AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Derrick Jensen. He’s been described as the poet-philosopher of the ecology movement. Derrick Jensen has written some 15 books critiquing contemporary society and the destruction of the environment. In 2008 he was named one of Utne Reader magazine’s 50 visionaries who are changing the world. Among his books, A Language Older than Words, Endgame, What We Left Behind, and Resistance against Empire.
Derrick Jensen lives in northern California. I had an extended conversation with him in San Francisco and began by asking him to explain the title of his latest book, what he means by Deep Green Resistance.
DERRICK JENSEN: I think a lot of us are increasingly recognizing that the dominant culture is killing the planet. And we can argue about whether, you know, there will be a few bacteria left or whatever, but when 90 percent of the large fish in the oceans are gone, when there’s six to ten times as much plastic as phytoplankton in parts of the ocean, when there’s dioxin in every mother’s breast milk, when background rates—or rates of extinction are a thousand to ten thousand times background rates, you know, it’s sort of just playing with numbers to talk about whether it’s killing the planet or simply mortally wounding it. And I think it’s very important for us to start to build a culture of resistance, because what we’re doing isn’t working, clearly.
I ask a lot of times why it is that environmentalists, as environmentalists—I include myself as a front line activist—I ask why it is that we lose so often. And there’s a couple of answers that really speak to me. One of them is that I think a lot of us don’t really know what it is we want, and we don’t think strategically very much. It’s like, so what do you want?
So, I don’t think that a lot of us think very clearly about what it is exactly we want. And, I mean, I do know what I want, which is I want to live in a world that has more wild salmon every year than the year before, and I want to live in a world that has less dioxin in every mother’s breast milk every year than the year before, and a world that has more migratory songbirds every year than the year before. And that’s part of—part of—one of the reasons I think that a lot of times we don’t win is, once again, I’m not sure that a lot of us know what we want.
And then another problem is that—there’s this absolutely extraordinary book called The Nazi Doctors by Robert Jay Lifton, and in this book he describes how it was that men—people, but men in this case—who had taken the Hippocratic Oath could work in Nazi death camps. And what he found was that many of the doctors who worked in the death camps actually cared very deeply for the health of the inmates. And, you know, Mengele was, you know, horrible. But a lot of the sort of straight-line doctors were just—they would do whatever they could. They would give them an extra scrap of potato to eat or—the inmates. Or they would hide them from the selection officers who were going to kill them. Or they would—
AMY GOODMAN: To keep their experiments going?
DERRICK JENSEN: No, no, no. They would hide them from the selection officers who were going to kill them. They would do this to protect the inmate for that day. They would put them to bed, you know. They would actually do everything—if they were in pain, they would give them aspirin to lick. They would do what they could to help, except for the most important thing of all, which is they wouldn’t question the existence of the entire death camp itself. So they would find themselves working within the rules, however they could, to try to improve conditions marginally. And in retrospect, of course, that’s just not sufficient. And as a longtime activist, I see myself and other activists doing the same thing, that what we do is we do everything that is allowed by those in power to attempt to stop their destruction. But the problem is, whenever we figure out a way to use their rules to actually stop them, they change the rules.
AMY GOODMAN: Derrick Jensen, deep green resistance, what form should it take?
DERRICK JENSEN: Sometimes I get accused of being the violence guy, because I talk about capital of fighting back. But I don’t ever think that’s really fair, because I really consider myself the everything guy, that I want to put everything on the table and talk about, you know, all forms of resistance, and decide whether they’re appropriate or inappropriate for use. I don’t want to go in prejudging.
I think, for example, one man, all by himself, almost stopped World War II: Georg Elser. He was a trade unionist who didn’t like what Hitler was doing to the trade unions. So he got a job in a mine, stole some explosives, and he knew every year, on the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, that Hitler would give a speech, and from 7:30 to 8:30, so he set a bomb to go off at 8:20, 1939. And unfortunately, because of the weather, Hitler gave his speech from 7:00 to 8:00 and left twenty minutes early. And so, my point is, I think that, in that case—you know, and we can certainly parse out cases where we think it’s appropriate to have militant response or non-militant response, but something I want to say about all that is that that’s not the real question for me. The real question is the distinction between those people who do something and those people who do nothing.
And I want to emphasize, too, that, for example, even the IRA at its strongest, or the U.S. military, for that matter, only about two percent of the people ever pick up weapons. Most of the people are doing support work. I mean, Maud Gonne was—excuse me, Maud Gonne was central to the Gaelic literature revival. She wrote plays, and she sang. And her son became the chief of staff of the IRA and later formed Amnesty International. And there’s this—I guess all I’m trying to say is that we need to ask ourselves, what do we want, and then to ask ourselves, how are we going to get there? And those are not rhetorical questions.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, there is an easy resorting to violence. I think it’s the—comes from the model of the establishment. They like to say war is the last resort, but so often it is the first approach that the establishment takes, led by the military—and sometimes not led by. They’re the ones that know the suffering the most, so it’ll just be the civilian government. But do you want to take that model of violence as a way—even a way to deal? I mean, imagine if you took violence off the table, you didn’t justify the violence the establishment was doing by saying—or you didn’t answer by saying they’re doing violence, so it has to be met with violence. I mean, from your life, you talk a great deal about your own growing up and the role that violence played and how incredibly destructive it was. Why don’t we go there? Why don’t you talk about how you came to be Derrick Jensen? What has shaped you, influenced you, both negatively and positively? But this issue of violence that is so real, unfortunately not a metaphor in your life.
DERRICK JENSEN: Well, yeah. My father’s extremely violent—was, presumably still is. I haven’t talked to him for years. And he broke my sister’s arm. My brother has epilepsy from blows to the head. He raped my mother, my sister and me. And that—one of the things that that—and we can talk about the negative effects of that. You know, many years of therapy. And we can talk about, you know, the years of insomnia and the night terrors and all that. But I think the central way—there are a few people—I know you’re not saying this—there are a few people who say, "Gosh, he just wants to fight back because he’s projecting his own, you know, helplessness as a child onto larger culture. You know, he hates the big daddy now, you know, the Uncle Sam daddy." And once again, I’m not suggesting you were suggesting that—and that’s always been sort of a kind of a ridiculous critique, I’ve thought, because if my father would have been perfect, 90 percent of the large fish in the oceans would still be gone, and Coca-Cola would still be destroying aquifers in India, and 25 percent of all women in this culture would still be getting raped. And, you know, we could go all down the list, that—
But one of the things that he—that that did do is it helped me understand—it helped me get a framework on which I could start to understand the larger movements of power in the culture and also the larger ways that discourse supports power.
AMY GOODMAN: We’ll continue with Derrick Jensen in a minute, author, activist. He’s been called the poet-philosopher of the ecology movement. If you’d like a copy of our show, you can go to our website at democracynow.org. Back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We turn back to my interview with author and environmental activist Derrick Jensen.
AMY GOODMAN: Derrick, what is the influence of Native Americans in your writing, in your work, in your activism?
DERRICK JENSEN: It’s another great question. And I have tried not to romanticize them, which is another form of objectification. And what I do know is I know that the Tolowa Indians, on whose land I now live up in way northern California, they lived there for at least 12,500 years, if you believe the myths of science. And if you believe the myths of the Tolowa, they lived there since the beginning of time, using a myth as stories that we tell ourselves that make the world fit together. So, in any case, the Tolowa lived there for at least 12,500 years. And when the dominant culture got there 180 years ago, the place was a paradise. I mean, salmon runs so thick that you could hear them for miles before you’d see them. Just—I learned this recently, that one of the—up in Canada, one of the things that people would do for fun when the salmon runs came in is they would throw a little pebble into the water, and they would see how long it would float on the backs of fish before it would hit the ground, because there were so many fish that the rock couldn’t make its way down. And, you know, I’m lucky if I see a half-dozen salmon in a year at this point.
So my point is that they do offer a model for—one of the things that abusers constantly want us to do is to believe that there is only one way to be, which is theirs. And this is true—you know, there’s the great line—I think it was Václav Havel—the struggle against oppression is a struggle of memory against forgetting. And one of the things we need to remember is that there have been other ways of living that have been sustainable. You know, the Tolowa lived there for 12,500 years, which is sustainable by any realistic measurement. And they didn’t do it because they were too stupid to invent backhoes. You know, why? Why? How did they look at the world differently that allowed them to live? It wasn’t because they were primitives. It wasn’t because they were savages. What did they have? They had social strictures in place.
AMY GOODMAN: Derrick, you’ve written, "Civilization is not and can never be sustainable."
DERRICK JENSEN: Yeah. Several years ago, I was riding around in a car with a friend of mine, George Draffan, with whom I’ve written a couple books. And I was just making conversation. I said, "So, George, if you could live at any level of technology that you want to, what would it be?" And he was not in a very good mood that day, and he said, "That’s a really stupid question, Derrick, because we can fantasize whatever we want, but the truth is there’s only one level of technology that’s sustainable. And that’s the Stone Age. And we’ll be there again some day. And the only question really is, what’s left of the world when we get there?"
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that any way of living that’s based on the use of non-renewable resources won’t last. In fact, I would say it takes anybody but a rocket scientist to figure that out. And likewise, it doesn’t take someone who’s very smart to figure out that if every year there are—fewer salmon return than the year before, that eventually there won’t be any left. I mean, there were so many passenger pigeons that they would darken the sky for days at a time. There were six times as many passenger pigeons than all the birds in the northern—in North America. Do we know why there aren’t any penguins in the northern hemisphere? The great ox? They were destroyed. And my point is that any way of life that’s based on the hyper-exploitation of renewable resources won’t last. You have to basically—in the book, What We Leave Behind, what we came to for a definition of "sustainability" is leaving the physical world in a better place than when you were born, that the world is actually a better place because you were born.
A lot of definitions of "civilization" that we see are not really very specific, and the definition I like the most, which is defensible both linguistically and historically, is civilization is a way of life characterized by the growth of cities—once again, defensible both linguistically and historically. And a couple things happen as soon as you—well, wait. Back up. So that’s great, Derrick, but what’s a city? A city, I’ve defined as people living in numbers large enough to require the importation of resources. And what this means, that the Tolowa didn’t live in cities, because they didn’t require the importation of resources. They didn’t live in cities; they lived in villages, camps, and they ate salmon. They ate what the land gave willingly.
And two things happen as soon as you require the importation of resources. One is that your way of living can never be sustainable, because if you require the importation of resources, it means you denuded the land base of that particular resource, and as your city grows, you’ll need an ever larger area. And the other thing it means is that your way of life must be based on violence, because if you require the importation of resources, trade will never be sufficiently reliable, because if you require the importation of resources and the people in the next watershed over aren’t going to trade you for it, you’re going to take it. And one of the problems with this whole system is that destroying your land base gives you a competitive advantage over the other cultures who don’t. The forests of North Africa went down to make the Phoenician and Egyptian navies. And if you destroy your land base, if you don’t care about the future, you can turn this into immediate power and then use it to conquer, and which is something you have to do, because you’ve destroyed your own land base. And as time goes on, you have to keep expanding. And that’s not a very good idea on a finite planet.
AMY GOODMAN: You’re a critic of environmental groups, a range of them, in terms of how we get to solutions around issues like global warming, groups like 350.org, for example, who on 10/10/10, October 10th, had something like 7,000 actions around the world, trying to put into people’s consciousness the idea that, you know, we have to change the way we do things, we’re heating up the globe. What is the problem with this, for you?
DERRICK JENSEN: Well, first I want to say that I have tremendous respect for Bill McKibben and for his tireless efforts to raise awareness about global warming, and so I don’t want to come across as criticizing him, because I think he’s doing very important work.
