Some thoughts on our beloved American "freedoms"

I would rather have peace than "freedom" because I think I know what peace looks like.

Freedom, well:

I can't ever legally own a fire arm (convicted felon; involuntary mental health committments)

I can't consume a legally made, legally sold, legally purchased product in places of business where the business owners overwhelming preference is that I be able to consume this entirely legally made product in their establishment (cigarettes).

I cannot vote for a state or national official who will represent my interests in the state capital or in Washington DC (because such officials only represent corporate interests, and the interests of the wealthy elites)

If I were employed and making, say $50,000 a year, I would pay more in taxes (percentage basis - all taxes, including FIT, Social Security / Medicare, State, munincipal, sales) So I am not even free to keep as much of the money I make as a very much wealthier person (on a percentage basis)

Without a savings account nor a checking account, I am not free to get my checks cashed for free

When I was in the mental hospital, I was not free to request a change of doctors, the DR assigned to me told me the other doctor wouldn't take me

When my ex-wife took our son out of the country, in clear violation of a court order, I had no money, and could not afford to seek legal intervention to prevent her from violating the court order. I was not free to have the parenting rights that were guaranteed me in the divorce decree

Shall I go on? JUST WHAT freedoms are we talking about when we speak of being "Proud to be an American where at least I can be free ..."

The largest truth of 9-11 was this: that when our nation was under attack, the ONLY LINE OF DEFENSE our citizens had was our own citizens on Flight 93; not our military (the air force did not have the coordinates of any of the major city air ports), not our police, not our national guard, but citizens who took it upon themselves to GIVE THEIR LIVES to protect us on the ground.

Our government, and our military, and our intelligence gathering apparatus failed us so miserably on 9-11 that there should have been an uprising and a removal from office of the President and Vice President, the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of the CIA, the director of the FBI, the director of the DIA. These all should have been fired for negligence, incompetence, and non-feasance.

The Republican Party should have issued an apology to Bill Clinton for ever accusing him of his attempt to assassinate Bin Laden for being a political cover for the Lewinsky blow jobs. President Dick Cheney and the Smirking Chimp George W Bush whould have prostrated themselves on the floor in the show window of Macy's and kissed Bill Clinton's fat ass for having failed to heed Slick Willy's warnings about Bin Laden. Richard Clark should have been promoted to Director of the DIA and Michael Scheurer should have been promoted to head the CIA and tasked exclusively with killing Bin Laden.

And the Media should have offered a public policy for having been so biased in its coverage of Al Gore that it (they) were far more guilty of stealing the election from Gore than even the Supreme Court Jefkoffs (yes, including that egomaniacal piece of crap lady justice, Sandra Day O'Connor, who got her just deserts in retirement.

May 31, 2011 Non Means Non By MAUREEN DOWD PARIS

In Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris,” an American writer clambers into a yellow vintage Peugeot every night and is transported back to hobnob with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Picasso, Dali, Toulouse-Lautrec and Gertrude Stein in the shimmering movable feast. The star-struck aspiring novelist from Pasadena, played by Owen Wilson, gets to escape his tiresome fiancée and instead talk war and sex with Papa Hemingway, who barks “Have you ever shot a charging lion?” “Who wants to fight?” and “You box?”  

Many Frenchmen — not to mention foundering neighbor, the crepuscular Casanova Silvio Berlusconi — may be longing to see that Peugeot time machine come around a cobblestone corner. 

Some may yearn to return to a time when manly aggression was celebrated rather than suspected, especially after waking up Tuesday to see the remarkable front page of Libération — photos of six prominent French women in politics with the headline “Marre des machos,” or “Sick of machos.” 

“Is this the end of the ordinary misogyny that weighs on French political life?” the paper asked, adding: “Tongues have become untied.”  

In the wake of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal, as more Frenchwomen venture sexual harassment charges against elite men, the capital of seduction is reeling at the abrupt shift from can-can to can’t-can’t. Le Canard Enchaîné, a satirical weekly, still argues that  “News always stops at the bedroom door,” but many French seem ready to bid adieu to the maxim. 

As Libération editor Nicolas Demorand wrote in an editorial: “Now that voices have been freed, and the ceiling of glass and shame has been bashed in, other scandals may now arise.”  

After long scorning American Puritanism and political correctness on gender issues, the French are shocked to find themselves in a very American debate about the male exploitation/seduction of women, and the nature of consent.  

Nicolas Sarkozy is trying to reverse his spiraling fortunes by shaking off his old reputation as a jumpy and flashy Hot Rabbit and recasting himself as a sober and quiet family man. One newspaper noted that the enduring image from the G-8 summit meeting in Deauville was Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, in white smock, showing the other leaders’ wives her baby bump.  

The French president wasted no time jettisoning a junior minister — also the mayor of Draveil — who was accused of sexual assault by two former employees. Georges Tron resigned on Sunday after the two women in their mid-30s said they had gotten the courage to come forward after the Strauss-Kahn arrest.  

Tron, it seems, liked to give foot massages and sometimes more.  It got to the point where some women would wear boots if they knew Monsieur Masseur was coming to a meeting.  

“Yes, my client is a reflexologist,” riposted Tron’s lawyer, Olivier Schnerb. “He’s never hidden it. He has given conferences at the Lion’s Club. It’s a healing treatment.”  

