not return to a concept of military use only in cases of true national defense so long as the military and its objectives are allowed to be twisted and propagandized to remain a source of profit for the defense industry and its varied interests, and so long as industry is allowed to remain in control of government through the corrupting influence of campaign contributions.
The pressure placed upon the United States by other nations, through their inadequate contributions to joint-defense objectives, contributes to the hand held by the military-industrial complex, raising the ante on the growth of their pot. And the deck is also stacked against change back toward a priority for diplomacy through words rather than boots because, unlike in the time of Dr. King and Vietnam, the military is no longer a conscripted force. A volunteer military minimizes public involvement, concern, and the chance that activism will play a role, as it did in Vietnam, to end unnecessary conflicts that are more damaging to the nation and its societal progress than they are to enemies, real or contrived.
Military service is a worthwhile experience which should again be required, not only for the character and skills it imparts to soldier-citizens, and the benefits provided to the nation during and after service, but because an encompassing, citizen participation mandates a greater public attention and awareness, and a commitment to change wrongheaded bureaucratic and political dictates by imposing a democratic voice to alter the mission objectives and the ways in which the military is used and abused. It is for this reason that the military-industrial complex loves a volunteer military force and will use all of its considerable political control to preserve it. The American people unwittingly assist in achieving that objective, because they will never support a return to conscripted service so long as they see the abuse of military force that exists today and know that they have no control to change it, even with a president as Obama, who is supposed to be better than he has been, allowing the obvious folly of profit by conflict and assisted corruption to continue to grow and further entrench itself as a seemingly constant and necessary aspect of daily American life, now and forever.
cc (via web forms) January 17, 2011: 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; House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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NFL - gone soft as the falling snow?
December 26, 2010, the last day of a holiday weekend, and there will be no Sunday Night NFL Football on NBC or anywhere else... postponed until Tuesday because of the weather in Philadelphia, where the Eagle’s stadium is uncovered. And the weather placed to blame is not lightening, or flood, or hurricane, or tornado, just cold and gusty snow, yet nothing to compare to the famed Packer Ice Bowl, or winter games played at Soldier Field in near white-out conditions. The would-be announcers for the game say that the postponement was “not because of the weather, per se, because there have been games played in worse weather with more snow and wind, but that the game was postponed because of public safety... travel concerns.”Well, one might wonder whose travel concerns, because the teams and coaches are there, and in all those other games, where the weather and the snow were worse, where the very same public safety issues still existed but were not ever considered or offered as an excuse to postpone a game, the fans with the exposed seats always showed up.
So what’s the reason the game was postponed? The real reason?
Because America has gone soft as the falling snow, in so many ways, from abdomens to detached, and therefore more easily carried out, unnecessary wars where with no public sacrifice there is no public outrage. The postponement is because the NFL has finally caught up with the public... and with many of its players, and gone soft too. Easier, on the very day of the game, for the NFL to postpone rather than take the difficult turf, and assume everyone else will postpone to join them later in their softer, mid-week exhibition.
It takes a hard-core football fan, perhaps even one who has played the game at some level beyond the Pee-Wee League, to understand why enduring bad weather is not to be too easily avoided: when fans who love their teams get into the elements with the players, suffer through the freezing cold and blowing snow with the players, there is never any other time that the bond between them, through that shared sacrifice, is greater. The players know it, and they appreciate the foul-weather fan who stands with them, apart from the protection of sky boxes and living-room HD TV, for it. That was needlessly taken away from those fans by the NFL tonight. And for everyone, there has been a chink cut into the softened armor of the NFL’s once brutally defiant roboman.
Once upon a time, in a game that was set apart by shrugging-off weather, it is quite probable that Vince Lombardi, a hard man who was master when football was a harder game, would have agreed, cursing into the wind.
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Top ten reasons why the tax-cut for the wealthy should not have been continued:
- Does not provide sufficient economic stimulus.
- Does not add significant jobs.
- Adds significantly, unnecessarily to the debt and the leverage of China and Mid East bond buyers.
- Many of America’s most wealthy people of conscience have said that the taxes they pay compared to middle- and lower-class people is an abomination.
- If anyone believes the pressure to repeal will be less significant in the election year of 2012, they’re wrong, and Republicans will properly suffer if taxes are allowed to increase because they would not forgo the unnecessary and ineffectual tax-break for the wealthy.
- The decision not to pass a continued tax break for the wealthy is an obligation to our children, contrary to the millionaires or even the middle-lower class at the expense of their children.
- It is immoral to give the wealthy tax breaks when prices and opportunities are all heavily leveraged exclusively in their favor.
- The time to get serious about economic equality and reducing the divide is now, not later.
- Failure to pass a continuance of the cuts including the wealthy will focus more pressure on making the changes to the tax laws that are overdue and necessary to simplify and spread the obligation more fairly to the wealthy brackets.
- The tax break is unfair to those who are among the long-term unemployed and low-income pensioners who have so far received no benefits or consideration during the recession except a single, $250 Social-Security payment!
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Tax-cut compromise is Obama pragmatism at play.
After reaching an agreement with hostage-taking Republicans to extend tax cuts for the wealthy as well as the middle class, today, President Obama talked tougher to his own Democrats than he has ever talked to the Republicans. Even if he is giving away the family farm to the conglomerate, maybe the president figures the voters who forgot it was the Republicans who created the economic upchuck he has been cleaning up over the last 18 months, or who didn’t stop to think that the smell remains a while after the cloth is swiped, will break with tradition in 2012 and remember his pointed, family rebuke and cast their votes with the respect one gives to a responsible, scolding parent, because he was right to do it. He was right because Democrats are too independent and undisciplined, compared to Republicans, costing them many of their goals, and because too many Democrats believed the president should have instead stood tough and forsaken tax cuts for the middle class, no matter if the Republicans were determined to sacrifice working-class Americans for the sake of the wealthy while also significantly deepening the deficit, which they were, at least with the wealthy non-tax, and which they have with the deficit.Liberal Democrats were confident voters would have endured the pain and then made the Republicans pay for it in the next election. But then, the president would have been just as guilty of the same self- or party-interest politics as grips the Republican psyche above any care for the national interest. And the president is also looking to the 2012 election, where, speaking particularly to Independents, he will now be able to say that he put the national interest ahead of his party, gaining not only an extension of tax breaks for the middle class, and an extension of unemployment benefits, but also another stimulus-shot in the arm for the Republican-desiccated economy, an important stimulus for continuing the job-growth turn-around that, in the new, Republican-majority House, would have never passed in a stand-alone version.
All of this matters because, despite that there are better ways to stimulate the economy, few if any of which Republicans would support, the poor and middle class cannot afford to pay more taxes, and many of the unemployed would be unduly harmed without the benefits extension, leaving the long-term unemployed as the only faction left dying as the dust clears, and who have been living without insurance benefits, extensions, and without hope for years, and who remain permanent political outcasts, invisible to the economic-stimulus or any charitable efforts of government to ease the pain.
Perhaps the most egregious aspect of the deal is that the president opened a crack in the door to Republican ambitions to kill Social Security by agreeing to a temporary cut in the employment tax that funds the Social Security Trust Fund. The greedy Republicans were not about to give up an ounce of their 300-million persons of flesh, also grabbing for a reduction to 35 percent on estate taxes.
But the president is not right when he charges factions of his party who criticize the tax-cut deal with “revisiting the health-care public option all over again.” The public option failed, making the health-care law more about setting basic rules than reform, because Democrats could not line up their own party and one Independent, Sen. Joe Lieberman, who is in the pocket of the health-insurance industry. Also zipped tightly into that pocket is the senior Democrat who chaired the Senate Finance Committee marking up the health-care bill, Max Baucus. The president and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid did nothing to call them out, to pin the scarlet letter of public opinion and disdain upon them, to even try to bring them in line to meet their public obligation over their special-interest bribes. The president shares, with them, and with Sen. Reid, the responsibility for the failure of the public option. But the president has the public option in mind when he speaks of the “big picture” and the “long view,” because there are loose ends that can be tied-up in subsequent legislation, if the 2012 election recaptures the Democratic majority, and Democrats must work with the president and within their own toward the big picture that materializes in that outcome of the long view.
And come November 2012, the Republicans will not be able to swim in the quicksand of their deficit-concern lies, or the lies that they care about the middle class; nor will they be able to claim that what’s best for the nation is a more important column in their ledger than the cushy bank-account balances of their wealthy and corporate constituencies, many, the likes of hedge-fund king Warren Buffett, and the former Bear Stearns CEO/JP Morgan vice chairman, Alan Greenberg, who do not want the Republican tax breaks and speak with resentment about the inequalities Republicans seek to extend with them.
But how much of a Democratic win should that Republican insensitivity and immoral turpitude generate, come that November?
It will depend upon the economy and unemployment, with two caveats: the voters have shown themselves to be an unduly-fearful, apathetic, pathetically impatient, uninformed and easily-duped bunch, so the odds remain very good that, unless the White House does an outstanding job of communicating and keeping the good memories of bad behavior by Republicans alive, the president’s coolly-calculated, 60/40, pragmatic gamble will not pay off; and second, considering the fear, and the Republican fervor to fan it, if before November 2012, through all the useless talks and delaying tactics, the president allows Iran to turn a portion of its desert sands into glass.
cc (via web forms) December 7, 2010: 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; House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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Republicans: One-Man-Dam Sen. Kyl (obscured); Chicken Crapper, Crier, Rep. Boehner; Most
Dangerous (& presumptive prez candidate) Rep. Eric Cantor; Kentucky’s Porker Sen. McConnell
Election regardless, no change: Republicans hold America and its working class hostage.
Republicans who are trying to protect the wealthiest Americans from a return to higher, Clinton-era tax levels are fond of saying that it is “important to avoid tax increases for anyone in this troubled economy.” What they do not mention is that, for those wealthiest Americans they are trying to protect, at a cost of $700 billion to the deficit, times could not be better! They have the ability to increase their wealth and possessions at a time when costs for everything from securities, to cars, to boats, to second and third homes, to airplanes, all of which most of those wealthy already own, are at the lowest prices in memory. It is practically impossible, even without the Bush cuts, for the wealthy not to prosper in this economy, and the only probable reason that elitist class would not like to see it continue as it is, is so that there need not be embarrassment at spending too lavishly. Embarrassment, which was evident in the first year of the recession, has already become tiresome and too much with which to bother; yet, their indulgences do not add any significance to the nascent economic recovery. In addition, despite that the wealthiest Americans, whose pockets the Republicans are trying to further line, can afford these things on the barrel head, mortgage and interest rates are depressed as prices are, affording them increased opportunities for low-cost wealth growth when many middle-income and all low-income Americans cannot afford to take advantage of the low rates and prices that prevail, making like a full-spectrum dollar store for the wealthy.The fact is that, even if the Bush gift to the wealthy expires, for them, the gravy train doesn’t stop. Those wealthy at the rising upper crust of America’s rotting pie will still be able to buy and invest and increase their fortunes with little real effect on their pampered lives. But even so, instead of doing the right thing, for both the economy and the deficit, by agreeing to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire for the wealthiest Americans, Republicans have instead allowed millions of Americans to suffer as their unemployment benefits expire because the Republicans want the rich to remain at shamelessly reduced tax levels, while at the same time fronting that reducing the deficit is their major objective, as they deny an $18 billion economic-aid boost to the economy at the cost of $700 billion added to the debt to pay the wealthy, whose rates are so embarrassingly low compared to average Americans that the most visible of their ilk, Warren Buffet, has plainly admitted as much, saying that the disparity is a travesty.
