- by Stephen Lendman
5/31/07
Probably no word better defines or underscores the Bush presidency than "terrorism" even though his administration wasn't the first to exploit this highly charged term. We use to explain what "they do to us" to justify what we "do to them," or plan to, always deceitfully couched in terms of humanitarian intervention, promoting democracy, or bringing other people the benefits of western civilization Gandhi thought would be a good idea when asked once what he thought about it.
Ronald Reagan exploited it in the 1980s to declare "war on international terrorism" referring to it as the "scourge of terrorism" and "the plague of the modern age." It was clear he had in mind launching his planned Contra proxy war of terrorism against the democratically elected Sandinista government in Nicaragua and FMLN opposition resistance to the US-backed El Salvador fascist regime the same way George Bush did it waging his wars of aggression post-9/11.
It's a simple scheme to pull off, and governments keep using it because it always works. Scare the public enough, and they'll go along with almost anything thinking it's to protect their safety when, in fact, waging wars of aggression and state-sponsored violence have the opposite effect. The current Bush wars united practically the entire world against us including an active resistance increasingly targeting anything American.
George Orwell knew about the power of language before the age of television and the internet enhanced it exponentially. He explained how easy "doublethink" and "newspeak" can convince us "war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength." He also wrote "All war propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from (chicken hawk) people who are not fighting (and) Big Brother is watching...." us to be sure we get the message and obey it.
In 1946, Orwell wrote about "Politics and the English Language" saying "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible" to hide what its user has in mind. So "defenseless villages are bombarded from the air (and) this is called 'pacification'." And the president declares a "war on terrorism" that's, in fact, a "war of terrorism" against designated targets, always defenseless against it, because with adversaries able to put up a good fight, bullies, like the US, opt for diplomacy or other political and economic means, short of open conflict.
The term "terrorism" has a long history, and reference to a "war on terrorism" goes back a 100 years or more. Noted historian Howard Zinn observed how the phrase is a contradiction in terms as "How can you make war on terrorism, if war is terrorism (and if) you respond to terrorism with (more) terrorism....you multiply (the amount of) terrorism in the world." Zinn explains that "Governments are terrorists on an enormously large scale," and when they wage war the damage caused infinitely exceeds anything individuals or groups can inflict.
It's also clear that individual or group "terrorist" acts are crimes, not declarations or acts of war. So a proper response to the 9/11 perpetrators was a police one, not an excuse for the Pentagon to attack other nations having nothing to do with it.
George Bush's "war on terrorism" began on that fateful September day when his administration didn't miss a beat stoking the flames of fear with a nation in shock ready to believe almost anything - true, false or in between. And he did it thanks to the hyped enormity of the 9/11 event manipulated for maximum political effect for the long-planned aggressive imperial adventurism his hard line administration had in mind only needing "a catastrophic and catalyzing (enough) event - like a new Pearl Harbor" to lauch. With plans drawn and ready, the president and key administration officials terrified the public with visions of terrorism branded and rebranded as needed from the war on it, to the global war on it (GLOT), to the long war on it, to a new name coming soon to re-ignite a flagging public interest in and growing disillusionment over two foreign wars gone sour and lost.
Many writers, past and present, have written on terrorism with their definitions and analyses of it. The views of four noted political and social critics are reviewed below, but first an official definition to frame what follows.
full article
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Five Gears in Reverse:
The Cold War and Modern Moral Cowardice
by Chris Floyd
Wednesday, 30 May 2007
http://www.chris-floyd.com/Articles/Articles/Five_Gears_in_Reverse%3A_The_Cold_War_and_Modern_Moral_Cowardice/
Perhaps it was the end of the Cold War that did it. After all, it's been almost 20 years since the Berlin Wall came down. You'd have to be well over thirty to remember the feel of those times, and what's more, to be steeped in the unspoken assumptions that pervaded the era. Whole generations have been raised up now for whom the mores of that time, good and bad, are little more than nostalgic fashions to pick and choose from -- or simply discard -- as they assemble their ideological wardrobe for the present day. This is inevitable and natural -- and a good thing on the whole, given the many monstrosities perpetrated by both sides in the actually-pretty-hot Cold War, in which millions died around the world. (Although not within the boundaries of the two main protagonists. Why die when others can do it for you?)
However, considering the massive indifference with which most Americans have greeted the barbaric mores of our new Terror War era -- the systematic practice of torture, rendition, indefinite detention, assassination, concentration camps, secret prisons, executive dictatorship and multiple slaughter of the innocent -- it could be that the fading of some of those old Cold War assumptions might indeed play a significant part in the public acceptance -- and in many cases, enthusiastic championing -- of these degradations.
We speak here not of government policy during the Cold War -- which obviously embraced most if not all of the misdeeds enumerated above, and more besides (to which the millions of war-spawned graves in Southeast Asia bear silent testimony) -- but of the attitudes of ordinary people: the private beliefs and assumptions that were shaped by the decades-long rivalry with the Soviet Union. (Again, the fact that many of these beliefs were unexamined, uncritical, and at times completely baseless, is not the point here.)
One of the chief molders of the political mindset of ordinary people during the Cold War was the firm, fundamental belief that "we are not like them" -- that what sets us apart, what gives us the high moral ground in the conflict is that we do not do the sinister things that the Soviets do. We don't have gulags like they do. We don't have concentration camps and secret prisons. We don't jail people without charges. We don't torture people like they do. We don't have secret agents snatching people off the streets and throwing them into dungeons, like the KGB does. Our mail is not opened. Our private organizations are not infiltrated. Our homes cannot be raided without a warrant. Our leaders don't exalt themselves beyond the law, like the Communist tyrants. We don't have huge propaganda mills smearing enemies of the state and supporting every contradictory twist and turn in government policy. And whenever it turned out that "we" were in fact doing something like "they" do, it would produce a genuine and painful cognitive dissonance -- and sometimes even a political reaction, such as the restraints put on executive authority during the 1970s after the egregious abuses of the CIA, the Pentagon, the FBI and the White House were revealed. [An example of the popular reaction could be seen in the way that FBI founder J. Edgar Hoover went from unassailable national hero (straight-shooting crimebuster) to national joke (cross-dressing blackmailer) virtually overnight.]
However misinformed this fundamental belief might have been in many respects -- in regard to both the Soviet Union and the West -- its pervasiveness during the Cold War remained a potent weapon for those who sought to put a brake on state tyranny and curb abuses of America's Constitutional liberties and universal human rights. "That sounds like something them Commies would do!" -- This was an argument that had resonance in what we call today, in our degraded parlance, "the heartland." I know because I heard it myself from old farmers sitting around the stove at my grandfather's feed store in the rural South. You could hear it on the streets and in the churches. You could read it in the letters pages of the state and local newspapers. Having defined themselves against this dreaded Other, most ordinary people did not want to see their own nation partaking of the Other's attributes (real or imagined).
And so the feeling that these attributes -- tyranny, torture, slavish obedience, surveillance, etc. -- were utterly un-American became deeply worked into the national psyche. (Or large quadrants of it.) But this is obviously not true anymore. The well-attested, well-publicized and manifold abuses of the Bush Administration have evoked scarcely a ripple of complaint from the American people, much less the kind of political reaction that enabled the Church Committee, the Pike Committee and other top-level investigations to roll back some of the rank abuses of power that had corrupted the American system. As Arthur Silber, Norman Solomon and many others have pointed out, even the current public opposition to the Iraq War -- which is actually quite tepid, confined largely to ticking a box on an opinion poll -- is due largely to the "failure" of the Bush Administration to produce a quick and easy "victory," and not to the howling moral obscenity of the attempted conquest itself. The Democrats have obviously recognized the essential softness of the national anti-war sentiment, and have trimmed their sails accordingly, knowing there will be no price to pay for the rank mendacity of their craven sell-out to Bush on funding the slaughter in Iraq. [Cindy Sheehan has also taken notice of this, and has now quit the organized anti-war movement, despairing of its egotistic in-fighting and its robotic defense of the do-nothing Democrats.]
But even this muffled resistance to the Iraq War stands out like a full-scale revolution in comparison to the pin-dropping silence that has met the transformation of the United States into an open champion of the crudest sort of police-state tactics. Right now, the government is trying an American citizen -- Jose Padilla -- who was snatched by secret agents, imprisoned for years without charges, subjected to exquisite refinements of torture and finally driven insane. And he is only being prosecuted now -- on minor charges -- because the Bush Administration wanted to head off a direct court challenge to its "enemy combatant" decrees, its assertion of autocratic power over the life and liberty of every American citizen -- indeed, over every inhabitant of the world.
Of course, Padilla is just the tip of a massive, blood-smeared iceberg. We don't know exactly how many people are now chained up in Bush's secret prisons, or what happens to them, or how many people he has simply had killed. (He openly boasted of his assassinations before a national TV audience in the State of the Union address in 2003, as we've noted here several times.) But what we do know is damning enough -- yet it has not been damned. In 2004, the Democratic candidate running to unseat Bush's loathsome regime did not even mention the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, much the less the far greater and far wider torture regimen instigated at Bush's express orders. One of the most flagrant stains on the national honor in America's history, exposed mere months before the vote -- and it was not even an issue in the election. Nor was the existence of a concentration camp -- an American concentration camp -- at Guantanamo Bay an issue in the 2004 election -- or in the 2006 election for that matter. The Democrats in Congress could close Gitmo tomorrow if they wanted to, just as they could roll back some of the worst of Bush's autocratic encroachments simply by overturning the infamous "Military Commissions Act." But they have done neither; nor is there any public pressure compelling them to act on these issues. Although isolated patriots like Henry Waxman soldier on with investigations, there will be no equivalent of the broad-ranging, high-profile Church and Pike Committees to shovel away some of the mountain of shit that Bush and his accomplices have heaped upon the Constitution.
II.
And so the abuses go on. On Monday, as the nation honored its war dead for what was everywhere called their sacrifices for freedom, the Guardian reported on the latest twist in the long, sordid tale of Guantanamo captive Jamil el-Banna (which we reported on earlier here: Deeper Into Darkness: Slavery and Betrayal in Bush's Gulag). Banna, a UK citizen, has been held in Gitmo for more than four and a half years. He was snatched in Africa by the Americans after British intelligence gave the CIA false information about him. They were trying to force him into becoming an informant on Muslim activities in Britain; when that didn't work, they gave him over to the Americans, who have held him -- and tortured him -- without charges all this time. Now, years after they knew he had been captured on false evidence, the Americans have finally cleared him for release -- one of hundreds of the "worst of the worst" in Gitmo who turned out to be completely innocent -. But Bush's little bulldog, Tony Blair, refuses to allow Banna back into the UK, threatening to send him instead to his native Jordan -- from which Banna escaped in 1994 after being tortured by the American-allied regime there. The Guardian notes:
This month Mr Banna was seen in Guantánamo by his lawyer, Zachary Katznelson from the group Reprieve. According to Mr Katznelson's transcript of the meeting, seen by the Guardian, Mr Banna said: "The British government has let me stay here for four and a half years. What crime did I commit? Together with the Americans, they have kept me from my children. They have deprived me of the chance to see them grow up, to hold them, to kiss them, to laugh with them, to play with them. There is no way to turn back time, to give me back those moments." During the visit, Mr Banna was allowed to watch a home video of his children, including his first sighting of his four-year-old daughter Maryam...
Speaking from Guantánamo, while shackled to the floor, Mr Banna said: "I have always told the truth. I have no information about terrorism. I've said since the very first day: put me on trial anywhere at any time. I will gladly stand up and tell my story. And I know that a fair court would set me free. But there is no chance of that here in Guantánamo. There is no justice here." Mr Banna said his diabetes is not being treated and his sight is deteriorating....During the visit Mr Banna also said that letters from his children were taking up to 16 months to reach him....
The [UK] government has maintained a position that it has no obligation to help British residents held by the US in Guantánamo.
And so here is where we are, here is what is quietly accepted -- when it is not enthusiastically embraced: a system where innocent men are kidnapped by secret agents then kept imprisoned, chained and abused for years on end, without charges, with only the barest minimum of grudgingly granted and increasingly restricted legal representation, then threatened with a new "rendition" to the torture chambers of faithful allies. Where American citizens can be snatched, imprisoned and tortured into madness at the arbitrary order of the national leader, who can subject any citizen to this process simply by declaring them -- again, arbitrarily -- an "enemy combatant." It is staggering for someone who came of age during the Cold War to see the United States and Britain turning into a sort of modern-dress version of East Germany.
The realities outlined above are precisely the kind of thing that the good old boys down at the feed store would have likened to "something them Commies might do." And a goodly proportion of such "heartlanders" indeed responded favorably when national politicians had the courage to cast the abuses of that era in such terms, i.e., as something inimical to American ideals, American identity. That movement was soon washed away, of course, primarily by the blowback from decades of bipartisan imperial gamesmanship - in this case, the Iranian revolution, the inevitable result of 30 years of American-sponsored repression by the Shah, whose brutal regime had been implanted by the Americans after a CIA "regime change" black op destroyed Iran's secular democracy in 1953. Jimmy Carter, like the rest of the American Establishment, was fanatically - and stupidly - devoted to the corrupt and vicious Iranian despot; and for his sins, Carter was given the hostage crisis that crippled his presidency and foredoomed him to defeat by the Reagan-Bush gang.
These newly empowered militarists dealt only in the darkest Cold War tropes, those which held that "anything goes" in the savage quest for world dominance. Ironically, the Rightists didn't define themselves in opposition to the Soviet Union, because they approved of so many of the Soviets' methods. There was actually very little ideological content in the Reagan-Bush militarists' opposition to the Soviet Union. They didn't really care what the Soviets stood for or didn't stand for, or what they did or didn't do; they just found the Soviets useful as a big bogeyman to "scare the hell out of the American people" and thus skew the system for the benefit of their own war-profiteering clique. As soon as the Soviet Union collapsed, they found other bogeymen: first the regime of Saddam Hussein that they had just spent a decade supporting, then the Islamic extremists whom they had also supported during those same years. (So you see, there was a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda after all; they were both pampered favorites of the militarist Right.)
III.
This idea of Cold War mores acting as an impediment to the open embrace of tyranny, torture and terror by the government cannot be pushed too far, of course. While it was almost certainly a contributing factor in emboldening the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate Democrats to enact some reforms, it was obviously not the only one. And the present-day acquiescence to Bush's new "United Stasi of America" system cannot be put down solely to the loss of that automatic, almost unconscious revulsion to anything that smacked of Soviet-style tyranny (or its forerunner in the popular mind, fascist tyranny).
But it is a fact that we now have generations who came of age (or to political awareness) only after the dark militarists (and their off-shoot, the "militarists lite" of the Clinton Administration and the Democratic Leadership Council) seized the zeitgeist. And without the touchstone of that widespread internal bias against tyranny to draw upon, those who uphold the Constitution, the rule of law and common decency now have to expend enormous amounts of energy arguing about issues that should have been settled long ago. There should not even be a debate over the "proper" use of torture, over whether we should "waterboard" captives or not. There should not even be a debate about the president's "right" to ignore the laws passed by Congress with "signing statements," executive orders and secret directives. There should not even be a debate over secret, unrestricted government surveillance into every aspect of our lives. There should not even be a debate about maintaining a concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, or holding people captive for years on end without charges and genuine due process. There should not even be a debate about launching a war of aggression against a nation that had not attacked us - and continuing that war after grinding the conquered land into ruins, displacing and degrading millions of its citizens, and killing more than 650,000 innocent people.
There shouldn't be a debate on any of these issues in America, or in Britain, or in any country that calls itself civilized, that calls itself a democracy, that calls itself free. But we have been forced into this humiliating position, in part because we have lost something in the national character - some kind of bedrock morality - that we still possessed, at least vestigially, even in the miasmic Seventies. It seems to have been replaced by a moral and physical cowardice that I never thought I would see in the United States.
And here we come to the crux of the matter. Those who defend the new, open authoritarianism do so because "9/11 changed everything." The events of that day, we are told, justify the evisceration of the Constitution, the militarization of society, torture, indefinite detention, aggressive war and hundreds of thousands of instances of "collateral damage." Because we must do "whatever it takes" to prevent the Islamists from hurting us again, or even taking over our entire country.
Of course, most if not all of the politicians who make hay of this fearmongering -- Bush, Cheney, Guiliani, Lieberman, etc. -- don't really believe it; if they did, they would not avidly pursue and support policies that are guaranteed to increase the threat of terrorism by several magnitudes. (Although their cheerleaders in the wingnut blogosphere really do believe it; they really do quake in fear at the thought of big bad Muslims coming to get them, and they are more than willing to sacrifice the Constitution -- and the lives of an unlimited number of American soldiers and foreign civilians -- to keep themselves safe and cozy at their keyboards.) But the cowardice that the politicians play upon obviously has some resonance in the wider public (in addition to the wingnut bootlicking fringe), and must account at least in some degree for the widespread indifference to the ongoing murder of the Republic. The internal touchstone of anti-tyranny has been replaced by a touchstone of fear.
Again, all of this is passing strange to anyone who lived through a substantial portion of the Cold War. For decades, the genuine threat of imminent destruction hung over our heads, consciously and unconsciously permeating every moment of existence. The force that threatened us (or seemed to; as anyone who's read James Carroll's House of War knows, the real history of those years shows that it was the United States that came closest to launching world-ending nuclear holocausts during that time) was one of the most powerful and well-armed states in the history of the world, fully capable of annihilating millions of Americans in an instant, and standing in the vanguard of a movement that controlled more than half the world's population.
Yet in the face of this very real existential threat, American liberties actually expanded enormously over the decades of the Cold War; the Civil Rights movement is only one example. America was able to absorb and embrace tremendous stresses of social and political change even with the dagger of nuclear war pointed squarely at its heart. Americans were able to stop an unjust war, bring down a criminal president and put fetters on government power -- and still preserve their "national security" from the greatest danger it had ever known.
Yet today, we are told that we must "curtail" our liberties, countenance evil practices ("the dark side, if you will," as Dick Cheney calls it), give the government unfettered power, ignore the open lawbreaking of the president, and continue an unjust war…because of the threat posed by a collection of small, scattered, isolated groups of religious primitives, often at each other's throats, despised by their own co-religionists for their murderous perversions of the faith, and unable to gain a foothold in any country that has not been brought to ruin or chaos by the geopolitical games of the major powers. The fact that cynical power-seekers and war profiteers have been able to inflate this deadly but minor scourge into a globe-straddling monster capable of destroying the United States and enslaving its people speaks volumes about the timorousness that has entered America's national character. It is as if a man who once had fought off an angry lion with his bare hands was now frightened to death of a rabid cat.
