This Can't Be Happening!

December 31, 2004

A New Year's Revolution?

US Air, the nation's seventh largest airline, currently in a bankruptcy designed to allow it to break all its previous union contracts and eliminate its pension program, has come up with a bold idea that is sure to sweep Bush USA.

The new idea: Working for free for your boss!

US Air management, perhaps taking a cue from the Bush Administration's success in getting National Guard and Reserve troops to "volunteer" for extra tours of duty in Iraq, has asked that its workers who are not scheduled to work over the New Year holiday weekend volunteer to come to work off the clock to greet passengers, help them with their bags and offer advice and directions.

What a cool idea!

It'll rescue the company from the horrible self-inflicted PR disaster it suffered when it screwed up royally over the Christmas weekend, canceling over 150 flights and leaving thousands of Christmas travelers stranded in airports overnight and in some cases for days, hundreds and thousands of miles from their families.

It will also save the company from having to pay overtime to add extra workers to cover the extra volume of travelers.

One can imagine how this idea might catch on all over the country, particularly as executives traveling on US Air first class experience the grand vision of all those friendly volunteer workers helping them get onto their flights.

Next we can expect to see municipal transit authorities asking transit workers to do volunteer shifts on the holidays to cover peak riderships, cops being asked to do volunteer gigs during campaign visits by luminaries like the president or the pope, teenagers being asked to do volunteer time behind the counter at McDonalds and Carvels during kids' birthday party events, and maybe teachers asked to stay on over the summer to teach summer school for free.

In the new "ownership" society of Bushland, it's all about owners, see, and clearly, the owners of American companies need our help. They have been running their businesses into the ground for decades, disinvesting domestically and shipping work and skilled jobs overseas. Now, an increasingly financially strapped American workforce is unable to do the kind of massive buying and consuming that kept the whole Ponzi scheme afloat for the last few decades, margins are getting squeezed and those companies need help. Bankruptcy courts can help. They allow the companies to screw the bondholders, suppliers and workers by ducking out of all, or most of their obligations. But there has still been this sticky problem of paying the workers. So far, the courts have balked at okaying the notion of indentured servitude or slavery, so they are still stuck with these annoyingly big payroll costs.

This is where US Air's scheme is so brilliant. Ordinarily, if workers come in and do extra time beyond their 40-hour workweek, it costs a company time and a half, making this an expensive proposition. And the labor laws passed during a prior era of do-good liberalism stipulate that when workers do work for the boss, they have to get paid.

But volunteering is something else. If workers volunteer to do charity work for their employer, there's no need to offer them compensation.

Of course, lefty whiners might question how voluntary such charity work really is, given the employer's power over employees ("Why should I give you a raise? You never volunteered to work on the holidays for free like your workmates?"), but hey, we're talking about grownups here. People can make their own minds up, right?

I say, more power to US Air.

Though, for myself, I think I will probably start flying other airlines. I’m not sure I want to be cruising at 30,000 feet in an aircraft that's being maintained by people who are "volunteering" their time, missing their weekends, and worrying about making the next mortgage payment.
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December 29, 2004

It's All Relative

Cost of one F-22 Raptor tactical fighter jet -- $225 million

Cost of the ongoing U.S. war in Iraq--$228 million/day

Amount spent by Kerry and Bush -- $400 million campaigns

U.S. aid to Yushenko camp in recent -- $30+ million Ukrainian conflict

Estimated cost of Bush's Second -- $ 40+ million Inauguration and Ball

Amount of U.S. tax cuts under Bush -- $1 trillion

Cost of the U.S. Iraq War in 2004 -- $147 billion

U.S. reconstruction aid budgeted for -- 18 billion Iraq (though never spent!)

Amount the U.S. initially in aid -- $ 10 million to Indian Ocean tsunami victims
Amount U.S. offered in tsunami aid -- $35 million after being chastised by UN official (But as noted above, recall that none of this is new money. It was just moved out of the US AID's pot of emergency aid funds, which were being used to aid the victims of genocide in Darfur, draught in the Sahel and typhoon flooding in the Philippines, etc.!)
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December 28, 2004

Natural Disaster, Unnatural Response

Word that the U.S. government is offering a paltry $15 million in aid to those countries whose coasts were devastated by tidal waves from the largest earthquake in 40 years (less than a third of what has already been collected so far to pay for President Bush's obscenely lavish second inaugural ball) should be a national embarrassment. That a nation which can talk casually about $400-$500 billion annual deficits, and about spending upwards of $100 billion a year in sowing destruction in Iraq can't come up with more than pocket change for disaster relief in an event that has displaced over a million people and rocked the earth in its orbit is mind-boggling.

But then, it's important to remember that there are disasters both natural and unnatural, and the American public and its chosen political system have markedly different responses to the two. There is also a different scale of concern for the deaths of Americans and the deaths of foreigners with brown skins.

There is national grief expressed for example, for the 15 Americans killed while serving themselves spaghetti in a military mess tent, while Iraqi men, women and children are being blown away, unremarked, at their dining tables on a daily basis by U.S. bombs and cannon fire.

There is untoward concern about 100 missing Americans in resorts like Phuket, but little anguish over the 45,000 locals swept away by the same sudden flood.

For that matter, such concern as has been expressed in America over the tragic loss of life around the rim of the Indian Ocean this past weekend as a result of a natural disaster stands in marked contrast to the complete lack of concern (much less guilt) expressed about the lost of more than twice that many lives at the hands of American troops in Iraq, where an estimated 100,000 civilians have thus far paid the ultimate price for their country’s "liberation."

Surely the world's richest nation could spare a few thousand rescue troops and medical teams and a billion dollars or so to help prevent the inevitable epidemics and starvation that will follow this latest natural catastrophe in one of the world’s poorest regions. But then, where would those troops and medics come from? They're all busy killing Iraqis and patching up the American wounded in the latest U.S. imperial adventure, and can't be spared for humanitarian gestures.

And where would that $1 billion come from? Wealthy Americans would have to either forgo a few dollars in tax relief next year, or the military in Iraq would have to make do without a couple of F-16 fighters.

And yet, if America really wanted to show that it cared about the Third World, and indeed the Muslim world, for that matter, here would be an excellent opportunity to prove it, by providing real , instead of just token assistance to the hard-hit Muslim communities in Bangladesh and Somalia, Indonesia and southern Thailand.

On Christmas Day, President Bush offered up a maudlin, sugar-coated "message of compassion" to the nation, urging the American public to consider the less fortunate. That same day, he offered up the national equivalent of a few surplus soup cans to the victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami. His words would have seemed more sincere and heartfelt had he offered to apply even some of the tens of millions of dollars that corporations and the wealthy are offering in legal bribes to help pay for his inauguration festivities to relief efforts instead.

We should all be ashamed.
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December 22, 2004

Edit War for Fun and Profiteering
The ongoing, deepening war in Iraq has brought us mayhem, death, probably increased terrorism, mounting U.S. budget deficits, and no doubt is responsible for us facing another four years of George Bush. Now the war is bringing us something else: the inevitable scams and fast-buck artists.

And it's not just companies like Haliburton or people like Bernie Kerick who are doing the scamming.

Those who have found the Nigerian bank scams entertaining--or who have been suckered into losing their shirts on these proposed crooked schemes--will be heartened to hear that there's also a new version of the email scam now emanating from the smoking ruins of Iraq.

The following email was received by me two days ago. Read on:

FROM: Sgt. John Mark Fitte

Important Message

To President / Managing Director

Good day,

My name is John Mark Fitte, I am an American soldier, I am serving in the military of the 1st Armored Division in Iraq, As you know we are being attacked by insurgents everyday and car bombs.We managed to move funds belonging to Saddam Hussien's family. The total amount is US$25 Million dollars in cash, mostly 100 dollar bills. We want to move this money to you, so that you may invest it for us and keep our share for banking. We will take 50%, my partner and I. You take the other 50%. no strings attached, just help us move it out of Iraq, Iraq is a warzone. We plan on using diplomatic courier and shipping the money out in one large silver box, using diplomatic immunity.If you are interested I will send you the full details, my job is to find a good partner that we can trust and that will assist us. Can I trust you? When you receive this letter,kindly send me an e-mail signifying your interest including your most confidential telephone/fax numbers for quick communication also your contact details. This business is risk free. The box can be shipped out in 48hrs.

Respectfully,

Sgt. John M. Fitte

The fact that "Sgt. Fitte" uses an email address for the India Times newspaper should raise a red flag for those who don’t recognize the MO of those Nigerian spammers, whose letter this one is modeled on.

Given that an astonishing number of people have lost a collective tens of millions of dollars on the Nigerian bank scams, it will be fun to see how many patriotic Americans will be suckered into shamelessly trying to access some of this alleged plunder.
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December 21, 2004

Land of the Paranoid, Bunker of the Skittish

In this post-Columbine, post 9-11 era, America has simply lost it.

Just this past week, a 10-year old girl who brought a pair of scissors from home to school in her school bag to continue work on a magazine clipping class project, was summarily turned over to police in Philadelphia by a bureaucratically blinded principal, who allowed her to be shipped off to jail, handcuffed, in a police wagon. The principal didn’t even bother to notify the frightened child's mother, who learned of her daughter's ordeal when police detectives called her and said they had her daughter in a holding cell. The school district is justifying its over-the-top handling of this incident by citing the several hundred cases of weapons and sharp objects being brought into Philadelphia schools this year, as well as some serious incidents of attacks on students by other students.

Earlier, a young boy's parents in Ohio were interrogated by detectives from the local sheriff's office because their junior high school son, in a classroom discussion on the war in Iraq, had opined that he hoped American soldiers would all be killed in that military adventure. The boy had not engaged in violence, nor threatened it; he had merely expressed a perhaps unpopular and unpatriotic political wish.

The list of these over-zealous persecutions of children resembles nothing so much as the mentality of the Puritans during the Salem witch trials.

I experienced a little of this madness myself when my son's second-grade teacher called his mother and me in for a meeting. We had no idea what the problem was but the woman sounded dead serious. When we arrived, she sat us down in the classroom and handed us a sheet of drawing paper, saying in a voice that sounded like someone had just died, "I found your son drawing this in class."

We looked at the page, on which were neatly arrayed a set of artfully drawn swords of all types--daggers, scimitars, cutlasses, epees, dirks and the like.

We both broke out in laughter, to the teacher's dismay. Our son, we explained, was fascinated with medieval weaponry, and this was a graphic cataloging of his knowledge. What did she think? That our second-grade, 48-lb son was going to come to school with a Roman broadsword and decapitate a few classmates someday?

The teacher looked skeptical, but the matter was quietly dropped.

What made this visit so annoying was that our son has never shown the least sign of violent or aggressive behavior, and in fact is known for his openness and willingness to be friends with everyone he meets.

What is going on here?

Universities report that they are losing foreign students, who used to flock to this country to study, because the immigration service now makes it so difficult for anyone from overseas to get a student visa. Many potential students have just given up the idea of going to the U.S. because it's not worth the hassle or the unpredictability of the visa process. Even in Taiwan, where I taught last spring, which has yet to send a terrorist to American shores and which probably ranks among the most pro-American societies in the world, frustrated students say they are given the third degree when they apply for a visa to study in the U.S. Every foreign student these days is viewed as a potential terrorist!

The Home of the Brave has become the Bunker of the Skittish.

It's not that the nation has become less safe, either. Schools always had bullies, kids with knives, and in fact, by most measures, the crime rate has been falling (though you wouldn't know this if you get your news watching local television).

And don't get me wrong. I don't want kids coming to school with guns either. But probably the best way to guard against that would be to make it harder for them to get guns--something our perverse society and political leadership seem averse to doing.

What seems to have gone wrong is this notion that bureaucratic rules and draconian punishments will cure the problem. Principals and teachers, like those involved in the above incidents are checking their common sense at home and turning into slavish automatons on the job. Administrators are handing down so-called "zero tolerance" guidelines on behavior and even speech that belong in China, the former Soviet Union or Iran, not in an American school. (The little girl mentioned at the top of this story was scheduled for a one-year expulsion hearing over the scissors, until media attention to her case caused the school district to back off.)

The answer to student alienation is not more draconian school rules, any more than the answer to anti-American terrorism is banning foreign exchange students. What we need are more humane and engaged schools. If the welfare and development of all students is the goal, students who misbehave or exhibit anti-social behavior will be treated with kindness and sensitivity, and offered appropriate treatment or therapy, not shipped off in cuffs in a police van.
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December 17, 2004

Maybe the Pres Just Needs an Ear Cleaning...

My old friend John Hess makes the astute observation that President Bush must have been having an ADD moment when he was discussing with his God the issue of a new Homeland Security Secretary. Surely the Lord knew about Bernie Kerick's ethical issues.

That may explain a lot of things.

It's kind of disturbing to hear that this president is acting as an agent of God and takes his counsel from the Big Guy, when you look at some of the dumb-ass decisions that he has made.

To name a few:

Invading Iraq.

Invading Iraq with a bare-bones military.

Failing to realize that Iraqis would not greet the U.S. invaders with open arms.

Failing to guard essential infrastructure in Iraq after the initial invasion.

Spending billions on a non-functioning ballistic missile defense system.

Cutting taxes on corporations and the rich to create jobs.

Destroying a well-functioning retirement system and replacing it with a national 401K-type system that has already left retirees penniless in Britain, Chile and other places it's been tried.

Trying to debate while wearing a hidden earpiece.

Eating pretzels while watching TV.

Now, thanks to the perceptive pundit Hess, we can rest our minds. It's not the Lord who has been giving bad advice; it's his messenger who has been failing to pay attention.

Who knows, he may be having these conversations with God while playing video games, or running on his treadmill?

We the People need to start putting political pressure on the president's handlers to make sure that the president has some quality time each day to sit in some quiet room free of such distractions, where he can commune with his Maker and carefully jot down the message of the day.

This could spare us all a great deal of unnecessary angst, suffering and death.

So, in the interest of a better America and a better world, please write to Karl Rove and Andrew Card, c/o the White House. Tell them: "Please establish some quiet time and a Communing Room for the president so he can get his messages from God accurately and completely.

"And Please, check to see that his ears have been cleaned."
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December 16, 2004

Racism in Philadelphia: No scissor-carrying fourth graders left behind

A four-letter word has been strangely missing from the coverage of the scandal involving the arrest and handcuffing of a 10-year-old fourth-grade elementary schoolgirl in Philadelphia who had been found to have a pair of household scissors in her schoolbag.

That word is race.

None of the articles in the city's news coverage of this story mentioned the fact that while little Porsche Brown, like 54 percent of her Philadelphia public school classmates, is African-American, the teacher, who rifled through her knapsack looking for some "good job" stickers missing from her desk and found and then reported the scissors, and the principal, who then authorized her arrest and incarceration by city police--before giving her mother a chance to intervene---are both white. (No stolen stickers were found in the girl's bag.)

For some reason it’s important to tell the race of a crime suspect, but not the race of a teacher or a principal whose actions do injury to a child.

At this point, both Philadelphia Police Chief Sylvester Johnson (who is African-American) and Paul Vallas, CEO of the city’s school system (who is white), have issued public and personal apologies to Brown's mother, Rose Jackson---though both offices are still trying to blame the other for the outrageous and uncalled for criminal treatment of a ten-year-old who said she had merely brought the scissors to continue work on a class magazine clipping project.

A spokesman for the school district (which, bankrupt, was taken over by the state last year) claims that the decision to handcuff and arrest Brown, and to throw her unaccompanied into the back of a reportedly urine and blood-stained police wagon, was made by Philadelphia police called to the scene by the school's security guard at the behest of the principal. "All we had done was bring her to the principal’s office," says the school spokesman, Fernando Gallard.

But a spokesman for Mayor John Street's office, speaking for the police, claimed police only took the girl to the station at the request of the principal, where they insist she was "already being detained." Police insist that the decision to handcuff the girl was a matter of police policy. Under Philadelphia Police policy, all suspects in detention from the age of 10 must be handcuffed, the spokesperson said.

Even there, there was an apparent effort to cover up the extent of mistreatment of this unfortunate and terrified little girl. Police initially claimed that the two female officers who responded to the principal’s call, out of concern for the girl's well-being, only handcuffed her in front of her body, and transported her in their patrol car to the detective station. In fact, it has now been confirmed by the mayor's office, Brown was handcuffed behind her back, and was transported, unaccompanied, in the back of a wagon. (Last year, the local daily, the Philadelphia Inquirer, documented how many suspects arrested by police had been seriously injured--even paralyzed--during rides in police wagons, because of their not being secured to seats while cuffed in the van. It is not known whether Brown was belted in during her long ride. Police authorities wouldn't say.)

To make matters worse, upon arriving at the detective’s bureau, her attorney Pat McKinney, says the girl was initially placed, astonishingly, in a jail cell along with two teenage boys, and later moved into another cell with two teenaged girls (who had been brought in for fighting and allegedly, in the process, breaking a teacher’s arm).

The ugly behavior by school authorities in this case has continued.

While the heads of the police and school system may have apologized, this didn't prevent the girl's school from suspending her for two days and holding an expulsion hearing, from which school police forcibly--and under threat of arrest--barred her attorney and her two grandmothers, allowing only her mother to accompany her.

The Philadelphia School District is understandably anxious about weapons or potential weapons in schools, as there have been a number of serious violent incidents, but in this particular case, there was clearly no threat, and no evidence of intent either. The scissors were reportedly found at 9:30 in the morning. The teacher, new this year, then acted according to official policy and turned the scissors in to the principal’s office. The item then sat in the principal’s inbox all day, because both principal and assistant principal were busy with meetings. Not until 2:30, when school was closing, did the principal return and find the scissors in her box. Until that time, little Porsche was simply in class participating in the day's work, unaware that there was any problem.

When she headed for the bus, however, there was an announcement on the PA, telling her to report to Principal Ethel M. Cabry's office. There, she was restrained while police were called, and was subsequently handcuffed and taken away in the wagon.

No one, reportedly, bothered to call her mother before or during her time in the principal's office, though her mother, an employee at Cigna's Center City offices, had provided her office and cellphone numbers as emergency contact numbers in the girl’s school file.

Only when Porsche was in a jail cell was her mother called, at which point she had to rush off through rush-hour traffic to Northeast Philadelphia to try to rescue her child from incarceration.

Porsche's attorney says at this point, her mother has not decided whether to take legal action against the school. "Her main concern is to help her little girl resume her normal life," she says.

That won’t be easy. "When all the news about the scissors broke out, all her friends thought she must have stabbed someone," says McKinney.

McKinney says Porsche's mother, Rose Jackson, has thus far not suggested that racism had anything to do with her daughter’s treatment at the hand of school and police authorities, but so far, the school district has not been able to come up with any examples from among the 259 confiscations of potentially dangerous items from K-4th graders this past year of white 10-year-olds having been turned over to police to be cuffed and jailed.

