May 31, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
THE GREEK WAY?
At Fresno State University there is a professor of classical studies named Victor Davis Hanson who has done very well thanks to the war in Iraq. Professor Hanson became a kind of guru to Snarling Dick Cheney by putting an intellectual veneer on the U. S. attack on and occupation of Iraq. Hanson likes to apply the "lessons" of antiquity to our own times. Looking to the Greeks seems to be fashionable these days in neocon circles. This article by Maureen Dowd is at roziusunbound.blogspot.com:
The odd thing is that conservatives wear pinstriped suits, when they really should be walking around in togas. The main contribution of the Greeks to modern American politics may have been Michael Dukakis, who once climbed the Acropolis in wingtips.
But that doesn’t stop conservatives — especially the Straussians who pushed for going into Iraq — from being obsessed with ancient Greece, and from believing that they are the successors to Plato and Homer in terms of the lofty ideals and nobility and character in American politics — while Democrats merely muck about with policies for the needy.
Harvey Mansfield, a leading Straussian who teaches political science at Harvard and who wrote a book called “Manliness” (he’s for it), gave the Jefferson lecture recently at the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington.
It was an ode, as his book is, to “thumos,” the Greek word that means spiritedness, with flavors of ambition, pride and brute willfulness. Thumos, as Philip Kennicott wrote in The Washington Post, “is a word reinvented by conservative academics who need to put a fancy name on a political philosophy that boils down to ‘boys will be boys.’ ”
THE MEDIA AND LABOR
I've wondered sometimes why so much attention is paid to the stock market, big business, CEOs, and celebrities while scant attention is paid to unions and working people. There are far more of us who work for wages than there are stockholders. An index of how life is for working people would be more appropriate than the daily recitation of the Dow Jones average or where NASDAQ closed. Part of it, of course, is that the media are owned by the wealthy and the powerful. They have a vested interest in keeping working people ignorant. This article by Nancy Cleeland is at www.huffingtonpost.com:
In a way, the Times created my obsession for economic and class issues by sending me into low-wage Los Angeles as part of a 1998 initiative to increase coverage of Latinos. I was a seasoned journalist with lots of experience in Third World countries. Still, the level of exploitation I saw shocked me. Illegal immigrants, in particular, had no rights. In a range of industries, including manufacturing and retail, they were routinely underpaid and fired after any attempt to assert rights or ask for higher wages.
That disregard for workers spread up the chain of regional jobs, just as a crash in subprime home loans eventually lowers the entire real estate market. The same is happening to various degrees across the country.
Rather than reverse those troubling trends, recent political leaders have done just the opposite. Enabled by a Milton Friedman-inspired belief in free markets and the idea that poverty is proof of personal failure, not systemic failure, federal trade and regulatory policies have consistently undermined workers. The inequities worsened under President George W. Bush, who wears his antipathy toward labor on his sleeve. But few alarms were sounded by the mainstream press, including the Los Angeles Times.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
May 30, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
DISEASE MONGERING
Nancy Reagan used to say, "Just say no," to drugs. We've had a "war on drugs." Remember the commercial where there's an egg frying and the announcer telling you, "This is your brain on drugs"? But drugs are really quite fashionable in the USA. Nicotine is a drug and very popular. Alcohol is a drug and very popular. They're also legal. Even humble caffeine, my favorite, is a drug. Now the pharmaceutical companies have discovered there's big money in creating diseases and offering the drugs to treat them. It reminds you a little of Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World, where the drug of choice was "soma." This commentary by Mike Adams is at www.newstarget.com:
Disease mongering - the practice of pushing disease in order to sell more drugs - has become so routine and so successful in modern medicine that drug companies actually depend on inventing new diseases as a way to ensure future profits. It's not enough to sell drugs to people who are truly sick, you see. Big Pharma cleverly figured out that they could sell even MORE drugs if they simply invented new diseases and convinced people they needed pharmaceuticals to treat those diseases.
The FDA, always happy to serve the profit interests of Big Pharma, went right along with the ploy and legalized television and magazine drug ads in 1997. Since then, drug sales have skyrocketed, drug company profits have ballooned, and fictitious disease diagnoses have proliferated at an alarming rate.
Diseases such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Social Anxiety Disorder are completely fictitious, invented by a panel of psychiatrists with a simple vote. Conditions like "high cholesterol" aren't diseases at all (they're simply descriptions of blood chemistry), and artificially lowering high cholesterol with statin drugs has been scientifically found to offer absolutely no net health benefit whatsoever. Breast cancer is so frequently misdiagnosed that for every one woman helped by cancer screening and treatment, ten are harmed by it (click here for the story), and Restless Legs Syndrome is so routinely marketed and hyped that people who hadn't even heard of the disease two years ago now think they need patented chemicals to treat it.
NESTLE AND BOTTLED WATER
You wonder sometimes if big corporations will find a way to privatize sunlight or air. With the explosion in the bottled water industry, we're seeing water privatized now. The effects on the environment, both from depleting water resources and from plastic bottles filling up landfills, are deleterious. This article talks about the Nestle company and the town of McCloud, California, a town Nestle is victimizing in the never-ending quest for profits. The article by Tara Lohan is at www.alternet.org:
Across the country, multinational corporations are targeting hundreds of rural communities to gain control of their most precious resource. By strong-arming small towns with limited economic means, these corporations are part of a growing trend to privatize public water supplies for economic gain in the ballooning bottled water industry.
With sales of over $35 billion worldwide in the bottled water market, corporations are doing whatever it takes to buy up pristine springs in some of our country's most beautiful places. While the companies reap the profits, the local communities and the environment are paying the price.
One of the biggest and most voracious of the water gobblers is Nestlé, which controls one-third of the U.S. market and sells 70 different brand names -- such as Arrowhead, Calistoga, Deer Park, Perrier, Poland Spring and Ice Mountain -- which it draws from 75 springs located all over the country.
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
DISEASE MONGERING
Nancy Reagan used to say, "Just say no," to drugs. We've had a "war on drugs." Remember the commercial where there's an egg frying and the announcer telling you, "This is your brain on drugs"? But drugs are really quite fashionable in the USA. Nicotine is a drug and very popular. Alcohol is a drug and very popular. They're also legal. Even humble caffeine, my favorite, is a drug. Now the pharmaceutical companies have discovered there's big money in creating diseases and offering the drugs to treat them. It reminds you a little of Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World, where the drug of choice was "soma." This commentary by Mike Adams is at www.newstarget.com:
Disease mongering - the practice of pushing disease in order to sell more drugs - has become so routine and so successful in modern medicine that drug companies actually depend on inventing new diseases as a way to ensure future profits. It's not enough to sell drugs to people who are truly sick, you see. Big Pharma cleverly figured out that they could sell even MORE drugs if they simply invented new diseases and convinced people they needed pharmaceuticals to treat those diseases.
The FDA, always happy to serve the profit interests of Big Pharma, went right along with the ploy and legalized television and magazine drug ads in 1997. Since then, drug sales have skyrocketed, drug company profits have ballooned, and fictitious disease diagnoses have proliferated at an alarming rate.
Diseases such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Social Anxiety Disorder are completely fictitious, invented by a panel of psychiatrists with a simple vote. Conditions like "high cholesterol" aren't diseases at all (they're simply descriptions of blood chemistry), and artificially lowering high cholesterol with statin drugs has been scientifically found to offer absolutely no net health benefit whatsoever. Breast cancer is so frequently misdiagnosed that for every one woman helped by cancer screening and treatment, ten are harmed by it (click here for the story), and Restless Legs Syndrome is so routinely marketed and hyped that people who hadn't even heard of the disease two years ago now think they need patented chemicals to treat it.
NESTLE AND BOTTLED WATER
You wonder sometimes if big corporations will find a way to privatize sunlight or air. With the explosion in the bottled water industry, we're seeing water privatized now. The effects on the environment, both from depleting water resources and from plastic bottles filling up landfills, are deleterious. This article talks about the Nestle company and the town of McCloud, California, a town Nestle is victimizing in the never-ending quest for profits. The article by Tara Lohan is at www.alternet.org:
Across the country, multinational corporations are targeting hundreds of rural communities to gain control of their most precious resource. By strong-arming small towns with limited economic means, these corporations are part of a growing trend to privatize public water supplies for economic gain in the ballooning bottled water industry.
With sales of over $35 billion worldwide in the bottled water market, corporations are doing whatever it takes to buy up pristine springs in some of our country's most beautiful places. While the companies reap the profits, the local communities and the environment are paying the price.
One of the biggest and most voracious of the water gobblers is Nestlé, which controls one-third of the U.S. market and sells 70 different brand names -- such as Arrowhead, Calistoga, Deer Park, Perrier, Poland Spring and Ice Mountain -- which it draws from 75 springs located all over the country.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
May 29, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
SUPERSTITION'S ASSAULT ON REASON
Maybe this is how it felt when the Roman Empire fell and the barbarians invaded. For all its faults, the Roman Empire did advance the cause of reason. When the Empire fell to the barbarians human history entered a period called the Dark Ages. About two hundred years ago the human race entered into another period called the Enlightenment when science, reason, and compassion began their ascendance. One of the arguments used by Bible thumpers is that we've allegedly descended into the gutter since the abolition of school prayer and began the teaching of the scientific theory of evolution. But how much barbarity and depravity existed when the cloud of religious superstition dominated? Now the proponents of superstition have built a "creation museum" that purports to prove the earth is only 6,000 years old and that dinosaurs co-existed with humans. This editorial is from the Los Angeles Times at www.latimes.com:
THE CREATION MUSEUM, a $27-million tourist attraction promoting earth science theories that were popular when Columbus set sail, opens near Cincinnati on Memorial Day. So before the first visitor risks succumbing to the museum's animatronic balderdash — dinosaurs and humans actually coexisted! the Grand Canyon was carved by the great flood described in Genesis! — we'd like to clear up a few things: "The Flintstones" is a cartoon, not a documentary. Fred and Wilma? Those woolly mammoth vacuum cleaners? All make-believe.
Science is under assault, and that calls for bold truths. Here's another: The Earth is round.
The museum, a 60,000-square-foot menace to 21st century scientific advancement, is the handiwork of Answers in Genesis, a leader in the "young Earth" movement. Young Earthers believe the world is about 6,000 years old, as opposed to the 4.5 billion years estimated by the world's credible scientific community. This would be risible if anti-evolution forces were confined to a lunatic fringe, but they are not. Witness the recent revelation that three of the Republican candidates for president do not believe in evolution. Three men seeking to lead the last superpower on Earth reject the scientific consensus on cosmology, thermonuclear dynamics, geology and biology, believing instead that Bamm-Bamm and Dino played together.
Religion and science can coexist. That the Earth is billions of years old is a fact. How the universe came into being and whether it operates by design are matters of faith. The problem is that people who deny science in one realm are unlikely to embrace it in another. Those who cannot accept that climate change may have caused the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago probably don't put much stock in the fact that today it poses grave peril to the Earth as we know it.
TEMP LAWYERS
In the increasing class polarization we see in the U. S. economy even the elite are polarized. You have CEOs who make millions and other CEOs not doing so well. There are cases of actual go-back-in-time slavery. We have temp lawyers now. As one who has done the temp thing, I can sympathize. This column by Barbara Ehrenreich is at www.thenation.com:
CEOs and slaves: These are the extreme ends of American class polarization. But a parallel kind of splitting is going in many of the professions. Top-ranked college professors, for example, enjoy salaries of several hundred thousand a year, often augmented by consulting fees and earnings from their patents or biotech companies. At the other end of the professoriate, you have adjunct teachers toiling away for about $5,000 a semester or less, with no benefits or chance of tenure. There was a story a few years ago about an adjunct who commuted to his classes from a homeless shelter in Manhattan, and adjuncts who moonlight as waitresses or cleaning ladies are legion.
Similarly, the legal profession, which is topped by law firm partners billing hundreds of dollars an hour, now has a new proletariat of temp lawyers working for $19-$25 an hour in sweatshop conditions. On sites like Temporary Attorney, temp lawyers report working twelve hours a day, six days a week, in crowded basements with inadequate sanitary facilities. According to an article in American Lawyer, a legal temp at a major New York firm reports being "corralled in a windowless basement room littered with dead cockroaches," where six out of seven exits were blocked.
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
SUPERSTITION'S ASSAULT ON REASON
Maybe this is how it felt when the Roman Empire fell and the barbarians invaded. For all its faults, the Roman Empire did advance the cause of reason. When the Empire fell to the barbarians human history entered a period called the Dark Ages. About two hundred years ago the human race entered into another period called the Enlightenment when science, reason, and compassion began their ascendance. One of the arguments used by Bible thumpers is that we've allegedly descended into the gutter since the abolition of school prayer and began the teaching of the scientific theory of evolution. But how much barbarity and depravity existed when the cloud of religious superstition dominated? Now the proponents of superstition have built a "creation museum" that purports to prove the earth is only 6,000 years old and that dinosaurs co-existed with humans. This editorial is from the Los Angeles Times at www.latimes.com:
THE CREATION MUSEUM, a $27-million tourist attraction promoting earth science theories that were popular when Columbus set sail, opens near Cincinnati on Memorial Day. So before the first visitor risks succumbing to the museum's animatronic balderdash — dinosaurs and humans actually coexisted! the Grand Canyon was carved by the great flood described in Genesis! — we'd like to clear up a few things: "The Flintstones" is a cartoon, not a documentary. Fred and Wilma? Those woolly mammoth vacuum cleaners? All make-believe.
Science is under assault, and that calls for bold truths. Here's another: The Earth is round.
The museum, a 60,000-square-foot menace to 21st century scientific advancement, is the handiwork of Answers in Genesis, a leader in the "young Earth" movement. Young Earthers believe the world is about 6,000 years old, as opposed to the 4.5 billion years estimated by the world's credible scientific community. This would be risible if anti-evolution forces were confined to a lunatic fringe, but they are not. Witness the recent revelation that three of the Republican candidates for president do not believe in evolution. Three men seeking to lead the last superpower on Earth reject the scientific consensus on cosmology, thermonuclear dynamics, geology and biology, believing instead that Bamm-Bamm and Dino played together.
Religion and science can coexist. That the Earth is billions of years old is a fact. How the universe came into being and whether it operates by design are matters of faith. The problem is that people who deny science in one realm are unlikely to embrace it in another. Those who cannot accept that climate change may have caused the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago probably don't put much stock in the fact that today it poses grave peril to the Earth as we know it.
TEMP LAWYERS
In the increasing class polarization we see in the U. S. economy even the elite are polarized. You have CEOs who make millions and other CEOs not doing so well. There are cases of actual go-back-in-time slavery. We have temp lawyers now. As one who has done the temp thing, I can sympathize. This column by Barbara Ehrenreich is at www.thenation.com:
CEOs and slaves: These are the extreme ends of American class polarization. But a parallel kind of splitting is going in many of the professions. Top-ranked college professors, for example, enjoy salaries of several hundred thousand a year, often augmented by consulting fees and earnings from their patents or biotech companies. At the other end of the professoriate, you have adjunct teachers toiling away for about $5,000 a semester or less, with no benefits or chance of tenure. There was a story a few years ago about an adjunct who commuted to his classes from a homeless shelter in Manhattan, and adjuncts who moonlight as waitresses or cleaning ladies are legion.
