“What’s With Your ‘Crazy’ U.S Politics?” — A Letter to European Friends

By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers

Dear Wolfgang and Jacqueline:

Finally some time to respond to your recent letter, where you asked me to explain the “crazy American political situation” and why “the U.S. is behaving so recklessly” with regard to Iran. Your terms are right on the mark.

First off, it’s important to know that “the U.S.” you refer to is mainly the Bush Administration. In poll after recent poll, Americans have indicated they regard his presidency as the worst ever in U.S. history. More than three-quarters of the citizenry, for example, now believe Bush’s war in Iraq was a terrible mistake that has taken this country into a catastrophic quagmire, and nearly two-thirds want our troops to start withdrawing as soon as practicable.

In other words, though it took a few years to learn how to read (and ignore) the Bush-enabling corporate mass-media, the American citizenry overwhelming now “gets it.” They understand that their reigning government is wildly off-track in terms of good governance and adherence to the Constitution, and, in important ways, is endangering U.S. national security in reckless misadventuring abroad. Americans also are mindful of the several trillion dollars that are being poured down the Iraq Occupation and “war on terror” ratholes, all to the detriment of our own infrastructure and social-program needs at home.

But, despite the tanking economy that is squeezing the middle class badly, and red-hot anger at the CheneyBush Administration for failing to deal with the issues most Americans care about (affordable health care, educational reform, good jobs, the Iraq disaster, college loans, sky-rocketing energy costs, etc.), the citizens tend to do little more than sign online petitions and occasionally send a donation to their preferred candidates.

The operating belief is that every four years, an election will resolve the situation so no need to get politically involved in a deep and consistent way. In addition, in this dismal economy a growing number of Americans are just squeezing by financially, if that, and feel they don’t really have the time or energy to become active dissenters. Obama or Clinton, or maybe even John McCain, will take care of the situation in a few months anyway, many figure, so no need to do much.

All too often, these excuses demonstrate lazy thinking, of course, aided by the mass-media’s concentrating on the electoral “horse race” and on distracting, trivial matters. But even if those citizen-expectations about the magic-bullet of elections were on the mark, there still would be problems. First, the voting and vote-tabulating systems are grossly deficient, provably corrupt and corruptable. Also, the three presidential hopefuls (all of whom are beholden, to a greater or lesser degree, to the usual elite political and corporate force$) leave much to be desired in terms of making significant changes, especially when it comes to American foreign/military policy.

McCAIN-THE-CHAMELEON

John McCain, for example, is basically a Bush clone when it comes to foreign policy, with a scary lust for war. He’s content for U.S. troops to stay in Iraq for 100 years or more, and he’s indicated his willingness, indeed eagerness, to bomb Iran. For McCain, as it is for Bush, the world is either simple black or simple white, no shades of complexity on the horizon. Act tough, act rough, the rest of the world will get out of our way, and American hegemony will prevail across the globe.

McCain clearly is the most extreme of the three, with little operative understanding of economics and, surprisingly, foreign-policy matters. Whether it’s his advanced age, or simple stubborn obtuseness, he comes across as a locked-in-the-past ideologue. Does he really believe what he’s saying or are his positions what he feels he’s required to assert in order to strengthen the GOP base and lure the old “Reagan Democrats” to his side for the general election?

One telling anecdote in this regard before moving on to the Democrats: McCain has been buddy-buddies with Jon Stewart for nearly a decade, and in his “maverick Republican” phase was invited often to appear on Stewart’s “The Daily Show”; there the two of them would banter and yuck it up. But when McCain appeared on the show in 2006, as he was gearing up to run again for president, Stewart, clearly disappointed in his hero, asked McCain why he was sucking up to the right wing fundamentalists by going to kiss the rings, so to speak, of the very ultraconservative leaders he once had exoriated as “agents of intolerance” who shouldn’t be “pandered” to by politicians. McCain danced around the question, trying not to answer. But his old friend Stewart was relentless and finally McCain, apparently forgetting that he was on national television, and in the presence of his joking buddy Stewart and an adoring audience, smiled ruefully and admitted, yes, he was indeed kowtowing to “the crazy base,” doing what he had to do to win the presidency. (See the full transcript of the exchange here, and analysis here.)

The astute Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo has been following McCain for many years. Here’s his explanation for McCain’s current shameful behavior, including taking the lower-than-Clinton attack road against Obama:

“The truth is that [McCain] doesn’t actually have any real convictions — or to put it more precisely, no real consistent convictions. That’s evidenced in part by the kind of campaign the guy’s running now. And at least a few of his press admirers are starting to sense that. But where you really see it most clearly is in the policy agenda he embraces.

“Genuine political and ideological transformations are pretty rare in contemporary American politics. Two in a row in less than a decade is close to unprecedented. McCain went from conservative Republican, to embracing many core Democratic policy positions and actively discussing a possible party switch, to cycling back and re-embracing the same policies.”

In short, the McCain that Stewart and many others admired for his “maverick” willingness to confront the Bush Administration on campaign-finance reform, torture as state policy, racial intolerance inside the GOP, etc., is no more. Now it’s the old guy who knows he has one arrow left in his quiver and is going to stand with the fundies and extreme conservatives on all the major issues because he believes that’s his only chance to wind up in the White House. To quote Stewart again: “Has John McCain’s Straight Talk Express been re-routed through Bullshittown?” The answer is, sad to say, yes.

THE DEMOCRATIC DUO

One would like to believe that the two Democratic contenders are significantly different, especially on Iraq and Iran. But are they?

Clinton the other day said that if Iran launched a nuclear attack on Israel while she was President, she would order Iran “obliterated.” (Her term.) There was not even a mention that Israel has demonstrated it’s perfectly capable of defending itself. Or that committing genocide on the Iranian population would inflame the world and place America in the war-crimes dock in The Hague.

Obama similary has rattled the sabers, saying he would keep the “military option” on the table to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. He’s been accused of not being “forceful” enough, and, by assuming the macho stance, perhaps Obama hopes to defuse that accusation. Maybe that’s why he’s supporting the promotion of Gen. Petraeus, the architect of the “surge” in Iraq, to be head of Central Command.

But regardless of political or personal motivations here, in all three candidates what’s clearly on exhibit is an unstated but underlying belief that America’s superpower status entitles it — nea, requires it — to make decisions of peace and war for other countries and regions of the world.

That’s the rationale the neo-cons used for attacking and occupying Iraq in the first place, which Bush bought into without hesitation, and it appears, sub rosa, to still be active in our strange political dance in 2008.

DIFFERENCES ON IRAQ OCCUPATION

On Iraq, the three candidates are a bit more distinct in their approaches. McCain focuses only on the military aspects of the “surge,” which he sees as a great success even though the required and promised political-reconciliation component of the surge isn’t happening. McCain seems determined to keep U.S. troops in that country for as long as it takes to fashion a strong, capable, American-friendly government and society.

If it takes decades, a hundred years, a thousand (yes, he threw that one in, too), that’s OK with McCain. He keeps comparing the Iraq situation to Germany and South Korea, where the U.S. has maintained a troop presence for more than half a century, conveniently ignoring that there was and is no raging sectarian war in those countries and no nationalist insurgency trying to throw out an occupying American force.

In McCain’s (and Bush’s) view, America has a region to tame, after all, and that requires that U.S. troops be on hand to help shape the Greater Middle East to our specifications. Unspoken is another reason: Using Iraq as a staging area, American power can help “protect” and control the increasingly-valuable oil flowing in the region that is so desperately needed and desired by the West.

Clinton has said she would have her military advisors draw up plans for an orderly withdrawal of American combat troops and begin that re-deployment, brigage by brigade, within 60 days of her assuming office. Obama has said he aims to have all U.S. combat troops out of Iraq within 16 months.

But both Clinton and Obama approve keeping an unspecified number of U.S. troops in Iraq for an unspecified time — to help train the Iraqi police and army, to battle the forces of “al-Qaida in Iraq,” and to be right there in case the situation were to suddenly deteriorate. (And how could it not if U.S. military forces are still on the premises?) Again, these are arguments that demonstrate the underlying soft-imperialism desires undergirding American exceptionalism.

OBAMA/CLINTON SLUGFEST

When you two wrote asking about our “crazy” politics, you made reference to the verbal boxing match between the two battling Democrats while the old warrior McCain is out there campaigning for the presidency.

My co-editor/colleague Ernest Partridge has summed up Senator Clinton’s behavior better than I could in his essay “The Monkey Trap, and Hillary Clinton’s Blind Rush to Defeat.” Short version: Clinton has no chance to win the Democratic nomination by fighting fairly; her only hope is to destroy Obama by whatever means necessary. Partridge writes:

“So if Clinton is to be nominated, she must overturn rules that she has agreed to, persuade most of the super-delegates to ignore the will of the voters and caucus participants, and to accomplish all this she must diminish Obama’s stature through negative campaigning. Because such tactics also devastate the public opinion of her (not very high to begin with), those same tactics employed to gain the nomination will almost certainly deprive her of the presidency in the general election.

“In sum, this is Hillary’s dilemma: Hold on to the bait, and both Clinton and the Democrats lose. Let go of the bait, and Obama wins. Hillary Clinton’s victory in November is not an option.”

A key House Democratic committee chairman the other day wondered aloud what I’ve heard voiced quietly elsewhere: If Hillary can’t get the nomination in 2008, she’ll so wound Obama that McCain might slip in. Or, even if Obama were to win the election, he’d be so damaged as to be unable to govern easily. In either case in 2012, Clinton, the only one left standing, figures she would be perfectly positioned to take the nomination.

Talk about “crazy”! Those reasons seems much too convoluted to be taken seriously, not the least because Clinton, in this scenario, would be universally recognized as the Dem spoiler who ruined the party’s best shot for taking back the White House. She would be the Ralph Nader of 2008 who would never be forgiven by the very activist Democratic base she would need in a future run for the presidency.

TRAGIC FLAW: OVERWEENING AMBITION

I’m not sure Obama would be the greatest campaigner against McCain or would necessarily be a great or even better-than-average President. But he is intelligent and a quick-learner, who, I’d like to believe, might well rise to the occasion. What does seem clear is that he is on a virtually unstoppable course to win the Democratic nomination and if Clinton continues to take the low dirty road in her attempt to mortally wound him, any future career plans beyond the Senate for her are finished.

All politicians at this level are consumed by ambition, but they usually disguise it a bit. Clinton’s is right out there for all to see. Will she, can she, rein in that aspect of her personality, especially if Obama winds up winning key states in the upcoming remaining primaries and more and more superdelegates endorse him? One would hope so for the good of the party, good of the country, good for her as an important Democratic leader. But the Clintons are notorious street-scrappers who will do or say anything to get what they want and, in any event, will not go gentle into that dark night. No wonder Rove is fixated on them, as they must remind him of aspects of himself.

That is crazy.

