JPBlog

Julie Mabus is the founder and CEO of Sudan Reconstruction. The JP interviewed her several weeks ago and will be posting the interview in a series of podcasts, of which this is the first.

Podcast

Robert Fisk, almost certainly the wisest and most knowledgeable correspondent on and in the Middle East, has written a deeply pessimistic report from darkened Beirut. Lebanon is on the verge of dissolution. People are scared; many are leaving. It is the quiet before the storm.

So what can a Middle East correspondent write on a Saturday morning except that the world in the Middle East is growing darker and darker by the hour. Pakistan. Afghanistan. Iraq. "Palestine". Lebanon. From the borders of Hindu Kush to the Mediterranean, we – we Westerners that is – are creating (as I have said before) a hell disaster. Next week, we are supposed to believe in peace in Annapolis, between the colourless American apparatchik and Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister who has no more interest in a Palestinian state than his predecessor Ariel Sharon.

I don't recall a more foreboding column from Fisk. It is clear that he believes we are about to reap, in Churchill's phrase, a "bitter harvest," all of it completely predictable.

Robert Fisk: Darkness falls on the Middle East

Decoding bin Laden's Latest: An Odd Congruence from the Daily Kos is a must read. Osama's complaints since 9/11 have been remarkably consistent and they are not groundless:

The author cites Michael Sheuer's list of Osama's complaints in his book Imperial Hubris.

(1) Unquestioning U.S. support for Israel, especially U.S. support for Israel's heavy-handed treatment of Palestinians.

(2) The presence of U.S. troops on the Arabian Peninsula. Bin Laden and his sympathizers view this presence as an occupation.

(3) The U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, and now of Iraq.

(4) U.S. support for what bin Laden considers to be the suppression of Islamic minorities in Russia, China, and India.

(5) U.S. pressure on Arab energy producers to keep the world markets awash in sufficient oil to keep oil prices low for the U.S. and other Western powers. Bin Laden believes that more oil revenues should be allocated for the benefit of Arab peoples.

(6) Closely related to (5) above, U.S. support for what bin Laden asserts are apostate, corrupt, tyrannical governments in the Islamic world, as in Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf, Egypt, and North Africa.

Irrespective of whether or not you agree, these are not frivolous complaints.

The author warns us not to underestimate Osama bin Laden:

Bin Laden is a serious and wily adversary who knows how to manipulate the Arab "street." He is intelligent and well-informed-- clearly far better informed about the U.S. and the West than the apparatchiks and their bosses in the current White House are informed about him and his region of influence. Bin Laden thinks strategically and takes the long view; he is tactically flexible and is not afraid to retreat to attain an ultimate strategic advantage. Unfortunately for the U.S., he probably has a 40 point I.Q. advantage over the current occupant of the White House.

In short, we should not risk underestimating bin Laden by dismissing him out of hand as "crazy" and "evil."

Do read the article.

Helena Cobbin, columnist for the Christian Science Monitor,relates the gist of her conversations with prominent persons in Cairo and reports that Sunnis are unanimously opposed to a U.S. attack on Iran. Further, she states that the animus among Sunnis towards Shiites is eclipsed by anger against the U.S. for its invasion and subsequent bungling of Iraq.

A former Egyptian ambassador rebutted Mr. Hadley's claim that Arab countries feel deeply threatened by Iran's nuclear program. "We have lived beneath Israel's nuclear weapons for many years, so even if Iran gets nuclear weapons it wouldn't be anything new. Anyway, they are not that close to it," he said.

Helena Cobbin: Sunni Arab view of US-Iran tensions: There's virtually unanimous opposition to a US attack on Iran.

Ms. Cobbin's blog, "Just World News," is linked on the sidebar of this page.

Once upon a time, some very visionary and clever people purchased a lot in a remote valley and built a house, intending to live there comfortably and cheaply forever. They cut down the trees on the lot, sawed them into boards and used them in the construction. They drilled a water well in order to have inexpensive water, since they were far from urban water systems. They forgot about sewage, however, until the house was nearly finished, when someone noticed a large pipe protruding from the foundation going nowhere.

That presented a serious problem. The sewage either had to be treated with a sewage disposal plant or underground septic tank, or it had to be channeled away from the house to a sufficiently distant place that it wouldn't cause problems for the inhabitants of the house. But treatment plants, septic tanks and long pipelines cost money, and they had spent almost all their money building the house and were unwilling to spend any more on sanitary system. Instead, they decided to dig a ditch leading to a small pit a short distance from the house where the sewage could accumulate and not cause them any problems. The pit was located behind a tall hedge, so they didn't have to see it when they looked out their windows or walked in the yard. Everyone agreed that it was the best and cheapest solution to the waste disposal problem.