That said, one of the problems that I see with the vast majority of so-called solutions to global warming is that they take industrial capitalism as a given and the planet which must conform to industrial capitalism, as opposed to the other way around. And that’s literally insane, in terms of being out of touch with physical reality, because without a real world, you don’t have any social system. You don’t have any social system at all. You don’t have life. You know, we’ve come to believe that our food comes from the grocery store and that our water comes from the tap, and that’s because it does. And that’s an extraordinary thing that the system has done, has been to interpose itself in between us and the real world, because if your experience is that your water comes from the tap and your food comes from the grocery store, you’re going to defend to the death the system that brings those to you, because your life depends on it. If, on the other hand, your water comes from a river and your food comes from a land base, you will defend to the death the river and the land base, because that’s what your life depends on. And so, that’s part of the difficulty, is this culture has inserted itself between, and it’s done that for us and then also happens all over the world. And that’s part of—it’s like, I have a friend whose ex-husband is Bangladeshi, and even 20 years ago, his mother would say to him, you know, "Go catch a fish for lunch from the river." And now they can’t do that, because the river is so polluted by industries nearby that there’s no fish, and they now get their fish from Iceland. And that separation is part and parcel of how the system works.
AMY GOODMAN: You talk about activists throwing up a "Gandhi shield" when you talk about use of force and violence. What do you mean by that?
DERRICK JENSEN: Well, that’s pretty interesting, that a lot of times if I talk about fighting back, the response by the audience is oftentimes fairly predictable, which is a lot of sort of mainstream peace and social justice activists will put up what I’ve taken to calling a Gandhi shield. And what that means is they say the names Gandhi, Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King again and again real fast to keep all evil thoughts at bay. And when I would do the same talk for, like, grassroots environmental activists, a lot of times they would have the same response, but they’d come up to me afterwards and say, [whispering] "Thank you so much for bringing this up." And then when there are other groups of people and I would talk to them, the response would be entirely different. And this would be prisoners.
AMY GOODMAN: You’ve worked in prisons.
DERRICK JENSEN: Yeah, I worked at Pelican Bay State Prison. I taught creative writing there for four or five years. And with gang kids, with victims in domestic violence, family farmers, these other groups, a lot of times if you talk about the possibility of fighting back, a lot times they say, "Come on, tell us something we don’t know. Let’s go, bro." And the difference, I realized—it took me a while to realize that the difference is that for those latter groups, for the most part—oh, American Indians are definitely in that category, too—violence is not some abstract or theoretical question to be puzzled through. It’s simply part of life. And that doesn’t mean you participate; doesn’t mean you don’t participate. It just means that you deal with it. And that’s a lot different than setting up, you know, some sort of preset rules.
AMY GOODMAN: Derrick Jensen, we let people know that I was going to be interviewing you, and a lot of people wrote in questions. And a few of them asked you to talk about what they call you advocating the use of violence. You have written, quote, "What I want is for all activists to act like they are serious about their resistance and that might include assassinations." What do you mean by that?
DERRICK JENSEN: The world is being killed. And if they were space aliens who had come down from outer space and they were systematically deforesting the planet and vacuuming the oceans and changing the climate, what would we do? There are two million dams in the United States. There’s about 70,000 dams over six-and-a-half-feet tall. And if we only took out one of those dams every day, it would take 200 years to take them all out.
And I want to be really clear that I don’t advocate violence any more than I advocate nonviolence. What I advocate is looking at the circumstances and deciding what would be the appropriate action, both personally and socially. And we can look at this in World War II. A great example is that the—you know, the Danish resistance in World War II, we’re all aware of how when the Jews had to put the stars on, the king put the first star on. That’s great, but that’s because Hitler declared Denmark a model protectorate. And if somebody in Poland would have tried that, it’s like, "Great, you can join them on the cattle car." It wouldn’t have—the tactic wouldn’t have worked. And so, I think it’s really important, once again, to ask ourselves what we want and then to ask ourselves how we’re going to get there.
AMY GOODMAN: You talk about the Apocalypse. What does that mean to you? And what gives you hope? How do you think we need to organize today?
DERRICK JENSEN: Well, we’re living in the midst of the Apocalypse. A hundred and fifty, 200 species went extinct today. You know, years ago I was talking to a friend, and he said, "So what will it take for you to finally use that word, 'Apocalypse'? And will it take the death of flocks of passenger pigeons? They were so large they darkened the sky for days at a time. The death of flocks of Eskimo Curlews, that they were just as large? You know, the death of the bison, the death of"—it’s like I was talking to this guy in Portland a couple years ago after a talk, and he said, "You know, I don’t think it’s time to fight back yet." I said, "OK, so 90 percent of the large fish in the oceans are gone. You tell me when it might be time to fight back." Whatever "fighting back" means—I’ll asterisk there. You know, 91 percent? Ninety-two percent? Ninety-three percent? Ninety-four percent? At what point? And by "fighting back," I want to be really, really clear that I don’t mean—that doesn’t have to necessarily mean picking up guns, because once again, like I said early on, there is so much work that people aren’t doing that’s purely above ground that—I mean, one of the things I’m doing right now at home, which is about as non-militant as you can get, is that the frogs where I live are dying from this one mold, Saprolegnia, and if I bring the egg sacs inside, they survive. So I go out in the pond, and I collect the egg sacs, and I put them in the house. And two months later—you know, I feed them, and then, two months later, I release them. And it’s—you can’t get less militant than that.
AMY GOODMAN: One of our listeners wrote in, "Derrick Jensen says that personal actions, such as living simply, composting, biking and not consuming, are ineffective and possibly detrimental to environmental solutions. In his article 'Forget Shorter Showers,' he says, 'The endpoint of the logic behind simple living as a political act is suicide.' Won’t this argument marginalize, disempower and divide those concerned about the environment while excusing personal bad habits?" That’s what the person wrote in.
DERRICK JENSEN: Well, we need to look at the numbers, that about 90 percent of water is used by agriculture and industry. And the same amount of water is used by municipal human beings as is used by municipal golf courses. So it’s a very, very short lever to take a shorter shower. I mean, I live pretty simply myself, but that’s basically because I’m a cheapskate. You know, it’s not a political act.
AMY GOODMAN: But once you make it your way of life, you start demanding that of others.
DERRICK JENSEN: But that’s still really trivial compared to the larger—OK, a great example is that, let’s say I reduce my waste to zero. You know, I repair my old toaster, and I wear the tennis shoes until they fall off my feet. My waste is zero. OK? The average person in the United States puts out about 2,600 pounds of trash a year, I think. I could be off by a little, but it’s close enough. Well, I got bad news, which is, actually, the average person in the United States puts out about twenty-six tons of garbage, but 97 percent of that is by industry. And so, once again, we’re looking at the wrong targets, and that’s one of the things that has been, I think, horribly detrimental to the environmental movement, has been to move toward personal purity as opposed to actually organize political resistance.
AMY GOODMAN: And that political resistance, the form it would take?
DERRICK JENSEN: I think it takes whatever forms are appropriate. And we look at Ken Saro-Wiwa with MODOP [sic]—MOSOP, sorry. And they attempted to act nonviolently. And out of his murder, the movement turned into MEND, which does use violence. And I’m not suggesting that as the only model, I want to be really clear, that MEND is one model. They’ve reduced oil output in Nigeria by up to 20 to 30 percent at times, and they’ve done that through sabotage, through kidnappings. That’s one model. We have, you know, the bus boycotts. That’s a different model. But what they have in common is organized political resistance. You don’t have Rosa Parks just sitting down on a bus all by herself. That doesn’t do any good at all.
I love a story about how—
AMY GOODMAN: And we’ll end with this.
DERRICK JENSEN:—how the Black Panthers were looking for a place to have a congress, and they were under assault, you know, by the feds. And the Quakers offered a meeting house and did so—they didn’t agree with the tactics, but they did so because they saw it was important, and surrounded the house with their bodies, because they knew that the cops wouldn’t shoot them. And, you know, Harriet Tubman carried a gun, but she couldn’t have done the Underground Railroad, her part of the Underground Railroad, without pacifists, you know? That’s why I feel so strongly we need everything.
AMY GOODMAN: Author and activist Derrick Jensen. He’s been described as the poet-philosopher of the ecology movement.
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/26/author_and_activist_derrick_jensen_the
Friday, November 26, 2010
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Jury convicts Tom DeLay in money laundering trial
By JUAN A. LOZANO, Associated Press Juan A. Lozano, Associated Press – 27 mins ago
AUSTIN, Texas – Former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay — once one of the most powerful and feared Republicans in Congress — was convicted Wednesday on charges he illegally funneled corporate money to Texas candidates in 2002.
Jurors deliberated for 19 hours before returning guilty verdicts against DeLay on charges of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering. He faces up to life in prison on the money laundering charge.
After the verdicts were read, DeLay hugged his daughter, Danielle, and his wife, Christine. His lead attorney, Dick DeGuerin, said they planned to appeal the verdict.
"This is an abuse of power. It's a miscarriage of justice, and I still maintain that I am innocent. The criminalization of politics undermines our very system and I'm very disappointed in the outcome," DeLay told reporters outside the courtroom. He remains free on bond, and his sentencing was tentatively set to begin on Dec. 20.
Prosecutors said DeLay, who once held the No. 2 job in the House of Representatives and whose heavy-handed style earned him the nickname "the Hammer," used his political action committee to illegally channel $190,000 in corporate donations into 2002 Texas legislative races through a money swap.
DeLay and his attorneys maintained the former Houston-area congressman did nothing wrong as no corporate funds went to Texas candidates and the money swap was legal.
The verdict came after a three-week trial in which prosecutors presented more than 30 witnesses and volumes of e-mails and other documents. DeLay's attorneys presented five witnesses.
"This case is a message from the citizens of the state of Texas that the public officials they elect to represent them must do so honestly and ethically, and if not, they'll be held accountable," Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg said after the verdict.
Prosecutors said DeLay conspired with two associates, John Colyandro and Jim Ellis, to use his Texas-based PAC to send $190,000 in corporate money to an arm of the Washington-based Republican National Committee, or RNC. The RNC then sent the same amount to seven Texas House candidates. Under Texas law, corporate money can't go directly to political campaigns.
Prosecutors claim the money helped Republicans take control of the Texas House. That enabled the GOP majority to push through a Delay-engineered congressional redistricting plan that sent more Texas Republicans to Congress in 2004 — and strengthened DeLay's political power.
DeLay's attorneys argued the money swap resulted in the seven candidates getting donations from individuals, which they could legally use in Texas.
They also said DeLay only lent his name to the PAC and had little involvement in how it was run. Prosecutors, who presented mostly circumstantial evidence, didn't prove he committed a crime, they said.
DeLay has chosen to have Senior Judge Pat Priest sentence him. He faces five years to life in prison on the money laundering charge and two to 20 years on the conspiracy charge. He also would be eligible for probation.
The 2005 criminal charges in Texas, as well as a separate federal investigation of DeLay's ties to disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, ended his 22-year political career representing suburban Houston. The Justice Department probe into DeLay's ties to Abramoff ended without any charges filed against DeLay.
Ellis and Colyandro, who face lesser charges, will be tried later.
Except for a 2009 appearance on ABC's hit television show "Dancing With the Stars," DeLay has been out of the spotlight since resigning from Congress in 2006. He now runs a consulting firm based in the Houston suburb of Sugar Land.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101125/ap_on_re_us/us_delay_trial
AUSTIN, Texas – Former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay — once one of the most powerful and feared Republicans in Congress — was convicted Wednesday on charges he illegally funneled corporate money to Texas candidates in 2002.
Jurors deliberated for 19 hours before returning guilty verdicts against DeLay on charges of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering. He faces up to life in prison on the money laundering charge.
After the verdicts were read, DeLay hugged his daughter, Danielle, and his wife, Christine. His lead attorney, Dick DeGuerin, said they planned to appeal the verdict.
"This is an abuse of power. It's a miscarriage of justice, and I still maintain that I am innocent. The criminalization of politics undermines our very system and I'm very disappointed in the outcome," DeLay told reporters outside the courtroom. He remains free on bond, and his sentencing was tentatively set to begin on Dec. 20.