I know American politics don’t make much sense to Europeans. Truth is, it barely makes sense to us here in the States. (On the other hand, I haven’t asked you two to explain your own sketchy European pols such as Berlusconi, Sarkozy, Putin, et al.) But I hope I’ve supplied some insights that might be helpful. Write and let me know your further thoughts. — Love to you and the kids, Bernie#

Bernard Weiner, Ph.D in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked as a writer/editor for the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers.

First published by The Crisis Papers and Democratic Underground 4/29/08.

Copyright 2008 by Bernard Weiner.

Impeachment Now or Apocalypse Later?

By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers

The political noose seems to be tightening on the key members of the remaining miscreants down in the White House bunker — mainly Bush, Cheney, Rice, Addington and Mukasey. (Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Gonzales, Powell and Tenet were pushed out the door earlier.) But will the Democrats, having been provided with smoking gun-type evidence of these officials’ high crimes and misdemeanors, take the next logical step to end this continuing nightmare of law-breaking at the highest levels? Consider:

TORTURE AUTHORIZED FROM ON HIGH

After eight years, the multiple examples of ethical and felonious crimes of the Bush Administration are now abundantly clear and beyond rational dispute. Most compelling among them is the crime of authorizing torture as state policy.

In recent days, we’ve learned that Geoge W. Bush signed orders authorizing torture, and admitted that he approved of the deliberations by his National Security Council’s Principals Committee on the torture regime being set up for a few high-value prisoners. (Which, of course, filtered down to how thousands of suspected terrorists were maltreated.)

Bush has conceded that his Principals (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Ashcroft, Powell, Tenet) kept him apprised of their deliberations on which suspected terrorists would undergo which forms of torture, according to ABC News’ recent blockbuster story.

The meetings of the Principals, according to ABC, took place in early 2002 at least four months before the Administration’s famous Bybee/Yoo memos were issued that retroactively sought to provide legal justification for the torture. (Short version of those memoranda: The President is above all U.S. laws and international treaties.)

During those Principals’ meetings, Dick Cheney was a driving force behind the use of “harsh interrogations” of the prisoners in U.S. care. Other members were more worried about what they were doing. In the ABC story, according to a top official, John Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: “Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.”

Condoleezza Rice, then National Security Advisor, aggressively chaired the Principals’ torture meetings. Despite some occasional misgivings voiced by Ashcroft and Colin Powell about the “enhanced interrogation” techniques being employed, Rice told the CIA: “This is your baby. Go do it.”

TRYING TO MAKE TORTURE “LEGAL”

Torture, as commonly understood and defined, is illegal under both U.S. law and international treaties that American governments have ratified over the decades. Bush&Co. had to come up with a way to torture suspects but not to appear to be doing so. Here’s how it worked: Officials felt they could honestly assert that the Administration didn’t approve of or authorize torture because under the new definition supplied in the Bybee/Yoo memos, it was torture only if the prisoners were near-death or their internal organs were about to fail as a result of their treatment. In other words, the Administration simply made everything else legal: beatings, near-drownings, electroshocks to the genitals, stress positions, sexual abuse, etc. Only if the interrogators killed the prisoners or were thisclose to doing so would they have crossed over the line. See my “Control the Dictionary, Control the World.” ( )

It turns out that David Addington, Cheney’s then-Legal Counsel who has since replaced Scooter Libby as Cheney’s chief of staff, was at the locus of the cockamamie reasoning behind both the Bybee/Yoo torture memos and the “unitary executive” theory of governance. The latter asserts that the President is in charge of basically everything governmental and can’t be touched; further, the Bybee/Yoo memos assert, the President cannot be second-guessed when he claims to be acting as “commander in chief” during “wartime.”

Of course, there has been no Congressional Declaration of War, as the Constitution requires; the “war” — at an estimated cost of several trillions(!) of dollars — is the “War on Terror,” which, since it’s being waged against a tactic, can never be completely won and thus is never-ending. In short, the President, under this asserted legal cover, can act more or less as a dictator forever, including declaring martial law whenever he deems an “emergency” situation prevails. (Suppose, for example, the ballot-counting books are cooked in November and the Democratic candidate once again has a victory stolen away. There could be mass protests, perhaps even riots, in the streets. A potential “civic emergency” right there.)

MUKASEY’S FALSE TESTIMONY

Michael Mukasey, who promised he would be an independent Attorney General, has turned out to be just as much of a lackey for the Administration as his predecessor Alberto Gonzales. Mukasey seems to feel, as Gonzales did, that he doesn’t work for the public but is there to ensure that his bosses stay out of jail. (Interesting side-note: Barack Obama says that, if elected, he would ask his attorney general to investigate whether Bush and Cheney might have committed indictable crimes while in office.

But what really got Mukasey into hot water in recent days was his assertion that the U.S. knew that a terrorist in Afghanistan was calling someone inside the U.S. prior to the 9/11 attack but the supposedly “outdated” FISA laws wouldn’t permit the Administration to tap that phone call and thus prevent the 9/11 events from happening. Mukasey was using that fallacious argument in 2008 as a scare reason for why the Bush Administration needed Congressional re-authorization immediately of the NSA’s domestic-spying program, complete with built-in amnesty for the big telecom companies working in cahoots with the Administration.

But Mukasey’s explanation is total B.S.

As Glenn Greenwald and others have made clear, under then-existing FISA law the Bush Administration could have eavesdropped on the pre-9/11 call and didn’t really need any more draconian spying programs. (Mukasey has since tried to tapdance away from having misled Congress.)

The whole object of the Bush Administration, in this and every other matter, has been to amass total control of information and intelligence in the White House, cutting out the courts (in this case, specifically the FISA Court) and Congress. They want full freedom to operate outside the law, with nobody — no judges, no legislators, no media reporters — looking over their shoulders at what they might be up to, and telling them what they can or cannot do. It’s possible that at least one aim of the domestic-spying programs is to learn from secret phone-taps and emails what their political enemies are thinking.

THINGS ON AND OFF THE TABLE

OK, so Cheney, Bush, Rice, Mukasey, Addington (and no doubt others not quite as prominent) are dirty, involved in activities beyond and outside the law. In other words, they have engaged, and are still engaged, in high crimes and misdemeanors. What’s to be done?

There’s more than enough documented evidence to justify, at the very least, an impeachment hearing in the House. Potentially, if the committee voted to go forward, there could well be enough support to convict in the Senate from both Democrats and Republicans worried about their electoral chances in 2008.

But nothing can happen unless or until the majority Democratic leaders in both the House and Senate make the collective decision to begin the impeachment process with hearings in the House Judiciary Committee.

But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers are sticking to their guns that impeachment is “off the table.”

THEIR REASONS FOR AVOIDING ACTION

Let’s examine the main reasons why the Congressional Democratic leaders refuse to budge from this policy, and how they might be made to change their minds. Their arguments appear to rest on four basic premises:

1. Breaking the impeachment cycle. The Democrats moved to impeach Republican President Richard Nixon (who resigned before the Senate could try him), then the Republicans impeached Democratic President Bill Clinton and tried him in the Senate (not for treason or malfeasance in office but for lying about a sexual dalliance. He was acquitted). Putting Cheney and Bush on trial in the Senate, according to this reasoning, might be seen as tit-for-tat partisan vengeance.

In this argument, the impeachment option is being over-used for political reasons and risks becoming cyclical each time one party controls Congress and the other controls the White House.

A Democrat may win the Presidency in 2008. Unless the impeachment cycle is broken now, this reasoning goes, a future Democratic President might become the object of a vendetta by forces of the Republican rightwing, anxious for some payback.

2. Impeachment would hamper getting essential Congressional business done. The Democratic leadership says that preparing and conducting impeachment hearings would use up all the political oxygen and energy in Congress, making it virtually impossible to deal legislatively with important matters.

The question is whether the Democrats are having any success right now dealing with these important legislative matters. Looking at the situation realistically, it’s obvious that not much essential business is being conducted, let alone completed.

The Republicans filibuster, or threaten to, at which point the Dems back off their legislation; if a bill by the Democratic majority does manage to sneak through, Bush either vetoes it or issues a “signing statement” saying he won’t obey the new law. Virtually all matters of import are being postponed until after the new President is installed next January.

3. Why rock the boat? Why risk the opprobium of Independent and moderate-Republican voters in November, who might think the Democrats are “piling on” for partisan, electoral reasons, and thus decide to vote for the Republican nominee?

The Democratic leadership’s argument goes: “Look, the Republicans are on the ropes as a result of this incompetent, corrupt, greedy, war-mongering Administration. As a result, we’re well positioned to enlarge our electoral gains in the House and the Senate, maybe to the point of being able to prevent obstructionist Republicans from filibustering needed legislation. And we may well take back the White House. So why rock the boat?

“Let’s just last out CheneyBush’s final months in office [the Dem argument continues]. Since we know that this unpopular pair will continue to earn the disdain and anger of the American public by continuing their extremist ways until Inauguration Day in January, it’s better they remain in office rather than risk firing-up GOP-base passions during the election campaign by putting Bush and Cheney in the impeachment dock. Besides, if we impeached them, the public’s focus would fasten on Bush and Cheney rather than on the Republican nominee and the dangers of a possible McCain presidency.”

In short, the American people, this reasoning goes, want to quickly move away from thinking about the godawful CheneyBush Administration of the past eight years and head to a more optimistic, hopeful future.

4. The fear of being slimed. The Democrats don’t want to be accused of being “unpatriotic” by putting a “wartime” President into the impeachment dock. Even though Bush is the most unpopular president in history, and though more than three-quarters of American citizens think under his leadership the country is “on the wrong track,” the Democrats, anxious for a re-election sweep in the House and Senate, remain terrified of Rovian-type Swiftboating smears that could possibly cost them some votes in November and in the 2010 midterm election.

Realizing that the Bushistas still control the mainstream, corporate-owned media, and thus have all sorts of TV/radio/newspaper organizations that could dump on them big time, the Democrats continue to roll over and make nice to the shrinking but noisy Republican base and their TV/radio pundits. In other words, the Dems are perennial wimps and haven’t yet figured out how best to confront the smash-mouth, take-no-prisoners politics of Rove & Co.

I strongly disagree with these four rationales for inaction, but at least I can understand where they’re coming from. But the Democrats, especially their leaders, are simply ignoring some essential arguments.

REBUTTAL: WHY NOT IMPEACHMENT?

1. Nine months is a longnnnnnnnnnnnnng time. Between now and January 2009, a full nine months from now, CheneyBush are capable of doing a hell of a lot of further damage to the body politic, to the economy, to the Constitution, to the reputation of the U.S. abroad, to the armed forces, to the “enemy” countries in their crosshairs. The propaganda campaign being catapulted against Iran, for example, is nearly a carbon copy of what took place before the U.S. bombed, invaded and occupied Iraq. The neo-cons in the Administration, especially Cheney and Bush, are salivating at the prospect of an enormous air assault on Iran’s military establishment and laboratories, have positioned attack forces near and around Iran, and are ready to rumble. All they need is an acceptable causus belli.