Everything went fine until the weather warmed up and folks started becoming aware of a faint foul odor, the source of which they couldn't locate. It was easily taken care of with some chlorophyll air wicks and baskets of potpourri scattered around the house.

The smell continued to worsen. The residents closed all the windows of the house and turned on the air conditioning to keep the foul air out. A little quicklime in a bowl helped to control the smell inside. When the smell further worsened they completely sealed the house.

Keeping the house sealed worked for quite a while. The small seepage of air into the house was taken care of by the quicklime and the chlorophyll. Everyone said that it wasn't important to go outside, anyway, that they really wanted to stay inside. After a few weeks, they started getting sick and the doctor discovered that they were infected with e coli bacteria. The well from which they drew their drinking water had become contaminated by seepage from the sewage. They started boiling water.

This went on for a few weeks until someone looked out the back window and saw a lake of foul dark liquid filling up the backyard and pouring under the house. Gradually the smell of the sewage found its way into the house through the floor and it finally became obvious to everyone that they could not continue to live there. They had ignored the source of the problem while designing ingenious technologies to keep from being inconvenienced by the costs of fixing it properly.

This parable occurred to me as I was reading an article from the New York Times, Open-Source Spying by Clive Thompson, published on December 3, 2006 ($). The article relates the efforts of the intelligence agencies to share intelligence without betraying sources or leaking sensitive information. The U.S. spends untold billions (much of which is hidden in the classified intelligence budget) on its intelligence agencies but they failed to anticipate the WTC attack because they had no way of putting together the clues possessed by different agencies.

The intelligence community has reacted to that failure in a number of ways, one of which is to experiment with blogs and wikis where intelligence personnel can share related information on a real time basis, rather than sending reports through a bureaucratic thicket and hoping that they will survive the trip.

It was an interesting article. Many of us have a fascination for spy stuff and Thompson writes entertainingly about what is usually a grim business.

Another thought, however, came to mind after reading the article: It's easy to become wrapped up in the intelligence game, much like becoming wrapped up in chess, where the fascination of strategy and tactics is everything. The difference is that in chess, there is no reason to play the game other than for the pleasure of it, or in a few cases for the acclaim one can receive from one's peers. The game itself is morally neutral.

The intelligence game, on the other hand, is played in order to advance national interests as defined for better or worse by the political process. Politicians decide the direction and speed of the ship of state, and the spooks try to spot in advance the icebergs in its path along with other ships in the vicinity that might offer resistance. It's obvious that if the captain and crew sail the ship due north, it will soon encounter icebergs and the intelligence services will be very busy.

The point is that intelligence is a reactive profession, even when it is aggressively pursuing some strategic objective. By its nature, it seldom asks how the world got into the situation it is now in, only what is happening now or will happen in the future. Richard Clarke, advisor on terrorism to the president, wrote "Why do they hate us?" and the president asked that very question in his address to the nation after September 11. Clarke never answered it. The president stated that they hated us because of our freedoms and our open society. Clarke was the more honest man. Bush simply lied, because the truth contradicts our national story so completely that the American people would dismiss it without thinking. Many people in the middle east hate us because we treated them badly and stole their oil for nearly a hundred years, telling ourselves (and them) that we were bringing civilization to the middle east.

Like the householders in the parable above, we have created something dangerous that could be kept out of sight and mind for a long time. When bad things started happening, we created clever fixes in order not to face reality and to prolong the good times. Eventually, what we have created has found its way to our back yard and under our house. Then it is too late; all choices are bad.

There is simply no substitute for realism. Things have a way of coming around; deceiving ourselves as to the cause of our troubles guarantees that there will be further bad consequences. Exhausting our cleverness producing fixes without solving underlying problems guarantees disaster, including in this case more 9/11s.

Via Juan Cole, Larisa Alexandrovna writes a compelling analysis of Bush's reasons for moving an additional 15,000-20,000 troops to Iraq, along with sending another carrier to the Persian Gulf, and predicts that the results will be disastrous for the nations of the middle east—including Israel—as well as for the rest of the world.

Saddam's Execution and the Campaign Against Iran

Middle east scholar and administration critic Juan Cole lists ten myths about Iraq. The first myth is that the U. S. can win.

But if it [winning] means the establishment of a stable, pro-American, anti-Iranian government with an effective and even-handed army and police force in the near or even medium term, then the assertion is frankly ridiculous. The Iraqi "government" is barely functioning. The parliament was not able to meet in December because it could not attain a quorum. Many key Iraqi politicians live most of the time in London, and much of parliament is frequently abroad. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki does not control large swathes of the country, and could give few orders that had any chance of being obeyed. The US military cannot shore up this government, even with an extra division, because the government is divided against itself. Most of the major parties trying to craft legislation are also linked to militias on the streets who are killing one another. It is over with. Iraq is in for years of heavy political violence of a sort that no foreign military force can hope to stop.