In Le Journal du Dimanche, Valérie Toranian, the editor of Elle, wrote about the puncturing of France’s “Latin culture of seduction”: “We laugh about our Italian neighbors, but the stone today is in our garden.” (She probably didn’t want to use a shoe-on-the-other-foot metaphor given the foot fetishist on the loose.)  

On Tuesday, Libération presented interviews with a parade of women who poured out long-stifled grievances about their paternalistic culture: How they feel they must wear pants to work to fend off leering; how they’re tired of men tu-ing instead of vous-ing and making comments like “O.K., but just because you have pretty eyes”; how they’re fed up with married pols who come to Paris three days a week and sleep with their assistants; how, as Aurélie Filipetti, a socialist representative, complained, male pols and journalists squat on 80 percent of the political space. 

Filipetti remembers hearing a male representative say during a ceremony, in front of three female representatives, “Hunting is like women. You always regret the shots you didn’t take.”  

Corinne Lepage, a former environment minister, talked about the de trop dirty jokes, recalling how once, when a female representative mentioned a rape, a male colleague called out: “With her face, it’s not going to happen to her.”  

Nicole Guedj, a lawyer and former minister, said wistfully of  male colleagues: “One thinks, ‘I wish you wouldn’t just look at me. I wish you would listen to me.’ ”  

Roselyne Bachelot, a government minister, warned about lechers: “Something important has happened in these last few days. The lifting of a very real omertà, which had been reinforced by a legal arsenal that protected private life. I think that public men have understood that the respect of privacy now has some limits.”  

Getting French men to change will still, she said, be pushing up “le rocher de Sisyphe.”

136 Catching up with MoDo: February 12, 2011 Simply the Worst By MAUREEN DOWD WASHINGTON

Donald Rumsfeld is starting to make Robert McNamara look good.

An interesting premise which says a lot, and requires a LOT of historical knowledge of the American invasion and occupation for Vie Nam to be able to evaluate MoDo's arguments.  This is assuredly meaty stuff.

At least McNamara felt sorry at the end for all those lives and limbs lost because of his colossal misjudgments and cretinous refusal to admit mistakes.

“We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose,” a penitent McNamara said.

An extremely well-chosen comment from McNamara - one that perhaps ought to introduce every grade-school, junior high school, and senior high school 20th Century American History text book.

By contrast, when Diane Sawyer asked Rumsfeld last week if he ever revisited decisions that cost lives, he blandly replied, “Well, you know, in a war, many things cost lives.”

The banality of evil (as Hannah Berent wrote of Richard Milhouse Nixon).

Goodness, gracious, stuff happens.

As a Republican congressman in the Johnson era and a Nixon White House official, Rummy had a front-row seat to the ego-driven bungling on Vietnam. But unlike McNamara, who said that the U.S. repeated Vietnam’s moral, political, economic and cultural mistakes in Iraq, Rumsfeld is still blinded by ego.

Actually, we don't know why Rumsfeld holds the world views he holds and it is quite wrong for MoDo to inpute motive.  It is enough to know what Rumsfeld does, what he says, and to see how much consistency exists between these two loci to decide matters.

As part of his “Je ne regret rien pas” book tour, the 78-year-old former defense secretary stopped by the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday, where he got the group’s annual “Defender of the Constitution” award. Only another person with such an ironic spin on the phrase “Defender of the Constitution” could present the award, of course, so Dick Cheney popped by to give it to his old pal.

Such delightful turnings of phrases.

Cheney’s entrance music was Tina Turner’s “Simply the Best,” also favored by Ricky Gervais for motivational speeches in the British version of “The Office.” When supporters of Ron and Rand Paul heckled the crusty pair — yelling “draft dodger” at Cheney, “Where’s bin Laden?” at Rumsfeld, and “war criminal” at both — Cheney blithely ordered them to “Sit down and shut up.”

Noting that his friend was both the youngest and oldest defense secretary, Cheney said, “Maybe if we give him a third term he’ll get it right.”

Doubtful. Rummy was still full of vinegar as he taunted President Obama for the conservatives.

Looking at the administration’s many “reversals of their announced policies on national security issues — Guantánamo Bay, military commissions, indefinite detention, CIA drone strikes,” he said, it makes me wonder if Dick has had more influence on President Obama than the people that got him elected.”

 CLEARLY, the practices of the Cheney administration have been embraced by the Obammie adminnie.

He is still oblivious about how wrong it was to shunt aside Afghanistan and goose up reasons to go careering into Iraq, which he felt had easier-to-hit targets and easier-to-find villains. He doesn’t agree with the “If you break it, you own it” theory. He thinks you can break it and just leave and not get bogged down in trying to build democratic dream countries.

Rummy’s memoir, “Known and Unknown,” is an unnerving reminder of how the Iraq hawks took crazy conditionals and turned them into urgent imperatives to justify what the defense chief termed “anticipatory self-defense.”

Lest we forget, the press, the media, ALL jumped upon the cause of war against the godless muslims.

At “Rumsfeld.com,” the author has put up an archive of records and memos. One, marked “SECRET” and declassified last month at his request, is dated Sept. 9, 2002. That was after his P.R. roll-out to the March 2003 Iraq invasion was under way.

The subject line reads “WMD.” Secretary Rumsfeld is sending a secret report that he received a few days earlier to Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, asking: “Please take a look at this material as to what we don’t know about WMD. It is big.”

The attachment is from Major Gen. Glen Shaffer, then the director for intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense, responding to Rummy’s request to know the “unknowns” about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

“We range from 0% to about 75% knowledge on various aspects of their program,” Shaffer wrote. Unfortunately, the 0% had to do with actual weapons.