A cornered CheneyBush&Co. down in the bunker may decide, what the hell, to unleash the dogs of war again, even though their two previous unleashings have been disasters. Iraq is a catastrophic quagmire of epic proportions, and a somewhat ignored Afghanistan is heating up again with the Taliban re-asserting control of larger and larger portions of the country.

In addition, John McCain is making it clear that he will be continuing the Administration’s foreign and domestic policies if he were to win in November. He’s said it would be fine for America to stay in Iraq for a hundred years or more, he’s indicated that he’s quite amenable (maybe even eager) to “bomb, bomb, bomb” Iran, he won’t do much to help deal with the consequences of global warming, he has little to offer in the way of solutions for the financial mess the country is in — we’re talking a possible foreign policy/economic/environmental apocalypse here!

2. The danger of a green light. Impeachment is an important and necessary step Americans can take to rein in an out-of-control administration that is endangering the country’s national security with its reckless, extreme misadventures.

Taking the possibility of impeachment “off the table” is to fight the CheneyBush Administration with one hand tied behind the back. Bush&Co. have demonstrated over the past eight years that they understand, and respond to, only one thing: countervailing power that refuses to give in. The ultimate effective weapon in the Legislative Branch’s arsenal is the fear of impeachment and conviction and removal from power, to be followed either by “war crimes” charges internationally and felony and civil-suit prosecutions inside the U.S.

Absent the possibility of impeachment, Cheney and Bush feel they have a green light to do whatever they wish in the time remaining of their tenure. Waxman and Leahy can try to humiliate and embarrass them in their Congresssional one-day hearings, but they will face no real accountability or punishment for their actions. So why not continue the corruption, attack Iran, appoint more ideologues to the courts and into high administrative positions, postpone any global-warming solutions, etc. etc.?

3. The precedent of respecting the law. Whenever leaders are not punished for their unethical policies or criminal misdeeds, the rule of law suffers. Impeachment is mentioned numerous times in the Constitution as the legal and required remedy for extreme misrule. It’s the last option for citizens, through their legislators, to discipline errant leaders.

If the Congress does not impeach this president and vice president, who have nearly taken the country down as a result of their reckless, dangerous, incompetent, authoritarian behavior, then the rule of law stands for nothing. And future elected leaders can legitimately believe that they more or less can also get away with anything they wish to do.

Putting Cheney and Bush into the impeachment dock is to assert the primacy of the rule of law under our system of governance, and would serve as a clear warning shot across the bow of future presidents.

4. Force CheneyBush to play defense. There is one other advantage to initiating impeachment hearings ASAP for Bush and Cheney. The Bush&Co. juggernaut is most effective when on the offensive and their opponents are put on the defensive. The Bushistas don’t like, and don’t do well, when they’re forced to play defense. Tying them up in defending themselves in impeachment hearings and/or impeachment trials might well prevent them from doing more mischief before they give up the reins of power. (Many Republicans were convinced they would never convict Bill Clinton in the Senate but figured the trial was worth doing anyway because it would hog-tie Clinton’s agenda for the rest of his presidency — and they were correct.)

A final side-benefit of impeaching Bush and Cheney: John McCain would find himself on the campaign trail being forced to take positions on torture and signing statements at the heart of the impeachment hearings, and, more often than not, would wind up either defending those unpopular policies or promising never to repeat them.

WILL THE DEMS SURPRISE US ALL?

Will the Congressional Democratic leaders change their attitude toward impeachment?

I think the answer is a clear No unless their constituencies loudly and unwaveringly tell them they have to or risk the consequences at the ballot box, or in the possible establishment of a new, grassroots-engendered party after the November election that will demonstrate the courage and passion for ethical and reality-based government that is so lacking in today’s timid, Bush-enabling Democratic Party.

That, unfortunately, is where we are politically in the Spring of 2008. It doesn’t have to be that way.#

Bernard Weiner, Ph.D., has taught government & international relations at universities in California and Washington, worked as a writer/editor at the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers. To comment: crisispapers@comcast.net .

First published by The Crisis Papers and Democratic Underground 4/22/08.

Copyright 2008 by Bernard Weiner.

Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”: Corporatism in Extremis

By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers

Most of the books I’ve read about the awfulness of the Bush presidency remind me of the old story about the blind men trying to figure out what an elephant looks like. Each one feels the part in front of him and describes the elephant within that singular context. The blind men’s descriptions are correct but they don’t really capture “elephant-ness,” the totality of what such an animal might be.

“The Shock Doctrine” by The Nation/Guardian writer Naomi Klein gets the pieces of the elephant right, but, more importantly, the book displays the author’s deep understanding of the dangerous political/economic philosophies that undergird U.S. domestic and foreign policy.

In this, “The Shock Doctrine” is the most compelling, intelligent, meticulously researched and wholistic book I’ve yet read about how the U.S., over the past fifty years, got itself into the unholy mess it’s in today.

A large part of Klein’s book, as you might guess, involves the catastrophe that is Iraq and the “war on terror” in general. But those military misadventures, she says, are but symptoms of the more all-encompassing ideological mindset that breeds the reckless policies being pursued today both domestically and internationally.

PROFITEERING ON HUMAN TRAGEDY

In the main, that ideology rests on a narrow, greed-oriented economic and political philosopy that barely recognizes the concept of a “public good.” Instead, the goal is what can be gained by private corporations and individuals if the “public good” is removed from the equation so that “free market” forces are permitted to act unconstrained.

The idea is to return to some imagined “clean slate” where those free-market forces can be allowed to do their stuff absent governmental interference and oversight. The economic “shock therapy” visited upon developing Latin American countries and the Iraq War/Occupation provide just two examples of such human intervention.

Often, however, Mother Nature through earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, etc. wipes the slate clean so that the greed paradigm can be allowed to flourish by removing (usually poorer) residents who get in the way of corporate desires. Klein incisively and movingly relates the tale of what happened in Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami disaster, where the local fishing villages were turned into luxurious tourist sites by money-hungry government officials in cahoots with Western developers. (Page 385)

Klein uses the term “disaster capitalism” to refer to these “orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events,” where the forces of greed view such tragedies “as exciting market opportunities.” (p.6) She quotes a Republican leader in Louisiana: “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” Katrina, Klein says, is a clear example of the new “preferred method of advancing corporate goals: using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering.” (p.

In short, in “disaster capitalism” there are huge profits to be made from other peoples’ misery, and since the welfare of the public is of no import in this economic/political theory, all that is needed for full control and enhanced profits are ways to optimally manage that misery.

MAN-MADE TRAUMA AND CHAOS

If nature doesn’t provide that trauma, humans can. According to Klein, that’s what “Shock & Awe” was all about in Iraq and which will be used in other attacks as well. The idea is to traumatize an entire culture through death, destruction, deprivation, fright, and often torture. One U.S. entrepreneur in Iraq stated it baldly: “fear and disorder offer real promise” in the marketplace. (p.9) This is reminiscent of Condoleezza Rice’s famous comment after 9/11 that the terrorist tragedy offerred conservatives a good “opportunity” to move quickly on their business and political agendas.

Much of the rationale for this type of thinking was born from Milton Friedman’s economic model developed at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and beyond. Klein, oddly enough, doesn’t even mention the complementary teaching by political philosopher Leo Strauss, the Machavellian godfather of neo-conservative extremism, who also was on the Chicago faculty; many of Strauss’ students became key players in the CheneyBush Administration. Strauss in a nutshell: grab what you can get by whatever means necessary.

While Friedman’s tough, corporate model can be, and has been, imposed on democratic cultures, Klein notes, “authoritarian conditions are required for the implementation of its true vision.” (p.11) And thus aggressive, tough strictures are often employed, often by dictators or invading armies or world financial institutions.

In non-dictatorships, government (which takes its cues from public clamor for services) must be effectively neutered or “hollowed-out” over time. The aim is to privatize as many of those public-need functions as possible, so that huge amounts of money can be made and, as it happens, healthy chunks of that cash can then be funnelled back into party coffers to aid proponents of free-markets to stay in office and expand their power base. (Conservative activist Grover Norquist aims for the day when government will be shrunken to the point that it can be “drowned in a bathtub.”)

In the Bush Administration, Klein writes, “the war profiteers aren’t just clamoring to get access to government, they are the government; there is no distinction between the two.” (p. 314)

PRIVATIZING GOVERNMENT ITSELF

As we have seen time and time again in the Bush Administration, virtually every possible government function is outsourced to corporate contractors, often with no bidding for those contracts. The middle-class and poor get stomped on and squeezed, but the corporate behemoths and multinationals — the Bechtels and Halliburtons and Blackwaters and KPMGs — make out like bandits. Graft and corruption are built into the system, with billions simply disappearing into corporate black holes, with the Administration conveniently looking the other way. And the general public, of course, winds up paying for all this transfer of wealth and is left holding the bag in the form of lack of spending on public needs and infrastructure upkeep and a huge debt burdening future generations.

“A more accurate term for a system that erases the boundaries between Big Government and Big Business is not liberal, conservative or capitalist but corporatist,” writes Klein. (p. 87) (Mussolini described this amalgam of government and business as fascism.)

“Its main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor, and an aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on security. … Other features of the corporatist state tend to include aggressive surveillance (once again, with government and large corporations trading favors and contracts), mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties and often, though not always, torture.” (p. 15)

At times, Klein seems to be suggesting that such behaviors are but unfortunate and accidental by-products of over-zealous free-marketeers, but mostly she leans in the direction of a conscious conspiracy on the part of the corporatist manipulators of the economy and body politic. For example, she says, “the extreme tactics on display in Iraq and New Orleans are often mistaken for the unique incompetence or cronyism of the Bush White House. In fact, Bush’s exploits merely represent the monstrously violent and creative culmination of a fifty-year campaign for total corporate liberation.” (p.19)

LATIN AMERICA AS CHICAGO LAB

Milton Friedman’s economic model, engineered by his former students (Klein calls them the “Chicago Boys”) placed in key countries around the world, rested upon, to use Friedman’s words, inflicting “painful shocks: only ‘bitter medicine’ could clear those distortions and bad patterns out of the way.” (p. 50) But time after time when economic shock therapies were tried out in the real world — downsizing government, eliminating millions of jobs, deregulation of industries, etc. — the resulting social chaos and dislocation were so horrific that the experiments had to be trimmed back or reconfigured, often using the very Keynesian mixed-economy approaches that are anathema to the Friedmanites.

The first public laboratory for Friedman’s drastic economic model was Latin America in the ’50s and ’60s and then beyond: Iran, Indonesia, former colonies in Afria, etc. But, says Klein, rather than encourage and bring democracy to Guatamala, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, et al., the result was the CIA-engineered “overthrow of democracy in country after country. And it did not bring peace but required the systematic murder of tens of thousands and the torture of between 100,000 and 150,000 people.” (p. 102)

Iraq, she indicates, is merely the latest manifestation of what happens when private profit and private power are the be-alls and end-alls of government policy, complemented by imperial hegemony resting on a belief in American “exceptionalism.”