One wonders what's in the mind of Bush when he proposes a "surge" of 25,000 - 30,000 men to clean out Baghdad. The biggest myth of all is that our military could do the operation on the cheap without asking the American people to make sacrifices. General Shensiki was unwavering in his insistence that less than 500,000 troops was too small a force and he was fired early on.

General Shensiki was an optimist. The administration never came clean with the American people as to the real reasons for the invasion. Whether it was to gain control of middle eastern oil or to reduce the production of oil and keep the price up, whatever the administration wanted, it was and is incapable of attaining it because of it's sheer incompetence and criminal cronyism. A million troops wouldn't have made a difference with this administration. And us chumps are the ones who will have to pick up the bill.

Juan Cole: Top Ten Myths about Iraq 2006

The Asia Times is carrying a three-part series "How Hezbollah Defeated Israel," arguing that the conflict fundamentally altered the power balance in the middle east away from U.S. and Israeli hegemony. The U.S. media have not seriously addressed the implications in depth, so this is required reading for anyone who wants to understand what is going on in the middle east. (Via Feral Scholar)

Part I - Winning the Intelligence War

Part II - The Ground War

Part III - The Political War


Tags: hezbollah, Israel, Lebanon

Via The Washington Note, Nir Rosen has written an extraordinarily informative article on Hizballah, the Shia-based party that stood up to Israel when it invaded southern Lebanon.

Tags: Hizballah, Hezbollah, Lebanon, Israel, Nasrallah

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has published an extensive report on the 20 most corrupt members of Congress. Fortunately, none of our Mississippi representatives or senators made the list, for which we are all grateful. All but one are enablers, however, and the enablers bear much of the blame for creating an atmosphere that sanctions the corrupt practices that are now coming to light.

Tags: Frist, Burns, corruption

You are roughly 6 times as likely to die from influenza than from a terrorist attack, says Wired Magazine. You are roughly 16 times as likely to die walking down the street than from being killed by a terrorist. True, 9/11 was a deed of awesome depravity, but it didn't change the strategic balance or threaten the United States like the Soviet Union once did. The fear is manufactured by ruthless men and women to scare us into doing what they want, like invading Iraq and submitting to limitations on our constitutional freedoms.

As to what really happened on 9/11, the Jackson Progressive came to disbelieve a long time ago what the Bush administration has been telling us.

Now the highly respected publisher, Presbyterian Publishing Corporation, has published Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9-11 (Westminster John Knox) by David Ray Griffin, who accuses the Bush administration of orchestrating the attack for political ends. The web has been abuzz for years with conspiracy talk, but it appears that 9-11 skepticism is hitting the mainstream. If the Democrats take over the Congress this fall, they will have the opportunity of a lifetime to launch a real investigation into the origin of the attacks.

We can best honor the dead by insisting upon a thorough investigation of how and why they died.

As you are aware, former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami is visiting the U.S. in a private capacity, even though little of his visit is being reported by the MSM. UK reporter Robert Fisk provides a detailed summary of one of Khatami's speeches.

Khatami's very presence in the U.S. is something of a surprise, as I would never have expected the Bush administration to grant permission for the visit of a former "Evil Axis" president under any circumstances. The fact that he attempted to liberalize Iran while president would have no weight with the neocons or the oil people in Washington; they employ democratic language to justify their authoritarian behavior much as Bill Clinton used the language of liberalism to further the conservative agenda of the Democratic Leadership Conference (DLC). Foreign governments who attend to the needs of their people are an obstacle to U.S. corporations in their quest for easy profits, and so are disfavored by the elites and the politicians of both parties that serve those elites.

This we know:

- Khatami is here with the blessings of both Washington and Tehran;

- He is no Chalabi or Palavi, but a highly respected philosopher-scholar, both inside and outside Iran and among both Sunni and Shiite moslems;

- He is highly critical of U.S. foreign policy and the Bush administration;

- His language is not that of a fanatic, but well-reasoned, almost friendly.

Khatami will undoubtedly meet with one or more representatives from the Whitehouse to discuss the relationship between the U.S. and Iran. He will likely return to Iran carrying a message of such sensitivity that it cannot be sent through the normal channels.

My guess (for what it's worth) is that it has finally dawned on Washington that to attack Iran carries unacceptable risks, and that it has painted itself into a corner with its campaign to demonize Iran. The Bushites are therefore looking for a face-saving way to declare success without having to go through with their threats. I predict that the figleaf will involve renewed inspections of Iran's nuclear facilities to which the U.S. and Iran can agree. If this is true, it will be good news. Iran is years away from building a bomb and the time to deal with that will be when the U.S. is in a better military and diplomatic posture.