Similarly, the legal profession, which is topped by law firm partners billing hundreds of dollars an hour, now has a new proletariat of temp lawyers working for $19-$25 an hour in sweatshop conditions. On sites like Temporary Attorney, temp lawyers report working twelve hours a day, six days a week, in crowded basements with inadequate sanitary facilities. According to an article in American Lawyer, a legal temp at a major New York firm reports being "corralled in a windowless basement room littered with dead cockroaches," where six out of seven exits were blocked.
Monday, May 28, 2007
May 28, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
SO IT'S MEMORIAL DAY
Jesus Christ said, "Blessed are the peace makers," but it's war that we glorify. As this article points out, we have two holidays that essentially glorify war, Veterans Day and Memorial Day. There are parades and flags and speeches extolling the sacrifice of the people who died in wars to "protect our freedom." I just saw the movie Patton and General Patton is quoted as saying that he, in fact, loves war. Sane people, no matter their nationality, do not love war. But somehow we find ourselves constantly manipulated into conflict with people we do not know and who never did anything to us. They just happen to be part of the "enemy" country. This article by Stephen Lendman is at www.commondreams.org:
It’s almost like it’s preordained and in the country’s DNA that this nation is a warrior state sending its expendable youth to fight and die in foreign wars but not for national security, honor or the rights of free people anywhere. It’s always for wealth and power that conquest and plunder afford the privileged who get to stay home safe and in comfort letting others do their dying, then shamelessly holding a day of remembrance honoring them for their sacrifice. This is the long tradition of this nation that since inception in 1776 has been at war with one or more adversaries every year without exception from that time to the present.
These two federal holidays warrant special condemnation. They represent a galling legacy of endless wars and false patriotic glorification of them including the so-called “good” one there was nothing good about as Ben Franklin knew and once said “There was never a good war or a bad peace.” Choosing days to honor the dead who sacrificed everything is a sacrilege and failure to note they died in vain on the alter of power and privilege for the few. Their deaths assure an unending cycle of violence and killing with legions of nameless, faceless grave sites ahead only to be known by those who’ll experience unconscionable loss.
These commemorative days stand above other federal holidays as symbols of this nation’s depravity and ultimate crime against humanity and wasted lives it’s taken. They ignore what Lincoln hoped for at Gettysburg in November, 1863 when he said “we here resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” He knew the horror of war and understood they must end. He also feared they would not and had to reflect that future wars would take their leaders to new battlefields in an endless cycle of death and destruction wars always guarantee.
BUSH'S POSTURING
Among the most galling things about holidays like Memorial Day is the pious posturing of politicians like George W. Bush. You see a solemn looking Bush with his hand over his heart at Arlington Cemetery, as though he really cares about the infinite misery he has caused. Bush and Cheney, supreme war hawks, didn't bother to serve in the military themselves, even though they were quite willing for other young men to serve and die. The most rabid supporters of this atrocity in Iraq don't volunteer to serve themselves, and certainly don't expect members of their families to serve. Jim Hightower talks about the war and its costs in this commentary at www.alternet.org:
An official UN count puts last year's death toll of innocent Iraqi civilians at 34,452--three times higher than the U.S. had admitted. Another 36,685 were wounded. One analysis puts the civilian death toll much higher--a total of 655,000 since the invasion.
Some 2 million Iraqis (16% of the population) have fled the country, including 40% of professionals (one third of doctors fled, 2,000 have been murdered). Three thousand people a day are fleeing--so many that Saudi Arabia (Bush's superrich ally in his war) is building a 560-mile fence to keep them out. By the way, the U.S. allowed only 202 Iraqi refugees into our country last year.
Another 1.6 million Iraqis are displaced within their country, forced from their homes by various factions in the civil/religious war. Many of these are children. Only 30% of Iraqi children attended school last year (pre-war, nearly 100% percent were in school). Children routinely witness violence and killings that are often gruesome, including seeing family and friend die. A recent study of 2,500 grade school children in Baghdad found that 70% showed symptoms of trauma.
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
SO IT'S MEMORIAL DAY
Jesus Christ said, "Blessed are the peace makers," but it's war that we glorify. As this article points out, we have two holidays that essentially glorify war, Veterans Day and Memorial Day. There are parades and flags and speeches extolling the sacrifice of the people who died in wars to "protect our freedom." I just saw the movie Patton and General Patton is quoted as saying that he, in fact, loves war. Sane people, no matter their nationality, do not love war. But somehow we find ourselves constantly manipulated into conflict with people we do not know and who never did anything to us. They just happen to be part of the "enemy" country. This article by Stephen Lendman is at www.commondreams.org:
It’s almost like it’s preordained and in the country’s DNA that this nation is a warrior state sending its expendable youth to fight and die in foreign wars but not for national security, honor or the rights of free people anywhere. It’s always for wealth and power that conquest and plunder afford the privileged who get to stay home safe and in comfort letting others do their dying, then shamelessly holding a day of remembrance honoring them for their sacrifice. This is the long tradition of this nation that since inception in 1776 has been at war with one or more adversaries every year without exception from that time to the present.
These two federal holidays warrant special condemnation. They represent a galling legacy of endless wars and false patriotic glorification of them including the so-called “good” one there was nothing good about as Ben Franklin knew and once said “There was never a good war or a bad peace.” Choosing days to honor the dead who sacrificed everything is a sacrilege and failure to note they died in vain on the alter of power and privilege for the few. Their deaths assure an unending cycle of violence and killing with legions of nameless, faceless grave sites ahead only to be known by those who’ll experience unconscionable loss.
These commemorative days stand above other federal holidays as symbols of this nation’s depravity and ultimate crime against humanity and wasted lives it’s taken. They ignore what Lincoln hoped for at Gettysburg in November, 1863 when he said “we here resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” He knew the horror of war and understood they must end. He also feared they would not and had to reflect that future wars would take their leaders to new battlefields in an endless cycle of death and destruction wars always guarantee.
BUSH'S POSTURING
Among the most galling things about holidays like Memorial Day is the pious posturing of politicians like George W. Bush. You see a solemn looking Bush with his hand over his heart at Arlington Cemetery, as though he really cares about the infinite misery he has caused. Bush and Cheney, supreme war hawks, didn't bother to serve in the military themselves, even though they were quite willing for other young men to serve and die. The most rabid supporters of this atrocity in Iraq don't volunteer to serve themselves, and certainly don't expect members of their families to serve. Jim Hightower talks about the war and its costs in this commentary at www.alternet.org:
An official UN count puts last year's death toll of innocent Iraqi civilians at 34,452--three times higher than the U.S. had admitted. Another 36,685 were wounded. One analysis puts the civilian death toll much higher--a total of 655,000 since the invasion.
Some 2 million Iraqis (16% of the population) have fled the country, including 40% of professionals (one third of doctors fled, 2,000 have been murdered). Three thousand people a day are fleeing--so many that Saudi Arabia (Bush's superrich ally in his war) is building a 560-mile fence to keep them out. By the way, the U.S. allowed only 202 Iraqi refugees into our country last year.
Another 1.6 million Iraqis are displaced within their country, forced from their homes by various factions in the civil/religious war. Many of these are children. Only 30% of Iraqi children attended school last year (pre-war, nearly 100% percent were in school). Children routinely witness violence and killings that are often gruesome, including seeing family and friend die. A recent study of 2,500 grade school children in Baghdad found that 70% showed symptoms of trauma.
Sunday, May 27, 2007
May 27, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
IRAQ IN ASHES
If things in Iraq are as rosy as George W. Bush and the neocons tell us, why are Iraqis leaving by the millions? If democracy is thriving, why are they leaving? The Iraqis have been victimized over and over again. They had to suffer the oppression of Saddam Hussein, a man largely made by the Reagan-Bush administration. They had to endure years of harsh U. S. sanctions. They suffered through a war with Iran and then the Gulf War in the early 90's. They have suffered from the effects of depeleted uranium. Their infrastruture was destroyed in this current war. The country has been totally destabalized and we have a civil war between the Sunnis and the Shias and horror piled on horror. This column by Frank Rich is at roziusunbound.blogspot.com:
Iraqis are clamoring to get out of Iraq. Two million have fled so far and nearly two million more have been displaced within the country. (That’s a total of some 15 percent of the population.) Save the Children reported this month that Iraq’s child-survival rate is falling faster than any other nation’s. One Iraqi in eight is killed by illness or violence by the age of 5. Yet for all the words President Bush has lavished on Darfur and AIDS in Africa, there has been a deadly silence from him about what’s happening in the country he gave “God’s gift of freedom.”
It’s easy to see why. To admit that Iraqis are voting with their feet is to concede that American policy is in ruins. A “secure” Iraq is a mirage, and, worse, those who can afford to leave are the very professionals who might have helped build one. Thus the president says nothing about Iraq’s humanitarian crisis, the worst in the Middle East since 1948, much as he tried to hide the American death toll in Iraq by keeping the troops’ coffins off-camera and staying away from military funerals.
But his silence about Iraq’s mass exodus is not merely another instance of deceptive White House P.R.; it’s part of a policy with a huge human cost. The easiest way to keep the Iraqi plight out of sight, after all, is to prevent Iraqis from coming to America. And so we do, except for stray Shiites needed to remind us of purple fingers at State of the Union time or to frame the president in Rose Garden photo ops.
NON-EXISTENT CONSPIRACY AGAINST RELIGION
The driving force for right-wingers is being against things. To be against things, you need some kind of enemy or conspiracy. Back in the day it was Communists and Communist sympathizers. It was "big government," which has the temerity to suggest that big business might need to be regulated. It's illegal immigrants for whatever reason, although illegal immigrants are okay as long as they provide cheap labor and keep their mouths shut. It's "secularists," people who actually believe in the separation of church and state that Thomas Jefferson advocated. We've heard about the mythical attacks on Christmas and how society supposedly went to hell after school prayer was outlawed. Newt Gingrich, immoral man and master opportunist, was recently pontificating about "secularism" at Liberty University. This commentary by Alec Dubro is at www.tompaine.com:
Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn once denied that Newt Gingrich was a conservative. Instead, said Cockburn, Gingrich is “a Benthamite liberal with his head stuffed full of futurist nonsense.” Others have dissected Gingrich’s political philosophy—which ranges from glib to insane—in equally unflattering terms. One thing that no one seems to have called him, though, is a fundamentalist Christian.
Better known for his venomous attacks and his personal sins than his church-going, Newt Gringrich would hardly seem the man to give the commencement address at Liberty University, soon after the timely death of its founder and spokesman, Reverend Jerry Falwell. But there he was, white-haired and black robed, inveighing mightily against the evil abroad in the country today.
Gingrich was particularly incensed by "a growing culture of radical secularism in the nation." Is this the same growing culture that Falwell, and other similar bigots, denounced in the 1970s? If it’s been growing since then, it ought to be huge by now—as well as very, very radical. So, what has this entrenched cabal of wickedness been up to?
“We are told that our public schools cannot invoke the Creator, nor proclaim the natural law, nor profess the God-given equality of human rights,” said Gingrich. “In hostility to American history, the radical secularist insists that religious belief is inherently divisive and that public debate can only proceed on secular terms when religious belief is excluded.”
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
IRAQ IN ASHES
If things in Iraq are as rosy as George W. Bush and the neocons tell us, why are Iraqis leaving by the millions? If democracy is thriving, why are they leaving? The Iraqis have been victimized over and over again. They had to suffer the oppression of Saddam Hussein, a man largely made by the Reagan-Bush administration. They had to endure years of harsh U. S. sanctions. They suffered through a war with Iran and then the Gulf War in the early 90's. They have suffered from the effects of depeleted uranium. Their infrastruture was destroyed in this current war. The country has been totally destabalized and we have a civil war between the Sunnis and the Shias and horror piled on horror. This column by Frank Rich is at roziusunbound.blogspot.com:
Iraqis are clamoring to get out of Iraq. Two million have fled so far and nearly two million more have been displaced within the country. (That’s a total of some 15 percent of the population.) Save the Children reported this month that Iraq’s child-survival rate is falling faster than any other nation’s. One Iraqi in eight is killed by illness or violence by the age of 5. Yet for all the words President Bush has lavished on Darfur and AIDS in Africa, there has been a deadly silence from him about what’s happening in the country he gave “God’s gift of freedom.”
It’s easy to see why. To admit that Iraqis are voting with their feet is to concede that American policy is in ruins. A “secure” Iraq is a mirage, and, worse, those who can afford to leave are the very professionals who might have helped build one. Thus the president says nothing about Iraq’s humanitarian crisis, the worst in the Middle East since 1948, much as he tried to hide the American death toll in Iraq by keeping the troops’ coffins off-camera and staying away from military funerals.
But his silence about Iraq’s mass exodus is not merely another instance of deceptive White House P.R.; it’s part of a policy with a huge human cost. The easiest way to keep the Iraqi plight out of sight, after all, is to prevent Iraqis from coming to America. And so we do, except for stray Shiites needed to remind us of purple fingers at State of the Union time or to frame the president in Rose Garden photo ops.
NON-EXISTENT CONSPIRACY AGAINST RELIGION
The driving force for right-wingers is being against things. To be against things, you need some kind of enemy or conspiracy. Back in the day it was Communists and Communist sympathizers. It was "big government," which has the temerity to suggest that big business might need to be regulated. It's illegal immigrants for whatever reason, although illegal immigrants are okay as long as they provide cheap labor and keep their mouths shut. It's "secularists," people who actually believe in the separation of church and state that Thomas Jefferson advocated. We've heard about the mythical attacks on Christmas and how society supposedly went to hell after school prayer was outlawed. Newt Gingrich, immoral man and master opportunist, was recently pontificating about "secularism" at Liberty University. This commentary by Alec Dubro is at www.tompaine.com:
Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn once denied that Newt Gingrich was a conservative. Instead, said Cockburn, Gingrich is “a Benthamite liberal with his head stuffed full of futurist nonsense.” Others have dissected Gingrich’s political philosophy—which ranges from glib to insane—in equally unflattering terms. One thing that no one seems to have called him, though, is a fundamentalist Christian.
Better known for his venomous attacks and his personal sins than his church-going, Newt Gringrich would hardly seem the man to give the commencement address at Liberty University, soon after the timely death of its founder and spokesman, Reverend Jerry Falwell. But there he was, white-haired and black robed, inveighing mightily against the evil abroad in the country today.
Gingrich was particularly incensed by "a growing culture of radical secularism in the nation." Is this the same growing culture that Falwell, and other similar bigots, denounced in the 1970s? If it’s been growing since then, it ought to be huge by now—as well as very, very radical. So, what has this entrenched cabal of wickedness been up to?
“We are told that our public schools cannot invoke the Creator, nor proclaim the natural law, nor profess the God-given equality of human rights,” said Gingrich. “In hostility to American history, the radical secularist insists that religious belief is inherently divisive and that public debate can only proceed on secular terms when religious belief is excluded.”
Friday, May 25, 2007
May 25, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
TOO MUCH SUPERSTITION IN THE U. S.
Years after the Scopes Monkey Trial a new Gallup poll shows that one in three Americans believe the Bible is the literal word of God. The interesting paradox is that so many Bible believers really can't tell you much about the Bible. People are hard pressed to name the four Gospels, for instance, or the Ten Commandments. If you just take a little time to read the Bible and the history of the Bible it becomes pretty apparent it can't be the literal word of any God. But we have some people who would like to impose a Taliban-like society based on their interpretation of the Bible. This article is from www.editorandpublisher.com:
NEW YORK About one-third of the American adult population believes the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally word for word, a new Gallup poll reveals. This percentage is only slightly lower than several decades ago.