One has to admit, though, that it's hard to imagine a little white fourth-grade girl being tossed handcuffed into a city wagon.

"Race may well have played a part in this, I'm sorry to say," says an African-American principal from a suburban elementary school just outside Philadelphia. "The fact that police were called in the first place, the fact that the principal allowed her to be handcuffed and placed into a paddy wagon, and the fact that her mother wasn't called right away, all suggest she was being treated like a criminal. I cannot imagine allowing one of my children to be placed in a paddy wagon like that!"
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December 14, 2004

Worse Than I Thought!

It turns out that the Democratic National Institute, the Democratic Party's international organization which, along with a similar Republican Party outfit, the International Republican Institute, has historically done some of the CIA's destablization work for it, is also busy these days in Iraq. Both the DNI and the IRI are reportedly spreading millions of dollars in State Department cash and "training" to favored parties in advance of the planned national election in Iraq next month. Making this gross interference in Iraq's first allegedly "free" election doubly outrageous is the fact that the DNI is headed by Madelein Albright, who as Secretary of State under President Clinton, oversaw the embargo of Iraq which was widely credited with having caused the untimely and avoidable deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. Albright's comment on being confronted with these deaths, mostly from lack of chlorination of water, was that they were "worth it," in the effort to undermine Saddam Hussein.
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December 13, 2004

The Democratic Party Leadership Should Be Sacked Immediately

What, I'd like to know, was the Democratic Party, which has demonstrated an uncanny ability to lose elections it should be able to win handily here in America, doing spending $40 million in U.S. taxpayers' dollars "helping" people and organizations in other countries to compete in elections to overturn incumbent governments overseas?

It turns out that even as it was blowing the presidential election in the U.S., an arm of the Democratic Party, the so called National Democratic Institute, was busy over the last year spending tens of millions of dollars prov ided by the State Department to help the opposition in the Ukraine to challenge the government party in that former Soviet state. (A similar Republican Party organization, the Republican International Institute, was doing the same thing with more State Department money. ) Some of that help was itself of questionable legality, which is why it was all done covertly.

Does anyone else see the huge irony and hypocrisy here? I mean, first of all, imagine for a moment the scandal that would ensue if it were to come out that a political party from a foreign country, say the British Labour Party or the Taiwanese Democratic Progressive Party, had secretly given $20 million to the Republicans or the Democrats during the last campaign!

On top of that, consider that the opposition party in the U.S. was actually working hand-in-glove with the government (and with the Republican Party!) in a subversive foreign policy effort of the Bush administration even as its chosen presidential candidate and nominal party leader, John Kerry, was campaigning against the foreign policy and foreign policy establishment of the Bush administration as inept and untrustworthy.

It takes nothing away from the students and workers of the Ukraine who took to the streets and overturned the results of a corrupt election to say that citizens in America--and especially people who call themselves members of the Democratic Party--should be outraged that they and their party, the victims of fraud and voter abuse at home, were engaged in some of the same kinds of subterfuges overseas that GOP operatives and Republican-led election bureaucracies were using against them here at home. We should be demanding the heads of the entire leadership of the Democratic Party for participating in this outrage!

Bad enough that the U.S. government is interfering with foreign countries' elections. But our political parties have no business getting involved in this way in foreign affairs. In fact, the U.S. Constitution itself strictly forbids this, declaring all international relations matters to be the sole responsibility of the federal government.

America's already tattered reputation as a democratic model is cheapened and destroyed if it furtively tries to undermine elections in other nations. While there was clear evidence of corruption and fraud in the Ukrainian election, the improprieties were not limited to the ruling party and the states it controlled, and American outrage and condemnation of the results will not be taken seriously either in the Ukraine or in other newly democratic nations, given America's own role in bankrolling the opposition.

Indeed, disclosure of the U.S. government’s large-scale covert backing of the opposition, more than anything else, could even lead to increased support for the governing party and end up costing the opposition victory in the Dec. 26 rematch, if the vote is close.

Meanwhile, we are left to wonder why the Democrats, so skilled at helping to organize mass demonstrations against election theft in the Ukraine, have proved so submissive and nonconfrontational in the face of election theft in places like Florida and Ohio.
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December 10, 2004

Deja vu all over again

John Fogerty has it right. "It’s déjà vu all over again," except with a difference.

In Vietnam, in the post-Tet period, when it had become clear to the soldiers on the ground that the war was a lost cause and that they were risking their lives and limbs just to provide cover to Richard Nixon and the other politicians in Washington, mutiny, desertion and "fragging"--the offing of overly aggressive officers who were trying to get you killed before your tour ended--not to mention the crazed and superstitious offing of the guys carrying the body bags into battle (if there were no body bags, nobody could get killed)--became epidemic.

This time around, as it becomes clear that the U.S. cannot win--whatever that even means--in Iraq, and is destined to be tossed summarily out of the country dragging its tail at some point, whether this year or five years from now, it's a different army. Instead of angry and unwilling draftees, the military doing the fighting this time around is composed, at least nominally, of volunteers--people who either signed up as regular military, or who joined the reserves or the National Guard. Few of them, obviously, thought they'd be in this kind of endless guerrilla war in a country half a world away, but they still know that they did sign up.

Granted many of the grunts in the desert were either sold a bill of goods by conniving and dishonest recruiters, or were driven to join the military by a lack of any employment alternative, or they saw military service as a way to pay for a college education that for many poor Americans is financially out of reach any other way, but they still have a sense, most of them, that they asked for the uniform.

But this is also an older, more self-assured military, which became apparent when a group of National Guard soldiers in Kuwait, about to be sent into the battle zone, were given a chance to meet with Defense Secretary and war architect Donald Rumsfeld.

They didn't frag the secretary, but if words could kill, that pompous gasbag would be pushing up daisies right now. The soldiers peppered him with hard questions about stop-loss orders that keep many of them on active duty long past their enlistment periods, about having to fight without body armor, about being given humvees and heavy trucks with no armor even as half or more of the casualties and fatalities of U.S. servicepeople in Iraq could have been prevented with better armor. In short, they let the shocked and befuddled secretary know that they are royally pissed at what they’re being asked to do. These soldiers dared to speak out in a way should shame the Washington and Pentagon press corps (if that overpaid and over groomed lot weren't such shameless suckups to power).

We hear now too, that this army of 150,000 in Iraq has so far experienced 5000 desertions--an astonishing attrition rate of 3.3 percent. That's remarkable, considering how hard it must be to desert in that environment, and what the penalties are. In Vietnam, you could hide out in a Saigon brothel, or, as some soldiers did, melt into the jungle, turn yourself over to the VC, and get smuggled north to North Vietnam and eventually Russia or even Sweden. The options in Iraq aren’t so good, particularly with an insurgency that is far less organized and disciplined, and that is as likely to kill a wandering deserter as to give him or her shelter and sanctuary.

How much longer will it be before desertion and angry questioning, and the occasional mutiny like we saw in late October with the fuel convoy that refused orders because of a lack of guards and armor on its explosion-prone trucks, give way to the same kind of disorder, sabotage and mayhem that plagued the U.S. military in Vietnam descends on the U.S. war machine in Iraq?

My guess is that day isn't that far off.

When soldiers believe in what they are doing--when what they're actually doing jibes more or less with the propaganda they were fed in training--they can endure incredible risks and hardship. Remember, a lot of U.S. troops believed they were avenging the 9/11 attacks and protecting America from a madman with The Bomb. Now many are realizing they are fighting a nationalist resistance in a country that was never a threat to the U.S., and that had nothing to do with 9/11. As it becomes ever clearer that they are just cannon fodder, that they are being asked to do something less noble, or worse, that all they are doing is cleaning up a mess made by political hacks, ideologues and incompetents back home, all they will want to do is what anybody in that situation would want to do: get out and back home alive and in one piece.

What we're seeing now are the first cracks.

It will only get worse.

As Fogerty sings in his powerful new song: "It's déjà vu all over again."
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December 9, 2004

Progressives! Let's Stop Whining and Start Fighting Back

All the whining and moaning coming from the progressive camp in America stands in remarkably stark contrast to the massive 24-7 rally in Kiev that resulted in the invalidation of a corrupt election in the Ukraine.

While I suspect that our own national election was stolen, whether by massive centrally directed fraud or by the piled-up misconduct of many zealous Republican election officials, the inability, and unwillingness, of our legal system and our media to root out the real abuses--the ones that actually kept or discouraged people from exercising or registering their vote as opposed to the ones that miscounted their votes--makes it more or less academic. The results are not about to be overturned.

What does bother me, though, is the widespread acceptance even among progressives, of this "Red State/Blue State" bilge.

As someone who has friends and relatives living all over the country, and who lives in a state, Pennsylvania, that is as conservative, in parts, as any county in the nation, I can state with certainty that there are nearly as many progressives in a state like North Carolina or Arizona as there are in a state like New York or Massachusetts, on a percentage basis. In fact, progressives in the so-called Red states (or in so-called Red counties of states like Pennsylvania), who have to confront much more blatant and outspoken conservatives in their daily lives, are often more outspoken and radical in their politics than their brie-and-cheese counterparts in California or the Northeast.

This makes the whole notion of "targeting" the Blue states, or writing off the Red states, as Kerry’s inept and misbegotten campaign did, absurd. (It makes Kerry's decision to hang on to $15 million in campaign funds downright treacherous.) It also shows how ridiculous is the conservative Democratic Leadership Council’s brilliant idea --already demonstrably a loser--of trying to win over Republican voters and religious conservatives by talking "moral values," faith and strong national defense and by downplaying traditional Democratic positions as national healthcare, labor and women’s rights and civil liberties.

Howard Dean may be no card-carrying progressive, but he had it exactly right, back in the primary debates, when he said (to the tut-tutting of the DLC crowd and candidate Kerry), that Democrats need to go after the guys with the confederate flags on their pickup trucks. Those "guys"--and not a few women too--are for the most part not Democratic or Republican. They are frustrated and desperate working people who are finding it increasingly difficult to keep a job, buy a home and support a family, and they aren't hearing any answers from either major party about their personal crisis.

The Republicans, unabashed pimps for corporations and the rich, cannot appeal to these people’s real concerns, so they have cleverly manufactured alternative issues to win their votes--gay marriage, abortion, terrorism, etc. But the only reason they can get away with this Three-Card Monte switch is that the Democrats are offering nothing substantively different on the key economic front, which is what these people, like most Americans everywhere, are really anxious and concerned about.

If progressives were to wrest back control of the Democratic Party--the way the conservatives took control of the Republican Party in the years since Richard Nixon--the next election would look a whole lot different.

A genuine populist can win in a traditionally conservative state. Look at Russ Feingold, who won re-election handily last month in Wisconsin, the home of Sen. Joe McCarthy, and who not only proudly campaigned on the fact that he was the only U.S. senator to have voted against the Iraq War authorization and the U.S. PATRIOT Act, but who also has consistently opposed the North American Free Trade Act.

Gutsy and forthright homegrown Democrats like Sen. Feingold could be winning election to Congress across the country in 2006, and not just in states like California and New York, but in Alabama, Oklahoma and Tennessee. A Democrat running openly and proudly on such consistently progressive issues could also take the White House in 2008—and could have taken it this year. But to get there, the Democratic Party would have to first drive a stake through the heart of the corporatists who are in control, and who have over the last 28 years or so sucked the lifeblood out of the party of Roosevelt, Johnson and McGovern.

Underneath the desiccated corpse of the Democratic National Committee, there is a vibrant Democratic Party still. I see it in my local community, and in my county here just north of Philadelphia. Progressive Democrats here recently took over our town board, long the exclusive preserve of Republicans, and for the fourth time in a row sent a Democrat to Congress, despite a majority Republican registration. There are similar stories all over the country.

This is why I disagree with those on the left who call for a third party.

While the idea of an ideologically driven, consistently progressive third party may be intellectually or emotionally appealing, the reality is that it has never happened, at least in modern American history. Worse yet, the history of the American left is replete with tales of rampant sectarianism, which will surely arise again to destroy any remotely successful effort to establish such a party before it could ever make any electoral headway (just look at the Greens).

So why go through such a pointless and doomed exercise when the vehicle for change is right before our eyes: the Democratic Party? Messy and ideologically unsatisfying it surely is, but it's there for the taking.

All we have to do is focus our energies and our minds on taking it back, fighting for election of progressives to local and state office, fighting in party caucuses, and gradually winning back the top levers of power in the party machine.

It can be done, and in fact it has been done before, but it can only happen if we decide we want it, and if we are willing to stay with it until we win, the way conservatives did in winning the GOP and ousting or marginalizing that party's so-called moderate or liberal wing.

Maybe a third party could eventually be developed that would become strong enough and broad-based enough to supplant the moribund Democratic Party, but I reckon that at the best, it would take decades to pry people away from long established habits of the two party system, and we don’t have decades. With Republicans pushing an agenda of war without end, environmental rape and plunder, national religion, a Puritan-era legal system and evisceration of the Constitution, we need to become competitive again much sooner than that.

A first step would be grabbing back control of the state and local offices that run state and local elections, and that draw electoral district boundaries.
=====================================

December 7, 2004

No democracy should have a secret budget of $40 billion for spying

Various news media have been bandying around the figure $25 billion to characterize the size of the U.S. intelligence budget while reporting on the tempest in a teacup concerning the reorganizing the upper hierarchy of control over that vast spy apparatus.

In fact, the amount of tax dollars being sucked up by the wholly secret intelligence system is much more than that. No one knows exactly what the figure is because the intelligence agencies have successfully argued that nobody, including Congress, should know how much they get, for fear that the mere size of the budget would provide useful information to America's enemies.

Never mind that in 1997 and 1998, in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, the intelligence budget's size was released (it was $26.6 billion and $26.7 billion respectively), and no intelligence disasters ensued.

In fact, there is absolutely no reason for Americans not to know the precise amount of money that gets poured into intelligence, except that it would probably lead to calls for something to be done about this incredible waste of money.

Secrecy has no place in a democracy, which is why the United Kingdom, Canada and the Netherlands have all decided to make their intelligence budgets public (they are, of course, miniscule compared to the U.S. spying budget).

In fact, according to an organization called the Intelligence Resource Program, which monitors such things, the U.S. in 2004 is spending in excess of $40 billion on intelligence. That represents a 50 percent increase over 1998, just six years earlier. It is far mor---in fact about double in constant dollars, what was being spent on intelligence by the U.S. at the height of the Cold War.

It also represents over $150 per year from every man, woman and child in America, or if you prefer, about $600 per family.

Anyone who thinks that the country is 50 percent safer for all this money, please raise your hand.

Just to put this into some kind of perspective (something that is sorely lacking where intelligence is concerned, thanks to today's toady Congress and even toadier media), $40 billion is an amount much bigger than the budgets of nearly all the states in the U.S., and most of the countries of the world. It's bigger than the entire gross domestic product of many of the world's nations, and more than the U.S. government itself spends on justice ($24 billion), Interior ($9 billion), energy ($23 billion), housing and urban development ($39 billion), NASA ($16 billion) or even Homeland Security ($31 billion)! It’s about two-thirds of what the federal government spends annually on education ($65 billion).

Of course, these other categories of spending get reviewed with a fine-toothed comb each year and are subject to all kinds of criticism in Congress in terms of effectiveness, efficiency and utility. Nothing like this happens with the intelligence budget, which is reviewed in secret...if it is reviewed at all.

The real question is why does the U.S. need such a humongous intelligence budget. Advocates, of course, will say it's to keep us safe from terrorism. But this budget has been gargantuan long before anyone in Washington was paying any attention to terrorism as an issue. Indeed, it was gargantuan even as it entirely failed to warn the country of the impending attack by Al Qaeda on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In fact, very little of that $40 billion going to intelligence spending this year is aimed at terrorism and terrorists. Much of it goes to operating spy satellites that monitor most of the nations of the globe. Much of it goes to interfering with and spying on the governments, both enemy and friend, around the world (as when the U.S. spied on and tapped the phones of the diplomatic offices of the other members of the UN Security Council during the 2003 vote threatening Iraq with "serious consequences".

And a decent part of it is used to spy on and monitor us.

No other nation in the world has an intelligence budget or apparatus remotely approaching what we have in the U.S., but then that is the price of empire. If you want to try to make every place in the world do your bidding, you need this kind of spy system to make it happen, and to try to find out if someone plans to start kicking back.

Arguably, no democratic society should have such a huge spy apparatus at its very core.

Arguably, in fact, the very existence of such a massive secret government agency or collection of agencies, undermines the very foundation of democracy, and is more characteristic of a police state.

A first step back to sanity and democratic rule would be for the media to at least try and get the numbers right, and then to start asking what all those tens of billions of dollars are being spent for.
==================================

December 6, 2004

Psst! Hey buddy, did you hear how well the Iraq war's going?

Here are some thoughts for the holidays:

Word that the Army's psy-op propagandists and perception mongers in the Pentagon had manufactured a fraudulent hero legend around the "friendly fire" death of footballer-turned special forces combatant Pat Tillman--much like the fraudulent tale woven about "rescuing Pvt. Lynch" during the Iraq war's initial days--should have us all on our guard regarding the stories out of Washington purveyed to us by a willing and gullible corporate media. If we take this scummy scam conducted at the late Tillman's expense as a starting point, we might go on to ponder some other things. Among them:

A majority of us Americans think that the unprovoked invasion of Iraq was a mistake--a mistake that has cost nearly 1300 American lives so far, with no end in sight, and over 100,000 innocent Iraqi lives (right up there on a scale comparable to the butchery of Saddam Hussein himself)--yet we just re-elected the man who is responsible for this colossal crime.

Americans continue to flock to auto dealerships to buy SUVs and trucks even though it is common knowledge that the money they pay to fuel these gas-guzzling behemoths goes straight into the pockets of the corrupt, dictatorial regimes, like Saudi Arabia and Yemen, that are breeding and even financially backing the terrorists who have been attacking Americans at home and abroad.

A decisive majority of Americans believe that healthcare should be a right, and that the solution to America’s healthcare crisis is to have a nationalized medical system like Canada's, yet such an idea isn't even on the table in Washington, and is not even discussed by the two parties during national campaigns.

A majority of Americans believe that anything that federal or state government runs is bound to be heavy-handed, bureaucratic and prone to corruption, and yet a majority of Americans also supports having those same governments administer the death penalty.

Government statistics keep telling us that the national income is rising, but the average American family today, with both parents working their butts off, is spending 75 percent of its disposable income on housing, food and transportation, compared with less than 50 percent of income back in 1960, when most families were supported by only one job. (Explanation for this enigma: the national income is an average, but with the rich getting unprecedentedly richer and the poor poorer, you can quickly see where the missing income is going.)