There's little I can say about the Israeli attack on Lebanon. It's so monstrous, so cruel, and so deliberate that words do not come. Douglas Southall Freeman once wrote that the Confederacy was not simply a nation at war; the Confederacy was war. It is beginning to look as though the state of Israel is war and little else.

In my cynicism, I have always maintained that when a nation does something so counterproductive, so idiotic, and so evil that the mind boggles at the obvious stupidity, there is always the possibility that it is merely playing by a rulebook of which I am ignorant.

I cannot conceive of any rulebook that would justify Israel's brutal attack on Lebanon. There is no future in continually pissing off your neighbors. Even if you can keep it up for a long time, eventually it blows up in your face. The crusaders' kingdom lasted 200 years, but it eventually succumbed to geopolitical reality; will Israel last that long, given it's behavior? I wouldn't bet on it, even though Israel has nukes.

James Wolcott says it a lot better than I can. Read his column.

7/22/2006. Counterspin features an interview with Fawaz Gerges on Lebanon, Israel and the Media (MP3) (RealAudio) Gerges, an American citizen and a professor at Sarah Lawrence College, is trapped in Beirut while on sabbatical.

With Senator Russ Feingold's lonely filibuster against the renewal of the P. Act getting virtually no support from even the most liberal Democrats in the Senate, that obnoxious, oppressive turd of a law which still stinks in spite of the rhetorical perfume sprinkled over it by the Republican-dominated Congress, will shortly become law. Even Senate minority leader Harry Reid has indicated that he will vote for it, a clear sign that I had overestimated his devotion to the U. S. Constitution, including the Fourth Amendment. What is the Whitehouse holding over the heads of these lemmings disguised as senators and congresspersons? It makes me want to cry.

Update 2/18/2006 The Senate invoked cloture on the P. Act II with only three no's. You saw it right. Only three sensible, conscientious senators in the whole Senate who take the Fourth and fourteenth Amendments seriously. Kerry, Clinton, Kennedy and all the rest of the Democrats except the courageous three have shown their true colors. A pox on their house as well as on the Republicans. I'm totally disgusted.

Let us now praise true patriots: Senators Russ Feingold, Robert Byrd and Jim Jeffords



Recommended reading:

Plutarch's biography of Cato the Younger,
Plutarch's bio. of Pompey
Wikipedia on the Weimar Republic

Provocative article on metaphors in American politics.

Here's a sample:

Regardless of the rhetoric about what Hillary is supposedly up to, she is likewise perceived as a threat to the patriarchal family. She is the archetypal Easterner; she speaks in complete sentences and is married to someone who speaks so well it makes him slick. If we translate the Easterner values from the 1950s westerns into today’s terms, we encounter individuals who try their best to find the better argument, people who give the notion of brotherly love something more than lip service, people who are unafraid of criticizing their own government, people who in fact believe that it is their civic duty to hold their leaders’ feet to the fire. In other words, I am describing the metaphorical nemesis of the rugged individualist in western cinema: liberals. And this is why so many men, and some women, bristle simply at the mention of Hillary’s name. They know essentially nothing about her, and yet they believe that she is a threat to everything they care about. Among herdsmen, and in patriarchal societies in general, men are owners of the flock or the herd and all that goes with it, women and children included. This stuff comes right out of the Bible. It’s what George Lakoff characterizes as “the strict father morality” in his book Moral Politics.

It is a fairly well-established fact that the incidence of depression among the American population has increased dramatically since the early '90s. There are several possible explanations for this increase, including better diagnosis, more public awareness, mass marketing by giant pharma of profitable new anti-depressants and even the increased consumption of junk food. My pet candidate is increasing environmental contamination of one kind or the other. That humans evolved over a period of thousands of years without these chemicals in the environment should be enough reason to seriously investigate the long-term effects of low concentrations of, say, anti-cholesterol medicine, birth-control hormones or bovine growth hormone.

Yesterday, I went to a seminar for lawyers (Yes, I am a lawyer) on the subject of stress in the law profession and how to cope with it. Since I occasionally give seminars on lawyer stress and impairment, I was familiar with most of what the speaker had to say, but he identified one stressor that I had long suspected: a lack of control over one's life.

Research has shown that we generally feel less stressed by situations we choose or create ourselves than by those situations that we believe are imposed upon us by other people. It follows that when members of a society either have or believe they have fewer options and therefore less control over their lives we can expect a higher rate of stress-related disorders, including depression, among the general population.