Prosecutors said DeLay, who once held the No. 2 job in the House of Representatives and whose heavy-handed style earned him the nickname "the Hammer," used his political action committee to illegally channel $190,000 in corporate donations into 2002 Texas legislative races through a money swap.
DeLay and his attorneys maintained the former Houston-area congressman did nothing wrong as no corporate funds went to Texas candidates and the money swap was legal.
The verdict came after a three-week trial in which prosecutors presented more than 30 witnesses and volumes of e-mails and other documents. DeLay's attorneys presented five witnesses.
"This case is a message from the citizens of the state of Texas that the public officials they elect to represent them must do so honestly and ethically, and if not, they'll be held accountable," Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg said after the verdict.
Prosecutors said DeLay conspired with two associates, John Colyandro and Jim Ellis, to use his Texas-based PAC to send $190,000 in corporate money to an arm of the Washington-based Republican National Committee, or RNC. The RNC then sent the same amount to seven Texas House candidates. Under Texas law, corporate money can't go directly to political campaigns.
Prosecutors claim the money helped Republicans take control of the Texas House. That enabled the GOP majority to push through a Delay-engineered congressional redistricting plan that sent more Texas Republicans to Congress in 2004 — and strengthened DeLay's political power.
DeLay's attorneys argued the money swap resulted in the seven candidates getting donations from individuals, which they could legally use in Texas.
They also said DeLay only lent his name to the PAC and had little involvement in how it was run. Prosecutors, who presented mostly circumstantial evidence, didn't prove he committed a crime, they said.
DeLay has chosen to have Senior Judge Pat Priest sentence him. He faces five years to life in prison on the money laundering charge and two to 20 years on the conspiracy charge. He also would be eligible for probation.
The 2005 criminal charges in Texas, as well as a separate federal investigation of DeLay's ties to disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, ended his 22-year political career representing suburban Houston. The Justice Department probe into DeLay's ties to Abramoff ended without any charges filed against DeLay.
Ellis and Colyandro, who face lesser charges, will be tried later.
Except for a 2009 appearance on ABC's hit television show "Dancing With the Stars," DeLay has been out of the spotlight since resigning from Congress in 2006. He now runs a consulting firm based in the Houston suburb of Sugar Land.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101125/ap_on_re_us/us_delay_trial
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
The Shock Doctrine Push to Gut Social Security and Middle Class
Monday 22 November 2010
by: Dave Johnson | The Campaign for America's Future | Op-Ed
by: Dave Johnson | The Campaign for America's Future | Op-Ed
Today's Washington Post has punch two of a one-two punch. Punch one was the Simpson/Bowles "plan" to cut Social Security, cut middle-class tax breaks and programs (and dramatically cut taxes on the rich.) Punch two is pushing this plan hard with headlines claiming this solution is actually popular, while shutting out voices who explain why we shouldn't do this. This is full-on Shock Doctrine, wait for an emergency like the terrible recession so people are in shock and want solutions, and then change everything so fast they can’t respond while telling them how this is good for them.
This is how they do it, folks, demonstrated by this story in today's Washington Post: Consensus is forming on what steps to take in cutting the deficit,
After an election dominated by vague demands for less debt and smaller government, the sacrifices necessary to achieve those goals are coming into sharp focus. ... Smaller Social Security checks and higher Medicare premiums. [. . .] the plan unveiled this month by co-chairmen Erskine B. Bowles ... and Alan K. Simpson ... has been respectfully received with a few exceptions by both parties. Its major elements are also winning support from a striking line-up of commentators. [. . .] The strange bedfellows are a "testament to the moderate nature" of the ideas under discussion.
Consensus? Sharp focus? Here's your "sharp focus": The public hates this!
That headline is the manufactured reality. The real reality is that the public just hates this, and has voted against and will vote against politicians who push it.
Last month you saw campaign ad after ad hitting Democrats who "cut $500 billion from Medicare," and Democrats lost the senior vote and the midterms. The public hates this.
A recent Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research report showed that an overwhelming 69% of voters agreed that "politicians should keep their hands off Social Security and Medicare" when they address the deficit. The public hates this.
Only 6% of the public says the government's priority should be deficits now. The public hates this.
An AARP poll finds that 90% of people aged 18 to 29 say Social Security is important. The public hates this.
An NBC/WSJ poll finds that 57% are against cutting Social Security no matter how bad the deficit is. The public hates this.
A USA Today poll finds that the public by 66/31 says don't cut benefits to fix the deficit. The public hates this.
I can continue citing poll after poll; there are no polls that show the public is in any way behind this.
It's Clear: The public hates this and will vote out any politician who does this. If you think the public didn’t like the bailouts and the politicians who voted for them, this "Deficit Commission" plan to cut Social Security is the other shoe dropping. Bailouts helped Wall Street and not Main Street and people certainly didn't like that. But this is paying for bailing out Wall Street by hitting Main Street in the gut. And the public understands this.
But here is today's reality: the public hates this, and the corporate media tells you how much you love it. This is how it's done. You have heard the stories of FDR and LBJ saying "make me do it," meaning create the public pressure that forces politicians to do act. This is a story of manufacturing consent where the elites, the Peterson Foundation, the President and the corporate right are setting up an appearance of making them do it. (We have a jobs emergency, but we get deficit commissions instead of jobs commissions?)
The public hates it but the elites are pushing ahead with their campaign anyway. If you remember the "run up" to the Iraq War, opposing voices were simply shut out of the discussion. All the "serious people" were explaining why we had no choice but to invade Iraq. And all the headlines were about the terrible threat that Iraq posed to our very existence. Seriously, it wasn't just stories about how Iraq was going to drop a nuke on us any second now. Do you remember the smallpox scare?, where you couldn't listen to the radio, read a newspaper or watch TV without hearing about all the terrible ways Iraq was going to attack us?
The Simpson/Bowles plan is part of a pre-arranged agenda to gut the middle class and further enrich the wealthy. The media machine is working to convince DC politicians that the public wants this done. They scare people with headlines about the terrifying things that will happen because of deficits. The only viewpoints you hear are the cutters and gutters. Those presenting the ideas the public favors - like the plan offered by Deficit Commission member Rep. Jan Schakowsky that cuts the deficit but actually strengthens Social Security -- are not heard. And keep telling people how popular and necessary this is.
Result? If you are a politician in DC, you really have no way to know how the pubic feels because all you see are headlines like today's Washington Post, telling you a consensus is forming.
This is why YOU have to respond and let YOUR members of Congress and Senators know that you are NOT going to go along with this.
Take Action
There are things YOU can do! November 30 is a national call-in day to save Social Security.
Do this: Click here and sign this petition: Tell President Obama to Reject Social Security Cuts:
"We must send an urgent message to President Obama – to tell him to reject the proposal to slash Social Security benefits coming from the co-chairs of his deficit commission. If President Obama tries to cut Social Security, it would spell political disaster in 2012."
Do this: November 30 National Call Congress Day: Hands Off Social Security,
The Co-Chairs of the National Fiscal Commission have proposed carving up Social Security like a Thanksgiving turkey. They want to increase the retirement age to 69 – making us work longer, deeply cut benefits for middle-class workers and reduce annual Cost of
Living Adjustments. We need your help to stop them!
Join thousands of Americans in a National Call Congress Day on Tuesday, November 30—CAN
WE COUNT ON YOU?We need your voice to be heard!
http://www.truth-out.org/the-shock-doctrine-push-to-gut-social-security-and-middle-class65383
Power and the Tiny Acts of Rebellion
Monday 22 November 2010
by: Chris Hedges | Truthdig | Op-Ed
photo
(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: philentropist, massenpunkt)
There is no hope left for achieving significant reform or restoring our democracy through established mechanisms of power. The electoral process has been hijacked by corporations. The judiciary has been corrupted and bought. The press shuts out the most important voices in the country and feeds us the banal and the absurd. Universities prostitute themselves for corporate dollars. Labor unions are marginal and ineffectual forces. The economy is in the hands of corporate swindlers and speculators. And the public, enchanted by electronic hallucinations, remains passive and supine. We have no tools left within the power structure in our fight to halt unchecked corporate pillage.
The liberal class, which Barack Obama represents, was never endowed with much vision or courage, but it did occasionally respond when pressured by popular democratic movements. This was how we got the New Deal, civil rights legislation and the array of consumer legislation pushed through by Ralph Nader and his allies in the Democratic Party. The complete surrendering of power, however, to corporate interests means that those of us who seek nonviolent yet profound change have no one within the power elite we can trust for support. The corporate coup has ossified the structures of power. It has obliterated all checks on corporate malfeasance. It has left us stripped of the tools of mass organization that once nudged the system forward toward justice.
Obama knows where power lies and serves these centers of power. The tragedy—if tragedy is the right word—is that Obama, after selling his soul to corporations, has been discarded. Corporate power doesn’t need brand Obama anymore. They have found new brands in the tea party, Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. Obama has been abandoned by those who once bundled contributions for him by the millions of dollars. Obama and the Democratic Party will, I expect, spend the next two years being even more obsequious to corporate power. Obama clearly loves the pomp and privilege of statecraft that much. But I am not sure it will work.
Reformers on the outside, while they remain militant and faithful to issues of justice, nevertheless depend on the liberal establishment to respond to public pressure. If these reformers cannot pressure the liberal class and the power elite to evoke real change, they become ineffectual. Our fate is intimately tied to the liberals who have betrayed us. We speak in the language of policies and issues. We will find it harder and harder, given our impotence, to compete with the impassioned calls for new glory, revenge and moral purity that resonate with a public beset by foreclosures, long-term unemployment, bankruptcies and a medical system that abandons them. Once any political system ossifies, once all mechanisms for reform close, the lunatic fringe of a society, as I saw in Yugoslavia, rises out of the moral swamp to take control. The reformers, however well meaning and honest, finally have nothing to offer. They are disarmed.
We have reached a point where stunted and deformed individuals, whose rapacious greed fuels the plunge of tens of millions of Americans into abject poverty and misery, determine the moral fiber of the nation. It is no more morally justifiable to kill someone for profit than it is to kill that person for religious fanaticism. And yet, from health companies to the oil and natural gas industry to private weapons contractors, individual death and the wholesale death of the ecosystem have become acceptable corporate business. The mounting human misery in the United States, which could lead to the sporadic bursts of anger we have seen on the streets of France, will be met with severe repression from the security and surveillance state, which always accompanies the rise of the corporate state. The one method left open by which we can respond—massive street protests, the destruction of corporate property and violence—will become the excuse to impose total tyranny. The intrusive pat-downs at airports may soon become a fond memory of what it was like when we still had a little freedom left.
All reform movements, from the battle for universal health care to the struggle for alternative energy and sane environmental controls to financial regulation to an end to our permanent war economy, have run into this new, terrifying configuration of power. They have confronted an awful truth. We do not count. And they have been helpless to respond as those who are most skilled in the manipulation of hate lead a confused populace to call for their own enslavement.
Dr. Margaret Flowers, a pediatrician from Maryland who volunteers for Physicians for a National Health Program, knows what it is like to challenge the corporate leviathan. She was blacklisted by the corporate media. She was locked out of the debate on health care reform by the Democratic Party and liberal organizations such as MoveOn. She was abandoned by those in Congress who had once backed calls for a rational health care policy. And when she and seven other activists demanded that the argument for universal health care be considered at the hearings held by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, they were forcibly removed from the hearing room.
“The reform process exposed how broken our system is,” Flowers said when we spoke a few days ago. “The health reform debate was never an actual debate. Those in power were very reluctant to have single-payer advocates testify or come to the table. They would not seriously consider our proposal because it was based on evidence of what works. And they did not want this evidence placed before the public. They needed the reform to be based on what they thought was politically feasible and acceptable to the industries that fund their campaigns.”