Most Americans continue to believe the fantasy that they have the best lifestyle in the world, but in fact, people in Europe and even in countries like Japan and Taiwan, in many ways, live better than do we Americans, in terms of diet, leisure time, old age security, healthcare, and even safety from terrorism.

With a dogmatism that resembles religious zealotry, American schools teach (or preach to) U.S. students that capitalism is the best economic system, and that the American political system is a model for the world, yet bombed-out-looking American inner cities shock visitors from Europe and even from the more advanced countries of Asia. Poverty in the U.S., while hidden from public view, is the equivalent of a mid-sized third world nation in our midst, with millions of American children growing up hungry, ill clothed, uneducated, and trapped in a cycle of poverty and despair.

In the land of the free, an employer is free to fire an employee for wearing a button supporting a political candidate disliked by her boss. Verbally criticizing a "superior" (there's a great term, like "boss", to find still in circulation in what is supposed to be a democratic society of equals) on the job is grounds for dismissal. The much celebrated freedom of speech guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights applies only to those few waking hours when citizens are asleep or during those few hours when they are either on their commutes to and from work or at home with their families.

And now this: After taking over the airwaves, taking over the print media, and dominating even the Internet, American corporations are now moving to conquer that last bastion of freedom of expression and information--the grapevine. In a cover story in last Sunday's New York Times, it was disclosed that companies with names like BzzAgent and Tremor are using tens of thousands of weird but willing volunteers to spread product advertisements by word of mouth, pretending that they are simply voicing their own independent opinions.

Since Washington, particularly these days, is little more than a particularly large corporate monopoly, we shouldn't be surprised to find its PR and image-control agents adopting the same techniques to promote the kind of scams we saw in the just-exposed Tillman saga. Expect volunteers in your community to begin soon talking in the check-out line about how well the war is going, and about how exciting the Iraqi experiment in democracy is.

Or maybe about how brilliant our maximum leader is.

Happy Holidays!
====================================

November 30, 2004
Hang on to Your Wallet! Don't Let Them Touch Social Security!

There's an old saying: When a man in a fancy suit starts to tell you how he's got a great idea to help you make a lot of money, walk away, and hold on to your wallet.

Well, President George Bush, fresh from his tainted election win, and the gang in Congress where Republicans picked up seats in both houses, all of whom wear fancy suits, are coming at us now with a scheme they claim will help us "save" our Social Security benefits, and even make our pensions a whole lot bigger.

The scheme, however, is really a scam.

For some years now, with the help of some conservative Democrats (like the late and unmourned Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan) or the still semi-quick Sen. Joe Lieberman) who have been in on the con, they have been working to scare us into believing that Social Security is in trouble, and that it might not even be there for younger workers when they retire. They've also tried to tell us that it is making a pitiful rate of return on our "investment" and that we could do much better if we could take that money that the government has been pulling out of our paychecks each month, and invest it ourselves in the stock market (a claim that sounded better back in the '90s when the market doubled, but that doesn't resonate much these days).

Let's first look at the premise. Is Social Security really in trouble?

The answer is no. Assuming no changes were made, it's funded right now right clear through 2043, a distant year when kids not yet born will be watching their own kids going off to college!), and even after that, it will have huge assets that can be counted on to cover over 75 percent of the demand that will be placed on the system by retiring Baby Boomers (like myself).

Would there be a shortfall in the fund after 2043 if no steps were taken to bolster it? Sure. But then you have to ask, what would need to be done to fully cover that Baby Boom wave of retirees? The answer is, all you would have to do is lift the ceiling on income that is subject to Social Security taxation. Right now there's a ceiling of $83,000. Earn more than that, and there's no Social Security tax taken on the additional earnings. In other words, the rich don't have to pay as much, percentage-wise, into the fund as the rest of us. It's the opposite of a progressive tax. It's downright regressive. Now you might not want to pay 7.5 percent tax on that extra $17,000 you'd be making if you got a raise to $100,000 a year, but remember, your employer is also paying that extra money into your account, so you're really making money. What's the beef? (Of course, if you were making $100,000, you'd probably be a Republican, and probably wouldn't be reading this column anyhow.)

Besides, there are other ways to fix things up through tinkering. If the government just changed the formula, and had employers pay an extra 1 percent tax into employees' accounts, the problem would be solved too--and at no cost to us, just to corporate shareholders who'd be seeing smaller profits.

Now the Bush guys who are running the show these days in Washington don't like these ideas. They don't want to see businesses and the rich--the people Bush so tellingly called his "base" in Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 911"--getting socked with higher payroll taxes. In fact, what he and his gang of con artists want to do is use this fake scandal to get rid of Social Security taxes. How to do that? Just wreck Social Security, a program that has been protecting the nation's elderly and the disabled since the dawn of the New Deal in the 1930s and that has been on the GOP hitlist since it's inception.

To accomplish that, all they have to do is start getting people to opt out of the system. And that's what this Bush "reform" plan is all about. Divide and conquer. They're proposing that the younger workers--people under 50 who are still relatively far from retirement and who just see Social Security as a deduction from their paychecks--get an option to take some of that money and, instead of having it sent to the Social Security Administration for payment to current retirees (their parents actually), invest it themselves in something like the stock market.

That might sound attractive if haven't read the financial pages, or have only lived during a time when the stock market has risen, but have you noticed that lately the market has mostly just gone sideways? And sometimes it's even gone significantly south.

What they also neglect to mention is that if you invest that money, some broker is going to be collecting a hefty fee to do your buying and selling. The Social Security Administration doesn't do that.

They also don't mention to you that your benefits under Social Security aren't determined by how well the SSA invests your money--they are set by Congress based upon the amount you put in over your lifetime of work. That's a very solid "investment"--one that you don't have to worry about. And it's there for you even if you've just worked 10 years and then have a disabling injury or disease--something you can't say about a private investment fund.

If you really want to know why you should be suspicious about this "reform" that's being touted for our Social Security, ask yourself this: When is the last time that Republicans did something good for poor people on their own initiative, without being forced to?

And ask yourself this too: What other problem facing this nation over the course of its 228-year history was addressed by any government, Republican or Democrat, 38 years in advance?

If you answered "never" to the first question and "none" to the second, you should be highly suspicious about this new campaign to allegedly "save" Social Security on your behalf.

And you should be joining the fight to make sure they don't touch the system, except perhaps to bolster it by lifting that cap on income subject to taxation.

By the way, don't expect to hear this argument made on TV or in your newspaper. The mass media is all owned now by mega-corporations that have a big stake in seeing Social Security destroyed. They're all paying 7.5% taxes to the Social Security Administration on the payrolls of their workers, and would love to be relieved of that burden. For some of these companies, after all the tax breaks and accounting gimmicks they've managed, it's almost the only tax they pay. But you've heard it here. So spread the word: Don't touch Social Security!

==============================

November 27, 2004
Blowback: Did US techniques for undermining Eastern Europe Elections Find Their Way Back to America?

An interesting and disturbing aspect of the post-election uprising in Ukraine is that it is not entirely a spontaneous event.

Although the election outcome was clearly manipulated by the government of outgoing president Leonid Kuchma, a corrupt and dictatorial Soviet-era autocrat, whose supporters in and out of the government's secret service apparatus have not shied away even from killing opponents, and although much of the movement that took to the streets in Kiev to protest and overturn the results, which had given victory to Kuchma's handpicked successor, Viktor Yanukovich, has been indigenous and heartfelt, there is also clear evidence that the U.S.--the CIA and various American "pro-democracy" front groups--is playing a crucial hand in destabilizing the pro-Russian regime.

Several excellent pieces in the British paper the Guardian have highlighted the role of U.S. agencies and NGO's, in helping, for example, to finance the very exit polls that have raised doubts about the outcome of the election, and in helping to pay for Yushchenko's campaign itself.

As the Guardian observes, it is more common than not that elections in the former Soviet republics have been manipulated by government authorities, who control most of the media, and especially television, as in Ukraine, and have often been stolen. The interesting question is why this time, in Ukraine, the U.S. government has taken such a strong position on behalf of the opposition.

The opposition candidate, Victor Yushchenko, is not, after all, some iconic democrat. Himself for a time a prime minister under Kuchma, he played a central role in the privatization of Ukrainian state enterprises that corruptly benefited old Communist Party apparatchiks, as happened also in Russia. Yushchenko's main calling card in terms of Western European and U.S. support has been his more pro-western stance, where Kuchma and Yanukovich have been more pro-Russian, to the point of Yanukovich favoring a merging of the two neighboring nation's economies and an opening of their shared border.

American interference with Ukraine's election would not be anything new. Such techniques were already employed in the Yugoslavian election that ousted Slobodan Milosovich and in the Georgian election that ended up ousting Eduard Shevardnadze, and were also attempted (unsuccessfully) in the last election in Byelorus. The U.S. ambassador to Byelorus, Michael Kozak, has a long sordid history of subverting elections in Central America--most notably Nicaragua.

It is worth speculating whether all this tampering with the democratic process in Eastern Europe, and Central America, may have resulted in a kind of blowback, with the anti-democratic techniques perfected for use in those fledgling democracies now being applied back home in the U.S.

No wonder the same government that is so quick to decry electoral abuses in Ukraine has been so silent about the exact same practices when its partisans employed them earlier this month at home.

No wonder too, that the same mass media news organizations that have largely dismissed the rampant fraud and abuse perpetrated in the U.S. presidential campaign and election by U.S. government and state and county Republican government officials, are ignoring the role of the U.S. government a in undermining the election in Ukraine.

What is really shocking though, is that one of the players in this gross interference in another nation's internal affairs, the National Democratic Institute--an arm of the U.S. Democratic Party which has a long and ugly history, along with USAID of providing cover for and doing the dirty work of the CIA--can't even stop the same kind of dirty tricks from happening to its parent organization here at home.

In a way, you'd have to say it's a kind of poetic justice.

=====================================

November 25, 2004
Nation of Sheep, Turkey of an Election: Ukrainians Show the Way

The Bush administration's incredible hypocrisy regarding the vote in the Ukraine continues, along with the mainstream media's stunning avoidance of any discussion of the unseemly parallels between what happened there and what happened in the recent US election.

Last night, CNN had Republican Senator Richard Lugar, who had been sent as an observer of the Ukraine presidential campaign and election, on to discuss the situation. Lugar cited exit polls as his explanation for disbelieving the election win by the incumbent party's candidate Victor Yanukovich.

Today, the N.Y. Times weighed in with a headline blaring that the Ukraine vote was "Full of Fraud." The article was accompanied by a Ukraine state map highlighting 10 states where fraud had been alleged.

That list of such frauds would sound rather familiar to critics of the campaign shenanigans that Republican-led governments engaged in in Ohio and Florida:

* In Volynska and Lviv, public employees, including firemen, policemen, teachers and other workers were tricked into handing in absentee ballots to their bosses thus precluding them from voting on election day. It is not known what happened to the absentee ballots they handed in. This is a close parallel to the Republicans' bogus registration drives that had people registering to vote only to have their registration forms shredded and tossed out, and that had students signing "petitions" that turned out to be voter address changes that blocked them from voting where they were going to school.

* In Ivano-Frankovosk, Chernivtsi, Ternopil and Chmelnytskyy, local prosecutors filed criminal cases against local election officials. Not much different from Florida, where the Republican-led state government sicced state police troopers on Democratic Party voter registrars (especially African Americans), actually sending armed officers to people's homes to interrogate them.

* In Mykolayiv, party activists working for opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko's campaign were arrested and manhandled by local police, and charged with such offenses as littering. Not much difference from towns in the U.S. where local police in Republican communities went to local homeowners and ordered them to remove John Kerry signs from their lawns, citing local sign ordinances, or where protesters at Bush/Cheney campaign events were arrested and removed merely for wearing anti-Bush T-shirts or for carrying small Kerry/Edwards signs.

* In Sumska, during the first round of voting in the Ukraine, hundreds of votes were shifted from Mr. Yuschenko to Viktor Yanukovich. This relatively minor example of fraud is simply dwarfed by the tense of thousands of known votes that were shifted by voting machines from Kerry to Bush (at least 20,000 discovered in North Carolina and thousands in Ohio), not to mention evidence that election officials were keeping double paper record tallies from machines in many Florida counties, and were caught trying to throw out the ones that showed higher totals for Kerry. How much more such vote shifting occurred in the U.S. vote is not known, but if the small example found in Sumska can be used to condemn the validity of the whole election there, why is the much larger concrete evidence of fraud in the U.S. being ignored?

* In Donetsk and Luhansk "suspiciously high turnouts" of about 90 percent of voters is cited as evidence of possible fraud, though no concerns get expressed in the mainstream media in the U.S.--indeed artful excuses are offered in an effort to explain away--the staggering and improbable majorities--as much as 85 percent--racked up by Bush in some Florida districts where Democrats vastly outnumbered Republicans among registered voters.

Given the remarkable similarities between the types of frauds being mentioned in the Ukraine election and those that are known to have occurred in the U.S--particularly in the key states of Ohio and Florida, a victory in either one of which would have given a victory to Kerry--it is a grotesque scandal that the U.S. media is not calling the U.S. election a fraud in the same way it is reporting the Ukraine election as a fraud.

It is particularly shocking that much of the fraud that is getting attention in the Ukraine, and that is being cited as grounds for annulling the election results there, involve incidents that related to the campaigning and the registering of voters, i.e.: campaign misconduct and efforts to depress the opposition vote. Here in the U.S., what concerns as are expressed in the media are limited to those, such as the provisional ballots in Ohio, that could affect the vote count. Pre-vote fraud and misconduct, such as deliberate and well-documented efforts by the Republican Secretary of State of Ohio and various Republican-led county election officials to depress Democratic votes by limiting the number of voting machines available in minority districts so that waiting times to vote sometimes stretched beyond eight hours, or the posting of Republican "challengers" to slow down the voting process in Democratic election districts, or efforts by the Republican Florida Secretary of State to use faulty lists to bar alleged felons from registering to vote, are considered irrelevant to the election itself, as they cannot be used to overturn the result.

In the Ukraine, such pre-balloting fraud is considered by the Bush Administration, and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as convincing grounds for the election results there to be ignored, on pain of U.S. sanctions of some sort. Not in the U.S., however.

In the view of the Bush administration, the Ukrainian election should be invalidated because it "did not meet international standards."

Now there's a laugh. Does anyone really think that the recent U.S. election met even minimal international standards?

A nation of sheep in America is getting a lesson in democracy from the former Soviet state of Ukraine. While Americans, Republican and Democrat, sit down to their Thanksgiving dinners and give thanks for living in a nation that deliberately discourages voting, that cuts aid to the poor, and that is currently the aggressor in a brutal war that has already killed 100,000 innocent civilians, hundreds of thousands of voters in the Ukraine are taking to the streets to protest the hijacking of their election. While American leaders, including the defeated Democratic candidate John Kerry, call for national reconciliation, and for acceptance of the tainted victory of George Bush, Ukrainians are being called on by their opposition leader to join in a nation-wide strike. Some states where support for Yushchenko is strongest have actually said they will refuse to recognize the victory of Yanukovich.

You've got to ask, who would Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine and Abe Lincoln be cheering for today?

=======================================

November 24, 2004
Double Standard on Exit Polling and Voter Fraud

A bitterly contested presidential election was held recently. The opposition candidate lost narrowly, by less than three percent of the vote, but now a large segment of the electorate is crying foul.

There was evidence of fraud--supporters of the opposition candidate being kept from the polls while supporters of the incumbent were voting more than once in those "red" regions of the country where the incumbent president's party was most popular, people crying foul in those regions where the opposition was stronger --and besides, exit polls showed the opposition candidate winning handily.

The country? Not America. It's the Ukraine.

The response to this evidence of a possibly stolen election? Hundreds of thousands of protesters have camped on the streets of the capital, insisting that opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko be declared the winner. Yushchenko himself has declared victory and even took a symbolic oath of office.

And in the U.S., the Bush administration, citing the exit polls and evidence of fraud that have been raised, has urged government authorities in Kiev "not to certify results until investigations of organized fraud are resolved."

Secretary of State Colin Powell went further, warning that failure legitimizing the election results in the Ukraine could have "consequences for our relationship" with the country. Speaking with a straight face, he said, "We cannot accept this result as legitimate, because it does not meet international standards and because there has not been an investigation of the numerous and credible reports of fraud and abuse."

What's this?

Roll back the film a minute.

Isn't the Bush administration facing much the same situation in the U.S., absent the mass street rallies? Did we just have a national election that would meet "international standards"?

In Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, and other battleground states in the U.S., there is considerable documented and anecdotal evidence of fraud, including organized efforts in Florida and Ohio by Republican Party authorities to hinder or depress the urban (read black and Democratic) vote, in the deliberate denial of voting rights to people of color, and of possible widespread fraud in the registering and the counting of votes. And exit polls universally showed opposition presidential candidate John Kerry winning handily in the key states of Florida and Ohio, victory in either one of which would have handed him victory.

Indeed, a University of Pennsylvania researcher, studying those exit poll results, has concluded that the consistent shift from Kerry to Bush from exit poll prediction to official tally result is a statistical impossibility, leaving fraud as the only explanation.

Yet in Ohio, where a recount of all votes requested by two small third parties, the Greens and the Libertarians, could conceivably overturn the state's pro-Bush result and hand the presidency to Kerry, the Republican-run Secretary of State's office is doing everything it can (with the help of a federal judge appointed by George Bush) to delay that recount until the state's electoral college meets and hands its 20 votes irrevocably to Bush., making the recount moot.

Where are the government calls to hold off on such a certification of Bush's election win until issues of fraud are "resolved."

Meanwhile, the mainstream media, while making much of the crisis in the Ukraine, have pretty much dropped the whole story of voter fraud in the U.S. election. Indeed, while exit polls are cited as providing strong evidence that Yushchenko probably was the real winner over governing party candidate Viktor Yanukovych in the Ukraine, in the U.S. media, the prevailing wisdom is that the U.S. exit polls--heretofore said to be far more accurate than pre-election polling--were simply wrong.

In contrast to feisty Ukraine opposition candidate Yushchenko, U.S. opposition candidate John Kerry almost immediately conceded victory to Bush, despite mounting evidence of massive fraud in Ohio and Florida, and despite earlier pledges to fight hard and to make sure "every vote is counted."

Little wonder that in the Ukraine, where people take their new democracy seriously, the victims of fraud have taken to the streets demanding an overturning of the tainted results, while in the U.S., voters on the losing side of this electoral scandal are reduced to private whining.

Even so, the idea of this president, who took office the first time in the face of widespread voter fraud and disenfranchisement in the state of Florida, thanks to a decision by a Supreme Court packed with members of his own party, and who "won" the Nov. 2 election thanks to similar tactics in Ohio and Florida, telling the Ukraine to hold off on declaring a winner until allegations of fraud can be investigated and resolved is hard to swallow.