Gallup reports that the majority of those "who don't believe that the Bible is literally true believe that it is the inspired word of God but that not everything it in should be taken literally." Finally, about one in five Americans believe the Bible is merely an ancient book of "fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by man."
There is also a strong relationship between education and belief in a literal Bible, Gallup explains, with such belief becoming much less prevalent as schooling continues.
Those who believe in the literal Bible amount to 31% of adult Americans. This is a decline of about 7% compared with Gallup polls taken in the 1970s and 1980s. It is strongest in the South.
CIA WARNED BUSH
Among the plethora of excuses the Bush administration has offered, there is the one about "bad intelligence" on Iraq. Supposedly, the administration believed in weapons of mass destruction based on CIA intelligence. They believed there would be a short and happy war and smooth transition into democracy. But the CIA warned the administration in the leadup to the war that toppling Saddam Hussein could lead to dangerous instability and create a haven for terrorists. This article by Lisa Myers and Robert Windrem is at www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18854414/:
In a move sure to raise even more questions about the decision to go to war with Iraq, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will on Friday release selected portions of pre-war intelligence in which the CIA warned the administration of the risk and consequences of a conflict in the Middle East.
Among other things, the 40-page Senate report reveals that two intelligence assessments before the war accurately predicted that toppling Saddam could lead to a dangerous period of internal violence and provide a boost to terrorists. But those warnings were seemingly ignored.
In January 2003, two months before the invasion, the intelligence community's think tank — the National Intelligence Council — issued an assessment warning that after Saddam was toppled, there was “a significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict with each other and that rogue Saddam loyalists would wage guerilla warfare either by themselves or in alliance with terrorists.”
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
TOO MUCH SUPERSTITION IN THE U. S.
Years after the Scopes Monkey Trial a new Gallup poll shows that one in three Americans believe the Bible is the literal word of God. The interesting paradox is that so many Bible believers really can't tell you much about the Bible. People are hard pressed to name the four Gospels, for instance, or the Ten Commandments. If you just take a little time to read the Bible and the history of the Bible it becomes pretty apparent it can't be the literal word of any God. But we have some people who would like to impose a Taliban-like society based on their interpretation of the Bible. This article is from www.editorandpublisher.com:
NEW YORK About one-third of the American adult population believes the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally word for word, a new Gallup poll reveals. This percentage is only slightly lower than several decades ago.
Gallup reports that the majority of those "who don't believe that the Bible is literally true believe that it is the inspired word of God but that not everything it in should be taken literally." Finally, about one in five Americans believe the Bible is merely an ancient book of "fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by man."
There is also a strong relationship between education and belief in a literal Bible, Gallup explains, with such belief becoming much less prevalent as schooling continues.
Those who believe in the literal Bible amount to 31% of adult Americans. This is a decline of about 7% compared with Gallup polls taken in the 1970s and 1980s. It is strongest in the South.
CIA WARNED BUSH
Among the plethora of excuses the Bush administration has offered, there is the one about "bad intelligence" on Iraq. Supposedly, the administration believed in weapons of mass destruction based on CIA intelligence. They believed there would be a short and happy war and smooth transition into democracy. But the CIA warned the administration in the leadup to the war that toppling Saddam Hussein could lead to dangerous instability and create a haven for terrorists. This article by Lisa Myers and Robert Windrem is at www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18854414/:
In a move sure to raise even more questions about the decision to go to war with Iraq, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will on Friday release selected portions of pre-war intelligence in which the CIA warned the administration of the risk and consequences of a conflict in the Middle East.
Among other things, the 40-page Senate report reveals that two intelligence assessments before the war accurately predicted that toppling Saddam could lead to a dangerous period of internal violence and provide a boost to terrorists. But those warnings were seemingly ignored.
In January 2003, two months before the invasion, the intelligence community's think tank — the National Intelligence Council — issued an assessment warning that after Saddam was toppled, there was “a significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict with each other and that rogue Saddam loyalists would wage guerilla warfare either by themselves or in alliance with terrorists.”
Thursday, May 24, 2007
May 24, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
TORTURE AS ENTERTAINMENT
As long as people have been on planet earth they have done heinous things to other humans. Major creativity has been used to inflict pain and death on fellow members of the species. I've recently been reading Robert K. Massie's biography of Russian Czar Peter the Great. In his time there were things like drawing and quartering, breaking people on the wheel, and being beaten to death with a kind of whip called a knout. In our time people get stoned to death, have limbs chopped off, or getting publicly beheaded. In supposedly more "enlightened" societies such as ours we've heard talk of "winnable" nuclear wars. People used to attend executions the way you would attend a picnic. Now we get fictionalized torture used for entertainment in movies like Casino Royale and in the television show 24. The author of this commentary speaks of torture from first hand experience. He was a victim. The commentary by John McCarthy is at http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article2578453.ece:
It is becoming increasingly clear that what we enjoy as entertainment shapes the world in which we live. As the American Psychiatric Association said recently, in calling for a reduction in television violence: "The debate is over. Over the last three decades, the one overriding finding in research on the mass media is that exposure to media portrayals of violence increases aggressive behaviour in children."
There is research too showing that the lessons learned are copied over into adulthood, while adults exposed to violent entertainment can become desensitised and begin to identify with the aggressors, and the aggressors' solutions to problems.
The biggest lie that has gained currency through television is that torture is an acceptable weapon for the "good guys" to use if the stakes are high enough. Extraordinary times require extraordinary measures, so the logic goes, a line of reasoning that is particularly pernicious given the excesses that have marked the "war on terror". It is a lie that underpins Fox Television's thriller 24, which features the ruthless agent Jack Bauer in a series that Time magazine recently dubbed "a weekly rationalisation of the 'ticking bomb' defence of torture".
The "ticking bomb" scenario, in which torture is justified if there is a limited period in which to prise from a suspect information that would avert a catastrophe, is the argument of choice for torture apologists everywhere. Certainly the co-creator of 24, Joel Surnow, makes no bones about where he stands in the debate, telling The Independent recently: "If there's a bomb about to hit a major US city, and you have a person with information... if you don't torture that person, that would be one of the most immoral acts you could imagine."
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
TORTURE AS ENTERTAINMENT
As long as people have been on planet earth they have done heinous things to other humans. Major creativity has been used to inflict pain and death on fellow members of the species. I've recently been reading Robert K. Massie's biography of Russian Czar Peter the Great. In his time there were things like drawing and quartering, breaking people on the wheel, and being beaten to death with a kind of whip called a knout. In our time people get stoned to death, have limbs chopped off, or getting publicly beheaded. In supposedly more "enlightened" societies such as ours we've heard talk of "winnable" nuclear wars. People used to attend executions the way you would attend a picnic. Now we get fictionalized torture used for entertainment in movies like Casino Royale and in the television show 24. The author of this commentary speaks of torture from first hand experience. He was a victim. The commentary by John McCarthy is at http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article2578453.ece:
It is becoming increasingly clear that what we enjoy as entertainment shapes the world in which we live. As the American Psychiatric Association said recently, in calling for a reduction in television violence: "The debate is over. Over the last three decades, the one overriding finding in research on the mass media is that exposure to media portrayals of violence increases aggressive behaviour in children."
There is research too showing that the lessons learned are copied over into adulthood, while adults exposed to violent entertainment can become desensitised and begin to identify with the aggressors, and the aggressors' solutions to problems.
The biggest lie that has gained currency through television is that torture is an acceptable weapon for the "good guys" to use if the stakes are high enough. Extraordinary times require extraordinary measures, so the logic goes, a line of reasoning that is particularly pernicious given the excesses that have marked the "war on terror". It is a lie that underpins Fox Television's thriller 24, which features the ruthless agent Jack Bauer in a series that Time magazine recently dubbed "a weekly rationalisation of the 'ticking bomb' defence of torture".
The "ticking bomb" scenario, in which torture is justified if there is a limited period in which to prise from a suspect information that would avert a catastrophe, is the argument of choice for torture apologists everywhere. Certainly the co-creator of 24, Joel Surnow, makes no bones about where he stands in the debate, telling The Independent recently: "If there's a bomb about to hit a major US city, and you have a person with information... if you don't torture that person, that would be one of the most immoral acts you could imagine."
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
May 22, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
THE MILITARY LURING KIDS
In the never ending quest for warm bodies to fight in wars the Pentagon is now targeting kids. Thousands of teenagers are in the military and the military has been targeting kids as young as thirteen. We're seeing children soldiers around the world, and once again the United States is failing to take the lead in ending a sordid practice. This article by Terry J. Allen is at www.alternet.org:
The Department of Defense (DoD) spends more than $4 billion a year on recruiting, with $1.5 billion for advertising and maintaining the recruiting stations staffed by more than 22,000 recruiters. Much of that money goes to convincing children to become soldiers.
A recruiters' handbook discusses creepy seduction techniques with all the subtlety of predatory stalking. Adult recruiters skilled in "projecting credibility" lurk in snack joints, set up laptops playing action-packed videos, proffer rides and promise friendship and fatherly advice. With blacks particularly skeptical of the war effort, the military is aggressively targeting Hispanics with multimillion dollar marketing campaigns that include chatting up mothers and attending church. Recruiters get non- English speaking parents to sign enlistment papers for 17-year- olds by letting them believe that service is mandatory, or that they were approving blood tests, according to the New York Times.
Recruiters also try to win over high school guidance counselors with offers of "extended tours, VIP trips ( A day in the life of a sailor') or workshops."
THE WORST IN FIRSTS
As we get to Memorial Day weekend, there will be plenty of pious chest-pounding red, white, and blue speeches, complete with proclamations of our greatness. Our greatness has been tarnished by the bloodbath in Iraq and the other crimes of the Bush administration. But a look at some of our "firsts" is also disturbing. While we proclaim our love of peace, we are the largest arms exporter in the world. We lead the world in oil consumption, military expenditures, and carbon dioxide emissions. This article by Frida Berrigan is at www.truthout.org:
Face it, the United States is a proud nation of firsts. Among them:
First in Oil Consumption:
The United States burns up 20.7 million barrels per day, the equivalent of the oil consumption of China, Japan, Germany, Russia, and India combined.
First in Carbon Dioxide Emissions:
Each year, world polluters pump 24,126,416,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the environment. The United States and its territories are responsible for 5.8 billion metric tons of this, more than China (3.3 billion), Russia (1.4 billion) and India (1.2 billion) combined.
First in External Debt:
The United States owes $10.040 trillion, nearly a quarter of the global debt total of $44 trillion.
First in Military Expenditures:
The White House has requested $481 billion for the Department of Defense for 2008, but this huge figure does not come close to representing total U.S. military expenditures projected for the coming year. To get a sense of the resources allocated to the military, the costs of the global war on terrorism, of the building, refurbishing, or maintaining of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and other expenses also need to be factored in. Military analyst Winslow Wheeler did the math recently: "Add $142 billion to cover the anticipated costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; add $17 billion requested for nuclear weapons costs in the Department of Energy; add another $5 billion for miscellaneous defense costs in other agencies…. and you get a grand total of $647 billion for 2008."
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
THE MILITARY LURING KIDS
In the never ending quest for warm bodies to fight in wars the Pentagon is now targeting kids. Thousands of teenagers are in the military and the military has been targeting kids as young as thirteen. We're seeing children soldiers around the world, and once again the United States is failing to take the lead in ending a sordid practice. This article by Terry J. Allen is at www.alternet.org:
The Department of Defense (DoD) spends more than $4 billion a year on recruiting, with $1.5 billion for advertising and maintaining the recruiting stations staffed by more than 22,000 recruiters. Much of that money goes to convincing children to become soldiers.
A recruiters' handbook discusses creepy seduction techniques with all the subtlety of predatory stalking. Adult recruiters skilled in "projecting credibility" lurk in snack joints, set up laptops playing action-packed videos, proffer rides and promise friendship and fatherly advice. With blacks particularly skeptical of the war effort, the military is aggressively targeting Hispanics with multimillion dollar marketing campaigns that include chatting up mothers and attending church. Recruiters get non- English speaking parents to sign enlistment papers for 17-year- olds by letting them believe that service is mandatory, or that they were approving blood tests, according to the New York Times.
Recruiters also try to win over high school guidance counselors with offers of "extended tours, VIP trips ( A day in the life of a sailor') or workshops."
THE WORST IN FIRSTS
As we get to Memorial Day weekend, there will be plenty of pious chest-pounding red, white, and blue speeches, complete with proclamations of our greatness. Our greatness has been tarnished by the bloodbath in Iraq and the other crimes of the Bush administration. But a look at some of our "firsts" is also disturbing. While we proclaim our love of peace, we are the largest arms exporter in the world. We lead the world in oil consumption, military expenditures, and carbon dioxide emissions. This article by Frida Berrigan is at www.truthout.org:
Face it, the United States is a proud nation of firsts. Among them:
First in Oil Consumption:
The United States burns up 20.7 million barrels per day, the equivalent of the oil consumption of China, Japan, Germany, Russia, and India combined.
First in Carbon Dioxide Emissions:
Each year, world polluters pump 24,126,416,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the environment. The United States and its territories are responsible for 5.8 billion metric tons of this, more than China (3.3 billion), Russia (1.4 billion) and India (1.2 billion) combined.
First in External Debt:
The United States owes $10.040 trillion, nearly a quarter of the global debt total of $44 trillion.
First in Military Expenditures:
The White House has requested $481 billion for the Department of Defense for 2008, but this huge figure does not come close to representing total U.S. military expenditures projected for the coming year. To get a sense of the resources allocated to the military, the costs of the global war on terrorism, of the building, refurbishing, or maintaining of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and other expenses also need to be factored in. Military analyst Winslow Wheeler did the math recently: "Add $142 billion to cover the anticipated costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; add $17 billion requested for nuclear weapons costs in the Department of Energy; add another $5 billion for miscellaneous defense costs in other agencies…. and you get a grand total of $647 billion for 2008."
Monday, May 21, 2007
May 21, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
TOXIC FOOD
In the past several months it's gotten scarier to eat. We had contaminated spinach. We had killer pet food. We know there is a danger of mad cow disease getting into our food supply. But right-wingers will smugly proclaim the virtues of the "free market." The "market" will police itself, they tell us, even though a few people might get really sick or die thanks to the rapaciousness of the "market." Government has some vital and necessary functions to perform. Insuring the safety of the food supply is one of those functions. This column by Paul Krugman is at www.welcome-to-pottersville.com:
These are anxious days at the lunch table. For all you know, there may be E. coli on your spinach, salmonella in your peanut butter and melamine in your pet’s food and, because it was in the feed, in your chicken sandwich.
Who’s responsible for the new fear of eating? Some blame globalization; some blame food-producing corporations; some blame the Bush administration. But I blame Milton Friedman.
Now, those who blame globalization do have a point. U.S. officials can’t inspect overseas food-processing plants without the permission of foreign governments — and since the Food and Drug Administration has limited funds and manpower, it can inspect only a small percentage of imports. This leaves American consumers effectively dependent on the quality of foreign food-safety enforcement. And that’s not a healthy place to be, especially when it comes to imports from China, where the state of food safety is roughly what it was in this country before the Progressive movement.
BENDING THE ANALYSES
Mark Twain wrote about lies, damned lies, and statistics. So it goes with right-wingers. Despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary, we were told that the Reagan era tax cuts were a bonanza for the economy, creating new jobs and tax revenues. Those nasty deficits, they said, were just due to too much Congressional spending. We got twisted "facts" and statistics to support the attack on Iraq. We've gotten twisted "facts" to support the concept of globalization. It's time to push aside the statistics and look at reality. This editorial by Dean Baker is linked at www.truthout.org:
Unfortunately, the Iraq war is not the only example of experts bending their analysis to suit those in power. This is the standard methodology of modern economics.