“There was nobody in the House or the Senate who held fast on universal health care,” she lamented. “Sen. [Bernie] Sanders from Vermont introduced a single-payer bill, S 703. He introduced an amendment that would have substituted S 703 for what the Senate was putting together. We had to push pretty hard to get that to the Senate floor, but in the end he was forced by the leadership to withdraw it. He was our strongest person. In the House we saw Chairman John Conyers, who is the lead sponsor for the House single-payer bill, give up pushing for single-payer very early in the process in 2009. Dennis Kucinich pushed to get an amendment that would help give states the ability to pass single-payer. He was not successful in getting that kept in the final House bill. He held out for the longest, but in the end he caved.”
“You can’t effect change from the inside,” she has concluded. “We have a huge imbalance of power. Until we have a shift in power we won’t get effective change in any area, whether financial, climate, you name it. With the wealth inequalities, with the road we are headed down, we face serious problems. Those who work and advocate for social and economic justice have to now join together. We have to be independent of political parties and the major funders. The revolution will not be funded. This is very true.”
“Those who are working for effective change are not going to get foundation dollars,” she stated. “Once a foundation or a wealthy individual agrees to give money they control how that money is used. You have to report to them how you spend that money. They control what you can and cannot do. Robert Wood Johnson [the foundation], for example, funds many public health departments. They fund groups that advocate for health care reform, but those groups are not allowed to pursue or talk about single-payer. Robert Wood Johnson only supports work that is done to create what they call public/private partnership. And we know this is totally ineffective. We tried this before. It is allowing private insurers to exist but developing programs to fill the gaps. Robert Wood Johnson actually works against a single-payer health care system. The Health Care for America Now coalition was another example. It only supported what the Democrats supported. There are a lot of activist groups controlled by the Democratic Party, including Families USA and MoveOn. MoveOn is a very good example. If you look at polls of Democrats on single-payer, about 80 percent support it. But at MoveOn meetings, which is made up mostly of Democrats, when people raised the idea of working for single-payer they were told by MoveOn leaders that the organization was not doing that. And this took place while the Democrats were busy selling out women’s rights, immigrant rights to health care and abandoning the public option. Yet all these groups continued to work for the bill. They argued, in the end, that the health care bill had to be supported because it was not really about health care. It was about the viability of President Obama and the Democratic Party. This is why, in the end, we had to pass it.”
“The Democrats and the Republicans give the illusion that there are differences between them,” said Dr. Flowers. “This keeps the public divided. It weakens opposition. We fight over whether a Democrat will get elected or a Republican will get elected. We vote for the lesser evil, but meanwhile the policies the two parties enact are not significantly different. There were no Democrats willing to hold the line on single-payer. Not one. I don’t see this changing until we radically shift the balance of power by creating a larger and broader social movement.”
The corporate control of every aspect of American life is mirrored in the corporate control of health care. And there are no barriers to prevent corporate domination of every sector of our lives.
“We are at a crisis,” Flowers said. “Health care providers, particularly those in primary care, are finding it very difficult to sustain an independent practice. We are seeing greater and greater corporatization of our health care. Practices are being taken over by these large corporations. You have absolutely no voice when it comes to dealing with the insurance company. They tell you what your reimbursements will be. They make it incredibly difficult and complex to get reimbursed. The rules are arbitrary and change frequently.”
“This new legislation [passed earlier this year] does not change any of that,” she said. “It does not make it easier for doctors. It adds more administrative complexity. We are going to continue to have a shortage of doctors. As the new law rolls out they are giving waivers as the provisions kick in because corporations like McDonald’s say they can’t comply. Insurance companies such as WellPoint, UnitedHealth Group, Aetna, Cigna and Humana that were mandated to sell new policies to children with pre-existing conditions announced they were not going to do it. They said they were going to stop selling new policies to children. So they got waivers from the Obama administration allowing them to charge higher premiums. Health care costs are going to rise faster. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services estimated that after the legislation passed, our health care costs would rise more steeply than if we had done nothing. The Census Bureau reports that the number of uninsured in the U.S. jumped 10 percent to 51 million people in 2009. About 5.8 million were able to go on public programs, but a third of our population under the age of 65 was uninsured for some portion of 2009. The National Health Insurance Survey estimates that we now have 58 or 59 million uninsured. And the trend is toward underinsurance. These faulty insurance products leave people financially vulnerable if they have a serious accident or illness. They also have financial barriers to care. Co-pays and deductibles cause people to delay or avoid getting the care they need. And all these trends will worsen.”
In Manuel de Lope’s novel “The Wrong Blood,” set during the first rumblings that led to the Spanish Civil War, he writes “... nobody knew this at the time and those who had premonitions wouldn’t go so far as to believe them, because fear rejects what intuition accepts.”
But the signs are now so palpable that even fear is not working. Our worst premonitions are becoming reality. Our intuition has proved correct. We are reaching the breaking point. An explosion, unless we halt the increased pressure, seems inevitable. And what is left for those of us who cannot embrace the contaminants of violence? If the system shuts us out how can we influence it through nonviolent mechanisms of popular protest? How can we restore a civil society? How can we battle back against those who will mobilize hatred to cement into place an American fascism?
I do not know if we can win this battle. I suspect we cannot. But I do know that if we stop resisting, if we stop rebelling, something fundamental will die within us. As the corporate vise tightens, as the vast corporate system begins to break down with fossil fuel decline, extreme climate change and the expansion of global poverty, even mundane and ordinary acts to assert our common humanity and justice will be condemned as subversive.
It is time to think of resistance in a new way, something that is no longer carried out to reform a system but as an end in itself. African-Americans understood this during the long night of slavery. German opposition leaders understood it under the Nazis. Dissidents in the former Soviet Union knew this during the nightmare of communism. Resistance in these closed systems was local and often solitary. It was done with the understanding that evil must always be defied. The tiny acts of rebellion—day after day, month after month, year after year and decade after decade—exposed to everyone who witnessed them the heartlessness, cruelty and inhumanity of the oppressor. They were acts of truth and beauty. We must take to the street. We must jam as many wrenches into the corporate system as we can. We must not make it easy for them. But we also must no longer live in self-delusion. This is a battle that will outlive us. And if we fight, even with this tragic vision, we will lead lives worth living and keep alive another way of being.
Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and writes a column every Monday for Truthdig. His newest book is “Death of the Liberal Class.”
http://www.truth-out.org/power-and-tiny-acts-rebellion65351?print
by: Chris Hedges | Truthdig | Op-Ed
photo
(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: philentropist, massenpunkt)
There is no hope left for achieving significant reform or restoring our democracy through established mechanisms of power. The electoral process has been hijacked by corporations. The judiciary has been corrupted and bought. The press shuts out the most important voices in the country and feeds us the banal and the absurd. Universities prostitute themselves for corporate dollars. Labor unions are marginal and ineffectual forces. The economy is in the hands of corporate swindlers and speculators. And the public, enchanted by electronic hallucinations, remains passive and supine. We have no tools left within the power structure in our fight to halt unchecked corporate pillage.
The liberal class, which Barack Obama represents, was never endowed with much vision or courage, but it did occasionally respond when pressured by popular democratic movements. This was how we got the New Deal, civil rights legislation and the array of consumer legislation pushed through by Ralph Nader and his allies in the Democratic Party. The complete surrendering of power, however, to corporate interests means that those of us who seek nonviolent yet profound change have no one within the power elite we can trust for support. The corporate coup has ossified the structures of power. It has obliterated all checks on corporate malfeasance. It has left us stripped of the tools of mass organization that once nudged the system forward toward justice.
Obama knows where power lies and serves these centers of power. The tragedy—if tragedy is the right word—is that Obama, after selling his soul to corporations, has been discarded. Corporate power doesn’t need brand Obama anymore. They have found new brands in the tea party, Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. Obama has been abandoned by those who once bundled contributions for him by the millions of dollars. Obama and the Democratic Party will, I expect, spend the next two years being even more obsequious to corporate power. Obama clearly loves the pomp and privilege of statecraft that much. But I am not sure it will work.
Reformers on the outside, while they remain militant and faithful to issues of justice, nevertheless depend on the liberal establishment to respond to public pressure. If these reformers cannot pressure the liberal class and the power elite to evoke real change, they become ineffectual. Our fate is intimately tied to the liberals who have betrayed us. We speak in the language of policies and issues. We will find it harder and harder, given our impotence, to compete with the impassioned calls for new glory, revenge and moral purity that resonate with a public beset by foreclosures, long-term unemployment, bankruptcies and a medical system that abandons them. Once any political system ossifies, once all mechanisms for reform close, the lunatic fringe of a society, as I saw in Yugoslavia, rises out of the moral swamp to take control. The reformers, however well meaning and honest, finally have nothing to offer. They are disarmed.
We have reached a point where stunted and deformed individuals, whose rapacious greed fuels the plunge of tens of millions of Americans into abject poverty and misery, determine the moral fiber of the nation. It is no more morally justifiable to kill someone for profit than it is to kill that person for religious fanaticism. And yet, from health companies to the oil and natural gas industry to private weapons contractors, individual death and the wholesale death of the ecosystem have become acceptable corporate business. The mounting human misery in the United States, which could lead to the sporadic bursts of anger we have seen on the streets of France, will be met with severe repression from the security and surveillance state, which always accompanies the rise of the corporate state. The one method left open by which we can respond—massive street protests, the destruction of corporate property and violence—will become the excuse to impose total tyranny. The intrusive pat-downs at airports may soon become a fond memory of what it was like when we still had a little freedom left.
All reform movements, from the battle for universal health care to the struggle for alternative energy and sane environmental controls to financial regulation to an end to our permanent war economy, have run into this new, terrifying configuration of power. They have confronted an awful truth. We do not count. And they have been helpless to respond as those who are most skilled in the manipulation of hate lead a confused populace to call for their own enslavement.
Dr. Margaret Flowers, a pediatrician from Maryland who volunteers for Physicians for a National Health Program, knows what it is like to challenge the corporate leviathan. She was blacklisted by the corporate media. She was locked out of the debate on health care reform by the Democratic Party and liberal organizations such as MoveOn. She was abandoned by those in Congress who had once backed calls for a rational health care policy. And when she and seven other activists demanded that the argument for universal health care be considered at the hearings held by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, they were forcibly removed from the hearing room.
“The reform process exposed how broken our system is,” Flowers said when we spoke a few days ago. “The health reform debate was never an actual debate. Those in power were very reluctant to have single-payer advocates testify or come to the table. They would not seriously consider our proposal because it was based on evidence of what works. And they did not want this evidence placed before the public. They needed the reform to be based on what they thought was politically feasible and acceptable to the industries that fund their campaigns.”
“There was nobody in the House or the Senate who held fast on universal health care,” she lamented. “Sen. [Bernie] Sanders from Vermont introduced a single-payer bill, S 703. He introduced an amendment that would have substituted S 703 for what the Senate was putting together. We had to push pretty hard to get that to the Senate floor, but in the end he was forced by the leadership to withdraw it. He was our strongest person. In the House we saw Chairman John Conyers, who is the lead sponsor for the House single-payer bill, give up pushing for single-payer very early in the process in 2009. Dennis Kucinich pushed to get an amendment that would help give states the ability to pass single-payer. He was not successful in getting that kept in the final House bill. He held out for the longest, but in the end he caved.”
“You can’t effect change from the inside,” she has concluded. “We have a huge imbalance of power. Until we have a shift in power we won’t get effective change in any area, whether financial, climate, you name it. With the wealth inequalities, with the road we are headed down, we face serious problems. Those who work and advocate for social and economic justice have to now join together. We have to be independent of political parties and the major funders. The revolution will not be funded. This is very true.”