That's not what I would call the kind of "certainty" you want to have when you lead a nation into the cesspool of war in the 21st century.

“Our assessments rely heavily on analytic assumptions and judgment rather than hard evidence,” the report said. “The evidentiary base is particularly sparse for Iraqi nuclear programs.”

Otherwise known as "SWAG"  Some Wild Ass Guess.

It added: “We don’t know with any precision how much we don’t know.” And continued: “We do not know if they have purchased, or attempted to purchase, a nuclear weapon. We do not know with confidence the location of any nuclear weapon-related facilities. Our knowledge of the Iraqi nuclear weapons program is based largely — perhaps 90% — on analysis of imprecise intelligence.”

On biological weapons: “We cannot confirm the identity of any Iraqi facilities that produce, test, fill, or store biological weapons,” the report said, adding: “We believe Iraq has 7 mobile BW agent production plants but cannot locate them ... our knowledge of how and where they are produced is probably up to 90% incomplete.”

On chemical weapons: “We cannot confirm the identity of any Iraqi sites that produce final chemical agent.” And on ballistic missile programs they had “little missile-specific data.”

Somehow that was twisted into “a slam-dunk.” You go to war with the army you have, but the facts you want.

And, any competent newspaper person could have called this within 365 hours of the attack on the U.S.S. Liberty!

 

135 by The Nation On Memorial Day, America Should Honor Her Troops by Bringing Them Home by John Nichols

May 30, 2011

It is unfortunate but true that on this Memorial Day -- when we pause to honor those Americans who have fought the good fights against British colonialism, the sin of slavery and the menace of fascism -- U.S. troops are currently bogged down in a quagmire of George Bush's creation in Afghanistan and an continuing mission of Bush's creation in Iraq.

Appallingly, Barack Obama has maintained Bush's undeclared wars of occupation. And he has now steered the United States into another fight with Libya.

Everything about these undeclared and open-ended conflicts is at odds with the vision of the founders of the American experiment -- who generally shared James Madison's view that "permanent war" posed the greatest threat to liberty -- and the serious intent of wars against kings, slaveholders and fascists.

Soldiers fight wars because of a sense of duty. And the soldiers involved in America's current conflicts are good men and women. But these are not good fights.

Nor are their necessary fights for the U.S. military.

It is for this reason that veterans of these undeclared wars of whim have organized so well and wisely to end them, in groups such as Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War, which is mounting a Memorial Day campaign to highlight the wrongheaded practice of deploying traumatized troops,  and the currently organizing Afghanistan Veterans Against the War project.

There are arguments to be made, some of them sound, some of them not, that people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya have reasons to be fighting. But the fights are their own -- not America's.

John Quincy Adams summed the sentiment up 190 years ago when, in an address to Congress, the then-Secretary of State declared that: "[America's] glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace."

"If the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world, the first observers of nutation and aberration, the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and Shrapnel shells, should find their hearts disposed to enquire what has America done for the benefit of mankind? Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government. America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity," explained Adams. "She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.... She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit."

The cynicism of the previous administration, which was led by a president whose family pulled strings to keep him out of the Vietnam War and a vice president who dodged the draft five times during that conflict, was beyond contempt. But so, too, is the cynicism of many Democrats who, despite their disdain for the failed foreign policies of Bush and Cheney, continue to echo the empty rhetoric of the administration when it comes to the debate about how best to end the war.

The best way to "support the troops" who have been placed in harm's way in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya is to bring them home.

Congress considered the prospect last week and more than 200 members of the House voted for a proposal to begin taking steps to exit Afghanistan. Unfortunately, a few more members opposed that necessary step.

The growing opposition to the misguided mission in Afghanistan, as well as the clear opposition to any expansion of the Libya mission, is the encouraging news of this Memorial Day.

America is growing weary of endless war.

Wars of whim, fought without proper congressional declaration and without exit strategies, are not fights for democracy.

Fights for democracy can only be considered successful when American democracy is open and vibrant enough to allow for a realistic discussion of the nation's circumstance. Those "my-country-right-or-wrong" politicians and pundits who would shut down dissent on Memorial Day, or any other day, make a mockery of the oath to defend a constitution that protects the right to speak truth to power and to assemble for the purpose of petitioning for the redress of grievances.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr's Vietnam War-era counsel to Americans holds true this Memorial Day.

Americans who love their country and its promise must move beyond "the prophesying of smooth patriotism" toward "a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history."

No honest reading of the history of America's founding, or of recent events, can led to a conclusion that the undeclared wars of the moment are justified.

Americans have fought and died in pursuit of what they -- and most Americans -- believed to be noble and necessary causes. It is right to celebrate their memory. But is right, as well, to recognize that not all wars are noble and necessary.

Making the distinction between wars that are unavoidable and wars that should have been avoided (and that can now be ended) honors all veterans and all soldiers, as does a recognition that it is time to begin establishing practices and policies that err on the side of making peace -- as opposed to endless conflict.

That's a message that Michael McPhearson, the former executive director of Veterans for Peace and a co-convener of United for Peace and Justice brings to the table this Memorial Day.