Because of political and economic changes over the past 26 years, the average American has fewer options. The American family works approximately six weeks more per year for the same income. Americans have gone deeply into debt, which restricts their spending options. The protection of labor unions and the labor laws have been gutted by successive anti-labor governments. The desires of the American people with respect to national policy decisions has been increasingly ignored by both Republican and Democratic politicians, although it is Republicans that have carried this trend to audacious extremes. Most people feel that their voice is not heard where it matters and have withdrawn from any form of political participation into either cynicism or fundamentalist premillinarinism.

The War on Drugs^® and the War on Terror^® have been used to shred the provisions of the Bill of Rights and create militarized police forces right in our own cities, equipped with military weapons and trained in military tactics. Even though Americans might feel that some of their rights might be profitably sacrificed for a little more security, it is hard to believe that these losses do not contribute to the general mood of despair for the future, even if unconscious. A descent from freedom into slavery or serfdom, even if voluntary, must inevitably have devastating psychological effects.

Depression has its political uses, as well. A depressed people are far less likely to challenge the ruling elite, since depression is almost invariably characterized by the loss of hope. Depression also makes people blame themselves for their troubles, rather than policy decisions made in Washington or in their own state houses. Depression impairs judgment and often expresses itself in psychosomatic illnesses. Because their judgment is impaired, depressed persons are apt to seek simple solutions handed down by demagogues rather than to pick their way through the complexity and moral ambiguity that has always been at the heart of the human condition.

Creationism instead of evolution solves the problem of who we are. Premillinarianism solves two problems. First, it absolves us from responsibility for the future by eliminating an earthly future. Global warming isn't a problem if the Earth isn't going to be around much longer. Second, it absolves us from moral obligations to anyone else but "us" as opposed to "them," meaning by "them" not only moslems, Hindus and Buddhists, but also non-premillinarian Christians. When the eschaton arrives, we "saved," dressed in white robes, will look down from the heights of Heaven with righteous pleasure on the sufferings of the damned far below and rejoice in our good fortune that we are not they. War and pestilence become merely signs of the second coming, which will end all suffering for the elect.

Apocalyptic beliefs, as reflected in history and literature, usually become widely adopted when people who are oppressed have lost hope that they can end their oppression by their own efforts. They withdraw from participation in what they see as a fundamentally evil and doomed society. When apocalypticism becomes a mass movement it frequently betokens the disintegration of a civilization and the beginning of a dark age.

What is to be done? Warn of the dangers but embrace hope, because there is hope. Comfort those who despair, but teach responsibility, because we cannot escape our responsibility for the way our behavior affects the rest of the world. Resist those who trade in lies and desire power above all else, but love them nevertheless, because evil thrives where love is gone. Lastly, remember that nothing of any real value has been done in this world by people concerned exclusively with protecting their own ass.

Richard Kim writes an interesting post in The Notion, entitled Freedom's Imperial March. He asks an important question that all progressives ought to be thinking about:

A hard question the left has yet to take up fully is: What came before and what comes after this particularly noxious imperial presidency?

The question is two-fold, the first being concerned with an evaluation of the Johnson-Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton succession and how it brought us to Bush II, and the second being concerned with planning and then articulating a vision for a post-Bush nation.

Although the writer is not a Platonist in the strict sense, he has used the logical and rhetorical techniques of The Republic in many debates and arguments with right-wingers with great success. In Plato's universally-acclaimed masterpiece, his character Socrates, after having demolished the arguments of the sophist Thrasymachus--that justice is the will of the powerful--arrives by a process of dialectic at a definition of justice and then constructs before our very eyes the idea of a just state, together with its individual counterpart, the just individual. Plato proceeds in this manner because his theory of forms held that all objects of perception are inferior copies of true forms. The chair in my kitchen is an imperfect copy of the chair form. All chairs share the quality of "chairness" and participate more or less in the ideal form. The highest form was the good. The form of a just state was the ideal state, of which all states are inferior copies.

In The Republic, Plato attempted to define the ideal state, one that would serve as both as a model and a benchmark for actual states. If you want to know how just a state is, compare it to the form of a just state. If you want to establish a just state, then make it as close as possible to the form of a just state.

Plato is the father of a family of philosophies collectively described as realist, all of which hold, in one way or another, that forms are real. Red things partake of "redness." Bad men partake of "badness." The other powerful philosophical current in western thought, descending from Heraclitus and Aristotle, is nominalism, which holds that what the realists call forms are merely names without an independent existence. Alfred North Whitehead once observed that all of western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. Mortimer Adler later added that Aristotle wrote most of the footnotes. Indeed, it is difficult to find serious arguments in any field that do not involve, at their core, the opposition between realism and nominalism.