“Those who are working for effective change are not going to get foundation dollars,” she stated. “Once a foundation or a wealthy individual agrees to give money they control how that money is used. You have to report to them how you spend that money. They control what you can and cannot do. Robert Wood Johnson [the foundation], for example, funds many public health departments. They fund groups that advocate for health care reform, but those groups are not allowed to pursue or talk about single-payer. Robert Wood Johnson only supports work that is done to create what they call public/private partnership. And we know this is totally ineffective. We tried this before. It is allowing private insurers to exist but developing programs to fill the gaps. Robert Wood Johnson actually works against a single-payer health care system. The Health Care for America Now coalition was another example. It only supported what the Democrats supported. There are a lot of activist groups controlled by the Democratic Party, including Families USA and MoveOn. MoveOn is a very good example. If you look at polls of Democrats on single-payer, about 80 percent support it. But at MoveOn meetings, which is made up mostly of Democrats, when people raised the idea of working for single-payer they were told by MoveOn leaders that the organization was not doing that. And this took place while the Democrats were busy selling out women’s rights, immigrant rights to health care and abandoning the public option. Yet all these groups continued to work for the bill. They argued, in the end, that the health care bill had to be supported because it was not really about health care. It was about the viability of President Obama and the Democratic Party. This is why, in the end, we had to pass it.”
“The Democrats and the Republicans give the illusion that there are differences between them,” said Dr. Flowers. “This keeps the public divided. It weakens opposition. We fight over whether a Democrat will get elected or a Republican will get elected. We vote for the lesser evil, but meanwhile the policies the two parties enact are not significantly different. There were no Democrats willing to hold the line on single-payer. Not one. I don’t see this changing until we radically shift the balance of power by creating a larger and broader social movement.”
The corporate control of every aspect of American life is mirrored in the corporate control of health care. And there are no barriers to prevent corporate domination of every sector of our lives.
“We are at a crisis,” Flowers said. “Health care providers, particularly those in primary care, are finding it very difficult to sustain an independent practice. We are seeing greater and greater corporatization of our health care. Practices are being taken over by these large corporations. You have absolutely no voice when it comes to dealing with the insurance company. They tell you what your reimbursements will be. They make it incredibly difficult and complex to get reimbursed. The rules are arbitrary and change frequently.”
“This new legislation [passed earlier this year] does not change any of that,” she said. “It does not make it easier for doctors. It adds more administrative complexity. We are going to continue to have a shortage of doctors. As the new law rolls out they are giving waivers as the provisions kick in because corporations like McDonald’s say they can’t comply. Insurance companies such as WellPoint, UnitedHealth Group, Aetna, Cigna and Humana that were mandated to sell new policies to children with pre-existing conditions announced they were not going to do it. They said they were going to stop selling new policies to children. So they got waivers from the Obama administration allowing them to charge higher premiums. Health care costs are going to rise faster. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services estimated that after the legislation passed, our health care costs would rise more steeply than if we had done nothing. The Census Bureau reports that the number of uninsured in the U.S. jumped 10 percent to 51 million people in 2009. About 5.8 million were able to go on public programs, but a third of our population under the age of 65 was uninsured for some portion of 2009. The National Health Insurance Survey estimates that we now have 58 or 59 million uninsured. And the trend is toward underinsurance. These faulty insurance products leave people financially vulnerable if they have a serious accident or illness. They also have financial barriers to care. Co-pays and deductibles cause people to delay or avoid getting the care they need. And all these trends will worsen.”
In Manuel de Lope’s novel “The Wrong Blood,” set during the first rumblings that led to the Spanish Civil War, he writes “... nobody knew this at the time and those who had premonitions wouldn’t go so far as to believe them, because fear rejects what intuition accepts.”
But the signs are now so palpable that even fear is not working. Our worst premonitions are becoming reality. Our intuition has proved correct. We are reaching the breaking point. An explosion, unless we halt the increased pressure, seems inevitable. And what is left for those of us who cannot embrace the contaminants of violence? If the system shuts us out how can we influence it through nonviolent mechanisms of popular protest? How can we restore a civil society? How can we battle back against those who will mobilize hatred to cement into place an American fascism?
I do not know if we can win this battle. I suspect we cannot. But I do know that if we stop resisting, if we stop rebelling, something fundamental will die within us. As the corporate vise tightens, as the vast corporate system begins to break down with fossil fuel decline, extreme climate change and the expansion of global poverty, even mundane and ordinary acts to assert our common humanity and justice will be condemned as subversive.
It is time to think of resistance in a new way, something that is no longer carried out to reform a system but as an end in itself. African-Americans understood this during the long night of slavery. German opposition leaders understood it under the Nazis. Dissidents in the former Soviet Union knew this during the nightmare of communism. Resistance in these closed systems was local and often solitary. It was done with the understanding that evil must always be defied. The tiny acts of rebellion—day after day, month after month, year after year and decade after decade—exposed to everyone who witnessed them the heartlessness, cruelty and inhumanity of the oppressor. They were acts of truth and beauty. We must take to the street. We must jam as many wrenches into the corporate system as we can. We must not make it easy for them. But we also must no longer live in self-delusion. This is a battle that will outlive us. And if we fight, even with this tragic vision, we will lead lives worth living and keep alive another way of being.
Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and writes a column every Monday for Truthdig. His newest book is “Death of the Liberal Class.”
http://www.truth-out.org/power-and-tiny-acts-rebellion65351?print
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
GOP's Top Tax Guy: Republicans Will Block Permanent Middle-Class Tax Cut
Brian Beutler | November 16, 2010, 4:51PM
The Republicans' top tax guy in the House threatened in the clearest possible terms today that he and the rest of the GOP would vote to block any tax cut for the middle class during the lame duck session unless tax cuts for the wealthy are extended for the same period of time.
In a policy speech at the business-friendly Tax Council today, incoming Ways and Means Committee chairman David Camp called the Democratic plan for tax cuts -- a permanent tax cut extension for all income up to $200,000, and a temporary extension for income above that level -- "a terrible idea and a total nonstarter."
"We would be foolish to fall for it," Camp said.
Now, everybody knows what's going on here. Republicans have been clear for months that their long term goal is to make sure all of these rates are extended permanently. But that means they don't want to have a fight in two or three years in which they side with the wealthiest two percent of the country against the Democrats. That's a losing fight, and terrible politics.
But they can't really come out and say that. If you ask a Republican member about this "decoupling" idea, the most common response you'll get is that it's a recipe for future tax increases. The implication is clear -- but good luck getting a more candid explanation.
[H/T: WSJ]
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/11/gops-top-tax-guy-republicans-will-block-permanent-middle-class-tax-cut.php
The Republicans' top tax guy in the House threatened in the clearest possible terms today that he and the rest of the GOP would vote to block any tax cut for the middle class during the lame duck session unless tax cuts for the wealthy are extended for the same period of time.
In a policy speech at the business-friendly Tax Council today, incoming Ways and Means Committee chairman David Camp called the Democratic plan for tax cuts -- a permanent tax cut extension for all income up to $200,000, and a temporary extension for income above that level -- "a terrible idea and a total nonstarter."
"We would be foolish to fall for it," Camp said.
Now, everybody knows what's going on here. Republicans have been clear for months that their long term goal is to make sure all of these rates are extended permanently. But that means they don't want to have a fight in two or three years in which they side with the wealthiest two percent of the country against the Democrats. That's a losing fight, and terrible politics.
But they can't really come out and say that. If you ask a Republican member about this "decoupling" idea, the most common response you'll get is that it's a recipe for future tax increases. The implication is clear -- but good luck getting a more candid explanation.
[H/T: WSJ]
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/11/gops-top-tax-guy-republicans-will-block-permanent-middle-class-tax-cut.php
10 Ways to Outfox Cops That Are Abusing Their Powers to Trick You
By Neill Franklin, LEAP
Posted on November 17, 2010, Printed on November 17, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/148860/
As a 33-year law enforcement veteran and former training commander with the Maryland State Police and Baltimore Police Department, I know how easy it is to intimidate citizens into answering incriminating questions or letting me search through their belongings. This reality might make things easier for police looking to make an easy arrest, but it doesn't always serve the interests of justice. That's why I believe all citizens should understand how to protect their constitutional rights and make smart decisions when dealing with officers of the law.
Unfortunately, this important information has remained largely unavailable to the public, despite growing concerns about police misconduct and the excesses of the war on drugs. For this reason, I agreed to serve as a technical consultant for the important new film, 10 Rules for Dealing with Police. The 40-minute docudrama aims to educate the public about basic legal and practical survival strategies for handling even the scariest police encounters. It was produced by the civil liberties group Flex Your Rights and is narrated by former federal judge and acclaimed Baltimore trial lawyer William "Billy" Murphy, Jr.
The opening scene portrays Darren, a young black man getting pulled over. He's driving home from college. This is the fifth time he's been pulled over in a year. Frustrated and scared, Darren immediately breaks Rule #1: Always Be Calm & Cool. Mouthing off to the officer, Darren aggressively exits the car and slams the door. The officer overreacts, dropping Darren with a taser shot to his chest.
Should the officer have tased Darren in that situation? Probably not. Would the officer likely be disciplined? No. But that's not the main point of 10 Rules. The point is that the choices you make during the course of such encounters have a massive impact on whether it ends with a simple warning, a tasing -- or worse. This is true even if you've done nothing illegal.
While being calm and cool is key to getting the best possible outcome, it's not enough to keep police from violating your constitutional rights. For example, when the officer commandingly asks Darren "You're not hiding any AK-47s in there? You don't mind if I take a look?", Darren gets tricked like most people do.
Intimidated and unaware of other options, he consents to the search. The officer carelessly dumps his bags, accidentally shattering Darren's laptop on the asphalt. In another "what if" scenario, the officer finds a small amount of marijuana hidden away. While someone else might have left it there, Darren winds up getting arrested.
What few people understand, but police know all too well, is that your constitutional rights only apply if you understand and assert them. Unless they have strong evidence (i.e. probable cause) police need your permission to search your belongings or enter your home. The instant you grant them permission to invade your privacy, many of your legal protections go out the window and you're left on the hook for anything illegal the police find, as well as any damage they cause in the process.
Of course, even if you know your basic rights, police officers are trained to shake your confidence. If you refuse a search, I might respond by threatening to call in a drug-sniffing dog and sternly reminding you that things will go much easier if you cooperate. Creating a sense of hopelessness for the suspect enables us to break down their defenses and gain compliance. In the film, we show several variations on these common threats, but the main lesson is that it doesn't matter what the officer says; you still have to remain calm and protect your rights.
In today's world of smart phone video, YouTube and Twitter, stories of police abuse travel fast, creating greater awareness of the problem of police misconduct. Unfortunately, this heightened awareness often serves to reinforce the notion that "cops can do whatever they want." It's true that much work remains to be done towards ensuring police accountability, but the very first step is to educate the public about basic constitutional rights.
Citizens who understand their rights are much less likely to experience negative outcomes, both on the street and in a court of law. Until each of us has the ability to protect our individual rights and recognize injustices against others, we're not likely to accomplish much in the realm of broader policy reform.
I hope 10 Rules for Dealing with Police will be embraced by parents, teachers, activists, and even police departments as we work towards reducing the tension that too often characterizes the relationship between cops and the communities they serve.
Here are the ten rules featured in the film:
1. Always be calm and cool: a bad attitude guarantees a bad outcome.
2. Remain silent: what you don't say can't hurt you.
3. You have the right to refuse searches: saying no to searches can't be held against you.
4. Don't get tricked: remember, police are allowed to lie to you.
5. Determine if you're free to go: police need evidence to detain you.
6. Don't expose yourself: doing dumb stuff in public makes you an easy target.
7. Don't run: they'll catch you and make you regret it.
8. Never touch a cop: aggressive actions will only earn you a more aggressive response.
9. Report misconduct: be a good witness.
10. You don't have to let them in: police need a warrant to enter your home.
Neill Franklin, a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, has been police officer for more than 32 years and has served as a commander for the Maryland State Police’s Bureau of Drug and Criminal Enforcement, as well as a trainer with the Baltimore Police Department.
http://www.alternet.org/rights/148860/10_ways_to_outfox_cops_that_are_abusing_their_powers_to_trick_you/
Posted on November 17, 2010, Printed on November 17, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/148860/
As a 33-year law enforcement veteran and former training commander with the Maryland State Police and Baltimore Police Department, I know how easy it is to intimidate citizens into answering incriminating questions or letting me search through their belongings. This reality might make things easier for police looking to make an easy arrest, but it doesn't always serve the interests of justice. That's why I believe all citizens should understand how to protect their constitutional rights and make smart decisions when dealing with officers of the law.