"To truly honor fallen soldiers requires self-reflection, questions and action," says the veteran who served as a field artillery officer in the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division during the first Gulf War. "We must reflect on our part in their deaths. Are we allowing the blood of soldiers and civilians to be spilled in war because we are not willing to do the hard work of peace making? Hard work that may mean we must change our lifestyles, consume less and learn more about the world around us. Are we prepared to take any responsibility for our nation’s relationships with other countries? Are we willing to question our government's foreign policies and demand a change from domination to collaboration? Are we willing to take action to change ourselves so that our personal behavior and attitude reflects peace making rather than acceptance of war?"

Americans will have plenty of answers to those questions. But the first ought to be that, on this Memorial Day, the time has come to honor the troops by bringing them home.

© 2011 The Nation

John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation and associate editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. His most recent book is The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition. A co-founder of the media reform organization Free Press, Nichols is co-author with Robert W. McChesney of The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again and Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy. Nichols' other books include: Dick: The Man Who is President and The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders' Cure for Royalism.

more John Nichols

134 The Sky Really Is Falling by Chris Hedges

The rapid and terrifying acceleration of global warming, which is disfiguring the ecosystem at a swifter pace than even the gloomiest scientific studies predicted a few years ago, has been confronted by the power elite with equal parts of self-delusion. There are those, many of whom hold elected office, who dismiss the science and empirical evidence as false. There are others who accept the science surrounding global warming but insist that the human species can adapt. Our only salvation—the rapid dismantling of the fossil fuel industry—is ignored by both groups. And we will be led, unless we build popular resistance movements and carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience, toward collective self-annihilation by dimwitted Pied Pipers and fools.Global climate change has made for freak storms and more intense weather. The result is Hurricane Katrina, this month’s devastating tornadoes and floods, and routine forest fires in California. Here, a tornado touches down in Iowa in 2008. (AP / Lori Mehmen)

Those who concede that the planet is warming but insist we can learn to live with it are perhaps more dangerous than the buffoons who decide to shut their eyes. It is horrifying enough that the House of Representatives voted 240-184 this spring to defeat a resolution that said that “climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for public health and welfare.” But it is not much of an alternative to trust those who insist we can cope with the effects while continuing to burn fossil fuels.

Horticulturalists are busy planting swamp oaks and sweet gum trees all over Chicago to prepare for weather that will soon resemble that of Baton Rouge. That would be fine if there was a limit to global warming in sight. But without plans to rapidly dismantle the fossil fuel industry, something no one in our corporate state is contemplating, the heat waves of Baton Rouge will be a starting point for a descent that will ultimately make cities like Chicago unlivable. The false promise of human adaptability to global warming is peddled by the polluters’ major front group, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which informed the Environmental Protection Agency that “populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations.” This bizarre theory of adaptability has been embraced by the Obama administration as it prepares to exploit the natural resources in the Arctic. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced recently that melting of sea ice “will result in more shipping, fishing and tourism, and the possibility to develop newly accessible oil and gas reserves.” Now that’s something to look forward to.

“It is good that at least those guys are taking it seriously, far more seriously than the federal government is taking it,” said the author and environmental activist Bill McKibben of the efforts in cities such as Chicago to begin to adapt to warmer temperatures. “At least they understand that they have some kind of problem coming at them. But they are working off the science of five or six years ago, which is still kind of the official science that the International Climate Change negotiations are working off of. They haven’t begun to internalize the idea that the science has shifted sharply. We are no longer talking about a long, slow, gradual, linear warming, but something that is coming much more quickly and violently. Seven or eight years ago it made sense to talk about putting permeable concrete on the streets. Now what we are coming to realize is that the most important adaptation we can do is to stop putting carbon in the atmosphere. If we don’t, we are going to produce temperature rises so high that there is no adapting to them.”

The Earth has already begun to react to our hubris. Freak weather unleashed deadly tornados in Joplin, Mo., and Tuscaloosa, Ala. It has triggered wildfires that have engulfed large tracts in California, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas. It has brought severe droughts to the Southwest, parts of China and the Amazon. It has caused massive flooding along the Mississippi as well as in Australia, New Zealand, China and Pakistan. It is killing off the fish stocks in the oceans and obliterating the polar ice caps. Steadily rising sea levels will eventually submerge coastal cities, islands and some countries. These disturbing weather patterns presage a world where it will be harder and harder to sustain human life. Massive human migrations, which have already begun, will create chaos and violence. India is building a 4,000-kilometer fence along its border with Bangladesh to, in part, hold back the refugees who will flee if Bangladesh is submerged. There are mounting food shortages and sharp price increases in basic staples such as wheat as weather patterns disrupt crop production. The failed grain harvests in Russia, China and Australia, along with the death of the winter wheat crop in Texas, have, as McKibben points out, been exacerbated by the inability of Midwestern farmers to plant corn in water-logged fields. These portents of an angry Gaia are nothing compared to what will follow if we do not swiftly act.

“We are going to have to adapt a good deal,” said McKibben, with whom I spoke by phone from his home in Vermont. “It is going to be a century that calls for being resilient and durable. Most of that adaptation is going to take the form of economies getting smaller and lower to the ground, local food, local energy, things like that. But that alone won’t do it, because the scale of change we are now talking about is so great that no one can adapt to it. Temperatures have gone up one degree so far and that has been enough to melt the Arctic. If we let it go up three or four degrees, the rule of thumb the agronomists go by is every degree Celsius of temperature rise represents about a 10 percent reduction in grain yields. If we let it go up three or four degrees we are really not talking about a planet that can support a civilization anything like the one we’ve got.”

