Elizabeth Edwards, according to an article in the NY Times, asked Ann Coulter to stop the personal attacks upon her husband, presidential candidate John Edwards. Coulter had previously made the remark, among others, that she wished he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot.

Coulter's response to Ms. Edwards revealed more than she probably intended:

Coulter responded with a laugh and charged that Edwards was calling on her to stop speaking altogether.

In other words, all she has to offer is hate-filled venom. Take that away and she would have nothing left to say. A scary prospect.

Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency begins today in the Washington Post. I'll be making comments on this series as I have the opportunity to study it more carefully, but it looks to be very interesting. Cheney is truly unique in the annals of the U.S. presidency; no other VP has exerted the influence over the president and the power over the executive branch as he has. No vice president has been so secretive and gotten away with it.

Remember one caviat: Over the past six years the Washington Post has printed most of its political ink in support of the Bush Administration, including some of its most idiotic and counterproductive policies. The really important information to be conveyed by these articles will be the information that is left out.

We wrote in 2000:

Jungian psychology often refers to the "shadow," meaning that part of the personality that is rejected and repressed but which still exists and exerts a deep influence upon the conscious ego. Likewise, organizations may be usefully imagined as casting a corporate shadow--institutional issues and facts that by tacit agreement don't exist in the corporate consciousness. It's easy to ascertain the shadow of your own organization; make a list of issues, events and things that cannot be mentioned, let alone discussed. Often these unmentionables are extremely important to the life of the organization, and ignoring them can spell institutional disaster, either from within or without. Nevertheless, the organization achieves a stable identity, a corporate ego, by denying and refusing to consider issues, events and things that threaten the corporate identity. Like the human ego, the corporate ego perceives the raising of those issues as a threat to its very existence and reacts in ways that from the outside often seem irrational and self-destructive. What is being preserved is not the organization but its ego, which has identified itself with the whole organization.

Like corporations, like governments.

I recently went to a birthday party at the clubhouse of a gated community near Jackson. Carefully secluded (I missed the entrance and had to turn around), the community first presents itself to a visitor as an upscale planned development behind electronically-controlled iron gates with an unoccupied brick guardhouse. The gates close at 10 in the evening. Once inside, the visitor drives upon what seems like endless winding streets past immaculately-manicured lawns and 3,000+ square-feet dwellings with expensive, late-model automobiles parked in double or triple garages. There are no sidewalks.

When was a kid in the '50s, gated communities were unknown in Jackson and the very idea of building a suburban McMansion 30 or 45 minutes out of town in a walled enclosure was not only unthinkable, but would have been regarded as contemptible. Why would anyone other than a farmer or a hermit choose to isolate himself (or especially herself) from the life of the city, the very word from which the term "civilization" is derived?

The answer stares us in the face. We have convinced ourselves that we are helpless in the face of economic laws that dictate constantly increasing inequality. They cannot be resisted, because, like a Calvinistic deity that foreordained from the beginning of creation who is to be damned and who is to be saved by some unknowable divine decision-making process, we believe that the almighty market has declared there must be winners and losers and the best a person can do is to try to be a winner by whatever means are available, and the devil take the hindmost.

From the time of the New Deal until the conservative counter-revolution in the '70s and '80s, most Americans saw through this market theology as so much plutocratic claptrap. They would not had changed their minds, either, had the right-wing forces, through their bogus think-tanks and their increasing control over a rapidly consolidating mass media, not, in effect, edited reality, so that news that did not support the conservative agenda simply ceased to exist in the public mind. The dominance of television news, to which superficiality comes naturally, made the task far easier than it would have been in print media alone.

Aside from the almost incontrovertible fact that these remote, gated communities will not survive in an energy-scarce world, there are other policy considerations that make these communities highly undesirable:

1. They are energy-intensive in many ways: obviously the long commute, either to work or shop requires a lot of gasoline. Walking anywhere is simply out of the question. In addition, these homes are large, single family dwellings that must be heated and cooled. Sizable lawns must be fertilized and watered. Because they are usually located away from lower-income areas, their "help" must drive to work, often over long distances. I read recently that workers in Aspen, Colorado have to commute 50-60 miles because they cannot afford housing any closer to their jobs. None of this is going to work when oil becomes $150/bbl or $250/bbl. These communities will become foreclosure cites when that happens.

2. It is bad for society when the rich and powerful are able to isolate themselves from even the middle class. In the case of Jackson, it is obvious that the leadership vacuum is harming not only the city itself, but the entire metropolitan area. A large piece of Jackson's leadership has moved into gated communities in Madison and Rankin counties, and even though it continues to conduct business and exert influence over city policy, it is mostly insulated from the effects of those policies upon the citizens of Jackson. When the rich and powerful must live amongst the hoi polloi and rub elbows with one and all, they tend to be more aware of this relationship and consequently more concerned for the general welfare.