How does this apply to debates with right-winger? Simple. I ask them to tell me in detail they kind of country they want the United States to be. In other words, I am asking them to define for me the form of a nation. It is a perfectly logical and reasonable question. People who want to change things ought to be able to answer where they expect those changes to take us. Plato's idea of a just state might seem totalitarian to us, but at least Plato was ruthlessly honest; he tells us just where he wants us to go.

Don't expect this kind of ruthless honesty from the typical right-winger. Usually, they will do everything they can to change the subject, because either they haven't thought about where their program is likely to take us, or worse, wish to conceal their true objective because they know it is unacceptable to the vast majority of Americans.

Conservatism is profoundly anti-democratic; at its very heart, it is a belief that only a few are intelligent and wise enough to rule the nation and that the overwhelming majority of people are unworthy to participate in the political process. Conservatism in twenty-first century America is a faith in plutocracy, the rule of the wealthy, by the wealthy and for the wealthy. Since the election of Ronald Reagan, there has been a significant shift of wealth and income from the lower and middle classes to the upper crust with very little protest from the people most affected. The Bush administration has accelerated this process by its irresponsible tax cuts and its current efforts to "balance the budget" by reducing public services, educational support and public relief, all of which benefit the middle and lower classes.

No conservative activist can admit that the end result of the conservative movement will be the impoverishment and disenfranchisement of nearly everyone save the favored few, so the entire conservative establishment of think tanks, non-profits, cable networks and political operatives must necessarily be continually engaged in perpetrating one monstrous lie--the lie that the goal of the conservative movement is to promote the general welfare of the American people.

That, dear reader, is why the conservative right-wingers will scatter when you ask the Platonic question. They also will realize that, whatever their answer may be, they will be asked next to tell us why their current policies and proposals will bring us closer to the nation they have just described.

One further caveat: Are we as progressives ready to answer those two questions without trying to change the subject? Can the Democratic Party answer those questions? Until they can, the American people have little reason to turn the future of their country over to them.

Ellsberg is a true patriot.

Part V 1/28/2006

Part VI 1/29/06 (final)

The fourth installment on the Daily Kos.

Favorite quote: "But a lot of the folks back home, if it were really put to them: It's either a lot of other people's sons and daughters have to die or you're going to have long gas lines."

Josh Marshal of Talking Points Memo and TPM Cafe has started a Drug Bill Debacle Blog on the TPM web site. Like many of the other blogs on TPM Cafe, this look like it will be a useful source of information and debate on the Medicare prescription drug benefit.

The Daily Kos is beginning a series of interviews with Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon Papers. Well worth reading and following.

Part I 1/20/2006

Part II 1/21/2006

Part III 1/22/206

Part IV 1/27/2006

Part V 1/28/2006

Part VI 1/29/06 (final)

It boggles the mind that Congress is again giving the wealthy huge tax cuts and at the same time reducing student loans, medicaid, targeting even poor children. This is not bizarre; it goes beyond hypocritical and ridiculous; we are being ruled by evil and corrupt people.

This nation is resilient; it has endured a calamitous civil war and legions of stupid and crooked politicians.

But Rome was also resilient and endured a long, long time—until a particularly frosty morning at the beginning of the 5th Century when the legions along the Rhine awakened and discovered to their dismay that the river had frozen over and was now a bridge. Gaul and Spain were lost quickly. Less than ten years later, the Visigoths sacked Rome and the western empire was no more.

It happened in the twinkling of an eye.

My beloved violin teacher, the late Daniel Guilet, once observed when the conversation came around to a world-famous violin dealer: "The French have a saying: too polite to be honest."

The concept has many applications. My favorite version is "Too Christian to be honest," but thanks to political developments over the past fifteen years, the phrase "Too conservative to be honest" is a close runner-up. Now, with the revelations of prominent libertarian "scholar" Doug Bandow, a Cato Institute fellow, having been paid by Jack Abramoff to write articles favorable to his clients, it now appears that the saying applies to libertarians, as well.

It's beginning to seem that everyone touched by Abramoff has been compromised by his money.

The main lesson I draw from all this is that the purer they are, the more crooked they can become.

See the article in Business Week, "Op Eds for Sale"

The Jackson Progressive has already written on possible solutions to the problem of touchscreen fraud. There is no perfect system. There is no avoiding the fact that the integrity of elections depends upon the integrity of the people running the elections. Even with the most sophisticated mechanisms for insuring an accurate vote, there is at least one link in the chain that depends on the human element. A hand-counted, paper ballot system depends upon the honesty of the local ballot-counters. Machine-read paper ballots require accurate counting machines that can be fixed. Voting machines are at the mercy of the technicians that keep them running. Touchscreen voting can be corrupted at a number of points in the chain of information from voting booth to the central vote-counting computers.