Republicans are clearly not interested in the national interest or any consideration of balance in the demographic-economic equation, holding a missile-defense treaty, deemed necessary by bipartisan leaders in American politics and government, hostage to their demand to keep the rich richer, in addition to dangling the heavily supported effort to end the socially discriminatory and unconstitutional practice of “don’t ask, don’t tell” for the military, in order to pressure keeping the cuts for the greedy rich in place. With any legislation, the spoiled-brat Republicans have, as they have been doing all along, refused to eat their dinner unless it is dessert.
Those unenlightened who are not among the wealthy, and who voted for the abomination the Republican party has become since the days of Eisenhower, can now see that the Republican campaign promise to end the deficit will be accomplished the same way the deficit was built: by stripping the poor and the middle class to hang furs and riches upon the wealthy and corporations, which now, in their steel and glass towers, oversee a controlling majority of the Supreme Court (the only branch of government with the power of the last word—the Founders’ great mistake), building for them a treasure of legal access and protections which are beyond all constitutional provisions or boundaries, and which, along with the unconstitutional, Senate-filibuster rule represents the greatest threat to democracy since the expanding Third Reich of Adolf Hitler and the cold-war missiles of the Stalinist Soviet Union.
Those who voted against, and especially those who did not vote to support continuing the turn-around begun by the Democratic administration and Congress—those who expected two decades of Republican trickle-down, economic disaster to be turned around and repaired in 18 months—should not complain as the nation continues to deteriorate in proportion to the growth of the wealth-divide and the deficit as their lives become more difficult; it is only what they so apathetically asked for and therefore, so richly deserve.
cc (via web forms) December 2, 2010: 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; House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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Terrorist attack cannot be stopped. Nuclear ambitions of irresponsible states can be.
NATO missile shield is weeds and bats.
Some news reporters have said, the missile shield President Obama has signed-on to with NATO, “sends a message to Tehran,” assuming the message is one which reflects upon the shield as a meaningful deterrent to any Iranian weapons development. This arrogance was the reporting, despite that anti-missile defense systems are far from wholly effective. Remember, in the Persian-Gulf War (1991), when one of the Iraqi Scud missiles, an intermediate-range system, got past an ineffective, American Patriot anti-missile “shield” to hit the Army barracks in Saudi Arabia, wounding scores of soldiers and killing 28? There was just some TNT stuffed inside the warheads of those low-trajectory missiles.Here’s the fact: the only message being sent to Iran by NATO’s building of a missile-defense shield is that Iran will not be prevented from developing its nuclear weapons and delivery systems, and that Western reliance on security will be placed on the “assurance” of destroying their weapons with the almighty shield after they are launched, a shield that would not be built if the resolve really was to prevent the development of the nuclear weapons and their delivery capability.
Spin those centrifuges!
If NATO had said that no missile-defense shield will be agreed upon or built, because NATO is resolved that Iran will not ever come to possess nuclear weapons, then Tehran would know that the only outcome it faces if it continues with its nuclear-weapons aspirations is war, destruction, and the end of the Islamic ruling regime.
That’s the message that needs to be sent to Iran.
And what message does the missile shield against Iran send to terrorists, who plan to get nuclear materials from extremist regimes, such as Iran, and unstable, extremist-infiltrated regimes, like Pakistan, or its more-stable, but also nuclear-unsecure neighbor, India, for unconventional delivery of fissile or dirty weapons that bypass any conventional defense systems to get to the target?
??????? The missile shield, as a replacement for prevention of nuclear-weapons capability for Iran, and terrorists, is a path to fulfillment of the terrorist dream of the destruction of Western civilization, because any detonation by them, or Iran, in any city, will cause the destruction of the global economy and launch an all-out, all-interests, regional war.
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The NATO missile shield is a waste of resources and a cowardly, non-confrontational go-ahead message to Iran’s nuclear-weapons programs, and by implication, reenforcing the okay already given by Bush action and President Obama’s inaction to N. Korea’s program, where it is has become necessary to risk the use of one or two such weapons by N. Korea if the buildup of that insane regime’s nuclear-weapons stockpile (and black-market inventory) is to be halted militarily, since the Chinese refuse to implement the necessary economic stranglehold to bring it about peacefully. Is NATO to wait for the same elevated cost for security with Iran? These would be wars worth fighting to restore security for the U.S., NATO, the Mid-East, Russia, and the Korean Peninsula, not the special-interest war that Iraq has always been and that Afghanistan has become. The decision to go to war, to once and for all end the nuclear threats, is the only chance that war might be averted to achieve that worthwhile purpose.
FUBAR (WWII soldier’s acronym. Google it.). Business as usual. So what else is new?
Weekend assignment: “Get the weeds and bats out of the old fallout shelter, Honey.”
cc (via web forms)November 20, 2010: 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; House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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The Green Goop in the Gut of the Great Geico Gecko Affair: a salvageable culture?
Isn’t it odd that none of the trivial-mongering “news” outlets that are diligently reporting the objections raised against the new Biance perfume commercial, that it’s too risque for TV, haven’t even noticed that Geico, for weeks now, has had the Gecko population, specifically, a poor lizard named “Stanley,” having sex and affair-fallout with women!That’s personification non grotto for you, Heff, bestiality, gecko-style... if you can draw the picture... and that’s selling insurance? Next, the Aflac duck’ll be running from a panting farmer Joe, tail feathers flying in trail, quacking, “There’s no exclusion for this! Where’s the sheep?”
This, on top of everything else:
like pat-downs of three-year-old girls (pedophile applications to TSA must be climbing to the wealth level of the top two percent—why doesn’t Obama force the application of common sense to screening... even if common sense is defined by some as including the rub of race profiling?);MSNBC’s Keith Olberman’s line is to end the fear of losing the culture by “embracing it.” I guess that’s okay, if it’s like the way Gecko Stanley and his lady friend held onto each other before the break-up, or like in the hug of farmer Joe’s frantic, feathered desires, or Sarah Palin embracing the moronic dream of a nightmare presidency?like an exemption on weapons sales to nations using child soldiers (wouldn’t have expected that from Obama, would you? The military-industrial complex hasn’t seduced him, it’s brainwashed him);
like Republican lunacy, arrogance, and obstructionism—to hell with the nation, the economy exists for and services the comforts of the wealthy, and for the rest, if you’re not making or delivering what the wealthy want (and for as little as you can possibly be paid to do it), it’s no promise of tomorrow and to hell in a hand basket... we’re on our way.
Keith’s a decade too late. A culture that accepts aspiration to and does all of this (less the extrapolated duck), and shows erectile-dysfunction commercials to children, and values and operates and votes on more characteristics of stupidity, injustice, inequity, and abuse than can be printed in all of tomorrow’s newspaper (what’s a newspaper?) has become garbage that needs to be wrapped in one and thrown out like rotten fish, as far, far away as the wealth of the tippity-top two-percent can afford a ticket on a barge.
Or maybe Dick Cheney can rig a catapult and hurl?
cc (via web forms) November 20, 2010: White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Sen. Arlen Specter, Rep Henry Waxman, Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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Hope prevails for a final passage.
Any elected official who is not ignorant should know, above all, that tyranny begins in the assertion by those in power that the end justifies the means. This is where Bush and Cheney crossed the line, by again and again subverting the Constitution, in addition to their moral and legal trespasses, for which, whether or not they ever admit to wrong, they are both guilty and should have been impeached and more... jailed, annuities repealed, and all revenues from speaking and publishing redirected to families of the dead who fell on their coat tails. No biography or memoir can re-write the history that will forever mark the Bush administration as one of the blackest and most unjustly-killing in America’s history.This new Bush book does nothing to justify or apologize for anything. It is merely an attempt to change, or at best, soften history and attempt to pull a legacy out of quicksand. Even if his ghost writer used perfect grammar and spelling, the book could only rate one or two stars because it has little substance and little that historians either do not already know or would not find out for themselves.
From the interviews and snippets from public appearances since leaving office, it is clear that both Bush and Cheney laugh too easily and share a too-smug satisfaction with themselves, unaccountable for having brought death and misery to so many for so unjust reasons, which are not at all related to the defense of the nation, returning the Department of Defense to a War Department, an effective overlord of fear and aggression. That is undeniable from the standpoint of those unfortunate enough to have been and who are under the muzzles of the guns of American soldiers and unconstitutional private armies as they pass in streets and break-down doors in the dead of night, and as they have, do NOT forget, also murdered. If that is not terror, even if one cannot place one’s self and family in other shoes, than what is? Can anyone be so obdurate not to see how Bush has grown the enemy at the same time he has decimated the image and war-power capacity and legitimacy of America?
The fact Bush says he has no regrets that he (and many others already gone, their blood on his hands) will not live to see the judgement of history on his conduct in office is a conscious rebuke of the global, widespread scorn with which his two terms are viewed, and his subconscious acceptance that the future judgement will be at least as condemning, that the history of his stretch in the office of president, and on many, many, many vacations, is eternally marked by the unjustifiable graves of more than 100,000 men, women, and children, including more than 4,400 U.S. soldiers, their fingers pointing to the decision on his deadly, nightmare legacy. It is this enormous weight that drives him now, willingly or not, so adamantly to the side of the military members, that it may be forgotten he callously used their service and lives as a tool of industrial expansionism in Iraq.
Now, that is the case in Afghanistan, where the mission to remove the Taliban government, responsible for abetting al Qaeda, was accomplished within the first few years after invasion, al Qaeda also having been exiled and no longer a widespread, local force, the mission there morphing into an extended program of the military-industrial complex (MIC): an occupation, its purpose to remove the Afghan tradition of tribal authority and control, eliminating opposition to commercial and resource development—no “defense of America” necessity in sight, except in lies and propaganda, tied to a struggle, “long” and “difficult” and “hard,” to prevent a vague, possible, maybe, future threat, trying to touch upon fear in the American people while orders for planes and tanks, like those recently made in Iraq, are the only things of major importance to the interests controlling the MIC that are really expected to cross America’s borders, targeting the defense plants of the MIC! But the unnecessary extension of military operations in Afghanistan is a down-side part of the Bush legacy, now shared with President Obama as he is seduced by the MIC, and really is an aside to Bush’s memoir, if not a contributing factor in the accelerating, multi-faceted decline of America.
Is America really paralleling the Roman destiny of decline? Bush’s book maps the outlines between the lines, and with the Bush “W” administration, never in the history of America has the military been so widely deployed around the American “empire of commercial and industrial influence,” the government so detached from the people and corrupted by wealth and greed, never has the populace seen a government so twisted in its purpose and execution placed into authority over them, to act in their name, disgracing them, and in the Bush-loaded, Republican-extremist Supreme Court, drowning out their voices with such scathing abuses. That is the dire legacy of Bush, Cheney, Rove, and those who steered their crippled design of socio-political travesty into power. It is a legacy to which many forces contributed and joined to create, but which only Bush could have prevented, had he the knowledge, ethic, and the courage that marks the heart of a patriot—the legacy that might have been would, then, have evolved, not the fiction Bush or Cheney would see ghost-written as memoirs of unfounded justifications and dubious truths, particularly on Bush’s feelings, regrets, and beliefs, for which there is no basis to judge the value, except the contradictory facts and consequences of his arrogant, usurping string of actions, and the harm done to the nation at the expense of the Constitution and those uncountable, irreplaceable, relinquished lives.