3. Taxes. It has always been a mystery to me why people who benefit the most from the wealth generated by the community and who are most able to afford paying taxes are the most resistant to giving back their fair share to the community. The entire history of English property law from the Norman conquest until the modern era can largely be explained as the efforts of the nobility to avoid paying feudal land taxes to the Crown. The Republican Party since 1980 often seems to have had no other significant economic policies than cutting taxes for the wealthy and lowering wages for everyone else through union-busting. Gated communities are invariably built in areas with low property taxes. They therefore represent a reduction of the urban tax base and an increase in the suburban (or more likely, exurban) tax base. In order to provide municipal services to a population that cannot afford their own private security guards and to pay for the infrastructure that modern cities must have, cities must raise taxes, which increasingly drives out more of the well-to-do. It's a vicious circle.

Because of a leadership vacuum--especially a vacuum of talented leadership that experiences what it's like to actually live in a Jackson neighborhood--the city is faced with a scarcity from which all other scarcities spring: a scarcity of imagination.

Clearly, there exists a crying need for new ideas about how to make cities work. Increasingly higher energy prices will force most exurbanites and many suburbanites to move closer to their work, thus raising the cost of housing in the city and putting pressure on the poor to find affordable housing in a rapidly-gentrifying city. Will the poor then gravitate to the suburbs, where there is no public transportation worth speaking of and, because of low-density development, where public transportation will be prohibitively expensive? The prospects do not look good.

Committees and blue-ribbon commissions have met and made recommendations world without end, and nothing happens. Societies die when they lose their imagination, when they cannot change because change is blocked by the forces that have grown fat on the status quo and would lose their privileged position if what is needed to be done were done.

Have we reached that point in our society?

We will probably know the answer to that question in the next few years.

Open Democracy: A Tale of Two Towns

I'm one of those people that tries not to be judgmental. As the Good Book says "Judge not that ye be not judged" (Matt. 7:1). Nevertheless, there exist human vermin and there is no point in pretending otherwise. Among the most despicable of those vermin are creditors and collectors that prey on the weak and the elderly.

Social Security benefits are protected by federal law from almost all form of garnishment, but many elderly are discovering that their directly-deposited checks disappear through garnishment or by a trick called "setoff," whereby a creditor bank simply claims that it is exempt from the law when the account holder owes it money.

Social philosopher Amitai Etzioni has written an angry diary in the Daily Kos on the practice, and the practice ought to make us angry, as well:

Federal law says Social Security can't be taken to repay debts. Section 207 of the Social Security Act reads, "none of the moneys paid or payable or rights existing under this title shall be subject to execution, levy, attachment, garnishment, or other legal process, or to the operation of any bankruptcy or insolvency law." However, banks claim the federal ban on capturing Social Security benefits to repay debts doesn't apply to them. They cite the doctrine of "set-off," which says banks can collect money that customers owe them by taking it out of customers' accounts.

Are we returning to the world of Charles Dickens? Sometimes it seems so.

Amitai Etzioni: Where is the voice? First shoot the debt collectors

Robert Bork, former Harvard Professor, former U.S. Soliciter General, U. S. Court of Appeals judge, U. S. Supreme Court nominee (rejected), fellow at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, public scold, and, most importantly for our discussion, the sworn enemy of large tort recoveries by injured plaintiffs, especially punitive damages, has filed a lawsuit in the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York against the Yale Club of New York City, alleging wanton and reckless negligence on the latter's part which caused him permanent injuries to his leg. Bork fell off a dais from which he was to speak.

Bork is demanding actual and punitive damages. He must believe that he is exempt from following his own principles.

It reminds me of a fundamentalist preacher's hellfire and brimstone sermons that terrified his congregation with predictions of the end of the world until they discovered that he was planting trees around his house.

The American Constitution Society for Law and Policy has a short article on Bork's previous opposition to large personal injury judgments.

See also Blomberg.com, and Bork's paper on Congress's power to enact tort reform.

Bork is another "intellectual" darling of the right-wing whose writings and influence over the past 50 years helped make this nation, weaker, poorer, nastier and more divided than before. I once thought of exposing this conceited windbag with a book of the same title as this article, a parody of the title of Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah, but decided that it wasn't worth the time. Others have done an excellent job.

In 2000, the Jackson Progressive republished an article by Theodore Postol from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, entitled The Target is Russia. The article began with the following:

The Clinton administration is relentlessly moving toward an ill-informed decision this summer to deploy an untested and fundamentally unworkable national missile defense (NMD) system. The administration claims this technically flawed defense is needed to negate an unproven long-range missile threat posed by "rogue" states.

The cost of this defense will not simply be measured in dollars. It may include an end to further nuclear arms reductions with Russia, an increased Chinese effort to expand its nuclear forces in response to the defense, negative reactions from U.S. allies in Europe and East Asia--who know that their security will also suffer from this ill-thought out American initiative--and an eventual collapse of global arms control and nonproliferation efforts.