Computerized voting mechanisms are indeed black boxes. Because of proprietary software and the general lack of expertise on the part of voters, they will remain black boxes. Thus there is only one verification method for insuring accurate vote counts: voters must be able to verify their vote after it has gone through all the black boxes. That means that a voter should be able to examine his vote on the Internet after it has been transmitted to election authorities. The only way this writer thinks that can be done is for the voter to draw an identification number from a fishbowl at the precinct, enter it into the touchscreen machine along with his vote, and then take the number with him to identify his vote when he pulls up the election database on the web.

Other measures would help. The operating system and software used must be open-source, so that trap doors and vote-altering code can be discovered and corrected. There must be a reliable paper trail that allows voters to see their ballot after they have entered their choices. Still, none of these measures will work unless the individual can check his own vote anonymously after it has been sent to the authorities.

One other necessity: the entire voting database must be easily available by download. That is the only way to insure that the totals are accurate. That way, every Tom, Dick and Susie can put the votes into Access or FileMaker and see for themselves whether the big computers are honest.

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/

http://www.votescam.com/home1.php

http://www.ballotintegrity.org/

Undernews: Diebold CEO Resigns

Excellent background article by blogger Steve Gilliard on the riots.

The rioting in France is reprehensible but, like many situations that have been festering for a long time, quite predictable. The only unknown was when.

The JP has already written about the new bankruptcy act, paid for by the credit card industry and delivered on a silver platter by Congress. The act, conceived in greed and born of corruption, will, when it takes effect next month, hang like an albatross around the victims of Hurricane Katrina as well as other Americans who face financial disasters. Even though it is undisputed that the majority of bankruptcies in America are the result of debts incurred from medical treatment, it is clear that the Congress has virtually repudiated the notion of bankruptcy as a fresh start for persons hopelessly over their heads through no fault of their own.

Wake up, Chumps!

With the exception of Bennie Thompson, our Mississippi senators and representatives voted for this corrupt legislation. As the poorest state in the nation, the irony of our elected representatives supporting this oppressive legislation--legislation immensely harmful to the citizens of this state--is simply overwhelming and a testimony to our penchant for shooting ourselves in the foot.

The bankruptcy law is only a symptom of what is going on in Washington, however. It is impossible to itemize all the actions, big and small, that occur daily in the halls of power that are designed to curtail our liberties, ravage our environment, endanger our health, make terrorism against us more likely, and shift the role of our government from serving and protecting the public to fattening the wallets of the wealthy and powerful few. The process grinds on from day to day, concealed from the public by its sheer volume, its obscure and often dishonest language, and the complicity of the mass media.

The evidence of this is overwhelming. Only the deliberately ignorant can dispute the existence of a vast and ever-widening disparity between the top 1% and the rest of us, both in income and wealth. Only the deliberately ignorant can ignore the sea change in governmental expenditures away from the general welfare to the industrial-military complex and the financial industry that facilitates it. Only the deliberately ignorant can close their eyes to the gutting of the nation's industrial strength to be replaced by a service industry that endows the few with fabulous wealth and the many with minimum-wage dead-end jobs.

We in Mississippi bear a special responsibility for this, having elected some of the most reactionary representatives to be found in Washington, D.C. The idea that the extreme, right-wing ideology that goes under the name of conservatism is good for Mississippi is a proposition so mean, so utterly idiotic, and so contrary to common sense and experience, that acceptance of it normally requires a level of hallucination sufficient to warrant commitment to a mental institution, a vivid illustration of Florence King's dictum that a wall erected along the Mason-Dixon line would enclose the world's largest asylum.

Building a wall around Mississippi would enclose a pretty big asylum, by itself.

There is one consolation, however: As the nation gradually but surely turns itself into a third-world country, we in Mississippi will hardly notice the difference, since we are already a third-world country. A national plantation system.

Chumps!

On the August 22, 2005 broadcast of the 700 Club, Pat Robertson, who calls himself a man of God, advocated assassinating Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Frias by the C.I.A. His exact words, as related by Media Matters:

ROBERTSON: There was a popular coup that overthrew him [Chavez]. And what did the United States State Department do about it? Virtually nothing. And as a result, within about 48 hours that coup was broken; Chavez was back in power, but we had a chance to move in. He has destroyed the Venezuelan economy, and he's going to make that a launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism all over the continent.You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war. And I don't think any oil shipments will stop. But this man is a terrific danger and the United ... This is in our sphere of influence, so we can't let this happen. We have the Monroe Doctrine, we have other doctrines that we have announced. And without question, this is a dangerous enemy to our south, controlling a huge pool of oil, that could hurt us very badly. We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.

Robertson is a liar and a scoundrel talking about the "doctrine of assassination" as though it was just another theological proposition, up there along with the virgin birth and the Trinity. Has the man no decency? Does he have any respect at all for the truth? Apparently not.