Unfortunately, this important information has remained largely unavailable to the public, despite growing concerns about police misconduct and the excesses of the war on drugs. For this reason, I agreed to serve as a technical consultant for the important new film, 10 Rules for Dealing with Police. The 40-minute docudrama aims to educate the public about basic legal and practical survival strategies for handling even the scariest police encounters. It was produced by the civil liberties group Flex Your Rights and is narrated by former federal judge and acclaimed Baltimore trial lawyer William "Billy" Murphy, Jr.
The opening scene portrays Darren, a young black man getting pulled over. He's driving home from college. This is the fifth time he's been pulled over in a year. Frustrated and scared, Darren immediately breaks Rule #1: Always Be Calm & Cool. Mouthing off to the officer, Darren aggressively exits the car and slams the door. The officer overreacts, dropping Darren with a taser shot to his chest.
Should the officer have tased Darren in that situation? Probably not. Would the officer likely be disciplined? No. But that's not the main point of 10 Rules. The point is that the choices you make during the course of such encounters have a massive impact on whether it ends with a simple warning, a tasing -- or worse. This is true even if you've done nothing illegal.
While being calm and cool is key to getting the best possible outcome, it's not enough to keep police from violating your constitutional rights. For example, when the officer commandingly asks Darren "You're not hiding any AK-47s in there? You don't mind if I take a look?", Darren gets tricked like most people do.
Intimidated and unaware of other options, he consents to the search. The officer carelessly dumps his bags, accidentally shattering Darren's laptop on the asphalt. In another "what if" scenario, the officer finds a small amount of marijuana hidden away. While someone else might have left it there, Darren winds up getting arrested.
What few people understand, but police know all too well, is that your constitutional rights only apply if you understand and assert them. Unless they have strong evidence (i.e. probable cause) police need your permission to search your belongings or enter your home. The instant you grant them permission to invade your privacy, many of your legal protections go out the window and you're left on the hook for anything illegal the police find, as well as any damage they cause in the process.
Of course, even if you know your basic rights, police officers are trained to shake your confidence. If you refuse a search, I might respond by threatening to call in a drug-sniffing dog and sternly reminding you that things will go much easier if you cooperate. Creating a sense of hopelessness for the suspect enables us to break down their defenses and gain compliance. In the film, we show several variations on these common threats, but the main lesson is that it doesn't matter what the officer says; you still have to remain calm and protect your rights.
In today's world of smart phone video, YouTube and Twitter, stories of police abuse travel fast, creating greater awareness of the problem of police misconduct. Unfortunately, this heightened awareness often serves to reinforce the notion that "cops can do whatever they want." It's true that much work remains to be done towards ensuring police accountability, but the very first step is to educate the public about basic constitutional rights.
Citizens who understand their rights are much less likely to experience negative outcomes, both on the street and in a court of law. Until each of us has the ability to protect our individual rights and recognize injustices against others, we're not likely to accomplish much in the realm of broader policy reform.
I hope 10 Rules for Dealing with Police will be embraced by parents, teachers, activists, and even police departments as we work towards reducing the tension that too often characterizes the relationship between cops and the communities they serve.
Here are the ten rules featured in the film:
1. Always be calm and cool: a bad attitude guarantees a bad outcome.
2. Remain silent: what you don't say can't hurt you.
3. You have the right to refuse searches: saying no to searches can't be held against you.
4. Don't get tricked: remember, police are allowed to lie to you.
5. Determine if you're free to go: police need evidence to detain you.
6. Don't expose yourself: doing dumb stuff in public makes you an easy target.
7. Don't run: they'll catch you and make you regret it.
8. Never touch a cop: aggressive actions will only earn you a more aggressive response.
9. Report misconduct: be a good witness.
10. You don't have to let them in: police need a warrant to enter your home.
Neill Franklin, a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, has been police officer for more than 32 years and has served as a commander for the Maryland State Police’s Bureau of Drug and Criminal Enforcement, as well as a trainer with the Baltimore Police Department.
http://www.alternet.org/rights/148860/10_ways_to_outfox_cops_that_are_abusing_their_powers_to_trick_you/
Sorting Out the Peak Oil Confusion
Peak Oil Reality
By Keith Kohl
Wednesday, November 17th, 2010
There's a peak oil heckler outside my office.
I pass him every morning in the parking lot. Like a gnat, he buzzes around and refuses to leave me alone, no matter how much I swat... My own personal fan, as I like to call him.
Each verbal prod or poke causes me to react in the same manner. I laugh all the way to my desk.
My mirthful response is due to the fact that he shares a very common trait with many of the antagonists I come across on a daily basis: denial.
And just like theirs, his misconceptions lead to a dangerous line of thinking.
Not only are his peak oil rants hand-fed to him by certain media outlets; but he doesn't seem to care whether or not the information is even legitimate.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised by how easy it is to mix things up. But time and time again, there's one subject at the top of his list...
"The world has plenty of oil"
That phrase is constantly shouted at me, often by caps-lock-obsessed people like my fan.
And every time I hear it, I chuckle. Because they're right.
We do have plenty of oil left in the earth — certainly enough to last until we shift our energy demand to renewable energy. Unfortunately, he and everyone else using this line of reasoning are making a serious mistake.
They're asking the wrong question. I believe it's the most common misconception in the entire peak oil debate.
You've seen me splash this answer on the pages of Energy and Capital too many times to count, so if you're one of my veteran readers, please bear with me a moment...
It's not about how much oil is left in the ground; rather the rate at which we can produce that oil.
We all know the bathtub metaphor. If we could fill a bathtub the world's remaining crude oil, there'd be no reason to worry. But if you only have a tiny straw with which to extract the oil from the tub, the situation dramatically changes.
Now, our current situation isn't as simple as that. The oil we're trying to produce is much more expensive to extract.
And you can see that much for yourself...
Declining production: The 6.7% fear factor
With the average decline rate for oil production at about 6.7%, the world needs to find roughly five million barrels of new oil every year — just to make up for the loss from natural decline.
And that decline rate will only rise. Several years ago, most analysts believed the annual decline rate was closer to 4.5%.
Considering the easy-to-get oil from the world's super-giant fields is declining, more of the world's production is coming from non-traditional means, and some sources like deepwater wells are cursed with much steeper decline rates.
Besides, we're literally going to the ends of the earth for just a chance at new oil supplies. Anyone else remember when the Russians boldly planted their flag on the Arctic seabed?
Think of the once-mighty Ghawar oil field...
Ghawar is the world's largest oil field, pumping out approximately five million barrels per day. That single field has been responsible for nearly 65% of all Saudi oil production from 1948 to 2000.
Taking that into account, oil producers must come up with a new Ghawar each year just to make up for the losses from natural decline. That's approximately five million barrels of new oil per year that we have to make up for.
Take a moment and give that some perspective.
Rethinking unconventional oil
As Nick Hodge reminded you yesterday, the reliance on unconventional oil and gas resources is becoming greater.
You have to wonder how much oil left in that bathtub is the easy-to-get stuff. And people often misunderstand how deep the tub is.
While we're at it, let's clear up one of the biggest misconceptions about unconventional oil — that we have trillions of barrels of oil from shale.
I can only hope you aren't among those who believe this.
Never mistake the Green River oil shales in Colorado and Wyoming for the shale boom happening.
Yes, there is a huge amount of oil there; but I have little faith that companies will ever succeed in reaching commercial production.
At the very least, ramping up production from the oil shales in Colorado and Wyoming would take decades. Unless a miracle happens, the cost would be enough to cause the wealthiest investors to cringe, flushing and shaking their heads with an emphatic “No!”
And, dear reader, this is where the hecklers truly show their ignorance...
“Well if it worked in the Bakken shale, it'll work there,” they say.
When you hear that, you know they're clueless.
To start, oil shale deposits (such as those found in the Green River formation) are the best example of unconventional oil out there. It's not even oil — rather sedimentary rocks that contain a large amount of kerogen. Kerogen requires much more processing.
It's a far cry from the light, sweet grade of crude that made Jed Clampett smile...
If we ever reach the point of developing the Green River Shales, we'll literally be scraping the bottom of the barrel.
The shale oil that you've heard about in the Bakken formation is actually light, sweet crude in an unconventional reservoir rock with low permeability. The problem has been that producers don't just stick a vertical well down and expect to hit pay dirt...
They are, however, becoming more efficient with each horizontal well they drill.
Right now, I'm putting the finishing touches on a new report highlighting one such opportunity taking unconventional production to the next level.
You'll hear all about it very soon.
Until next time,
Keith Kohl
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/peak-oil-IEA/1342
By Keith Kohl
Wednesday, November 17th, 2010
There's a peak oil heckler outside my office.
I pass him every morning in the parking lot. Like a gnat, he buzzes around and refuses to leave me alone, no matter how much I swat... My own personal fan, as I like to call him.
Each verbal prod or poke causes me to react in the same manner. I laugh all the way to my desk.
My mirthful response is due to the fact that he shares a very common trait with many of the antagonists I come across on a daily basis: denial.
And just like theirs, his misconceptions lead to a dangerous line of thinking.
Not only are his peak oil rants hand-fed to him by certain media outlets; but he doesn't seem to care whether or not the information is even legitimate.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised by how easy it is to mix things up. But time and time again, there's one subject at the top of his list...
"The world has plenty of oil"
That phrase is constantly shouted at me, often by caps-lock-obsessed people like my fan.
And every time I hear it, I chuckle. Because they're right.
We do have plenty of oil left in the earth — certainly enough to last until we shift our energy demand to renewable energy. Unfortunately, he and everyone else using this line of reasoning are making a serious mistake.
They're asking the wrong question. I believe it's the most common misconception in the entire peak oil debate.
You've seen me splash this answer on the pages of Energy and Capital too many times to count, so if you're one of my veteran readers, please bear with me a moment...
It's not about how much oil is left in the ground; rather the rate at which we can produce that oil.
We all know the bathtub metaphor. If we could fill a bathtub the world's remaining crude oil, there'd be no reason to worry. But if you only have a tiny straw with which to extract the oil from the tub, the situation dramatically changes.
Now, our current situation isn't as simple as that. The oil we're trying to produce is much more expensive to extract.
And you can see that much for yourself...
Declining production: The 6.7% fear factor
With the average decline rate for oil production at about 6.7%, the world needs to find roughly five million barrels of new oil every year — just to make up for the loss from natural decline.
And that decline rate will only rise. Several years ago, most analysts believed the annual decline rate was closer to 4.5%.
Considering the easy-to-get oil from the world's super-giant fields is declining, more of the world's production is coming from non-traditional means, and some sources like deepwater wells are cursed with much steeper decline rates.
Besides, we're literally going to the ends of the earth for just a chance at new oil supplies. Anyone else remember when the Russians boldly planted their flag on the Arctic seabed?
Think of the once-mighty Ghawar oil field...
Ghawar is the world's largest oil field, pumping out approximately five million barrels per day. That single field has been responsible for nearly 65% of all Saudi oil production from 1948 to 2000.
Taking that into account, oil producers must come up with a new Ghawar each year just to make up for the losses from natural decline. That's approximately five million barrels of new oil per year that we have to make up for.
Take a moment and give that some perspective.
Rethinking unconventional oil
As Nick Hodge reminded you yesterday, the reliance on unconventional oil and gas resources is becoming greater.
You have to wonder how much oil left in that bathtub is the easy-to-get stuff. And people often misunderstand how deep the tub is.
While we're at it, let's clear up one of the biggest misconceptions about unconventional oil — that we have trillions of barrels of oil from shale.
I can only hope you aren't among those who believe this.