In the end, of course, it doesn't matter where the combination of cowardice, ignorance and belligerence that has characterized the American character in the 21st century comes from. It is here, it is our reality, our shame -- and our responsibility.
by Chris Floyd
Wednesday, 30 May 2007
http://www.chris-floyd.com/Articles/Articles/Five_Gears_in_Reverse%3A_The_Cold_War_and_Modern_Moral_Cowardice/
Perhaps it was the end of the Cold War that did it. After all, it's been almost 20 years since the Berlin Wall came down. You'd have to be well over thirty to remember the feel of those times, and what's more, to be steeped in the unspoken assumptions that pervaded the era. Whole generations have been raised up now for whom the mores of that time, good and bad, are little more than nostalgic fashions to pick and choose from -- or simply discard -- as they assemble their ideological wardrobe for the present day. This is inevitable and natural -- and a good thing on the whole, given the many monstrosities perpetrated by both sides in the actually-pretty-hot Cold War, in which millions died around the world. (Although not within the boundaries of the two main protagonists. Why die when others can do it for you?)
However, considering the massive indifference with which most Americans have greeted the barbaric mores of our new Terror War era -- the systematic practice of torture, rendition, indefinite detention, assassination, concentration camps, secret prisons, executive dictatorship and multiple slaughter of the innocent -- it could be that the fading of some of those old Cold War assumptions might indeed play a significant part in the public acceptance -- and in many cases, enthusiastic championing -- of these degradations.
We speak here not of government policy during the Cold War -- which obviously embraced most if not all of the misdeeds enumerated above, and more besides (to which the millions of war-spawned graves in Southeast Asia bear silent testimony) -- but of the attitudes of ordinary people: the private beliefs and assumptions that were shaped by the decades-long rivalry with the Soviet Union. (Again, the fact that many of these beliefs were unexamined, uncritical, and at times completely baseless, is not the point here.)
One of the chief molders of the political mindset of ordinary people during the Cold War was the firm, fundamental belief that "we are not like them" -- that what sets us apart, what gives us the high moral ground in the conflict is that we do not do the sinister things that the Soviets do. We don't have gulags like they do. We don't have concentration camps and secret prisons. We don't jail people without charges. We don't torture people like they do. We don't have secret agents snatching people off the streets and throwing them into dungeons, like the KGB does. Our mail is not opened. Our private organizations are not infiltrated. Our homes cannot be raided without a warrant. Our leaders don't exalt themselves beyond the law, like the Communist tyrants. We don't have huge propaganda mills smearing enemies of the state and supporting every contradictory twist and turn in government policy. And whenever it turned out that "we" were in fact doing something like "they" do, it would produce a genuine and painful cognitive dissonance -- and sometimes even a political reaction, such as the restraints put on executive authority during the 1970s after the egregious abuses of the CIA, the Pentagon, the FBI and the White House were revealed. [An example of the popular reaction could be seen in the way that FBI founder J. Edgar Hoover went from unassailable national hero (straight-shooting crimebuster) to national joke (cross-dressing blackmailer) virtually overnight.]
However misinformed this fundamental belief might have been in many respects -- in regard to both the Soviet Union and the West -- its pervasiveness during the Cold War remained a potent weapon for those who sought to put a brake on state tyranny and curb abuses of America's Constitutional liberties and universal human rights. "That sounds like something them Commies would do!" -- This was an argument that had resonance in what we call today, in our degraded parlance, "the heartland." I know because I heard it myself from old farmers sitting around the stove at my grandfather's feed store in the rural South. You could hear it on the streets and in the churches. You could read it in the letters pages of the state and local newspapers. Having defined themselves against this dreaded Other, most ordinary people did not want to see their own nation partaking of the Other's attributes (real or imagined).
And so the feeling that these attributes -- tyranny, torture, slavish obedience, surveillance, etc. -- were utterly un-American became deeply worked into the national psyche. (Or large quadrants of it.) But this is obviously not true anymore. The well-attested, well-publicized and manifold abuses of the Bush Administration have evoked scarcely a ripple of complaint from the American people, much less the kind of political reaction that enabled the Church Committee, the Pike Committee and other top-level investigations to roll back some of the rank abuses of power that had corrupted the American system. As Arthur Silber, Norman Solomon and many others have pointed out, even the current public opposition to the Iraq War -- which is actually quite tepid, confined largely to ticking a box on an opinion poll -- is due largely to the "failure" of the Bush Administration to produce a quick and easy "victory," and not to the howling moral obscenity of the attempted conquest itself. The Democrats have obviously recognized the essential softness of the national anti-war sentiment, and have trimmed their sails accordingly, knowing there will be no price to pay for the rank mendacity of their craven sell-out to Bush on funding the slaughter in Iraq. [Cindy Sheehan has also taken notice of this, and has now quit the organized anti-war movement, despairing of its egotistic in-fighting and its robotic defense of the do-nothing Democrats.]
But even this muffled resistance to the Iraq War stands out like a full-scale revolution in comparison to the pin-dropping silence that has met the transformation of the United States into an open champion of the crudest sort of police-state tactics. Right now, the government is trying an American citizen -- Jose Padilla -- who was snatched by secret agents, imprisoned for years without charges, subjected to exquisite refinements of torture and finally driven insane. And he is only being prosecuted now -- on minor charges -- because the Bush Administration wanted to head off a direct court challenge to its "enemy combatant" decrees, its assertion of autocratic power over the life and liberty of every American citizen -- indeed, over every inhabitant of the world.
Of course, Padilla is just the tip of a massive, blood-smeared iceberg. We don't know exactly how many people are now chained up in Bush's secret prisons, or what happens to them, or how many people he has simply had killed. (He openly boasted of his assassinations before a national TV audience in the State of the Union address in 2003, as we've noted here several times.) But what we do know is damning enough -- yet it has not been damned. In 2004, the Democratic candidate running to unseat Bush's loathsome regime did not even mention the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, much the less the far greater and far wider torture regimen instigated at Bush's express orders. One of the most flagrant stains on the national honor in America's history, exposed mere months before the vote -- and it was not even an issue in the election. Nor was the existence of a concentration camp -- an American concentration camp -- at Guantanamo Bay an issue in the 2004 election -- or in the 2006 election for that matter. The Democrats in Congress could close Gitmo tomorrow if they wanted to, just as they could roll back some of the worst of Bush's autocratic encroachments simply by overturning the infamous "Military Commissions Act." But they have done neither; nor is there any public pressure compelling them to act on these issues. Although isolated patriots like Henry Waxman soldier on with investigations, there will be no equivalent of the broad-ranging, high-profile Church and Pike Committees to shovel away some of the mountain of shit that Bush and his accomplices have heaped upon the Constitution.
II.
And so the abuses go on. On Monday, as the nation honored its war dead for what was everywhere called their sacrifices for freedom, the Guardian reported on the latest twist in the long, sordid tale of Guantanamo captive Jamil el-Banna (which we reported on earlier here: Deeper Into Darkness: Slavery and Betrayal in Bush's Gulag). Banna, a UK citizen, has been held in Gitmo for more than four and a half years. He was snatched in Africa by the Americans after British intelligence gave the CIA false information about him. They were trying to force him into becoming an informant on Muslim activities in Britain; when that didn't work, they gave him over to the Americans, who have held him -- and tortured him -- without charges all this time. Now, years after they knew he had been captured on false evidence, the Americans have finally cleared him for release -- one of hundreds of the "worst of the worst" in Gitmo who turned out to be completely innocent -. But Bush's little bulldog, Tony Blair, refuses to allow Banna back into the UK, threatening to send him instead to his native Jordan -- from which Banna escaped in 1994 after being tortured by the American-allied regime there. The Guardian notes:
This month Mr Banna was seen in Guantánamo by his lawyer, Zachary Katznelson from the group Reprieve. According to Mr Katznelson's transcript of the meeting, seen by the Guardian, Mr Banna said: "The British government has let me stay here for four and a half years. What crime did I commit? Together with the Americans, they have kept me from my children. They have deprived me of the chance to see them grow up, to hold them, to kiss them, to laugh with them, to play with them. There is no way to turn back time, to give me back those moments." During the visit, Mr Banna was allowed to watch a home video of his children, including his first sighting of his four-year-old daughter Maryam...
Speaking from Guantánamo, while shackled to the floor, Mr Banna said: "I have always told the truth. I have no information about terrorism. I've said since the very first day: put me on trial anywhere at any time. I will gladly stand up and tell my story. And I know that a fair court would set me free. But there is no chance of that here in Guantánamo. There is no justice here." Mr Banna said his diabetes is not being treated and his sight is deteriorating....During the visit Mr Banna also said that letters from his children were taking up to 16 months to reach him....
The [UK] government has maintained a position that it has no obligation to help British residents held by the US in Guantánamo.
And so here is where we are, here is what is quietly accepted -- when it is not enthusiastically embraced: a system where innocent men are kidnapped by secret agents then kept imprisoned, chained and abused for years on end, without charges, with only the barest minimum of grudgingly granted and increasingly restricted legal representation, then threatened with a new "rendition" to the torture chambers of faithful allies. Where American citizens can be snatched, imprisoned and tortured into madness at the arbitrary order of the national leader, who can subject any citizen to this process simply by declaring them -- again, arbitrarily -- an "enemy combatant." It is staggering for someone who came of age during the Cold War to see the United States and Britain turning into a sort of modern-dress version of East Germany.
The realities outlined above are precisely the kind of thing that the good old boys down at the feed store would have likened to "something them Commies might do." And a goodly proportion of such "heartlanders" indeed responded favorably when national politicians had the courage to cast the abuses of that era in such terms, i.e., as something inimical to American ideals, American identity. That movement was soon washed away, of course, primarily by the blowback from decades of bipartisan imperial gamesmanship - in this case, the Iranian revolution, the inevitable result of 30 years of American-sponsored repression by the Shah, whose brutal regime had been implanted by the Americans after a CIA "regime change" black op destroyed Iran's secular democracy in 1953. Jimmy Carter, like the rest of the American Establishment, was fanatically - and stupidly - devoted to the corrupt and vicious Iranian despot; and for his sins, Carter was given the hostage crisis that crippled his presidency and foredoomed him to defeat by the Reagan-Bush gang.
These newly empowered militarists dealt only in the darkest Cold War tropes, those which held that "anything goes" in the savage quest for world dominance. Ironically, the Rightists didn't define themselves in opposition to the Soviet Union, because they approved of so many of the Soviets' methods. There was actually very little ideological content in the Reagan-Bush militarists' opposition to the Soviet Union. They didn't really care what the Soviets stood for or didn't stand for, or what they did or didn't do; they just found the Soviets useful as a big bogeyman to "scare the hell out of the American people" and thus skew the system for the benefit of their own war-profiteering clique. As soon as the Soviet Union collapsed, they found other bogeymen: first the regime of Saddam Hussein that they had just spent a decade supporting, then the Islamic extremists whom they had also supported during those same years. (So you see, there was a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda after all; they were both pampered favorites of the militarist Right.)
III.
This idea of Cold War mores acting as an impediment to the open embrace of tyranny, torture and terror by the government cannot be pushed too far, of course. While it was almost certainly a contributing factor in emboldening the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate Democrats to enact some reforms, it was obviously not the only one. And the present-day acquiescence to Bush's new "United Stasi of America" system cannot be put down solely to the loss of that automatic, almost unconscious revulsion to anything that smacked of Soviet-style tyranny (or its forerunner in the popular mind, fascist tyranny).
But it is a fact that we now have generations who came of age (or to political awareness) only after the dark militarists (and their off-shoot, the "militarists lite" of the Clinton Administration and the Democratic Leadership Council) seized the zeitgeist. And without the touchstone of that widespread internal bias against tyranny to draw upon, those who uphold the Constitution, the rule of law and common decency now have to expend enormous amounts of energy arguing about issues that should have been settled long ago. There should not even be a debate over the "proper" use of torture, over whether we should "waterboard" captives or not. There should not even be a debate about the president's "right" to ignore the laws passed by Congress with "signing statements," executive orders and secret directives. There should not even be a debate over secret, unrestricted government surveillance into every aspect of our lives. There should not even be a debate about maintaining a concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, or holding people captive for years on end without charges and genuine due process. There should not even be a debate about launching a war of aggression against a nation that had not attacked us - and continuing that war after grinding the conquered land into ruins, displacing and degrading millions of its citizens, and killing more than 650,000 innocent people.
There shouldn't be a debate on any of these issues in America, or in Britain, or in any country that calls itself civilized, that calls itself a democracy, that calls itself free. But we have been forced into this humiliating position, in part because we have lost something in the national character - some kind of bedrock morality - that we still possessed, at least vestigially, even in the miasmic Seventies. It seems to have been replaced by a moral and physical cowardice that I never thought I would see in the United States.
And here we come to the crux of the matter. Those who defend the new, open authoritarianism do so because "9/11 changed everything." The events of that day, we are told, justify the evisceration of the Constitution, the militarization of society, torture, indefinite detention, aggressive war and hundreds of thousands of instances of "collateral damage." Because we must do "whatever it takes" to prevent the Islamists from hurting us again, or even taking over our entire country.
Of course, most if not all of the politicians who make hay of this fearmongering -- Bush, Cheney, Guiliani, Lieberman, etc. -- don't really believe it; if they did, they would not avidly pursue and support policies that are guaranteed to increase the threat of terrorism by several magnitudes. (Although their cheerleaders in the wingnut blogosphere really do believe it; they really do quake in fear at the thought of big bad Muslims coming to get them, and they are more than willing to sacrifice the Constitution -- and the lives of an unlimited number of American soldiers and foreign civilians -- to keep themselves safe and cozy at their keyboards.) But the cowardice that the politicians play upon obviously has some resonance in the wider public (in addition to the wingnut bootlicking fringe), and must account at least in some degree for the widespread indifference to the ongoing murder of the Republic. The internal touchstone of anti-tyranny has been replaced by a touchstone of fear.
Again, all of this is passing strange to anyone who lived through a substantial portion of the Cold War. For decades, the genuine threat of imminent destruction hung over our heads, consciously and unconsciously permeating every moment of existence. The force that threatened us (or seemed to; as anyone who's read James Carroll's House of War knows, the real history of those years shows that it was the United States that came closest to launching world-ending nuclear holocausts during that time) was one of the most powerful and well-armed states in the history of the world, fully capable of annihilating millions of Americans in an instant, and standing in the vanguard of a movement that controlled more than half the world's population.
Yet in the face of this very real existential threat, American liberties actually expanded enormously over the decades of the Cold War; the Civil Rights movement is only one example. America was able to absorb and embrace tremendous stresses of social and political change even with the dagger of nuclear war pointed squarely at its heart. Americans were able to stop an unjust war, bring down a criminal president and put fetters on government power -- and still preserve their "national security" from the greatest danger it had ever known.
Yet today, we are told that we must "curtail" our liberties, countenance evil practices ("the dark side, if you will," as Dick Cheney calls it), give the government unfettered power, ignore the open lawbreaking of the president, and continue an unjust war…because of the threat posed by a collection of small, scattered, isolated groups of religious primitives, often at each other's throats, despised by their own co-religionists for their murderous perversions of the faith, and unable to gain a foothold in any country that has not been brought to ruin or chaos by the geopolitical games of the major powers. The fact that cynical power-seekers and war profiteers have been able to inflate this deadly but minor scourge into a globe-straddling monster capable of destroying the United States and enslaving its people speaks volumes about the timorousness that has entered America's national character. It is as if a man who once had fought off an angry lion with his bare hands was now frightened to death of a rabid cat.
In the end, of course, it doesn't matter where the combination of cowardice, ignorance and belligerence that has characterized the American character in the 21st century comes from. It is here, it is our reality, our shame -- and our responsibility.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Al Gore Illogically Blasts the 9/11 Truth Movement
by Richard L. Franklin
5/28/07
I was finally stirred to briefly come out of retirement after listening to a one hour interview with Al Gore discussing his latest book, 'The Assault on Reason'. As one who has dedicated himself to the encouragement and preservation of clear thinking, arguably the greatest gift entrusted to us by the Enlightenment, I was naturally curious about the apparent subject of his book. I've certainly had never thought of Gore as a rationalist, although he certainly can be quite rational about climate change. I've always viewed him as an aristocratic member of the Washington establishment. His deep interest in climate change was actually anomalous for one of his background and class ethos, but that hardly detracts from the great value of his missionary work in that area. Nonetheless, a leopard does not normally change his spots overnight. If it is a politician who is claiming to work toward X, his or her promise usually lacks credibility. True pols seldom fully change their spots.
I want to focus on one brief exchange in the Gore interview because it says a lot. The interviewer focused on Gore's claim that the invasion of Iraq was the 'single greatest mistake in the history of the United States'. With some prodding, Gore expanded. By 'mistake' he meant the acceptance of a panoply of lies by Bush and his associates that deceived the people into believing Saddam had played a role in 9/11. My ears perked up. Could it be possible Gore was inching toward a hint that something hugely nefarious had taken place behind the scenes? His claim that the American people had committed a monstrous 'mistake' in supporting the war and in allowing themselves to be foolishly deceived by Bush and his accomplices just might open the door for a rational discussion of 9/11. False flag ops are old hat in American history, and Gore knows it. I was on pins and needles.
The interviewer smiled. Did he also hope that Gore might be headed down the right path? The interviewer wasted no time in encouraging such a journey. He noted that grand deceptions were hardly new in American history when it came to preparing the people for the launching of a war. The Spanish-American war was triggered by a false flag operation, namely the blowing up of the Maine. Gore quickly agreed. The interviewer smiled. He then added that the Vietnam War was launched with the Tonkin Bay false flag op. Gore once again was quick to agree. The interviewer's eyes gleamed. They were truly getting somewhere.
At this point in the interview it's possible the interviewer was about to mention the sinking of the Lusitania, which was cleverly triggered by Wilson and the Brits so as to drag the US into WWI. He also may have wanted to add Pearl Harbor, a plot which followed the modus operandi of Wilson in managing to finagle an attack on US ships. In both cases, Germany and then Japan were forced to attack as a matter of national survival. Germany faced losing the war in Europe if the US continued with its generous shipments of war supplies, and the Empire of Japan would surely come to a crashing end if their oil supply lines were cut off as threatened by FDR. In both cases, the American people were led to believe the US had been attacked by evil enemies for evil purposes. 'Evil' is so damned handy as a cause for such events. As always, the existence of 'evil' enemies who had committed 'evil' deeds became key factors in US propaganda that cloaked the true complex mechanisms behind those two shocking events.