Chavez is the legally elected president of Venezuela. He won a recall vote last year by a landslide in an election that foreign observers pronounced honest and fair. Chavez has won elections by a wide margin since 1998, even though he has been opposed by the commercial media the entire time.

The coup of which Robertson speaks was a typical South American plutocratic coup, whose purpose was to restore the old economic regime in which the few were fabulously wealthy and the rest of the nation was dirt poor. They were resentful because Chavez cracked down on PDVSA, the Venezuelan national oil corporation and forced it to pay its profits to the government instead of concealing it overseas.

But what really set off the upper crust was Chavez's decision to direct a large portion of the nation's fabulous oil wealth to the welfare of the entire nation rather than the tiny minority that previously had monopolized the benefits. He was building schools and hospitals, the latter staffed with Cuban physicians payed for by Venezuelan oil. For the first time, the average Venezuelan had hope that he or she might rise out of poverty and lead a decent life.

That could not be allowed to continue. Who knows what might happen if the regimes in South and Central America actually looked out after their own people's welfare? There wouldn't be enough Contras to go around. The sweatshops might have to start paying living wages. If thing really got bad, the drug trade might dry up, a disaster for law enforcement and the prison industry. The spectre of the job market being flooded by unemployed former narcs, paramilitaries, drug lords, SWAT teams and prison guards must have kept our nation's leaders up at night in a cold sweat.

As soon as Carmona, the new "president" assumed office, he abolished Parliament and the Supreme Court. He didn't just suspend the constitution; he abolished it, as well. The Bush administration applauded the return of democracy and quickly recognized the new government. It was a bit premature, however. Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans took to the streets and for once, the military refused to cooperate with the coup and so Chavez was restored to his elected office in a couple of days. The coup was very likely backed by the CIA.

Robertson advocates conquest and murder for oil and U.S. hegemony over South America. He is angry that a popular, nationalist, dark-skinned politician is actually managing to improve the lives of all Venezuelans, rather than channeling all that wealth to the elite that, along with the giant U.S. corporations, previously appropriated it all for themselves. If you don't believe that's what he says, listen to Robertson say it.

After such viciousness, can anyone believe his claim to be a man of God? A follower of Christ? The answer is obvious.

For an alternative view of Venezuela, read The Narcosphere, VHeadline.com, and The Narco News Bulletin. They are not the final word on Venezuela or South America, of course, but much of their reporting comes from reporters on the spot and they bring a fresh breath of air into what has up to now been a desert of corporate propaganda.

Kurtztown, Pennsylvania high school students who hacked into their school's administrative computer network using school-issued laptops have been charged with felonies, according to an AP article. The students were able to do this because of the rank incompetence of the administration in securing its network, including using the same administrative password for all the student laptops and taping the password to the back of one or more of the computers.

It appears to this writer that our society--perhaps unconsciously--has decided that the criminal justice system is the solution to any behavior we don't like, even when children or teenagers are involved and no one is hurt. When the police seize a 12-year old girl for eating french fries in a Washington, D.C. subway station, handcuff her, and book her for a misdemeanor, it is a sign that our society has crossed a line that will be difficult, if not impossible, to retreat across. It doesn't matter that the action of the police passed constitutional muster; the mere fact that the police employed force on a 12-years old girl for what was admittedly a trivial infraction is a strong demonstration that we have lost our faith in persons being reasonable. We also seem to have taken up the doctrine of original sin with a vengence.

It reminds me of the Queen of Hearts, whose solution to all transgressions was "Off with their heads." When I was a child and saw Alice in Wonderland, I thought the queen's behavior was bizarre and atypical. Now it's beginning to seem commonplace.

The other day I came across a copy of George Monbiot's list of the top ten world-changing books, published in the Guardian a couple of years ago. Having read the top title, Bernard Lietaer's The Future of Money, of which I am now preparing a book review, I decided to read the second book on the list, Soil and Soul by Alastair McIntosh.

All it took was an email to Charlie at Eudora Welty library and in a few days the book was here on interlibrary loan and ready to be picked up. It came from Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, a small liberal arts college founded by Quakers. The librarians at the Lilly Library went to the trouble of packaging and sending it to Jackson, Mississippi, to someone they had never heard of, putting it in the hands of total strangers, and trusting that it will be returned.

Living as we do in a pay-for-everything society, it is a deep comfort to know that there is a network of institutions staffed by people whose entire purpose is to give something away without any expectation of profit or return on investment. No decent society can exist without the leavening of those generous souls and the institutions that nurture and shelter them.

The economy of the business world is based on acquisition: acquiring more money, more power, more stuff. The economy of the soul is just the opposite: success is how much you can give away without looking back.

The soul of a library is a very great soul indeed.