Never mistake the Green River oil shales in Colorado and Wyoming for the shale boom happening.
Yes, there is a huge amount of oil there; but I have little faith that companies will ever succeed in reaching commercial production.
At the very least, ramping up production from the oil shales in Colorado and Wyoming would take decades. Unless a miracle happens, the cost would be enough to cause the wealthiest investors to cringe, flushing and shaking their heads with an emphatic “No!”
And, dear reader, this is where the hecklers truly show their ignorance...
“Well if it worked in the Bakken shale, it'll work there,” they say.
When you hear that, you know they're clueless.
To start, oil shale deposits (such as those found in the Green River formation) are the best example of unconventional oil out there. It's not even oil — rather sedimentary rocks that contain a large amount of kerogen. Kerogen requires much more processing.
It's a far cry from the light, sweet grade of crude that made Jed Clampett smile...
If we ever reach the point of developing the Green River Shales, we'll literally be scraping the bottom of the barrel.
The shale oil that you've heard about in the Bakken formation is actually light, sweet crude in an unconventional reservoir rock with low permeability. The problem has been that producers don't just stick a vertical well down and expect to hit pay dirt...
They are, however, becoming more efficient with each horizontal well they drill.
Right now, I'm putting the finishing touches on a new report highlighting one such opportunity taking unconventional production to the next level.
You'll hear all about it very soon.
Until next time,
Keith Kohl
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/peak-oil-IEA/1342
Saturday, November 13, 2010
While the Hegemon Caves From Within
by Vincent Di Stefano
Published on Saturday, November 13, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
The results of the US mid-term elections reflect a return of cynicism and ennui among those who were moved by the visionary promises of Barack Obama as he campaigned for the presidency a short 2 years ago. In May 2008, when campaigning in North Carolina, he described the core message of his campaign in the following terms: "It's not enough just to replace the party in the White House. We've got to change our politics as well." Our collective memories are too short. Our expectations too easily side-stepped.
The past two years have shown that in US politics, it is still business as usual. The problem, of course, is that US business continues to affect us all.
While Obama, shadowed by 250 US business executives, was meeting with high dignitaries in India on his 10-day tour through Southeast Asia, his erstwhile opponent-become-Secretary-of-State Hillary Clinton, accompanied by her Defense Secretary Robert Gates, were meeting with Julia Gillard and her new coterie in Australia.
And while Obama was busily negotiating new arms deals which included securing a $3.5 billion contract for 10 Boeing C-17 cargo planes -- the sixth biggest arms deal in US history -- and lining up an additional $11 billion order for 126 combat fighter jets for the Indian air force, Clinton and Gates were meeting with Australian politicians and military planners in order to secure an increased US military presence in Australia.
It was therefore both politic and pragmatic that Obama was met by Jim McNerney, CEO of Boeing, and Jeffrey Imelt, CEO of General Electric, when Air Force One touched down on the Tarmac of Mumbai airport on 7th November. General Electric was recently contracted to supply 107 F414 engines for the new Tejas lightweight jet fighter presently being constructed in India. And for the past 2 years, GE-Hitachi have been jockeying for the construction of new nuclear power stations in India.
It would seem that the US presidency has more decidedly become an office to promote the sale of US arms in a world already ravaged by the effects of too many wars and too much deadly weaponry.
There is no shortage of irony. In a speech given at a joint sitting of both houses of Parliament in New Delhi on 8th November, Obama invoked the spirits of both Gandhi and Martin Luther King: "I've always found inspiration in the life of Ghandiji and his simple and profound lesson to be the change we seek in the world." He went on to say: "After making his pilgrimage to India half a century ago, Dr. King called Ghandi's philosophy of nonviolent resistance 'the only logical and moral approach' in the struggle for justice and progress."
Words have ever been cheap in the theatre of politics. The contradiction between the rhetoric and the action in his speech in New Delhi is as sharp as it was in his acceptance speech for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize at Oslo a year ago.
Despite the hopes and the promises that brought Obama to the US presidency, American pragmatism continues to rule. If the US does not sell its jets and its weapons to India, then the Russians or the Europeans will. The Indian military remains one of the largest importers of military hardware on the planet despite the fact that tens of millions of Indian men, women and children continue to live in deep poverty. But the whole game plan has now changed. Many who were of the view that Barack Obama shared their insight into what was necessary during this time of escalating planetary difficulties have been left wondering what peculiar deception was at play.
Obama took office at a pivotal point in history. The Bush era had brought the theory and practice of political self-interest to a high pitch. The rich got richer, the already powerful got more power, the belligerent were given greater scope for the exercise of their belligerence.
As independent journalist Robert Freeman has so astutely pointed out, nothing really changed when Obama entered the White House. Mammon's rule was confirmed by Obama's selection of the unholy trinity of Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke to run the country's finances. Under Clinton, Larry Summers had single-mindedly driven the deregulation of banks that enabled the rape of national economies around the globe. He was appointed Head of the National Economic Council. Under George W. Bush, Timothy Geithner had already funneled trillions of dollars of public moneys to his old buddies on Wall Street in the guise of "saving the system". He was appointed Secretary of the Treasury. And as Chairman of the Federal Reserve since 2006, Ben Bernanke had presided over a series of monstrous excesses that fattened the already rich and flayed the poor of what little they had. Bernanke was re-appointed in his role by Obama.
And able economists like Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman and David Korten continue to remain on the margins awaiting the inevitable.
Most of Obama's choices have followed this pattern. Despite his promise to renew and to reform US politics, little has changed. According to Robert Freeman, US banks "are making the largest profits in their history and paying themselves the biggest bonuses on record." Meanwhile, both the Pentagon and the US armaments industry are as busy as ever. Oil and energy companies have demonstrated who is really calling the tune through their scuttling of the Copenhagen Climate Summit last year. Their activities continue unabated. While tar sands continue to be mined in Canada at enormous cost to the environment and enormous expenditure of energy, methane gas begins to pour out of the entire Siberian permafrost region and the Arctic seabed itself. The inexorable receding of immense continental glaciers bodes poorly for those populations dependent on the great river systems issuing from ancient glaciers for their drinking water and for the irrigation waters that enable food production.
The 2008 financial crisis offered an opportunity to clean up the dirty practices that bankrupted literally millions of householders by recklessly enabling unserviceable mortgages and that emptied untold numbers of pension funds and retirement savings by exploiting newly created financial instruments such as derivatives.
The unconditional multi-billion bailout of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler at that time similarly squandered an opportunity to completely redesign transport systems and to transform an obsolete industrial infrastructure.
These opportunities came and went while politicians argued, bankers schemed, oil companies colluded and armaments manufacturers planned.
It would seem we are a refractory species. Not until the situation has become irremediably dire do we begin to take the necessary collective action we could have taken and should have taken long before to prevent widespread collapse and progressive dissolution.
Let us never lose sight of the potencies available to us in familial and community awareness and action during these times of political dereliction and moral abandonment.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/11/13-0
Published on Saturday, November 13, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
The results of the US mid-term elections reflect a return of cynicism and ennui among those who were moved by the visionary promises of Barack Obama as he campaigned for the presidency a short 2 years ago. In May 2008, when campaigning in North Carolina, he described the core message of his campaign in the following terms: "It's not enough just to replace the party in the White House. We've got to change our politics as well." Our collective memories are too short. Our expectations too easily side-stepped.
The past two years have shown that in US politics, it is still business as usual. The problem, of course, is that US business continues to affect us all.
While Obama, shadowed by 250 US business executives, was meeting with high dignitaries in India on his 10-day tour through Southeast Asia, his erstwhile opponent-become-Secretary-of-State Hillary Clinton, accompanied by her Defense Secretary Robert Gates, were meeting with Julia Gillard and her new coterie in Australia.
And while Obama was busily negotiating new arms deals which included securing a $3.5 billion contract for 10 Boeing C-17 cargo planes -- the sixth biggest arms deal in US history -- and lining up an additional $11 billion order for 126 combat fighter jets for the Indian air force, Clinton and Gates were meeting with Australian politicians and military planners in order to secure an increased US military presence in Australia.
It was therefore both politic and pragmatic that Obama was met by Jim McNerney, CEO of Boeing, and Jeffrey Imelt, CEO of General Electric, when Air Force One touched down on the Tarmac of Mumbai airport on 7th November. General Electric was recently contracted to supply 107 F414 engines for the new Tejas lightweight jet fighter presently being constructed in India. And for the past 2 years, GE-Hitachi have been jockeying for the construction of new nuclear power stations in India.
It would seem that the US presidency has more decidedly become an office to promote the sale of US arms in a world already ravaged by the effects of too many wars and too much deadly weaponry.
There is no shortage of irony. In a speech given at a joint sitting of both houses of Parliament in New Delhi on 8th November, Obama invoked the spirits of both Gandhi and Martin Luther King: "I've always found inspiration in the life of Ghandiji and his simple and profound lesson to be the change we seek in the world." He went on to say: "After making his pilgrimage to India half a century ago, Dr. King called Ghandi's philosophy of nonviolent resistance 'the only logical and moral approach' in the struggle for justice and progress."
Words have ever been cheap in the theatre of politics. The contradiction between the rhetoric and the action in his speech in New Delhi is as sharp as it was in his acceptance speech for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize at Oslo a year ago.
Despite the hopes and the promises that brought Obama to the US presidency, American pragmatism continues to rule. If the US does not sell its jets and its weapons to India, then the Russians or the Europeans will. The Indian military remains one of the largest importers of military hardware on the planet despite the fact that tens of millions of Indian men, women and children continue to live in deep poverty. But the whole game plan has now changed. Many who were of the view that Barack Obama shared their insight into what was necessary during this time of escalating planetary difficulties have been left wondering what peculiar deception was at play.
Obama took office at a pivotal point in history. The Bush era had brought the theory and practice of political self-interest to a high pitch. The rich got richer, the already powerful got more power, the belligerent were given greater scope for the exercise of their belligerence.
As independent journalist Robert Freeman has so astutely pointed out, nothing really changed when Obama entered the White House. Mammon's rule was confirmed by Obama's selection of the unholy trinity of Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke to run the country's finances. Under Clinton, Larry Summers had single-mindedly driven the deregulation of banks that enabled the rape of national economies around the globe. He was appointed Head of the National Economic Council. Under George W. Bush, Timothy Geithner had already funneled trillions of dollars of public moneys to his old buddies on Wall Street in the guise of "saving the system". He was appointed Secretary of the Treasury. And as Chairman of the Federal Reserve since 2006, Ben Bernanke had presided over a series of monstrous excesses that fattened the already rich and flayed the poor of what little they had. Bernanke was re-appointed in his role by Obama.
And able economists like Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman and David Korten continue to remain on the margins awaiting the inevitable.
Most of Obama's choices have followed this pattern. Despite his promise to renew and to reform US politics, little has changed. According to Robert Freeman, US banks "are making the largest profits in their history and paying themselves the biggest bonuses on record." Meanwhile, both the Pentagon and the US armaments industry are as busy as ever. Oil and energy companies have demonstrated who is really calling the tune through their scuttling of the Copenhagen Climate Summit last year. Their activities continue unabated. While tar sands continue to be mined in Canada at enormous cost to the environment and enormous expenditure of energy, methane gas begins to pour out of the entire Siberian permafrost region and the Arctic seabed itself. The inexorable receding of immense continental glaciers bodes poorly for those populations dependent on the great river systems issuing from ancient glaciers for their drinking water and for the irrigation waters that enable food production.
The 2008 financial crisis offered an opportunity to clean up the dirty practices that bankrupted literally millions of householders by recklessly enabling unserviceable mortgages and that emptied untold numbers of pension funds and retirement savings by exploiting newly created financial instruments such as derivatives.
The unconditional multi-billion bailout of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler at that time similarly squandered an opportunity to completely redesign transport systems and to transform an obsolete industrial infrastructure.
These opportunities came and went while politicians argued, bankers schemed, oil companies colluded and armaments manufacturers planned.