“I have sympathy for those who are trying hard to figure out how to adapt, but they are behind the curve of the science by a good deal,” he said. “I have less sympathy for the companies that are brainwashing everyone along the line ‘We’re taking small steps here and there to improve.’ The problem, at this point, is not going to be dealt with by small steps. It is going to be dealt with by getting off fossil fuel in the next 10 or 20 years or not at all.”

“The most appropriate thing going on in Chicago right now is that Greenpeace occupied [on Thursday] the coal-fired power plant in Chicago,” he said. “That’s been helpful. It reminded people what the real answers are. We’re going to see more civil disobedience. I hope we are. I am planning hard for some stuff this summer.”

“The cast that we are about is essentially political and symbolic,” McKibben admitted. “There is no actual way to shut down the fossil fuel system with our bodies. It is simply too big. It’s far too integrated in everything we do. The actions have to be symbolic, and the most important part of that symbolism is to make it clear to the onlookers that those of us doing this kind of thing are not radical in any way. We are conservatives. The real radicals in this scenario are people who are willing to fundamentally alter the composition of the atmosphere. I can’t think of a more radical thing that any human has ever thought of doing. If it wasn’t happening it would be like the plot from a Bond movie.”

“The only way around this is to defeat the system, and the name of that system is the fossil fuel industry, which is the most profitable industry in the world by a large margin,” McKibben said. “Fighting it is extraordinarily difficult. Maybe you can’t do it. The only way to do it is to build a movement big enough to make a difference. And that is what we are trying desperately to do with 350.org. It is something we should have done 20 years ago, instead of figuring that we were going to fight climate change by convincing political elites that they should do something about this problem. It is a tactic that has not worked."

"One of our big targets this year is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is the biggest front group for fossil fuel there is,” he said. “We are figuring out how to take them on. I don’t think they are worried about us yet. And maybe they are right not to be because they’ve got so much money they’re invulnerable.”

“There are huge decisive battles coming,” he said. “This year the Obama administration has to decide whether it will grant a permit or not for this giant pipeline to run from the tar sands of Alberta down to the refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. That is like a 1,500-mile fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet. We have to figure out how to keep that from happening. The Obama administration, very sadly, a couple of months ago opened 750 million tons of western coal under federal land for mining. That was a disgrace. But they still have to figure out how to get it to port so they can ship it to China, which is where the market for it is. We are trying hard to keep that from happening. I’m on my way to Bellingham, Wash., next week because there is a plan for a deep-water port in Bellingham that would allow these giant freighters to show up and collect that coal.”

“In moral terms it’s all our personal responsibility and we should be doing those things,” McKibben said when I asked him about changing our own lifestyles to conserve energy. “But don’t confuse that with having much of an impact on the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere. You can’t make the math work one house or one campus at a time. We should do those things. I’ve got a little plaque for having built the most energy-efficient house in Vermont the year we built it. I’ve got solar panels everywhere. But I don’t confuse myself into thinking that that’s actually doing very much. This argument is a political argument. I spend much of my life on airplanes spewing carbon behind me as we try to build a global movement. Either we are going to break the power of the fossil fuel industry and put a price on carbon or the planet is going to heat past the point where we can deal with it.”

“It goes far beyond party affiliation or ideology,” he said. “Fossil fuel undergirds every ideology we have. Breaking with it is going to be a traumatic and difficult task. The natural world is going to continue to provide us, unfortunately, with many reminders about why we have to do that. Sooner or later we will wise up. The question is all about that sooner or later.”

“I’d like people to go to climatedirectaction.org and sign up,” McKibben said. “We are going to be issuing calls for people to be involved in civil disobedience. I’d like people to join in this campaign against the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It’s very easy to sign up. If you don’t own a little business yourself you probably shop at 10 or 20 of them a week. It’s very easy to sign those guys up to say the U.S. Chamber doesn’t speak for me. We can’t take away their [the Chamber’s] money, but we can take away some of their respectability. I would like people to demonstrate their solidarity with people all around the world in this fight. The next big chance to do that will be Sept. 24, a huge global day of action that we’re calling ‘Moving Planet.’ It will be largely bicycle based, because the bicycle is one of the few tools that both rich and poor use and because it is part of the solution we need. On that day we will be delivering demands via bicycle to every capital and statehouse around the world.”

“I wish there was some easy ‘end around,’ some backdoor through which we could go to get done what needs to be done,” he said. “But that’s not going to happen. That became clear at Copenhagen and last summer when the U.S. Senate refused to take a vote on the most mild, tepid climate legislation there could have been. We are going to have to build a movement that pushes the fossil fuel industry aside. I don’t know whether that’s possible. If you were to bet you might well bet we will lose. We have been losing for two decades. But you are not allowed to make that bet. The only moral action, when the worst thing that ever happened in the world is happening, is to try and figure out how to change those odds.”

“At least they knew they were going to win,” he said of the civil rights movement. “They didn’t know when, but they knew they were going to win, that the tide of history was on their side. But the arch of the physical universe appears to be short and appears to bend towards heat. We’ve got to win quickly if we’re going to win. We’ve already passed the point where we’re going to stop global warming. It has already warmed a degree and there is another degree in the pipeline from carbon already emitted. The heat gets held in the ocean for a while, but it’s already there. We’ve already guaranteed ourselves a miserable century. The question is whether it’s going to be an impossible one.”