Almost as hard to swallow as the media that report this without even a passing note about its irony and hypocrisy.

=================================

November 19, 2004
Apocalypse Soon

The allegedly pious George Bush, champion of the saved, is said to be a believer in Armageddon.

He may indeed live to see the apocalypse in his final term of office, but it will not be the one he had read to him in from the Bible. It is likely to be rather more secular in nature, though perhaps nearly as cataclysmic.

As he heads towards his second inauguration, Bush's handlers and new neo-con cabinet will be looking at storm clouds gathering all around.

First, of course, there's the war in Iraq, which is getting nastier by the day for the U.S. Hungary is the latest to leave the coalition of the willing, and Poland, the third largest "ally" after Great Britain, with its 2000 troops, won't be far behind. Soon it will just be stop-loss indentured American troops doing the fighting and dying, with a few British soldiers standing near the gangplank in the port city of Basra, ready to beat a hasty retreat. The election, in which the administration professes to place such stock, will be a sham exercise, with Sunni Iraqis either boycotting, or unable to vote because their polling places have been flattened by American bombs. If the remaining balloting is honest, a fundamentalist Shi'ia coalition will triumph and order the U.S. out of the country. Alternatively, in the more likely event that the January plebiscite is orchestrated by the same folks who brought us the 2000 and 2004 election charades in the U.S., we'll see the victory going to a U.S. puppet who will have no popular support, thus further empowering the insurgency. Any way you cut it, it's only going to get worse and bloodier and more costly.

Then there's the U.S. dollar. In case you haven't noticed, it's been sinking like a rock, trading at roughly 100 Japanese yen to the dollar and $1.30 to the Euro. Today, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, who in the run-up to the election was pooh-poohing any concern about the U.S. dollar and the ballooning trade deficit, told European bankers that he is worried that foreign investors, who have been propping up the greenback for decades, are finally showing signs of giving it up for dead. Should that happen, we can expect to see in short order a major economic disaster here in the U.S.

The first thing that would likely happen is that the big oil exporting nations--Russia, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Venezuela and Iran--would, along with the rest of the producing countries, switch their pricing away from dollars to Euros, or perhaps a basket of currencies. That would have the effect of undercutting all support for the dollar, while causing energy prices in the U.S. to go through not just the roof but also the stratosphere. The impact on the U.S. economy would be immediate and drastic--akin to your SUV running out of gas on the freeway.

Yet another storm cloud on the horizon is the U.S. budget deficit. As long as the economy stays marginally healthy, this is a problem deferred, as incomes and tax revenues keep rising or at least holding steady, and as the stock market keeps attracting foreign investment (necessary to keep the dollar afloat and interest rates low). But should the economy founder, as it already shows signs of doing, and as it surely will do over the course of the next four years, government revenues will plummet, leading to deficits that will dwarf anything seen in history, even relative to the gross domestic product. (With the dollar in collapse, there would be no option to lower interest rates. In fact, interest rates will soar.) Such a crisis would lead to demands for massive cuts in social programs and government services--everything from highway repair to postal services, from school funding to veterans' care. Nor would state and local governments be able to pick up the slack--they're all cutting back services and raising taxes already.

Little wonder that over the last four years the administration spent so much of its time undermining civil liberties and packing the courts. The protests against these disasters, as the raindrops from these darkening clouds start to pelt down on the voters of red and blue states alike (perhaps more on red states than on blue, given that the red states have long been the net beneficiaries of federal largesse), will be huge and widespread. Maybe that's what the rumored prison camps being constructed in the California desert and elsewhere are all about.

The Rovian campaign machine has proven itself brilliant at diverting public attention from the real issues of war and economy, and at focusing the attention of voters instead on such trivia as gay marriage laws and flag burning. As the deluge begins, this sleight of hand will become much harder to pull off, even with the unflagging help of the Foxed media.

Bush may be surrounding himself this term with an amen chorus cabinet, but the amens from the public will not be very loud or inspired as these storms begin to hit.

====================================

November 18, 2004
Time to Crash the Party

A group of MoveOn activists in my town, Upper Dublin, just north of the Philadelphia city line, gathered earlier this week at a local bar to discuss--and to some extent to celebrate--their performance in the campaign.

They had a right to be pleased, even though their main man, John Kerry, had conceded the presidential election. Upper Dublin, which has traditionally voted Republican, and which has more Republican than Democratic voters, went for Kerry by 40 votes. The MoveOn crew, by diligent door-to-door legwork aimed at a targeted group of Democratic slackers--party registrants whom records showed had voted, but not in every election--and by calling those few voters on their list who had not shown up at the polls by evening, had brought in 160 voters, many of whom probably would have sat the election out if left alone.

The district had also gone for Allyson Schwartz, the Democrat who won the Republican-gerrymandered seat that had belonged to Rep. Joe Hoeffel, who had left to challenge Sen. Arlen Specter (Hoeffel lost by 7 percent).

"So what do we do now?" asked the local MoveOn coordinator, Lee Wenkos.

Across the country, activists at organizations like ACT, MoveOn and other groups are asking the same thing.

Here's a suggestion: Instead of moping about the last election, and waiting around disconsolately for the next primary season, how about starting a campaign right now to take over the Democratic Party from top to bottom, so that next time around, progressives won't be in the position of doing all that grunt work on behalf of a weak-kneed and compromised candidate who barely qualifies as a liberal?

How about starting from the bottom up and sweeping Al From, Terry McAlliffe and the entire corporate-whore Democratic Leadership Council out the door?

Every election season, progressives are faced with the same bitter debate--whether to support the mealy-mouthed, sell-out candidates offered up by the party machine, or to step away and support a quixotic third party candidate.

Both alternatives are terribly demoralizing. Campaigning and voting for the lesser evil of a Democratic candidate is what brought us Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and then Al Gore and John Kerry. If the DLC has its way, next it will be Hillary Clinton or, god forbid, John Kerry or Al Gore again.

As for the third party route, the system is so structured in favor of the two major parties that there is little chance of a third party breaking into double digits in our lifetime, so that will always be just a protest vote.

But the Democratic Party, a desiccated carcass that only exists because the political structure keeps pumping air into its corpse, is waiting there to be revivified by a progressive takeover.

If even a fraction of the energy and numbers of activists that labored heroically on behalf of Kerry's doomed candidacy this fall were to be turned to the task of conquering the Democratic Party, it could be accomplished easily.

Progressives should check out the party rules and caucus schedules, and start now organizing to take over those caucuses. We progressives should be flooding those caucuses and voting in our people. We should be running candidates for local office and for state party positions, and getting ready to take on the national leadership.

Never again should the party leadership be in a position to undermine a popular candidate like Howard Dean, as was done in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses.

Enough complaining about how bad the Democratic Party is! It's time for action.

The Republicans have taken over the government. We can at least take over the opposition party.

====================================

November 17, 2004

Escalation in Iraq Follows a Campaign of Lies

With the election out of the way, the Bush administration is now free to proceed with what it knew would have to happen--an escalation of the war in Iraq, and an increase in the number of U.S. troops facing death and injury.

During the campaign, Bush was dismissive of calls for more troops in Iraq, which his opponent John Kerry insisted would be necessary to "get the job done." Bush repeatedly countered that there would be no need to add more troops, and claimed that the training of Iraqi soldiers meant that in fact troop levels could start to be reduced.

Now we see that it was all a campaign trick.

First there was the attack on Fallujah, which was carefully delayed until after Election Day so as to keep the inevitable casualties--52 U.S. soldiers killed and over 400 wounded by the official count--out of the campaign. Now it is being admitted that security in Iraq is so bad that an additional 12,000 troops will have to be sent in through at least January 30, in order for a scheduled national election to be held.

The government is trying to say it isn't really adding troops--just overlapping the arrival of fresh troops and the return of existing troops scheduled to leave Iraq, but any way you cut it, raising the number of soldiers in country from 138,000 to 150,000 is a troop increase. (Tell the troops who thought they'd made it through their tours of duty, and who are now being told they have to live in hell for several more months--and their long-suffering families--that it's not a troop increase.)

In the Vietnam era, that, like the attack on and destruction of Fallujah, was called escalation.

Anyone who thinks this thing is going to soon be over is in for a big surprise. That Iraqi army which Bush spoke so glowingly about during the latter weeks of the campaign is such a joke that U.S. soldiers are taught how to watch their backs when working with their Iraqi "allies." In Fallujah, embedded reporters said that the Iraqi soldiers never saw battle at all, but were just brought in to do guard duty after American soldiers were done with the kill-and-be-killed part of the attack. In Mosul, where insurgents had taken over most of the police stations in response to the Fallujah attack, the Iraqi forces simply fled.

Given the pathetic state of the Iraqi defense forces and police, which are riddled with insurgent infiltrators and supporters, officials are now saying that the U.S. will have to have maintain substantially the number of troops it now has in Iraq for another decade. Note that nothing really new has happened in Iraq to lead to this grim assessment. It was all known to the Pentagon and the White House before Nov. 2. In fact, it was even being reported widely outside of the mainstream U.S. media.

But consistent with the good news mantra of the Bush campaign, and its echo chamber in the media, nothing was admitted in the lead-up to the election. Instead it was all lies and rosy scenarios.

The voters have been had.

The question is what will we do about it now?

If we'd had a peace candidate running against the president, at least all of this lying would have come out, and voters would have had an honest choice. Instead, we had a Democratic presidential candidate who was unable to really challenge the president on the war because he actually supported it, and wanted to escalate the fighting himself with an additional 40,000 troops, and a Republican candidate who actually called himself a "peace" candidate, implying that he was about to wind down the war. The war, in fact, proved to be hardly an issue in this campaign--an astonishing thing given that over half the electorate says it is a mistake.

Plans are being made for a major anti-war demonstration at the second Bush inaugural. That is fine as far as it goes, but we all saw how ineffective the huge demonstrations against the war were back in early 2003. Unless the anti-war organizing includes a major campaign aimed at electing peace candidates to congress in 2006, we can count on being in Iraq for as long as we were in Vietnam.

And unlike the Vietnamese, who confined all their fighting to their own unhappy land, Iraqi insurgents and their supporters can be counted on at some point to bring the war home to America--as is their right.

===========================

November 16, 2004
Don't Support the Troops! Not When They Commit War Crimes

It is depressingly predictable how "worked up" the Pentagon brass gets about an atrocity committed in gross violation of the Geneva Conventions when the crime is captured on film, as happened during this recent Fallujah action in the case of an NBC pool cameraman showing the execution by a US Marine of a wounded Iraqi captive, and the apparent execution of several other wounded captives later on.

But does anyone seriously believe that this particularly grisly atrocity is the only one that occurred during the week-long and ongoing assault?

The casual way it was done, in front of the embedded cameraman, makes it clear that quite to the contrary, this must be standard operating procedure for the American soldiers, who weren't even worried about about the possible consequences of their being photographed. (Remember, the executioner was not alone, and none of his colleagues tried to stop him.)

How surprised should we be at this bloodthirsty and criminal behavior? The goal of the assault on Fallujah was not the capture of a city--the normal situation in a war. It was the killing of all the insurgents who were in the city.

Consider this. The approach taken to this assault was first to ring the city with a cordon of over 10,000 heavily armed troops, supported by virtually the entire fleet of U.S. warplanes in the Iraq theater--F-15s, F-16s, F-18s, A-10 Warthogs and helicopter and fixed-wing gunships. Women and children were allowed to leave the doomed city, but all males "of fighting age" were turned back if they tried to leave.

You have to ask: turned back for what purpose?

If the goal was to capture potential guerrillas, here were the men and boys trying to leave, offering themselves up to be arrested, investigated, interrogated and even held in detention. But instead of this, they were turned back to face the coming attack (this action in itself was a major violation of the Geneva Conventions, which require armies to allow non-combatants to leave the scene of combat). If they were really fighters, did it make sense to send them back into Fallujah where they could pick up weapons and possibly kill U.S. soldiers? If the goal was to capture insurgents, then these unfortunates would simply have to be captured later, accomplishing the same thing, but under much more dangerous circumstances for both them and for their U.S. attackers.

Clearly the real goal all along was something else: to kill them all--insurgents, potential insurgents, and any other "fighting age" males (that included little boys as young as 15!) unlucky enough to be residents of Fallujah.

That such horrors are going on in our name should be no surprise. This war was never about "liberation." It is about conquest.

That so little is being said about it here in the U.S. is a crime.

"Support the troops" we are told.

But we cannot do that, if the troops are engaged in criminal behavior.

Surely no American would wish harm to the many thousands of good men and women, boys and girls who have been snatched away from their families and their lives to fight Bush's war in Iraq. We want them all home safe, immediately. But no one should be blindly adopting a slogan that implies supporting what the troops are doing in Iraq, which we know includes atrocities worthy of the German SS.

It should be clear to any thinking person that the U.S. cannot win in Iraq. Unable to defeat the insurgency in there, the U.S. has turned to terror and to military tactics--the executing of wounded and captured fighters, the turning back of refugees, the denial of water and food to people in Fallujah, the barring of ambulances and medics from the scene of battle, the deliberate destruction of medical facilities and the capture and closure of hospitals--that are on their face war crimes. Yet in adopting such tactics, the U.S. is ensuring that it cannot win either. The criminal behavior of American troops in Fallujah, so reminiscent of the behavior of Serbian troops in Bosnia, now broadcast over all of the Middle East, merely encourages more Arab and Iraqi fighters to enlist in the growing anti-American jihad.

And let's face it, the confining of fleeing, unarmed males to Fallujah on the eve of the assault of that city, and the return of fleeing unarmed men and boys during the heat of battle (reporrted widely in the U.S. media), is no different than the herding up and execution of adult males in Sbrynica by Serb militia. The Serb war criminals, who had no air force, had to kill their victims by small arms fire. All the U.S. war criminals (and here I'm referring to the colonels and generals and Defense Department officials who set the policy on refugees) have had to do is force them to stay trapped in the killing zone.

If you want to support the troops, bring them home.

Nothing else is going to save them, either from the enemy, or from the criminal policies of their own leadership.
=======================================

Does `Support the troops' mean supporting this?
warcrime.jpg
American soldier is filmed executing a wounded Iraqi insurgent in Fallujah.

==================================

November 13, 2004

Ruins of Fallujah: Statistics Don't Lie; But They Don't Tell the Story, Either

Statistics don't lie, but in the wrong hands, they only hint at the truth.

So far, as of Sunday, the U.S. attack on the city of Fallujah has led to 22 U.S. combat deaths, a few "allied" Iraqi security force deaths, over 400 American wounded and 1000 "insurgent" deaths, according to a various news reports out of Iraq.

First of all, it must be pointed out that many of those American deaths and many of those casualties now coming home to nurse missing limbs, eyes or other miscellaneous body parts are the direct victims of a cold political strategy by the Bush/Cheney political campaign to push off this assault on a rebel stronghold for several months until the presidential election was safely over.

Because the president and his campaign managers were so afraid of casualties in the tens or hundreds during the final weeks of a nail-biting campaign--afraid, that is, that such casualties would give the lie to the "good news" message they were falsely trumpeting about everything going swimmingly in Iraq--that they postponed the action, giving the insurgents plenty of time to get their leadership and most of their fighters safely out of the city, while booby-trapping and arming to the gills those few martyrs they left behind to do as much damage to invading U.S. troops as they could.

If I were a soldier in Iraq, or the parent of a dead or injured soldier in the Fallujah campaign, I'd be mad as hell at this callous political calculus at the expense of American troops. In fact, if I was one of the sheep driving around the country with those yellow-ribbon magnets on my car saying "Support the Troops," I'd pull it off and mail it to the White House in protest (or maybe throw it over the White House fence where John Kerry claims he threw his medal ribbons, once in a more noble time of his life).

Meanwhile, the small number of dead Iraqi "allied" troops gives a good indication of their importance to the U.S. war effort As far as reflecting their role in the fighting, it's safe to say that it even inflates it, since those soldiers are fighting with a lot less protection, a lot worse armament, and less backup than are U.S. troops, meaning that they are surely dying and getting hurt at a much higher rate than are our Marines and GIs. If the U.S. military isn't providing all its own front-line troops with body armor, you can bet, for example, that they aren't providing it to the Iraqis. Nor do they get the best guns, or the equipment to call in back-up air support.

Finally, about that 1000 enemy dead total.

This figure may be right, but who these people really are is highly suspicious.

In a grotesque and blatant war crime, the U.S. began this assault by first encircling Fallujah, and then declaring that it would allow women, children and old people to leave, but not "men and boys of fighting age" (whatever that may be). Several hundred people in a group of families trying to flee the city over the weekend were actually detained, and then, after allowing the women and children to go, U.S. troops tested the men's hands for gunpowder traces. Finding none, they nonetheless sent them back to the doomed city to face their fate.

By trapping as many as 100,000 men and boys in the city before invading it, the U.S., acting for all the world more like a group of Bosnian Serb thugs than like the army of the Free World, has assured that it will be killing many, many civilians, but we won't be hearing much about that. As far as the Pentagon and Centcom in Iraq go, the dead in Fallujah are and will be all rebels. If they die, they must have died fighting.

And with all this brutality, killing and war-crimes behavior, what has the Pentagon accomplished?

Fallujah is in ruins, but the insurgency has simply spread to dozens of other cities, and to Baghdad, and the U.S. is more hated than ever.
==============================

November 10, 2004

The Hill: Taking a Leak on the Bush Bulge

In an article in a Washington newsletter, The Hill, on Nov. 4, the publication's editor, Albert Eisele, and writer Jeff Dufour claim to debunk the story of Bush's mystery bulge during the debates, claiming that unnamed "sources" in the Secret Service had told them the president was simply wearing body armor under his suit.

The White House, Bush campaign and the president himself all had said it was not body armor, the two wrote, because they didn't want to give away any secrets about the president's security protection while he was "out" campaigning.

There are a couple of big problems with this alibi story, however.

First of all there is the matter of the unidentified sourcing. The Secret Service is very like the CIA in not giving out information. It doesn't confirm or deny where presidential or vice presidential security is involved--something everyone who covers that agency well knows, myself included.

When such a leak does come out, as with the CIA, it is not out of the kindness of some spook or T-man trying to help out a poor reporter--it is to advance some agenda in the agency or the government. Eisele and Dufour certainly should write their story, but they ought to raise the question of why someone or several people (they used the plural of source) would have wanted to put out this story.

This is particularly true since the explanation given as to why the president and his staff would have lied about the bulge being armor was that they supposedly didn't want to disclose his security arrangements when he was campaigning in public.

Don't they care about his security any more now that he's elected? Is the president done visiting with the public? Will he be withdrawing entirely like a box turtle into the White House for the next four years? Has he decided not to campaign for members of Congress in 2004?