This book and its reviews, in whatever venues they exist, have become Bush’s third war—the war of the stars, where the one- and five-star reviews slug it out without much regard to the book on either side, the extremists of both sides, who have the time, frantically clicking “no’s” to rate the reviews of the other, not realizing the first rating is often the only one counted, even after reload. Those looking for a more objective book review should start by ignoring all of those which are posted without the courage and assertion of a real name, and then just stick to the two- thru four-star comments, giving most weight to the three-star, which will probably turn out to be evenly split between those believing Bush is either a hero or a war criminal, and that the book reveals some truths among some obvious lies, deceptions and redirects, but still, giving it only two stars, those for putting heat on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on opposing the Iraq occupation.
But, a shiny jacket on a new book is not a change of skin... or anything lying beneath.
From this bad president comes a bad book, and neither it, nor any among the lunatic fringe who support its tired premises, openly, or with a secluded eye looking to 2012, will change the facts, bring back the dead or alter the history that will bury Bush’s legacy with them. Bush has already said he is resigned to live and die accepting the judgement without regrets, though, one with no regrets, and wealth enough, hardly has the need or drive to supervise the writing of a memoir that isn’t a pure labor of love, so how could any book that attempts to paint a kind perspective on the eight years of war and terror and torture and kidnapping and domestic law-breaking and constitutional stomping by the chief perpetrator of the crimes be anything but an exercise in... vanity?
Regardless that he seemingly just says he has no regrets, providing another preview into the lack of credulity bound into the spine of the book, and the man, for not having the courage to finally accept accountability that the awful reality of the truth that buried the dead, and remains, still, for the living, is to be found in his failures: personal, political, strategic, and economic, then maybe those who so quickly rush to defend the wreckage wrought by his wrong-headed, wrangling ways should begin to live with it instead of, like him, trying too hard?
Hope prevails that Bush’s book and its introductory accompaniments will, outside of a courtroom, at last mark his final goodbye and passage out of provoked memory.
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who define patriotism with the dollar and votes of self-interest.
Bush mistakes keep on coming.
In his 2010-published, memoirs book, re-framing history, George Bush wrote that cutting troop levels too soon was the biggest mistake in the war in Iraq.That statement is another Bush mistake, demonstrating that he still doesn’t get it, through his obdurate, irrepressibly Republican-corporate-imprinted mind, which was trolled into office by his puppeteers, that INVADING Iraq was the biggest mistake. And behind that disaster, only one among a galaxy of Bush blunders, would be failing to properly account for the aftermath, which by itself encompasses a slew of mistakes that were all more severe than premature troop-level decisions.
And Bush’s kind of thinking lives on under the skin in the extremes of the unenlightened Republican party, where the likes of John McCain and Sarah Palin believe in war, forever, anywhere there’s a buck to be made.
The Roman destiny, repeated in an American decline, has already begun and is assured to end in a fundamental collapse so long as parties and politicians act to define patriotism with self-interest and the dollar, which cannot be ended so long as elections are funded by contributions and parties control process, limits, and districting.
In 75 years, historians will look back at this election season and the Bush/Tea-party/Palin episodes, and they will conclude that al Qaeda tainted the national waters with neuropathogens.
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Pick up the pieces by establishing the peace.
We live among a growing spate of fools; though, tossing half of the Democratic Blue Dogs, liberalizing or “progressivizing” the caucus and providing one of the silver linings in the losses, may belie that.But then, the dumbing-down of the nation becomes even more of an embarrassment as it takes another Quayle step backward into the greedy grasp of those Republicans who, with no guilt for the gushing glut, and who, it has so obviously been forgotten, brought down the anchor upon staying the truer course of decades past, set before they hogged the helm. Now, with three fingers back on the tiller, it is they who so loudly demand change, so long overdue, they dare so boldly to say, with such unstained, unattached abandon, they, who once so recklessly set the nation’s course into the seething storm.
The proverb says, “The people get the government they deserve.” The people have voted, or not, in this mid-term election, in both cases as victims who are accosted in the park by muggers with empty guns—handing over their purses and the bullets.
Now, though nearly half of those who participated and object to the new intrusion by putting on a swimsuit, we’ll all get striped-down, sobbing, to get a total tanning, eh? Flip-flop, the front... the back... and now we shed all modesty, “sob,” as we allow ourselves to be planted naked on a hot summer’s beach, tearful, blinded with no sunglasses, no shade or cooling breeze, no sunscreen, no earplugs to block the crowded, ceaseless din of deceptive and inflamed discourse, and no fruity, spirited refreshment anywhere in sight, and no way to pay for any if there were.
As the president responds to the “shellacking,” as he put it, with the same, refined, surrendering, invitational approach and argument as before—the only reality he can truthfully address with the same apparent detachment that helped create it—we shall bake, expressing our anger and frustration in the mire of politically motivated House investigations, double-talk, and far more sharply pointed obstructionism, halting all progress, and handing the president a remaining term of little more than theater politics. The Republican agenda remains the same: limit President Obama to one term, though it is no longer publically stated, since the obdurate leadership finally gets that it is a priority that is widely, properly recognized as selfish and a disservice to the national interest.
“The best man for the job,” once taken as a good thing for the country, when government worked better, less at the mercy of a merciless and destructive party mechanism, with all its trappings to gather money and influence, placing itself above the system it embodies and the people who embody it.
Amidst the rubble of his unavoidable fate and his self-confessed failings, and the aimless, hovering turns of Congress, the president will at least still have control to finally act against another great destroyer of America that has seduced him in his first two years, as it has seduced every president, since Eisenhower: the hold on government by the military-industrial complex. If he chooses, he can claim the reins of defense over aggression by removing the troops, so hapless and ignored by both press and candidates in this mid-term election, from Iraq and Afghanistan, where the war was illegitimate in the first case and won seven years ago in the latter. In their place, he can strengthen intelligence-based law enforcement, special ops, and international/interagency coordination. He should also end the flow of billions of dollars to those corrupt, self-interested governments, payments viewed by many with the same disdain, or worse, as the pay-outs to AIG and Freddie/Fannie, and then act to vastly reduce the sprawling military footprint around the world, finally claiming America’s right to be at peace, where it should be as integral and financial recovery accelerates.
These things he can do without Congress, to turn back another great misdirection of entrenched, extremist-Republican rule, and he should if he wishes to serve another term.
cc (via web forms) November 3, 2010: White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Sen. Russ Feingold, Sen. Arlen Specter, Rep. Steve Driehaus, Rep Henry Waxman, Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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Answer robo-signing with heartfelt voting.
The mortgage-foreclosure scandal, with its digitized, consolidated, detached, robo-signed documents, more than anything else demonstrates that, to the lenders, people are an industrial commodity to be squeezed, abused, twisted, grindstone processed, swept out and discarded like so much garbage when there is insufficient profit to be derived from them. These many lenders, with their calloused theology of greed, are who Republicans stand behind, ready to junk financial and safety regulations, toss the already-poor-house minimum wage, wreck earned social security if they can’t control it, and put the care of the nation’s health back into the hands of the profit-prioritized and motivated insurance industry, which treats people the same as many housing lenders: as processed meat, all the while, sending American jobs and manufacturing south and overseas... all for profits.Go ahead, put yourself and your neighbors back on the manufacturing-supplies shelves of industry and vote Republican. After all, after where the Republicans have put America, with their two-plus decades of conservative, trickle-down bias to the wealthy and corporations, what else is there to lose?
A lot, besides the turnaround, which has begun.
Change, particularly socioeconomic, doesn’t happen overnight. Impatient bouncing of government control back to those who wrecked it and see government as little more than a tool to manipulate money flow guarantees the only change will be a widening, deeper, steeper hole for most citizens, one that captures many more.
What’s good for people is good for the country and benefits industry is how it really goes, not the other way around. That’s been the proof rendered after more than two decades of Republicans trying it the other way and, don’t forget, failing... badly.
Your future is in your hands. Vote for a brighter future with your heart, not with your fear, anger, or impatience, and certainly not with the apathy or frustrated resignation of a non-vote.
Your Democratic vote now will temper capitalist greed into tomorrow, with
regulation promoting the safety and prosperity of people. Don’t let it pass.
cc (via web forms) October 14, 2010: White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Sen. Russ Feingold, Sen. Arlen Specter, Rep. Steve Driehaus, Rep Henry Waxman, Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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Dickensian, 2010 politics—the literature in the tea leaves.
There is that disconcerting element of the conservative wealthy, flexing throughout America and the “civilized” West, that would see a return to Victorian times, with its immutable classes and fearsome work houses, as a revolution of great promise and, for them, deserved privilege and placement.Among them are those who, despite the wreckage brought down upon most everyone except the wealthy in the last three years, in a roller-coaster crash of the economy that saw its descent begin from an apex many Republican years before, when there were no brakes or wheel-guards installed, they who set loose that deadly fall, and the net of TARP that would save its designers, they would have you vote to see business unleashed again to stalk at will, to have everyone else’s safety net of mandated health-care standards swept away, and Social Security privatized and/or slashed to save a perceived tax and provide another enriching resource with which to play, at the risk of devastation to those with only that as their earned support: be that as it may; or, who would say to those, so untethered, who are so resourceless, therefore, so lazy, “be damned,” as would have been the case in this Great Recession; indeed, as it has been for many who would, otherwise, themselves be standing up within that crowd of self-assured individualists.
And, for many who, still standing, attend quaint, dangerous tea parties, the dread, dire boom is just out of sight, lurking, perhaps in the walls of an artery or a malignant growth, or an accident, or career disaster, waiting to harshly lower and also sink them deep within the muckety-muck dirt of that world to which they are now so skillfully solicited, and then painted with bold watercolor so as to seem, of it, a lasting, brethren part.
They, who with much emotion and little thought outside their own charity, aid to so enthusiastically cut away at the slandered cords of social conscience and responsibility, when done, will find that the floor beneath them has instead been let go; or, for now, at least in the case of the artery wall or other health affliction, that despite their best efforts to prevent it, they have been saved.
cc (via web forms) October 8, 2010: White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Sen. Russ Feingold, Sen. Arlen Specter, Rep. Steve Driehaus, Rep Henry Waxman, Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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The Terminator is back!
The Republican Governator of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in the virgin days of fall, stepped outside the current-day Republican-party profile and returned to the old days of national-interest-orientated Republicanism, not seen since Eisenhower and the elder George H.W. Bush (the 41st president, who was most responsible for bringing a cooperative end to the Cold-War Soviet Union—not Reagan). In taking this bold and necessary step, Schwarzenegger set an important example by confronting the big-oil, corporate interests who are spending $millions to attack California’s Proposition 23, which mandates industry restrictions to help the environment recover and prevent its further deterioration. In his fiery speech, he went head-on, without the usual, vague references to the culprits, naming names (alero Energy Corp., Tesoro Corp. and Koch Industries, the Koch brothers—the Tea Party founders), and he condemned the motivations of those attempting to overturn the law, which he said was passed by 75-percent of the voters, saying that those companies and those men were attempting to set aside the health interests of the people for the sake of: “profits... motivated by greed.”He hit the nail on the head, in stating the motives behind all of Republican-supported industry today: greed, which, with just recent examples, wrecked the economy and the futures of millions of people, and none of those harmed were the responsible bankers; greed, which killed 11 men on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, poisoning the Gulf of Mexico and the lives of its dependents; greed, which killed another 25 men in the Massey Mine disaster, and many before it; and which killed 51 people in the crash of a commuter plane in New York state, and on and on and on it goes, back through U.S. history, beyond the industrial revolution to the days of the Founders, when Thomas Jefferson warned of the danger of national power and the people’s interests being overtaken by business. In each of these modern-day, recent instances, and, again, many, many more, before them, the Democratic regulations intended to check greed, promote safety, and save lives were trumped by the driving motivation for profits, driven by greed, causing existing regulations to be weakly or not at all enforced by agencies directed by the hands-off agendas of Republican administrations, or in the legislative venue, where the corruption of campaign contributions and party politics causes needed regulations to be watered down or removed from the books, or prevented from ever being passed into laws.