For example, when President Bush wanted to privatize Social Security, his economists used projections that assumed that stock prices would continue to soar for decades, even as they projected that the economy - and corporate profits - would stagnate. While the inconsistency of these assumptions could be shown with simple arithmetic, even most critics of Social Security privatization were too polite to point out that President Bush's numbers didn't add up.
Until the mid-nineties, mainstream economists held it as an absolute article of faith that the unemployment rate could not fall below six percent without triggering explosive inflation. Because of his quirky background, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan chose to ignore the consensus view, and pursued an interest rate policy that allowed the unemployment rate to fall to four percent. As a result, millions of additional workers were able to get jobs, and there was the first period of broadly based wage growth in a quarter century. And there was no inflationary spike. Yet, there was no serious effort to re-examine the consensus view in economics that had said such prosperity was impossible.
As yet another example, economists tell the public that the upward redistribution of wage income of the last quarter-century was simply the result of changes in technology that favor more educated workers. This argument means that the upward redistribution is a sort of natural phenomenon. According to the mainstream of the economics profession, it has nothing to do with trade and immigration policies that are designed to put less- educated workers in competition with people in the developing world, or [with] anti-union policies that undermine the ability of workers to bargain collectively.
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
TOXIC FOOD
In the past several months it's gotten scarier to eat. We had contaminated spinach. We had killer pet food. We know there is a danger of mad cow disease getting into our food supply. But right-wingers will smugly proclaim the virtues of the "free market." The "market" will police itself, they tell us, even though a few people might get really sick or die thanks to the rapaciousness of the "market." Government has some vital and necessary functions to perform. Insuring the safety of the food supply is one of those functions. This column by Paul Krugman is at www.welcome-to-pottersville.com:
These are anxious days at the lunch table. For all you know, there may be E. coli on your spinach, salmonella in your peanut butter and melamine in your pet’s food and, because it was in the feed, in your chicken sandwich.
Who’s responsible for the new fear of eating? Some blame globalization; some blame food-producing corporations; some blame the Bush administration. But I blame Milton Friedman.
Now, those who blame globalization do have a point. U.S. officials can’t inspect overseas food-processing plants without the permission of foreign governments — and since the Food and Drug Administration has limited funds and manpower, it can inspect only a small percentage of imports. This leaves American consumers effectively dependent on the quality of foreign food-safety enforcement. And that’s not a healthy place to be, especially when it comes to imports from China, where the state of food safety is roughly what it was in this country before the Progressive movement.
BENDING THE ANALYSES
Mark Twain wrote about lies, damned lies, and statistics. So it goes with right-wingers. Despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary, we were told that the Reagan era tax cuts were a bonanza for the economy, creating new jobs and tax revenues. Those nasty deficits, they said, were just due to too much Congressional spending. We got twisted "facts" and statistics to support the attack on Iraq. We've gotten twisted "facts" to support the concept of globalization. It's time to push aside the statistics and look at reality. This editorial by Dean Baker is linked at www.truthout.org:
Unfortunately, the Iraq war is not the only example of experts bending their analysis to suit those in power. This is the standard methodology of modern economics.
For example, when President Bush wanted to privatize Social Security, his economists used projections that assumed that stock prices would continue to soar for decades, even as they projected that the economy - and corporate profits - would stagnate. While the inconsistency of these assumptions could be shown with simple arithmetic, even most critics of Social Security privatization were too polite to point out that President Bush's numbers didn't add up.
Until the mid-nineties, mainstream economists held it as an absolute article of faith that the unemployment rate could not fall below six percent without triggering explosive inflation. Because of his quirky background, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan chose to ignore the consensus view, and pursued an interest rate policy that allowed the unemployment rate to fall to four percent. As a result, millions of additional workers were able to get jobs, and there was the first period of broadly based wage growth in a quarter century. And there was no inflationary spike. Yet, there was no serious effort to re-examine the consensus view in economics that had said such prosperity was impossible.
As yet another example, economists tell the public that the upward redistribution of wage income of the last quarter-century was simply the result of changes in technology that favor more educated workers. This argument means that the upward redistribution is a sort of natural phenomenon. According to the mainstream of the economics profession, it has nothing to do with trade and immigration policies that are designed to put less- educated workers in competition with people in the developing world, or [with] anti-union policies that undermine the ability of workers to bargain collectively.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
May 20, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
CORPORATIONS AND CRIMINALS PARTNER UP
When corporations aren't committing crimes themselves they're now aiding known criminals, who use information gathered from mailing lists to rip off elderly people. Then banks, being the swell people they are, allow the bilking to take place by not establishing more stringent safeguards. This article talks about Wachovia Bank and a data collection company called infoUSA. InfoUSA actually had a mailing list specifically calling people "gullible," an open invitation for scam artists. Tell me again why the "free market" is so wonderful. This article by Charles Duhigg is at www.nytimes.com:
Mr. Guthrie, who lives in Iowa, had entered a few sweepstakes that caused his name to appear in a database advertised by infoUSA, one of the largest compilers of consumer information. InfoUSA sold his name, and data on scores of other elderly Americans, to known lawbreakers, regulators say.
InfoUSA advertised lists of “Elderly Opportunity Seekers,” 3.3 million older people “looking for ways to make money,” and “Suffering Seniors,” 4.7 million people with cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. “Oldies but Goodies” contained 500,000 gamblers over 55 years old, for 8.5 cents apiece. One list said: “These people are gullible. They want to believe that their luck can change.”
As Mr. Guthrie sat home alone — surrounded by his Purple Heart medal, photos of eight children and mementos of a wife who was buried nine years earlier — the telephone rang day and night. After criminals tricked him into revealing his banking information, they went to Wachovia, the nation’s fourth-largest bank, and raided his account, according to banking records.
FALWELL AND FOREIGN POLICY
Jesus Christ was quoted in the Gospels as saying, "I am no part of the world and my followers are no part of the world." That statement eluded the late Jerry Falwell and many others of the religious right. They have consistently meddled in politics and worked to move our domestic and foreign policy to a far right wing paradigm. Falwell was a believer in the "end times" and pushed for a foreign policy that reflected his end times theology. This article by Bill Berkowitz is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
The Reverend Jerry Falwell, who died Tuesday at the age of 73, is perhaps best known for his fundamentalist social positions and tirades against lesbians, gays and feminists, not to mention "pagans", "abortionists" and assorted other miscreants.
But Falwell also had a significant impact on U.S. foreign policy over the last 30 years, and was one of the founding fathers of so-called Christian Zionism -- the belief that the modern state of Israel is the fulfillment of Biblical "End Times" prophecy and thus deserving of political, financial and religious support.
From his pre-Moral Majority days when he preached against religious folk involved in the civil rights movement, to his support for the President Ronald Reagan-backed contra movements in Central America and Africa that were responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people, to his invective against Nelson Mandela and South Africa's African National Congress and his support for the apartheid regime, Falwell was a Republican Party stalwart and a dependable voice of reaction.
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
CORPORATIONS AND CRIMINALS PARTNER UP
When corporations aren't committing crimes themselves they're now aiding known criminals, who use information gathered from mailing lists to rip off elderly people. Then banks, being the swell people they are, allow the bilking to take place by not establishing more stringent safeguards. This article talks about Wachovia Bank and a data collection company called infoUSA. InfoUSA actually had a mailing list specifically calling people "gullible," an open invitation for scam artists. Tell me again why the "free market" is so wonderful. This article by Charles Duhigg is at www.nytimes.com:
Mr. Guthrie, who lives in Iowa, had entered a few sweepstakes that caused his name to appear in a database advertised by infoUSA, one of the largest compilers of consumer information. InfoUSA sold his name, and data on scores of other elderly Americans, to known lawbreakers, regulators say.
InfoUSA advertised lists of “Elderly Opportunity Seekers,” 3.3 million older people “looking for ways to make money,” and “Suffering Seniors,” 4.7 million people with cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. “Oldies but Goodies” contained 500,000 gamblers over 55 years old, for 8.5 cents apiece. One list said: “These people are gullible. They want to believe that their luck can change.”
As Mr. Guthrie sat home alone — surrounded by his Purple Heart medal, photos of eight children and mementos of a wife who was buried nine years earlier — the telephone rang day and night. After criminals tricked him into revealing his banking information, they went to Wachovia, the nation’s fourth-largest bank, and raided his account, according to banking records.
FALWELL AND FOREIGN POLICY
Jesus Christ was quoted in the Gospels as saying, "I am no part of the world and my followers are no part of the world." That statement eluded the late Jerry Falwell and many others of the religious right. They have consistently meddled in politics and worked to move our domestic and foreign policy to a far right wing paradigm. Falwell was a believer in the "end times" and pushed for a foreign policy that reflected his end times theology. This article by Bill Berkowitz is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
The Reverend Jerry Falwell, who died Tuesday at the age of 73, is perhaps best known for his fundamentalist social positions and tirades against lesbians, gays and feminists, not to mention "pagans", "abortionists" and assorted other miscreants.
But Falwell also had a significant impact on U.S. foreign policy over the last 30 years, and was one of the founding fathers of so-called Christian Zionism -- the belief that the modern state of Israel is the fulfillment of Biblical "End Times" prophecy and thus deserving of political, financial and religious support.
From his pre-Moral Majority days when he preached against religious folk involved in the civil rights movement, to his support for the President Ronald Reagan-backed contra movements in Central America and Africa that were responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people, to his invective against Nelson Mandela and South Africa's African National Congress and his support for the apartheid regime, Falwell was a Republican Party stalwart and a dependable voice of reaction.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
May 19, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
GOP VOTER SUPPRESSION EFFORTS
The Republican party does not represent the majority of Americans. It caters especially to the economic elite. A few crumbs are tossed to the religious right, but the major objective is to attain power, use government as a tremendous cash cow for the rich, and pursue a foreign policy that will enrich corporations. The Republican party doesn't like a high voter turnout because most people will not vote for Republicans. The GOP opposed statistical sampling for the census, for instance, because that census would result in counting people not friendly to Republicans and carve out districts that would vote for Democrats. There is mounting evidence that the U. S. Attorneys scandal is related to voter suppression. This article by Stephen Pizzo is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
What we've learned is that, once Gonzales was promoted from White House Counsel to Attorney General his top assignment was to do use the heavy hand of Justice to intimidate and suppress Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts around the nation.
Suddenly US Attorney's in key states were being pushed to start aggressively charging and prosecuting Democratic get-out-the-vote groups under the guise of fighting vote fraud. When prosecutions did come quickly enough, or at all because of lack of evidence, heads began to roll. Eight US Attorney's, seven of whom had stellar performance records, we fired and replaced by GOP toadies. The message was, “get with the pogrom or we'll free you up to pursue other interests.”
In all 26 US attorneys were on the White House hit list before the new Democratic-controlled Congress began holding the first real oversight hearing in six years. It wasn't long before those hearings blew the administration's cover story, that those fired were let go because of “poor performance.” What they did not say, and could not say, was precisely what assignment they had performed poorly on – using their power to suppress Democratic votes through intimidation in future elections.
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
GOP VOTER SUPPRESSION EFFORTS
The Republican party does not represent the majority of Americans. It caters especially to the economic elite. A few crumbs are tossed to the religious right, but the major objective is to attain power, use government as a tremendous cash cow for the rich, and pursue a foreign policy that will enrich corporations. The Republican party doesn't like a high voter turnout because most people will not vote for Republicans. The GOP opposed statistical sampling for the census, for instance, because that census would result in counting people not friendly to Republicans and carve out districts that would vote for Democrats. There is mounting evidence that the U. S. Attorneys scandal is related to voter suppression. This article by Stephen Pizzo is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
What we've learned is that, once Gonzales was promoted from White House Counsel to Attorney General his top assignment was to do use the heavy hand of Justice to intimidate and suppress Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts around the nation.
Suddenly US Attorney's in key states were being pushed to start aggressively charging and prosecuting Democratic get-out-the-vote groups under the guise of fighting vote fraud. When prosecutions did come quickly enough, or at all because of lack of evidence, heads began to roll. Eight US Attorney's, seven of whom had stellar performance records, we fired and replaced by GOP toadies. The message was, “get with the pogrom or we'll free you up to pursue other interests.”
In all 26 US attorneys were on the White House hit list before the new Democratic-controlled Congress began holding the first real oversight hearing in six years. It wasn't long before those hearings blew the administration's cover story, that those fired were let go because of “poor performance.” What they did not say, and could not say, was precisely what assignment they had performed poorly on – using their power to suppress Democratic votes through intimidation in future elections.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
May 16, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
THE FALWELL-MOON CONNECTION
Look at some of the big movers and shakers in the Republican party and the religious right, and who backs them, and you see the oily paws of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. The Bush family has done quite nicely from their relationship with Moon. It appears that the late Jerry Falwell also enjoyed a big windfall from Moon. As Falwell's Liberty University was facing bankruptcy, Moon came to the rescue. This article by Robert Parry is at www.consortiumnews.com:
Falwell’s secret benefactor was Rev. Moon, who is controversial with many fundamentalist Christians because of his strange Biblical interpretations and his brainwashing tactics that have torn thousands of young people from their families. By the mid-1990s, Moon also had grown harshly anti-American.
So, covertly, Moon helped bail out Liberty University through one of his front groups which funneled $3.5 million to the Reber-Thomas Christian Heritage Foundation, the non-profit that had purchased the school's debt.
I discovered this Moon-Falwell connection while looking for something else: how much Moon's Women's Federation for World Peace had paid former President George H.W. Bush for a series of speeches in Asia in 1995. I obtained the federation's Internal Revenue Service records but discovered that Bush's undisclosed speaking fee was buried in a line item of $13.6 million for conference expenses.
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
THE FALWELL-MOON CONNECTION
Look at some of the big movers and shakers in the Republican party and the religious right, and who backs them, and you see the oily paws of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. The Bush family has done quite nicely from their relationship with Moon. It appears that the late Jerry Falwell also enjoyed a big windfall from Moon. As Falwell's Liberty University was facing bankruptcy, Moon came to the rescue. This article by Robert Parry is at www.consortiumnews.com:
Falwell’s secret benefactor was Rev. Moon, who is controversial with many fundamentalist Christians because of his strange Biblical interpretations and his brainwashing tactics that have torn thousands of young people from their families. By the mid-1990s, Moon also had grown harshly anti-American.
So, covertly, Moon helped bail out Liberty University through one of his front groups which funneled $3.5 million to the Reber-Thomas Christian Heritage Foundation, the non-profit that had purchased the school's debt.
I discovered this Moon-Falwell connection while looking for something else: how much Moon's Women's Federation for World Peace had paid former President George H.W. Bush for a series of speeches in Asia in 1995. I obtained the federation's Internal Revenue Service records but discovered that Bush's undisclosed speaking fee was buried in a line item of $13.6 million for conference expenses.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
May 15, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
FALWELL IS GONE
John Donne wrote that "the death of any man diminishes me," but I can't summon any tears for the late Reverend Jerry Falwell. He was an agent of intolerance who used Jesus Christ as a prop to advocate his far right wing political social and political agenda. He also got rich in the process. Falwell and Pat Robertson have used Christianity as a mask to advocate a hateful agenda against anyone not sharing their Medieval view of the world. This article by Sue Lindsey is at news.yahoo.com:
Matt Foreman, executive director of National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, extended condolences to those close to Falwell, but added: "Unfortunately, we will always remember him as a founder and leader of America's anti-gay industry, someone who exacerbated the nation's appalling response to the onslaught of the
AIDS epidemic, someone who demonized and vilified us for political gain and someone who used religion to divide rather than unite our nation."