At this point in the course of the conversation, a light bulb seemed to go off in Gore's head. He sat up straight with a wary look. I suspect that at this moment he realized he was in danger of being sucked into the question of whether or not 9/11 had been yet another false flag operation in American history.
He quickly said, 'I think I see where you might be heading.' Not wishing to even say the words 'nine eleven' or the words 'false flag', he deftly trashed the ongoing 9/11 truth movement with these few words: 'All that other stuff is outside the range of possibility'.
Gore has named his book 'The Assault on Reason', and yet here he is claiming that the 9/11 truth movement is making claims 'outside the range of possibility'. With that one statement he has stunningly sabotaged his supposed defense of reason in his new book.
Phrases such as 'outside the range of possibility' often come close to being just plain nuts. Here's why. The one place where the concept of impossibility is carefully examined is logic. Please forgive me for using a tired old example, but we logically know there are no square circles anywhere among the furniture of this universe or in any other universe. The nice thing is that we can conclude this simply by looking at the claim itself. The mere locution 'square circle' is illogical. What rules here is the fact that if something is not logically true, it cannot be empirically true. When I was a young lad and this was pointed out to me by a teacher, I was absolutely delighted. It meant one could completely forsake the labor of an empirical investigation to determine the truth of certain claims.
This is hardly a stunning new maxim. When Christian missionaries first flooded Africa and then the Pacific islands to convert the natives, the biggest single block they ran into in converting the natives to Christianity was teaching them about the greater glory of the Holy Trinity. Much to the exasperation and anger of the missionaries, the natives kept rejecting the notion of a god who was simultaneously three discrete beings who occasionally melted into one seamless being. More than one native of the Americas were brutally murdered as a result of their 'stubborn' heathen inability to grasp this concept. One can scarcely find a more ironic and sad moment in the history of the Conquista.
I felt sad when Gore's interviewer allowed him to get away with a totally preposterous, ignoble statement. What was actually 'outside the range of possibility' was any sense to what Gore was so arrogantly claiming. One cannot quite so easily squeeze a false flag operation by our government into the same category as square circles. Trying to do so is the mark of a charlatan.
Undaunted, Gore kept harping on how we Americans had let the gang in the White House get away with all sorts of weak and even preposterous claims; yet Gore had just made himself a partner in the White House cabal's biggest fraud of all, not to mention making his own book title a depressing irony.
Mr. Franklin is the author of 'The Mythology of Self-Worth'
5/28/07
I was finally stirred to briefly come out of retirement after listening to a one hour interview with Al Gore discussing his latest book, 'The Assault on Reason'. As one who has dedicated himself to the encouragement and preservation of clear thinking, arguably the greatest gift entrusted to us by the Enlightenment, I was naturally curious about the apparent subject of his book. I've certainly had never thought of Gore as a rationalist, although he certainly can be quite rational about climate change. I've always viewed him as an aristocratic member of the Washington establishment. His deep interest in climate change was actually anomalous for one of his background and class ethos, but that hardly detracts from the great value of his missionary work in that area. Nonetheless, a leopard does not normally change his spots overnight. If it is a politician who is claiming to work toward X, his or her promise usually lacks credibility. True pols seldom fully change their spots.
I want to focus on one brief exchange in the Gore interview because it says a lot. The interviewer focused on Gore's claim that the invasion of Iraq was the 'single greatest mistake in the history of the United States'. With some prodding, Gore expanded. By 'mistake' he meant the acceptance of a panoply of lies by Bush and his associates that deceived the people into believing Saddam had played a role in 9/11. My ears perked up. Could it be possible Gore was inching toward a hint that something hugely nefarious had taken place behind the scenes? His claim that the American people had committed a monstrous 'mistake' in supporting the war and in allowing themselves to be foolishly deceived by Bush and his accomplices just might open the door for a rational discussion of 9/11. False flag ops are old hat in American history, and Gore knows it. I was on pins and needles.
The interviewer smiled. Did he also hope that Gore might be headed down the right path? The interviewer wasted no time in encouraging such a journey. He noted that grand deceptions were hardly new in American history when it came to preparing the people for the launching of a war. The Spanish-American war was triggered by a false flag operation, namely the blowing up of the Maine. Gore quickly agreed. The interviewer smiled. He then added that the Vietnam War was launched with the Tonkin Bay false flag op. Gore once again was quick to agree. The interviewer's eyes gleamed. They were truly getting somewhere.
At this point in the interview it's possible the interviewer was about to mention the sinking of the Lusitania, which was cleverly triggered by Wilson and the Brits so as to drag the US into WWI. He also may have wanted to add Pearl Harbor, a plot which followed the modus operandi of Wilson in managing to finagle an attack on US ships. In both cases, Germany and then Japan were forced to attack as a matter of national survival. Germany faced losing the war in Europe if the US continued with its generous shipments of war supplies, and the Empire of Japan would surely come to a crashing end if their oil supply lines were cut off as threatened by FDR. In both cases, the American people were led to believe the US had been attacked by evil enemies for evil purposes. 'Evil' is so damned handy as a cause for such events. As always, the existence of 'evil' enemies who had committed 'evil' deeds became key factors in US propaganda that cloaked the true complex mechanisms behind those two shocking events.
At this point in the course of the conversation, a light bulb seemed to go off in Gore's head. He sat up straight with a wary look. I suspect that at this moment he realized he was in danger of being sucked into the question of whether or not 9/11 had been yet another false flag operation in American history.
He quickly said, 'I think I see where you might be heading.' Not wishing to even say the words 'nine eleven' or the words 'false flag', he deftly trashed the ongoing 9/11 truth movement with these few words: 'All that other stuff is outside the range of possibility'.
Gore has named his book 'The Assault on Reason', and yet here he is claiming that the 9/11 truth movement is making claims 'outside the range of possibility'. With that one statement he has stunningly sabotaged his supposed defense of reason in his new book.
Phrases such as 'outside the range of possibility' often come close to being just plain nuts. Here's why. The one place where the concept of impossibility is carefully examined is logic. Please forgive me for using a tired old example, but we logically know there are no square circles anywhere among the furniture of this universe or in any other universe. The nice thing is that we can conclude this simply by looking at the claim itself. The mere locution 'square circle' is illogical. What rules here is the fact that if something is not logically true, it cannot be empirically true. When I was a young lad and this was pointed out to me by a teacher, I was absolutely delighted. It meant one could completely forsake the labor of an empirical investigation to determine the truth of certain claims.
This is hardly a stunning new maxim. When Christian missionaries first flooded Africa and then the Pacific islands to convert the natives, the biggest single block they ran into in converting the natives to Christianity was teaching them about the greater glory of the Holy Trinity. Much to the exasperation and anger of the missionaries, the natives kept rejecting the notion of a god who was simultaneously three discrete beings who occasionally melted into one seamless being. More than one native of the Americas were brutally murdered as a result of their 'stubborn' heathen inability to grasp this concept. One can scarcely find a more ironic and sad moment in the history of the Conquista.
I felt sad when Gore's interviewer allowed him to get away with a totally preposterous, ignoble statement. What was actually 'outside the range of possibility' was any sense to what Gore was so arrogantly claiming. One cannot quite so easily squeeze a false flag operation by our government into the same category as square circles. Trying to do so is the mark of a charlatan.
Undaunted, Gore kept harping on how we Americans had let the gang in the White House get away with all sorts of weak and even preposterous claims; yet Gore had just made himself a partner in the White House cabal's biggest fraud of all, not to mention making his own book title a depressing irony.
Mr. Franklin is the author of 'The Mythology of Self-Worth'
Monday, May 28, 2007
Venezuela's RCTV
Sine Die and Good Riddance
- by Stephen Lendman
5/28/07
Venezuelan TV station Radio Caracas Television's (known as RCTV) VHF Channel 2's operating license expired May 27, and it went off the air because the Chavez government, with ample justification, chose not to renew it. RCTV was the nation's oldest private broadcaster, operating since 1953. It's also had a tainted record of airing Venezuela's most hard right yellow journalism, consistently showing a lack of ethics, integrity or professional standards in how it operated as required by the law it arrogantly flaunted.
Starting May 28, a new public TV station (TVES) replaces it bringing Venezuelans a diverse range of new programming TV channel Vive president, Blanca Eckhout, says will "promot(e) the participation and involvement of all Venezuelans in the task of communication (as an alternative to) the media concentration of the radio-electric spectrum that remains in the hands of a (dominant corporate) minority sector" representing elitist business interests, not the people.
Along with the other four major corporate-owned dominant television channels (controlling 90% of the nation's TV market), RCTV played a leading role instigating and supporting the aborted April, 2002 two-day coup against President Chavez mass public opposition on the streets helped overturn restoring Chavez to office and likely saving his life. Later in the year, these stations conspired again as active participants in the economically devastating 2002-03 main trade union confederation (CTV) - chamber of commerce (Fedecameras) lockout and industry-wide oil strike including willful sabotage against state oil company PDVSA costing it an estimated $14 billion in lost revenue and damage.
This writer explained the dominant corporate media's active role in these events in an extended January, 2007 article titled "Venezuela's RCTV Acts of Sedition." It presented conclusive evidence RCTV and the other four corporate-run TV stations violated Venezuela's Law of Social Responsibility for Radio and Television (LSR). That law guarantees freedom of expression without censorship but prohibits, as it should, transmission of messages illegally promoting, apologizing for, or inciting disobedience to the law that includes enlisting public support for the overthrow of a democratically elected president and his government.
In spite of their lawlessness, the Chavez government treated all five broadcasters gently opting not to prosecute them, but merely refusing to renew one of RCTV's operating licenses (its VHF one) when it expired May 27 (its cable and satellite operations are unaffected) - a mere slap on the wrist for a media enterprise's active role in trying to overthrow the democratically elected Venezuelan president and his government. The article explained if an individual or organization of any kind incited public hostility, violence and anti-government rebellion under Section 2384 of the US code, Title 18, they would be subject to fine and/or imprisonment for up to 20 years for the crime of sedition.
They might also be subject to prosecution for treason under Article 3, Section 3 of the US Constitution stating: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort" such as instigating an insurrection or rebellion and/or sabotage to a national defense utility that could include state oil company PDVSA's facilities vital to the operation and economic viability of the country and welfare of its people. It would be for US courts to decide if conspiring to overthrow a democratically government conformed to this definition, but it's hard imagining it would not at least convict offenders of sedition.
Opposition Response to the Chavez Government Action
So far, the dominant Venezuelan media's response to RCTV's shutdown has been relatively muted, but it remains to be seen for how long. However, for media outside the country, it's a different story with BBC one example of misreporting in its usual style of deference to power interests at home and abroad. May 28 on the World Service, it reported RCTV's license wasn't renewed because "it supported opposition candidates" in a gross perversion of the facts, but that's how BBC operates.
BBC online was more nuanced and measured, but nonetheless off the mark in key comments like reporting "Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in Caracas Sunday, some to celebrate, others to protest" RCTV's shuttering. Unexplained was that Chavez supporters way outnumbered opponents who nearly always are part of rightist/corporate-led staged for the media events in contrast to spontaneous pro-government crowds assembling in huge numbers at times, especially whenever Chavez addresses them publicly.
BBC also exaggerated "skirmishes" on the streets with "Police us(ing) tear gas and water cannons to disperse (crowds) and driving through the streets on motorbikes, officers fired plastic bullets in the air." It also underplayed pro-government supportive responses while blaring opposition ones like "Chavez thinks he owns the country. Well, he doesn't." Another was "No to the closure. Freedom." And still another was "Everyone has the right to watch what they want. He can't take away this channel." BBC played it up commenting "As the afternoon drew on, the protests got louder." The atmosphere became nasty. Shots were fired in the air and people ran for cover. It was not clear who was firing" when it's nearly always clear as it's been in the past - anti-Chavistas sent to the streets to stir up trouble and blame it on Chavez.
BBC's commentary ended saying "The arguments highlight, once again, how deeply divided Venezuela is." Unmentioned was that division is about 70 - 80% pro-Chavez, around 20% opposed (the more privileged "sifrino" class), and a small percentage pro and con between them.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at mailto:lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com Saturdays at noon US central time.
- by Stephen Lendman
5/28/07
Venezuelan TV station Radio Caracas Television's (known as RCTV) VHF Channel 2's operating license expired May 27, and it went off the air because the Chavez government, with ample justification, chose not to renew it. RCTV was the nation's oldest private broadcaster, operating since 1953. It's also had a tainted record of airing Venezuela's most hard right yellow journalism, consistently showing a lack of ethics, integrity or professional standards in how it operated as required by the law it arrogantly flaunted.
Starting May 28, a new public TV station (TVES) replaces it bringing Venezuelans a diverse range of new programming TV channel Vive president, Blanca Eckhout, says will "promot(e) the participation and involvement of all Venezuelans in the task of communication (as an alternative to) the media concentration of the radio-electric spectrum that remains in the hands of a (dominant corporate) minority sector" representing elitist business interests, not the people.
Along with the other four major corporate-owned dominant television channels (controlling 90% of the nation's TV market), RCTV played a leading role instigating and supporting the aborted April, 2002 two-day coup against President Chavez mass public opposition on the streets helped overturn restoring Chavez to office and likely saving his life. Later in the year, these stations conspired again as active participants in the economically devastating 2002-03 main trade union confederation (CTV) - chamber of commerce (Fedecameras) lockout and industry-wide oil strike including willful sabotage against state oil company PDVSA costing it an estimated $14 billion in lost revenue and damage.
This writer explained the dominant corporate media's active role in these events in an extended January, 2007 article titled "Venezuela's RCTV Acts of Sedition." It presented conclusive evidence RCTV and the other four corporate-run TV stations violated Venezuela's Law of Social Responsibility for Radio and Television (LSR). That law guarantees freedom of expression without censorship but prohibits, as it should, transmission of messages illegally promoting, apologizing for, or inciting disobedience to the law that includes enlisting public support for the overthrow of a democratically elected president and his government.
In spite of their lawlessness, the Chavez government treated all five broadcasters gently opting not to prosecute them, but merely refusing to renew one of RCTV's operating licenses (its VHF one) when it expired May 27 (its cable and satellite operations are unaffected) - a mere slap on the wrist for a media enterprise's active role in trying to overthrow the democratically elected Venezuelan president and his government. The article explained if an individual or organization of any kind incited public hostility, violence and anti-government rebellion under Section 2384 of the US code, Title 18, they would be subject to fine and/or imprisonment for up to 20 years for the crime of sedition.
They might also be subject to prosecution for treason under Article 3, Section 3 of the US Constitution stating: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort" such as instigating an insurrection or rebellion and/or sabotage to a national defense utility that could include state oil company PDVSA's facilities vital to the operation and economic viability of the country and welfare of its people. It would be for US courts to decide if conspiring to overthrow a democratically government conformed to this definition, but it's hard imagining it would not at least convict offenders of sedition.
Opposition Response to the Chavez Government Action
So far, the dominant Venezuelan media's response to RCTV's shutdown has been relatively muted, but it remains to be seen for how long. However, for media outside the country, it's a different story with BBC one example of misreporting in its usual style of deference to power interests at home and abroad. May 28 on the World Service, it reported RCTV's license wasn't renewed because "it supported opposition candidates" in a gross perversion of the facts, but that's how BBC operates.
BBC online was more nuanced and measured, but nonetheless off the mark in key comments like reporting "Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in Caracas Sunday, some to celebrate, others to protest" RCTV's shuttering. Unexplained was that Chavez supporters way outnumbered opponents who nearly always are part of rightist/corporate-led staged for the media events in contrast to spontaneous pro-government crowds assembling in huge numbers at times, especially whenever Chavez addresses them publicly.
BBC also exaggerated "skirmishes" on the streets with "Police us(ing) tear gas and water cannons to disperse (crowds) and driving through the streets on motorbikes, officers fired plastic bullets in the air." It also underplayed pro-government supportive responses while blaring opposition ones like "Chavez thinks he owns the country. Well, he doesn't." Another was "No to the closure. Freedom." And still another was "Everyone has the right to watch what they want. He can't take away this channel." BBC played it up commenting "As the afternoon drew on, the protests got louder." The atmosphere became nasty. Shots were fired in the air and people ran for cover. It was not clear who was firing" when it's nearly always clear as it's been in the past - anti-Chavistas sent to the streets to stir up trouble and blame it on Chavez.
BBC's commentary ended saying "The arguments highlight, once again, how deeply divided Venezuela is." Unmentioned was that division is about 70 - 80% pro-Chavez, around 20% opposed (the more privileged "sifrino" class), and a small percentage pro and con between them.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at mailto:lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com Saturdays at noon US central time.
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Friday, May 25, 2007
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Lie Clocks
A man died and went to Heaven. As he stood in front of Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates, he saw a huge wall of clocks behind him.
He asked, " What are all those clocks?"
St. Peter answered, "Those clocks are Lie Clocks.
Everyone on earth has a Lie-Clock. Every time you lie, the hands on the clock will move."
"Oh," said the man, "whose clock is that?"
"That's Nelson Mandela's. The hands have never moved, indicating that he never told lie." "Incredible, said the man. "And whose clock is that one?"
St Peter responded, "That's Abraham Lincoln's clock. The hands have moved twice, telling us that Abe told only two lies in his entire life."
"Where's Bush's clock?" asked the man.
St. Peter responded, "Bush's clock is in Jesus' office. He's using it as a ceiling fan."
He asked, " What are all those clocks?"
St. Peter answered, "Those clocks are Lie Clocks.
Everyone on earth has a Lie-Clock. Every time you lie, the hands on the clock will move."
"Oh," said the man, "whose clock is that?"
"That's Nelson Mandela's. The hands have never moved, indicating that he never told lie." "Incredible, said the man. "And whose clock is that one?"
St Peter responded, "That's Abraham Lincoln's clock. The hands have moved twice, telling us that Abe told only two lies in his entire life."
"Where's Bush's clock?" asked the man.
St. Peter responded, "Bush's clock is in Jesus' office. He's using it as a ceiling fan."
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Forty Years of Occupation
- by Stephen Lendman
5/23/07
This June will mark an anniversary that will live in infamy for the people affected by the event it commemorates following a far greater one 19 years earlier on May 14, 1948. On June 5, 1967, Israel launched its so-called "Six-Day (preemptive) War" against three of its neighboring Arab states - Egypt, Jordan and Syria - claiming it was in self-defense to avoid annihilation Israeli leaders later admitted was spurious and false cover for a large-scale long-planned, calculated war of aggression it believed it could easily win and did.
[...]