In that venue, in the U.S. House and Senate, legislators who are working for the interests of the people who elected them need to follow the Governator’s example and start pointing fingers and naming names of those among them who they know are acting on behalf of the special interests who contribute to their campaigns, staff their offices, and direct their legislative agendas. And in the body of men and women who work for the people, within the halls of government, these instruments of political and legislative, corporate manipulation, embedded within them, are known: elected officials like Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), who caused the public option to be removed from the health-care bill, components which would have leveled the playing field in the cost people have to pay for insurance and drugs, and which would have taken control of health costs out of the hands of greed-motivated, profit-driven, and Wall-Street-ideology prioritized insurance companies.
And if you want to know who’s not standing up for keeping jobs in America, who in Congress stands beside the corporations who don’t care if they wreck the middle class and poverty stricken by eliminating their jobs in favor of cheap, overseas labor, look to the entire Republican caucus, which voted against legislation that would have provided tax incentives for companies that brought jobs back to the U.S., killing it. Yes, there were two Republicans who didn’t vote, allowing them to say they did not vote against the people. But even for them, the non-vote was only a ploy that killed the bill because it would have passed if they had voted for it, and they probably were being given political, party payback for something like fund-raising, to be selected to not vote, or perhaps they have tough races coming up in the next election where a vote against American workers would have put their re-election in doubt? I haven’t the time to research the political manipulation that was behind those two Republican non-votes, but you should know that non-votes are not always just a matter of absence, and all anyone who cares about American jobs and prosperity needs to know when they go to vote is that not a single Republican, not a one, voted for them.
The custom of imposed, polite rhetoric when confronting those who oppose important issues for the people of America must end. The stakes are too high, damages are too quickly rendered, and the society of today has too many demands and distractions and streams of information for the greater mass of people to be informed through all the facades and deceptions and outright lies. The light must shine, directly and starkly upon what and who it is that really places them and their futures in danger, as the Governator did, in his speech attacking the greed of those big-oil companies, whose executives are looking to their pockets rather then to ways in which they can profit within a framework of community and national responsibility.
Shining a bright light of public scrutiny is doing what must be done to push back the darkness that has come into the lives of so many Americans and which threatens its future and that of all the world.
Shining the bright light of truth upon the eyes and names of the wicked, that’s being a terminator.
cc (via web forms) October 29, 2010: White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Sen. Russ Feingold, Sen. Arlen Specter, Rep. Steve Driehaus, Rep Henry Waxman, Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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The Patient’s Bill of Rights.
Today, September 23, 2010, thanks to a Democratic priority for social conscience, important barriers have been placed against the for-profit-motivated abuses of the health-insurance companies. These barriers were put in place despite the best efforts of Republicans in Congress to prevent it, and they are protections for all citizens who have health insurance, protections that the Republicans have vowed to repeal if they regain control of Congress after the November election.These protections are representative of the classic struggle to balance democracy with capitalism, where Democrats seek to curb the corporate greed and excess of naked capitalism with regulations, imposed by law and enforced by government, and where Republicans oppose limitations on capitalism, calling it “big government controlling business.” Republicans don’t like to mention how big “business” is, and they would have you forget how harmful business can be when it is left to regulate itself, a primary factor that created the recession which has devastated families throughout the nation. Collectively, these protections against the inate proclavity for abuse within the health-insurance industry are known as the Patient’s Bill of Rights, and these are the protections all health-insured citizens have, starting today, that they did not have before, and that the Republicans want to take away:
No lifetime limits on your coverage:Republicans have pledged to repeal the new health-care bill and all of these protections. Yet they would lie and say to you that they would not take these important benefits away if asked about them. They would answer by substituting a non-specific, big-picture lie that what they’re doing is preventing big-government intrusion into healthcare decisions, where there is none, and saving the aged from cuts in Medicare, where there are no net cuts, only gains.
If you or anyone covered in your family is struck with a catastrophic illness, your insurance company can no longer stop paying for your treatment because of an imposed cap. Republicans want to give the insurance companies back the cap and leave you on the lurch to pay.No more rescissions (or arbitrary cancelling of coverage) except in cases of fraud:
No longer can your insurance company refuse coverage or refuse to renew your coverage because you have become ill and now need the insurance to pay for your treatments. Republicans want to give back the power to cancel to the insurance companies.Coverage of most adult children up to age 26:
Your children, covered on your health plan, cannot be dropped until they are 26, requiring you to pay for separate policy coverage before then, coverage the insurance companies know many of them will never need until they are older and on their own. Republicans want to let the insurance companies either have you pay for separate policies or, when your children reach 18, let them go uncovered.Coverage of preventive services without cost sharing:
Preventive services will help prevent serious illnesses and save lives. Republicans want to let the insurance companies require that you pay a major share, instead of having a portion of the premiums you pay go from the obscene profits of insurance executives to instead work for you to help keep you healthier and live longer.Access to OB / GYNs without referrals:
Insurance companies can no longer force you to get a referral from them or an approved practitioner for you to visit a gynecologist. Republicans want to let the insurance companies dictate the conditions under which you can make such appointments.Restrictions to prevent insurers from placing unreasonable annual limits on your coverage:
Insurance companies can no longer tailor limits on categories of annual payouts to the dictates and priorities of profit criteria. Republicans want to let the insurance companies dictate the limits, without restriction, they can pay for treating your illnesses.No exclusion of coverage for children with pre-existing conditions (up to age 19):
Insurance companies are now prohibited from refusing to cover your children who need treatment for medical conditions. Republicans want to let the insurance companies say no to your children’s treatment needs.Access to out-of-network emergency room services:
Insurance companies can no longer limit the facilities you can go to for emergency care, requiring you to search your policy or hold on the phone to find out from the insurance company where you can go and be covered. Republicans want to let the insurance companies dictate where you have to go to get emergency treatment.A strengthened appeals process:
Insurance companies no longer have the built-in advantage when you oppose their coverage decisions. Republicans want to keep the playing field tilted in favor of the insurance companies on appeals and all other circumstances.
Do you want to see these protections swept away and give all the power back to the insurance companies? Then vote for a Republican this November, or fail to go out and vote for a Democrat, because that’s what it has unfortunately come down to: Democrats serve the people, Republicans serve the insurance companies, but in both cases, only after they first serve themselves and their parties. It is, again unfortunately, a matter of choosing the lessor of two evils, and that choice, unless you are wealthy, is clearly the Democrats.
Thanks to Republicans, and some rogue Democrats, like Sen. Max Baucus, many more important protections and services the health-care bill provides will have to wait until 2014 to go into effect. And, thanks to them, insurance companies still have price control without competition that isn’t prioritized on profits, and the health-insurance industry is already pushing hard to put large increases into effect to preserve their Wall-Street and greed mandated, pocket-bulging profits.
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Don’t ask, don’t tell.
A self-interested, cowardly Congress lets drug companies plaster TV audiences of all ages with offensive erection commercials, 24/7, yet despite the military’s desire to drop the unconstitutional, gay-acceptance, DADT policy, it won’t, the Senate imposing the denial of sexual-preference reality to the very adults who commit their lives to wage its misbegotten wars.So much for all of those congressional military-support speeches.
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aspirations, religious or otherwise, is tasteless because it always offends indiscriminately.
Does the false conviction of an “obscure” Florida pastor reveal an obscured truth?
In guerilla or urban warfare, commanders are perplexed by an inability to engage the enemy, at least, on their terms; so, isn’t it odd that Gen. Petraeus and Defense Secretary Gates, among others, in response to the so-called Christian pastor from Florida, who threatened to burn Korans on the ninth anniversary of 911, complained that it would put U.S. troops in greater danger? That could only happen if the militants, or the occupied Afghan fighters, or the radical Islamists, or terrorists, whatever, showed themselves to threaten the troops, either directly, or to drone recons as they plant their IEDs. To any commander who wishes to engage and thereby defeat the enemy, this would be a good thing. But to Gen. Petraeus, who obviously wants a nice, relatively safe, prolonged, by-the-numbers occupation with which, whether he supports or not, the military-industrial complex (MIC) can continue to profit, the increasing danger and engagement, and the increasing casualties that would come with it, would threaten to bring greater public pressure to bear to end an occupation which, for a growing number of Americans, is no longer being taken at the word of the MIC and its spokespersons as necessary to defend the U.S.Long-term conflict, at a simmer, with an “acceptable” number of casualties, is what America has been brainwashed to accept and to expect for an indefinite and “conditional” term, especially where “fighting terrorism” is concerned. “Fighting terrorism,” despite the near-unilateral success of law-enforcement and intelligence operations, has come to be defined as only capable of being effectively executed by occupations that, now and historically, without exception, have propped up corrupt regimes, and will be “long,” and “hard,” and “difficult” propositions, all requiring “responsible withdrawals.”
In a reply, conspicuous for its lack of policy objectives, to a letter objecting to the continued occupation of Afghanistan, where the military objective was really won in 2003 with the routing of the al Qaeda presence to caves and the overthrow of the Taliban government the year before, Sen. James Webb (D-VA), who is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, on September 3, 2010, wrote with one conspicuous assertion, twice stated:
“I have great regard for the careful process employed by this administration in an effort both to define a new approach for the long-standing military commitment in Afghanistan and to put an operational framework in place for our responsible withdrawal...“Long-standing military commitment... long-term implications.” America and its military are already way beyond that.“Our national security and the welfare of our men and women in uniform demand this deliberative approach in addressing a complex issue that carries significant long-term implications for our nation.”
And now, with U.S. Marines staging an armed boarding of a German ship in the Gulf of Aden, to capture Somali pirates, defense of America has been completely thrown out of the equation for use of military force. Though the September 9, 2010 boarding was successful and resulted in no injuries or casualties to marines, the international crew, or pirates, and is not standard procedure, it was ordered based on advantageous circumstances and is just another example of how out of control the use of U.S. military resources has become, and how the U.S. routinely subsidizes the defense costs of other nations with its resources and the blood of its soldiers.
It seems that World War II marked the end of an American war policy that was based on the concept of true defense, defeating the offending regime’s army and then removing the regime and getting the troops home again, and doing it all as quickly as humanly possible. WWII was also the last war, police action, whatever, where there was really no standing army, where it had to be raised and trained.