The 1980s marked the religious conservative movement's high-water mark. In more recent years, Falwell had become a problematic figure for the GOP. His remarks a few days after Sept. 11, 2001, essentially blaming feminists, gays and liberals for bringing on the terrorist attacks drew a rebuke from the White House, and he apologized.
Falwell's declining political star seemed apparent when he was quietly led in and out of the Republican Party's 2004 national convention. Just four years earlier, he was invited to pray from the rostrum.
WE NEED PAID SICK DAYS
It's amazing to realize that now, in the 21st century, that a good portion of American workers get absolutely no paid sick days. We've seen a constant assault by business against working people over the past two decades. Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers and the union movement has declined. We can see the dismal results in lousy wages and little or no benefits. Proposed legislation would mandate seven paid sick days a year from companies that employ 15 or more workers. It might be a good place to start. This column by Bob Herbert is at www.welcome-to-pottersville.com:
The reality, for a surprising percentage of the U.S. population, is more like the 19th century. Nearly half of all full-time private sector workers in the U.S. get no paid sick days. None. If one of those workers woke up with excruciating pains in his or her chest and had to be rushed to a hospital — well, no pay for that day. For many of these workers, the cost of an illness could be the loss of their job.
The situation is ridiculous for those in the lowest quarter of U.S. wage earners. Nearly 80 percent of those workers — the very ones who can least afford to lose a day’s pay — get no paid sick days at all.
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
FALWELL IS GONE
John Donne wrote that "the death of any man diminishes me," but I can't summon any tears for the late Reverend Jerry Falwell. He was an agent of intolerance who used Jesus Christ as a prop to advocate his far right wing political social and political agenda. He also got rich in the process. Falwell and Pat Robertson have used Christianity as a mask to advocate a hateful agenda against anyone not sharing their Medieval view of the world. This article by Sue Lindsey is at news.yahoo.com:
Matt Foreman, executive director of National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, extended condolences to those close to Falwell, but added: "Unfortunately, we will always remember him as a founder and leader of America's anti-gay industry, someone who exacerbated the nation's appalling response to the onslaught of the
AIDS epidemic, someone who demonized and vilified us for political gain and someone who used religion to divide rather than unite our nation."
The 1980s marked the religious conservative movement's high-water mark. In more recent years, Falwell had become a problematic figure for the GOP. His remarks a few days after Sept. 11, 2001, essentially blaming feminists, gays and liberals for bringing on the terrorist attacks drew a rebuke from the White House, and he apologized.
Falwell's declining political star seemed apparent when he was quietly led in and out of the Republican Party's 2004 national convention. Just four years earlier, he was invited to pray from the rostrum.
WE NEED PAID SICK DAYS
It's amazing to realize that now, in the 21st century, that a good portion of American workers get absolutely no paid sick days. We've seen a constant assault by business against working people over the past two decades. Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers and the union movement has declined. We can see the dismal results in lousy wages and little or no benefits. Proposed legislation would mandate seven paid sick days a year from companies that employ 15 or more workers. It might be a good place to start. This column by Bob Herbert is at www.welcome-to-pottersville.com:
The reality, for a surprising percentage of the U.S. population, is more like the 19th century. Nearly half of all full-time private sector workers in the U.S. get no paid sick days. None. If one of those workers woke up with excruciating pains in his or her chest and had to be rushed to a hospital — well, no pay for that day. For many of these workers, the cost of an illness could be the loss of their job.
The situation is ridiculous for those in the lowest quarter of U.S. wage earners. Nearly 80 percent of those workers — the very ones who can least afford to lose a day’s pay — get no paid sick days at all.
Monday, May 14, 2007
May 14, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
RIPPING OFF THE POOR
Poverty has never been so attractive to big business as it now. There is a burgeoning industry in extracting money from the poor via payday loans, higher interest rate car loans, higher interest rate mortgages, and high interest rate credit cards. Any time I watch TV, especially on the weekends, I see informercials for cars promising easy credit or that bad credit not a problem. One company deceptively advertises payments by the week or biweekly, rather than by the month, because the monthly payment would be horrifying. A lot of people probably don't know what "biweekly" means. This article by Brian Grow and Keith Epstein is at www.businessweek.com:
Armed with the latest technology for assessing credit risks—some of it so fine-tuned it picks up spending on cigarettes—ambitious corporations like Byrider see profits in those thin wallets. The liquidity lapping over all parts of the financial world also has enabled the dramatic expansion of lending to the working poor. Byrider, with financing from Bank of America Corp. (BAC ) and others, boasts 130 dealerships in 30 states. At company headquarters in Carmel, Ind., a profusion of colored pins decorates wall maps, marking the 372 additional franchises it aims to open from California to Florida. CompuCredit Corp., based in Atlanta, aggressively promotes credit cards to low-wage earners with a history of not paying their bills on time. And BlueHippo Funding, a self-described "direct response merchandise lender," has retooled the rent-to-own model to sell PCs and plasma TVs.
The recent furor over subprime mortgage loans fits into this broader story about the proliferation of subprime credit. In some instances, marketers essentially use products as the bait to hook less-well-off shoppers on expensive loans. "It's the finance business," explains Russ Darrow Jr., a Byrider franchisee in Milwaukee. "Cars happen to be the commodity that we sell." In another variation, tax-preparation services offer instant refunds, skimming off hefty fees. Attorneys general in several states say these techniques at times have violated consumer-protection laws.
Some economists applaud how the spread of credit to the tougher parts of town has raised home- and auto-ownership rates. But others warn that in the long run the development could slow upward mobility. Wages for the working poor have been stagnant for three decades. Meanwhile, their spending has consistently and significantly exceeded their income since the mid-1980s. They are making up the difference by borrowing more. From 1989 through 2004, the total amount owed by households earning $30,000 or less a year has grown 247%, to $691 billion, according to the most recent Federal Reserve data available.
HUNGER IN THE UNITED STATES
In the early 1960's Michael Harrington wrote a book about a hunger in America called The Other America. JFK, then campaigning for the presidency, was appalled when he saw the reality of poverty in West Virginia. When JFK took office he tried to address poverty and LBJ took dramatic steps to combat poverty. Right-wingers then started snarling about the "welfare state." They want it both ways. They love having a class of poor people who are available to do low wage jobs. But heaven forfend that the poor get any assistance in even basics like food and shelter. It's "socialism," you see. This editorial comes from The New York Times and talks about the reality of hunger in the United States. The editorial is at www.nytimes.com:
If you think people do not go hungry in America, you’re wrong. At last count in 2005, 35 million low-income Americans — about a third of them children — lived in households that cannot consistently afford enough to eat. Since 2005, the situation has most likely become worse. Last year, real wages for low-income workers were still below 2001 levels. This year, job growth is slowing and prices are rising.
And each year, the federal food stamp program — the bulwark against hunger for 26 million Americans — does less to help. In large part, that is because a key component of the formula for computing most families’ food stamps has not been adjusted for inflation since 1996. Over all, food stamps now average a meager $1.05 per person per meal.
Bolstering food stamps must be Congress’s top priority in this year’s farm bill, the mammoth legislation that covers the food stamp program.
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
RIPPING OFF THE POOR
Poverty has never been so attractive to big business as it now. There is a burgeoning industry in extracting money from the poor via payday loans, higher interest rate car loans, higher interest rate mortgages, and high interest rate credit cards. Any time I watch TV, especially on the weekends, I see informercials for cars promising easy credit or that bad credit not a problem. One company deceptively advertises payments by the week or biweekly, rather than by the month, because the monthly payment would be horrifying. A lot of people probably don't know what "biweekly" means. This article by Brian Grow and Keith Epstein is at www.businessweek.com:
Armed with the latest technology for assessing credit risks—some of it so fine-tuned it picks up spending on cigarettes—ambitious corporations like Byrider see profits in those thin wallets. The liquidity lapping over all parts of the financial world also has enabled the dramatic expansion of lending to the working poor. Byrider, with financing from Bank of America Corp. (BAC ) and others, boasts 130 dealerships in 30 states. At company headquarters in Carmel, Ind., a profusion of colored pins decorates wall maps, marking the 372 additional franchises it aims to open from California to Florida. CompuCredit Corp., based in Atlanta, aggressively promotes credit cards to low-wage earners with a history of not paying their bills on time. And BlueHippo Funding, a self-described "direct response merchandise lender," has retooled the rent-to-own model to sell PCs and plasma TVs.
The recent furor over subprime mortgage loans fits into this broader story about the proliferation of subprime credit. In some instances, marketers essentially use products as the bait to hook less-well-off shoppers on expensive loans. "It's the finance business," explains Russ Darrow Jr., a Byrider franchisee in Milwaukee. "Cars happen to be the commodity that we sell." In another variation, tax-preparation services offer instant refunds, skimming off hefty fees. Attorneys general in several states say these techniques at times have violated consumer-protection laws.
Some economists applaud how the spread of credit to the tougher parts of town has raised home- and auto-ownership rates. But others warn that in the long run the development could slow upward mobility. Wages for the working poor have been stagnant for three decades. Meanwhile, their spending has consistently and significantly exceeded their income since the mid-1980s. They are making up the difference by borrowing more. From 1989 through 2004, the total amount owed by households earning $30,000 or less a year has grown 247%, to $691 billion, according to the most recent Federal Reserve data available.
HUNGER IN THE UNITED STATES
In the early 1960's Michael Harrington wrote a book about a hunger in America called The Other America. JFK, then campaigning for the presidency, was appalled when he saw the reality of poverty in West Virginia. When JFK took office he tried to address poverty and LBJ took dramatic steps to combat poverty. Right-wingers then started snarling about the "welfare state." They want it both ways. They love having a class of poor people who are available to do low wage jobs. But heaven forfend that the poor get any assistance in even basics like food and shelter. It's "socialism," you see. This editorial comes from The New York Times and talks about the reality of hunger in the United States. The editorial is at www.nytimes.com:
If you think people do not go hungry in America, you’re wrong. At last count in 2005, 35 million low-income Americans — about a third of them children — lived in households that cannot consistently afford enough to eat. Since 2005, the situation has most likely become worse. Last year, real wages for low-income workers were still below 2001 levels. This year, job growth is slowing and prices are rising.
And each year, the federal food stamp program — the bulwark against hunger for 26 million Americans — does less to help. In large part, that is because a key component of the formula for computing most families’ food stamps has not been adjusted for inflation since 1996. Over all, food stamps now average a meager $1.05 per person per meal.
Bolstering food stamps must be Congress’s top priority in this year’s farm bill, the mammoth legislation that covers the food stamp program.
Sunday, May 13, 2007
May 13, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
MORE OF THE SAME
In the recent Republican debate, the candidates assiduously avoided mentioning George W. Bush. They talked about Ronald Reagan instead. I think Reagan was a terrible president, but his name is magic in right wing circles. But, while they didn't mention George W. Bush, they also didn't indicate any real change in direction. They would keep us in the quagmire in Iraq. They would do nothing about national health care or protecting the middle class. They would do nothing for the working class. Their solution to illegal immigration is a wall on the border with Mexico. We can't count on them to address global warming. And what would they do about the massive corruption in the Bush administration? Since they have the same ideology, we could probably count on more crony capitalism and scandals. This column by Frank Rich is at www.welcome-to-pottersville.com:
The candidates mentioned Reagan’s name 19 times, the current White House occupant’s once. Much as the Republicans hope that the Gipper can still be a panacea for all their political ills, so they want to believe that if only President Bush would just go away and take his rock-bottom approval rating and equally unpopular war with him, all of their problems would be solved. But it could be argued that the Iraq fiasco, disastrous to American interests as it is, actually masks the magnitude of the destruction this presidency has visited both on the country in general and the G.O.P. in particular.
By my rough, conservative calculation — feel free to add — there have been corruption, incompetence, and contracting or cronyism scandals in these cabinet departments: Defense, Education, Justice, Interior, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development. I am not counting State, whose deputy secretary, a champion of abstinence-based international AIDS funding, resigned last month in a prostitution scandal, or the General Services Administration, now being investigated for possibly steering federal favors to Republican Congressional candidates in 2006. Or the Office of Management and Budget, whose chief procurement officer was sentenced to prison in the Abramoff fallout. I will, however, toss in a figure that reveals the sheer depth of the overall malfeasance: no fewer than four inspectors general, the official watchdogs charged with investigating improprieties in each department, are themselves under investigation simultaneously — an all-time record.
WE NEED GOVERNMENT SERVICES
If you work in an office, you've probably had some parent selling something for their kids for some school project. It's something like candy bars or, recently, magnetic license plates. It's getting almost ludicrous how underfunded schools and other parts of government are these days thanks to the anti-tax mania that swept the country a couple of decades ago. Our basic infrastructure, things like bridges, highways, sewer and water systems, are in bad shape because there isn't enough money to fix or rebuild them. The private sector can do some things better than government, but the government can do many things better than the private sector. This article by Ezra Klein is at www.latimes.com:
How has this come to pass? As the old adage goes, when the gods want to punish you, they give you what you want. Conservatives talk a lot about government failure, but over the last few years, it's really we who have failed government, depriving it of the revenue, the conscientious management and the attention needed for it to succeed. Undercapitalize a pizza joint and your customers will taste the poor ingredients, become frustrated by the long waits and grow repulsed by the grimy environs. Staff it with your unmotivated drinking buddies and the service will falter, as will the quality of the product. It's no way to run a pizza place, and it's certainly no way to run a government.
But that's exactly what we've done. With Proposition 13 and the famous California tax revolt, and with presidents whose entire domestic programs amounted to mindless tax-cutting, and with Congresses that have been happy to pass cuts and stack deficits, we have systematically deprived the government of the revenues it needs to provide basic services, even as we've come to need it to do so much more.
The Bush administration has only added to the problem. The president once said: "I was campaigning in Chicago, and somebody asked me, 'Is there ever any time where the budget might have to go into deficit?' I said only if we were at war or had a national emergency or were in recession. Little did I realize we'd get the trifecta." He's right. Not only have we spent more than $500 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan and untold more on homeland security measures, but we've created, in Medicare Part D, the most expensive new entitlement since President Johnson signed the Great Society into existence. We've also increased education spending through the No Child Left Behind Act.
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
MORE OF THE SAME
In the recent Republican debate, the candidates assiduously avoided mentioning George W. Bush. They talked about Ronald Reagan instead. I think Reagan was a terrible president, but his name is magic in right wing circles. But, while they didn't mention George W. Bush, they also didn't indicate any real change in direction. They would keep us in the quagmire in Iraq. They would do nothing about national health care or protecting the middle class. They would do nothing for the working class. Their solution to illegal immigration is a wall on the border with Mexico. We can't count on them to address global warming. And what would they do about the massive corruption in the Bush administration? Since they have the same ideology, we could probably count on more crony capitalism and scandals. This column by Frank Rich is at www.welcome-to-pottersville.com:
The candidates mentioned Reagan’s name 19 times, the current White House occupant’s once. Much as the Republicans hope that the Gipper can still be a panacea for all their political ills, so they want to believe that if only President Bush would just go away and take his rock-bottom approval rating and equally unpopular war with him, all of their problems would be solved. But it could be argued that the Iraq fiasco, disastrous to American interests as it is, actually masks the magnitude of the destruction this presidency has visited both on the country in general and the G.O.P. in particular.