“As proto-disaster capitalists, the architects of the War on Terror are part of a different breed of corporate-politicians from their predecesors, one for whom wars and other disasters are indeed ends in themselves. … That’s because what is unquestionably good for the bottom line of these companies is cataclysm — wars, epidemics, natural disasters and resource shortages. … Public service is reduced to little more than a reconnaissance mission for future work in the disaster capitalism complex.” (p. 311)

SHOCKING & AWING IN IRAQ

Nowhere is this more evident that in Iraq, which contains all four of those calamities (war, epidemics, natural disasters and resource shortages) in one convenient location:

“After the crusade had conquered Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, the Arab world called out as its final frontier…The architects of this invasion were firm believers in the shock doctrine — they knew that while Iraqis were consumed with daily emergencies, the country could be discreetly auctioned off and the results announced as a done deal.”

“The architects of the war surveyed the global aresenal of shock tactics and decided to go with all of them — blitzkrieg military bombardment supplemented with elaborate psychological operations, followed up with the fastest and most sweeping political and economic shock therapy program attempted anywhere, backed up, if there was any resistance, by rounding up those who resisted and subjecting them to ‘gloves-off’ abuse…[an] experiment in mass torture for months.” (p. 331)

Torture and the other dislocations usually occur early as a demonstration model; the extreme maltreatment is not aimed solely or sometimes even mainly at those persons tortured or killed, but are designed to stimulate a general sense of chaos and fright and to “destroy the parts of society that those people represent,” such as resisters, political activists, or labor organizers. (p. 101)

So why did the U.S. Occupation go so badly? One could name a host of reasons, but certainly a huge one is an obvious blind spot in the theory of American exceptionalism:

“It was this theft of Iraq’s reconstruction funds from Iraqis, justified by unquestioned, racist assumptions about U.S. superiority and Iraqi inferiority — and not merely the generic demons of ‘corruption’ and ‘incompetence’ — that doomed the project from the start. (p. 347) … It was straight-up corporate gorging on state coffers.” (p. 355)

“[The Bush Administration} had commissioned a kind of country-in-a-box, designed in Virginia and Texas, to be assembled in Iraq. ... Iraqis did not see the corporate reconstruction as 'a gift': most saw it as a modernized form of pillage," in cahoots with a corrupted Iraqi government bureaucracy. (p. 347) At that point, a huge number of those disenchanted, angry Iraqis joined the armed rebels.

RENTING-BACK ESSENTIAL SERVICES

So what lies in store for the future, now that so many major countries are little more than national-security police states, with their traditional governmental public-service functions outsourced or otherwise "disappeared"? Klein looks into her crystal ball:

"The next phase of the disaster capitalism complex is all too clear: with emergencies on the rise, government no longer able to foot the bill, and citizens stranded by their can't-do state, the parallel corporate state will rent back its own disaster infrastructure to whomever can afford it, at whatever price the market will bear. For sale will be everything from helicopter rides off rooftops to drinking water to beds in shelters." (p. 319) Blackwater providing armed guards in post-Katrina New Orleans was just the tip of the iceberg (p. 421), or Sandy Spring, GA., where the entire city government is run by the private corporation CH2M Hill.

"

But the [disaster] industry has far greater ambitions, including privatized global communication networks, emergency health and electricity…the contracting-out of police and fire departments to private security companies…and the ability to locate and provide transportation for a global workforce in the midst of a major disaster. … [We are witnessing] the expansion of the narrow military-industrial complex into the sprawling disaster capitalism complex. Today, global instability does not just benefit a small group of arms dealers; it generates huge profits for the high-tech security sector, for heavy construction, for private health-care companies treating wounded soldiers, for the oil and gas sectors — and of course for defense contractors.” (p. 420)

And the stock markets reflect that reality, rising as disasters occur. Says Klein: “Shock-therapy ‘reforms’ have been the crack cocaine of financial markets.” (p. 87)

COUNTERING THE GREED MERCHANTS

Can anything be done to counter the rise of the national-security/disaster-capitalism states? Klein says the blowback is already happening against disaster-capitalism all over the globe, but is most clearly evident in Latin America where leaders and populations are rebelling against U.S. hegemonic desires and harsh IMF policies. They are learning to “build shock absorbers into their organizing models,” Klein writes. (p. 453)

In Europe, two countries (France and Holland) rejected the European Constitution, the French because they saw that document as “the codification of the corporatist order,” what they called “savage capitalism.” More and more grassroots-generated collectives are being started in Brazil to reclaim unused land, and in Argentina hundreds of bankrupt companies “recovered” by their workers have been turned into democratically-organized cooperatives. (p. 455)

These are small steps, to be sure, but they may represent strong, active anti-disaster capitalism tectonics about to emerge. Certainly, the appearance of this brilliantly argued book is a giant and necessary step in turning this country, and the world, around.#

Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked as a writer/editor for the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org). To comment: crisispapers@comcast.net .

First published by The Crisis Papers and Democratic Underground 4/15/08.

Copyright 2008 by Bernard Weiner.

Things That Go Bump In My Night

By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers

In the hour of the wolf, we progressive activists are sometimes visited by nightmarish political scenarios. No doubt, dear reader, you have your own scary visitations. Here are ten of mine:

1. MOVING CLOSER TO IRAN WAR

That some major false-flag terrorist attack, perhaps arranged by our own black-op agencies, will be unloosed in an American city — maybe a dirty nuke, or some virulent toxin, or a bomb — and the planted “evidence” will seem to lead back to Iran. CheneyBush, perhaps in coordination with Israel, will finally get their wished-for aerial assault on that country.

An attack on Iran could happen very soon. The buildup of U.S. forces in the region has proceeced apace in the past few months; naval preparations ( http://en.rian.ru/russia/20070327/62697703.html ), according to Russian intelligence, are much the same as just prior to CheneyBush’s “shock&awe” attack on Iraq five years ago. The Saudis seem to be preparing for possible nuclear fallout from an attack on Iran’s reactors. ( http://www.chris-floyd.com/content/view/1463/135 ) Not a good sign.

The result of a U.S. attack on Iran would be a catastrophic rise in violence in the Greater Middle East, more hatred of America around the world, the dollar heading into the toilet, various holders of billions of U.S. notes calling them in, a possible anti-U.S. economic embargo of essential resources, the economy in ruins, America a pariah in international affairs.

2. ABOVE & BEYOND THE LAW

That there won’t be an inauguration of a new president because Bush, following some major incident (perhaps the false-flag operation noted above or something similar), will declare martial law and rule by decree. Which, not incidentally, is pretty close to what he’s doing right now with his signing statements and executive orders and his refusal to obey decisions of the courts and Congress’ subpoenas requiring testimony and documents.

Under the cockamamie “unitary executive” theory, and hiding behind his supposed wartime powers that assert that Bush can do anything he wishes as long as he says it’s done as “commander-in-chief” during “wartime,” Bush has effectively put himself above and beyond the law. The only hope for saving what remains of our democratic institutions lies in impeachment, a rebellion in Congress and among the populace, a united Supreme Court ruling against him, a refusal by the military to fire on protesting civilians, or a sweeping, massive Democratic victory in November. Probably most or all of these at the same time will be required.

If none of these stop-gaps work during CheneyBush’s residency in the White House, it could be incarceration in FEMA camps for all manner of protesters and resisters.

3. A THIRD TERM FOR BUSH

That Hillary Clinton’s destructive campaign (praising McCain as fit to be “commander-in-chief” while constantly demeaning Obama as unfit to rule and unable to win the general election) will effectively result in Bush being elected to a third term. That is, John McCain would win.

McCain would be aided in this by Ralph Nader, who as a “spoiler” once again would be financially supported by the Republicans, as happened in 2000 and 2004.

4. PILFERING AT THE POLLS

That the November 2008 election, assuming we actually have one, will be stolen yet again by the GOP in enough key states to guarantee a Republican presidential victory through a combination of manipulated vote totals by the private, GOP-leaning companies that tabulate the ballots, and by the host of dirty tricks that by now the Rove-ian forces have down to a T, such as:

Culling the voting rolls of hundreds of thousands of likely Democratic voters in minority precincts; robo-calling registered Dem voters again and again and again, supposedly by Dem candidates, to irritate those called into not voting for that candidate; telling poor voters that if they have any unpaid traffic tickets, they are liable for arrest at their voting precinct; distributing leaflets in minority communities that voting this year will be on a Wednesday; etc. etc. (All of these, and more, were vote-suppression techniques utilized by the GOP in 2004 and 2006.)

5. DELUSIONAL THINKING IN IRAQ

That the Joint Chiefs of Staff will be unable to stop CheneyBush from escalating the Iraq fighting yet again, getting the U.S. even more deeply enmeshed in that country’s civil war, and making it even more difficult for a new administration to extricate America from that immoral, multi-trillion-dollar sinkhole.

Bush remains lodged somewhere in cloud-cuckoo land, bragging about how the current explosion of violence throughout Iraq is a sign of the “success” of his policies. The only reasons the violence slowed a bit post-”surge” was that Muqtada al-Sadr told his militia forces to stand down and the U.S. paid off Sunni insurgents not to attack U.S. troops. Now that the battles are being resumed, the violence spikes will continue to rise.

CheneyBush, desperate for something that looks positive in Iraq, may have leaned on Maliki to launch a major offensive against the al-Sadr militias, or maybe it was the other way around, with Maliki using the U.S. troops as shields as he attacked his major political foes. But, whoever initiated the offense, it was way premature, as the Maliki forces are not there yet, and may never be. (There have been significant defections to the militias by forces supposedly loyal to the central government.)

This is the same mistake made by the American forces moving into Iraq five years ago — that it would all be over quickly. We “underestimated their capabilities,” said an Iraqi government official. Sound familiar?

6. LOCATING THE BODIES FOR MORE WAR

That given this recent turn of events, the effect of the Iraq government offensive is to put American and British forces in the middle between warring Shi’ite factions. I don’t think the American public, or the Pentagon chiefs, will support having U.S. troops in such an untenable position for any length of time.

Sadr, after his forces humiliated Maliki by stalemating him on the ground, has now called off his troops, but the militant cleric has made his point: He can bring rack and ruin to the Iraq cental government whenever he wants, and there’s not much Maliki can do about it.

And Sadr may want to release his militia force again before the American election in November, which is precisely what the CheneyBush Administration fears as another large Sadrist attack would once again demonstrate the total ineffectiveness of U.S. policy in Iraq.

The big winner ( www.juancole.com/2008/03/iran-brokers-call-for-ceasefire-bush.html ) in all this, of course, is Shi’ite Iran. It stepped in and helped separate Iraq’s two warring Shi’ite factions. Lots of egg on lots of Iraqi and U.S. faces.

Already, Bush has indicated there will be no draw-down of U.S. forces this Spring. Eventually, there may have to be yet another “surge” force dispatched to Iraq, just to “temporarily stabilize” the situation. Can you spell (and smell) V-I-E-T-N-A-M and Q-U-A-G-M-I-R-E?