Something is automatically fishy here.

But there are other problems too.

Now that NASA scientist Dr. Robert Nelson has shown us the shape of the object under the presidential suitjacket, it would behoove anyone who claims it is a flak jacket under there to show us how it clasps, because that would be some piece of hardware.

In fact, all the bulletproof armor I've been able to find on the market that is meant for hidden use under jackets fastens on the side or the front, and uses smoothly attaching Velcro, not heavy-duty clasps which could, in any event, be blown open by a first shot, rendering the suit useless. There are no vests that I've seen with a clasp remotely like that shape shown by Dr. Nelson's photo enhancement work.

Then too, there's that wire, so clearly visible snaking up to the presidential shoulder in debate 1 pictures. That has nothing to do with an armored vest. Likewise the wire seen peeking out from the left side of the presidential tie in a picture from debate 2.

No, this story still has legs, whatever the cover story "sources" at the Secret Service may be planting at The Hill. (The Hill's own willing role in purveying this weak alibi story must also be questioned, given the jocular way the article dismissed stories about the Bulgegate as "conspiracy theories"--a choice of wording that attempts to disparage the serious efforts some journalists have been making to examine this issue of possible presidential misconduct and deceit.)

It remains to be seen whether investigators can prove that Bush stole the election, but so far, the evidence strongly suggests that he at least tried to cheat in the debates, and that he certainly lied prodigiously about what the bulge was under his jacket.
==============================
November 8, 2004

Lessons from a Quagmire

Fallujah: the Hue of Iraq

It's amazing how history gets twisted or forgotten.

As the Marines prepare for the brutal fight to capture Fallujah, we read in the Associated Press that Sgt. Maj. Carlton W. Kent, the top enlisted Marine in Iraq, has told his massed troops that they are fighting a battle like the one Marines and soldiers fought to recapture Hue, the ancient imperial capital of Vietnam, overrun and captured by the Viet Cong in the Tet Offensive of 1968.

One should certainly hope, for the sake of Marines and the Iraqi people of Fallujah, that Sgt. Maj. Kent is wrong.

Hue was a colossal disaster for the U.S. The retaking of that once beautiful city not only produced some of the highest casualties of the war for the U.S., it also led to the slaughter of thousands of innocent Vietnamese civilians--including many women and children.

It was also the beginning of the end for the US war in Vietnam. Once the American public realized that the Viet Cong had the power to capture one of Vietnam's largest cities, and that they were actually welcomed by the people when they did so, it was the turning point in terms of public support for the war effort at home.

After that it was all downhill, though it took years for the bloodshed to end.

Unfortunately, Kent may be right in drawing this parallel, though certainly not in the way he intends.

No doubt, the U.S. military will recapture Fallujah--most likely because the bulk of the insurgents will, as in the case of Hue, simply melt away.

Already, the Sunni clerics have told the people of Iraq that they are bound to help the insurgents to escape, and reports suggest that most of them already have done so.

The popular masses of Iraq are rooting for the insurgents.

The U.S. will use the most brutal power at its disposal, as it is already doing--2000 lb. bombs, helicopter gunships and larger turboprop gunships, and massive bombardments by tanks and howitzers.

Most of the city will be leveled.

Already, we read that the U.S. military has attacked hospitals, indeed invaded hospitals. Ambulances are targeted deliberately. Can the mosques be far behind?

In the end, the U.S. will be universally reviled even as it captures the pile of rubble that will be what is left of the City of Mosques.

And what will be gained by this battle the Bush administration cynically postponed until after Election Day (not having the courage to let the electorate see the casualties it would inevitably cause)?

Very little, if anything.

The insurgency will still survive, most of its fighters already having left the city, leaving a martyr contingent willing to stay and fight to the death, inflicting as many casualties on American troops as they can.

The American army will have further alienated itself from Iraqis--those few who may still have wished the occupation well. The government of Ayad Allawi will be further compromised, seen as the puppet regime it is for endorsing an attack that is totally unnecessary, even as offers were being made to resolve the conflict peacefully.

It is as though the insurgents had read Ho Chi Minh's brilliant playbook, and were working through the chapters, while the Pentagon and Donald Rumsfeld are stuck with General Westmoreland's stupid plan.

No wonder American troops are holding revival meetings, getting baptized and anointed with holy oil. Led by martinets who do the bidding of a craven regime, they have nowhere else to turn for solace and protection.

Those who die will have achieved nothing.

Those who survive will have little to celebrate.

As Secretary Colin Powell and many of the generals have already said, this war is being lost. As with the battle to recapture Hue, it's just a delay of the inevitable.
==================================

Nov. 6, 2004

Silver Linings: The Feingold Path

If you want to know what's wrong with the Democratic Party, compare the stories of Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis) and Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

Kerry lost the national presidential race to George Bush by two percent, or about 3.5 million votes. In the state of Wisconsin, which pollsters say is gradually shifting color from blue to red, Kerry squeaked by with a narrow win, netting just over 50 percent of the vote to take the state's 10 electoral votes.

Feingold, who himself only narrowly won re-election in Wisconsin six years ago, swept to victory on Tuesday against Republican Tim Michels, winning 55-44 percent.

What was different about Feingold and Kerry?

John Kerry voted for the Senate resolution that authorized President Bush to go to war in Iraq. During the Democratic primary, he joined several other contenders--Richard Gephardt and Joe Lieberman, in ganging up on anti-war candidate Howard Dean and running as the pro-war candidate. He equivocated later, during the campaign, trying to say that Bush has misled the Congress about Iraq, but throughout the campaign he always insisted that he planned, if elected, to "win the war" in Iraq. Kerry also voted for the USA PATRIOT Act, an epic assault on the Constitution and particularly the Bill of Rights. On the economy, Kerry, while decrying the outsourcing of jobs to low-wage countries, continued to endorse free-trade agreements like the World Trade Assn. and NAFTA.

In contrast, Feingold was the lone person in the Senate to vote against the war authorization and the Patriot Act. He also, in his re-election campaign, condemned NAFTA and other trade pacts as unfair to American workers.

Feingold's strong win suggests another possibility: Kerry wasn't progressive enough.

If Feingold, in the heartland state of Wisconsin, could make opposition to the war and the PATRIOT Act a campaign asset, if he could attract working class votes by condemning the trade pacts that allow American companies to shift not white collar jobs but entire plants overseas and then import the goods they use to make in America back in tax-free, then Kerry could have done the same thing in Ohio, Florida, New Mexico and the other swing states he lost by running a timid Republican-lite campaign.

The lesson is clear. As long as the Democratic Party remains in the hands of the DLC party hacks, as long as Democratic primary voters allow themselves to fall for the argument that progressive politics are a losing proposition, the Republicans will keep winning more and more elections.

Russ Feingold for president!

PS. Another bit of silver lining in those post Nov. 2 clouds: Cynthia McKinney, trashed and run out of Congress in 2002 by a right-wing/pro-Israel lobby jihad after raising legitimate questions about the 9-11 attacks, trounced her opponent in Georgia's 4th District and will return triumphant and unbowed to Congress.
=================================

November 4, 2004

Dept. of Silver Linings: Russ Feingold Shows the Way to Winning in 2008

If you want to know what's wrong with the Democratic Party and why it lost this election, compare the stories of Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis) and Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry,

Kerry lost the national presidential race to George Bush by two percent, or about 3.5 million votes. In the state of Wisconsin, which pollsters say is gradually shifting color from blue to red, Kerry squeaked by with a narrow win, netting just over 50 percent of the vote to take the state's 10 electoral votes.

Feingold, who himself only narrowly won re-election in Wisconsin six years ago, swept to victory on Tuesday against Republican Tim Michels, winning 55-44 percent.

What was different about Feingold and Kerry?

John Kerry voted for the Senate resolution that authorized President Bush to go to war in Iraq. During the Democratic primary, he joined several other contenders--Richard Gephardt and Joe Lieberman--in ganging up on anti-war candidate Howard Dean and running as the pro-war candidate. He equivocated later, during the campaign, trying to say that Bush has misled the Congress about Iraq, but throughout the campaign he always insisted that he planned, if elected, to "win the war" in Iraq. Kerry also voted for the USA PATRIOT Act, an epic assault on the Constitution and particularly the Bill of Rights. On the economy, Kerry, while decrying the outsourcing of jobs to low-wage countries, continued to endorse free-trade agreements like the World Trade Organization and NAFTA.

In contrast, Feingold was the lone person in the Senate to vote against the war authorization and the PATRIOT Act. He also, in his re-election campaign, condemned NAFTA and other trade pacts as unfair to American workers.

According to the conservative pro-corporate Democratic Leadership Council, of which candidate Kerry is a charter member, and to the candidate's now discredited campaign staff, Feingold's positions were "out of touch" with the American mainstream. The DLC is now trying to blame Kerry's disastrous loss of the 2004 election on everything from Karl Rove's success in making gay marriage a key issue in swing states to Americans having succumbed to Bush's scare tactics.

Feingold's strong win suggests another more likely possibility: Kerry wasn’t progressive enough.

If Feingold, in the heartland state of Wisconsin, could make opposition to the war and the PATRIOT Act a campaign asset, if he could attract working class votes by condemning the trade pacts that allow American companies to shift not just white collar jobs but entire plants overseas and then import the goods they used to make in America back in tax free, then Kerry could have done the same thing in Ohio, Florida, New Mexico and the other swing states he lost by running a timid Republican-lite campaign.

The lesson is clear. As long as the Democratic Party remains in the hands of the DLC party hacks, as long as Democratic primary voters allow themselves to fall for the argument that progressive politics are a losing proposition, the Republicans will keep winning more and more elections.

Russ Feingold for president!

PS Another bit of silver lining in those post-Nov. 2 clouds: Cynthia McKinney, trashed and run out of Congress in 2002 by a right-wing/pro-Israel lobby jihad after raising legitimate questions about the 9-11 attacks, trounced her opponent in Georgia's 4th District and will return triumphant and unbowed to Congress.

==============================

Posted on: November 3, 2004

What went wrong? Wrong candidate, Lying Media, Ignorant Voters

The presidential election is over.

Now it's time to start analyzing what went wrong--and plenty did go wrong.

Clearly John Kerry was the wrong candidate to take on Bush. Having boxed himself into an untenable pro-war position during the primaries, he was unable to articulate a position significantly different from the president's on the deepening quagmire in Iraq. And having set himself up for the inevitable attack by Vietnam-era revisionists by hyping his Vietnam war service at the DNC, he opened himself up to inevitable attacks on his patriotism and integrity. But even given those weaknesses, there was more at work here in the stunning Democratic loss, not just of the presidency, but of more seats in both House and Senate.

Consider that Pennsylvania and Ohio are virtually carbon copies of each other. Neighboring states with a similar history of deindustrialization and massive loss of blue-collar union jobs, they share the same demographic: large urban black populations, broad swaths of conservative white rural areas, a large ethnic Catholic population, and a significant evangelical population. Yet Pennsylvania went decisively for Kerry, and Ohio went to Bush.

What is different about these two states? In Pennsylvania, the state electoral apparatus--especially in the heavily Democratic areas of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh--is in the hands of Democrats, while in Ohio, the election machinery even in many urban centers, is dominated by Republicans. In Pennsylvania, there was virtually no organized effort to disenfranchise Democratic voters. In Ohio, efforts to disenfranchise minority voters were rampant and blatant, from the attempt to bar voter registration forms that weren't on cardstock, to the assigning of Republican registration challengers at every election site. People, particularly in low-income and minority areas, were unconscionably forced to stand in line, often outside in a cold rain, for hours to get to vote. No one knows how many such voters simply gave up and went home. All these efforts at vote suppression were deliberate. The same thing happened in Florida, New Mexico, and other key swing states--especially where Republicans were in charge.

The narrow Bush win--touted as a mandate by the White House, but clearly anything but, considering that this is an incumbent president seeking election in the midst of a war, who by historical precedent should have been a shoe-in--tells us that the public doesn't trust this administration, but that the Bush strategy of hyping terror and terrorizing the public is working.

A key reason it's working is that the media is playing along. Every new threat suggested by the Department of Homeland Security, every arrest of some Muslim charged with being a terrorist, is trumpeted by everything from Fox TV to the New York Times, then forgotten.

Meanwhile, important news that might raise legitimate doubts about the real extent of the terrorist threat, or that would suggest that the administration has led the country down a wrong and dangerous road, is downplayed or simply buried. For example, few papers or broadcast networks even reported that the American military has been visiting a virtual holocaust on the Iraqi people, with some 100,000 civilians--mostly women and children-- evidently killed at American hands since their "liberation." Few papers note that it is highly unlikely that the many bombings and attacks on Iraqis and American forces attributed to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi are actually the work of this Jordanian terrorist, or that he may actually not even be alive.

Most Americans, who get their news from the major television news programs or from their local papers, don't even know that Secretary Of State Colin Powell has said that the U.S. is losing the war in Iraq, or that many to top US generals think the U.S. war in Iraq is unwinnable.

Most Americans don't know that Republican efforts to minimize minority voting managed to keep several million minority voters from registering this year, as in 2000.

Most Americans too are unaware that the president, whom many voters told exit pollsters they believed represented integrity in government, was wearing an electronic device under his jacket in the three debates, and almost certainly tried to cheat by getting help with his answers through a hidden radio-linked earpiece,

This last cover-up I have personal knowledge about. I exposed this scandal on Oct. 30 in Mother Jones on the magazine’s website (www.motherjones.com), after it was brought to my attention by a top NASA scientist and photo imaging specialist, Robert Nelson. Nelson, however, came to me with his dramatic only after being turned down by three of the nation’s leading newspapers.

It turns out that the 30-year veteran of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, who is in charge of satellite imaging for the Cassini Saturn probe, first took his story to the LA Times, which ignored it. He then went to Bob Woodward, half of the acclaimed investigative reporting duo that broke the Watergate scandal. Woodward, now assistant managing editor at the Washington Post, called Nelson back and told him he couldn't get approval from senior management of the paper in time to run the story, and actually recommended that he take them to Salon.com magazine, which of course ran the images.

Nelson instead took his damning photos to the New York Times, which a source at the nation's self-styled "newspaper of record" informs me went ahead and assigned three reporters to the story. The resulting article, I learned from a Times journalist, was set and ready to go, complete with Nelson's pictures, into last Thursday's paper, a full five days before the election. It never happened though. Senior editors pulled it at the last minute. Their reason? "They said it was too close to the election," confides a journalist at the Times.

This outrageous decision by a top editor that the American public was too immature to be able to properly handle news demonstrably proving the president to have been a liar and a probably cheat in the debates, arguably cost Kerry the election.

Clearly, had the Times run that story last week, instead leaving it for me to do it on the Mother Jones website, it would have become a central aspect of the national campaign. Both the president and his opponent would have been forced to address the issue. It seems likely that such compelling evidence of a lack of integrity and candidness and confidence on the part of the president could have swayed one or two percent of voters in key states like Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, and New Mexico, and perhaps handed the election to Kerry.

But this is just one story that has been hidden from the public. The number of such deceptions, distortion and cases of the purveying of blatant pro-government propaganda by what once proudly called itself the Fourth Estate, is so great that it is no wonder that half the voting public believes that the president is a competent, intelligent and honest leader, when the opposite is clearly the case.

Clearly, if democratic government is to survive in America, the media will have to be rejuvenated. And the public will have to rebel against being spoon-fed the quasi-official line that is posing as news.

It's not as though there is no alternative.

While it is routinely dismissed as "The Internet" of "internet gossip" by the official media, in fact the Web is now awash with highly reliable sources of alternative news and information, from webcasts of news reports from the likes of Pacific broadcasting to the web pages of foreign newspapers like the Independent or Guardian, or quality internet publications like Slate, Salon, In These Times or Mother Jones. For those who don’t have time to troll the web, there are also sites like AlterNet or Truthout, that provide a daily index of alternative news reports.

So spread the word. The First step towards a revived political process is good information.

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November 1, 2004

How the nation's biggest papers ran from a Bulgegate scoop

Like the dramatic photos of Saturn's rings and moons that he and his teammates have been analyzing and enhancing, the photos of President Bush's back during the three debates, similarly subjected to NASA photo expert Robert Nelson's skillful analysis, offer astonishing revelations. The president is a man wired to the hilt, and obviously so in need of electronic backup during his confrontation with John Kerry that he risked exposure twice even after a controvery had arisen about the bulge in his jacket following the first debate. (For a look at the pictures, go to www.motherjones.com.)

That said, this photo imaging tour-de-force by senior research scientist Nelson, a 30-year veteran of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and past chair of the Division for Planetary Science of the American Astronomical Society, also reveals much about the sorry state of some of our most prominent daily newspapers, which ducked it or killed it at the expense of leaving the public uninformed about a significant issue: the president's integrity.

Nelson, it turns out, initially examined, out of personal curiousity, a photo of Bush's back, which he took with a digital camera off a video screen image of the first debate. When he discovered, working on his own time and on his own personal equipment, that under the jacket was a quite obvious electrical device, including a wire running up over the president's right shoulder, he decided he had a big story on his hands.

Here, after all, was concrete evidence that the president had cheated in the three debates, and that the White House, the Bush/Cheney campaign, and the president himself--who had called the bulge in debate one the result of a "poorly tailored shirt"--had lied to the press and the public.

The response of the American media to this story, however, has been as dismal, politically biased and cowardly as Nelson's was courageous.

First, Nelson, who lives and works in Pasadena, offered his story to the local daily, the Pasadena Star News. Such a big story by a Cal Tech/JPL scientist would seem a shoe-in for page-one play in his local daily, but he says the conservative paper's editors shot him down. Likewise the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, from his hometown in Pennsylvania--the second place he offered the story to.

Deciding he might have better luck with the major media, which he assumed might be less tainted by politics, Nelson tried the nearby Los Angeles Times. No luck. Although he sent his photos to the paper's editors, he says they ""sat on them for four days" and never returned his phone call.

Nelson had better luck, at least initially, with the New York Times. Several reporters there took an interest, he says, "and they promised a story which was ready to go last Thursday. A journalist at the Times confirms that the story was set to run at that time but was killed by top editors on the grounds that "the clock ran out--it was too close to the election." This source said that there was considerable frustration about that decision among the Times staff. A phone call and an email to the Times' ombudsman, Daniel Okrent went unanswered.

Finally, Nelson says he offered his photos of the first debate to the Washington Post. Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward (he of Watergate investigative reporting fame), actually personally called him back, Nelson says. "He said it would take too long for him to clear these images with his editors and he encouraged me to go to Salon." (That being the online magazine where I initially broke the story about Bush's bulge on October 8.) Imagine if Woodward had done the same thing with his source, Deep Throat, in the Watergate scandal.