© 2011 TruthDig.com

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.  His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

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133 CommonDreams.org Dispatches from the End of Empire by David Michael Green

Published on Monday, May 30, 2011 by 

 

Well folks, there’s good news, and there’s bad news in America today.
The good news is that people seem to be waking up just a bit to what’s being done to them.
The bad news is that it really is just a bit that they’re waking up.
The good news is that the Republican Party is showing some serious signs of preparing for self-immolation.
The bad news is that that leaves us with Barack Obama and the other Republican Party as an ‘alternative’.
Such is the state of America at the end of empire.
This week, one of the reddest districts in the country voted to send a Democrat to Congress.  There was a special election to fill the seat, after the highly moralistic married Republican who had been holding it previously got busted sending out hunky topless pictures of himself as he trolled for a little babe action on Craigslist.  What a shock to find that those who lecture us incessantly about our sexual morality turn out to be, er, somewhat hypocritical about it all, eh?  If you ask me, it’s one of the few iron laws of political science.  You can bet the house that any politician who makes it his or her business to speak and legislate on your sexuality is, in fact, secretly one of the most twisted vines in the jungle.  Count on it.
But back to our story.  A Democrat won the special election in a hugely Republican-leaning district simply by pointing out that her opponent had said that she would have joined almost every other Republican in the House in voting for Paul Ryan’s Medicare Massacre.  Interestingly, that alone was enough to destroy the GOP candidate in what was otherwise going to be a slam-dunk victory.  Then, amazingly, Harry Reid actually stumbled accidentally into going on the offensive for the first time in his life, and forced a vote on the same legislation in the Senate, the very next day.  Almost every Republican voted for it there as well.
But they sure didn’t want to.  Talk about your proverbial rock and a hard place.  Your Scylla and Charybdis.  These guys are really in a bad way.  And, remarkably, because of their own ideological inanity, they are poised to lose a presidential election in 2012 to a guy who by then will have presided over four years of vast unemployment, high gasoline prices, endless wars and unpopular legislation.  I mean, think about it.  Just how ugly do you have to be to pull off that feat?  And all this after having won a crushing victory over Democrats just six months ago.
The problem for Republicans, of course, is Republicans.  The problem is that they take their rhetoric and their ideology sorta seriously.  Well, that’s fine, but sooner or later one would expect Americans to cease hoisting themselves up for their regular voluntary piñata beating.  Yes, even in America, where there seems to be almost no imaginable limitation to the depths of political stupidity, you’d think the laws of political physics would ultimately kick in, and, if nothing else, naked self-interest would be enough to shut down the national rape factory that is today’s GOP.
For a while there, I was wondering if we hadn’t somehow shot through the wormhole into some alternative universe where gravity was inverted or something.  As it turns out, what it was instead was that inane voters were more than happy to vote against “wasteful spending”, provided that term referred to welfare for negroes and foreign aid for, well, foreigners.  Once you start talking about their own gubmint bennies, well then that’s a whole ‘nuther story, brother.
Which brings us from the laws of physics to the laws of mathematics.  Even the magic of religion is not enough to turn lead into gold, try as one desperately might.  If you insist on spending even more for ‘defense’ than we already do, and if you insist on cutting tax revenues even more than we already have, and if you agree that defaulting on the interest owed from previous borrowing would be a very bad idea, you then come up headlong against a very stiff and well constructed wall otherwise known as basic math.  Even by slashing social spending mercilessly, you still cannot remotely balance the budget given the above sacred cow assumptions as your starting point.  Indeed, since the Ryan plan calls for slashing taxes even more than they already have been these last thirty years, what Republicans never tell you is that – according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office analysis – it will actually produce the precise opposite effect to that which is being claimed in order to sell it.  It will actually increase debt, not lower it.  That’s right.  When all is said and done, and the smoke clears, seniors will be far sicker and far deader, in exchange for which the national debt will have only grown fatter.  Such a deal.
But the thing for the GOP today is that they have become so rabid that they cannot divorce themselves from their own litmus tests and fairytales, and they are now eating themselves up from within, like the rapacious cancer they in fact truly are.  What can you possibly say, this side of Lewis Carroll or Salvador Dali, about a party in which the likes of Newt Gingrich is drummed out for being insufficiently regressive, and just plain lacking in an adequate degree of meanness?
Gingrich, a veritable cartoon of what it means to be a regressive today, pushed the self-destruct button on his own presidential election campaign when he called the Ryan plan “too radical”.  It’s not like the guy all of a sudden found morality or something, notwithstanding (actually, despite) his newly-adopted Catholicism he is placing at the center of his campaign.  Gingrich is absolutely capable of being, saying or doing anything in the endless quest to salve his boundless personal insecurities by grabbing the White House.  So, rest assured that he didn’t make those remarks because he recently got clobbered by the honesty stick or anything like that.  What he did was to make a political calculation that killing Medicare was an electoral loser, at least in a general election.  He didn’t need New York’s 26th district to tell him that, though ironically he might not have gotten mugged so violently by his own school of pirana if he had waited to make the same remarks today, rather than a week ago.
Might.  Quite likely, though, it still wouldn’t matter.  There’s a certain powerful suicidal tendency to regressive politics today (which – by the way – suits me just fine).  They are, of course, completely divorced from logic, empirical evidence, and, therefore, reality, and completely wedded to dogmatic faith in their magical incantations.  That’s why you have to support the Ryan plan to have a prayer at the Republican nomination, even though it actually increases deficits, not lowers them.  Math no longer matters.  Objective analysis is for socialists.  Truth is for pissing on when urinals are otherwise unavailable.
Which brings us to an interesting little field test of just how insane America truly is that is likely to play out over the next several years.  The nature of this experiment can be boiled down to one more or less simple proposition and one more or less simple question.  The former is that it is increasingly clear that no even remotely sane (or, more accurately, honest) person can hope to win the Republican nomination for president.  Increasingly, this logic also applies to other races down the ticket, so that even a far-right senator like Bob Bennett can get primaried out of existence for lack of ideological purity.  This is why we’re seeing the astonishingly hilarious sight of human prostitution machines like Mitt Romney or Tim Pawlenty constantly trying on extremely ill-fitting gladiator costumes, and asking us to forget everything about their histories, in a truly pathetic effort to placate the tea party voters of the GOP, who (especially in early states like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina) will be picking the Republican nominee.  Get used to it.  This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.  This is the sort of electorate for whom believing that Barack Obama was actually born in America makes you suspiciously Marxist.