On June 5, 1967, Israel launched its third major war of aggression but hardly its last with another one always planned and ready to unleash on the flimsiest pretext almost no other nation could get away with. It did it for the usual reasons nations go to war when under no external threat to do it - territory, resources (for Israel Golan's water was key), and a desire for unchallengeable regional dominance. As it always did since, Israel falsely claimed its security was threatened by creating myths Syria was shelling Israeli farmers; legitimate, non-threatening Egyptian military exercises masked a preparation for war; and that "incendiary Arab rhetoric" proved it. With plans set and a date picked, Foreign Minister Abba Eban flew to Washington May 26 to inform Lyndon Johnson of Israel's intentions and was assured the US backed them.
[...]
full article
5/23/07
This June will mark an anniversary that will live in infamy for the people affected by the event it commemorates following a far greater one 19 years earlier on May 14, 1948. On June 5, 1967, Israel launched its so-called "Six-Day (preemptive) War" against three of its neighboring Arab states - Egypt, Jordan and Syria - claiming it was in self-defense to avoid annihilation Israeli leaders later admitted was spurious and false cover for a large-scale long-planned, calculated war of aggression it believed it could easily win and did.
[...]
On June 5, 1967, Israel launched its third major war of aggression but hardly its last with another one always planned and ready to unleash on the flimsiest pretext almost no other nation could get away with. It did it for the usual reasons nations go to war when under no external threat to do it - territory, resources (for Israel Golan's water was key), and a desire for unchallengeable regional dominance. As it always did since, Israel falsely claimed its security was threatened by creating myths Syria was shelling Israeli farmers; legitimate, non-threatening Egyptian military exercises masked a preparation for war; and that "incendiary Arab rhetoric" proved it. With plans set and a date picked, Foreign Minister Abba Eban flew to Washington May 26 to inform Lyndon Johnson of Israel's intentions and was assured the US backed them.
[...]
full article
Friday, May 18, 2007
As Some Warn Victory, Some Downfall
by Christopher Cooper
Published on Friday, May 18, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/18/1290/
I guess we’ll annoy some people here today. Ah, well, yes, and who’s surprised about that? Anybody expecting this corner of the page to deliver comfortable conciliation will long since have learned to seek elsewhere. We come seldom to encourage enthusiasm for the quality of our present accommodation and the solidity of its ride. Alarm more often is our message as we hurry from car to car crying out that the trestle is gone, the engineer drunk or dead, the fireman and conductor about to jump into the puckerbrush with the mailbags full of payroll cash and pension checks.
What may surprise even regular readers, if I can tie my thoughts into a coherent package before the editor comes ‘round to tell me I’ve used up my space and the patience and tolerance of God Almighty his own self, will be just how comprehensively offensive I can be, perhaps alienating right, left and center to such a degree as to engender a true bipartisanship of outrage, although each of course shall be aghast at different points and paragraphs.
I have kept myself in line since the twenty-second of January, when last I confronted this topic. In five columns since then I have presented my thoughts on 1) the quality of editing my pieces endure (a subject itself suggested by a disgusted reader); 2) Sonny and Cher Muslims, a pleasant diversion containing some small kernels of deeper thought that may have passed unnoticed; 3) Maine town meetings, a subject I return to periodically and in the furtherance of which I only incidentally, for contrast, ridicule other, lesser towns than my own; 4) Don Imus, in which piece I appear to have extolled the virtues of both free speech and vulgarity; and 5) a particular, expensive brand of hardware (screws) I like and buy and use, together with appreciative comments concerning several salespersons involved with the product and some general ideas about universal brotherhood and the meaning of interpersonal relationships, honesty, integrity and the value, even to the disaffected, iconoclastic, surly writers of unwieldy essays, of a little bit of the human touch.
So it does seem about time for something just a bit more tart, doesn’t it? OK. Give me ten minutes more and we can both have this behind us.
Subject: The War. Reference: The Republicans. Conclusion: You can waste your summer praying in vain for these people to reconnect with reality. “Stay the course”? What course? The “Surge”? More like a great Flush-more money (billions), more bodies, more social, economic, environmental, spiritual ruin. Stay until we win? Tell me what winning looks like. Until “We get the job done”? What job ? If killing every Iraqi who might now or soon or someday develop a hatred of American policy (different, please understand, from hating America or hating Americans or hating freedom) is our goal, our endgame, our exit strategy, then load up the nukes and let the games begin, because a war of total annihilation we can win, in short order. With, of course, its own consequences, known, unknown and (God, I miss Rummy!), unknown unknown.
But you and I are no safer for one more day or dollar of war. We are in fact less safe the longer we throw our weight around in this country we’ve devastated because of a series of lies too many of us were too eager to believe. Saddam is dead. Feel better? Saddam was a clown, a jerk, a bully. He gassed the Kurds with Rumsfeld’s blessing. Rummy’s Gone; Saddam’s gone. Mission Accomplished. Here’s the irrefutable truth: George Bush and Dick Cheney are responsible for many more dead Americans than Saddam Hussein ever was. And (if any of us cares), more dead Iraqis than Saddam, too.
Support the Commander In Chief? Why? Look, I sort of feel sorry for the guy. He was doomed by birth. Had he been adopted into a decent blue collar family of modest means he might have grown up and found an honest job in the construction trades. I think, with direction and encouragement, he could have learned to sand drywall effectively; possibly, with enough practice, he might have learned to apply tape and mud. But President of the United States? The crop of half-crazies and dim bulbs and religious zealots vying for the Republican nomination are pleased to invoke the name of Ronald Reagan, a dead B-movie actor and shill for Boraxo who slept through cabinet meetings, but none too eager to be seen in public with W.
So we need to elect a Democrat. Do we? Didn’t we do just that last November? Gave ‘em a majority in the House and another in the Senate and, according to every proper columnist and commentator I’ve read or heard, sent ‘em a message. The message? Stop the war. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid said they understood. In their way and in the fullness of time, nothing sudden or precipitate or radical, you understand, they produced a bill to fund the war a majority of voters want to get out of. Fund it big-time (yes, many more billions) with some minor recommendations and meaningless “benchmarks” for measuring Iraqi performance. (Yes, the conventional wisdom now assigns blame for our fix to the Iraqis, for failing to “step up”.)
Well, W. said that timid bill, which gave him every dime he wanted for bombs and blood and his buddies at Halliburton, gave comfort to “America’s Enemies” (by which I guess he probably didn’t mean Dick Cheney, although I’d give him Public Enemy Number One status) and he’d not sign it. So the Democrats talked among themselves about compromise. They had a meeting with the president. They talked about funding for two months at a time. They talked about some “advisory” language they might slip in to the grant of funds. Bush stood firm against “tying the hands of our commanders in the field” even as one of those recently in the field bought TV time to urge us to get out and go home and stop killing them and fooling ourselves.
Before Bush vetoed the first bill candidate Obama said Congress should send him a second bill that he would find palatable enough to sign. Candidate Clinton said if she’d known back then what she knows now…. She did know. We all knew. Some of us chose to not admit what we knew, even to ourselves. It was war fever time. The handwriting was on the wall. It was get Saddam, show the big stick, kick ass, smoke ‘em, burn ‘em, make somebody pay. It was wrong then, Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Reid. It’s wrong now. Are you against the war, Congressmen and Congresswomen? Of course you are, all but thirteen Democrats. Should we cut our losses? The public says yes. Every day we stay we get further into the hole. Every night Public Television shows the pictures of our dead children “as their names are made public and as photographs become available.” There is no “win.” There is only an end with today’s toll of dead or tomorrow’s or next week’s, thirty-five hundred or four thousand, a hundred or so a month.
We’ll leave eventually. We will not have won. We will only have wasted an as yet undetermined amount of money and killed some greater number of men and women and children. We kill children every day, you know. Shoot ‘em, bomb, ‘em, burn ‘em. Are we proud of that?
Congressional Republicans are increasingly embarrassed by their president. Some are even ashamed of him, possibly of themselves. None of them wants to run for office or field a Republican candidate for president with this war still surging. Democrats, I think, wouldn’t mind seeing it still festering somewhat closer to election day. I know that sounds cynical, but how else can we interpret their half-hearted, weak, enabling legislation? This war is bad, it’s wrong, it’s stupid. It’s ruined Iraq, damaged America’s reputation, and made every one of us less secure. Support the troops? Sure thing. Send Bush a bill directing him to disengage with all speed consistent with the safe extrication of our men and women and those Iraqi interpreters and allies and employees whose association with us puts them and their families at risk. Give him enough money for airplanes or troop ships or trains to Turkey -enough to bring them home.
Every dead soldier since the new Congress convened may now be laid equally at the threshold of Democratic as well as Republican conscience. It’s just this easy, Senators. Use it without royalty or attribution; I give it to you because few of you seem able to compose such a thought out of your own minds and hearts: I support our troops and will vote to stop paying to put them to death in this war which serves no worthwhile, decent, humane interest and cannot be won according to any rational use of the term.
Bush will veto any funding bill you send him if he doesn’t like the language. He’ll whine that cutting off funding is un-American. That was an effective strategy five years ago; it worked well enough even as he rejected the recommendations of his own Baker Commission and sold this preposterous “surge” idea (if what we’re doing isn’t working, we’ll do it harder and faster). It won’t work now. It took six years, but here’s what we all know now: the president is a loser, his election and re-election were terrible mistakes, and the war is undermining the moral foundations of our once-great country.
Anybody who likes this war should sign on to it. Send his or her son and daughter. Send the Pentagon a generous check toward the cost. Support the troops? Go die in the desert so they don’t have to. Yellow ribbons tied to a power pole or a string of made in China toy flags along a bridge rail don’t do the job five long years into the butchery.
I wish I thought electing Democrats these days made much difference. I wish I thought the anguish ninety or a hundred families feel every month when they see a brace of officers coming up their front walks bearing that unspeakably terrible salutation could somehow seep into each of our hearts and make us turn off the ball game or the car race or walk out of the Spiderman sequel and demand that somebody, anybody, either party, do the right thing. Right now.
Mr. Cooper wishes to assure his readers that he is even more weary of writing about the dangerous criminals running our country, the lame compromisers managing the useless Democratic response, the careful corporate press, and voters for whom babies blown to bits with their tax dollars today are less interesting than lies and fables still circulating on talk radio about the “Heroes of 9/11″ than they are tired of reading him on these subjects. But how does he, how does anyone not return to this awful reality every day? How can he not think about these things and, thinking, necessarily write, using the only weak, small tool he owns against this monstrous perversion? He regrets he has no answers, only outrage and disgust and fear. For those who ask his recommendation for personal action, he offers only this: Ignore your Republican representatives–they are too corrupted to save or instruct or enlighten; write to your Democratic ones only to tell them, “No compromise, no retreat, no surrender–and no more time to waste.” Write him if you like at ckc2@prexar.com.
Published on Friday, May 18, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/18/1290/
I guess we’ll annoy some people here today. Ah, well, yes, and who’s surprised about that? Anybody expecting this corner of the page to deliver comfortable conciliation will long since have learned to seek elsewhere. We come seldom to encourage enthusiasm for the quality of our present accommodation and the solidity of its ride. Alarm more often is our message as we hurry from car to car crying out that the trestle is gone, the engineer drunk or dead, the fireman and conductor about to jump into the puckerbrush with the mailbags full of payroll cash and pension checks.
What may surprise even regular readers, if I can tie my thoughts into a coherent package before the editor comes ‘round to tell me I’ve used up my space and the patience and tolerance of God Almighty his own self, will be just how comprehensively offensive I can be, perhaps alienating right, left and center to such a degree as to engender a true bipartisanship of outrage, although each of course shall be aghast at different points and paragraphs.
I have kept myself in line since the twenty-second of January, when last I confronted this topic. In five columns since then I have presented my thoughts on 1) the quality of editing my pieces endure (a subject itself suggested by a disgusted reader); 2) Sonny and Cher Muslims, a pleasant diversion containing some small kernels of deeper thought that may have passed unnoticed; 3) Maine town meetings, a subject I return to periodically and in the furtherance of which I only incidentally, for contrast, ridicule other, lesser towns than my own; 4) Don Imus, in which piece I appear to have extolled the virtues of both free speech and vulgarity; and 5) a particular, expensive brand of hardware (screws) I like and buy and use, together with appreciative comments concerning several salespersons involved with the product and some general ideas about universal brotherhood and the meaning of interpersonal relationships, honesty, integrity and the value, even to the disaffected, iconoclastic, surly writers of unwieldy essays, of a little bit of the human touch.
So it does seem about time for something just a bit more tart, doesn’t it? OK. Give me ten minutes more and we can both have this behind us.
Subject: The War. Reference: The Republicans. Conclusion: You can waste your summer praying in vain for these people to reconnect with reality. “Stay the course”? What course? The “Surge”? More like a great Flush-more money (billions), more bodies, more social, economic, environmental, spiritual ruin. Stay until we win? Tell me what winning looks like. Until “We get the job done”? What job ? If killing every Iraqi who might now or soon or someday develop a hatred of American policy (different, please understand, from hating America or hating Americans or hating freedom) is our goal, our endgame, our exit strategy, then load up the nukes and let the games begin, because a war of total annihilation we can win, in short order. With, of course, its own consequences, known, unknown and (God, I miss Rummy!), unknown unknown.
But you and I are no safer for one more day or dollar of war. We are in fact less safe the longer we throw our weight around in this country we’ve devastated because of a series of lies too many of us were too eager to believe. Saddam is dead. Feel better? Saddam was a clown, a jerk, a bully. He gassed the Kurds with Rumsfeld’s blessing. Rummy’s Gone; Saddam’s gone. Mission Accomplished. Here’s the irrefutable truth: George Bush and Dick Cheney are responsible for many more dead Americans than Saddam Hussein ever was. And (if any of us cares), more dead Iraqis than Saddam, too.
Support the Commander In Chief? Why? Look, I sort of feel sorry for the guy. He was doomed by birth. Had he been adopted into a decent blue collar family of modest means he might have grown up and found an honest job in the construction trades. I think, with direction and encouragement, he could have learned to sand drywall effectively; possibly, with enough practice, he might have learned to apply tape and mud. But President of the United States? The crop of half-crazies and dim bulbs and religious zealots vying for the Republican nomination are pleased to invoke the name of Ronald Reagan, a dead B-movie actor and shill for Boraxo who slept through cabinet meetings, but none too eager to be seen in public with W.
So we need to elect a Democrat. Do we? Didn’t we do just that last November? Gave ‘em a majority in the House and another in the Senate and, according to every proper columnist and commentator I’ve read or heard, sent ‘em a message. The message? Stop the war. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid said they understood. In their way and in the fullness of time, nothing sudden or precipitate or radical, you understand, they produced a bill to fund the war a majority of voters want to get out of. Fund it big-time (yes, many more billions) with some minor recommendations and meaningless “benchmarks” for measuring Iraqi performance. (Yes, the conventional wisdom now assigns blame for our fix to the Iraqis, for failing to “step up”.)
Well, W. said that timid bill, which gave him every dime he wanted for bombs and blood and his buddies at Halliburton, gave comfort to “America’s Enemies” (by which I guess he probably didn’t mean Dick Cheney, although I’d give him Public Enemy Number One status) and he’d not sign it. So the Democrats talked among themselves about compromise. They had a meeting with the president. They talked about funding for two months at a time. They talked about some “advisory” language they might slip in to the grant of funds. Bush stood firm against “tying the hands of our commanders in the field” even as one of those recently in the field bought TV time to urge us to get out and go home and stop killing them and fooling ourselves.
Before Bush vetoed the first bill candidate Obama said Congress should send him a second bill that he would find palatable enough to sign. Candidate Clinton said if she’d known back then what she knows now…. She did know. We all knew. Some of us chose to not admit what we knew, even to ourselves. It was war fever time. The handwriting was on the wall. It was get Saddam, show the big stick, kick ass, smoke ‘em, burn ‘em, make somebody pay. It was wrong then, Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Reid. It’s wrong now. Are you against the war, Congressmen and Congresswomen? Of course you are, all but thirteen Democrats. Should we cut our losses? The public says yes. Every day we stay we get further into the hole. Every night Public Television shows the pictures of our dead children “as their names are made public and as photographs become available.” There is no “win.” There is only an end with today’s toll of dead or tomorrow’s or next week’s, thirty-five hundred or four thousand, a hundred or so a month.
We’ll leave eventually. We will not have won. We will only have wasted an as yet undetermined amount of money and killed some greater number of men and women and children. We kill children every day, you know. Shoot ‘em, bomb, ‘em, burn ‘em. Are we proud of that?
Congressional Republicans are increasingly embarrassed by their president. Some are even ashamed of him, possibly of themselves. None of them wants to run for office or field a Republican candidate for president with this war still surging. Democrats, I think, wouldn’t mind seeing it still festering somewhat closer to election day. I know that sounds cynical, but how else can we interpret their half-hearted, weak, enabling legislation? This war is bad, it’s wrong, it’s stupid. It’s ruined Iraq, damaged America’s reputation, and made every one of us less secure. Support the troops? Sure thing. Send Bush a bill directing him to disengage with all speed consistent with the safe extrication of our men and women and those Iraqi interpreters and allies and employees whose association with us puts them and their families at risk. Give him enough money for airplanes or troop ships or trains to Turkey -enough to bring them home.
Every dead soldier since the new Congress convened may now be laid equally at the threshold of Democratic as well as Republican conscience. It’s just this easy, Senators. Use it without royalty or attribution; I give it to you because few of you seem able to compose such a thought out of your own minds and hearts: I support our troops and will vote to stop paying to put them to death in this war which serves no worthwhile, decent, humane interest and cannot be won according to any rational use of the term.
Bush will veto any funding bill you send him if he doesn’t like the language. He’ll whine that cutting off funding is un-American. That was an effective strategy five years ago; it worked well enough even as he rejected the recommendations of his own Baker Commission and sold this preposterous “surge” idea (if what we’re doing isn’t working, we’ll do it harder and faster). It won’t work now. It took six years, but here’s what we all know now: the president is a loser, his election and re-election were terrible mistakes, and the war is undermining the moral foundations of our once-great country.
Anybody who likes this war should sign on to it. Send his or her son and daughter. Send the Pentagon a generous check toward the cost. Support the troops? Go die in the desert so they don’t have to. Yellow ribbons tied to a power pole or a string of made in China toy flags along a bridge rail don’t do the job five long years into the butchery.
I wish I thought electing Democrats these days made much difference. I wish I thought the anguish ninety or a hundred families feel every month when they see a brace of officers coming up their front walks bearing that unspeakably terrible salutation could somehow seep into each of our hearts and make us turn off the ball game or the car race or walk out of the Spiderman sequel and demand that somebody, anybody, either party, do the right thing. Right now.