By my rough, conservative calculation — feel free to add — there have been corruption, incompetence, and contracting or cronyism scandals in these cabinet departments: Defense, Education, Justice, Interior, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development. I am not counting State, whose deputy secretary, a champion of abstinence-based international AIDS funding, resigned last month in a prostitution scandal, or the General Services Administration, now being investigated for possibly steering federal favors to Republican Congressional candidates in 2006. Or the Office of Management and Budget, whose chief procurement officer was sentenced to prison in the Abramoff fallout. I will, however, toss in a figure that reveals the sheer depth of the overall malfeasance: no fewer than four inspectors general, the official watchdogs charged with investigating improprieties in each department, are themselves under investigation simultaneously — an all-time record.
WE NEED GOVERNMENT SERVICES
If you work in an office, you've probably had some parent selling something for their kids for some school project. It's something like candy bars or, recently, magnetic license plates. It's getting almost ludicrous how underfunded schools and other parts of government are these days thanks to the anti-tax mania that swept the country a couple of decades ago. Our basic infrastructure, things like bridges, highways, sewer and water systems, are in bad shape because there isn't enough money to fix or rebuild them. The private sector can do some things better than government, but the government can do many things better than the private sector. This article by Ezra Klein is at www.latimes.com:
How has this come to pass? As the old adage goes, when the gods want to punish you, they give you what you want. Conservatives talk a lot about government failure, but over the last few years, it's really we who have failed government, depriving it of the revenue, the conscientious management and the attention needed for it to succeed. Undercapitalize a pizza joint and your customers will taste the poor ingredients, become frustrated by the long waits and grow repulsed by the grimy environs. Staff it with your unmotivated drinking buddies and the service will falter, as will the quality of the product. It's no way to run a pizza place, and it's certainly no way to run a government.
But that's exactly what we've done. With Proposition 13 and the famous California tax revolt, and with presidents whose entire domestic programs amounted to mindless tax-cutting, and with Congresses that have been happy to pass cuts and stack deficits, we have systematically deprived the government of the revenues it needs to provide basic services, even as we've come to need it to do so much more.
The Bush administration has only added to the problem. The president once said: "I was campaigning in Chicago, and somebody asked me, 'Is there ever any time where the budget might have to go into deficit?' I said only if we were at war or had a national emergency or were in recession. Little did I realize we'd get the trifecta." He's right. Not only have we spent more than $500 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan and untold more on homeland security measures, but we've created, in Medicare Part D, the most expensive new entitlement since President Johnson signed the Great Society into existence. We've also increased education spending through the No Child Left Behind Act.
Saturday, May 12, 2007
May 12, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
BUSH'S TRAITS OF A TYRANT
You get tired of Hitler analogies. Sometimes it's an almost Pavlovian response. But it's hard to ignore the similarities in George W. Bush's method of operation and those of the Nazi regime in Germany. Bush has frequently brazenly ignored the Constitution that he swore to preserve and protect. The United States has engaged in practices like torture that we have roundly condemned in the past. The level of spying by government on private citizens is chillingly like totalitarian governments. This article by Sherwood Ross is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
As public sentiment begins to build for impeachment, it might be illuminating to examine the many ways President Bush operates in a manner reminiscent of history's tyrants. Here are 10 areas that come readily to mind.
First, tyrants tend to see themselves, as Hitler did, at the head of some kind of "master race." President Bush and his backers would deny it, but their drive for a "New American Century" betrays them. They're world-beaters, and won't sign the global warming treaty or any other cooperative document. Republicans at their last Convention jeered the very mention of the words "United Nations." Those who see it differently get slandered. Recall how Bush's hatchet men impugned Senator Kerry's Vietnam War record. This was reminiscent of Nazi claims Germany's Jewish veterans of the Great War did not deserve their medals. Another manifestation is Neocons would reduce gay and lesbian Americans to second-class citizenship status. Bush's backers are convinced of their superiority at home and globally.
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
BUSH'S TRAITS OF A TYRANT
You get tired of Hitler analogies. Sometimes it's an almost Pavlovian response. But it's hard to ignore the similarities in George W. Bush's method of operation and those of the Nazi regime in Germany. Bush has frequently brazenly ignored the Constitution that he swore to preserve and protect. The United States has engaged in practices like torture that we have roundly condemned in the past. The level of spying by government on private citizens is chillingly like totalitarian governments. This article by Sherwood Ross is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
As public sentiment begins to build for impeachment, it might be illuminating to examine the many ways President Bush operates in a manner reminiscent of history's tyrants. Here are 10 areas that come readily to mind.
First, tyrants tend to see themselves, as Hitler did, at the head of some kind of "master race." President Bush and his backers would deny it, but their drive for a "New American Century" betrays them. They're world-beaters, and won't sign the global warming treaty or any other cooperative document. Republicans at their last Convention jeered the very mention of the words "United Nations." Those who see it differently get slandered. Recall how Bush's hatchet men impugned Senator Kerry's Vietnam War record. This was reminiscent of Nazi claims Germany's Jewish veterans of the Great War did not deserve their medals. Another manifestation is Neocons would reduce gay and lesbian Americans to second-class citizenship status. Bush's backers are convinced of their superiority at home and globally.
Friday, May 11, 2007
May 11, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
GIULIANI: MILLIONAIRES ONLY, PLEASE
Rudy Giuliani may be in favor of abortion rights and gay rights, but he's pretty much all Republican. Republicans think of us working types as just rabble to squeeze for our labor and toss out like yesterday's newspaper. Giuliani stiffed people in Iowa because they weren't millionaires. They just weren't the right type of people, I guess. This item comes from firedoglake.com:
I feel bad for Mrs. Von Sprecken, but surely she understands by now that the Republican Party is only for toothless, snake-handling religious fanatics, people who love their gun collections more than they love their children, and the Chosen Few who qualify for Bush's millionaire tax-cuts. Oily oligarchs like Giuliani see the rest of the people in America (not to mention his ex-wives and kids) as being rather like the homeless guys at the traffic light who rush up to try and clean your windshield. In other words, "Back off, riffraff! Stop steaming up my bullet-proof quarter-panels."
Unless Emperor Rudy can count on running into you on the polo pitch or at some swank $5,000-a-plate funder, you're just dirt underfoot, another neck to step on as he makes his grasping, elitist way from imposing a police state in New York City to trying to impose one on the whole country.
No wonder he's the front runner for the GOP nomination. He's the veritable embodiment of Republican Values. Place the priorities of millionaires and mega-corporations first, fill all available jobs with your cronies, no matter how corrupt and incompetent they are, and display a breathtaking indifference to real American values like liberty, freedom, and equal justice under the law. Oh, and make a lot of noise about "family values" while leading a private life that would make Caligula look like a Brownie Scout.
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
GIULIANI: MILLIONAIRES ONLY, PLEASE
Rudy Giuliani may be in favor of abortion rights and gay rights, but he's pretty much all Republican. Republicans think of us working types as just rabble to squeeze for our labor and toss out like yesterday's newspaper. Giuliani stiffed people in Iowa because they weren't millionaires. They just weren't the right type of people, I guess. This item comes from firedoglake.com:
I feel bad for Mrs. Von Sprecken, but surely she understands by now that the Republican Party is only for toothless, snake-handling religious fanatics, people who love their gun collections more than they love their children, and the Chosen Few who qualify for Bush's millionaire tax-cuts. Oily oligarchs like Giuliani see the rest of the people in America (not to mention his ex-wives and kids) as being rather like the homeless guys at the traffic light who rush up to try and clean your windshield. In other words, "Back off, riffraff! Stop steaming up my bullet-proof quarter-panels."
Unless Emperor Rudy can count on running into you on the polo pitch or at some swank $5,000-a-plate funder, you're just dirt underfoot, another neck to step on as he makes his grasping, elitist way from imposing a police state in New York City to trying to impose one on the whole country.
No wonder he's the front runner for the GOP nomination. He's the veritable embodiment of Republican Values. Place the priorities of millionaires and mega-corporations first, fill all available jobs with your cronies, no matter how corrupt and incompetent they are, and display a breathtaking indifference to real American values like liberty, freedom, and equal justice under the law. Oh, and make a lot of noise about "family values" while leading a private life that would make Caligula look like a Brownie Scout.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
May 10, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
THE REAL REAGAN ADMINISTRATION
The current crop of Republican presidential candidates try not to mention George W. Bush and instead invoke the memory of Ronald Reagan. If you listen to the mythology about Reagan, you would think he stood up like David against the Goliath of the Soviet Union all by himself and sent the Communists packing. You will also hear tall tales about the great economy under Reagan. Job growth was worse during his administration than during the Carter administration. Until the current administration Reagan probably had the most corrupt administration in our history. This article by Joe Conason takes a look at the real Reagan administration. The article is at www.commondreams.org:
The tough gunslinger described by the Republican candidates resembles the real Reagan about as accurately as his movie roles resembled his real life. It was strange to hear him mentioned in the context of Iran, the scene of the worst foreign-policy fiasco of his administration—and the topic that most clearly demonstrates the distance between right-wing fantasy and historical reality.
And it was especially strange to hear those words uttered by Giuliani, who wants everyone to remember that he once served as a top official in the Reagan Justice Department, yet seems to have forgotten the criminal case and constitutional crisis known as the Iran-contra affair. But let’s begin at the beginning.
Available evidence strongly indicates that when the Iranian regime released American hostages in January 1981, within hours of the first Reagan inauguration, that decision had nothing to do with fear of the new president and everything to do with a pre-arranged deal. While no proof of that plot has ever emerged, the covert sequel that commenced three years later certainly arouses suspicion.
Between 1984 and 1986, the Reagan administration tried to free American hostages in Lebanon from their Shiite captors, not by confronting the terrorists militarily but by negotiating with their presumed Iranian sponsors. By then, Reagan had already retreated from Lebanon, withdrawing the Marines after the terrorist bombing of their Beirut barracks had claimed 241 American lives.
BEWARE OF BIOFUELS
George W. Bush has advocated using fuel derived from corn as an alternative to oil. Sounds good, right? It's not so good at all. According to a new study, using food crops for energy may lead to severe food shortages and deforestation. We definitely need to move away from oil, but we should look at something other than biofuels. This article by John Vidal is at www.commondreams.org:
The global rush to switch from oil to energy derived from plants will drive deforestation, push small farmers off the land and lead to serious food shortages and increased poverty unless carefully managed, says the most comprehensive survey yet completed of energy crops.
The United Nations report, compiled by all 30 of the world organization’s agencies, points to crops like palm oil, maize, sugar cane, soya and jatropha. Rich countries want to see these extensively grown for fuel as a way to reduce their own climate changing emissions. Their production could help stabilize the price of oil, open up new markets and lead to higher commodity prices for the poor.
But the UN urges governments to beware their human and environmental impacts, some of which could have irreversible consequences.
The report, which predicts winners and losers, will be studied carefully by the emerging multi-billion dollar a year biofuel industry which wants to provide as much as 25% of the world’s energy within 20 years.
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
THE REAL REAGAN ADMINISTRATION
The current crop of Republican presidential candidates try not to mention George W. Bush and instead invoke the memory of Ronald Reagan. If you listen to the mythology about Reagan, you would think he stood up like David against the Goliath of the Soviet Union all by himself and sent the Communists packing. You will also hear tall tales about the great economy under Reagan. Job growth was worse during his administration than during the Carter administration. Until the current administration Reagan probably had the most corrupt administration in our history. This article by Joe Conason takes a look at the real Reagan administration. The article is at www.commondreams.org:
The tough gunslinger described by the Republican candidates resembles the real Reagan about as accurately as his movie roles resembled his real life. It was strange to hear him mentioned in the context of Iran, the scene of the worst foreign-policy fiasco of his administration—and the topic that most clearly demonstrates the distance between right-wing fantasy and historical reality.
And it was especially strange to hear those words uttered by Giuliani, who wants everyone to remember that he once served as a top official in the Reagan Justice Department, yet seems to have forgotten the criminal case and constitutional crisis known as the Iran-contra affair. But let’s begin at the beginning.
Available evidence strongly indicates that when the Iranian regime released American hostages in January 1981, within hours of the first Reagan inauguration, that decision had nothing to do with fear of the new president and everything to do with a pre-arranged deal. While no proof of that plot has ever emerged, the covert sequel that commenced three years later certainly arouses suspicion.
Between 1984 and 1986, the Reagan administration tried to free American hostages in Lebanon from their Shiite captors, not by confronting the terrorists militarily but by negotiating with their presumed Iranian sponsors. By then, Reagan had already retreated from Lebanon, withdrawing the Marines after the terrorist bombing of their Beirut barracks had claimed 241 American lives.
BEWARE OF BIOFUELS
George W. Bush has advocated using fuel derived from corn as an alternative to oil. Sounds good, right? It's not so good at all. According to a new study, using food crops for energy may lead to severe food shortages and deforestation. We definitely need to move away from oil, but we should look at something other than biofuels. This article by John Vidal is at www.commondreams.org:
The global rush to switch from oil to energy derived from plants will drive deforestation, push small farmers off the land and lead to serious food shortages and increased poverty unless carefully managed, says the most comprehensive survey yet completed of energy crops.
The United Nations report, compiled by all 30 of the world organization’s agencies, points to crops like palm oil, maize, sugar cane, soya and jatropha. Rich countries want to see these extensively grown for fuel as a way to reduce their own climate changing emissions. Their production could help stabilize the price of oil, open up new markets and lead to higher commodity prices for the poor.
But the UN urges governments to beware their human and environmental impacts, some of which could have irreversible consequences.
The report, which predicts winners and losers, will be studied carefully by the emerging multi-billion dollar a year biofuel industry which wants to provide as much as 25% of the world’s energy within 20 years.
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
May 09, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
BUSH DOING WHAT AL-QAEDA WANTS
Prolonging the occupation of Iraq is playing right into al-Qaeda's hands. Our military is tied down there and will have limited ability to respond to a crisis anywhere else. People in our military are getting killed and maimed. Our treasury is being bled dry. Bush tries to claim that a withdrawal from Iraq is what the enemy wants. But internal communications from al-Qaeda have shown great concern about a U. S. pullout. This article by Robert Parry is at www.consortiumnews.com:
But one could argue that it is Bush’s open-ended war strategy that is playing into al-Qaeda’s hands.
In past articles at Consortiumnews.com, we have noted that Bush’s “listen to words of the enemy” argument was flawed because al-Qaeda’s public statements, which Bush would cite, often were at odds with its internal communications, which presumably reflected the group’s real thinking.
For instance, intercepted communiqués dating from the last half of 2005 revealed that al-Qaeda feared that a prompt U.S. military withdrawal would lead to the collapse of its operations in Iraq and that “prolonging the war is in our interest.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Al-Qaeda’s Fragile Foothold.”]
U.S. intelligence analysts also were keyed in to al-Qaeda’s use of reverse psychology, for instance, when Osama bin Laden released a videotape on the Friday before Election 2004 denouncing Bush and thus giving the President a boost in the final days of the campaign.
Privately, CIA analysts concluded that bin Laden wanted Bush to get a second term so his blunderbuss “war on terror” could continue for another four years and thus help al-Qaeda recruit more young terrorists.
