Tuesday, May 31, 2011

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
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Monday, May 30, 2011

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
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
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
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131 by ThisCantBeHappening Don’t Blame America’s Debt Crisis on Social Security and Medicare (Especially on Memorial Day) by Dave Lindorff

Published on Monday, May 30, 2011 
Amid all the nonsense and gobbledegook that has been written about banking industry and about the economic slump during the last four years of the global financial crisis, New York Times reporter Gretchen Morgenson has stood out both for the clarity of her analysis, and for her willingness to go after the guilty parties in the political and especially the banking system, naming names and calling it as she sees it.
So it was kind of disappointing--even shocking--to read her latest article reporting on a new “study” by Peterson Institute for International Economics Senior Fellow Joseph Gagnon, warning about the nation’s growing debt crisis.
The Peterson Institute, founded by Wall Street tycoon Peter Peterson, has long been gunning for the Social Security and Medicare systems, which he, and the rest of the Wall Street gang, see as unfairly competing with Wall Street for the assets of the public, and as destructive of the “free market.”
Peterson’s basic schtick is that the two critical support systems for the elderly and infirm are going to bankrupt the country as they pay out benefits that exceed what retirees paid into the system, and that the solution is to cut back on those benefits, increase the taxes collected, or better, to privatize both systems.
Given Peterson’s and his institute’s long-standing agenda to gut Social Security and Medicare, it’s not surprising that Gagnon, as a fellow there, would say the solution to the nation’s growing debt is to either raise taxes or cut those two hugely successful, critically important and broadly popular social programs.
Morgenson is too smart not to know better, and yet not once in her article did she look outside of Gagnon’s narrow definition of the problem at the real cause of the national debt: the country’s outlandish military budget and a decade of unfunded wars, which have been piling up debt at a rate of some $150 billion a year (and that’s just the principal!).
After all, the country has been piling up this debt for several decades, and especially over the last decade, but during all this time, Social Security and Medicare have been paying out their benefits from current dedicated payroll taxes and by drawing on the trust funds that had built up because of the years that more was being collected than paid out in benefits.
Get the point? Nobody, including Gagnon, Morgenson or the Social Security and Medicare-hating members of Congress like Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), will acknowledge the fact that not one dime of the huge US deficit has been caused by a benefit check paid by Social Security, and the only parts of Medicare that are funded by general tax revenues are doctors bills and the prescription drug benefit--Medicare Part D--a lousy measure promoted by President George W. Bush and the Republicans in Congress which bars the government from negotiating discounts from the Pharmaceutical companies--a problem easily fixed by improved legislation.
It’s the wars, stupid!
If the US would just cut its military spending down to size, instead of spending as much as the rest of the world combined on war or preparing for war--say by 75%--it would free up more than $450 billion a year that could go towards funding things like improved education, research into alternative energy, improving health care access, and paying down the deficit, too. Toss in cuts in the outsized $40+ billion annual secret intelligence budget, in the nation’s obsolete and dangerous nuclear weapons program and other ancillary military-related expenditures, and we’re talking about saving half a trillion dollars a year!
Morgenson should be ashamed at carrying water for the likes of Peterson and Gagnon.
This being Memorial Day weekend, she could at least make an attempt to restore her once sterling but now sullied reputation as an uncompromising financial journalist by taking on the Pentagon.

© 2011 ThisCan'tBeHappening.net

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130 by The Nation Remembering Gil Scott-Heron by Peter Rothberg



Published on Sunday, May 29, 2011 
I first saw Gil Scott-Heron perform in 1985 at the Brazilian club SOB's [1] in Manhattan, which during that period functioned as his home-base. His unique musical fusion of jazz, blues, rap, funk, and soul was captivating and his radical political vision was transformative, not just for me, but for a generation of musicians and activists especially in the hip-hop community.
The pioneering poet and musician is often credited as one of the progenitors of hip-hop with Public Enemy's Chuck D, Aesop Rock, Talib Kweli, Kanye West and Common all citing the poet/songwriter as a chief influence.
Tragically, Scott-Heron died Friday afternoon [2] in New York at the tender age of 62.
Best known for the song "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised [3]" which firmly entered the cultural lexicon after appearing on his 1971 album Pieces of a Man, Scott-Heron later battled drug problems and was incarcerated for a period during the 2000s, but he never stopped touring, and in 2010 he released the well-received I'm New Here.
His political legacy was vast and his connections to social movements deep. He was particularly active in the civil rights struggle and the anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s and 1980s. He wrote probably the most moving song ever about the perils of nuclear power ("We Almost Lost Detroit"), undoubtedly the catchiest tune decrying the exploitation of mine workers, ("Three Miles Down,") and what became the anthem of the anti-Apartheid movement, ("Johannesburg.")
In 1979 he performed alongside Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne and many others at the MUSE [4] benefits at Madison Square Garden, and in 1985 he led the protest anthem "Sun City" in a star-studded line-up featuring Bob Dylan, Steve Van Zandt, RUN DMC, Lou Reed and Miles Davis.
His writing also touched on domestic violence, addiction, the increasing gap between rich and poor, political disillusionment and what a bad actor Ronald Reagan had been.
It's impossible to select a top ten from Scott-Heron's vast canon but the choices below represent an effort to highlight his astonishing musical range, his incisive political commentary and his incendiary live performances.
We'll be compiling additional written and musical tributes in the next few days.
B Movie

Home is Where the Hatred Is

Johannesburg

We Almost Lost Detroit

Three Miles Down

The Bottle

Winter in America

Whitey on the Moon

Shut 'Em Down

Comment #1

A Toast to the People

Copyright © 2011 The Nation

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129 by OtherWords A Little Less Corporate Political Corruption - Obama is thinking about issuing an executive order that would mitigate some of the damage done to our democracy by the Supreme Court's dastardly Citizens United edict. by Jim Hightower

May 29, 2011

Come on, Obama, do it. Stand up, stand tall, stand firm. Yes, you can!
President Barack Obama is thinking about issuing an executive order that would mitigate some of the damage done to our democracy by the Supreme Court's dastardly Citizens United edict, which unleashes unlimited amounts of secret corporate cash to pervert America's elections. Photograph: Scott Lenger
Obama's idea is simply to require that those corporations trying to get federal contracts disclose all of their campaign donations for the previous two years, including money they launder through such front groups as the Chamber of Commerce.
This approach says to those giants who are sucking up billions of our tax dollars for endless war, the privatization of public services, etc.: You're still free to shove trainloads of your shareholders' money into congressional and presidential races, but — hey, just tell the public how much you're giving and to whom.
Neat. It would be a clean, direct, and effective reform — so, of course, the corporate powers and their apologists are squealing like stuck pigs. Steven Law, a Bush-Cheney operative who is now both a Wall Street Journal editorialist and the head of a secret corporate money fund, recently decried the very idea of public disclosure of contractor campaign contributions: "When I was in the executive branch," he sniffed, "mixing politics with procurement was called corruption."
Yes, Steve, and y'all were corruption experts. Perhaps you've forgotten about Halliburton, the Cheney-run corporation that helped put Bush in office and then snagged tens of billions in contracts, becoming the poster child of corrupt, no-bid procurement.
Come on, Obama, don't back down under pressure from these corporate sleazes — sign that disclosure order. If they're going to steal our elections, let's at least make them admit it.

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