The Bush Administration has continued the development and deployment of this unbelievably expensive and highly unreliable system, whose official purpose is to protect against "rogue" states, such as Iran and North Korea. It is hard to escape the conclusion, however, as Dr. Postol did in 2000, that our government has not been entirely candid about its real purpose.

It is difficult to imagine, as Postol pointed out, that a radar facility located near Vardo, on the northern tip of Norway and only 40 miles from the Russian border, is intended for surveillance of only North Korea and Iran.



Perhaps it's just the coincidence of today's headlines in USA Today and the fact that I'm listening to an audiobook version of Gore Vidal's novel, The Golden Age: An American Chronicle Novel, set in Washington, D.C. around the time of this nation's entry into World War II, but it is looking more and more that since the fall of the Soviet Union the power elite has been slowly maneuvering us into a new cold war. The headlines proclaim "Bush says Russia 'derailed' moves toward democracy," although the headlines on the inner page state "Bush: 'Russia is not our enemy.'" Bush made his remarks at a democracy conference in Prague, Czech Republic, prior to leaving for the Group of Eight summit in Germany.

Needless to say, Vladimir Putin has not been happy with either Bush's remark or an anti-missile system obviously designed and deployed against Russia, despite Bush's protestations to the contrary.

Vidal's novel is the remarkable reconstruction of how Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, and War Secretary Stimson, together with the help of the mass media and others, deliberately provoked the Japanese to attack the United States. It is fascinating to read Vidal's description of the elaborate web that Roosevelt wove, a web so vast and elaborate that no one else could see just where he was leading the nation, especially as the strands of the web invariably ended in the Oval Office.

Obviously, the invention of nuclear weapons has altered the script. Once Russia had the bomb and a method of delivery, total war was no longer an option. On the other hand, the threat of nuclear war became a fearsome tool to enrich the arms industry, diminish civil liberties. and colonize the third world to keep it free from the "scourge of Communism."^®

The fear du jour technique of the Bush administration is beginning to look ridiculous, because it requires a level of inventiveness seldom possessed by authoritarians like the ones now in power. The cockeyed plan to blow up a jet fuel pipeline leading to JFK Airport by some terrorist wannabes has become the subject of snickering, not a source of terror. After a while, any con game becomes stale and grows mold. Now that the Global War on Terror^® is losing its ability to terrify the guy in Texarkana or Hennepin, a suitable replacement must be found for the GWOT, which is now rancid and must be discarded.

A second Cold War could easily fill the bill. Looking back to the '50s, it is amazing how the the First Cold War subsumed reason, memory and ethics into a mindless, bipolar Manicheanism that justified nearly anything the power elite decided it wanted.

This is not an exclusively Republican project, by any means. Once the security establishment recovered from the surprise of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, it immediately began to search for threats. The economics and financial side of the power elite made sure that the "reforms" made in Russia would not lead to a more democratic state, but instead would lead to an oligarchy run by bosses and former Soviet officials who had little or no experience with democratic institutions and even less respect for them. Recall that Boris Yelsin, a democratic hero in the West, settled his dispute with parliament by having his tanks shoot into the building.

This process has continued throughout the Clinton and Bush II administrations. Russia was very unhappy with Clinton's bombing of Serbia, a Slavic nation with historic ties to Russia. Bush has been provoking the Russians, not just with the anti-missile system, but by his continual rhetoric criticizing Russia's internal politics. Putin and the Russian government are reacting predictably, and, I suggest, according to plan. Whenever they push back, the U.S. government and its media mouthpieces can point to it as an indication of Russian intransigence.

A presidential candidate who does not buy into this program cannot be elected. If by some strange twist of fate such a person were elected to the presidency, he or she would be either sidelined, impeached or assassinated.

So the stage is set for a new cold war. The actors are studying the scripts and trying them out on the population and each other.

This is a different kind of drama, however; the audience is required to participate according to the instructions in the script, it can't leave, and the actors try to keep the play going as long as possible.

It's a dangerous play, so sit back and enjoy it while you can.

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Memory: Some readers will recall that in 1999, the Russian army reached the Serbian air base in Pristina before NATO forces, under the command of Gen. Westly Clark, had reached it. When Clark learned of it, he became furious and ordered British General Sir Mike Jackson to order an assault on the Russian troops, whereupon Jackson refused and told Clark "I'm not going to start the third world war for you." The original article appeared in the Guardian but is not available from its web archives but there are a number of existing articles that amplify the dispute among the NATO commanders and their governments:

Gen. Strangelove and the Wimps

Tracing Clark's Military Map

Wikipedia Article on Westly Clark (obviously the contents of this article can change)

Jeff Elkins: When thieves fall out (commentary)