CONSERVATISM MEANS LESS FREEDOM
The mantra of right-wingers has been to "get the government off our backs." They claim they want people to have choices (except in little things like abortion, I guess). What they really want is a predatory marketplace where big business can do whatever it wants, pay lousy wages, offer no benefits, outsource jobs, destroy the environment, offer shoddy products that you can't even sue them over, and reduce us to penury. This article by Beth Shulman is at www.commondreams.org:
Conservatism historically has seen government as a problem to overcome, an albatross. President Reagan stated it succinctly when he said, “we need to get government off our backs.” Conservatives usually justify this negative view of government in the name of freedom. They conflate freedom with unregulated markets, anti-unionism, low taxes and a rabid individualism. Without so-called government interference, people would be free to make their own choices. But what has this restricted view of government and the notion of freedom it embraces meant for America’s families today? In one word—disaster.The “you are on your own” notion of government and freedom has meant that American families must live with stagnant wages at a time of high profits and productivity without a way to get ahead no matter how hard they try. It has meant health insecurity for workers and their families as fewer and fewer jobs provide health care coverage. It has meant that workers face their older years without the means they counted on to retire, as corporations have slashed traditional pension plans. And it has meant that half of Americans don’t have the fundamental right to take a day off from work when they are sick without losing a job or a paycheck.
It has meant parents having to forgo a child’s high school or college graduation or a PTA meeting because twenty percent of America’s workers do not have any vacation or personal days. It has meant parents tag teaming their shifts to provide their children supervision leading to increased divorce rates because they can’t afford child care. It has meant families who are more stressed out as jobs become more and more insecure. And it has meant more families just struggling to get by with one out of every three workers making less than what it takes to have basic self-sufficiency. All this has been dumped on the already sagging shoulders of working families while government has stood on the sidelines.
And as parents look to provide a better future for their children, it has meant coming up short. Today, it is only the wealthy who have the resources to provide their children the tools required to move up in our society—quality early education, good public schools and a college education. The rest of America’s children just have to do without.
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
BUSH DOING WHAT AL-QAEDA WANTS
Prolonging the occupation of Iraq is playing right into al-Qaeda's hands. Our military is tied down there and will have limited ability to respond to a crisis anywhere else. People in our military are getting killed and maimed. Our treasury is being bled dry. Bush tries to claim that a withdrawal from Iraq is what the enemy wants. But internal communications from al-Qaeda have shown great concern about a U. S. pullout. This article by Robert Parry is at www.consortiumnews.com:
But one could argue that it is Bush’s open-ended war strategy that is playing into al-Qaeda’s hands.
In past articles at Consortiumnews.com, we have noted that Bush’s “listen to words of the enemy” argument was flawed because al-Qaeda’s public statements, which Bush would cite, often were at odds with its internal communications, which presumably reflected the group’s real thinking.
For instance, intercepted communiqués dating from the last half of 2005 revealed that al-Qaeda feared that a prompt U.S. military withdrawal would lead to the collapse of its operations in Iraq and that “prolonging the war is in our interest.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Al-Qaeda’s Fragile Foothold.”]
U.S. intelligence analysts also were keyed in to al-Qaeda’s use of reverse psychology, for instance, when Osama bin Laden released a videotape on the Friday before Election 2004 denouncing Bush and thus giving the President a boost in the final days of the campaign.
Privately, CIA analysts concluded that bin Laden wanted Bush to get a second term so his blunderbuss “war on terror” could continue for another four years and thus help al-Qaeda recruit more young terrorists.
CONSERVATISM MEANS LESS FREEDOM
The mantra of right-wingers has been to "get the government off our backs." They claim they want people to have choices (except in little things like abortion, I guess). What they really want is a predatory marketplace where big business can do whatever it wants, pay lousy wages, offer no benefits, outsource jobs, destroy the environment, offer shoddy products that you can't even sue them over, and reduce us to penury. This article by Beth Shulman is at www.commondreams.org:
Conservatism historically has seen government as a problem to overcome, an albatross. President Reagan stated it succinctly when he said, “we need to get government off our backs.” Conservatives usually justify this negative view of government in the name of freedom. They conflate freedom with unregulated markets, anti-unionism, low taxes and a rabid individualism. Without so-called government interference, people would be free to make their own choices. But what has this restricted view of government and the notion of freedom it embraces meant for America’s families today? In one word—disaster.The “you are on your own” notion of government and freedom has meant that American families must live with stagnant wages at a time of high profits and productivity without a way to get ahead no matter how hard they try. It has meant health insecurity for workers and their families as fewer and fewer jobs provide health care coverage. It has meant that workers face their older years without the means they counted on to retire, as corporations have slashed traditional pension plans. And it has meant that half of Americans don’t have the fundamental right to take a day off from work when they are sick without losing a job or a paycheck.
It has meant parents having to forgo a child’s high school or college graduation or a PTA meeting because twenty percent of America’s workers do not have any vacation or personal days. It has meant parents tag teaming their shifts to provide their children supervision leading to increased divorce rates because they can’t afford child care. It has meant families who are more stressed out as jobs become more and more insecure. And it has meant more families just struggling to get by with one out of every three workers making less than what it takes to have basic self-sufficiency. All this has been dumped on the already sagging shoulders of working families while government has stood on the sidelines.
And as parents look to provide a better future for their children, it has meant coming up short. Today, it is only the wealthy who have the resources to provide their children the tools required to move up in our society—quality early education, good public schools and a college education. The rest of America’s children just have to do without.
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
May 08, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
BUSH: WAR GOOD, ENVIRONMENT BAD
George W. Bush has used the excuse that tighter environmental standards to reduce greenhouse emissions could hurt the economy, but he doesn't mention the economic harm done by war. Contrary to common assumptions, war is not a good stimulus for the economy. After a few years it starts to have a negative impact on job creation. In this article Dean Baker takes a look at the economic consequences of this debacle in Iraq. The article is at www.commondreams.org;
In order to better inform the debate, the Center for Economic and Policy Research commissioned the econometric forecasting firm Global Insight to simulate the impact of a sustained increase in military spending equal to one percentage point of GDP, or $140 billion annually at present (approximately the same increase that has taken place since 2001). Global Insight was selected because it has a highly respected econometric model and is one of the oldest econometric forecasting firms in the country (it was formed from the merger of WEFA and DRI).
The model showed that after an initial stimulus, the impact of higher military spending turns negative around the sixth year. By the tenth year, the economy is projected to have 464,000 fewer payroll jobs in the high-spending scenario. If the higher spending persists for 20 years, the simulation shows job loss reaching 670,000. The job loss is concentrated in construction and manufacturing, with the construction sector projected to lose 144,000 in the tenth year and the manufacturing sector 95,000. By the twentieth year, the number of construction jobs is projected to be 211,000 lower in the high military spending scenario.
The projections also show a considerably larger trade deficit, which would add roughly $1.8 trillion (in 2007 dollars) to the foreign debt in 20 years (approximately nine percent of GDP). In the twentieth year, car sales are projected to be 730,000 lower in the high military spending scenario, while housing starts and sales are projected to be down by 39,000 and 287,000, respectively.
MCCARTHYISM THEN AND NOW
One of the most shameful periods in American history was during the 1950's when Senator Joseph McCarthy launched an anti-Communist hysteria that destroyed lives and careers. People who had done absolutely wrong suddenly found themselves blacklisted and unable to get work. The techniques of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee were to get people to name their friends and associates as "Communist sympathizers." It was a kind of smear pyramid scheme. In our time we've seen McCarthyism revived by people like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O'Reilly. We heard George W. Bush claim that "you're with us or against us," as though any dissent from his policies was treason. This article by Walter C. Uhler contrasts the 1950's and now with a look at a voice of reason, the late George Kennan. The article is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
Kennan excoriated McCarthyism's "alarmed and exercized anti-communism," as "an anti-communism of a quite special variety, bearing an air of excited discovery and proprietorship, as though no one had ever known before that there was a communist danger, as though no one had ever thought about it and taken its measure, as though it had all begun about the year 1945 and these people were the first to learn of it."
President Bush behaved the same way, as if "alarmed and exercised" anti-terrorism rhetoric would enable him to hide his failures to prevent 9/11, notwithstanding numerous warnings about impending terrorist attacks. Attempting to gain proprietorship, Bush's numerous asinine assertions about the terrorists demonstrated that he didn't have a clue.
First, he ignorantly claimed: "They hate our freedoms -- our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other." Then he foolishly promised to "rout out terror wherever it may exist." [Woodward, p.73] More ominously, he would "make no distinction between those who planned these acts and those who harbor them." [p. 30] Finally, he also promised to "rid the world of evil." [p. 67]
Such words befit an overeager, ignorant, petulant child, not a mature statesman. Yet, can any less be said of all the Americans, who found such nonsense persuasive? No wonder citizens throughout the rest of the world consider the United States to be the greatest menace to world peace.
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
BUSH: WAR GOOD, ENVIRONMENT BAD
George W. Bush has used the excuse that tighter environmental standards to reduce greenhouse emissions could hurt the economy, but he doesn't mention the economic harm done by war. Contrary to common assumptions, war is not a good stimulus for the economy. After a few years it starts to have a negative impact on job creation. In this article Dean Baker takes a look at the economic consequences of this debacle in Iraq. The article is at www.commondreams.org;
In order to better inform the debate, the Center for Economic and Policy Research commissioned the econometric forecasting firm Global Insight to simulate the impact of a sustained increase in military spending equal to one percentage point of GDP, or $140 billion annually at present (approximately the same increase that has taken place since 2001). Global Insight was selected because it has a highly respected econometric model and is one of the oldest econometric forecasting firms in the country (it was formed from the merger of WEFA and DRI).
The model showed that after an initial stimulus, the impact of higher military spending turns negative around the sixth year. By the tenth year, the economy is projected to have 464,000 fewer payroll jobs in the high-spending scenario. If the higher spending persists for 20 years, the simulation shows job loss reaching 670,000. The job loss is concentrated in construction and manufacturing, with the construction sector projected to lose 144,000 in the tenth year and the manufacturing sector 95,000. By the twentieth year, the number of construction jobs is projected to be 211,000 lower in the high military spending scenario.
The projections also show a considerably larger trade deficit, which would add roughly $1.8 trillion (in 2007 dollars) to the foreign debt in 20 years (approximately nine percent of GDP). In the twentieth year, car sales are projected to be 730,000 lower in the high military spending scenario, while housing starts and sales are projected to be down by 39,000 and 287,000, respectively.
MCCARTHYISM THEN AND NOW
One of the most shameful periods in American history was during the 1950's when Senator Joseph McCarthy launched an anti-Communist hysteria that destroyed lives and careers. People who had done absolutely wrong suddenly found themselves blacklisted and unable to get work. The techniques of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee were to get people to name their friends and associates as "Communist sympathizers." It was a kind of smear pyramid scheme. In our time we've seen McCarthyism revived by people like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O'Reilly. We heard George W. Bush claim that "you're with us or against us," as though any dissent from his policies was treason. This article by Walter C. Uhler contrasts the 1950's and now with a look at a voice of reason, the late George Kennan. The article is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
Kennan excoriated McCarthyism's "alarmed and exercized anti-communism," as "an anti-communism of a quite special variety, bearing an air of excited discovery and proprietorship, as though no one had ever known before that there was a communist danger, as though no one had ever thought about it and taken its measure, as though it had all begun about the year 1945 and these people were the first to learn of it."
President Bush behaved the same way, as if "alarmed and exercised" anti-terrorism rhetoric would enable him to hide his failures to prevent 9/11, notwithstanding numerous warnings about impending terrorist attacks. Attempting to gain proprietorship, Bush's numerous asinine assertions about the terrorists demonstrated that he didn't have a clue.
First, he ignorantly claimed: "They hate our freedoms -- our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other." Then he foolishly promised to "rout out terror wherever it may exist." [Woodward, p.73] More ominously, he would "make no distinction between those who planned these acts and those who harbor them." [p. 30] Finally, he also promised to "rid the world of evil." [p. 67]
Such words befit an overeager, ignorant, petulant child, not a mature statesman. Yet, can any less be said of all the Americans, who found such nonsense persuasive? No wonder citizens throughout the rest of the world consider the United States to be the greatest menace to world peace.
Monday, May 07, 2007
May 07, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
THE PERVERSION OF COUNTRY MUSIC
The soundtrack of my life features Merle Haggard, Emmylou Harris, Buck Owens, Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, and Waylon Jennings. I can't listen to contemporary country music because it's just not very good. It certainly doesn't speak for working people the way country music has traditionally spoken. This article talks about Toby Keith, a man who has made lots of money speaking for corporations, a man with limited talent at best, and limited ethics. This article by Jaime O'Neill is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
My taste for country music was founded on my romantic sense that it was the people's music, the songs of blue collar balladeers. It came down to us from people like Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter family, and Woody Guthrie, then got translated and transmitted generationally through such voices as Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Patsy Cline and Dolly Parton, singers and songwriters who took the hard-scrabble lives and struggles of working class people and turned those lives into prole poetry. It celebrated family, the virtues of hard work, loyalty, and love of the land while lamenting life's assaults upon the heart, and the struggles of working people to feed their kids. Since the music was usually fairly simple, its main virtue was to be found in its authenticity, the sense that it was, indeed, the vox populi, the bubbling up of the sentiments of otherwise voiceless working class folks.
Toby Keith is about as hot a country music star as they make. He's won a passel of Country Music Association awards. He's been the subject of a profile on 60 Minutes II, and his picture adorns the covers of Sunday supplements in newspapers throughout the country. The full marketing machine is in gear, and Toby is awash in money, having made more than $45 million last year, and expected to make a good deal more in the years to come. Much of his popularity can be traced to his redneck hymns of belligerence toward enemies of America, both real and imagined. Toby Keith is the soundtrack to the nation's coast-to-coast Right Wing Talk Radio Hoedown. Toby Keith is the guy who piled on when the Dixie Chicks were getting pummeled by every country music jock on American radio, a brave American hero eager to beat up on any little fillies who might have the audacity to speak the truth about the leader of Toby Keith's political party.
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
THE PERVERSION OF COUNTRY MUSIC
The soundtrack of my life features Merle Haggard, Emmylou Harris, Buck Owens, Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, and Waylon Jennings. I can't listen to contemporary country music because it's just not very good. It certainly doesn't speak for working people the way country music has traditionally spoken. This article talks about Toby Keith, a man who has made lots of money speaking for corporations, a man with limited talent at best, and limited ethics. This article by Jaime O'Neill is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
My taste for country music was founded on my romantic sense that it was the people's music, the songs of blue collar balladeers. It came down to us from people like Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter family, and Woody Guthrie, then got translated and transmitted generationally through such voices as Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Patsy Cline and Dolly Parton, singers and songwriters who took the hard-scrabble lives and struggles of working class people and turned those lives into prole poetry. It celebrated family, the virtues of hard work, loyalty, and love of the land while lamenting life's assaults upon the heart, and the struggles of working people to feed their kids. Since the music was usually fairly simple, its main virtue was to be found in its authenticity, the sense that it was, indeed, the vox populi, the bubbling up of the sentiments of otherwise voiceless working class folks.