And from where would the military, already stretched dangerously thin in the Greater Middle East and around the globe, put their hands on 30,000 more bodies? The Reserves and National Guard and in-country troops about to be “stop-lossed” yet again are close to the point of rebellion. As much as CheneyBush do not wish to go there (because of the likelihood of a mammoth opposition to the war in the American middle class), one can feel a draft in the room.

7. NOBODY DID ANYTHING WRONG

That Bush will issue blanket presidential pardons to Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales, John Ashcroft, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, David Addington, and Himself for all crimes they “may have committed” during their tenure in the Administration.

Once again, nobody in the higher echelons is ever accountable in the CheneyBush royal court. It must have been the pesky dog that ate everybody’s homework.

8. A DEPLETED WORLD LARDER

That the trend of various countries in the world running short of essential commodities will result in even more horrendous resource-wars between and inside nations over potable and irrigation water, oil, wheat, rice, and so on. Starvation, dehydration, not even rice to feed Asia, not enough grains with which to make pasta and bread in Europe, not enough oil to run cars and machinery, etc. etc.

Another worldwide Great Depression, aided by an unfolding collapse of the U.S. economy.

9. DENIAL ON A GLOBAL SCALE

That even with the ocean waters rising as a result of global warming and the consequent faster melting of glaciers and ice shelves, with the consequent disastrous effects on climate-change, the Republicans will continue to downplay what they see in front of their eyes. Given that state of denial means that the GOP will wind up doing nothing about global warming; instead, they will continue to blame Bill Clinton, abortion providers, and the “homosexual agenda.” (”Let’s see, today I’m going to get my hair done, get married to my partner, and then take my hair dryer and go melt some glaciers.”)

10. CHENEY, THANK YOO

That Dick Cheney will be named chairman of John McCain’s vice-presidential selection committee. And that John Yoo will be nominated by McCain for the next open seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.

*****

This is where we are after nearly eight years of CheneyBush rule: The scariest thing about most of these nightmare visions is that, based on CheneyBush’s documented record of outrageous and illegal and reckless governance, the above scenarios sound almost normal these days. Which means they could easily happen.

All the more reason why we must redouble our oppositional energies: organize, organize, organize; resist, resist, resist. #

Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at univerisities in California and Washington, worked as a writer/editor with the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades, and currenty serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org). For comment: crisispapers@comcast.net .

First published by The Crisis Papers and Democratic Underground 4/1/08.
www.crisispapers.org/essays8w/bump.htm

Copyright 2008 by Bernard Weiner.

A Western Parable: Waist-Deep in the Big Muddy (Again)

By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers

My neighbor’s cattle operation had a huge number of prized Black Angus steers and Holstein dairy-cows. I wanted them and the lush range they fed on. I tried making some sort of deal with the owner, but he was one ornery sumbitch.

He knew his Double I-Ranch was prime real estate, with super cattle herds, so he made sure to hire the strongest guards and gave them the latest weapons so nobody would consider making a move on him. He was taunting me, telling me he wouldn’t deal, that I could go to hell. He needed a good lesson in humility.

Over the years, the guy had been getting old and his security system had slipped into disrepair. He ran his ranch as a kind of corrupt one-man show so I knew he’d be a pushover if I moved on his property and just took it, got rid of him and set up my own manager of the place who would run it “independently” but take his cues from me, if you get my drift. I’m the most powerful land baron in the area now, so why not? Nobody could really stop me.

But I couldn’t just march my assembled gunslingers and cowhands in there and openly take it. I’d have to attack under cover of “the law”: helping the poor downtrodden residents who live there, that sort of thing. So I went to the County Council and told them all sorts of scary stories about huge caches of weapons, including some really dangerous experimental ones, that were stockpiled on his ranch. I said he was planning on using all that ordnance against us and his other neighbors and his own people.

I also told them that the rancher had been involved in the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing, even though I knew he hadn’t been. Oddly enough, I could get only one other major neighbor to join my plan, a suck-up kind of poodle who thought he’d hitch his small ranch to my power-star.

ATTACK BEFORE ANYONE CAN PREVENT IT

I urged the County Council to pass a resolution saying the rancher better disarm or else face an attack. But before agreeing, the county authorities (those suspicious a-holes!) didn’t want to take my word about the weapon-stockpiles and sent in arms-inspectors who, not surprisingly, weren’t finding much of anything.

I knew if I got all balled up in those inspections and in County Council politics, I’d never be able to take control of his ranch, and later the surrounding properties that also seemed ripe for the plucking. So I decided to attack first, “pre-emptively,” so to speak, before he could do any damage and before anybody could try to stop me.

Word got out about my impending attack, and lots of folks from all over the county, and even the state, demonstrated in the streets against me, warning about all the things that could go wrong if our guys attacked without a solid moral reason, without an imminent threat against us, and without a large coalition of friends and neighbors.

But my top ranchhands and some former residents of Double I-Ranch I consulted about the coming attack told me it would be a “cakewalk,” would be over real quicklike, and that all the abused workers on the ranch would be so happy to be freed from their tyrannical boss, they’d be grateful to us forever.

NOT SO FAST WITH THAT “VICTORY”

So we hyped all those scary stories about weapons and fooled or paid off enough County Council members, and soon we were mortaring the bejusus out of the next-door ranch — it was awesome! It didn’t take long for our guys to get to the main ranch-house. The hired guards didn’t put up much of a fight — in fact, they seemed to have melted into the general population. So I held a press conference announcing, under a big “Victory Is Ours” banner, that our guys had “prevailed” in the fighting. Double I-Ranch was now “under new management,” which meant we began setting up friendly crew-chiefs who would do our bidding.

But then all hell broke loose. Turns out that our guys had pretty much wrecked the place and weren’t able to reconstruct much of this broken ranch. The contractors I hired couldn’t rebuild the ruined corrals, stockyards, water-delivery and electrical systems, and so on. (They did waste and steal a lot of the reconstruction funds, but I thought it was worth looking the other way to keep them happy.)

The local Double I-Ranch residents, including a lot of former guards, were getting surly. They started fighting us, using abandoned weapons caches our guys hadn’t bothered to secure, since so much of our attention was focused on getting the Black Angus and Holstein herds to market and to expanding and protecting our new grazing lands.

To make a long story short, our occupation of the ranch went into the toilet, and we no longer were seen to be on the moral high ground after word got out that our guys were abusing the locals we had captured. Every month, we lost more and more of our own hired gunslingers to the rebels in ambushes and sneak-attacks, often without the right armor to protect themselves.

Some weak-kneed namby-pambys said it made sense at that point to abandon Double I-Ranch, which was consumed in chaos in any event, as various factions among the ranchhands were fighting among themselves. But even though they hated each other, by this time virtually the entire I-Ranch population, employees and just regular locals alike wanted us to leave. Even some of those ungrateful leaders we’d installed felt the same way. Many of our supporters thought we were bogged down there, for sure, and could be in that mess for decades.

Even if there were no stockpiles of advanced weapons, and no Double I-Ranch connection to the Okalahoma City bombing, our guys were on the ground there, as planned, so it made sense to send in more armed ranchands and just power on through and come up with a victory down the road somewhere. Not just on this ranch, but in the entire area. So we built huge staging bases on the ranch, which would be used for leverage in getting our way with the other property owners in the region whenever we decided to move.

NOW IN OUR SIXTH YEAR

I’ll try to bluff those owners into giving us effective access and control over their land, livestock and resources, including water and even possible oil fields. But, if that doesn’t work, I figure since we still are the most powerful landowners in the county — our Flying W brand is a strong one — we’ll just take what we want by force, if it comes to that. And why shouldn’t we? We are the Good Guys. Almost all the politicians and local reporters say so. Of course, I own or can control virtually all the papers and radio stations/TV channels, and, for that matter, most of the politicians who count, too.

Trouble was, this damned operation, which is now in its sixth year, is costing us a humongous fortune and folks on my Flying W ranch are starting to get restless, since I don’t have much money left over to repair our fences, maintain our herds, and repair our ranch buildings. And many are noticing that I’m financing our campaign to control the grazing fields and herds and natural resources by borrowing heavily from outsiders — mainly from those who might be future enemies. This means that my kids and grandkids will be paying that huge debt forever.

Even worse, the lies and deceptions that my friends and I had told early on to get us into attacking Double I-Ranch are now coming back to bite us. Even many of my supporters who agreed with my plans at the beginning are rejecting me now that the going is tough. Indeed, folks are talking about a public lynching unless I abandon my “extreme” agenda. In short, I am so unpopular — sometimes I feel like a skunk at a nudist colony — that my supporters probably aren’t going to be able to control the County Council in the next election.

To which I say a hearty “Fuck you!” to one and all. You have no power, I have all the power. And our side is winning; we’re winning, I tell you! And I have faith we will achieve victory. Someday.

Or, if not, so?

I’m about to retire and move to Costa Rica or Paraguay or somewhere. So what do I care if I’ve screwed it up so badly that whoever comes after me will be waste-deep in the big muddy for years, with nowhere to go but down? In the meantime, maybe I’ll attack another big ranch in the area. Why? Just because I can. And it will provide a great distraction from my other…uh…projects.

In short, I don’t recommend trying to cross me. Just lie back and enjoy it.

If any group moves against me and tries to destroy my rule, I’ll take them all down with me when I go. Them and the whole goddamned ranch. It’s that simple. You choose. #

Bernard Weiner, a poet and playwright, has written numerous parables, political fantasies and satires of the CheneyBush Administration. A Ph.D. in government & international relations, he has taught at various universities, worked as a writer/editor with the San Francisco Chronicle, and currently co-edits The Crisis Papers. For comment: crisispapers@comcast.net .

First published by The Crisis Papers and Democratic Underground 3/25/08.

Copyright 2008 by Bernard Weiner.

Peace May Be Possible in the Post-Bush Middle East

By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers

The Middle East is undergoing yet another paroxysm of violence. An attack from one side or the other, be it Israeli or Palestinian in origin, leads to reprisal attacks, which leads to — well, we all understand the vortex that both sides continue to fall into.

This state of warfare has been going on for at least 60 years, since the founding of the State of Israel, and, in a sense, much much longer than that. And the situation is getting worse.

Those on the extremes in both Israel and Palestine (including those inside the governing entities on both sides) are attempting to make sure there will never be a peace settlement. And, by and large, both both sides’ leaders allow that interference in the peace process to rule their responses, even though polls in both Israel and Palestine indicate most citizens would prefer a peaceful two-state solution.

The Israel/Palestine situation is so seemingly intractable in how to get to that solution that it leads to regional, indeed almost universal, despair and depression. Without much energy or hope for progress, the status quo of low-level violence persists and constantly threatens to break out into full-scale warfare.

Every so often, maybe every five or ten years, the ongoing slaughter pushes the two battle-weary sides to come close enough to inspire hope that a solution can be devised — not a perfect solution, not one that guarantees peace, but one leading in that direction. And just as usually, those potential “solutions” tend to fall apart, usually after an act of violence from a crazed individual or an over-reacting Israeli government or from Hamas or other militant groups in Palestine.

DOES ANYBODY REALLY WANT PEACE?