It would seem we are a refractory species. Not until the situation has become irremediably dire do we begin to take the necessary collective action we could have taken and should have taken long before to prevent widespread collapse and progressive dissolution.
Let us never lose sight of the potencies available to us in familial and community awareness and action during these times of political dereliction and moral abandonment.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/11/13-0
A Small Fraction of a Man
Saturday 13 November 2010
by: William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
George W. Bush was all over my television this past week, all over the newspapers, and the feelings inspired by his sudden reappearance are almost beyond my capacity to describe. There was the story about his hearty approval of waterboarding. There was the story that had him contemplating dropping Dick Cheney from the administration. There was the story that had him describing himself as a "dissenter" on the Iraq invasion. He did interviews, and excerpts of his new book dribbled out, and it was all too much to endure.
This is the guy, I thought to myself when I saw his face or heard his voice. This is the guy.
This is the guy who took a massive Clinton administration budget surplus and gave it away to his friends at the top of the tax bracket, a move that laid the groundwork for our current economic calamity.
This is the guy who breezed passed a pointed warning about Osama bin Laden, terrorism and airplanes on August 8, 2001, because he was on vacation and couldn't be bothered.
This is the guy who parlayed that massive failure into a constant goad of fear to be wielded with impunity against the people he purported to lead. Plastic sheeting and duct tape, anthrax under your pillow, and of course, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
This is the guy who, not even a month after the Towers came down, looked into a television camera and said, "We need to counter the shockwave of the evildoer by having individual rate cuts accelerated and by thinking about tax rebates."
Oh yes, this is the guy who stood before the American people in January of 2003 and proclaimed that Iraq was in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile biological weapons labs, uranium from Niger for use in a "robust" nuclear weapons programs, and that Iraq enjoyed connections to al Qaeda that led directly to the attacks of September 11.
This was the guy who presided over the outing of a deep-cover CIA agent after her husband had the temerity to call him a liar in the public prints. That agent was running a network for the purpose of thwarting any person or group that might try to deliver weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.
This is the guy who strutted like a bantam rooster under a banner reading "Mission Accomplished," bragging about the end of a war that was to grind on for seven more years, and grinds on even to this day, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.
This is the guy who said "Bring it on" and put a target on the backs of tens of thousands of US troops. This is the guy who is personally responsible for the death and injury of hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings. The body count from his administration is breathtaking in size and scope.
This is the guy who allowed the intelligence services of this nation to violate the Constitutional rights of its citizens in a way never seen before.
This is the guy who turned the entire world against America after that same world embraced us so completely after September 11. World leaders could not stand to be in the same room with him, and openly mocked him, thus humiliating us all.
This is the guy who literally fiddled while Hurricane Katrina devoured the city of New Orleans.
This guy actually said he considered dropping Cheney from the administration? It would be comic if it were not so pointedly fraudulent. Cheney ran the government, ran roughshod over every right he found meddlesome, and Bush sat by and let him do it with that same simpering smirk on his face.
This is the guy who set stem cell research back more than a decade because of his overarching fealty to "snowflake babies" over living, breathing, suffering people.
This is the guy who unleashed all the horrors of the torture chamber because the lawyers said it was OK. If the president does it, it's not illegal, right? Nixon came up with that line, but this is the guy who took it farther than it has ever been taken before.
This is the guy, and now he's back on my television again, and it makes me want to eat my own teeth. I endured him for eight long, brutal years, and have often thought since that no matter how bad things get - and they have, indeed, gotten pretty damned bad - I don't have to endure his face or his voice or his abject serial failures anymore.
But now he's back, and it is like returning to a nightmare.
I don't know what this George W. Bush Reputation Rehabilitation Tour will actually accomplish in the end. The same 20% of the country that kept his approval ratings from slipping into single digits - said group now being known as the "Tea Party" - will go out and buy his book. They will lap up his mealy-mouthed pabulum like cats into the cream, and some of our "mainstream" commentators will try to shoehorn the idea that he is missed into the national conversation.
He is not. George W. Bush was, and likely will forever be, the single worst American president in the nation's history. To outstrip his remarkable record of failure, criminality and disgrace, a future president will have to personally cause the Earth to crash into the sun.
All I can do for now is avoid the TV, stay away from the newspapers, and pray to God on High that this small fraction of a man will soon retreat back into the ignominy from which he has emerged. There is no salvaging him, and thanks to him, there may be no salvaging America in his aftermath.
We are all children of this bastard fool now. The least he can do is stay in the shadows where he belongs, while we toil and sweat to repair what he wrought.
http://www.truth-out.org/a-small-fraction-a-man65077
by: William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
George W. Bush was all over my television this past week, all over the newspapers, and the feelings inspired by his sudden reappearance are almost beyond my capacity to describe. There was the story about his hearty approval of waterboarding. There was the story that had him contemplating dropping Dick Cheney from the administration. There was the story that had him describing himself as a "dissenter" on the Iraq invasion. He did interviews, and excerpts of his new book dribbled out, and it was all too much to endure.
This is the guy, I thought to myself when I saw his face or heard his voice. This is the guy.
This is the guy who took a massive Clinton administration budget surplus and gave it away to his friends at the top of the tax bracket, a move that laid the groundwork for our current economic calamity.
This is the guy who breezed passed a pointed warning about Osama bin Laden, terrorism and airplanes on August 8, 2001, because he was on vacation and couldn't be bothered.
This is the guy who parlayed that massive failure into a constant goad of fear to be wielded with impunity against the people he purported to lead. Plastic sheeting and duct tape, anthrax under your pillow, and of course, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
This is the guy who, not even a month after the Towers came down, looked into a television camera and said, "We need to counter the shockwave of the evildoer by having individual rate cuts accelerated and by thinking about tax rebates."
Oh yes, this is the guy who stood before the American people in January of 2003 and proclaimed that Iraq was in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile biological weapons labs, uranium from Niger for use in a "robust" nuclear weapons programs, and that Iraq enjoyed connections to al Qaeda that led directly to the attacks of September 11.
This was the guy who presided over the outing of a deep-cover CIA agent after her husband had the temerity to call him a liar in the public prints. That agent was running a network for the purpose of thwarting any person or group that might try to deliver weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.
This is the guy who strutted like a bantam rooster under a banner reading "Mission Accomplished," bragging about the end of a war that was to grind on for seven more years, and grinds on even to this day, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.
This is the guy who said "Bring it on" and put a target on the backs of tens of thousands of US troops. This is the guy who is personally responsible for the death and injury of hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings. The body count from his administration is breathtaking in size and scope.
This is the guy who allowed the intelligence services of this nation to violate the Constitutional rights of its citizens in a way never seen before.
This is the guy who turned the entire world against America after that same world embraced us so completely after September 11. World leaders could not stand to be in the same room with him, and openly mocked him, thus humiliating us all.
This is the guy who literally fiddled while Hurricane Katrina devoured the city of New Orleans.
This guy actually said he considered dropping Cheney from the administration? It would be comic if it were not so pointedly fraudulent. Cheney ran the government, ran roughshod over every right he found meddlesome, and Bush sat by and let him do it with that same simpering smirk on his face.
This is the guy who set stem cell research back more than a decade because of his overarching fealty to "snowflake babies" over living, breathing, suffering people.
This is the guy who unleashed all the horrors of the torture chamber because the lawyers said it was OK. If the president does it, it's not illegal, right? Nixon came up with that line, but this is the guy who took it farther than it has ever been taken before.
This is the guy, and now he's back on my television again, and it makes me want to eat my own teeth. I endured him for eight long, brutal years, and have often thought since that no matter how bad things get - and they have, indeed, gotten pretty damned bad - I don't have to endure his face or his voice or his abject serial failures anymore.
But now he's back, and it is like returning to a nightmare.
I don't know what this George W. Bush Reputation Rehabilitation Tour will actually accomplish in the end. The same 20% of the country that kept his approval ratings from slipping into single digits - said group now being known as the "Tea Party" - will go out and buy his book. They will lap up his mealy-mouthed pabulum like cats into the cream, and some of our "mainstream" commentators will try to shoehorn the idea that he is missed into the national conversation.
He is not. George W. Bush was, and likely will forever be, the single worst American president in the nation's history. To outstrip his remarkable record of failure, criminality and disgrace, a future president will have to personally cause the Earth to crash into the sun.
All I can do for now is avoid the TV, stay away from the newspapers, and pray to God on High that this small fraction of a man will soon retreat back into the ignominy from which he has emerged. There is no salvaging him, and thanks to him, there may be no salvaging America in his aftermath.
We are all children of this bastard fool now. The least he can do is stay in the shadows where he belongs, while we toil and sweat to repair what he wrought.
http://www.truth-out.org/a-small-fraction-a-man65077
Friday, November 12, 2010
Ronald Reagan's Budget Director Says Repeal the Tax Cuts: Republicans "Should be Ashamed"
Submitted by mark karlin on Thu, 11/11/2010 - 5:55pm.
BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG FOR TRUTHOUT BY MARK KARLIN
Peggy Noonan, a speechwriter who helped craft the Disneyesque aura for Ronald Reagan, wrote a book, "What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era." It lavished praise on the "Gipper."
David Stockman, who was Reagan's budget director, has gone in another direction. He's renouncing deficit-building tax cuts, calling for their rollback.
"We've had a 30-year spree of really phony prosperity in this country," Stockman recently told Leslie Stahl on "60 Minutes."
Stockman derided the "anti-tax religion" of the GOP.
"Well it's become in a sense an absolute. Something that can't be questioned, something that's gospel, something that's sort of embedded into the catechism and so scratch the average Republican today and he'll say 'Tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts,'" Stockman told Stahl. He added, "To stand before the public and rub raw this anti-tax sentiment, the Republican Party, as much as it pains me to say this, should be ashamed of themselves."
In short, tax cuts provide the illusion to the American public that Social Security, Medicare, military spending and government funded public expenditures - such as highways - can be had without citizens paying a fair share.
As for the wealthy, Stockman was loaded for bear in another appearance, this one on ABC News: "Two years after the crisis on Wall Street, it has been announced that bonuses this year will be $144 billion, the highest in history. That's who's going to get this tax cut on the top, you know, 2 percent of the population. They don't need a tax cut. They don't deserve it."
When Stockman declares, "We're now becoming the banana republic [of] finance," wise men and women should listen.
After all, he was the person who put together the largest tax cuts in US history. He knows of what he speaks.
http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/11933
BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG FOR TRUTHOUT BY MARK KARLIN
Peggy Noonan, a speechwriter who helped craft the Disneyesque aura for Ronald Reagan, wrote a book, "What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era." It lavished praise on the "Gipper."
David Stockman, who was Reagan's budget director, has gone in another direction. He's renouncing deficit-building tax cuts, calling for their rollback.
"We've had a 30-year spree of really phony prosperity in this country," Stockman recently told Leslie Stahl on "60 Minutes."
Stockman derided the "anti-tax religion" of the GOP.
"Well it's become in a sense an absolute. Something that can't be questioned, something that's gospel, something that's sort of embedded into the catechism and so scratch the average Republican today and he'll say 'Tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts,'" Stockman told Stahl. He added, "To stand before the public and rub raw this anti-tax sentiment, the Republican Party, as much as it pains me to say this, should be ashamed of themselves."
In short, tax cuts provide the illusion to the American public that Social Security, Medicare, military spending and government funded public expenditures - such as highways - can be had without citizens paying a fair share.
As for the wealthy, Stockman was loaded for bear in another appearance, this one on ABC News: "Two years after the crisis on Wall Street, it has been announced that bonuses this year will be $144 billion, the highest in history. That's who's going to get this tax cut on the top, you know, 2 percent of the population. They don't need a tax cut. They don't deserve it."
When Stockman declares, "We're now becoming the banana republic [of] finance," wise men and women should listen.
After all, he was the person who put together the largest tax cuts in US history. He knows of what he speaks.
http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/11933
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