Salon jumped at Nelson's photos (its editors didn't need to spend days ruminating on the political consequences of doing the right thing), running them with a short article that explained the techniques he used, and demonstrating yet again that the Internet has become the place where real journalism is happening, while the mainstream print media continue their slide into irrelevance.

Mother Jones magazine picked up the story from there, asking Nelson to apply the same techniques of analysis and enhancement to digital photos of Bush's back to photo made from tapes of the other two presidential debates. The results were posted Saturday evening on the magazine's website.

"I'm just really ticked that editors are saying they have to know what it is before they'll ask the White House about it," says a frustrated Nelson. "That's way too high a threshold for pursuing this story."

It remains to be seen whether the mainstream media, print and electronic, will have the intestinal fortitude to report before Election Day on Nelson's findings and to display his photographs, now that the story is out there in two reputable publications. As of Monday, no one had done anything in the mainstream, so it is unlikely to see the light of day there until after the voting is over, when it won't matter much.

At least we can expect the humorists--John Stewart, David Letterman and Gary Trudeau--to have fun with the new images, and the growing scandal. The humor section seems to be the only part of the mainstream media that recognizes the importance of, and the huge public interest in, this scandal.

Extra: When this story of the photos was offered to Susan Lund, producer of NPR's flagship "Talk of the Nation" newsprogram on Monday, her comment in turning it down was "Since it's generally accepted that Kerry won all three debates, this seems a moot point to me." Evidently at NPR, solid proof that the president lies is not worth reporting.
--this story originally ran in Counterpunch at www.counterpunch.org

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October 30, 2004

Was Bush Wired All Three Times? Is He Lying About It? NASA Photo Expert Says You Bet!

(As appearing in Mother Jones online-www.motherjones.com) A leading NASA scientist who normally spends his days analyzing and enhancing photo images sent across the depths of space by the Cassini and other space probes has turned his expertise to images of the president in his three debates. His conclusion: "George Bush is obviously wearing something -- probably a receiver of some kind -- under his jacket for each debate."

Robert M. Nelson, who has worked for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology for some three decades, provided a dramatic photo of the bulge under the jacket at the first debate to Salon.com which posted it Oct. 29. Now -- working at home and using his own computers -- he's done the same analysis for MotherJones.com on images of Bush's back taken during the second two debates. Nelson, a top-ranked senior research scientist at JPL and past chair of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society, says that by enhancing the contrast and the edge definition in digital photographs taken of video broadcasts of the three debates, the object under the jacket can be clearly delineated.

Nelson told MotherJones.com, "In the first debate the bulges create the impression of a letter T with a small feature which appears similar to a wire under the jacket running upward from the right. In the second and third debates the jacket has a generally padded shape across a large part of the entire back which tapers inward toward the spine in a downward direction. This is consistent with the hypothesis that a pad was inserted to conceal the T-shaped device seen in the first debate." (To link to the Mother Jones site with all the amazing photos go to Nelson’s Debate Photos.)

The new photos, together with the image from the first debate, strikingly refute the series of contradictory explanations that have come from the White House, from the Bush/Cheney campaign, and from the president himself -- explanations that only addressed the obvious bulge in his jacket that was noticed at the first debate. Bush and the White House have not acknowledged -- nor has the mainstream press even asked about -- the other two debates.

The White House position on the issue of the bulge has shifted over time. When the bulge was first reported by this writer in Salon on Oct. 8, the White House claimed that it didn't exist -- suggesting that photos depicting a rectangular bulge had been doctored. When it was explained that in fact the photos had been taken directly off of broadcasts of the debate, and that the bulge could be clearly seen in stop-frames of the Fox News pool broadcast, the White House fell back on the claim that the bulge was a "pucker" in an ill-tailored suit -- the explanation given to the New York Times, which ran one news report on the issue, on Oct. 9.

While the mainstream media for the most part failed to press the matter further, Charles Gibson of ABC"s "Good Morning America" show, in an interview with the president, did ask him for an explanation. Bush replied that the bulge had been the result of a "poorly tailored shirt." Gibson didn't press the matter, and didn't ask about the bulges that were evident during the subsequent debates.

A call to the Bush campaign press office on Oct. 29 elicited the same response: it was a badly tailored shirt.

The problem, of course, is that with photos showing that the bulge was apparent at all three debates, this would mean that the president either wore the same bad shirt on all three occasions (he changed jackets and ties), or that he has a whole wardrobe of similarly ill-fitting shirts.

Besides, it would be hard to imagine any shirt, however outsized, making the prominent bulged-out shapes disclosed by Dr. Nelson's investigation of the photos.

Nelson's work makes one thing abundantly clear: the White House, the Bush campaign, and the president himself have been lying about the bulge in his suit.

Nelson's photo analysis raises a number of questions, chief among which is this: What was the president wearing?

Alex Darbut, technical and business development vice president at Resistance Technology, Inc. of Arden Hills, MN, a company that makes back-mounted transceivers that link to wireless earpieces hidden in the ear canal, says he is certain the president was wearing such a device. Darbut, whose company sells such a device to ""he military and to professionals," including actors and people in communications, says, "There's no question about it. It's a pretty obvious one -- larger than most because it probably has descrambling capability."

If the president were wearing a wire, the second question would be: was he cheating and getting help with his answers? His behavior during all three debates left many viewers wondering. During the first debate, there were those two uncomfortably long pauses after questions were asked of him, when he just stared out at the camera with a blank expression, saying nothing and looking for all the world like he was waiting for an answer to be explained to him. There was also the peculiar moment when, midway through a 90-second answer period (during which no interruptions were allowed, and well before his warning light would have been flashing), the president interrupted himself, blurting out with an expression of annoyance, "Now let me finish!"

In debate number two, there were also odd pauses, and several occasions when he would appear detached only to leap up and shout out something -- on one occasion even interrupting the moderator.

In debate three, the president was much more reserved, but again there were the long pauses in his speech, before and even during answers.

Bloggers have been pretty much alone in dogging this story (see www.isbushwired.com), and some have suggested that the president may be hiding a medical device -- the prevailing theory is an external atrial defibrillator. But at least one physician, Dr. Stephen Tarzynski of Pasadena, CA, says most such devices are worn on the front of the body, closer to the heart. Another suggestion is an electrical impulse machine that could be designed to relieve chronic pain. In either case, the public has a right to know the health condition of the man they are considering as a candidate for the next four years -- particularly as the vice president, Dick Cheney, himself suffering from a serious heart condition, is far less popular among voters than the head of the Bush/Cheney ticket.

(Remember, the U.S. media have been criticized in the past for covering up President Franklin Roosevelt's leg braces and President Kennedy's Addison's disease, as well as President Ronald Reagan's Alzheimer's in office.)

A third big question is why the media -- and the Kerry campaign -- have stayed away from this story, refusing to press the president for an explanation of the bulges in his three suit jackets. Several calls to the Kerry campaign press office for a response to this and earlier articles on the topic went unanswered.

Nelson says that for several weeks he has tried to interest the major media outlets in photos he had worked on from the first debate, to no avail.

He says he offered the photos at no charge to the Los Angeles Times, which "sat on them for four days" and never returned his phone call. He claims he also offered them to the New York Times, "and they promised a story which was ready to go last Thursday when it was yanked at the last minute by higher ups." Finally, he says he offered his photos of the first debate to the Washington Post. Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward, he says, called him personally. "He said it would take too long for him to clear these images with his editors and he encouraged me to go to Salon."

"I'm just really ticked that editors are saying they have to know what it is before they'll ask the White House about it," says Nelson. "That's way too high a threshold for pursuing this story."

Jeffrey Klein, a former Mother Jones editor, says, "The current fear factor among American political reporters is greater than anything I've ever witnessed. Having spoken with more than a dozen journalists, I've heard a variety of excuses for why they won't or can't pursue this story. The excuses range from `Kerry isn't making an issue of this so how can I?' (Time magazine) to `The paper has clamped down on anti-Bush stories. Nothing about the bulge is going to run here before the election.' (The Wall Street Journal)."

Klein adds, "Major media outlets are understandably reluctant to influence an election, but in this instance, they have a certified government expert willing to go on the record; there's absolutely no excuse for their silence. All any journalist needs to do is report this news."

Meanwhile, it becomes another form of bias for the media not to do anything, once the evidence is put out there, as Nelson has done with these photos.

It is no longer possible for the administration and the president himself to laugh off the bulge in his jacket at all three debates as bad tailoring, or as an Internet urban legend. Between Nelson's photos and the onslaught in such comedic venues as The Daily Show and Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury column, the question has to be asked: What was the president wearing and why does he wear it?

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October 29, 2004

Bulgegate: NASA photo analysis expert exposes the bulge. This is a wrinkle?

Whatever else one may think about the president, we can now state with absolute certainty that George Bush, the man who claims to be bringing godliness and integrity to the White House, is a cheap liar.

Check out the pictures above, obtained by Salon Magazine yesterday from D. Robert M. Nelson, a top photo analyst with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Nelson, a 30-year veteran at JPL, used his expertise at enhancing photos from space probes (he's in charge of analyzing the new photos just sent of Saturn's moon Titan by the Cassini space probe) to look at photos taken from the videotape of Bush's back in the first presidential debate.

Recall that Bush, when asked about the much-discussed mystery bulge under his jacket during the debate by ABC's "Good Morning America" reporter Charles Gibson, said it was the result of a "badly tailored shirt." He assured Gibson in that interview, as members of his White House and campaign staff have assured me and other reporters, that there were "no electronics devices" on him in the debate.

Uh-huh. (Check out the wire clearly seen running from whatever is under there up onto his right shoulder.)

Some shirt wrinkle there Mr. President. You should fire whoever does your ironing.

So now we have the big question: When will the corporate media ask the president about this huge whopper? When will the gaggle of sycophants called the campaign press demand that he and his campaign explain what he's wearing?

It is increasingly clear that the president, in all three debates, was wearing a device--almost certainly a radio receiver connected to a wireless earpiece hidden in his ear canal--with which to receive help with his answers.

So far that corporate media has been reduced to letting its comedy shows make jokes about the bulge, with the more enterprising reporters seeking out tailors--among them the presidential tailor--to make the preposterous claim that the president was just the victim of a badly tailored suit--an alibi that the president himself shot down by laying the blame on his shirt.

"I've been trying to get the attention of the mainstream media about these photos for several weeks," says a frustrated Dr. Nelson, who has deferred working on the excitiing pictures of smog-shrouded Titan while he contines analyzing what's under the lie-shrouded presidential jacket.

And where's Sen. John Kerry?

Why isn't the Democratic presidential candidate demanding an explanation for what was clearly a violation of the debate rules (the Presidential Debate Commission was assigned the responsibility for the electronics of this debate, and assured me that there were no wires on either candidate).

Stay tuned for photo analysis of the bulge seen in video footage of debates 2 and 3.

October 28, 2004

More on Bulgegate: What's That Wire?

We know that the White House and the president are lying about whatever it is he was wearing under his jacket during the debates. Anyone who has raised kids knows that the easiest way to spot a lie is when they give you more than one contradictory explanation for some misdeed that they're trying to cover up. And here we have three alibis: there was no bulge (it was doctored photos); it was just a pucker in the suit, and finally, from the president himself, it was a badly-tailored shirt.

But what is the wire that at one point in debate number two could be seen peeking out from under the president’s tie?

Such a wire would be consistent with the control device that the PTT inductor-type hearing devices, such as the one pictured above, have.

More importantly, the presidential debate commission told me that they were assured by both campaigns that the candidates "were not wearing any electronic devices or wires."

This, on its face, was a lie by the Bush campaign, given the clear image of a wire on the president in this debate two photo. It's a lie right up there with "I didn't have sex with that woman." At this rate, next we'll be having "it depends on your definition of what wire is."

If the campaign press gaggle and the White House press corps have a shred of integrity at this point, they should be demanding a serious and credible answer now from the president and his retinue as to what he was hiding.

Does the public care about Bulgegate? I would argue yes on two grounds. First of all, this site, when it carries information about Bulgegate developments, has been averaging over 50,000-60,000 hits per day, compared with traffic of a tenth that amount on other newsdays.

Second, the adoption of this story by the humor beat--Jay Leno, David Letterman, John Stewert and finally Gary Trudeau in Doonesbury--shows that it is an issue that has reached mainstream America.

Why should they care? This president staked his claim to the White House on the argument that he (in contrast to the prior president, Bill Clinton), was a man of honor and integrity. If he cheated in the debates, then he has blown up that claim. Then too, many people view these presidential debates, flawed as they are structurally, as a kind of mano a mano test of the candidates' intellect and grasp of issues. If one candidate is battling on his own wits and the other is getting outside help, it is a gross deception of the voters.

Why should the media care? Supposedly it's their job.

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October 26, 2004

Bulgegate: The President's Newest Lie About What He Wore to the Debates

Okay, tell me the truth. Does anyone think that millionaire preppy George W. Bush has a badly tailored shirt or a badly tailored suit in his wardrobe?

The question is important because that’s the lame excuse that Bush and Karl Rove have come up with to try and quiet the media buzz about the bulge under his jacket during the three presidential debates.

After behaving like total cowards for the past two weeks, the White House press corps finally squeaked. In an interview with Bush, ABC's "Good Morning" reporter Charlie Gibson yesterday finally showed the guts to ask the president what the bulge in his jacket was.

Bush's response was to laugh and try to play dumb (something he does convincingly). "I don't know what that is. I mean, it is, uh, it is, it's a -- I'm embarrassed to say it's a poorly tailored shirt," he said.

Earlier, the Bush campaign and the White House were saying it was a poorly tailored jacket. Now, the man in question says it was the shirt. Are we supposed to believe that the president wore the same shirt for all three debates? He changed his jacket. He changed his tie. But he kept the shirt? And a badly fitting one at that? (see pictures 1, 3, and 4 above)

Gibson, while showing more courage than his media colleagues in posing the question at all, didn't bulldog it. He let it go, limiting his question to the bulge seen in the first debate. Clearly the follow-up question should have been: "If you knew you had a badly tailored shirt that was causing this controversial bulge, why did you wear the same shirt in debate number two and debate number three?"

Gibson also clearly didn’t look at the White House web site, where there was a 2002 photo showing the same bulge underneath a T-shirt Bush was wearing while driving a pickup on his ranch. That was clearly not the same shirt he was wearing in any of the debates. (See picture 2)

So now we know, if we didn't know it already, that the White House is lying. Several calls to the White House and to the Bush/Cheney campaign press office went unreturned. At the White House, as soon as I told a secretary what my question was about, she informed me that the person she had just told me I needed to speak with was "out on an errand"--the same line I was given on multiple occasions when I was first breaking this story for Salon magazine several weeks back. When I called at the end of the day, I was told that the same press spokesperson had "probably left for the day."

They're getting away with all this dodging and dodginess because, except for Gibson, nobody in the mainstream press that tags around after the president is pressing him on it, much less investigating the matter more aggressively by trying to get sources from inside the president's camp to come forward.

They're getting away with it because, as one reporter who has contacted friends in many of the major news outlets has been told, the mainstream press won't go after this story "because the Kerry camp hasn’t made it an issue."

Get that: the media cannot go after a story about a candidate unless the other candidate makes it an issue. Now there's a wimpy new answer to the question: what is news?

Fortunately, the American public is smarter than this. If they think that the president's dodge is ridiculous, it provides an opening for humor, and that's where the story is now showing up--on Jay Leno, David Letterman, and now most powerfully, in Gary Trudeau's "Doonesbury" strip. (See the link above if your paper doesn't carry it.)

At this point, unless the president can come clean and give a credible explanation for the cause of the bulge that appeared under his jacket at all three debates and on his ranch (when he was being interviewed at length by an AP reporter), we have to assume that it was what it appears to have been--a transceiver and a hidden radio-linked micro-earpiece--and that he was cheating in the debates, getting tips and hints of how to answer from someone in the back room. (See picture 5 showing one type of such a back-mounted receiver, along with the pocket-linked control and the micro-earpiece-this one made by Resistance Technology, Inc. of Arden Hills, MN.)

There's still a week in this campaign. It will be interesting to see whether anyone on the campaign trail or in the Washington press corps has the guts to follow up Gibson's question to ask for a real explanation that would cover the bumps in the jacket at all three debates.

The electorate at least knows something's amiss. Voters should all take that into consideration when they consider both the president's intelligence and his integrity. He's been caught cheating. Not on his wife; on the public.

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Posted on: October 25, 2004 9:12 AM

Bush's War on the Rocks

Clearly it's all falling apart for Bush's splendid little war in Iraq, and the war on terror too. Just look at the latest news:

The Pentagon is scrambling to cover up both its botched torture/interrogation campaign at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, with prosecutions and guilty pleas being dragged out of only the lowest ranking participants in the scandal. Yet new outrages keep popping up, like the report that in a gross violation of Geneva rules, captured Iraqis were secretly moved out of the country for more intense interrogation.

Hundreds of the over 600 people swept up during the U.S. attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan and spirited off to indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba are now being quietly shipped back to Afghanistan or, if they are foreigners from other countries, to their homelands (to an uncertain future at best), after it became clear that no court would allow the Pentagon to go ahead with kangaroo-court military tribunals of their cases. Most of them, the Pentagon is now concedes, had nothing to do with terror or threats to the U.S.

The Pentagon is also doing its best to cover up the first reported case of open rebellion against orders by troops in Iraq--the reserve unit of 18 people who, with their commander, refused to make what they called a "suicide run" to deliver tainted aircraft fuel to a remote camp in badly maintained and unarmored trucks with no armed escort. This desperate act of collective insubordination, which was brought to public attention by the soldiers' families, is reminiscent of widespread mutiny against battle orders that swept the U.S. military in Vietnam beginning in 1969, and hobbled the U.S. war effort there. It is probably the tip of a looming iceberg.

Meanwhile, in the new Iraqi defense force, which Bush repeatedly touted as his ace in the hole during the presidential debates, insubordination and refusal to fight on command is the least of the problem. Yesterday, 50 new recruits were executed in a carefully orchestrated slaughter that reports say showed clear evidence of having been the result of inside information about the Iraqi defense forces plans. If the new Iraqi army is already riddled with rebel fifth-columnists, it will be worse than useless in assisting the U.S. military occupation of Iraq, and certainly won't help the U.S. to escape the deepening quagmire.

Back home, the news from Iraq--even in the still largely uncritical corporate media--is so grim that military recruiters aren't even meeting their recruitment goals for this year with the help of $15,000 recruiting bonuses and promises of increased scholarship assistance for returned veterans. The Pentagon reportedly missed its active-duty recruiting goals by 20 percent this year, and missed its reserve recruiting goal by a whopping 45 percent. The figures for the National Guard--traditionally not used for fighting foreign wars, but on the front line in this one--aren't in yet, but will likely be even worse.