One can’t help but conclude that neither side really wants peace; they seem to feel more comfortable playing the victim role. Each side uses its distressing history and a belief that God is on its side. Each would feel supreme joy if the other side simply vanished. Each convinces itself that with just a little more effort — just another major attack or two, another bit of pressure tactics — the other side will disappear, will see that it cannot win and will capitulate to its enemy’s demands.

Yes, of course, that type of thinking makes no rational sense, but the Middle East puzzle, it’s clear, operates mainly out of emotion, hypernationalism, overweening ethnic and religious pride, the ongoing rituals of conflict, and thoroughgoing contempt and fear of The Other.

The two sides, given the mutual hatred and massacres and suspicions, seem incapable of creatively making a peace on their own, though on occasion temporary and informal cease-fires do manage to occur. Outside mediators, be they Arab organizations or the superpower U.S., then have a go at trying to lead the two warring sides into meaningful negotiations.

Various American presidents have put their reputations and energies on the line to try to bring about a settlement that can last (Clinton and Carter were the most successful), only to see the spiral of mistrust and suspicion and violence rise to the fore yet again. Totally ignored is the role-model of how Northern Ireland moved away from its seemingly intractable violence to a tenuous but growing peace.

MIDDLE EAST SPIN AND PHOTO-OPS

George W. Bush occasionally makes some sort of diplomatic move in the Middle East, usually right before a major domestic election. Now, just before another presidential balloting and as his eight-year tenure is coming to a close and he’s thinking about his legacy, Bush initiates yet another feint. The White House P.R. machine beats the drum that the U.S. is trying hard to arrange a Mideast peace settlement, but nobody believes that anymore, since it’s clear Bush doesn’t believe it either. Since he’s tied U.S. policy so tightly to Israeli policy — Israel being America’s only dependable ally in the region — it’s all spin and photo ops, lots of sound bites signifying nothing, really.

Indeed, it may well be that the war Bush&Co. care about is not the Israel/Palestinian one, but the ones about to come, perhaps as early as this summer: U.S./Israel against Iran and Israel vs. Hezbollah in Lebanon (as proxy for Syria).

Clearly, there will be no real chance for a movement toward peace in the Middle East until the new American regime takes over, if then. CheneyBush were happy to let the Israelis handle the Palestinian in their own fashion, including further humiliation and brutalization. Bush&Co. admired and saw their own aggressive policies mirrored by the “tough” Israelis.

All three of the major-party contenders for the presidency profess to be staunchly pro-Israeli, so it’s unclear whether anything major will change if McCain or Clinton or Obama were to become the new resident in the White House. AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby in Washington, continues to cow many legislators into silence, though they do not represent the wide variety of opinion, much of it sympathetic to Palestinian cries for justice and an end to the occupation, in the American Jewish community. There are strong Jewish pro-peace movements both inside America and inside Israel.

But we do know for sure that as long as Cheney and Bush are in power, nothing will change and the situation in the Middle East will become even more explosive and dangerous,

One can hope that the new U.S. Administration in 2009 will recognize its opportunity to move forcefully and quickly to craft ways out of the endless Israel/Palestine morass. Indeed, this may be history’s final opportunity to craft a viable two-state solution. For the U.S. to abdicate its role in helping bring peace to that agonized region would be shameful and self-defeating.

From now and until the November election, each of the three presidential contenders should be grilled by the press and public about their plans for ameliorating the situation in the Middle East. No doubt, they would fudge and spin their answers, but just forcing them to talk about Israel and Palestine, and how a solution is tied tightly to America’s well-being, might yield benefits down the line.

SOME FOUNDATIONAL ASSESSMENTS

Here are some possible starting points that the new president might want to consider about the Middle East dilemma:

1. Working a way to a just and peaceful solution in the Middle East is of supercharged importance not only to the survival of Israelis and Palestinians, but also is in the vital national interests of the United States.

So much of the fervor, passion and anger directed at the U.S., Israel and the West by Hamas and many other distressed Palestinians and other Arabs in the Greater Middle East would start to dissipate if the Palestinians were to achieve a viable, geographically-contiguous state of their own. To continue to let the current situation stagnate and fester is to ask for more trouble, big trouble. Doing nothing meaningful in the Middle East has been the Bush Administration’s policy for nearly eight years, and that’s what must be changed, quickly, by whoever becomes President.

2. Under Bush, the U.S. supposedly was big on helping democracy bloom in the region. But when a democratic election didn’t go the way the Bush Administration wanted, when Hamas won the approval of the majority of Palestinian voters in its parliament and both the U.S. and Israel said it would not recognize that popular electoral result, the hypocrisy of the American position was plain for all to see.

Hamas is not going to go away. Israeli governments cannot wish it away and cannot blow it away with missiles and bombs. Hamas is strong among its people because it stands up against Israel and America. Hamas therefore will have to be included in any diplomatic discussions leading to a negotiated solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict. No doubt, this will happen after Fatah and Hamas make their own separate peace with each other, if such is even possible, so as to negotiate as a united Palestinian government.

There have been hints that Obama and Clinton are not philosophically opposed to meeting with those deemed America’s “enemies” — such as Iran, Syria, North Korea, et al. — as long as preparations for such meetings would seem to indicate fruitful avenues for discussion. Is it too much to hope that the new American president might be consistent and follow the same approach with Hamas?

NEITHER HAMAS NOR ISRAEL WILL DISAPPEAR

3. Israel is not going to go away. Even if most Arabs in the region believe that the establishment of Israel in 1948 on land taken from Palestinian residents was grossly illegal, the practical reality is that the Israeli state is there to stay. No amount of international pressure or bullets or suicide bombers is going to alter that reality, though the permanent borders are still up for discussion. Therefore, all Palestinian/Arab entities will have to deal with Israel at the negotiating table. (Hamas has been the most adamant political organization to oppose Israel’s right to exist, but on occasion has hinted that if Israel made the right concessions, it could possibly bend even on that hardline position.)

4. Both sides have to realize that each has historical justifications on its side, and that in their behavior both sides are both right and wrong. In short, the question of who is the more aggrieved victim, while important, is not going to get either side anywhere, certainly not to a just peace. It’s long since time to put that history to the side, so to speak, and just get it done. This doesn’t mean Palestinians and Israelis will, or even should, like each other, or ignore their suspicions of the other’s motives or their own painful histories. It just means getting the peace made and getting the difficult details worked out as best as one can.

5. The hope for a potential peace treaty depends on both sides’ leaders (as well as those in the U.S.) being willing to make huge, politically risky decisions. Everyone knows this.

GETTING FROM HERE TO THERE

A. Israel will have to end its Occupation and return to its pre-1967 borders. It will have to abandon its settlements in the West Bank/Gaza so that the requisite geographically-contiguous state of Palestine can be made viable. Maintaining the Occupation of Palestinian lands is bleeding Israel of treasure and, more importantly, of its moral sense of itself.

B. The various branches of the Palestine liberation movement will have to recognize Israel’s right to exist within secure borders, probably based on the pre-1967 map.

C. Even if the above were to occur, there likely would be occasional acts of violence and terrorism emanating from both sides. Ultra-Orthodox, fundamentalist Jews (some inside the government), believing that the Torah supports them in their Greater Israel territorial claims, may well try to derail any peace negotiations, and the requisite concessions, by attacking Palestinian targets. Likewise, ultra-nationalist or militant Islamist groups in Palestine and beyond, believing history and/or their faith give them justifications for their policies, may keep up the rocket attacks on Israel and suicide bombings inside Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and elsewhere.

Both negotiating sides will have to agree that they will not permit the movement toward a peaceful solution to be vetoed by those who would try to stop that progress through violence. Right now, anytime there is some hope for the peace process and an incursion or bombing or rocket attack takes place, the violence veto is allowed to trump the hard work of the solution-minded diplomats and political leaders. That must stop, and can be stopped, in effect, by ignoring the terrorism. If the two viable states are talking to each other and reach significant agreements, that terrorism eventually will diminish.

D. If (and it’s a very big if) the two sides can recognize that The Other is not going to disappear, no matter how much violence is employed, and sign a peace treaty, then a wide variety of other vexing issues can be brought to the forefront and solutions found. Issues such as: how to deal with the Palestinians’ claimed “right of return” to their ancient lands inside Israel, who will rule Jerusalem, who will control the water rights in that parched region, how thousands of Palestinians can move back and forth easily between Gaza and the West Bank and to their daily jobs inside Israel, etc. etc.

SOME POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

One can see the outlines, if not the details, as to how these problems might be solved:

A. Once a peace treaty has been signed, some Palestinian families will be permitted to return to their ancestral lands inside Israel, but there’s no way Israel will permit millions or even hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees to pour into the Jewish State. Equitable financial compensation will be paid by Israel to those not permitted to return. (In principle, Palestinian negotiators in the past have indicated that they’d be willing to entertain discussion along these lines.)

B. Jerusalem is holy land for all three major religions in the area. It would make sense for Jersualem to become an “international city,” administered either by a joint Christian/Jewish/Islamic body or by an already existing international agency, perhaps under United Nations auspices. (Again, discussions already have taken place on such a potential arrangement.)

C. Water rights and easy access to and from Israel/Palestine no doubt can be worked out once the essential compromises have been made and both sides are working in good faith with each other.

PEACE MAY BE THE ONLY OPTION LEFT

Given the current tense, explosive situation on the ground in Gaza and throughout the Middle East, is any of what’s been discussed above practical or even possible? Maybe not. Maybe it will take another decade or two of continued slaughter and occupation before cooler, probably younger, leaders emerge with the courage to make the deal to ensure the peaceful future of their children and grandchildren.

But to do nothing, to give into that status quo despair, to surrender to ongoing violence, to assume that we have to wait decades for the killing to get so intense, is to give tacit support to Israel’s continued occupation and brutalization and humiliation of Palestinians, to give tacit encouragement to Palestinian suicide bombers and rocket launchers.

With the departure of CheneyBush in January of 2009 and the possibility of a new, more intelligent and nuanced Administration in Washington, we must all try to build up the momentum for peace in the Middle East. To do nothing, in the mode of the Bush Adminstration, is self-defeating, immoral, and can no longer be accepted as an option.#

Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has written extensively on the Middle East condundrum; he has taught an universities in California and Washington, worked as a writer/editor for the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers. To comment: crisispapers@comcast.net .

First published by The Crisis Papers and Democratic Underground 3/11/08.

Copyright 2008 by Bernard Weiner.

The E.L.F.s are mad! Why aren’t we?

“Of Mommies and Daddies Who Just Don’t Give a Fuck”

By Jason Miller

Thomas Paine’s Corner

Sorry kids, but you’re just going to have to deal with the fact that we are greedy narcissists. We’re dyed in the wool consumers, we worship Mammon, and eliminating the cancer of capitalism is simply out of the question.