Mr. Cooper wishes to assure his readers that he is even more weary of writing about the dangerous criminals running our country, the lame compromisers managing the useless Democratic response, the careful corporate press, and voters for whom babies blown to bits with their tax dollars today are less interesting than lies and fables still circulating on talk radio about the “Heroes of 9/11″ than they are tired of reading him on these subjects. But how does he, how does anyone not return to this awful reality every day? How can he not think about these things and, thinking, necessarily write, using the only weak, small tool he owns against this monstrous perversion? He regrets he has no answers, only outrage and disgust and fear. For those who ask his recommendation for personal action, he offers only this: Ignore your Republican representatives–they are too corrupted to save or instruct or enlighten; write to your Democratic ones only to tell them, “No compromise, no retreat, no surrender–and no more time to waste.” Write him if you like at ckc2@prexar.com.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Oh Right, We're Still At War
How horrifying is it when Bush's unwinnable disaster becomes so dreary and forgettable?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/
Wednesday, May 16, 2007I think it was Keith Olbermann who said it first, who said yes wow that Virginia Tech shooting rampage was horrible and shocking and brutal and oh my God we lost a lot of really good, honest American kids and Something Should Be Done.
And maybe let’s start with the wide-eyed gun-rights maniacs and the conservative pseudo-cowboys and those twitchy Second Amendment paranoids who somehow still think that we all must cling to our nasty little Glocks ‘cuz gosh, what might happen if our own government turns on us and nobody has their little handgun to protect their kids from the tanks and the missiles and the heat-ray guns? Right.
But hey wait (Olbermann went on to say), then again, in the 10 days prior to that horrific shooting, didn’t we also lose nearly exactly that same number of young people over in Iraq (well over 30) to even more brutal idiocy and insanity, to cluster bombs and insurgent shootings and gruesome death and a hugely inept, warmongering American president who is so violently unable to see just what kind of bland, lackluster evil he has wrought upon the planet that he is now on the verge of entering the record books as the Worst President in History?
And maybe, just maybe, given how we are still losing double-digit numbers of good, honest American bodies every week in Iraq, just as we have for the past four solid years, perhaps we should be equally — if not perhaps quite a bit more — appalled and disgusted and shocked that this “war” is still raging, nonstop, to the tune of 3,400 dead Americans and tens of thousands wounded and counting fast?
What, in other words, is wrong with us? Where is our outrage? Where is the pain and wailing and the candlelight vigils? Why has it become so easy to let Iraq turn into this numb, forgettable, boring thing, a blip in media, a sad yawn in your day?
Yes, maybe you heard all that and, like many Americans, reacted by saying, well yes, Iraq is awful and all, but it’s a war, and like it or not, kids are supposed to die in wars, in unspeakable and unrecorded and unbloggable ways, it’s understandable and acceptable and even (tragically, morbidly) expected, whereas that’s not supposed to happen in a nice upscale college where most kids can keep their nervous rage in check with iPods and drugs and beer bongs and lousy recreational sex.
Or perhaps you replied, well, it’s easy to ignore Iraq because, unless you’re in the family of a soldier, this might be the most painless, distant, unfelt war in our short history, so removed and so disconnected from our everyday lives that it’s almost as if it’s not happening at all, just some minor political irritant as opposed to a horrid, gory embarrassment that’s costing us $100,000 per minute, or $275 million per day — enough money, by the end of it all, to rebuild every school and every park and every free clinic in America and then go on to house every homeless person and solve the oil crisis and cure a few diseases and perform a thousand other social improvements you can’t even imagine right now lest you feel disgusted and sour and sad for the rest of the month.
See, it’s all about perspective. And when it comes to Iraq, we aren’t really required to have a great deal of it anymore because, let’s be honest, we’re not really at war, are we? War requires a clear enemy, serious consequences, something powerful and vital must be at stake and there’s nothing at stake in Iraq — except, of course, our own crumbling identity.
What’s more, no one except the most bitter die-hard neocon is actually claiming that America itself is actually under any sort of attack, and we’re certainly not fighting and dying for anything, not really, unless you’re naive enough to believe in the “march of democracy” thing and if you do, I have a time-share on some swampland in Florida, cheap.
Maybe it’s merely the natural progression, the way it must be. Iraq has been going on for so long, will be going on for so long, maybe the only response possible is to become numb to it all, to tune out the dreary headlines as they trudge on by because every day it’s a new bombing, a new helicopter shot down, five or six or 20 more American bodies ripped and gored and blown up and to feel every one would be to quickly induce trauma fatigue.
And then there’s the horrible feeling, that deeper understanding that no one really wants to acknowledge but which everyone knows to be true: The terrorists have already won. Oh my good Allah, yes they have.
Bush has seen to it that America has become, post-Sept. 11, a reactionary, rogue, knee-jerk, hateful outpost of isolationism and thuggishness that no self-respecting developed nation really wants to deal with anymore. Just like the terrorists wanted. Disrupt America and make us paranoid and implosive and openly loathed by the few remaining shreds of the Middle East that didn’t mistrust us already? Hey, mission accomplished.
Me, I like to imagine the babies. I like to imagine all the children born back in 2003 (or 2001, if you count the equally failed Afghan campaign), the Year of Brutal Idiocy, the Year It All Went Wrong, the Year America Jumped the Shark.
All these children born at the war’s beginning are well over 4 years old now. They are walking, talking, speaking in complete sentences with more complexity and coherence than the president himself. And for their entire lives, America has been at war. They have never known a day where we have been at peace, where we haven’t lived under this bitter cloud of rampant incompetence, violence, a deep sadness, a sense that something has gone very, very wrong with the American idea, and no one really has any clue how to fix it. How will they be affected? What sort of perception of a broken, lost America will they have drilled into their baffled little bones?
Which leaves us right here, in this murky no-man’s-land of vague dis-ease, this foul, anesthetized place where our brutal-war-that-isn’t-really-a-war has become the norm, a time when it feels like we as a country should be getting stronger and should be leading the world in everything from peacekeeping to environmentalism to medicine to technology, and yet we have this giant, bloodstained monkey on our backs, violent and ugly and still shockingly strong, and he is laughing, cackling at our feeble attempts to shake ourselves free, even as he eats at our soul.
Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate and in the Datebook section of the San Francisco Chronicle.
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/
Wednesday, May 16, 2007I think it was Keith Olbermann who said it first, who said yes wow that Virginia Tech shooting rampage was horrible and shocking and brutal and oh my God we lost a lot of really good, honest American kids and Something Should Be Done.
And maybe let’s start with the wide-eyed gun-rights maniacs and the conservative pseudo-cowboys and those twitchy Second Amendment paranoids who somehow still think that we all must cling to our nasty little Glocks ‘cuz gosh, what might happen if our own government turns on us and nobody has their little handgun to protect their kids from the tanks and the missiles and the heat-ray guns? Right.
But hey wait (Olbermann went on to say), then again, in the 10 days prior to that horrific shooting, didn’t we also lose nearly exactly that same number of young people over in Iraq (well over 30) to even more brutal idiocy and insanity, to cluster bombs and insurgent shootings and gruesome death and a hugely inept, warmongering American president who is so violently unable to see just what kind of bland, lackluster evil he has wrought upon the planet that he is now on the verge of entering the record books as the Worst President in History?
And maybe, just maybe, given how we are still losing double-digit numbers of good, honest American bodies every week in Iraq, just as we have for the past four solid years, perhaps we should be equally — if not perhaps quite a bit more — appalled and disgusted and shocked that this “war” is still raging, nonstop, to the tune of 3,400 dead Americans and tens of thousands wounded and counting fast?
What, in other words, is wrong with us? Where is our outrage? Where is the pain and wailing and the candlelight vigils? Why has it become so easy to let Iraq turn into this numb, forgettable, boring thing, a blip in media, a sad yawn in your day?
Yes, maybe you heard all that and, like many Americans, reacted by saying, well yes, Iraq is awful and all, but it’s a war, and like it or not, kids are supposed to die in wars, in unspeakable and unrecorded and unbloggable ways, it’s understandable and acceptable and even (tragically, morbidly) expected, whereas that’s not supposed to happen in a nice upscale college where most kids can keep their nervous rage in check with iPods and drugs and beer bongs and lousy recreational sex.
Or perhaps you replied, well, it’s easy to ignore Iraq because, unless you’re in the family of a soldier, this might be the most painless, distant, unfelt war in our short history, so removed and so disconnected from our everyday lives that it’s almost as if it’s not happening at all, just some minor political irritant as opposed to a horrid, gory embarrassment that’s costing us $100,000 per minute, or $275 million per day — enough money, by the end of it all, to rebuild every school and every park and every free clinic in America and then go on to house every homeless person and solve the oil crisis and cure a few diseases and perform a thousand other social improvements you can’t even imagine right now lest you feel disgusted and sour and sad for the rest of the month.
See, it’s all about perspective. And when it comes to Iraq, we aren’t really required to have a great deal of it anymore because, let’s be honest, we’re not really at war, are we? War requires a clear enemy, serious consequences, something powerful and vital must be at stake and there’s nothing at stake in Iraq — except, of course, our own crumbling identity.
What’s more, no one except the most bitter die-hard neocon is actually claiming that America itself is actually under any sort of attack, and we’re certainly not fighting and dying for anything, not really, unless you’re naive enough to believe in the “march of democracy” thing and if you do, I have a time-share on some swampland in Florida, cheap.
Maybe it’s merely the natural progression, the way it must be. Iraq has been going on for so long, will be going on for so long, maybe the only response possible is to become numb to it all, to tune out the dreary headlines as they trudge on by because every day it’s a new bombing, a new helicopter shot down, five or six or 20 more American bodies ripped and gored and blown up and to feel every one would be to quickly induce trauma fatigue.
And then there’s the horrible feeling, that deeper understanding that no one really wants to acknowledge but which everyone knows to be true: The terrorists have already won. Oh my good Allah, yes they have.
Bush has seen to it that America has become, post-Sept. 11, a reactionary, rogue, knee-jerk, hateful outpost of isolationism and thuggishness that no self-respecting developed nation really wants to deal with anymore. Just like the terrorists wanted. Disrupt America and make us paranoid and implosive and openly loathed by the few remaining shreds of the Middle East that didn’t mistrust us already? Hey, mission accomplished.
Me, I like to imagine the babies. I like to imagine all the children born back in 2003 (or 2001, if you count the equally failed Afghan campaign), the Year of Brutal Idiocy, the Year It All Went Wrong, the Year America Jumped the Shark.
All these children born at the war’s beginning are well over 4 years old now. They are walking, talking, speaking in complete sentences with more complexity and coherence than the president himself. And for their entire lives, America has been at war. They have never known a day where we have been at peace, where we haven’t lived under this bitter cloud of rampant incompetence, violence, a deep sadness, a sense that something has gone very, very wrong with the American idea, and no one really has any clue how to fix it. How will they be affected? What sort of perception of a broken, lost America will they have drilled into their baffled little bones?
Which leaves us right here, in this murky no-man’s-land of vague dis-ease, this foul, anesthetized place where our brutal-war-that-isn’t-really-a-war has become the norm, a time when it feels like we as a country should be getting stronger and should be leading the world in everything from peacekeeping to environmentalism to medicine to technology, and yet we have this giant, bloodstained monkey on our backs, violent and ugly and still shockingly strong, and he is laughing, cackling at our feeble attempts to shake ourselves free, even as he eats at our soul.
Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate and in the Datebook section of the San Francisco Chronicle.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
A Review of 'End Times'
A Review of Alexander Cockburn's and Jeffrey St. Clair's End Times
- by Stephen Lendman
5/16/07
[...]
End Times - A Collection of Essays from Cockburn and St. Clair On the Dismal State of the Dominant Print Media
"End Times - The Death of the Fourth Estate" is a collection of 50 wide-ranging essays written in recent years under six topic headings, mostly by Cockburn and St. Clair with a few by other contributors, on the dismal state of the corporate print media today. They were dominant at their zenith in the mid-1970s Pentagon Papers - Watergate era but now, the authors say, are in an inevitable state of decline agreeing with media mogul (Cockburn-labeled "WORLD-SCALE MONSTER") Rupert Murdock's characterization of a long twilight at best.
Even more, their current state is symptomatic of our overall societal decay with unprecedented wealth disparities, the nation in endless wars of illegal aggression, predatory corporate giants ruling the world, and our democracy on life support heading for the crematorium to be heralded on arrival in front page coverage of the nation's leading purveyors of "news unfit to print." This review covers the authors account of their decline at a time noted historian Gabriel Kolko calls "the most dangerous period in mankind's entire history" when the kind of news and information we most need isn't served up by the dominant fourth estate suppressing it in service to power. The essence and flavor of the book is covered with selected examples from it in an age of media concentration, deregulation and "in-bed-with" journalists posing as the real thing.
The book came out at a time public distrust for traditional print and electronic news is increasing as growing numbers of people, hungry for real information, are turning to alternate sources including a new, vibrant world of them online like CounterPunch the authors say gets around three million daily hits, 300,000 page views, and 100,000 unique visitors including 15,000 regular US military readers stationed around the world, a sign many thousands more of them visit other sites like CounterPunch and pass on what they learn to others. A hopeful, but not certain, indication of a growing trend too powerful to stop. More on that at the end...
full article
- by Stephen Lendman
5/16/07
[...]
End Times - A Collection of Essays from Cockburn and St. Clair On the Dismal State of the Dominant Print Media
"End Times - The Death of the Fourth Estate" is a collection of 50 wide-ranging essays written in recent years under six topic headings, mostly by Cockburn and St. Clair with a few by other contributors, on the dismal state of the corporate print media today. They were dominant at their zenith in the mid-1970s Pentagon Papers - Watergate era but now, the authors say, are in an inevitable state of decline agreeing with media mogul (Cockburn-labeled "WORLD-SCALE MONSTER") Rupert Murdock's characterization of a long twilight at best.
Even more, their current state is symptomatic of our overall societal decay with unprecedented wealth disparities, the nation in endless wars of illegal aggression, predatory corporate giants ruling the world, and our democracy on life support heading for the crematorium to be heralded on arrival in front page coverage of the nation's leading purveyors of "news unfit to print." This review covers the authors account of their decline at a time noted historian Gabriel Kolko calls "the most dangerous period in mankind's entire history" when the kind of news and information we most need isn't served up by the dominant fourth estate suppressing it in service to power. The essence and flavor of the book is covered with selected examples from it in an age of media concentration, deregulation and "in-bed-with" journalists posing as the real thing.
The book came out at a time public distrust for traditional print and electronic news is increasing as growing numbers of people, hungry for real information, are turning to alternate sources including a new, vibrant world of them online like CounterPunch the authors say gets around three million daily hits, 300,000 page views, and 100,000 unique visitors including 15,000 regular US military readers stationed around the world, a sign many thousands more of them visit other sites like CounterPunch and pass on what they learn to others. A hopeful, but not certain, indication of a growing trend too powerful to stop. More on that at the end...
full article
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
The War on Free Expression
by Stephen Lendman
5/9/07
In a post-9/11 climate, the right of free expression is under attack and endangered in the age of George Bush when dissent may be called a threat to national security, terrorism, or treason. But losing that most precious of all rights means losing our freedom that 18th century French philosopher Voltaire spoke in defense of saying "I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Using it to express dissent is what noted historian Howard Zinn calls "the highest form of patriotism" exercising our constitutional right to freedom of speech, the press, to assemble, to protest publicly, and associate as we choose for any reason within the law.
Even then, there are times more forceful action is needed, and Thomas Jefferson explained under what circumstances in the Declaration of Independence he authored. When bad government destroys our freedoms, we the people have the right and duty to disobey civilly and resist. Henry David Thoreau called it "Civil Obedience" in 1849, and men like Gandhi and Martin Luther King practiced it successfully 100 years later. That's our challenge today at a time our constitutional rights are more compromised and threatened than at any previous time in our history. Resistance is the antidote to restoring them, and freedom-loving people have a duty and obligation to do it.
That's what democracy is all about and what our Founders had in mind when they crafted what they called "the great (democratic) experiment" that became our Constitution and Bill of Rights, imperfect as they are with omissions and ambiguities. In words first written by Thomas Jefferson, they "declared their independence" in 1776 from the British king who ruled the colonies with "repeated injuries and usurpations (by his) absolute Tyranny" using language considered audacious then or now:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal (and) endowed....with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. - That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed, - That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government....to effect their Safety and Happiness." Try doing that today, and it's called treason, a capital offense. Jefferson, Madison, Franklin and others thought otherwise saying we must act in our own defense when government won't do it for us.
[…]
The War On Free Expression We Can't Afford to Lose
A play on Thomas Jefferson's words might be that "All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience" to be denied their First Amendment rights to speak, write and otherwise communicate freely and openly without fear of recrimination in a state they want to remain democratic but won't without that right. Today our freedoms are jeopardized in an atmosphere of heightened fear with too few people aware how threatened their most important one of all is at a time there's risk they all may be lost without a concerted effort to save them.
It starts by propping up our First Amendment one without which none of the others are guaranteed or safe. Freedom of expression is the foundation of a free society, or as Jefferson put it: "Information is the currency of democracy (and) If a nation expects to be ignorant (uninformed or misinformed) and free....it expects what never was and never will be."
[…]
full article
5/9/07
In a post-9/11 climate, the right of free expression is under attack and endangered in the age of George Bush when dissent may be called a threat to national security, terrorism, or treason. But losing that most precious of all rights means losing our freedom that 18th century French philosopher Voltaire spoke in defense of saying "I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Using it to express dissent is what noted historian Howard Zinn calls "the highest form of patriotism" exercising our constitutional right to freedom of speech, the press, to assemble, to protest publicly, and associate as we choose for any reason within the law.
Even then, there are times more forceful action is needed, and Thomas Jefferson explained under what circumstances in the Declaration of Independence he authored. When bad government destroys our freedoms, we the people have the right and duty to disobey civilly and resist. Henry David Thoreau called it "Civil Obedience" in 1849, and men like Gandhi and Martin Luther King practiced it successfully 100 years later. That's our challenge today at a time our constitutional rights are more compromised and threatened than at any previous time in our history. Resistance is the antidote to restoring them, and freedom-loving people have a duty and obligation to do it.
That's what democracy is all about and what our Founders had in mind when they crafted what they called "the great (democratic) experiment" that became our Constitution and Bill of Rights, imperfect as they are with omissions and ambiguities. In words first written by Thomas Jefferson, they "declared their independence" in 1776 from the British king who ruled the colonies with "repeated injuries and usurpations (by his) absolute Tyranny" using language considered audacious then or now:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal (and) endowed....with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. - That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed, - That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government....to effect their Safety and Happiness." Try doing that today, and it's called treason, a capital offense. Jefferson, Madison, Franklin and others thought otherwise saying we must act in our own defense when government won't do it for us.