To top it off, economists are now reporting that the cost of the Iraq war, in addition to the $120 billion spent directly by the government, should include some $150 billion in economic losses caused by dramatically higher oil prices and by uncertainty that has stunted investment and stock market performance.

It may be that the president and his war party will pull off a squeaker of a victory November 2, thanks to the lack of any real anti-war alternative from the Democratic Party. Even if this happens, though, things in Iraq will only get worse, both for Iraqis and for U.S. troops. Like their forebears in Indochina, American soldiers find themselves fighting and dying in a war they cannot win, at this point simply to protect this president, like Richard Nixon before him, from the humiliation of having to admit to defeat.

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Saturday, October 9, 2004

About that Bush Wire in the Debates: It's Not What Really Matters

My Salon magazine story Friday about the mysterious rectangular bulge in Bush's suit jacket during the first debate (What's that Bulge?(Oct. 8, 2003) ), which had been rocketing around the Internet on blogsites in the days after the debate, has crossed over into at least some of the corporate media now, with articles appearing Saturday in both the New York Times (The Mysterious Bulge, Oct. 9, 2004) ) and the Washington Post ( Bulge Under President's Coat in First Debate Stirs Speculation, Oct. 9, 2004) ).

While the White House and the Bush campaign both repeatedly blew me off over several days of calls when I tried to elicit some explanation from them for the obvious object under his jacket between his shoulder blades, the Times and Post had better luck. According to the Times, the campaign first tried to claim that the photo run in Salon and on the web was "doctored."

When they were forced to admit that the image of the object was clear in the video feeds available direct for C-Span and other broadcasters of the original videotape of the debate, they changed their story, according to the paper, suggesting that it was a wrinkle. Even the Times itself noted that they failed to explain why the wrinkle had a rectangular shape.

The most important piece of information obtained by the Times reporter was a statement by the Bush campaign that the president was not wearing a bullet-proof vest during the debate appearance--one of the most widely offered alternative explanations for the bulge in the jacket.

The Post quoted administration spokespeople as trying to disparage the story by making fun of it, suggesting that people who thought the president was getting tips via a hidden receiver in his ear duct were like Kennedy conspiracy theorists.

That said, the best evidence that something untoward was under the president's jacket last week is that it had disappeared by Friday night at the second debate.

The president was wearing a different, olive-colored jacket, which some people noted was not particularly well fitted (the sleeves appeared a little long and the back was a bit wrinkled--both odd for a president in one of the key appearances of his presidency).

So was the president wired for debate number two? Many observers suspect he was not, both because, if he was wired last week and suspicions were raised, it would have been dangerous to attempt the strategy again this time, when everyone would be watching, and because his performance was so poor. Recall that the president on at least two occasions ran out of things to say, that he repeated himself several times and even fell back on his "hard work" theme, which had been mocked so badly after the first debate, and that he was completely stumped when Kerry embarrassed him with information drawn from his 2001 tax return, showing he had claimed to be the owner of a timber farm on the basis of $85 dollars in profits from some tax dodge.

At this point, the story seems unlikely to go away. Speculation that the president is getting secret help via an electronic transmission will not be squelched by feeble White House and Bush campaign denials, unless the president is willing to be searched before his third and last debate appearance next Wednesday (don’t bet on it).

Meanwhile, as my 20-year-old daughter points out to me, the matter of whether or not Bush is channeling Karl Rove is really not the issue, and in fact may be a diversion. The real issue, as she correctly argues, is what the Bush administration is doing and will do if he is re-elected.

As the president has made abundantly, if inarticulately, clear in the course of the first two debates, he intends to appoint sycophantic conservative judges to the Supreme Court. He will further erode women's rights, sees the environment as something to be exploited by his corporate "base," thinks, or pretends to think, that the war in Iraq is going swimmingly, and that Afghanistan is becoming a peaceful democracy. He backs the Patriot Act in all its abusive language and practice, and wants to extend it with a Patriot II addendum next year. And he has no intention of making the tax code fairer, tackling the humongous and growing federal deficit, or of dealing with the health care crisis facing most Americans. These are the real issues that voters need to be considering as November 2 approaches.

The important thing is that people should not be taken in by the carefully crafted distortions and deceptions coming out of the president’s mouth--whether those deceptions were scripted for him in advance and memorized, or are being telegraphed to him via a hidden earpiece.
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Thursday, October 7, 2004

There’s a Draft in the Air All Right

The Republicans are running like mad away from the rumor that's running like wildfire around on the web in the form of email and blog messages, that the Bush administration and the Pentagon have a secret plan to reinstate the Draft after the election.

The memo that's going around notes that there are bills in both the Senate and the House that call for a Draft call-up. Now this is a little alarmist and off the mark, because both those bills were introduced by Democrats--Charles Rangel (D-New York) in the House and Ernest Hollings (D-TK) in the Senate--who weren't so much hoping for their bills to pass as to make a point about the unfair burden the war is placing by all the low-income folks and minorities who sign up for the military, the reserves or the National Guard for economic reasons, and who are now trapped in the sands of Iraq.

Frightened silly by the flood of news speculating about a call-up around the corner--Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry was actually asked about it at a campaign "town meeting" a few days ago and said that while he would not support a draft, he couldn't speak for Bush--the Republicans have responded by killing the Rangel's House bill. Bush also made a point--or recited a point that was read into his ear-piece (see the article below about his performance in the Miami debate!)—about the war in Iraq being fought "by a volunteer army."

More recently, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld weighed in, saying there is no plan for a draft, and claiming that Kerry's insinuation that Bush might have to turn to conscription was "full of it."

But his Republican PR effort should not be taken too seriously.

As the administration and the Republican dominated Congress proved with the USA PATRIOT Act, which was thrown together in a couple of days in late 2001 and passed with no hearings while the ink was still drying on the copies of the bill, it doesn't take long to introduce and ram through a bill in Congress --particularly a Republican bill sought by the president.

Besides, we know (as I wrote in an expose back in 2003 in Salon magazine which just won me a "Most Censored Story" award from Project Censored), that the Bush administration and the Pentagon have been busily restaffing the dusty local and regional draft boards that are the crucial human machinery of the Selective Service System.

And there is this matter of how you fight a war like the one in Iraq when you’'e running out of troops.

Col. David H. Hackworth, one of the country's most decorated soldiers, is convinced that Kerry and the people passing around worried emails have it right. For one thing, he notes acerbically that Rumsfeld "has been flat wrong on every major military call regarding Iraq."

He goes on to say, "Right now--with both our regular and Reserve soldiers stretched beyond the breaking point--our all-volunteer force is tapping out. If our overseas troop commitments continue at the present rate or climb higher, there won't be enough Army and Marine grunts to do the job. And thin, overworked units, from Special Forces teams to infantry battalions, lose fights."

Hackworth's conclusion: "Although Pentagon puff artists insist they’re making quota, recruiters are already saying it would be easier to find $100 bills on the sidewalk outside a homeless shelter than fill their enlistment quotas, even with the huge bonuses now being paid. So the draft--which will include both boys and girls this time around--is a no-brainer in ‘05 and ‘06."

Bush has stated repeatedly, most recently in the Miami debate, that he listens to his generals. If they call for more men, he will deliver. (Of course, it's a lie. When Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki warned presciently that the military needed 300,000 troops to go invade Iraq, Bush cashiered him, showing what happens when you say what you're thinking in this administration.) And that's the way it will come down. At some point, Bush will have the generals over at the Pentagon announce that they need more fresh troops, and he will "reluctantly" order a return to the Draft.

Count on it.

As for Kerry, unless he's smart enough to climb down from his tough talk about "winning the war" in Iraq, and pulls the U.S. out of that blood-drenched quagmire, he may find himself in the same bind, should he manage to win the election. And what a grand irony that would be--the old Vietnam War protester calling up a new generation of cannon-fodder for another doomed military adventure.
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Tuesday, October 5, 2004

What's That Thing the President is Wearing?

If a picture is worth 1000 words, it will be interesting to see the words that the Bush campaign and the White House come up with to explain the one circulating on the Internet now . This image, taken by television cameras during the first presidential debate in Miami last week, clearly shows a large solid object situated between President Bush's shoulder blades as he's leaning over the lecturn and facing moderator Jim Lehrer.

The president is not known to wear a back brace, and it's not the location for a pistol, if the president is "packing". Nor can it be part of the miking for the president, since both Kerry's and Bush's mikes in Miami were attached to their lecturns. It would, however, be a natural spot to locate a hidden receiver to pick up transmissions from someone offstage who might have been feeding the president answers through a hidden earpiece (the device, whatever it is, might not have even shown up, had the normally ramrod-straight president not uncharacteristically hunched over so much during the debate).

This speculation that the president may have been getting help with his answers is being fed by a number of other bits of evidence. A securities employee with a Taiwan-based brokerage house recalls that while watching the international CNN coverage of Bush's visit to the Pope last summer, he witnessed an incident in which crossed wires in that broadcast led to viewers like himself hearing someone clearly feeding lines to the president, who was then repeating them. The error was quickly caught and corrected by CNN, so that only the president's voice could be heard.

The same exact kind of thing happened on a CNN broadcast of Bush's talk during the D-Day celebration in France.

Suspicion that the president may have been "channeling" the voice of someone backstage in Miami is heightened by some of his bizarre comments and behavior during that event.
Recall the peculiar interjection "Now let me finish!" which Bush blurted out angrily during the recent debate with John Kerry? Coming midway through a two-minute answer, it attracted the attention of commentators and observers, because no one had interrupted him.

No one we could hear, that is.

A hidden helper coming through a hearing device would also explain uncomfortably long silences which occurred at odd points in the president's answers, during which he wore an odd expression--not his usual frown or grimace--that looked just as if he were listening carefully to some instructions.

As I noted yesterday, we shouldn'' be surprised if a president is getting fed his lines. The supposedly "great communicator" Ronald Reagan used to be provided by his staff (and sometimes his wife) with cue cards for every occasion. He even had cards that reminded him to say "Good Afternoon" when meeting a head of state.

That said, getting tips during a debate would break all the rules. A campaign debate is supposed to be a kind of contest of wits between the competing candidates.

So far the Kerry campaign is staying clear of this story. A press officer at the Democratic National Committee claimed--improbably--that it was "the first time" they’d ever heard of the issue when called on Tuesday for comment, while a spokeswoman at the press office of Kerry headquarters refused to permit this reporter to talk with anyone in the campaign's research office.

Questions put to the White House and the Bush national campaign press office, seeking an explanation for the obvious presence during the debate of some large object on the president's back underneath his jacket went unanswered.

It will be interesting to watch how Bush performs at the upcoming Oct. 8 debate against Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, when clearly many people will be looking for any evidence of a wire or hearing device, making it probably too dangerous for him to wear one.

My prediction is that the malapropisms and misstatements for which the president is famous, and which seemed to have miraculously disappeared from Bush's public statements in recent months, could return with a vengeance.
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Monday, October 4, 2004

Is Bush Channeling Karl Rove?

Why is it that the Republicans have all the good ideas?

They came up with the idea of invading Iraq--perfect for ralling the jingoistic yahoos. They came up with the idea of using an acronym for their attack on civil liberties so it would be called the USA PATRIOT Act, forcing its opponents into being against patriotism. Now they've come up with the way to win debates--they've seemingly given their incoherent and intellectually-challenged candidate a secret little earplug connected to a wireless receiver, so that he can be provided with answers and clever lines when he comes up empty.

Remember the peculiar interjection "Now let me finish!" which Bush blurted out angrily during the recent debate with John Kerry? It attracted the attention of commentators and observers, because no one had interrupted him.

No one we could hear, that is.

But what if someone, realizing that the president was flailing around desperately for an answer, had jumped into his earpiece, irritating him.

In fact, a hidden wire connected to Karl Rove or some flunky transmitting for Rove would explain Bush's peculiar, hunched- over stance and his frequent expressions of annoyance, as well as the uncomfortably long silences at odd points in his statemen...which looked just as if he were listening carefully to some instructions!

The suspicion that George Bush was literally channeling Karl Rove during the debate last week was first raised by blogger Joseph Cannon (see Cannonfire.com), who says his girlfriend, during a replaying of the debate, noticed what looked like a wire running down the back of Bush's jacket.

Cannon notes that others have noticed Bush appearing to wear a hearing aid at speaking events, though he has no known hearing impairment, and further suggests that technological advances now permit the implanting, in tooth or in the inner ear, of hearing devices that would be totally invisible but might nonetheless require a more noticeable receiver somewhere else on the body.

(Note to readers. Everone should start scanning through Bush photos on line, looking for a telltale bulge on his jacket, or for a wire.)

Though such devices might be difficult to detect (who's going to require that the president and his Democratic debate challenger submit to a body search or pass through a metal detector before the next debate?), it would be interesting to have someone with a high quality multi-frequency scanner observe the next two debates and check for broadcasts of answers to the president.

Then again, here's an interesting idea for the Democrats, for a change: Equip Kerry with a miniature, high-tech multi-frequency jammer to keep in his own jacket pocket. At awkward moments for the president, Kerry could just press the button in his pocket and broadcast a loud electronic squawk.

Such intertference could make for interesting television!

If publicity about a possible wire on the president frightens the White House into pulling the plug on this scheme, it could also make for a fun time at the next two debates, when he'll have to operate solo, which could also make for interesting reality TV.
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Friday, October 1, 2004

Lies and Misleading Statements from the Debates

Bush:

The Taliban no longer exist.

In fact, unless Bush is completely living in a bubble protected from bad news, he has to know that his own intelligence is reporting that the Taliban have regrouped, control large swaths of Afghanistan, and are on the move.

The U.S. has trained 100,000 Iraqi police.

The number of trained police personnel is closer to 50,000, and even they are so poorly trained and equipped that it is doubtful that they could be counted on to do anything of significance to prop up the puppet regime of Ayad Allawi if the U.S. were to leave.

We're winning in Iraq.

See the Taliban statement above. Bush's own generals, secretary of state and intelligence services all say the opposite--that the war is lost or in the process of being lost, with little hope of things being turned around.

We're installing a missile defense system.

Only if you call setting up a few rocket launchers and missile interceptors that have never worked even under test conditions with rigged targets carrying homing devices on them. What he has installed is a boondoggle.

The U.S. has allies.

One of our allies, Costa Rica, which never provided any troops and has a constitutional ban on providing any military aid in actions that are not sanctioned by the U.N., had to sue to have its name taken off this honorable list. Others, like Spain, have pulled out their troops, while Britain, which only has 7000 soldiers in Iraq, is already making plans to pull a third of them home. Most of the other "allies" are only there because they were paid to be there or threatened if they didn't sent a few token troops.

We will win the war on terror.

Right. Maybe the president should talk with folks in Israel, Spain or Russia about "winning" such a war. Al Qaeda is bigger and wider-spread than ever, and still plotting, and new groups are springing up all the time.

Every life is precious.

Except for Afghani, Iraqi and Sudanese lives, not to mention the lives of Americans in uniform under my command.

Kerry:

I have always been consistent.

Except that he voted for the war authorization which everyone knew at the time was being treated by Bush as a signal to go ahead with his plan to attack Iraq, and except for the fact that during the primaries Kerry defended the war on Iraq and his support for it in the Senate, trashing those like Howard Dean who opposed it, except that he voted for Antonin Scalia for Supreme Court Justice though he claims to be a supporter of women's rights, except that he voted for the Patriot Act while claiming to be a defender of freedom, except for the fact that he endorses the death penalty for terrorism after saying that he was against the death penalty because it can't be fairly administered. Except..., except...

I will win the war against terror.

See Bush on the same topic above.

I will do what it takes to win the war in Iraq.

Here I think the lie is that Kerry has no intention of spending the next four years fighting a war in Iraq. I think he is saying the war was a colossal mistake in judgment and a diversion because after taking office he would find a justification for pulling the troops out as soon as possible. Why? Because the last thing he'd want, four years hence as he ran for a second term, would be to still have a war--by then his war--going on in Iraq. He'll want to get out, blame the mess on Bush, and get on with other things so the national short attention span will rescue him from this mess. Pure conjecture here on my part, I confess, and maybe wishful thinking, but I do believe it, particularly given Kerry's personal experience with the quagmire in Vietnam, and how it destroyed Lyndon Johnson's chance for another term in office as well as ruining Nixon's presidency.
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Wednesday, September 29, 2004

High-Tech Vote Machines Make a Corrupt Election a Certainty

Will the vote be counted correctly this November 2?

How incredible is it that after over two centuries of practice, in a country that claims to be the birthplaced of democracy, and that has the technological prowess not just to put robotic rovers on Mars but to use another satellite to take pictures of those rovers, the answer to this question is a resounding: No.

We know for certain that tens of thousands of ballots were trashed or improperly ruled invalid in the state of Florida alone, that impossible vote tallies were recorded on electronic voting machines in other states, and that records of vote tallies were erased and simply lost in others where the margin of victory was just several hundred votes.

We also know that test runs of new electronic voting machines (on which over one fourth of the national electorate will vote), made by companies like Diebold and Sierra Systems, have failed dramatically, even under the most pristine of controlled conditions.

And yet, despite the experience of recent years--and particularly despite concerns about the security and integrity of the touch-screen and other electronic voting machines, which have no paper record to back up the electronic signals that are supposedly recording voter preferences--state after state and county after county have been racing to install the new equipment. This unseemly haste to adopt new and untested technology has been encouraged by voter registrars and secretaries of state who, unbeknownst to voters, have been lavishly courted, wined, dined and otherwise buttered up by the companies that make the machines (companies whose owners, it should be added, are big contributors to the Republican Party).

The general explanation for the rush into electronic voting is that it allows results to be tabulated quickly and easily.

The real question, which is not being asked, is why this obsession with speed? The answer is the big corporate media--particularly the network news programs and competing cable news networks--which want for ratings purposes to be able to announce the winners in November within minutes of the polls closing.

But when it comes to voting, the only thing that should matter is accuracy.

In the case of the presidential election, the nation's new chief executive doesn't even assume office until more than two months after election day, which would be long enough away for the vote totals in Alaska to be delivered to Congress on horseback!

I just spent several months in Taiwan, a vigorous young democracy that was in the midst of a bitterly contested presidential election. The voting in that very modern and high-tech island nation of 23 million people located just off the coast of China, which was conducted just two days after a controversial assassination attempt upon the incumbent president and vice president, was done entirely on paper ballots!

When the losing candidate, whom most polls had picked as the likely winner, contested the president's razor-thin re-election victory, a court-supervised recount of all 14 million votes cast was conducted, with each paper ballot checked by an election official from both of the two party coalitions. The result: almost an exact duplicate of the initial count.

Try getting that kind of consistency and reliability from our automated and semi-automated electoral machinery! Every time there are recounts in American elections, the totals the second time around seem to differ by hundreds, even thousands of votes. Missing machines are found, hard-drives go missing, etc.