What’s that, our beloved sons and daughters? You’re worried that the air will be too polluted to breathe, the water too toxic to drink, the rain forests too sparse to act as the Earth’s lungs, and the resources too depleted to sustain you and the other sentient inhabitants of this planet? You don’t believe “clean” coal, biofuels, and nuclear power will sustain the exquisite industrial civilization we will bequeath you once we’ve siphoned off the last drop of oil and departed for the big suburb in the sky?

Unfortunately, you’ll just have to suck it up, shut up, and deal with it! George Bush 41 made it abundantly clear that our “American Way of life is non-negotiable.” We Americans don’t even negotiate with terrorists, so it would be idiocy to even consider the possibility that we would budge an inch for mere children! Culturally genocidal perpetuators of the horrors of factory farming like McDonald’s; mammoth, gas-guzzling personal tanks that keep the economy Humming; televisions with screens large enough to put AMC out of business; single family McMansions with sufficient square footage that one subdivision could solve the homeless problem in America; our dinosaur-sized carbon foot-prints; and the production of enough garbage to ensure that we have the means to fill that ugly void known as the Grand Canyon are indispensable aspects of our being.

Better Buckle Up! — CheneyBush’s Final 10 Months

By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers

If anyone still harbors any illusions that the lame-duck CheneyBush Administration will taxi relatively harmlessly to its departure gate in January 2009, recent events suggest otherwise. It’s been made abundantly clear that in the next ten months, these guys are going to behave even more brutishly in amassing and misusing their power, and in screwing things up, than they’ve already done in the past seven-plus years.

In essence, the message emanating from the White House to the country can be summed up this way: “You want us? You come and get us. Otherwise, get out of our way! We’ve got a whole lot of unfinished business to complete.”

In foreign policy, we should expect CheneyBush to continue locking-in agreements with the Iraq government that will permit permanent stationing of troops and aircraft and missiles on that country’s soil, which in effect means a continuation of the war perhaps for decades — or, in the approving estimate of John McCain, for 50 or 100 years or more. (But you can bet that CheneyBush will withdraw some troops from Iraq, for partisan reasons, just prior to the election.) Then there’s the prospect they will bomb Iran’s military/scientific installations from the air, something Cheney and Bush and the other neo-cons, in and out of government, are salivating about.

In domestic policy, one can expect even more bad policy: placing a whole lot more incompetent ideologues into positions of administrative power and onto the courts, selling off more of America’s public lands for energy exploitation, giving more sweetheart deals to their contributors (such as the one the EPA just cut with big agriculture so they don’t have to report their factory-farm toxic-gas emissions), cutting more vital social and infrastructure programs as the economy continues to tank — thanks to Bush policies of spending upwards of three trillion dollars on the wars and associated costs), etc. etc. 

Consider just four examples from last week:

1. ENJOY YOUR “DOWNER” BURGERS

Americans were justifiably horrified when they saw recent hidden-camera footage on the nightly news of emaciated, scrabrous cows being dumped into the food supply that winds up as hamburger meat in schools and prisons and who knows where else. According to Department of Agriculture regulations, those so-called “downer” cattle (those too sick or weak to stand) are not permitted to be placed into the public food-supply chain, for fear of passing on “mad cow” or other horrific diseases.

Nearly 145,000 million pounds of such potentially tainted meat from the slaughterhouse in question had to be recalled, 37 million pounds of which already had been consumed in school lunches and other nutrition programs.

Good, the meat-processers in question were shamed and embarrassed. The government’s regulatory system was in place and all was well in the world. Right?

Wrong. CheneyBush and their GOP enablers in Congress are in hock up to their eyeballs to their corporate benefactors, and ideologically opposed in any case to the concept of regulating a free market. So, how did the Administration handle this black-eye episode?

Were the fines increased for meat-processors that skirt the rules? Their corporate owners shunned and contracts canceled? Nope.

Instead, last week, the CheneyBush Administration officially authorized the use of “downer” meat as fit for human consumption. A few more random inspections were ordered at meat-processing plants, but no systemic overhaul of the limited inspection protocols were devised to increase protection for the public. 

“So you caught us red-handed bowing to the meat-processing industry,” Bush&Co. seemed to be saying. “What are you going to do about it? Bugger off and get out of our face.”

2. WHO WATCHES THE WATCHERS?

The CheneyBush Administration is probably the most secretive in U.S. history. It doesn’t like anybody looking over its shoulder and knowing what it’s up to, mainly because so much of what it’s up to is either immoral, illegal or the result of massive corruption, often all three at the same time.

CheneyBush have been especially secretive about the many and various ways they’ve mangled and decimated the Constitution, especially in how the massive intelligence-gathering techniques available to it have been marshalled to data-mine and spy on American citizens. New technologies have enabled federal agents to secretly enter citizens’ computers, read their personal email, tap their telephones, etc., without those victimized ever knowing. Such privacy violations are done, of course, in the name of “fighting the war on terrorism.”

Just like authoritarian governments all over the globe, the CheneyBush regime keeps its illegal operations top-secret, and fights like the devil to keep them that way. One way they do this is to make sure nobody — no court, no congressional committee, and certainly not the public — is privy to their shadowy operations. To have total control of the inflow of information, they had to figure a way to avoid the post-Nixon law establishing the FISA Court as the one legal entity for oversight of all Executive requests for wiretapping and the like.

Even though the FISA court has been a virtual rubber-stamp for whatever Bush&Co. choose to do, CheneyBush don’t want to be compelled to seek official  “permission” to listen in on phone calls of American citizens. But they especially don’t want to admit that the President can be reined in by any other institution. And so, shortly after CheneyBush took office, but before 9/11, on their own order they had the NSA begin massive wiretapping and eavesdropping. After 9/11, they asserted an even greater desire to have all intelligence in their hands, always using the “national security” excuse, and, in effect, maneuvered the FISA court out of any meaningful say in their intel-mining programs.

But one final institutional outlet needed to be made toothless. It’s called the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), established in 1993, which had the power to question the legal authority of intel decisions made by the Administration. By executive order last week, it has been renamed (taking the word “foreign” out of its title) and its most important committee, the Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), was effectively stripped of its oversight responsibilities. Most notably removed was the requirement that abuses of executive power “shall be reported” to the Attorney General and that investigations can be carried out by the IOB to determine how bad the situation is. The IOB now merely reports to the Director of National Intelligence.

Here’s the sum-up, as explained by Daily Kos’ Sminthius: “The Bush administration is engaged in an epic struggle with Congress to keep its illegal domestic intelligence activities secret. That is what the battle over the FISA bill is all about. The last thing Bush, Cheney, and Addington would wish to do would be to leave the IOB in a position to start investigating or exposing that illegality — now, or in a future administration.”

What are CheneyBush hiding in their all-encompassing intel-mining of U.S. citizens? It could involve listening in on their political enemies, or it could be something huge in the works (an attack on Iran?) that they feel would require a nationwide clampdown on intel collection and dissemination. Stay tuned.

3. TRUE CONTEMPT OF CONGRESS

Another way of avoiding scrutiny and oversight is to ignore and neuter the other branches of government. Given how many HardRight judges they’ve appointed, CheneyBush more or less can count on getting their questionable actions approved by the appellate courts and even by the Supreme Court. In addition, they control the Department of Justice through the ideological toadies they appointed as Attorney General, most notably Alberto Gonzales and now Michael Mukasey.

Recently, the House voted to hold two key Administration figures (White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolton and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers) in contempt of Congress for their failure to honor a subpoena by the House Judiciary Committee requiring their testimony and relevant documents relating to the matter of the fired U.S. Attorneys. They were informed by the committee that they could assert a claim of “executive privilege” as a justification for not answering questions and not providing the documents, but they had to do that by appearing and making that claim in front of the committee. They were not simply free to ignore a lawful subpoena to appear. In short, nobody was above the law.

The committee gave the Administration all sorts of extended deadlines and opportunities to comply, but all they got back was silence from the White House. CheneyBush didn’t want their aides to appear and so they didn’t; for them to appear, in this twisted theory of governance, would be to acknowledge the validity of Congressional oversight and the separation of powers under which the U.S. has operated for more than 225 years.

Congress can not challenge the authority of the President, this White House reasoning essentially is: “We  will not submit to your requests or demands or subpoenas, so go stuff yourself.” (Of course, it’s easier to strike this tough-guy ‘tude when you know that the Democrats in charge of Congress have taken impeachment “off the table.”)

Eventually, the House leadership had had enough and Miers and Bolton were cited for contempt, which could earn them jail time. But the citation is meaningless unless it can be enforced and guess who is in charge of referring those contempt citations to a grand jury for possible indictments? Right, Michael Mukasey, CheneyBush’s handpicked lackey as Attorney General. And, sure enogh, Mukasey refused to refer.

Democratic Senators Dianne Feinstein and Charles Schumer voted to confirm Mukasey because, they said, he promised to be an objective independent AG. It didn’t take long, as was demonstrated last week, to figure out that Mukasey, like Gonzales, is little more than a trained poodle willingly and energetically doing the White House bidding whenever called upon to protect Cheney and Bush from possible legal problems.

And, even if Muksasey had sent the contempt citations to the criminal court, the U.S. Attorney for the D.C. District, Jeffrey Taylor, would have to sign the request in order for criminal indictments to be delivered. Taylor is another made man, one of Bush&Co.’s handpicked U.S. Attorneys, and he’s made clear that he would not enforce Congress’ contempt citations against Administration officials.

4. YOU’VE GOT (NO) MAIL

Another way Bush&Co. hide what they’re really up to is to make sure there’s no evidence lying around. Rove and his minions, to keep their less savory projects secret, used both White House email addresses and Republican National Committee email addresses. The White House claims that several million of its requested emails have gone “missing. When Congress subpoenaed the tens of thousands of RNC emails to the White House, they were told that, glory be, those emails likewise had somehow “disappeared” and couldn’t be found. Angry Democratic chairmen said look again. The Republicans said they would try to restore computer backup tapes.

Many months have now gone by and last week, the RNC told Congress that it “has no intention of trying to restore the missing White House e-mails.” No explanation. That’s it. “Up yours. Whatya goin’ to do about it, suckers?”

Unless somehow the Democrats can bring more power to bear, the RNC move, writes Lambert at the Corrente blog, “increases the likelihood that an untold number of RNC e-mails dealing with official White House business during the first term of the Bush administration — including many sent or received by former presidential adviser Karl Rove — will never be recovered…”

Maybe the Democrats should ask Attorney General Mukasey to look into the likely destruction of email evidence pointing to illegal activity in the White House. That should take care of the matter.

FOLLOW THE POLITICS

The secrets of how and why CheneyBush fired those U.S. Attorneys and replaced them with their own loyalists will remain hidden away from public view, even though it’s clear to all what was going on. CheneyBush needed to get rid of independent-minded U.S. Attorneys and replace them with those who would do what they’re told, especially harassing and indicting Democrats on trumped-up “vote fraud” and other phony charges prior to the November election, and protecting corrupt officials and GOP dirty-tricks operatives working to suppress hundreds of thousands of minority voters from exercising their franchise in the November elections.

So shutting down Congress’ contempt citations is par for the course for this administration that makes sure that it is never held accountable for its reprehensible and often illegal actions. That’s the way autocrats rule.