And it has been only since WWII that the influence of the sprawling estate of defense contractors, weapons manufacturers, militaristic, political think tanks, and legions of militaristic, career military, civil, and elected officials, all of whom are collectively known as the military-industrial complex, has grown beyond the point of a self-sustaining, five-headed serpent (the fifth is contract mercenaries, like XE Services, formerly Blackwater) of full-time militarism, laying down and executing a carefully planned and provoked, perpetual enterprise, sold through policy-speak, think tanks, military-college recruitment, TV ads, and football military fly-overs, where the global business plan of America is war, or “occupation,” or “providing stability,” or “spreading democracy,” whatever, and where the quick defeat of the offending regime and its armed forces is no longer the objective, but rather, is only the prelude to a protracted engagement with objectives no army can meet, designed to facilitate the spending of $billions and tens upon tens of thousands of soldier’s lives (since WWII) to become involved in what the Founders called the “messy” business of overseas politics, as a front for spreading the sales territory for orders of tanks and fighter jets and everything that goes with them, as has just recently been ordered by whatever it is that passes for a government in Iraq these days, where its prime minister is another corrupt, wannabe-dictator with his own, private army.
And all of this has happened despite the direct and specific warning of the growing threat, given to the American people after WWII by the man who, in that war, led the greatest army the world has ever known to victory against the daunting power of the most evil and threatening force in modern times, if not all of history. It was in 1961, in his farewell speech to the nation, after completing his second term as president, that Dwight Eisenhower said:
“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.Since Eisenhower made his prediction, formed with the astute insight of a versed military expert, the harm done to America’s military members and the nation aside, does not the Blackwater/XE Services massacre of civilians in Iraq qualify as the latest pinnacle episode, among many, in the “disastrous rise of misplaced military power” that has plagued America, and in far greater numbers than America’s soldiers, the peoples America had supposedly been “fighting to help?”“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Oh, say, can you see?
Why Gen. Petraeus was not elated over a home-grown exercise of free speech (distasteful though it was, whether for the burning of Korans, King James Bibles, or Torahs) that holds the likelihood of bringing the enemy out into the open? If the General really wanted to engage and defeat as many of the enemy as possible, as soon as possible, to end the conflict, he should have been telling his commanders to tell the troops that, “this Florida pastor, with a strange irreverence for Holy writings, just might give us the chance we’ve been wanting to engage more of these SOBs, so lock and load, and keep your eyes and ears open and your heads down!”
Not that greater engagement will ever make anything any better for America’s occupation there than it was for the Soviet Union’s, the stated, high-and-mighty, American political motivations for Afghanistan notwithstanding.
Perhaps Gen. Petraeus should explain to the troops how the politics of another country has anything to do with defending the old hometown. All the explanations from the career politicians are quite a stretch of extremes and unfounded generalizations, where for any credibility to replace the lacking ring of truth, the stock and trade of a pastor is all that remains: faith.
And where hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, faith that trusts in God finds no grace of repose with a politician.
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Another premature “end of war” media build-up.
It’s Wednesday, August 18, 2010, and the U.S. TV-news establishment is celebrating the “end of combat operations in Iraq,” reporting, “the last combat troops are leaving Iraq,” as the last designated combat brigade, some 600 men and women, crossed the border into Kuwait, some talk hosts claiming Iraq to be a war that was, “in some sense, won.”Like when the war began, is the media just slushing along, slinging at us the dribble the government’s spilling on them?
President Obama, in his August 31, 2010 speech, announcing the end of combat operations in Iraq, could only be fully justified in the praise he gave to the troops as the only constant of success that has been seen in Iraq since the invasion. But to say the combat is over?
Excuse me. Are there not 50,000 well armed and combat-trained troops still in harm’s way? In what sense is there a withdrawal, so long as they remain there, a magnet for violence and for the return of more troops in the name of their safety? And in what sense, as the media reported, has there been a win? The sense in which Bush made the claim of the “end of major combat,” standing in front of a “Mission Accomplished” sign aboard an aircraft carrier, on May 2, 2003?
- More than seven years have been spent there by soldiers on numerous, divorce- and suicide-inducing tours;
- there is still no government in Iraq;
- a new lexicon of words and names, all invoking despairing memories, has been dropped like bombs on the American people;
- infrastructure services, like electricity, have been seriously degraded to what existed before the invasion;
- violence has been markedly increasing over the last several months;
- military assets and responsibilities are being replaced by the State Department, and contractors, not included in the remaining troop count;
- Iran’s influence has grown to exceed that of any other nation;
- American business trails in contracts being awarded;
- American criminal and political justice and constitutional checks and balances have collapsed:
allowing the war to begin;
allowing it to become a wrongly motivated, extended occupation;
allowing the perpetrators, Bush, Cheney et al to escape any accountability for numerous violations;
The removal of a murderous dictator has to be weighed against the loss of American lives and possibly up to 100,000 dead Iraqis—men, women, and children, and all the repercussions on both sides. It’s a pitiful comparison, at best.
- $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $
- More than 4,400 U.S. soldiers have been killed and more than 6,500 wounded, many severely;
- and, unlike Vietnam, there are still 55,000 troops, armed, making them combat troops, and a pretty major number of them at that, still occupying Iraq, although the government would have you believe that what’s being left behind are a detachment of embassy guards and training advisors.
Some say that if, years or decades ahead, Iraq becomes a self-reliant democracy, it will have been worth it.
Really? With those decades, and a decade before them filled with war and death, a mass of lame and buried, mourned as the modern label for American ideological expansion and the sustaining of profits for the stakeholders in America’s sprawling military-industrial complex? And then, that, as a justification to repeat the process again and again?
The question has to be asked: is America’s military—the lives of its soldiers—to be spent to achieve democracy and economic prosperity for other nations? Or, should the military only be utilized in America’s defense, against direct and immediate threats to its security, threats which can be identified and effectively targeted with armies? Because if anything other than immediate threats are to be allowed, America can hear unfounded sound-bites and catch-phrases repeated again and again by politicians as justification to keep America at war in occupations of indefinite term abroad, as America did in Vietnam and is headed for again in Afghanistan, where the military is engaged in nation-building, and where the objectives of defensive war were won in 2003.
The only positive (if you’re not on the payroll of the military-industrial complex) is the record of service logged by the vast majority of the troops sent there, again, and again, and again, and again, and...
And why are they shipping the hardware back to the U.S., when it will be needed shortly in Iran, that is, unless the U.S. intends to give Iran the same, nuclear free-pass Bush gave to them and N. Korea?
Iraq remains a mess, where the 50,000 troops that remain at the end of August are a magnet for violence, and worse, a temptation for the administration to re-engage there, and later, to do an about-face on the withdrawal, claiming it as necessary for their safety. Withdrawing them is necessary for that. But this phase of the withdrawal is an important step toward the promise the president made to get the troops out. Still, 50,000 combat troops (let’s not play semantics; they have weapons and have been trained and experienced to use them) will remain on very dangerous ground.
The Defense and/or State Department (administration) is playing semantics, calling the Iraq mission a change from combat to stability operations. But both mean the threat and use of force to counter force, as “Operation New Dawn,” replaces “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” a change of name which, so far, aside from slave-wage troops (compared to security contractors—mercenaries) that have been withdrawn, is the only change that is significant.
Will there be another historical flood of post-war immigrants? Their arrival has been the past, reliable indicator that the end of another American political-military blunder has really arrived.
The Iraq war is over?
Let’s hope the troops leaving are not ever sent back as the violence continues to increase. The State Department says any such recall would require a change in policy, as if that’s some meaningful barrier in a government where policy can flip like pancakes. Now, if they would have said that, as the Constitution requires, it would take an act of Congress to bring troops back, well... a non-reversing withdrawal would be far more assured. And let’s hope that those left behind don’t have to pay a steep residual price. They’re not being paid nearly as well for that exposure as the State Department’s unconstitutional army of a reported 7,000 armed-to-the-teeth mercenaries (security contractors?) who will be joining them.
It looks like a lot more guns are going in than coming out over the next month.
And, just so it doesn’t look like a war, all the command is now going to be routed, publicly, at least, through the podium with the State Department’s emblem on it instead of Defense’s. Clever.
Bottom line: it doesn’t matter if the administration says, through Defense or State, that the troops left in Iraq are guarding the embassy, training police and troops, peeling potatoes, or acting as school-crossing guards, 50,000 armed and combat-experienced troops being left there, with more than ten percent of their number in contract mercenaries, is not, in any sense, a withdrawal! The administration is trying hard to convince that it is, that it represents a reasonable “administrative” number, “for stability,” but what it represents is nothing less than a continued occupation, in considerable force, in a zone of perpetual and growing violence, with considerable potential to be drawn into conflict and take considerable casualties, while the Iraqis haggle about how best to shut each other out of the still-to-materialize governing process and corner the market on corruption and the illicit riches that come with the power and the U.S. presence. It’s a despicable situation, not at all in defense of the nation, and it is despicable to be involved in it or to risk the loss of another soldier’s leg or life to further perpetuate it.
War over?
“Historic moment?” Or, was it the fabricated history of an historic public-relations blitz, tied to an isolated, invited TV news outlet (MSNBC), and the staged, cross-border movement of a comparatively small Army unit, to engineer the dead-of-night launch of an election-campaign offensive?
We’ll see. We’ll see if all troops are out, as (conditionally) agreed and promised, by 2012.
Meanwhile, there’s no question the military-industrial complex’s profit objectives are being kept alive, and the weapons orders flowing. And you can’t fill orders for F-16 fighters (around $18 million, each, not including ordinance and spares—read below) to confront Iran, as is being done, for delivery to a country that doesn’t have a friendly government... or an occupation to support one.
Can you.
“Click”...
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Asked of his relationship with Karzai, he said, “The relationship with Afghanistan is very good.”
American military policy is a business plan for extended wars.
To pave the way for rumbling over any deadline for a so-called, military withdrawal in Iraq, and keeping alive the military-industrial complex’s (MIC) operations there, Ryan C. Crocker, the former American ambassador to Iraq, who was instrumental in negotiating the agreement stipulating withdrawal before 2012, said, “For a very long period [read indefinite-to-forever] of time, we’re going to be on the ground, even if it’s solely in support of U.S. weapons systems.”Lt. Gen. Babaker Zebari, Iraq’s chief military commander, who rightly expects sectarian violence to greatly increase, also spoke in the August heat to say that the U.S. forces should not leave Iraq until 2020, ten more years, until his army is able to guarantee internal security.
And finally, with the mid-August, weekend broadcast of NBC’s Meet the Press, the unified scope of U.S. military ambition was made clear, as Afghanistan U.S. forces commander, Gen. David Petraeus paralleled Iraq to Afghanistan in response to questions on the length of the U.S. occupation there, referring to the president’s earlier, West-Point message of “a substantial additional commitment... in troops, funding... and an increase in urgency,” which he said is the emphasis of the July 2011 deadline in Afghanistan, as “a conditions-based process, not an event...” He then mirrored former Iraq Ambassador Crocker’s remarks about the term of occupation in Iraq by saying this for Afghanistan’s occupation: “We will have an enduring presence here, in some fashion.”
Petraeus stressed the “urgency” to increase progress, describing “progress” as a building of small successes in different areas and linking and expanding them, but admitting that, “Progress only began [after nine long years] in late spring, in Helmand Province... a lot of progress still needs to be made and that will be a long-term operation.” And he repeated, “Withdrawal will be “conditions based... the July 11, 2011 withdrawal date... is conditional.”
His remarks also demonstrated how far removed from defense the Afghanistan occupation really is, when speaking of the what-if’s: “If we lose,” he said, “think of the repercussions for the country, and then the region,” which was the same “if we lose” justification that blanketed those questions in Vietnam.