[…]
The War On Free Expression We Can't Afford to Lose
A play on Thomas Jefferson's words might be that "All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience" to be denied their First Amendment rights to speak, write and otherwise communicate freely and openly without fear of recrimination in a state they want to remain democratic but won't without that right. Today our freedoms are jeopardized in an atmosphere of heightened fear with too few people aware how threatened their most important one of all is at a time there's risk they all may be lost without a concerted effort to save them.
It starts by propping up our First Amendment one without which none of the others are guaranteed or safe. Freedom of expression is the foundation of a free society, or as Jefferson put it: "Information is the currency of democracy (and) If a nation expects to be ignorant (uninformed or misinformed) and free....it expects what never was and never will be."
[…]
full article
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
When We Forget To Remember...
By Sheila Samples
May 08, 2007
The gutters are clogged with the dead
The ones who couldn't join in
The others refusing to sing
The ones who are losing their voice
The ones who've forgotten the tune.
- Excerpt "God Bless America," Harold Pinter, January 2003
Preceeding generations had every reason to believe those following them would step into the breach and continue the vigil over this nation's Constitutional freedoms and, if necessary, fight to preserve them. They believed, like George Washington warned -- "Government is a "force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action." And they remembered, from generation to generation. Unfortunately, those following our generation will have no such luxury.
We blew it.
We forgot to remember when history goes around, it inevitably comes back around. We forgot to remember that the U.S. Constitution is the beating heart of the United States and, from its inception, was designed to protect the freedoms and liberties of "we the people." However, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia maintains that the Constitution is a "dead" document, and says he "cringes" when it is referred to as "living." Vice President Dick Cheney, the duck-hunting buddy Scalia unconstitutionally installed in the White House in the 2000 election coup must agree, since he refuses to abide by even one of its strictures.
Nobody is more adept at forgetting to remember than Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, or “Fredo,” as Bush calls him. Remember Fredo -- Michael Corleone's dumb-as-dirt, totally controlled brother in the “Godfather” series? The nickname is a perfect fit for Gonzales, who cannot recall what he had for breakfast this morning. The one thing he knows for certain -- the Constitution is "an outdated document" -- quaint and old-fashioned, but of no use in Fredo's world of abuse and torture and trickle-down fascism.
And President George Bush, who flies into a rage when he feels his will -- his God-given right to rule -- is being tested, holds this living document of American liberty in utmost contempt. In Dec. 2005, when Bush was determined to renew and expand the destructive USA Patriot Act, an aide reminded him that invasion into citizens' private lives underminded the Constitution. Bush immediately exploded -- "Stop throwing the Constitution in my face," he screamed, "It's just a goddamned piece of paper."
Right then. At that moment, Bush should have been removed from office. Can anyone make the case that Bush deserved to remain at the helm of this nation for even 10 seconds after spewing such treasonous hate and filth? Lest we forget, not once, but twice, Bush stood before the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, his hand on the Bible, and parroted, "I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
Lest we forget, that 35-word oath is required of all elected presidents,and can be found in Article II, Section I, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution.
The Constitution is so vital for keeping this republic on track that those who work for the government -- all three branches -- to include the vice president, each member of both houses of Congress, unelected Supreme Court justices, and military personnel must take similar oaths. Supporting the Constitution -- defending it against all enemies, both foreign and domestic -- is literally their job description. All else is political folly.
Surely Americans must know that a crisis without precedent is underway in this country. The first target in the Straussian neocon's war of terror was the Constitution and, by extension, the American people. We are hurtling headlong into tyranny and, as Harold Pinter so aptly put it -- those whom we elected to protect both us and the Constitution have either lost their voices or seem to have forgotten the tune.
It's all politics all the time. Those on the right champion the suppression of free speech and assembly. Those on the left are equally to blame; complicit in their silence, although they know Bush's war is but another "option on the table" to keep the populace cowering in irrational fear for political gain. Neither side seems willing to admit there's a big difference, both legal and ethical, between asking citizens to die for their country -- and demanding they "kill" for their country...
Bush's "reign" since 9-11 has been one bad-tempered tantrum after another. Bush has executed the office of the president every single day over the past six years, just as he promised -- faithfully, relentlessly. As we stare dazedly over the blood-sodden landscapes of two continents, we remember -- too late -- the only thing Bush ever did in his entire life with any enthusiasm was "execute."
It's time for Americans to actually read the "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA Patriot Act) Act of 2001 (preceeding generations recognize this as the "Enabling Act"), and the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which completes the loop of oppression, revokes the right to habeas corpus not only for detainees, but for anyone Bush or Fredo labels an “enemy combatant,” including legal US citizens. This destructive act places the "Commander Guy" at the helm of the executive panthean where he is bound only by his imagination when it comes to detaining, torturing and murdering other human beings.
Continued compliance with such venal madness is no longer an option on the people's table. Elected officials must do more than jerk the Constitution out of their pockets and wave it in the faces of their opponents as they rip off some really neat sound bites and posture for the media. Perhaps if they actually read the Constitution, they would discover what they forgot to remember -- they have no choice but to impeach the entire cabal for their absolute despotism, illegal actions, lies, and filthy war crimes.
It's in their job description.
And then we should revive the Declaration of Independence so we can get on with restoring this once great republic to its former grandeur -- an ethical and political entity that derives its powers from the consent of the governed.
Sheila Samples is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian US Army Public Information Officer. She is a regular contributor for a variety of Internet sites. Contact her at rsamples@sirinet.net
May 08, 2007
The gutters are clogged with the dead
The ones who couldn't join in
The others refusing to sing
The ones who are losing their voice
The ones who've forgotten the tune.
- Excerpt "God Bless America," Harold Pinter, January 2003
Preceeding generations had every reason to believe those following them would step into the breach and continue the vigil over this nation's Constitutional freedoms and, if necessary, fight to preserve them. They believed, like George Washington warned -- "Government is a "force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action." And they remembered, from generation to generation. Unfortunately, those following our generation will have no such luxury.
We blew it.
We forgot to remember when history goes around, it inevitably comes back around. We forgot to remember that the U.S. Constitution is the beating heart of the United States and, from its inception, was designed to protect the freedoms and liberties of "we the people." However, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia maintains that the Constitution is a "dead" document, and says he "cringes" when it is referred to as "living." Vice President Dick Cheney, the duck-hunting buddy Scalia unconstitutionally installed in the White House in the 2000 election coup must agree, since he refuses to abide by even one of its strictures.
Nobody is more adept at forgetting to remember than Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, or “Fredo,” as Bush calls him. Remember Fredo -- Michael Corleone's dumb-as-dirt, totally controlled brother in the “Godfather” series? The nickname is a perfect fit for Gonzales, who cannot recall what he had for breakfast this morning. The one thing he knows for certain -- the Constitution is "an outdated document" -- quaint and old-fashioned, but of no use in Fredo's world of abuse and torture and trickle-down fascism.
And President George Bush, who flies into a rage when he feels his will -- his God-given right to rule -- is being tested, holds this living document of American liberty in utmost contempt. In Dec. 2005, when Bush was determined to renew and expand the destructive USA Patriot Act, an aide reminded him that invasion into citizens' private lives underminded the Constitution. Bush immediately exploded -- "Stop throwing the Constitution in my face," he screamed, "It's just a goddamned piece of paper."
Right then. At that moment, Bush should have been removed from office. Can anyone make the case that Bush deserved to remain at the helm of this nation for even 10 seconds after spewing such treasonous hate and filth? Lest we forget, not once, but twice, Bush stood before the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, his hand on the Bible, and parroted, "I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
Lest we forget, that 35-word oath is required of all elected presidents,and can be found in Article II, Section I, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution.
The Constitution is so vital for keeping this republic on track that those who work for the government -- all three branches -- to include the vice president, each member of both houses of Congress, unelected Supreme Court justices, and military personnel must take similar oaths. Supporting the Constitution -- defending it against all enemies, both foreign and domestic -- is literally their job description. All else is political folly.
Surely Americans must know that a crisis without precedent is underway in this country. The first target in the Straussian neocon's war of terror was the Constitution and, by extension, the American people. We are hurtling headlong into tyranny and, as Harold Pinter so aptly put it -- those whom we elected to protect both us and the Constitution have either lost their voices or seem to have forgotten the tune.
It's all politics all the time. Those on the right champion the suppression of free speech and assembly. Those on the left are equally to blame; complicit in their silence, although they know Bush's war is but another "option on the table" to keep the populace cowering in irrational fear for political gain. Neither side seems willing to admit there's a big difference, both legal and ethical, between asking citizens to die for their country -- and demanding they "kill" for their country...
Bush's "reign" since 9-11 has been one bad-tempered tantrum after another. Bush has executed the office of the president every single day over the past six years, just as he promised -- faithfully, relentlessly. As we stare dazedly over the blood-sodden landscapes of two continents, we remember -- too late -- the only thing Bush ever did in his entire life with any enthusiasm was "execute."
It's time for Americans to actually read the "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA Patriot Act) Act of 2001 (preceeding generations recognize this as the "Enabling Act"), and the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which completes the loop of oppression, revokes the right to habeas corpus not only for detainees, but for anyone Bush or Fredo labels an “enemy combatant,” including legal US citizens. This destructive act places the "Commander Guy" at the helm of the executive panthean where he is bound only by his imagination when it comes to detaining, torturing and murdering other human beings.
Continued compliance with such venal madness is no longer an option on the people's table. Elected officials must do more than jerk the Constitution out of their pockets and wave it in the faces of their opponents as they rip off some really neat sound bites and posture for the media. Perhaps if they actually read the Constitution, they would discover what they forgot to remember -- they have no choice but to impeach the entire cabal for their absolute despotism, illegal actions, lies, and filthy war crimes.
It's in their job description.
And then we should revive the Declaration of Independence so we can get on with restoring this once great republic to its former grandeur -- an ethical and political entity that derives its powers from the consent of the governed.
Sheila Samples is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian US Army Public Information Officer. She is a regular contributor for a variety of Internet sites. Contact her at rsamples@sirinet.net
Sunday, May 06, 2007
Two Parties Looking For A Candidate
by Mary Pitt
5/6/07
The 2008 campaign season must have started too soon. Neither party seems to be prepared as both have trotted out their second string to make public appearances on all the talk shows, festivals, county fairs, and well-scripted television "debates". First, there is no real debate in them, just a few controlled questions designed to show them all in their best light. To one who lives out here in the real world, it is simply another version of American Idol.
The Democrats were a motley crew. Hillary Clinton was her usual, well-prepared self as she sent the message that, if you liked Bill, you'll love her. (As if the Great Unwashed had learned nothing about nepotism when George W. "took" the presidency.) Barack Obama, the great writer and orator, couldn't seem to find the words which usually rolled off his tongue so easily, perhaps due to beginner's stage fright. And there was Joe Biden. There is always Joe Biden. The only interesting parts of the appearance were supplied by Dennis Kucinich who makes up in persistence and fortitude for his insignificant appearance and former Senator Mike Gravel, who has justifiably said that "Washington could use some adult supervision." However, the pundits dismiss both of them as gadflies of the extreme left.
The Republicans met in California at the Reagan Museum with Nancy Reagan in attendance and it seemed as if the Ghost of Christmas Past hovered over the whole affair. President Reagan was lionized by one and all, though the current President barely rated a mention. However, when Mrs. Reagan proffered a question about embryonic stem cell research, she was firmly informed that it ain't going to happen so she may as well get over it. Of course, everyone applauded the recent Supreme Court ruling and agreed that it would be a good day when Roe v. Wade is overturned. Only Rudy left open the possibility that these laws should be "left up to the States".
The front-runners were there in all their glory. Mayor Rudy used to be pre-choice but now he's pro-life and he promised to be an inspirational leader, just as he was in New York, (after 9/11 of course). Governor Romney was proud of the way he managed to turn the medical care in his State over to the insurance companies, and defended his statement that he doesn't care a damn what the Pope thinks. I couldn't help but remember the words of his Uncle George, "What's good for General Motors is good for the country." It sort of seems like the Republicans may not so good for the country, right? John McCain was his bellicose self and made clear that he thinks this is a totally winnable war except that it is being run by an idiot and, instead of running us into bankrupcy fighting Iraq, he would chase Oamsa "to the gates of hell". Everyone agreed on everything except for Ron Paul who provided the difference by opposing the Iraq War and advocating for a flat tax, this placing him in the same position as Mike Gravel! The concensus was that any new ideas were anathema and anything wrong could be cured by the elimination of personal freedoms, reduction of taxes, and destruction of all the social programs. Everyone was spiffed up to the nth degree but one was overwhelmed by the thought that something was missing.....the real candidate. There was more shifting, waffling, and flip-flopping than one would expect of a Clinton-Kerry appearance.
Surely I am not the only one out here in the real world who is disgruntled with the lot of them. Except for Kucinich, Gravel, and perhaps Ron Paul, we saw no new thinking, no interesting ideas, and no commitment to the problems that concern working Americans. They seemed to neither know nor care about anything but the war and abortion, those in favor of one being against the other, which really makes no sense at all. But nobody mentioned the loss of jobs, the mortgage foreclosures, illegal immigration, or "fair" trade. Nobody seems to have gotten the point from the recent discovery of contaminated wheat gluten from China which sickened and killed so many of our pet animals with bad pet food which was then given to hog farmers to contaminate your breakfast chops. Nor would any know that the root cause of that was our fair trade treaty with China which destroyed the market for our own gluten factories, most of which have gone out of business. How ironic that we here in the "bread basket to the world" would be importing wheat products! Of course, nobody even brought up New Orleans.
And candidates of both parties appeared to be consumed with the necessity for protecting Israel against any attack from anybody. Wouldn't we be prepared to be as careful of any other friendly nation? They certainly don't seem that concerned about Somalia or Darfur, both of which are in much greater danger. Ot maybe they don't even know about that, or many of the other things which concern those who read newspapers and on-line reports or with which we must deal in our everyday lives. We are told that their jobs are very time-consuming what with wheeling and dealing among other politicians who don't know any more than they do they have no time to learn what is happening outside the Beltway..
But, more pronounced than anything that we felt as we watched the opening appearances of the political "season" was the absence of the Real Candidate of either party. As the spirit of Ronald Reagan hovered above the Republican confab, they seemed to be waiting for the appearance of a Hollywood cowboy to ride up on a white horse and save them all. Maybe they hope the actor and former Senator, Fred Thompson will come along to establish Law and Order like he does on TV or Newt Gingrich will decide to take out another Contract On America. And all through the Democratic show-up was the burning question, "Where is Al Gore?"
No matter. If either party had someone who would fill the desires of the people, they would surely have presented them. Instead of going back to Clinton or to Reagan, we are looking for someone who will go forward; someone who will scrape off the barnacles of corruption from our Ship of State and re-create the shining dreams that we knew yesteryear, dreams of equality and brotherhood, fairness, and justice in a land where the contents of your wallet are less important than the kindness that is in your heart; dreams that our children may have a better life than we instead of having to labor and suffer to pay our debts; dreams that no matter the circumstances of your birth, you may attain success by your own efforts and diligence.
The best advice for both parties is to clean their paint brushes and start on a new picture. The American public is sick and tired of re-runs and old ideas. The past is prologue and we are concerned about our future. Perhaps the presidential election of 2008 is of even less importance than continuing the rollover of Congress to new people who really understand what the American public want. Get over it and MOVE ON!
Mary Pitt lives in a house by the side of the road in a little rural village in Kansas where she can observe the world both as it is and as she would like it to be. Questions and comments will reach her at mpitt@cox.net
5/6/07
The 2008 campaign season must have started too soon. Neither party seems to be prepared as both have trotted out their second string to make public appearances on all the talk shows, festivals, county fairs, and well-scripted television "debates". First, there is no real debate in them, just a few controlled questions designed to show them all in their best light. To one who lives out here in the real world, it is simply another version of American Idol.
The Democrats were a motley crew. Hillary Clinton was her usual, well-prepared self as she sent the message that, if you liked Bill, you'll love her. (As if the Great Unwashed had learned nothing about nepotism when George W. "took" the presidency.) Barack Obama, the great writer and orator, couldn't seem to find the words which usually rolled off his tongue so easily, perhaps due to beginner's stage fright. And there was Joe Biden. There is always Joe Biden. The only interesting parts of the appearance were supplied by Dennis Kucinich who makes up in persistence and fortitude for his insignificant appearance and former Senator Mike Gravel, who has justifiably said that "Washington could use some adult supervision." However, the pundits dismiss both of them as gadflies of the extreme left.
The Republicans met in California at the Reagan Museum with Nancy Reagan in attendance and it seemed as if the Ghost of Christmas Past hovered over the whole affair. President Reagan was lionized by one and all, though the current President barely rated a mention. However, when Mrs. Reagan proffered a question about embryonic stem cell research, she was firmly informed that it ain't going to happen so she may as well get over it. Of course, everyone applauded the recent Supreme Court ruling and agreed that it would be a good day when Roe v. Wade is overturned. Only Rudy left open the possibility that these laws should be "left up to the States".
The front-runners were there in all their glory. Mayor Rudy used to be pre-choice but now he's pro-life and he promised to be an inspirational leader, just as he was in New York, (after 9/11 of course). Governor Romney was proud of the way he managed to turn the medical care in his State over to the insurance companies, and defended his statement that he doesn't care a damn what the Pope thinks. I couldn't help but remember the words of his Uncle George, "What's good for General Motors is good for the country." It sort of seems like the Republicans may not so good for the country, right? John McCain was his bellicose self and made clear that he thinks this is a totally winnable war except that it is being run by an idiot and, instead of running us into bankrupcy fighting Iraq, he would chase Oamsa "to the gates of hell". Everyone agreed on everything except for Ron Paul who provided the difference by opposing the Iraq War and advocating for a flat tax, this placing him in the same position as Mike Gravel! The concensus was that any new ideas were anathema and anything wrong could be cured by the elimination of personal freedoms, reduction of taxes, and destruction of all the social programs. Everyone was spiffed up to the nth degree but one was overwhelmed by the thought that something was missing.....the real candidate. There was more shifting, waffling, and flip-flopping than one would expect of a Clinton-Kerry appearance.