So that’s the premise.  No one who isn’t as regressive as The Inquisition and as caustic as sulphuric acid will emerge with the Republican presidential nomination.  The much beloved (in hagiographic form, at least) Ronald Reagan could never satisfy these monsters, so tame was he in comparison.  So the question then becomes, can such a person hope to win the presidency in the general election?  And that is the aforementioned test of American sanity.
The last decade – and really, the last three – have not been so good in that respect.  I confess that I have spent most of the last dozen years or so with my jaw firmly attached to the floor, incredulous at the idiocy of which Americans are capable.  From impeachment, to Election 2000, to the tax cuts, to Iraq, torture and beyond, I have just been stunned at how unenlightened a people we are capable of being.  And it’s not a simple matter of policy preference discrepancies, either.  It isn’t just that I prefer Path A while others prefer the equally legitimate Path B.  I’m sorry, but this is about national hallucination.  And, worse, we have mostly been doing this tripping during times of relative prosperity, which raises the question of what the country is capable of when things get worse.  Like now, for instance.
It’s hard to get a good reading on America these days.  We are, more than anything, in an extended period of political oscillation which reflects, I think, a fairly profound fundamental dissatisfaction with the direction of the country.  In 2002, the electorate went strongly for the Republicans and their fear-mongering campaign against the same foreign bogeymen GOP administrations had just gotten done ignoring or, earlier, even supporting.  By 2004, this bit was already getting so tedious that a pair of turds like the Johns Kerry and Edwards could almost win the election (and actually may well have, but for the theft of Ohio) against an incumbent president fighting two wars, bathing in the ‘heroic’ glow of 9/11 and presiding over a decent economy.  The floodgates then opened in 2006 and 2008, with crushing defeats of Bushism.  But these were then quickly followed by the Democratic train wreck of 2010, which seemed a century removed from the election of just two years earlier.
What this represents, I think, is a sort of bratty toddler of an American body politic, badly in need of a diaper change.  The little bastard knows that it is unhappy, though it can’t quite discern why.  It is agitated and acting up in the name of change, but it wants somebody else to take care of the matter.  This country is fighting three or four wars at the moment (or is it more? – I’m a professor of international relations, and I can’t even keep an accurate count), suffering through the worst and most prolonged economic crisis since the Great Depression, is plunged heavily into debt, and is (not) grappling with the über-crisis of global warming – and that’s all just for starters – and yet there were more votes cast recently for American Idol than there were in the 2008 presidential election.  Need we say more?
Apparently people are angry, but not angry enough to roll their obese American physiques off the couch, turn off the TV’s latest episode of “This Or That Cloned Breathless Police Drama!”, and actually take ownership of their democracy to the extent necessary to learn about issues and demand credible solutions.  Such a combination of angry petulance and a lazy desire to have someone else wave a magic wand and solve the problem is, history has made emphatically clear, quite a fine prescription for disaster.  Can you say, “Man on horseback”?
This is the main reason – among very, very many – that the Democratic Party generally and Barack Obama particularly are so disastrous.  If no one provides real, constructive solutions, the scary monsters of the right will gladly offer the fake, catastrophic ones.  The most charitable reading of Obama is that he seems to believe that affability is what people want in their president.  Maybe in the era when Leave It To Beaver was the top show on national television that was true, but certainly not today.  People want solutions to personal and national problems, and they want security above all, which has been rapidly eroding under their feet.  Hence the electoral oscillations of the last decade, and hence the danger of the present moment.
Very few people will be voting for Obama in 2012, even though he’ll get lots of votes.  Many of those will be much more against his embarrassingly lame opponent than for his embarrassingly lame self.  His two greatest assets in that election will be the Republicans of yesterday and the Republicans of today.  Even in a society as politically immature as is America, there does still seem to be some residual memory of the former, in the form of the national horror show known as Bush/Cheney, though still not enough to prevent the remarkable amnesia/dementia of Election 2010.
As to the present, the only folks on the planet capable of making Obama look like a political giant just happen to be the same folks going for the Republican Party presidential nomination.  Gingrich?  Palin?  Romney?  These are like the rejected extras for the midget riot scene from “Banana Republic II: The Empire Strikes Out”.  You know you’re talking about a real stinker of a party when everyone’s lamenting the fact that Mitch Daniels has decided not to run for president.  Apart from the fact that he’s bald, has bad skin, is about five foot five, and his wife ditched him to run off with some other guy, who she then later dumped to return to Mitch, somebody was bound to mention during the campaign the slightly inconvenient fact that the guy who would have been leading ‘the party of fiscal responsibility’ happened to previously preside over a full doubling of the national debt as George W. Bush’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget.  If a loser like this creates a massive vacuum at the top of the GOP by choosing not run, you know you’re looking at a sad sack of a party, indeed.  And you are.
I don’t think Obama’s prospects are great for 2012, though they are probably good for precisely this reason of the nature of his opposition.  But I’d say the thing to fear is not so much 2012 as what comes after.  Obama is not about solutions, unless, of course, you happen to be a partner at Goldman Sachs.  So the oscillations will continue.  People will vote for the party not in power – even if they just were a mere two years ago, and even if their solutions are laughable – to try for yet another cheap fix.  But it won’t work, of course, and each round will breed further desperation.  Which will breed further willingness to accept radical and radically destructive ‘solutions’.  If you think I’m exaggerating about this, just look at the progression within the Republican Party from Gerry Ford to Ronald Reagan to Newt Gingrich to George W. Bush to Sarah Palin.  Trust me, you don’t wanna know what comes after that.
But the choices are all merely relative when the empire’s in decline.  An Obama victory over the forces of madness would represent a mere postponement of the reckoning definitively headed our way, and it’s a very angry fellow indeed.  The bad news is that even if the GOP loses, it still wins.  Only it’s called the Democratic Party instead.
It may be the Wisconsin and New York’s 26th represent a liberal spring in America, or a long-delayed realization that regressives are not the friends of the middle class.  I doubt it.  More likely, certain stupid and selfish voters simply revolted from the mantra of slashing government spending when it became their turn to face the meat axe themselves.
But at this point in the history of what has now become a rapidly sinking kleptocracy of a polity, I’d happily settle for even the pathetic politics of self-interest.
Anything that could slow the national pillaging by America’s oligarchs would represent a step in the right (that is to say, left) direction.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (mailto:dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.