On “if we win,” while qualifying his statement with a push-back on the use of the word “win,” as being an unlikely definable goal (which, in and of itself says a lot about the legitimacy of the extended occupation there), he mentioned security, of course, but the overwhelming emphasis of his answer, and of his statement of why the U.S. is in Afghanistan, fell far from the legitimate defense of America: “There are $trillions in minerals development if we win.” And Petraeus further described the markers of success, which, admit it or not, are objectives, as “like in Iraq... achieving a level of violence that is reduced sufficiently to allow commerce, business, and outside investment...”
It all has the undeniable ring of a capitalistic agenda vs. defensive, doesn’t it?
If it looks like a duck...
And the General, an exacting and well-versed politician who denies it, finally fell back on the same old generalization that has become the universal facade for claims of national security, which facts show do not apply, are not achievable, and are not critical to the operations of al Qaeda which, like electricity, takes the path of least resistance as it flows to the voids: “We’re here so that Afghanistan does not become a sanctuary for trans-national extremists.” As has been pointed out before, on that basis, the U.S. would be able to justify occupations in at least a dozen nations throughout the globe. It is not a justification for what is, in reality, nation-building, as the General so much as said, to create a platform for commerce.
Lockheed Martin’s F-16 assembly line.
Can industry ever justify soldiers’ lives for livelihoods or profits, especially on weapons sales to other nations?
On the heels of these summer, 2010, MIC-prep statements, and those of President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, in the same period, intended to direct the public communication and acceptance of Afghan- and Iraqi-military policies, the “non-government” in Iraq has filled-in Crocker’s statement (and Petraeus’s image of Afghan end-game success), by ordering 140 tanks for $200 million, in addition to naval ships, small arms, F-16 fighter planes, and supporting vehicles, armaments, munitions, and spares—the entire spectrum of the MIC’s conventional-arms-manufacturing-establishment showroom.Ka-ching! The money flows, blooded by more than 4,400 dead and near 6,800 wounded U.S. troops.
Operation Enduring Freedom? More like enduring pain (except for the MIC), and it is time to let the Iraqis live in the stew they make for themselves. And, yes, it is their situation and circumstance now. The U.S. has paid with the lives of its soldiers more than long enough and painfully enough to both atone for the Bush-Cheney crime and give them the real chance they need to get past their prejudices and historical strife to make a new start, and America can no longer be held responsible for their future, nor should it be, not by the Iraqis, not by U.S. elected, appointed, or career officials, and certainly not by the MIC.
Yet, it is clear that the Iraqi occupation will not end, as President Obama falsely promised, because it has entered the phase of end-game payoff for the industrial component of the MIC: the establishing of another armed state where, despite whatever form of leadership evolves to rule Iraq, instead of a defense treaty (and the history of the Iraq-Kuwait invasion outcome) to protect against foreign invasion, the U.S. build-up, maintenance, and involvement with another military nation-state will be perpetuated indefinitely, with the benefits to fall only into the pockets of that industry which has been the only entity to continuously profit from the deaths of the tens upon uncounted tens of thousands of people since Bush invaded. And that’s just Iraq. Only a liar would say this is not the very same future envisioned by “officials,” elected or otherwise, for Afghanistan, and then for Iran, and then the rogue nations of North Africa, one by one, keeping America at war and the money flow to the MIC intact beyond the lifetimes of anyone’s children.
The Predator drones (above) and ship-launched cruise missiles are the
current, primary offensive U.S. weapons in the N. African shadow war.
Or, sanity may prevail, at least where taking the tactical fight to al Qaeda is concerned. The covert approach, basically, the focused, limited-force, intelligence/special-operations approach favored by the Biden camp, has been a component of the occupations in both Iraq and Afghanistan, but is now the core of a quietly built-up engagement composed of intelligence gathering, accelerated drone attacks, and special operations in North Africa, described by administration officials as using a scalpel instead of the hammer of troops. This covert conflict is dubbed the “Shadow War,” and whether the focused cut of the “scalpel” is a holding action for the later “hammer” of troop invasions, or will be established as the means by which troops will be replaced, to properly engage “shadow” enemies, remains to be seen. But the tactics are being applied, with local-government permission, by the expanded military-operations capacity of the CIA, and by expanded military-intelligence derived, special-group operations against al Qaeda in Yemen and other N. African locales. It represents an important step in the right direction, despite the concerns of oversight and blurred military-rights/protections legalities, because officials have finally conceded that the use of intelligence, law enforcement, and special operations is effective while avoiding the kinds of cost and waste that have been endured (again, except by the MIC) and which are the future with troop operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.Speaking on the shadow war in Yemen, a former United States ambassador to that nation, Edmund J. Hull, warned that American policy must not be limited to using force against al Qaeda, saying, “I think it’s both understandable and defensible for the Obama administration to pursue aggressive counter-terrorism operations... I’m concerned that counter-terrorism is defined as an intelligence and military program. To be successful in the long run, we have to take a far broader approach that emphasizes political, social and economic forces.”
But there is danger here, in an “approach that emphasizes political, social and economic forces,” non-defensive terms coming from a civilian official, which are also primary MIC precursors to increasing military presence—build-up, as was done in Vietnam, or invasion and occupation, to establish the security and/or train the local forces to eventually, after another “long-term, hard” struggle, with “conditional” withdrawal criteria, provide the security that is required to grow desired “political, social, and economic” environments, or... to nation-build.
It begins with what Obama administration officials say they already are doing: increasing Yemen’s foreign-aid budget and proposing advice (advisors, military, primarily, which is how the build-ups begin), which was emphasized, by unnamed administration officials as the core of America’s effort, along with equipping, and establishing coordinated intelligence exchanges. How quickly and easily this stirring phase of the shadow war can turn into another inflated, unnecessary, perpetuated military presence, with all the attendant casualties and costs, is alarming.
But the vastly more effective, far-less costly shadow war remains only a second front until it is applied in Afghanistan and Iraq without the presence of occupying troops. But there is a more relevant, critically important difference to note between shadow wars and wars fought with occupations, which reflects the justification of purpose: shadow wars are legitimate defense because, by their nature, they can have no commercial or capitalist objectives or rewards. Shadow wars have no commercial or capitalist objectives or rewards.
Defense Secretary Gates is only scratching at the surface of the MIC’s sprawl with his announced plans to cut into the bloated top ranks of the military’s personnel and parts of its flow-chart components and proposed systems. Much, much more needs to be done, because when a nation that is, by far, the greatest military power on Earth spends decades in war or occupation of third-world nations, that nation is not acting in its defense, but is instead acting out its warfare-derived business plan, where defense (and al Qaeda) is only the initiative excuse.
While the legacy of the Obama administration will be to have turned the steep, domestic-prosperity down-slide, initiated by a string of conservative-Republican, trickle-down, deregulate administrations, it will also be one of propagation of the MIC grand plan for unnecessary, extended war and death, for profit, for a national-security intent that is as much a facade now as it was in Vietnam or Korea, but with a different kind of underlying truth, where the real fear is the nuclear arsenal that is scattered throughout a politically unstable Pakistan, and where, rather than spend 3,000 troops over two years, tops, to eliminate that grave threat to the fabric of America’s society and the lives of every demographic of its citizenry, the U.S. is determined to instead spend decade upon decade, at least 15,000 soldier’s lives, or more, and unlimited national debt to support neighboring nation-building and occupations for some kind of misguided “stability,” and to do it indefinitely.
Military deployment for defense cannot be subverted for economics or cultural policing.
Tactics to encourage an endless occupation in Afghanistan have lately targeted strongly emotional issues, relating to the abusive treatment of women, which is hardly an Afghan novelty. Most recent, the story from the cover of Time magazine’s issue of a year ago, August 9, 2009, has had new light put upon it. Aisha, the disfigured girl on the cover, was then a beautiful, 18-year-old who had the misfortune of being the niece of a custodial uncle who killed a man and, under Pashtun tribal custom, atoned by giving her and her younger sister to the dead man’s relative, who made her his bride when she reached puberty. When she was caught, after fleeing years of abuse, her owner-husband cut off her nose and both ears, since tribal custom sees a man whose wife dishonors him as having cut off his nose. It was a perverted eye-for-an-eye retribution, leaving Aisha as she appeared in the controversial Time magazine cover (she has since been secretly smuggled out of Afghanistan to the U.S. for reconstructive surgery), a picture difficult to look at, confronting those who are civilized with a window into the incomprehensible, cowardly brutality of one selfish, unfeeling man, whose savage assault stands with those of many others to represent a society of, by civilized standards, deeply perverse values.The presence of an American occupation in Afghanistan is not preventing these atrocities, and they will continue, in this decade, if and when America leaves or if it stays, and, the evidence shows, Taliban government or not. Aisha’s is only one among uncounted cases of familial/religious punishments, derived from religious or tribal customs, that are carried out daily in Afghanistan and many other nations whose customs, by Western, civilized standards, are hideously barbaric, most of which are never reported. But among those that are, in Afghanistan, it is clear that the local acceptance and enthusiasm for the practice of these customs is widespread, beyond the clique of those labeled as “Taliban fighters” or “clerics,” like the crowds in the Deep South celebrated lynchings of African-Americans, or the frontier bounties for “Indian” scalps, or like Salem’s settlers stoked the witch-burning fires. Time (not soldiers) will also succeed to evolve Afghanistan’s violent cultural practices.
One such reported case, of note, which would make the stories of the defunct soap, The Guiding Light, seem tame, was the stoning to death of a young, Afghan couple who eloped, the woman already engaged to marry a relative of her lover, who himself was already married and had two children. When they were induced by family members to return home, they were seized by the Taliban and tried before a religious court, under Shariah law, presided over by local mullahs. Being found guilty, they were taken to the village bazaar, where they were circled by a crowd (women were prohibited) and stoned to death by some 200 of the men, with an even-larger, non-participating crowd looking on and cheering. Of course, Taliban spokesmen supported the punishment, as did members of the crowd who were interviewed. And among those throwing the stones were the man’s father and brother, and the girl’s relatives, including her brother. Similar and less-serious village-participatory-punishment practices are regularly reported from every Afghan province.
Atrocities are not only part and parcel with the Third World, they are exported with immigrants. In the U.S., the practice of Shariah law has not ended, any more than cock fighting has for Cuban immigrants. Honor killings and other practices are continually reported. If the United States cannot prevent these and the barbaric culture-practices of other immigrants within its borders, how can anyone expect that the U.S. can succeed in doing so in other nations, or that it should endure the cost of lives and fortune it takes to act as the world’s cultural policeman to try? The U.S. will not end these practices in Afghanistan, or anywhere else, with occupations, despite if the occupations have industrial ambitions at their end, though, occupations are far less likely if they do not.
The way to accelerate time’s change of culture on Afghanistan’s and other primitive societies is the way missionaries spread Catholicism throughout the world, but without the religious proselytism, through education and diplomatic and economic incentives and sanctions, by bringing to bear the penalties of deprivation and isolation, and the carrots of aide programs and international participation, not with the lives of American soldiers, and governments should help organizations engaged in this, non-religious kind of work. The wide community acceptance of cruel punishment that has been shown to exist must be handled civilly and changed into disdain, beginning with the local leadership, then leading to criminality. It won’t be easy, because even U.N. sanctions to prevent nuclear proliferation are routinely sidestepped by many nations, making them less effective or useless. But the worth of American soldiers’ lives is only justified in giving over to the defense of the nation, nothing less, not to any other cause that does not reach the scope of genocide, or any capitalist/military-industrial facade that has the label of defense hung upon it.
Otherwise, where, and with what afflicted group, will the wars shrouding the American people ever end?