Surely I am not the only one out here in the real world who is disgruntled with the lot of them. Except for Kucinich, Gravel, and perhaps Ron Paul, we saw no new thinking, no interesting ideas, and no commitment to the problems that concern working Americans. They seemed to neither know nor care about anything but the war and abortion, those in favor of one being against the other, which really makes no sense at all. But nobody mentioned the loss of jobs, the mortgage foreclosures, illegal immigration, or "fair" trade. Nobody seems to have gotten the point from the recent discovery of contaminated wheat gluten from China which sickened and killed so many of our pet animals with bad pet food which was then given to hog farmers to contaminate your breakfast chops. Nor would any know that the root cause of that was our fair trade treaty with China which destroyed the market for our own gluten factories, most of which have gone out of business. How ironic that we here in the "bread basket to the world" would be importing wheat products! Of course, nobody even brought up New Orleans.
And candidates of both parties appeared to be consumed with the necessity for protecting Israel against any attack from anybody. Wouldn't we be prepared to be as careful of any other friendly nation? They certainly don't seem that concerned about Somalia or Darfur, both of which are in much greater danger. Ot maybe they don't even know about that, or many of the other things which concern those who read newspapers and on-line reports or with which we must deal in our everyday lives. We are told that their jobs are very time-consuming what with wheeling and dealing among other politicians who don't know any more than they do they have no time to learn what is happening outside the Beltway..
But, more pronounced than anything that we felt as we watched the opening appearances of the political "season" was the absence of the Real Candidate of either party. As the spirit of Ronald Reagan hovered above the Republican confab, they seemed to be waiting for the appearance of a Hollywood cowboy to ride up on a white horse and save them all. Maybe they hope the actor and former Senator, Fred Thompson will come along to establish Law and Order like he does on TV or Newt Gingrich will decide to take out another Contract On America. And all through the Democratic show-up was the burning question, "Where is Al Gore?"
No matter. If either party had someone who would fill the desires of the people, they would surely have presented them. Instead of going back to Clinton or to Reagan, we are looking for someone who will go forward; someone who will scrape off the barnacles of corruption from our Ship of State and re-create the shining dreams that we knew yesteryear, dreams of equality and brotherhood, fairness, and justice in a land where the contents of your wallet are less important than the kindness that is in your heart; dreams that our children may have a better life than we instead of having to labor and suffer to pay our debts; dreams that no matter the circumstances of your birth, you may attain success by your own efforts and diligence.
The best advice for both parties is to clean their paint brushes and start on a new picture. The American public is sick and tired of re-runs and old ideas. The past is prologue and we are concerned about our future. Perhaps the presidential election of 2008 is of even less importance than continuing the rollover of Congress to new people who really understand what the American public want. Get over it and MOVE ON!
Mary Pitt lives in a house by the side of the road in a little rural village in Kansas where she can observe the world both as it is and as she would like it to be. Questions and comments will reach her at mpitt@cox.net
RudyMcRomney
"RudyMcRomney" - just a perfect name for the republican candidates. Eventually, we are going to be watching the RudyMcRomney campaigning against the democratic candidate. As things look now, it’s going to be one of the most dismal circus seasons.
The democrats, having sourly disappointed many of their supporters so far, seem determined to go head-to-head with the RudyMc for best sound bite. What this country needs more than ever is a down and dirty debate, one on one, like we used to have in this country. Sometimes, they went on for hours. We think we keep electing the person with the best “hey, look at me, I feel your pain, I’ll protect you, and won’t raise your taxes” sound bite. Actually, all we’re really doing is just voting for the best sound bite.
Now, with more and more early primaries, we’re going to be watching that show for more than a damned year. Watching, because we really aren’t going to be doing anything about the situation.
People ask, “Don’t you support the troops?” I ask them what they’re doing to bring them home. I see pictures of coworkers’ children and grandchildren, and I ask them why they think those kids have any sort of a future. Yeah, I piss people off, but tough shit. I piss them off when they find one of my anti-war, anti-bush cards looking at them from the display of canned peas at the supermarket, or a bin of bolts at the hardware store, the gas pump, and anyplace else I’ve been. And I guess I piss off some people when I drive my truck here and there because of the decals, judging from some of the comments.
The bushcheney is going to push the occupation of Iraq onto the next president, who’s going to try to push it onto the next, etc. because they’re all so afraid that they’ll be accused of “losing the war”. The US will continue to kill Afghans in that failed occupation for the same reason. And the American people are afraid of a “horde of illegal aliens” invading their country. At least they aren’t invading “with their tanks, and their guns, and their bombs”. A pathetic picture of a country that bills itself as “the home of the brave”.
In January 2009, the bushcheney is going to ride off into the sunset to become folk heroes to the idiot right because, after all, they didn’t “lose Iraq”, and gave great tax cut. Just like their addle-brained actor turned hero president. Best role ronnie reagan ever played.
A 'Pathetic Assemblage'
The Republican Debate
By Georg Mascolo and Marc Pitzke
Translated By Armin Broeggelwirth
May 4, 2007
http://www.watchingamerica.com/derspiegel000008.shtml
Germany - Der Spiegel - Original Article (German)
Washington/New York: It was a pathetic assemblage: Ten old white men exhausting themselves with slogans and platitudes in the first televised Republican debate. Most importantly, frontrunners McCain, Giuliani and Romney all delivered a lousy picture. What triumphed was a spirit - the spirit of Ronald Reagan.
With a retired "Air Force One" in the auditorium suspended from the ceiling, the Ronald Reagan library houses millions of documents and gifts from the President's eight year presidency. For example, a Russian Cossack saddle that Mikhail Gorbachev gave to his friend Ronald Reagan.
Sometimes the choice of location is the message: It was no coincidence that the first televised debate of the Republican presidential candidates took place in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, amid the gentle hills of southern Californian. After the torment of the Bush years, the search is on for a new Reagan.
But he is nowhere be found. The field of Republican candidates is pale one, when compared to the Democrats: No Hispanic (like New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson), no woman (Hillary Clinton) and no Black (like Barack Obama). Ten old white men all wearing black suits. Only their ties had color. Seven of the candidates wore red. One, the long shot, Sam Brownback, wore gold.
An icon with which the beleaguered President's party could pull itself up is missing from this sorry circle. Either the candidates are not conservative enough for the base or too far right or unknown to have a chance.
'I want to lead this nation'
"RudyMcRomney" reminds Republicans of the trouble with their three leading candidates. There's Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York who is now leading in the polls. But a true conservative cannot be a double-divorcee, and the media had begun to put the past of this "hero: of September 11 under a magnifying glass. This could prove embarrassing.
Mitt Romney is a Mormon, which is difficult to finesse with the Christian base. And for McCain, who has been eying the presidency for a long while and should have his turn under the rules of the Party - things look dark: His support for the Iraq War has cost him support. Besides, he'll be 72 when he assumes office, which is the life expectancy for males in America.
McCain was also the one who had the most to lose yesterday, and he delivered a poor performance. Stubborn and biting was the impression left. Staring into the camera with his fist clenched, McCain pointed threateningly at the camera, repeatedly misspeaking and banging the edge of the lectern. He looked like an animatronic figure in Disneyland, being operated by an invisible hand. "I'm not the youngest, but I'm the best prepared," he swore, which is his campaign slogan.
Where was the charismatic "straight talker?" McCain tried to articulate an indefinitude of slogans, and misspoke again and again. He weaseled around the Iraq War; "the war has been terribly mismanaged." He wants to follow Osama bin Laden, "to the gates of hell." He swore to voters, "I want to lead this nation."
Stuttering through the affair
Giuliani didn't fare particularly well, either. His attempt to exhume Reagan for his own purposes was embarrassing, particularly since the elderly Nancy Reagan sat in the first row. His repetitive (and incorrect) remembrance, that he alone had liberated New York from criminality was annoying. His beating around the bush over abortion (I hate abortion, the ex-pro-choicer reiterated twice) was all too transparent. And his 911-hero-certificate (in the face of terror, I will never retreat), OK good, what else do you have?
Romney stood out like a sore thumb with his horrible tan and shellac-like hair spray. A perfect anchorman with a tone of voice and words that went down like honey - and which a moment later one could not remember. "Of course we get Osama bin Laden" he bragged. "He will die!," and then the obligatory "I love America … American is the greatest nation in the world!"
In any case, a debate it was not. It was more like a series of hectic questioning by three moderators, with only rudimentary interaction between the candidates. The format (30 and 60 second answers) produced empty sound-bites of slogans and platitudes. All of which clarified again that TV debates are relics of old, when presidential elections were still epic dramas and the camera gave the citizenry a feeling of participation. Today candidacies are born (and buried) on YouTubes and "Peep Shows (Vanity Fair) of our online world. Nevertheless, it was full-scale war on the stage. If you didn't watch closely, one couldn't tell who was speaking. Besides the top-three, Senator Brownback, ex-governors Jim Gilmore, Mike Huckabee and Tommy Thompson, and Congressmen Duncan Hunter, Ron Paul and Tom Tancredo, all performed acts of mental gymnastics. The latter, Tancredo, stuttered and misstepped throughout the affair, illustrating the expression, "not ready for primetime."
An hour passes before bush is praised
The evening was jammed with the favorite themes of Republicans: the death tax, stem cells, taxes, the nation's budget. (Romney: "I can't wait to get my hands on the budget in Washington") The subject of most interest, however, was only fleetingly addressed at the beginning: Iraq. There was nothing new added. Brownback said he knew that the war could be won, "if only we stand by our values." Ron Paul, in the role of court jester, demanded a foreign policy of "non-intervention," as that is the most "conservative, Republican and pro-American." Almost an hour passed until one of the candidates had something nice to say about President George W. Bush. McCain praised Bush for his efforts to reform an immigration law, and that only after being asked.
Certainly, the evening had some amusing moments. Only two candidates would change the Constitution so that immigrants like California Governor Arnold Schwarenegger (seated next to Nancy Reagan) could become President. Huckabee courageously admitted the existence of global warming. Tancredo promise "no human cloning" in the fight against the scarcity of organs. Romney tormented himself by discussing "faith" without mentioning his own. Thompson reminded everyone twice that he had vetoed "1900 things." And Paul - who wants to abolish the income tax completely, uttered sentences like, "I have made many critical, life-saving decisions, but at the moment I can't remember any."
At the end of the night, many in the audience might have had the same felling. After 90 minutes, only one thing stood out as firmly as Romney's hair: Ronald Reagan won't be getting any competition.
The democrats, having sourly disappointed many of their supporters so far, seem determined to go head-to-head with the RudyMc for best sound bite. What this country needs more than ever is a down and dirty debate, one on one, like we used to have in this country. Sometimes, they went on for hours. We think we keep electing the person with the best “hey, look at me, I feel your pain, I’ll protect you, and won’t raise your taxes” sound bite. Actually, all we’re really doing is just voting for the best sound bite.
Now, with more and more early primaries, we’re going to be watching that show for more than a damned year. Watching, because we really aren’t going to be doing anything about the situation.
People ask, “Don’t you support the troops?” I ask them what they’re doing to bring them home. I see pictures of coworkers’ children and grandchildren, and I ask them why they think those kids have any sort of a future. Yeah, I piss people off, but tough shit. I piss them off when they find one of my anti-war, anti-bush cards looking at them from the display of canned peas at the supermarket, or a bin of bolts at the hardware store, the gas pump, and anyplace else I’ve been. And I guess I piss off some people when I drive my truck here and there because of the decals, judging from some of the comments.
The bushcheney is going to push the occupation of Iraq onto the next president, who’s going to try to push it onto the next, etc. because they’re all so afraid that they’ll be accused of “losing the war”. The US will continue to kill Afghans in that failed occupation for the same reason. And the American people are afraid of a “horde of illegal aliens” invading their country. At least they aren’t invading “with their tanks, and their guns, and their bombs”. A pathetic picture of a country that bills itself as “the home of the brave”.
In January 2009, the bushcheney is going to ride off into the sunset to become folk heroes to the idiot right because, after all, they didn’t “lose Iraq”, and gave great tax cut. Just like their addle-brained actor turned hero president. Best role ronnie reagan ever played.
A 'Pathetic Assemblage'
The Republican Debate
By Georg Mascolo and Marc Pitzke
Translated By Armin Broeggelwirth
May 4, 2007
http://www.watchingamerica.com/derspiegel000008.shtml
Germany - Der Spiegel - Original Article (German)
Washington/New York: It was a pathetic assemblage: Ten old white men exhausting themselves with slogans and platitudes in the first televised Republican debate. Most importantly, frontrunners McCain, Giuliani and Romney all delivered a lousy picture. What triumphed was a spirit - the spirit of Ronald Reagan.
With a retired "Air Force One" in the auditorium suspended from the ceiling, the Ronald Reagan library houses millions of documents and gifts from the President's eight year presidency. For example, a Russian Cossack saddle that Mikhail Gorbachev gave to his friend Ronald Reagan.
Sometimes the choice of location is the message: It was no coincidence that the first televised debate of the Republican presidential candidates took place in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, amid the gentle hills of southern Californian. After the torment of the Bush years, the search is on for a new Reagan.
But he is nowhere be found. The field of Republican candidates is pale one, when compared to the Democrats: No Hispanic (like New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson), no woman (Hillary Clinton) and no Black (like Barack Obama). Ten old white men all wearing black suits. Only their ties had color. Seven of the candidates wore red. One, the long shot, Sam Brownback, wore gold.
An icon with which the beleaguered President's party could pull itself up is missing from this sorry circle. Either the candidates are not conservative enough for the base or too far right or unknown to have a chance.
'I want to lead this nation'
"RudyMcRomney" reminds Republicans of the trouble with their three leading candidates. There's Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York who is now leading in the polls. But a true conservative cannot be a double-divorcee, and the media had begun to put the past of this "hero: of September 11 under a magnifying glass. This could prove embarrassing.
Mitt Romney is a Mormon, which is difficult to finesse with the Christian base. And for McCain, who has been eying the presidency for a long while and should have his turn under the rules of the Party - things look dark: His support for the Iraq War has cost him support. Besides, he'll be 72 when he assumes office, which is the life expectancy for males in America.
McCain was also the one who had the most to lose yesterday, and he delivered a poor performance. Stubborn and biting was the impression left. Staring into the camera with his fist clenched, McCain pointed threateningly at the camera, repeatedly misspeaking and banging the edge of the lectern. He looked like an animatronic figure in Disneyland, being operated by an invisible hand. "I'm not the youngest, but I'm the best prepared," he swore, which is his campaign slogan.
Where was the charismatic "straight talker?" McCain tried to articulate an indefinitude of slogans, and misspoke again and again. He weaseled around the Iraq War; "the war has been terribly mismanaged." He wants to follow Osama bin Laden, "to the gates of hell." He swore to voters, "I want to lead this nation."
Stuttering through the affair
Giuliani didn't fare particularly well, either. His attempt to exhume Reagan for his own purposes was embarrassing, particularly since the elderly Nancy Reagan sat in the first row. His repetitive (and incorrect) remembrance, that he alone had liberated New York from criminality was annoying. His beating around the bush over abortion (I hate abortion, the ex-pro-choicer reiterated twice) was all too transparent. And his 911-hero-certificate (in the face of terror, I will never retreat), OK good, what else do you have?
Romney stood out like a sore thumb with his horrible tan and shellac-like hair spray. A perfect anchorman with a tone of voice and words that went down like honey - and which a moment later one could not remember. "Of course we get Osama bin Laden" he bragged. "He will die!," and then the obligatory "I love America … American is the greatest nation in the world!"
In any case, a debate it was not. It was more like a series of hectic questioning by three moderators, with only rudimentary interaction between the candidates. The format (30 and 60 second answers) produced empty sound-bites of slogans and platitudes. All of which clarified again that TV debates are relics of old, when presidential elections were still epic dramas and the camera gave the citizenry a feeling of participation. Today candidacies are born (and buried) on YouTubes and "Peep Shows (Vanity Fair) of our online world. Nevertheless, it was full-scale war on the stage. If you didn't watch closely, one couldn't tell who was speaking. Besides the top-three, Senator Brownback, ex-governors Jim Gilmore, Mike Huckabee and Tommy Thompson, and Congressmen Duncan Hunter, Ron Paul and Tom Tancredo, all performed acts of mental gymnastics. The latter, Tancredo, stuttered and misstepped throughout the affair, illustrating the expression, "not ready for primetime."
An hour passes before bush is praised
The evening was jammed with the favorite themes of Republicans: the death tax, stem cells, taxes, the nation's budget. (Romney: "I can't wait to get my hands on the budget in Washington") The subject of most interest, however, was only fleetingly addressed at the beginning: Iraq. There was nothing new added. Brownback said he knew that the war could be won, "if only we stand by our values." Ron Paul, in the role of court jester, demanded a foreign policy of "non-intervention," as that is the most "conservative, Republican and pro-American." Almost an hour passed until one of the candidates had something nice to say about President George W. Bush. McCain praised Bush for his efforts to reform an immigration law, and that only after being asked.
Certainly, the evening had some amusing moments. Only two candidates would change the Constitution so that immigrants like California Governor Arnold Schwarenegger (seated next to Nancy Reagan) could become President. Huckabee courageously admitted the existence of global warming. Tancredo promise "no human cloning" in the fight against the scarcity of organs. Romney tormented himself by discussing "faith" without mentioning his own. Thompson reminded everyone twice that he had vetoed "1900 things." And Paul - who wants to abolish the income tax completely, uttered sentences like, "I have made many critical, life-saving decisions, but at the moment I can't remember any."
At the end of the night, many in the audience might have had the same felling. After 90 minutes, only one thing stood out as firmly as Romney's hair: Ronald Reagan won't be getting any competition.
Saturday, May 05, 2007
Roundup of violence in Iraq 28 April - 4 May 2007
by McClatchy Newspapers
This is not a comprehensive list of all violence in Iraq, much of which goes unreported. It’s posted without editing as transmitted to McClatchy’s Washington Bureau. 
This is not a comprehensive list of all violence in Iraq, much of which goes unreported. It’s posted without editing as transmitted to McClatchy’s Washington Bureau.
Friday, May 04, 2007
Wall Street Journal Claims Chavez Oil Policy 'Aims to Weaken US'
- by Stephen Lendman
5/4/07
The Wall Street Journal's main Hugo Chavez antagonist is its self-styled Latin American "expert" Mary Anastasia O'Grady who makes up for in imagination and vitriol what she lacks in knowledge and journalistic integrity. She, however, wasn't assigned to write the May 1 Journal attack piece reporters David Luhnow in Mexico City and Peter Millard in Caracas got to do titled "How Chavez Aims to Weaken US." Of course, when it comes to Venezuela, the issue is oil and Chavez's having the "audacity" to want his people to benefit most from their own resources, not predatory foreign oil companies the way it used to be when the country's leadership only served the interests of capital ignoring essential social needs. No longer.