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132 by OregonLive.com Obama's War Policy More and More Like Bush's by Anthony Gregory

Published on Monday, May 30, 2011  

After more than two years, President Obama's national security policy looks all too familiar: like President Bush's policy. (This ought to not surprise anywone who paid attention;  if you read the BlackCommentator or the Black Agenda Report, you would have known the anguish felt by the intellectual leaders of the black community at how Barack Obama was going to coopt Bush's wars and run them LONGER AND HOTTER AND EVER MORE EXPENSIVE!!  You remember the Bush doctrine? Its most prominent tenet was the policy of preventive war -- using the U.S. military to eliminate potentially dangerous enemies, rather than using military force only when the United States is clearly threatened.

Generally speaking, the Bush administration argued that deposing unfriendly regimes and promoting democracy both militarily and diplomatically were in America's long-term best interests. President Obama not only has embraced this approach, stressing it again in his May 19 speech on the Middle East, he's gone further: increasing military spending, expanding the war in Afghanistan, handing off more of the mission to contractors and mercenaries, and bombing Libya without anything resembling a threat to the United States or even a nod from Congress -- in violation of the War Powers Act.

Consider the budget. President Obama's first defense budget, for fiscal year 2010, was $685.1 billion, if we include the "supplemental" funds for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars (a budget gimmick he had promised not to use). This was 3 percent higher than in the previous year.

The Obama administration upped the ante again for FY 2011, requesting a base budget of $548.9 billion, plus $159.3 billion for Afghanistan and Iraq, for a total of $708.3 billion. That was before the bombing of Libya, which already has cost some $750 million, Defense Secretary Robert Gates revealed on May 12 at Camp Lejeune, N.C.

The president has requested "only" $670.9 billion for fiscal year 2012 -- but the Department of Defense baseline request was actually raised from $548.9 billion to $553.1 billion. The overall decrease comes from a projected cut in operational costs for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Yet, according to the Congressional Research Service, Afghanistan will still cost $113.7 billion compared with the $43.5 billion spent in 2008, President Bush's last year. Iraq will be much cheaper than before, but this decline was already in the works. In late 2008, President Bush signed the Status of Forces Agreement setting the Iraq drawdown in motion. If anything, President Obama has slowed down the withdrawal, and is now petitioning Iraq to stay past 2011. Meanwhile, the stepped-up war in Afghanistan has offset much of the savings we could have expected in Iraq.

And this is just the financial cost. Last year 559 American troops died in Iraq and Afghanistan -- significantly more than the 469 who died during Bush's final year in office.

Moreover, a growing number of civilian contractors also have fallen. In the first half of 2010, for example, 250 contractors reportedly died in Iraq and Afghanistan -- more than the 235 military personnel who fell during the same period.

As a senator and presidential candidate, Barack Obama criticized President Bush's war policies. But instead of changing course, President Obama has tripled down in Afghanistan, widened the war into Pakistan, multiplied the drone attacks, bombed Yemen and Somalia, and started an undeclared NATO war in Libya.

On surveillance questions, presidential war powers, Guantanamo, detention policy and habeas corpus, he has similarly stayed the course, or even expanded Bush's precedents.

Almost none of this had anything to do with killing Osama bin Laden.

Those who voted for Obama in 2008, expecting a shift in defense policy, must face a sad fact: The United States would have likely spent less money and spilled less American and foreign blood in its wars had the president simply continued on the path charted by President Bush. Instead, we now have Bush Plus.

© 2011 OregonLive

Anthony Gregory is research editor at The Independent Institute and author of the coming report "What Price War? Afghanistan, Iraq and the Costs of Conflict."