House Speaker Pelosi said she’s now entertaining taking those contempt citations into civil court, thus bypassing the U.S. Attorney. We shall see.

Or, given the CheneyBush penchant for secrecy — aided and abetted by their enablers in Congress, the corporate mass-media, and the courts — maybe we won’t see. #

Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at various universities, worked as a writer/editor for the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers. To comment: crisispapers@comcast.net .

First published by The Crisis Papers and Democratic Underground 3/4/08.

Copyright 2008 by Bernard Weiner.

Bloviate this!

An Open Letter to Bill O’Reilly

By Jason Miller

Thomas Paine’s Corner

Dear Bill,

This is a note from an American radical.

We are few in number, but we do exist.

Time and again we’ve watched you bully your victims (or “guests” as you duplicitously refer to them) from your secure little perch high atop the food chain of craven and mendacious propagandists dutifully maintaining the pernicious lies that perpetuate the moral retardation and turpitude of this nation. You are a truly despicable human being. And by the way, Bill, characterizing you as a human being is a sign of our generosity and open-mindedness.

[As an aside, just what did Fox give you in exchange for your soul, Bill? Hopefully it was worth it because you are so deeply complicit in maintaining the mind fuck that enables your masters amongst the power elite to continue annihilating millions of sentient beings and destroying the planet via naked imperialism, neocolonialism, resource exploitation, factory farming, and a plethora of other evils.]

In an interview on “Sixty Minutes” within the last few years, you proclaimed yourself to be “working class.” Now that took some real balls to float such an obvious lie on a show with that many viewers. Actually, rather than displaying nerve, you were probably just being shrewd. As adept as you are at plying your craft as a professional prevaricator, you knew that many US Americans (who still believe in the magic kingdom of meritocracy and egalitarianism) would swallow that whopper hook, line and sinker. [If by some ridiculous chance you are making working class wages, you better tell Rupert or Roger you want to renegotiate your contract immediately!]

Being the avaricious and narcissistic careerist you are, you have clawed your way to the top of the dung heap of apologists for a system that is murdering the planet by “bravely” proclaiming your support of motherhood, apple pie, and the American Way. What most of your fans and viewers don’t realize (and perhaps you don’t even see it–though it is unlikely you are that unsophisticated) is that you are a Right Wing thug thriving in a Right Wing Nation where “liberal” mainstream politicians like Hillary Clinton would need to move several degrees left simply to make it to dead center.

It’s all so easy when you’ve got the backing of deep-pocketed corporate sponsors, isn’t it Bill? And how can you lose when you consistently shoot fish in a barrel by skewering mealy-mouthed liberal proponents of “fixing our system” (rather than flushing it down the sewer where it belongs)? To the indoctrinated masses you look like a hero when you beat such “threats to the American way of life” into the ground with your jejune tirades and then proudly proclaim that you “aired an opposing viewpoint.”

But not all of us on the Left in the US are so passive, mild, and impotent. Some of us are radicals in the sense that we get to the root of the matter. We recognize that the status quo, including capitalism, hyper-industrialism, militarism, environmental rape, corporatism, imperialism, and a host of other ills you defend so vociferously, is a piece of shit that needs to go, much like you.

We don’t give a fuck about being PC. We’d just as soon kick you in the balls, tell you to fuck off, and stick your microphone up your ass as to attempt to engage you in an intellectually honest debate (of which you are incapable anyway). Which is why you would embarrass yourself in a profound way if you debated a radical in a neutral venue.

You see, Bill, as small in number as we may be, there is a true Left in the United States. It appears that you either don’t know we exist or, quite conveniently, neglect to acknowledge our presence.

We aren’t latte-sipping pacifists who drive Volvos and “abhor guns and violence.” Some of us believe in the Second Amendment as fervently as reactionary libertarians from Texas. And we’re locked, loaded, and ready to exercise our right of defense by any means necessary, just as they are.

We see you for the wretched creature that you are. To us it is obvious that you and your ilk are the ones who belong in the American gulag of the prison industrial complex. Your work has figuratively fucked millions upon millions up the ass; it’s time you were on the receiving end of some of that action.

While we recognize that in the “land of the free” the alternative to at least ostensibly playing by the rules of the system is to sleep under a bridge or dwell in a cell, we refuse to fully dedicate ourselves to the depravity of the American Way. History has repeatedly demonstrated that revolutions will occur when conditions warrant it. Given the intrinsically oppressive nature of American capitalism, it is only a matter of time before such conditions arise. And when they do, people pursuing true democracy in America will be prepared to act.

We understand that many who engage in the banal evils of perpetuating the American Empire do so out of ignorance or coercion. They are the ones we move to awaken from the false consciousness fogging their minds.

We know that cynical, conscious promoters and beneficiaries of globicide like you are beyond reclamation and will ultimately be swept away by the forces of truth and justice you work so hard to suppress.

In short, we are friends to the working class and enemies of the ruling elite you serve with such enthusiasm.

We have a very weak hand, for now, and we play it accordingly. As long as Keynesianism, chewing gum, and bailing wire hold things together enough to shelter many US Americans from suffering too much economic pain, we know that scum like you will continue to prosper in this Right Wing Nation of rabid “free market” proponents who have been brain-washed to act against their own interests to preserve the “rights” of you and your ilk to continue raping the planet.

However, as powerful as you are, not even you and your opulent masters can maintain an irrational, unstable, and malevolent socioeconomic structure indefinitely. But it’s obvious you’re going to enjoy the ride all the way to the bottom.

Meanwhile, those of us struggling to forge a humane civilization will strive to mitigate the damage inflicted by the savage war you and your ilk are waging upon the Earth and its sentient beings.

Glad to meet you, Bill O’Reilly. Now go fuck yourself…..

Sincerely,

Jason

Jason Miller is a recovering US American middle class suburbanite who strives to remain intellectually free. He is Cyrano’s Journal Online’s associate editor (http://www.bestcyrano.org/) and publishes Thomas Paine’s Corner within Cyrano’s at http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/. You can reach him at JMiller@bestcyrano.com

Beyond CheneyBush: A Realistic (Cynical?) View of Change

By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers

Here’s a brief survey of where we are now in the Election 2008 cycle, which might help progressives figure out where we want to go and maybe even what the post-CheneyBush future might look like. Four quick observations:

1. Let’s assume, at least for the sake of argument, that the November election proceeds without attempts at intervention or “postponement” by CheneyBush, and that it is a reasonably honest one, with a minimum of electoral fraud involved. (Certainly, what we’ve witnessed in the primaries should make us all nervous: a hundred thousand votes not counted in Los Angeles, unsecured ballot boxes left overnight in poll workers’ homes in New Mexico, votes not being recorded or going to other candidates on touchscreen voting machines in New Hampshire, etc. etc.)

The election campaign from now until November no doubt will be a mighty dirty one, initiated by Rove and his GOP and swiftboating minions. It will include the usual ploy of illegally suppressing the Democratic vote by knocking off the election rolls as many as hundreds of thousands of legitimately registered citizens. Democratic registration drives will be harrassed by White House-friendly U.S. attorneys charging Dems with “fraud” right before the election. And much more such attempts to manipulate the vote. It’s possible that American public might be even more turned off by such obvious tactics, which would harm the Republican candidate.

And, if CheneyBush launch a pre-election air attack on Iran’s military and nuclear-lab facilities, which they are itching to do, this also might backfire on the GOP candidate. My own guess is that such an attack, if the reluctant Pentagon brass is not able to prevent it, would come either very soon or between November and when the new president takes over in late-January. (Loosing the dogs of war after the election would avoid a potential negative backlash by voters alarmed that Republicans would be taking the U.S. into yet another interminable Middle East war.)

2. GOP ALREADY LOOKING TO 2012?

Unless something extraordinary happens between now and November, it would seem that John McCain will be the GOP nominee. The only things up in the air are: who McCain will nominate as his running mate (Huckabee?), and how many HardRight conservatives will sit on their hands or vote for a third-party candidate rather than vote for McCain. Even with Romney and Bush#41 giving their imprimature, McCain still isn’t trusted as a true conservative by the extremist wing of the party.)

One can reasonably presume that a goodly number of Republican leaders, seeing the handwriting on the wall that the Democrats are a shoo-in in November, privately realize that 2008 is a lost cause and have started working for 2112. In a sense, it’s a re-run of the 1964 race: The GOP knew that it was going to lose big by nominating Goldwater, but the rightwing used that huge defeat as the starting point and fuel for building the new engine of HardRight conservatism. Rightwing billionaires like Scaife, Coors, Otis, the Koch Brothers, et. al, founded think tanks, published books, bought up cable networks and radio talk shows, employed scores of rightwing pundits, trained college students in conservative Republican activism, etc. etc. But that 16-year infrastructure-building effort paid off big in 1980 when Ronald Reagan took office.

3. CLINTON V. OBAMA

There is no certainty at this point in the Democratic camp. Clinton seems to have had no Plan B beyond the February 5 SuperDuper primaries, which she and her advisers mistakenly assumed would result in her “inevitable” nomination. The result was a number of tactical errors, including not competing in a number of smaller-states’ primaries and caucuses, which did her campaign great damage. Now she’s playing catch-up big time — dumping her campaign manager in the process — and banking that the big-state delegates in Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania will take her over the top.

If that happens, she may pull even with Obama and count on the superdelegates, mainly more status quo-oriented office-holders, to push her into the nomination.

But Obama’s momentum is so huge now — as I write this, he’s won eight in a row — that he may be unstoppable.

The danger for the Democrats is that Clinton and Obama, desperate for victory, will savage each other in such ways as to provide an enormous amount of political ammunition for McCain and the Republicans in both the presidential and congressional contests.

4. DEALING WITH THE CHENEYBUSH MESS

4. Supposing that either Clinton or Obama beats McCain handily in November, what might a Democratic administration look like and how much of the CheneyBush disaster could be reversed?

I think it’s safe to say that whomever gets into power would be inheriting a huge, tangled mess, one of the worst in American political history. Part of that mess derives from the near-total ineptitude of the current Administration, but much of it is planned chaos designed to mess up the social/political/economic system so badly as to hamstring the incoming president from being able to do much corrective or creative restoration of good government. The GOP hope is that the public will then take out their frustrations on the Democrats in power rather than on those who originally created the gawdawful situation domestically and in Iraq and probably Iran as well.

How many times must a sorely tempted Al Gore have asked himself: “Even if I could win the presidency in 2008, would I want it? Or is it better for me to sit this one out — look and sound ‘presidential’ but not have to deal with any of the catastrophe left by Cheney and Bush with which no Democratic president, no matter how decent and inventive, probably can deal effectively?” Perhaps this is why Gore said no thanks.

Maybe Kucinich, or maybe even Edwards, if one of them were to have ascended to the White House, could have turned the CheneyBush policies on their heads, and really made a significant contribution to getting America back on track. But it would seem overly optimistic to think that Clinton (despite her reputed toughness) or Oba