Chavez, of course, announced months ago his government would complete renationalizating his country's oil reserves when state oil company PDVSA became the majority shareholder May 1 in four Orinoco River basin oil projects with a minimum 60% ownership in joint ventures with foreign partners. The plan was broadly denounced in the US major media with Journal columnist O'Grady writing April 16 "Chavez (was) brimming with bravado as he shredded (the) oil contracts (telling) foreigners to step aside because he's in charge now (but the move will likely) end up hitting the 'commandante of the revolution' in the pocketbook (because of) corruption, incompetence and mismanagement" meaning Venezuela will now run all its own oil operations and forge its own future, not Big Oil O'Grady wants sole right to do it. No longer indeed, and O'Grady's not pleased. She's also dead wrong in her outlook for Venezuela's oil future run by PDVSA with foreign partners, but don't ever expect her to admit it.
So is the New York Times agreeing April 10 with O'Grady and other corporate media Big Oil cheerleaders. The Times used charged language condemning Chavez's "revolutionary flourish (and his) ambitious (plan to) wrest control of several major oil projects from American and European companies (with a) showdown (ahead for these) coveted energy resources...." The Times went on to claim this action would undermine Venezuela's growth hinting Big Oil's threat to leave might get Chavez to back down enough to get them to stay. It never happened as this writer suggested April 12 in an article titled "Wall Street Journal and New York Times Attack journalism." The article made it clear oil exploration and production in Venezuela is so profitable that even with a smaller share of the profits US, European and other Big Oil investors wouldn't dream of leaving. Whine plenty, leave, not likely, and now we know they won't.
AP's Natalie Obiko Pearson reported April 26 that "Four major oil companies (stopped whining April 25 and) agreed to cede control of Venezuela's last remaining (majority-owned) privately run oil projects to President Hugo Chavez's government" with ConocoPhillips coming around May 1 showing it, too, was all bark and no bite. Those agreeing through signed memorandums of understanding were Chevron, BP(Amoco) PLC, France's Total SA, Norway's Statoil ASA, ConocoPhillips, and with most antagonistic of all to the idea ExxonMobil finally doing it privately as was almost certain to happen and then did.
AP reported ConocoPhillips has the most Orinoco basin exposure in two of four projects, Ameriven and Petrozuata with a (former) 50.1% stake in the latter. It was inconceivable the company would abandon them, and on May 1 it announced it would stay on. The one remaining issue to be resolved is compensation with foreign investors having until June 26 to negotiate terms for their reduced stakes. Expect more Big Oil whining followed by capitulation again to Venezuelan Energy Ministry's expected offer of fair and equitable takeover terms.
On April 26, PDVSA's web site reported a total of 10 foreign oil companies agreed to transfer majority control of their "Oil Belt" operations to the state-run oil company. Further, the company expects to achieve a daily capacity of 5.85 million barrels in 2012 and said its January 1 taking control of 32 oil fields will advance the country "toward full national sovereignty over (its) natural energy reserves."
In response to these actions, and on the day it took effect, the Journal went on the attack again with more ahead certain to be as false and misleading. Its writers called Chavez a "self-proclaimed Maoist (wanting to) reshape the global oil business by sidelining the US and making China his country's chief strategic energy partner" for investment and export. The Journal also accused Chavez of using "oil as a political weapon" since taking office in 1999 offering discounted oil "to dozens of Latin American countries" as his weapon of choice plus forging alliances with US "economic rivals like China and political rivals like Iran."
Hugo Chavez, in fact, is a self-proclaimed social democrat charting his own independent course toward progressive "21st century socialism" along the lines Latin American expert James Petras calls the "pragmatic left" in contrast to the more "radical left" of Colombia's FARC guerrillas; elements of "teachers and peasant-indigenous movements in Oaxaca, Guerrero and Chiapas in Mexico;" many "small Marxist groups in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and elsewhere;" and Venezuela's "peasant and barrio movements," among others. Other Latin American leaders Petras calls "pragmatic" leftists include Bolivia's Evo Morales, Cuba's Castro and many "large electoral parties and major peasant and trade unions in Central and South America" including Mexico's PRD party, El Salvador's FMLN, Chile's Communist Party, "the majority in Peruvian (Ollanta) Humala's parliamentary party;" and others including "the great majority of left Latin American intellectuals."
Unlike what the Wall Street Journal and rest of the US corporate media report or imply, Chavez and others on the "pragmatic left" aren't aiming to destroy capitalism, just tame it. They also plan no wholesale renunciation of accumulated IMF, World Bank and other international lending agency debt, only calling for it to be on more equitable terms; restructuring it to make their nations' debt burden fair; and aiming to become free from its repressive yoke as Venezuela did paying it off completely with Chavez announcing May 1 his country is pulling out of the IMF and World Bank, formally breaking free from the kind of debt slavery these institutions impose on countries they lend to guaranteeing their people continued impoverishment.
It's an important move that may encourage other countries to follow as Ecuador's President Raphael Correa already did ousting the country's World Bank representative saying "we will not stand for extortion by this international bureaucracy." Look for more IMF-World Bank resentment to surface ahead as Chavez's and Correa's courage may embolden other leaders to move in the same direction or at least begin by openly voicing public discontent as a first step to possible policy change to follow.
Hugo Chavez offers them a new choice having announced in March he intends creating a Bank of the South social democratic alternative to the repressive neoliberal Washington Consensus IMF-World Bank model. So far Bolivia and Argentina have agreed to be part of it with Chavez hoping other Latin countries will join as well by contributing 10% of their capital reserves for this enterprise he hopes will be operating by summer.
Additional parts of Chavez's plan involve forging stronger ties to other oil importing nations like China to reduce Venezuela's dependency on a hostile US. He also announced April 29 the nation hopes to gradually sell its seven US-based Citgo refineries replacing them with a new Latin American-based network in Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Haiti and Dominica. It's part of his plan to provide the region a stable oil supply and 100% of the energy needs for Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) members and Haiti.
He further offers discounted oil to Latin American and other nations, not to buy support as the Journal claims, but to build progressive ALBA trade and other good neighbor alliances with regional nations the opposite of WTO-style Global North exploitive one-way deals. The Fifth ALBA Summit held in Barquisimeto, Venezuela just ended April 29 at which heads of state from Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua and Haiti signed strategic ALBA agreements with delegations from Ecuador, Uruguay, Dominique and St. Vincent and the Grenadines also attending along with social movements from other states.
Chavez aims for more than just fair and equitable trade and other commercial, industrial and energy deals, and Summit leaders made progress toward them. They agreed to alliances in ALBA Education, Health, Culture, Food, and Telecommunications that may ahead extend Venezuela's and Cuba's social agenda to other ALBA countries and Haiti.
The May 1 Wall Street Journal article says "Chavez wants to replace the US as Venezuela's main partner and client in the oil business (and) The big winner could be (big, bad US rival) China" that spells bad news for Washington and Big Oil. It continued saying the country has the largest proved reserves outside the Middle East, and if Chavez succeeds he'll force the US to be even more dependent on that volatile region than it already is. Further, Journal writers take aim at PDVSA demeaning it as a state-run company claiming it has "little focus" because Chavez turned it into a "poverty-alleviation ministry." As a result, the Journal says it became inefficient and its production fell from 3.1 million barrels a day when Chavez first took office in 1999 to 2.4 million barrels a day now according to US government Energy Information Administration (EIA) figures that look to have been cooked to bring them down.
They're disputable with differing ones coming from alternate sources including the 2006 CIA World Factbook listing Venezuela's daily production at slightly under 3.1 million daily barrels, around the same figure PDVSA reported then including extra-heavy crude from Orinoco belt production. In May, 2006, Venezuelan Minister of Petroleum and Energy, Raphael Ramirez indicated the International Energy Agency (IEA) recognized the nation's daily oil production at over 3 million daily barrels while the government reports it now at 3.3 million compared to 2.6 million or less claimed by international oil analysts and EIA deliberately understating oil output the way Washington and the West distort everything positive about Venezuela under Hugo Chavez.
The Bush administration and US corporate media, flacking for Big Oil, are all over Hugo Chavez with the Journal's May Day article staying true to form. It ends saying Venezuela "was historically one of the US's most reliable energy allies" pumping all out to guarantee America a steady supply when it was most needed as it did in WW II, the 1973 Arab oil embargo and the 1991 Gulf war. It then blamed Chavez for changing that instead of reporting Washington was at fault for soured relations that hit rock bottom during the aborted two-day April, 2002 coup against him that the Journal can't admit the US instigated and supported.
All it can say, with a heavy-handed dose of sour grapes, is that "Mixing oil and politics may not help Mr. Chavez in the long run" as he'll need "private companies' expertise to develop the heavy crude in the Orinoco region" without ever conceding he already has it and a long line of takers ready to step in if any now there foolishly leave. They won't, but don't expect to see that opinion reported anywhere in the Wall Street Journal as they'd then have to admit everything they wrote earlier was false and misleading. They don't have to. You just read it here.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen each Saturday to the Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on The Micro Effect.com at noon US central time.
5/4/07
The Wall Street Journal's main Hugo Chavez antagonist is its self-styled Latin American "expert" Mary Anastasia O'Grady who makes up for in imagination and vitriol what she lacks in knowledge and journalistic integrity. She, however, wasn't assigned to write the May 1 Journal attack piece reporters David Luhnow in Mexico City and Peter Millard in Caracas got to do titled "How Chavez Aims to Weaken US." Of course, when it comes to Venezuela, the issue is oil and Chavez's having the "audacity" to want his people to benefit most from their own resources, not predatory foreign oil companies the way it used to be when the country's leadership only served the interests of capital ignoring essential social needs. No longer.
Chavez, of course, announced months ago his government would complete renationalizating his country's oil reserves when state oil company PDVSA became the majority shareholder May 1 in four Orinoco River basin oil projects with a minimum 60% ownership in joint ventures with foreign partners. The plan was broadly denounced in the US major media with Journal columnist O'Grady writing April 16 "Chavez (was) brimming with bravado as he shredded (the) oil contracts (telling) foreigners to step aside because he's in charge now (but the move will likely) end up hitting the 'commandante of the revolution' in the pocketbook (because of) corruption, incompetence and mismanagement" meaning Venezuela will now run all its own oil operations and forge its own future, not Big Oil O'Grady wants sole right to do it. No longer indeed, and O'Grady's not pleased. She's also dead wrong in her outlook for Venezuela's oil future run by PDVSA with foreign partners, but don't ever expect her to admit it.
So is the New York Times agreeing April 10 with O'Grady and other corporate media Big Oil cheerleaders. The Times used charged language condemning Chavez's "revolutionary flourish (and his) ambitious (plan to) wrest control of several major oil projects from American and European companies (with a) showdown (ahead for these) coveted energy resources...." The Times went on to claim this action would undermine Venezuela's growth hinting Big Oil's threat to leave might get Chavez to back down enough to get them to stay. It never happened as this writer suggested April 12 in an article titled "Wall Street Journal and New York Times Attack journalism." The article made it clear oil exploration and production in Venezuela is so profitable that even with a smaller share of the profits US, European and other Big Oil investors wouldn't dream of leaving. Whine plenty, leave, not likely, and now we know they won't.
AP's Natalie Obiko Pearson reported April 26 that "Four major oil companies (stopped whining April 25 and) agreed to cede control of Venezuela's last remaining (majority-owned) privately run oil projects to President Hugo Chavez's government" with ConocoPhillips coming around May 1 showing it, too, was all bark and no bite. Those agreeing through signed memorandums of understanding were Chevron, BP(Amoco) PLC, France's Total SA, Norway's Statoil ASA, ConocoPhillips, and with most antagonistic of all to the idea ExxonMobil finally doing it privately as was almost certain to happen and then did.
AP reported ConocoPhillips has the most Orinoco basin exposure in two of four projects, Ameriven and Petrozuata with a (former) 50.1% stake in the latter. It was inconceivable the company would abandon them, and on May 1 it announced it would stay on. The one remaining issue to be resolved is compensation with foreign investors having until June 26 to negotiate terms for their reduced stakes. Expect more Big Oil whining followed by capitulation again to Venezuelan Energy Ministry's expected offer of fair and equitable takeover terms.
On April 26, PDVSA's web site reported a total of 10 foreign oil companies agreed to transfer majority control of their "Oil Belt" operations to the state-run oil company. Further, the company expects to achieve a daily capacity of 5.85 million barrels in 2012 and said its January 1 taking control of 32 oil fields will advance the country "toward full national sovereignty over (its) natural energy reserves."
In response to these actions, and on the day it took effect, the Journal went on the attack again with more ahead certain to be as false and misleading. Its writers called Chavez a "self-proclaimed Maoist (wanting to) reshape the global oil business by sidelining the US and making China his country's chief strategic energy partner" for investment and export. The Journal also accused Chavez of using "oil as a political weapon" since taking office in 1999 offering discounted oil "to dozens of Latin American countries" as his weapon of choice plus forging alliances with US "economic rivals like China and political rivals like Iran."
Hugo Chavez, in fact, is a self-proclaimed social democrat charting his own independent course toward progressive "21st century socialism" along the lines Latin American expert James Petras calls the "pragmatic left" in contrast to the more "radical left" of Colombia's FARC guerrillas; elements of "teachers and peasant-indigenous movements in Oaxaca, Guerrero and Chiapas in Mexico;" many "small Marxist groups in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and elsewhere;" and Venezuela's "peasant and barrio movements," among others. Other Latin American leaders Petras calls "pragmatic" leftists include Bolivia's Evo Morales, Cuba's Castro and many "large electoral parties and major peasant and trade unions in Central and South America" including Mexico's PRD party, El Salvador's FMLN, Chile's Communist Party, "the majority in Peruvian (Ollanta) Humala's parliamentary party;" and others including "the great majority of left Latin American intellectuals."
Unlike what the Wall Street Journal and rest of the US corporate media report or imply, Chavez and others on the "pragmatic left" aren't aiming to destroy capitalism, just tame it. They also plan no wholesale renunciation of accumulated IMF, World Bank and other international lending agency debt, only calling for it to be on more equitable terms; restructuring it to make their nations' debt burden fair; and aiming to become free from its repressive yoke as Venezuela did paying it off completely with Chavez announcing May 1 his country is pulling out of the IMF and World Bank, formally breaking free from the kind of debt slavery these institutions impose on countries they lend to guaranteeing their people continued impoverishment.
It's an important move that may encourage other countries to follow as Ecuador's President Raphael Correa already did ousting the country's World Bank representative saying "we will not stand for extortion by this international bureaucracy." Look for more IMF-World Bank resentment to surface ahead as Chavez's and Correa's courage may embolden other leaders to move in the same direction or at least begin by openly voicing public discontent as a first step to possible policy change to follow.
Hugo Chavez offers them a new choice having announced in March he intends creating a Bank of the South social democratic alternative to the repressive neoliberal Washington Consensus IMF-World Bank model. So far Bolivia and Argentina have agreed to be part of it with Chavez hoping other Latin countries will join as well by contributing 10% of their capital reserves for this enterprise he hopes will be operating by summer.
Additional parts of Chavez's plan involve forging stronger ties to other oil importing nations like China to reduce Venezuela's dependency on a hostile US. He also announced April 29 the nation hopes to gradually sell its seven US-based Citgo refineries replacing them with a new Latin American-based network in Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Haiti and Dominica. It's part of his plan to provide the region a stable oil supply and 100% of the energy needs for Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) members and Haiti.
He further offers discounted oil to Latin American and other nations, not to buy support as the Journal claims, but to build progressive ALBA trade and other good neighbor alliances with regional nations the opposite of WTO-style Global North exploitive one-way deals. The Fifth ALBA Summit held in Barquisimeto, Venezuela just ended April 29 at which heads of state from Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua and Haiti signed strategic ALBA agreements with delegations from Ecuador, Uruguay, Dominique and St. Vincent and the Grenadines also attending along with social movements from other states.
Chavez aims for more than just fair and equitable trade and other commercial, industrial and energy deals, and Summit leaders made progress toward them. They agreed to alliances in ALBA Education, Health, Culture, Food, and Telecommunications that may ahead extend Venezuela's and Cuba's social agenda to other ALBA countries and Haiti.
The May 1 Wall Street Journal article says "Chavez wants to replace the US as Venezuela's main partner and client in the oil business (and) The big winner could be (big, bad US rival) China" that spells bad news for Washington and Big Oil. It continued saying the country has the largest proved reserves outside the Middle East, and if Chavez succeeds he'll force the US to be even more dependent on that volatile region than it already is. Further, Journal writers take aim at PDVSA demeaning it as a state-run company claiming it has "little focus" because Chavez turned it into a "poverty-alleviation ministry." As a result, the Journal says it became inefficient and its production fell from 3.1 million barrels a day when Chavez first took office in 1999 to 2.4 million barrels a day now according to US government Energy Information Administration (EIA) figures that look to have been cooked to bring them down.
They're disputable with differing ones coming from alternate sources including the 2006 CIA World Factbook listing Venezuela's daily production at slightly under 3.1 million daily barrels, around the same figure PDVSA reported then including extra-heavy crude from Orinoco belt production. In May, 2006, Venezuelan Minister of Petroleum and Energy, Raphael Ramirez indicated the International Energy Agency (IEA) recognized the nation's daily oil production at over 3 million daily barrels while the government reports it now at 3.3 million compared to 2.6 million or less claimed by international oil analysts and EIA deliberately understating oil output the way Washington and the West distort everything positive about Venezuela under Hugo Chavez.
The Bush administration and US corporate media, flacking for Big Oil, are all over Hugo Chavez with the Journal's May Day article staying true to form. It ends saying Venezuela "was historically one of the US's most reliable energy allies" pumping all out to guarantee America a steady supply when it was most needed as it did in WW II, the 1973 Arab oil embargo and the 1991 Gulf war. It then blamed Chavez for changing that instead of reporting Washington was at fault for soured relations that hit rock bottom during the aborted two-day April, 2002 coup against him that the Journal can't admit the US instigated and supported.
All it can say, with a heavy-handed dose of sour grapes, is that "Mixing oil and politics may not help Mr. Chavez in the long run" as he'll need "private companies' expertise to develop the heavy crude in the Orinoco region" without ever conceding he already has it and a long line of takers ready to step in if any now there foolishly leave. They won't, but don't expect to see that opinion reported anywhere in the Wall Street Journal as they'd then have to admit everything they wrote earlier was false and misleading. They don't have to. You just read it here.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen each Saturday to the Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on The Micro Effect.com at noon US central time.
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