There is so little time that sweeps past the life of a generation that no policy of war should be permitted to fill large segments of it. Baby Boomers are experiencing their 30th year of life in a nation at war, and that’s the least of any post-WWII generation, on a percentage scale, with most of it illegitimate, with at least another decade as much as promised, but “Oh, yes we can,” Mr. President... militarize the world, enslave the souls of our children in a climate of continuing conflict, not change the way Washington fails or end the throat-grip held by any of the influences that control and profit from the carnage that afflicts the flesh and the spirit of soldiers, “collaterals,” their families, and the span of generations that bear the pain as a constant affliction in their news and their psyches, and who will pay for it.
“For a very long period of time, we’re going to be on the ground, even if it’s solely in support of U.S. weapons systems.”“We will have an enduring presence here, in some fashion.”
Expect “a tough fight with difficult days ahead.” Your words, among the others’, Mr. President.
Was that the promise... or the goal?
This December 2009 swath of violence in Karachi, Pakistan is only one occurance of the internal struggle for
power and control that has sympathizers in every level of that nuclear state’s society, including the military.
Shake out order from the chaos, and there is the big picture: despite all of the lives and money spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, and military aide, “stability” $billions sent to Pakistan, part of which ends up paying border interests hostile to the U.S., and parts of which support a dangerous nuclear arsenal, there will never be any chance for unilateral nuclear disarmament by Pakistan, not as long as America is unwilling to begin confronting that nation with the fact that it, Pakistan, is the real threat that is currently unacceptable in the region, through the nuclear weapons it tenuously holds and the force of propagation they impel to other nations, like Iran. And there will never be any guarantee that somehow, someday, a weapon in Pakistan’s questionable control will not find its way to some form of detonation on Western soil, where the U.S. is the prime target. The objectives of the MIC prevent that confrontation of truth and the shorter conflict, or ended conflicts that would result. There has been enough of the drawn-out-for-decades military aid and war games, with the U.S. footing most of the bill and the blood as all risks remain evermore ominously on the table.
Are you reassured that this guard of the Pakistani nuclear missiles is smiling?
The nuclear weapons in these medium-range missiles are only the tip of the pyramid of risk that
widens as controls beyond the launch-site soldier’s weapon must be flawlessly extended through
the production, assembly, command-and-control, transportation, storage, and waste processes.
A great source of the hate and determination that continuously drives that dark, nuclear-initiated objective of the extremists, and which brought down the capitalist-iconic Twin Towers, is the perception that capitalism drives America’s new epoch of Mid-East-region imperialism, not democracy, a perception that was reenforced by Ambassador Crocker and Gen. Petraeus, among others. The other offending factor, becoming more so to Americans, as well, is the widening presence of U.S. troops and infringing U.S. culture, particularly sexual objectification and commercialism, in lands where the U.S., its troops and culture, do not belong, and where the military footprint does no good, except to incite and legitimize Islamic-fronting radicals who want the fight, and to complete the business plan of U.S. “defense” industries which want sustained profits and expansion of their markets and capabilities to be realized on a slowly-simmering stage.You, Mr. President, are carrying forward their corrupted agenda of greed. President Eisenhower would tell you as much.
He already has.
cc (via web forms) August 16, 2010: White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Sen. Russ Feingold, Sen. Arlen Specter, Rep. Steve Driehaus, Rep Henry Waxman, Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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On illegal immigration, the Democratic left is guilty of Republican-conservative propagandizing.
Critics, including MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who call the Republican party an “anti-immigration” party, or that the Republican party is “anti-Hispanic,” or seeks to “make criminals out of newborns” by amending the 14th Amendment’s citizenship stipulations, these critics are guilty of the very same, grossly exaggerated, inflaming propaganda that is characteristic of FOX and the conservative-Republican party’s leadership, their trumped-up charges having no basis whatsoever in fact. Despite that it is difficult to pose any rational defense for the positions (more, the lack of) of the Republican party of today, and that its leadership is not gifted with the capacity to moderate their views or avoid abuses of rhetoric, the fact is that the Republican party, and many others, are only seeking to see immigration law enforced and American ideals preserved, as immigration law intends.This, more correctly, makes the Republican party the anti-ILLEGAL-immigration party, as opposed to the Democratic party, which seems inclined to pander to the Hispanic vote. And, no, the Republican party does not “hate” Hispanics, but the truth is that it is Hispanics, and chiefly those from Mexico, who with the help of the U.S. and their government, through a multi-state network of Mexican consul offices, are abusing the laws, resources, and courtesy of the American people. There is no other way in which to address the problem than to name that race or nationality which is at its root, simply by the nature of geography, not any other intrinsic race or ethnic characteristic, and any allusion to any other characteristic by critics, other than political, where there are serious deficits, is simply an effort to paint legitimate fact-naming as racism for the sole purpose of casting critics in a completely, falsely deplorable light.
Pandering to the illegal-Hispanic alliance, if allowed to continue, admitting wave after wave of illegal immigrants, as will be the case if an amnesty is again granted with “reform,” allowing more millions to bypass immigration law and obtain the “unenlightened” vote, will eventually result in the loss of the Democratic party and all politics in America to the hands of those very illegal immigrants, forever casting aside America’s historical heritage, which rose from the Founding fathers to fight against the opposed evils in two World Wars, and which, in stark contrast to much of Central and South America, where illegal immigrants have their political values and experience, has stood as the world’s beacon of freedom and democratic process. Such overthrow of the traditionally American society would mark a significant dilution of the already diminishing global cultural diversity, which, like America’s heritage, is worth preserving.
There is no legitimate reason to oppose a policy of enforcing immigration law, because to enforce is also to support preserving America’s unique customs and heritage instead of seeing them absorbed and replaced by that which predominates Central and South America. Only those who wish to bring about exactly that result, who wish to see the United States opened up to a sea-change of heritage, custom, and political power as a consequence of an unregulated invasion of Hispanics from Mexico and other nations of Central and South America can oppose, without any legitimate basis, rejecting amnesty or enforcement of immigration law that, enforced, protects America’s identity and ideals.
Even more ludicrous is the charge that the Republican party seeks to criminalize babies of illegal immigrants. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The intent is to remove a key magnet that draws illegal immigrants to America: that their children, born here, are automatically granted citizenship as a mere consequence of presence within America’s borders, which was not an issue for the nation when the 14th Amendment was passed, but which has been a right that has been abused for purposes never intended or foreseen when the Amendment was passed.
There is no basis of reason for any expectation that children born of parents who are within the borders of the U.S. illegally, or even legally as visitors, should expect those children to be granted citizenship status. The change sought would be limited to change citizenship so that only children born with at least one parent being a U.S. citizen would automatically receive citizenship status. This would not criminalize any child, because, legally, those who make that false claim know full-well that the children are devoid of any capacity for culpable intent, criminal or otherwise, and infants born of illegal immigrants would retain the citizenship and nationality of their parent’s country of origin and would remain with their parents as they are processed through immigration enforcement, not, as are their parents, as lawbreakers, but only as their attendant children. If any critics of this necessary change can deny that the intent of those who come to America illegally, to bear their children here, are not doing so with the intent and purpose of securing citizenship alone, in order that they can both receive free natal healthcare and later secure admission on a legal basis for themselves and their relatives, is either a liar or suffering damaged intellect to not have that awareness.
The only illegal immigrants the U.S. has any obligation to consider for a “structured” amnesty, are those who have served honorably in the U.S. military or whose immediate family are U.S. citizens, and that latter obligation is only through consideration of the citizen relatives. It is important and necessary to close the spigot the 14th Amendment has opened, to remove the strongest lure to illegal immigrants, after jobs, and prevent further, ongoing abuse.
cc August 15, 2010: Chris Matthews; (via web forms): White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Sen. Russ Feingold, Sen. Arlen Specter, Rep. Steve Driehaus, Rep Henry Waxman, Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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Happy birthday, Mr. President.
Happy birthday, Mr. President (via web card, August 4, 2010):At the late-July, Kabul Conference, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said that Afghan forces would take over security by 2014, as you, Mr. President, said that the U.S. is a “long-term partner for security and progress.”
It is obvious that the real meaning of both Karzai’s and your statements is quite different than Webster’s would apply. Karzai means that 2014 is a hoped-for date at which Afghan forces can begin to take control, while you mean that the U.S. occupation and sacrifice will be long-term, beyond your promised date in 2011 to begin withdrawal, and beyond Karzai’s 2014 deadline. Secretary of State Clinton reenforced the complete lack of any intent to withdraw any time soon, or distant, by stating, “2011 is the start of a new phase, not the end of our involvement.”
Meanwhile, Karzai, while enjoying wide international support and U.S. funding and troop protections, is not trusted by a large segment of his own people and his administration is extremely unpopular after nine years of U.S.-supported existence.
The narrative of the histories of Hamid Karzai, in Afghanistan, and Ngo Dinh Diem, in South Vietnam, and then, in 1965, General Nguyen Van Thieu, are eerily interchangeable, if the proper names are omitted. They are histories of commonalities of corruption, power lust, regime dependence upon American forces, failure, and repeated mistakes, each costing the lives of U.S. soldiers and each taking hefty chunks of U.S. cash, where the only question is how Karzai’s end will be written. In 1963, Diem was assassinated by the CIA, resulting in near two-and-one-half years of chaos, hosted by nine inept and corrupt regimes before the U.S. installed Van Thieu, who took the despot’s more traditional path out of power, skipping into exile, in 1975, taking much of the treasury’s gold with him and leaving the RVN Army, loyal only to the cash from diminishing U.S. aid, to quickly dismantle itself, as the stages of the U.S. withdrawal were complete and the Viet Cong army prepared to take Saigon.
The world did not come to an end.
U.S. national security suffered only self-inflicted pain.
Iraq and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki are different chapters of the same, sorry story, the denouement, though predictable, also still to be written.
Whether or not you will change your mind about saying Afghanistan is not like Vietnam, of which the foul play of leadership is just one similarity, the fact is that the outcome is heading for the same fruitless end, except that, early on, the primary objective of removing a government that sanctioned attacks against the U.S. was long ago achieved. It was, in 2003, a victory, and since that early-on, successful attainment of the mission objective in Afghanistan, when Bush should have followed his father’s lead, in the first Iraq war, and just withdrawn the troops, the parallels to the misplaced confidences and assertions regarding the war in Vietnam have become unmistakable, and there is no doubt that if America remains any further to prop up governments and nation-build, the outcome will be another failure, compounded by the deaths of new thousands, heaped on the backs of the 4,400 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.
Wrong.
American military involvement throughout the world is out of control, Sir. As you celebrate your birthday, a month after America’s, I hope that you will dedicate yourself to oppose the military interests that wish to see the U.S. military continually engaged in the name of national security, and move to disengage America from illicit occupations, as Iraq, and unnecessary ones, where the victory, to remove the government that supported al Qaeda, and inflict serious harm upon the leadership and body of that organization, was actually won years ago.