Toby Keith is about as hot a country music star as they make. He's won a passel of Country Music Association awards. He's been the subject of a profile on 60 Minutes II, and his picture adorns the covers of Sunday supplements in newspapers throughout the country. The full marketing machine is in gear, and Toby is awash in money, having made more than $45 million last year, and expected to make a good deal more in the years to come. Much of his popularity can be traced to his redneck hymns of belligerence toward enemies of America, both real and imagined. Toby Keith is the soundtrack to the nation's coast-to-coast Right Wing Talk Radio Hoedown. Toby Keith is the guy who piled on when the Dixie Chicks were getting pummeled by every country music jock on American radio, a brave American hero eager to beat up on any little fillies who might have the audacity to speak the truth about the leader of Toby Keith's political party.
Sunday, May 06, 2007
May 06, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
ROMNEY PANDERS TO CHRISTIAN RIGHT
It seems to me that Republican candidates going to places like Regent University, Pat Robertson's alleged college, has to be pretty demeaning. They're reaching out to people locked in hardcore superstition and reactionary ideas. There's not a lot of difference, as far as I can see, between fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist Moslems and fundamentalist Jews. They are all living in the past in a world of ghosts and goblins and sky beings that don't exist. It's absurd that Romney blamed the Virginia Tech shootings on movies and popular culture. The Virginia Tech shootings were more a product of an insane man who had easy access to weapons. This article by Perry Bacon, Jr., is at www.washingtonpost.com:
And he twice referred to the Virginia Tech shootings on April 16 in which a gunman killed 32 people before killing himself.
"We're shocked by the evil of the Virginia Tech shooting," Romney said. "I opened my Bible shortly after I heard of the tragedy. Only a few verses, it seems, after the Fall, we read that Adam and Eve's oldest son killed his younger brother. From the beginning, there has been evil in the world."
He added: "Pornography and violence poison our music and movies and TV and video games. The Virginia Tech shooter, like the Columbine shooters before him, had drunk from this cesspool."
COUNTRY'S SHAME: HOMELESSNESS
Right-wingers call you an "America hater" if you criticize anything about the United States. They have no problem with racism, sexism, inequality, corporate crime, illegal wars, war profiteering, and betrayal of the military. And it's never their fault. There is always someone to scapegoat. The same goes with homelessness. Homelessness has become a major problem since the Reagan administration and right-wing economics are largely responsible. The people who are so "family values" oriented don't seem troubled that a good portion of the homeless population are children. This article by Stephen Fleischman is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
The destruction of the middle class began during the Reagan Administration, in the 1980s, with the breaking of the labor movement and the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. Those at the lowest end of the ladder fall even lower while there is an explosion of wealth at the top.
You in mid air.
Is that the nature of capitalism? There used to be a system of checks and balances and safety nets.
Don't you love farce?
Is it the system, Stupid?
There was a time, in this system, when people mattered. When infrastructure mattered. When environment mattered. We had an NRA and a WPA and a Tennessee Valley Authority and a Living Newspaper, a Federal Theatre Project and a Farm Security Administration and ways of putting people to work.
Good riddance, you say. The depression is over. Let the private sector do it. Well, what goes around comes around. We may not be at '29 but we may be sneaking up on '28.
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
ROMNEY PANDERS TO CHRISTIAN RIGHT
It seems to me that Republican candidates going to places like Regent University, Pat Robertson's alleged college, has to be pretty demeaning. They're reaching out to people locked in hardcore superstition and reactionary ideas. There's not a lot of difference, as far as I can see, between fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist Moslems and fundamentalist Jews. They are all living in the past in a world of ghosts and goblins and sky beings that don't exist. It's absurd that Romney blamed the Virginia Tech shootings on movies and popular culture. The Virginia Tech shootings were more a product of an insane man who had easy access to weapons. This article by Perry Bacon, Jr., is at www.washingtonpost.com:
And he twice referred to the Virginia Tech shootings on April 16 in which a gunman killed 32 people before killing himself.
"We're shocked by the evil of the Virginia Tech shooting," Romney said. "I opened my Bible shortly after I heard of the tragedy. Only a few verses, it seems, after the Fall, we read that Adam and Eve's oldest son killed his younger brother. From the beginning, there has been evil in the world."
He added: "Pornography and violence poison our music and movies and TV and video games. The Virginia Tech shooter, like the Columbine shooters before him, had drunk from this cesspool."
COUNTRY'S SHAME: HOMELESSNESS
Right-wingers call you an "America hater" if you criticize anything about the United States. They have no problem with racism, sexism, inequality, corporate crime, illegal wars, war profiteering, and betrayal of the military. And it's never their fault. There is always someone to scapegoat. The same goes with homelessness. Homelessness has become a major problem since the Reagan administration and right-wing economics are largely responsible. The people who are so "family values" oriented don't seem troubled that a good portion of the homeless population are children. This article by Stephen Fleischman is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
The destruction of the middle class began during the Reagan Administration, in the 1980s, with the breaking of the labor movement and the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. Those at the lowest end of the ladder fall even lower while there is an explosion of wealth at the top.
You in mid air.
Is that the nature of capitalism? There used to be a system of checks and balances and safety nets.
Don't you love farce?
Is it the system, Stupid?
There was a time, in this system, when people mattered. When infrastructure mattered. When environment mattered. We had an NRA and a WPA and a Tennessee Valley Authority and a Living Newspaper, a Federal Theatre Project and a Farm Security Administration and ways of putting people to work.
Good riddance, you say. The depression is over. Let the private sector do it. Well, what goes around comes around. We may not be at '29 but we may be sneaking up on '28.
Saturday, May 05, 2007
May 05, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
EVERYTHING IS A CRIME
Since the terrorist attacks on 9/11 Americans are being treated more and more as criminals. We have to go through almost absurd checks to get on an airplane. Our names can be added to no fly lists. The Bush administration wants to read our email, monitor our Internet activity, listen in on our phone calls, and track what we buy. When I last renewed my driver's license I got hassled because I don't like to use my given first name. It was never a problem before, but I had to take my birth certificate and get my driver's license issued in the name I don't like. I had to file for unemployment last year and had to provide a mass of documentation to the Employment Development Department to get a few lousy unemployment benefits. This article talks about the criminalization of everyday life. The article is at phoenixwoman.wordpress.com:
It is difficult these days to get personal records from government agencies, especially from another state. There are restrictions on obtaining copies of anything that can be used for identification, because, you know, you might want it because you’re a terrorist or illegal immigrant in need of a false ID, and not, for example, an amateur genealogist.
It’s a reasonable precaution for financial transactions, because there are in fact so many ways to steal account information. But for most other activities, it worries me that we’re being trained to “show our papers” and tolerate being treated like suspected criminals.
I have many friends who will not fly, or who will no longer cross the Canadian border, because of the absurd “security” requirements. Their boycott doesn’t affect the government policy in the slightest; it just restricts their own activities. (If you think the security is necessary or useful, you need to be reading security expert Bruce Schneier’s blog. He’s demonstrated repeatedly why airport security does not make us safer but only makes us accept any kind of nonsense the government wants to inflict on us. To make this point, Bruce is sponsoring a contest to “invent a terrorist plot to hijack or blow up an airplane with a commonly carried item as a key component. The component should be so critical to the plot that the TSA will have no choice but to ban the item once the plot is uncovered”.)
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
EVERYTHING IS A CRIME
Since the terrorist attacks on 9/11 Americans are being treated more and more as criminals. We have to go through almost absurd checks to get on an airplane. Our names can be added to no fly lists. The Bush administration wants to read our email, monitor our Internet activity, listen in on our phone calls, and track what we buy. When I last renewed my driver's license I got hassled because I don't like to use my given first name. It was never a problem before, but I had to take my birth certificate and get my driver's license issued in the name I don't like. I had to file for unemployment last year and had to provide a mass of documentation to the Employment Development Department to get a few lousy unemployment benefits. This article talks about the criminalization of everyday life. The article is at phoenixwoman.wordpress.com:
It is difficult these days to get personal records from government agencies, especially from another state. There are restrictions on obtaining copies of anything that can be used for identification, because, you know, you might want it because you’re a terrorist or illegal immigrant in need of a false ID, and not, for example, an amateur genealogist.
It’s a reasonable precaution for financial transactions, because there are in fact so many ways to steal account information. But for most other activities, it worries me that we’re being trained to “show our papers” and tolerate being treated like suspected criminals.
I have many friends who will not fly, or who will no longer cross the Canadian border, because of the absurd “security” requirements. Their boycott doesn’t affect the government policy in the slightest; it just restricts their own activities. (If you think the security is necessary or useful, you need to be reading security expert Bruce Schneier’s blog. He’s demonstrated repeatedly why airport security does not make us safer but only makes us accept any kind of nonsense the government wants to inflict on us. To make this point, Bruce is sponsoring a contest to “invent a terrorist plot to hijack or blow up an airplane with a commonly carried item as a key component. The component should be so critical to the plot that the TSA will have no choice but to ban the item once the plot is uncovered”.)
Friday, May 04, 2007
May 04, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
WHAT A SORRY SPECTACLE
I didn't watch the Republican debate from Ronald Reagan's library in Simi Valley. Nausea is something I try to avoid. I decided long ago that any working class person who votes for any Republican needs serious therapy. And it isn't just economics. These clowns would keep us in Iraq forever and maybe even expand our occupation to other parts of the Middle East like Iran. They would reverse a woman's right to choose. It makes you wonder how long it would be before they would have American women wearing burkas. They will do absolutely nothing constructive in protecting the middle class. A class of serfs is really to their liking. I once saw a book called Neanderthal when I was browsing at Barnes and Noble and, naturally, Republicans jumped to mind. But the book was about the original Neanderthals. This column by Robert L. Borosage is at www.huffingtonpost.com:
What do these monochromatic candidates offer? Without exception, war and more war. No exit from Iraq. New confrontation with Iran, with only former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani mumbling a hint of caution. For former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, brandishing his newborn wing-nut credentials, it's war not just against al Qaeda, Iraq and Iran, but against Shia and Sunni, Hezbollah and Hamas and more. Wartime for America.
All this is done while invoking Ronald Reagan's sunny optimism. But they've forgotten Reagan's basic caution.
While he committed serial follies in the Middle East, Reagan never got caught in a losing war. When the Marines he fecklessly dispatched to Lebanon were blown up, he cut and ran, invading hapless Grenada to cover his retreat. And when the USSR's Mikhail Gorbachev sued for peace, Reagan ignored the CIA, which called it a trick, spurned the neocons and went to the negotiating table.
TRUTH 1, REPUBLICANS 0
Around the same time as the Neanderthals were debating another debate was taking place between Bill Kristol, one of the major architects of modern conservatism, and Robert Kuttner. Kristol trotted out the standard lies about the great world we have thanks to the policies of Ronald Reagan, et al. Kuttner pointed out that the economy actually grew more under Presidents Carter and Clinton. We're seeing Gilded Age inequality now thanks to the policies of Reagan and the Bushes. This column by Isaiah J. Poole is at www.huffingtonpost.com:
In this universe, the conservatism of Ronald Reagan - whose library served as the stage for the debate - has ushered in what Kristol called "very impressive economic growth over the last quarter century" that not only benefited America but much of the world. Countries like China and India, by implementing Reagan's formula of supply-side economics, deregulation and open markets "brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty."
In foreign policy, meanwhile, neo-conservatism brought down the Soviet Union and ended the Cold War, and would have meant a successful Iraq war if it had not been for the twin evils of President Clinton's underfunding of the military and President Bush's management missteps.
This is, of course, not the world the rest of us live in, and so if the Republican candidates who were trying to sell themselves as Ronald Reagan 3.0 seemed a bit out of touch, it is because conservatism itself gets the real world wrong. How wrong was evident in the Kristol-Kuttner debate.
Kristol's rosy portrait of the economy under conservative government was easily refuted earlier at the conference by William E. Spriggs, the chairman of the economics department at Howard University. Kristol scoffed at "stagflation" and "70 percent marginal tax rates" under President Jimmy Carter, but according to government data compiled by Spriggs, job growth during the Carter administration was actually higher (3.1 percent) than under Reagan's two terms (2.1 percent). During the Clinton administration, job growth was 2.4 percent. Job growth during the terms of both George W. Bush and his father are well under 1 percent. Median family incomes, in constant dollars, rose faster under both Carter and Clinton than they did under Reagan and the two Bushes.
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
WHAT A SORRY SPECTACLE
I didn't watch the Republican debate from Ronald Reagan's library in Simi Valley. Nausea is something I try to avoid. I decided long ago that any working class person who votes for any Republican needs serious therapy. And it isn't just economics. These clowns would keep us in Iraq forever and maybe even expand our occupation to other parts of the Middle East like Iran. They would reverse a woman's right to choose. It makes you wonder how long it would be before they would have American women wearing burkas. They will do absolutely nothing constructive in protecting the middle class. A class of serfs is really to their liking. I once saw a book called Neanderthal when I was browsing at Barnes and Noble and, naturally, Republicans jumped to mind. But the book was about the original Neanderthals. This column by Robert L. Borosage is at www.huffingtonpost.com:
What do these monochromatic candidates offer? Without exception, war and more war. No exit from Iraq. New confrontation with Iran, with only former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani mumbling a hint of caution. For former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, brandishing his newborn wing-nut credentials, it's war not just against al Qaeda, Iraq and Iran, but against Shia and Sunni, Hezbollah and Hamas and more. Wartime for America.
All this is done while invoking Ronald Reagan's sunny optimism. But they've forgotten Reagan's basic caution.
While he committed serial follies in the Middle East, Reagan never got caught in a losing war. When the Marines he fecklessly dispatched to Lebanon were blown up, he cut and ran, invading hapless Grenada to cover his retreat. And when the USSR's Mikhail Gorbachev sued for peace, Reagan ignored the CIA, which called it a trick, spurned the neocons and went to the negotiating table.
TRUTH 1, REPUBLICANS 0
Around the same time as the Neanderthals were debating another debate was taking place between Bill Kristol, one of the major architects of modern conservatism, and Robert Kuttner. Kristol trotted out the standard lies about the great world we have thanks to the policies of Ronald Reagan, et al. Kuttner pointed out that the economy actually grew more under Presidents Carter and Clinton. We're seeing Gilded Age inequality now thanks to the policies of Reagan and the Bushes. This column by Isaiah J. Poole is at www.huffingtonpost.com:
In this universe, the conservatism of Ronald Reagan - whose library served as the stage for the debate - has ushered in what Kristol called "very impressive economic growth over the last quarter century" that not only benefited America but much of the world. Countries like China and India, by implementing Reagan's formula of supply-side economics, deregulation and open markets "brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty."
In foreign policy, meanwhile, neo-conservatism brought down the Soviet Union and ended the Cold War, and would have meant a successful Iraq war if it had not been for the twin evils of President Clinton's underfunding of the military and President Bush's management missteps.
This is, of course, not the world the rest of us live in, and so if the Republican candidates who were trying to sell themselves as Ronald Reagan 3.0 seemed a bit out of touch, it is because conservatism itself gets the real world wrong. How wrong was evident in the Kristol-Kuttner debate.
Kristol's rosy portrait of the economy under conservative government was easily refuted earlier at the conference by William E. Spriggs, the chairman of the economics department at Howard University. Kristol scoffed at "stagflation" and "70 percent marginal tax rates" under President Jimmy Carter, but according to government data compiled by Spriggs, job growth during the Carter administration was actually higher (3.1 percent) than under Reagan's two terms (2.1 percent). During the Clinton administration, job growth was 2.4 percent. Job growth during the terms of both George W. Bush and his father are well under 1 percent. Median family incomes, in constant dollars, rose faster under both Carter and Clinton than they did under Reagan and the two Bushes.
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