The occupations in Afghanistan, and in Iraq, for any other purpose than as a tactical position for operations against Iran, must end. And the end of the Afghan occupation is not a defeat. The objectives of the military forces there have been achieved and are no longer valid for that type of force deployment. Vigorous intelligence, law enforcement, and special operations efforts against al Qaeda, which have brought all the victories, world-wide, should continue and be accelerated, as Vice President Biden supported before the decision to send additional troops was made. If the Taliban eventually rule there, so be it, and it must be made clear that they must cooperate with all U.S. and Pakistani intelligence, law enforcement, and special operations efforts for as long as al Qaeda is present, and that any failure to do so will be viewed as a position of supporting them, causing the regime to be removed again by force, which U.S. troops can do at will, quickly and easily, leaving afterward to allow whatever government to rise that will, which would have imposed upon it the same conditions and obligations if it is to be allowed to exist. This is the only way to deal with nations like Afghanistan. It is not America’s place to determine who runs the governments of Afghanistan or Iraq, only to leave the message that if they support threats to America, they will be removed by force, that such support of these elements, or to seek WMD, is regime suicide. Costly and unwinnable occupations that create corrupted, elitist, allied regimes are unwise, unprofitable, and unnecessary. And it will be necessary to focus America’s military upon Iran, which will never give up nuclear armament until confronted with overwhelming force.
You can insure that the U.S. has a better birthday, with yours to follow, next year, if you will act this year to change the direction the military-industrial complex has set America upon, and which path has led for so long to so much harm and failure. A good first step, to signal that there will be withdrawal, and to send a message to Iran at the same time, would be to strongly advise and press that Congress approve a resolution or bill that authorizes you to direct the military to formulate and implement contingency planning for redeployment of Afghan forces to join American forces in Iraq, near the Iranian border and away from any populated areas, for the purpose of positioning and preparing for offensive operations against Iran, with specific prohibitions against any of those forces engaging with internal Iraqi conflicts. The occupation in Iraq, since it is a reality, now has only one legitimate objective for America, and that is as an organizing and jump-off point for an invasion of Iran, and seeking congressional authorization to plan and make initial moves would be a strong message to all nations that if war in Iran is to be avoided, sanctions need to be strictly enforced, with the full effort and involvement of all nations which have relations with Iran.
Then, there might be real cause for you and the nation to have a Happy birthday. But that is doubtful. It seems to be unavoidable that Iran will be America’s next necessary conflict, unless you decide to do nothing and see a replication of the Korean experience in Iran. America has given that regime all it needs to be sure that nothing will be done to stop it: nothing was done with N. Korea, nothing was done with Pakistan, or India, or Israel, and the Iranians consider themselves to be ethnically and historically superior to all of those nations. They do not believe they will win if there is war. They believe their threats will deter any action until they have two devices and can detonate one in a test that is primarily a statement, at which point, they calculate that, as with Korea, the cost of intervening with force will be deemed to be too high. That’s the way it is, and you should be prepared to act before they produce a result that can be deployed.
Quite a job you chased after, fully immersed, not one for really happy birthdays, after all. Not in these times.
cc (via web forms): Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Sen. Russ Feingold, Sen. Arlen Specter, Rep. Steve Driehaus, Rep Henry Waxman, Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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President Obama delivers the 9th straight, war-time commencement speech to West Point’s Cadet Corp,
warning them to expect a “tough fight with difficult days ahead” as the U.S. nation-builds in Afghanistan.
Why is America still in Afghanistan?
America has reduced much of foreign policy to a level that should be beneath the contempt of an intellectual president: buy them or kill them, or both, which is now the situation in Afghanistan, never mind the cost and carnage of innocents left in the wake of such blundering pursuits.In regard to the WikiLeaked documents, which highlight Afghanistan military-operations data and statistics, including civilian deaths, the administration has lined up the statements of Afghan and Pakistani officials to match its own, saying the leaks pose a severe danger to troops and operations, despite that the documents were vetted and redacted by responsible news organizations to remove names and specific data that could compromise troops or intelligence, and administration spokesmen also say, contradictorily, that most of the information was already known, is outdated, and the problems no longer exist.
Right. And where’s that bridge?
First, a shrug of the verbal shoulder to deflect the leaked revelations, which reflect poorly on the government’s line on Afghanistan, as unimportant. And now, it is very likely that with his contradictory statements of grave harm, Sec. Gates is spearheading the making of the leaks into an excuse for the failure of the counterinsurgency effort, the emphasis of which, as a policy, had already been found lacking and had begun a change to anti-terrorism priorities before the leaks.
More manipulation, less truth?
Secretary of Defense Gates cited the violated trust between governments and individuals represented by the WikiLeaks documents:What Gates does not deign to mention, and which his omission makes an example, is the trust between the U.S. government and its own people, particularly when the reasons for sending America’s sons and daughters into war are at question. The leaked documents show a violation there, more onerous than any other, because for too long, truth, trust, and honesty have been placed last, or not at all, before the American people, behind the consideration of all others, as Gates perfectly reflects in his statement.
“It is amazing how much trust matters in relationships, whether it’s with individuals or governments around the world.”
White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, who is the public face on administration policy, said:This is an outrageously unachievable objective, first because it is invalid, because the Afghan government was removed as a response to 9/11, and al Qaeda decimated, hundreds of its front-line leaders killed, and thousands of the Afghan people of al Qaeda and the Taliban, associated and not, were killed, all in a victory responding to the 9/11 attack, achieving the goal stated if the demands issued to the Taliban by Bush were not met, all within the first two years after the invasion! Second, the objective stated by Gibbs is ridiculous because even if it were possible to destroy all Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, which it is not, Afghanistan is not the where and all of al Qaeda bases or planning capabilities. There is no need for a base in Afghanistan (or Pakistan) to plan attacks against the U.S. Al Qaeda is global and electronically mobile. The stated objective of the Press Secretary is so useless and meaningless that it can only be propaganda.
“We are in this region of the world because of what happened on 9/11. Ensuring that there is not a safe haven in Afghanistan by which attacks against this country and countries around the world can be planned. That’s why we’re there, and that’s why we’re going to continue to make progress on this relationship.”
So what is the real objective that hides behind the expressed one of denial of Afghanistan as a place to plan attacks against the U.S.? Is it the wealth of minerals in the hills and the drool of industries to control and exploit that wealth, U.S. and foreign? Is it the corporations that profit with defense contracts, those military personnel who would not be happy if there was not some engagement somewhere, and those elected officials who, through contributions or through some vicarious, warmongering ideology are in their pockets, all of whom are otherwise collectively known as the military-industrial complex? Is it to control the presence of India?
Or... most likely, is the administration afraid to say that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is a threat to America? If it were, which it is, should not the army be there instead of Afghanistan, achieving an objective that is both quantifiable and most highly affecting of U.S. and Western national security? That would be a meaningful war, one that removes all nuclear capability from an unstable country that is both threatened by and composed of extremist sympathizers. One that would also pave the way to remove them from another nation afterward, peaceably. If al Qaeda or any Mid-Eastern terrorist organization gets nuclear materials to deploy in a weapon against the U.S. or its allies, it will come from either Pakistan or Iran, more likely before Russia or India. Does the Obama administration wish to avoid highlighting that because it does not wish to place such a threat and confrontation with an unstable Pakistan before the public? The reason provided by Mr. Gibbs is so easy to substitute, and so unconvincing.
One example demonstrating how blatantly the government, and the Department of Defense, attempts to minimize the negative nature of the truth regarding “difficult” military operations, is Afghanistan commander, Gen. Petraeus’s July 2010 statement that, “some of the ground troops might see the rules of engagement as being somewhat bureaucratic.” The fact is that the rules of engagement, which are highly restrictive upon soldiers, are levered to the prime value of the local populace in accord with the objectives of counter-insurgency operations, not the safety of U.S. soldiers, and they are considered by most soldiers to be a factor increasing the “danger and casualties” for them, not as being bureaucratic upon them, but rather, as being hazardous to them. When a nation employs its military in operations that dictate rules and procedures detrimental to its survival, that should be a clue that the situation is not one that justifies the deployment of U.S. troops, because force of fielded armies is meant to be employed against enemies who are identifiable, and always in ways most effective to maximize reduction of the enemy and minimize losses to the troops, always. If it can’t be done that way, there’s another way the problem has to be addressed, besides troops. Afghanistan has another way, expressed by the Vice President (LEISO), and like Iraq, Afghanistan has now become a misuse of troops.
The United Nations records that in 2009, there were 2,412 civilians who were killed in Afghanistan—men, women, and children. And, despite increased awareness that the death of civilians is always two-steps backward for the overall objectives, and regardless of more restrictive rules of engagement, that figure is 14-percent higher than the previous year, which speaks against a war that is reported by governments as going well, as well as “difficult” and “hard.” If one out of three of the related reports from the secret documents disclosed by WikiLeaks in late July 2010 were discarded, there would still be ample reason to believe that the U.N. figures are vastly understated.
There have also been war crimes that go beyond the attributes of the fog of war, committed by the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan. But while America has so far avoided the branding that comes with trial in the World Court or by war-crimes commissions, that taint is on the heart of compassionate citizens and is a constant source of helpless regret and anger which has spanned the generations to today, beginning with My Lai, in Vietnam, the incredible carnage inflicted upon that massacred village, mostly women and children, and babies, to include sexual abuse, torture, and mutilation, being the first of which most Americans can directly associate. Is this a palatable price for national security, in unjustifiable or unnecessary, or wrongly-extended wars, and in conditions of a partial commitment, overextending troops year upon year, and unconstitutionally augmenting a thinned resource with contract killers, unaccountable and already responsible for one cross-gender/age massacre, in Iraq?
Yet, the wars, mostly unnecessary and unjustified, keep on coming, prodded by a push to keep the machine well oiled, and reap the profit of it, along with a growing acceptance of “collateral damage,” which is evidenced by the coining of that dehumanizing term for what is, starkly put, a veil upon the casual murder of innocents. From distant rooftops by machine-gunning, laughing mercenaries and soldiers, pumping rounds into unknown targets on a distant road, to the trigger on a joystick in an air-conditioned room 3,000 miles from the fallen targets, the mechanics of death have becoming more indiscriminate and robotic than the initiation of global conflicts in which the toys and theories are put to the ultimate test, in situations far removed from any ultimate threat to national security, instead, contributing to its demise.
In response to the WikiLeaks documents, the New York Times reported that:
“On Capitol Hill, a leading Senate Democrat (Sen. John Kerry, D-MA) said the documents, with their detailed account of a war faring even more poorly than two administrations had portrayed, would intensify Congressional scrutiny of Mr. Obama’s policy. ‘Those policies are at a critical stage, and these documents may very well underscore the stakes and make the calibrations needed to get the policy right more urgent,’ said Senator Kerry.”Therein, within that statement of a leading U.S. Senator, lies a big problem with the Afghanistan occupation, and all wars and occupations: Congress does not understand that the Constitution puts the power and responsibility for war policy, not just the funding, in the body of Congress, not any president, not an intellectual, right-intended president like President Obama, and certainly not an ignorant, authoritative “Great Decider” criminal like George Bush. Presidents are empowered to determine the methods and procedures, configurations and levels of force that will be deployed to achieve the goals and policies set by Congress, not make the policy or goals for military deployments themselves. If a president believes there is a need for military engagement, or a change in congressionally authorized policy or goals, the Constitution requires that the executive “sell it” to Congress in order to get the authority through law, resolution, or order, never to initiate on its own. Until Congress starts getting that right, there is going to be little hope of ever returning to a state of war as limited and last resort.
And every day it keeps on being done wrong, and wrongly—every day—more U.S. and innocent lives are savagely torn and extinguished. To continue in this way, or delay to change it, is deadly wrong.
cc (via web forms) July 29, 2010: White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Sen. Russ Feingold, Sen. Arlen Specter, Rep. Steve Driehaus, Rep Henry Waxman, Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...
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Born of danger, to dangerous times.
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 jo