Add to that that this time around, memories will be wiped…or replaced.

Count on it: the closer this election is, the more outrageous will be the cheating.

There is no excuse for this scandal which is just waiting to happen.

The entire U.S. election could be conducted on paper. If election officials are dead-set on using electronic voting machines in an effort to reduce the need for paid personnel, then they should make sure that every machine is connected to a printer, and that every voter leaves a paper record. (Nevada just ran a test using machines produced by Sierra Systems which produced a paper ballot record for every voter, giving the lie to the many claims by election officials and from Diebold that printed records would be unwieldy and technically impossible.)

It's getting pretty late in the game for such measures, yet 25 percent of voters this November will be casting votes on electronic machines for which there will be absolutely no record other than an easily lost or manipulated total on the machines' own hard-drives. If a recall is ordered for any of those election districts, it will be impossible to do.

Fortunately, if you live in a district that will be using electronic voting machines, there is something you can do to protect your vote: request and use an absentee ballot. But hurry! The deadline for requesting such a paper ballot in most jurisdictions is getting close, and there has to be time to receive your request, process it, mail you your ballot, and have you mail it back in.

Get set for a crazy November. If this election is as close as it is predicted to be, there will inevitably be cheating and widespread demands for recounts. For a quarter of the voting public, however, no recounts will be possible this time around.

We just endured four years of a president who almost certianly was actually the loser of the last election. The next president, whether it's Bush or Kerry, will also almost certainly be seated under a cloud of suspicion regarding the legitimacy of his victory.
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Tuesday, September 21, 2004 Whatever You Think of Kerry and Nader, Make Sure to Vote for Progressive Congressional Candidates

I've been getting a lot of mail on the question of whether progressives should hold their noses and vote for Kerry, despite his pathetic campaign and his failure to condemn the Iraq war as a fiasco that should be immediately ended, or vote for Ralph Nader, who laid out a full anti-corporate agenda and who has called for a rapid U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

I'm not going to deal with that issue here, beyond saying that in my view the Bush administration poses such a uniquely serious threat to American democracy and civil liberties that exorcising it has to be the priority in this election--and voting for Nader does not do that, unless you happen to live in a state like California, New York, or Massachusetts. (Nor does voting for Nader do anything to end the war in Iraq; on the contrary, by helping to elect Bush, it assures increased bloodshed and mayhem in that tortured nation--a reality that peace advocates need to consider very seriously.)

What I want to focus on today is Congress.

The reason that the Bush administration has been so able to shred the Bill of Rights, drag the nation into a war of aggression, and hand over $1 trillion dollars of tax breaks to corporations and the rich, has been that it has complete control over Congress. Had Democrats been in charge of even one of the houses of Congress, the dynamic of opposition would have made it likely that, even given the pro-corporate stance of both major parties, there would have been a brake on the actions of the administration. Now it's true that the spineless Democrats in Congress, Kerry among them, buckled when presented with a resolution authorizing the president to attack Iraq, and when presented with the USA PATRIOT Act, but the former was the result of massive disinformation presented by the administration, and the latter was passed in the shadow of the 9/11 attack. It remains true that on many issues, from tax measures and the appointment of conservative judges to the bill that slashed overtime for millions of workers, Democrats as the minority opposition party have stood in opposition.

At this point progressives, if they were to turn out in large numbers across the country, could help restore Congress as a check on a re-elected Bush. It is still within reach for Democrats to regain control this November of the Senate, and even, conceivably, of the House (admittedly a long-shot). What works against this coming to pass is the lackluster and issue-avoiding campaign of John Kerry, which is likely to do little to energize voters, and which has actually alienated many potential voters.

Progressives need to get beyond their disgust and anger at Kerry and the conservative leadership of the Democratic Party. If you cannot bring yourself to vote for Kerry, it is all the more important to energetically work to get out the vote for Democratic congressional candidates. I would even argue that at this point it matters little what the political positions of those Democratic candidates are. Even less-than-progressive Democrats in Congress will help, because once a party has majority status, it gains control of all the committees and of the legislative process.

The danger is that frustrated progressive voters and indeed the whole Democratic Party base of working and middle-class people, dismayed or just uninspired by John Kerry, will stay home on Election Day, and surrender Congress (and state legislatures, too) to the Republicans for what promises to be an even more horrific four years.

That cannot be allowed to happen.
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Sunday, September 19, 2004 America a Police State? No, Not Yet Anyway

A number of people have written me recently, particularly in response to several articles about the arrest of peaceful demonstrators at Bush campaign events, suggesting that America has become a police state.

This is an interesting proposition. It is undeniable that the First Amendment freedoms of assembly and speech are under assault by this administration and justice department.

* People in New York City during the Republican National Convention were arrested and held without charge and without access to an attorney for as long as several days in defiance even of a court order for their release.

* Over the course of the past four years, many protesters seeking to express their opposition to the Bush administration or its policies have been herded by police into remote, fenced-in compounds cynically called "free speech zones" by local police acting on the authority of the Secret Service and the White House, while those who have refused to be hidden away have been arrested, usually to be charged with "trespass" or "disorderly conduct."

* Domestic spying has burgeoned, with undercover agents infiltrating legitimate non-violent groups, and police, including federal law enforcement officers, going to the homes of people planning peaceful protests to threaten them with arrest and jail.

* Travelers with progressive political backgrounds or connections have found themselves on a computer list operated by the Transportation Security Administration, which results in their being singled out at airport security checkpoints for extensive questioning and body searches which have sometimes resulted in missed flights, though it is clear that they pose no threat to airplane safety.

* And of course, we know the administration has been arresting and deporting immigrants without due process and has even imprisoned American citizens and held them without charge for years.

These and other outrages like the computer monitoring of internet use are certainly all hallmarks of a police state, but does this mean we are living in a police state?

My perspective on this may be colored by the fact that I spent nearly two years living in a genuine police state--the People’s Republic of China--and that in my younger days, I visited on several occasions another one (now happily defunct), the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). In both of those countries, people who made even the slightest protest against the government could--and in China still can be--snatched up and taken away, to be tossed into a prison gulag where there is no monitoring, no lawyer, and often no contact with friends and family. Many have been and, again in today's China, continue to be killed for their beliefs and actions. Monitoring and spying in such states is pervasive. People in neighborhoods are paid to spy on and report on people to the police authorities, but often personal grudges can result in false claims that can ruin lives--and there is no recourse for challenging the abuses.

In such an environment, people understandably become afraid to even speak their minds among friends and family. Children learn very early that there are two worlds--one in the home and one outside the home--and that things that are said in the home are not to be communicated to anyone, even childhood playmates, outside the home.

This to me is what a police state is, and thankfully, as ugly as things have gotten of late in America, we are not there, or even close to there, yet.

What bothers me about the premature characterization of the U.S. as a police state is that it seems to play right into the hands of what the Bush administration and Republican Party leaders are trying to do, which is to create a climate of fear and intimidation, in which dissent and expressions of opinions outside the mainstream are considered mad, evil or even treasonous.

Instead of caving in to this intimidation, I think it is important for those of us on the left to take advantage of the enormous freedom that we still have to protest and speak out, and to encourage others, who may be afraid, to do so, too.

When our libraries are afraid to post warnings about the Patriot Act, we should complain, and write letters to our local newspapers. When our media run fawning and uncritical reports on government policies, we should complain loudly, on the phone and in letters. When local politicians wrap themselves in the flag, we should call them on it. When we oppose the war in Iraq, we should do it loudly and visibly, with T-shirts, bumper stickers, signs on our lawns, and in conversation when people around us make pro-war comments.

Bemoaning the attacks on freedom in America is a defeatist approach. Instead, we need to grasp the freedom we have and use it to the max.

Could America become a police state? Yes.

Is it one?

No. Certainly not yet.
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Friday, September 17, 2004 Democrats: Pussycats Against Republicans, But Tigers Against Nader

Many frustrated progressive Democrats have been bemoaning the lack of aggressiveness of the Democratic Party and its presidential standard bearer John Kerry in this campaign. While Republicans in Florida and Michigan work to bar or scare off black voters, and smear Democratic candidates with vicious ad hominem attacks, lie blatantly and stoke voter fear of terrorism, the Democrats have largely campaigned as if it were all a gentleman's game of tennis.

For example, according to a report in the St. Petersburg Times in Florida, the Bush campaign filed its election documents with the secretary of state's office in Tallahassee a day late, thanks to the Republican Party's decision to hold its nominating convention so unprecedentedly late (and conveniently close to the 9/11 anniversary). Technically, that late filing should have prevented Bush’s name from appearing on Florida ballots in November. But did Democrats seek to make the state follow the letter of the law? No. The Democratic Party, incredibly, gave Republicans a pass and failed to challenge them! (Just imagine what would have happened had Kerry's people filed their papers a day late…)

Ironically, the one place the Democrats have played hardball is in seeking to block access to the ballot by independent candidate Ralph Nader--and not just in Florida. Here, the Democratic Party machine has pulled out all the stops, challenging signatures, hiring pricey attorneys, defending arcane anti-democratic rules, and even using deception on occasion, in at least one case sending its own volunteers to Nader volunteer sign-up events to prevent genuine volunteers from getting into meetings.

How can it be that the Democratic Party would be so capable of playing in the mud when it comes to Nader, yet so timid when it comes to battling the GOP?

The answer may be that besides posing a threat to Democratic hopes of victory in November, Nader also threatens the cabal of Democratic Leadership Council conservatives (Kerry among them) who have been controlling the party's dismal legacy of decline for over a decade.

A strong Nader showing this November, even if it did not derail Kerry's presidential hopes, would demonstrate that the party has been abandoning a key part of its base--the progressive wing that rejects the pro-corporate, pro-empire, pro-militarist stance of the party leadership.

For a party elite that has been trying desperately to cozy up to the big corporations that dominate the American economy and polity, this threat is far worse than just losing a presidential election.

At this point, I don't know where I stand on how to vote November 2, especially living as I do in the swing state of Pennsylvania. As disappointed in and suspicious of Kerry as I am, I suspect he would be far more susceptible to public pressure and dissent as president than Bush has been, and that he could be forced into ending the war and undoing some of the more dreadful domestic policies implemented by Bush over the past few years, but on the other hand, the Democratic Party will never be turned into a genuine alternative to the Republican corporatist ideology if progressives just keep voting for every corporate lackey that it puts up as its candidate for president.

What I am certain of though, is that any effort to deny voters the chance to vote for a viable alternative viewpoint such as that offered by Ralph Nader is profoundly undemocratic and ought to be condemned.
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Thursday, September 16, 2004 Lessons in Democracy from Bush?

Talk about pots calling kettles anti-democratic!

Following word that Russian President Vladimir Putin is planning to clamp down on democracy in Russia, making the country's regional governors appointed instead of elected, President Bush has warned that "as governments fight the enemies of democracy, they must uphold the principles of democracy."

This statement, if it weren't so completely outrageous, would be comical.

Bush, after all, is himself an unelected president, whom we all now know stole the 2000 election in Florida with the connivance of his brother, the governor, and his state campaign chair, the secretary of state.

Bush, recall, himself responded to the terror attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001 by almost immediately and in the dead of night, introducing legislation in Congress--the so-called USA PATRIOT Act--that undermined to some extent most of the Bill of Rights, and that introduced the concept of preventive detention and of indefinite detention without charge--things that American revolutionaries fought and died to eradicate. Bush's administration, in the name of combating terrorism, has effectively established the right of the president to revoke the birthright of citizenship, has thrown out the ancient British Common Law concept of habeas corpus, and has in myriad ways trampled on freedom and democracy by expanding domestic spying, arresting and detaining peaceful demonstrators against the president, and most critically, putting the country at war without a declaration of war or any threat of attack.

Only recently, the Bush administration actually floated the idea of postponing the November 2 election in the event of another major terrorist attack, and only backed down from that ultimate anti-democratic proposal because of a groundswell of popular outrage.

The last three years since 9/11 have been littered with examples of the undermining of American democracy by the Bush Administration and its allies in the Congress. Indeed, Putin, in making his draconian proposal, quite understandably cited the U.S. as a model of a country that was reducing democratic freedoms in order to "combat terrorism."

Not surprisingly, the corporate media have completely failed to point out the irony of Bush and his Secretary of State Colin Powell criticizing the Russian president for taking anti-democratic steps to combat domestic terrorism, even in editorials.

Typical was an article in Thursday's Philadelphia Inquirer, which actually noted that Putin's latest moves to consolidate his power as president "are an `acceleration' of a four-year trend by the Russian leader" to centralize power in Moscow.

Left unsaid in that article is the fact that the same exact thing could be said of Bush's efforts to concentrate power in the hands of the Executive Branch. The PATRIOT Act, for example, as a number of conservative Republican critics have pointed out, was actually a hodgepodge of federal police powers which individually had been rejected by Congress in prior years, but which were cynically re-introduced, in the wake of 9/11 in the hopes--born out by the panicky way the bill was passed without discussion--that this time Congress would approve them.
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Wednesday, September 15, 2004 Bush's Trampling of Dissent

As the president races around the country, furiously pushing the twin lies that things are getting better in Iraq and that the economy is on the upswing, and ducking the reports that he hid from the draft in a National Guard unit and then went AWOL from even that cushy post, a huge, coordinated effort, largely unreported, is underway to insulate him and the media from any signs of dissent.

The latest evidence of this shameless and brazen trampling of the First Amendment to the Constitution is found in a lawsuit filed yesterday by the ACLU against the White House and the Secret Service on behalf of two West Virginia Republicans, Jeff Rank, 29, and Nicole, 30, who were arrested on July 4 at a Charleston, West Virginia, rally for President Bush, because they refused to remove two home-made T-shirts sporting the international circle-and-slash "no" symbol superimposed over the word "Bush."

According to the suit, filed by the ACLU in federal court, even though the Ranks had tickets to the event, which was held on the public grounds of the state capital, and were not being disruptive, city police arrested and handcuffed them, charging them with trespassing, and held them for several hours, on instructions of the Secret Service, the federal police agency that is tasked with "protecting" the president.

Nicole, who works for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a notorious nest of right-wing loonies, was also temporarily suspended from her job following the arrests.

The charges were later thrown out, and the city council apologized to the Ranks for the incident, saying local police would never have bothered them had they not been ordered to act by the Secret Service. (Bush and the White House had no apologies to offer.)

As outrageous as this incident is, it is hardly isolated or unique. Back last year, I wrote an article in Salon Magazine, "Keeping Dissent Invisible" (Oct. 16, 2003) , which documented how the removal of all signs of dissent from Bush and Cheney public events has been standard operating procedure, with instructions coming from the Secret Service and White House advance teams. Paul Wolf, a deputy police chief from Pittsburgh, PA, where police were instructed to fence off protesters in a remote baseball field during a 2002 visit there by President Bush, stated on the record that his department had been told what to do by Secret Service and White House staff. Around the country, protesters who have been similarly removed from presidential parade routes or rally sites, or arrested by police for simply carrying protest signs, have reported being told that it was "on instructions from the Secret Service."

Americans need to become aware how profoundly antagonistic towards, and dangerous for American civil liberties like the right of free speech and assembly this current administration is.

Our corporate media, whose highly paid and well-groomed reporters prefer to travel with the presidential motorcade and to broadcast promotional soundbites from the president, don't even see, much less bother to track down and interview the many people who have the courage and principle to come and try to protest. As a result, the average American doesn’t even know that there is a vast sea of opposition to this president and his policies. Nor do they know about the concerted taxpayer-funded effort to crush and hide that opposition.

Protests, as we saw in the coverage of the Republican National Convention, basically get reported on in the mass media only when there is violence or arrests. Little or no effort is made to report on the messages that protesters are trying to send.

It is significant that the ACLU's case brought on behalf of the Ranks, though announced in a press release that went out to all major media, was not even reported today in the New York Times, supposedly the nation's paper of record, which instead devoted most of its campaign ink to covering Bush's self-aggrandizing speech to a convention of the National Guard and to questions being raised about CBS’s "60 Minutes" report exposing the sordid story of his Guard "service."

John Kerry reportedly had his campaign hire a Decatur, Alabama woman who was fired from her private-sector job because her boss didn’t like her having a "Kerry for President" bumper sticker on her car. Maybe he should start hiring all the people who are being rounded up, herded into "free speech pens" or arrested at Bush/Cheney campaign events. Besides supplying him with a lot of local on-the-ground support across the country, it would do wonders for his own tarnished image on civil liberties (Kerry has had precious little to say about the USA PATRIOT Act, for which he himself voted, and its trampling of the Bill of Rights), and would go a long way towards making up for his failure to condemn the use of a "protest cage" by Boston Police during his own nominating convention.
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Tuesday, September 14, 2004 About that Missing and Misspent $87 Billion: Kerry Was Right to Vote No

The Bush campaign has been blasting John Kerry for refusing to vote last year for a bill that authorized a supplemental $87 billion for the Iraq War.

In fact, of course, while much of that money was for the military, and thus, in the minds--if such a term can be applied here--of Bush backers "for supporting the troops," $18 billion of it was supposedly for Iraq reconstruction. And it was because there was so little in the way of monitoring and bidding in place for the allocation of this huge sum of money that Kerry and some other Democratic senators balked (you can’t vote for part of a bill in the Senate--it’s all or nothing).

Now we learn, once again, that in fact virtually none of that $18 billion has been spent anyhow. Despite the fact that Iraqis have been suffering without water, without sewage treatment plants, and without electricity since the war began, the Bush administration and the occupation authorities have spent only $1 billion on reconstruction, according to a report in the N.Y. Times.

Incredibly, this is the same pathetic amount that had reportedly been spent over six months ago, suggesting that in the intervening months, almost nothing has been done to rebuild the infrastructure that the U.S. destroyed during its invasion of Iraq and through the sanctions it enforced over the prior decade--and that it continues to destroy daily.

As for the balance of that money--that's the $69 billion supposedly "for the troops"--reports from soldiers in Iraq, and occasionally surfacing in the media, would suggest that a lot of that money has not been spent either--at least not on them. While Iraqi insurgents seem to have all the munitions they need, on the U.S. side there are shortages in Iraq of bombs, bullets, body armor, spare parts for mechanized equipment--the list goes on and on.

If the current Congress were not in the hands of Republicans, there would almost certainly have already been aggressive investigations into war profiteering and into the bureaucratic inefficiencies which have seen so much of this incredible sum of money either languishing in Pentagon accounts, getting secretly shuffled around into unauthorized expenditures preferred by the Bush administration, or simply pilfered.

It is nothing short of astonishing that an administration that claims it is trying to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis has for over a year been unwilling or unable to spend any of the money allocated by Congress for exactly that purpose.

If the people running John Kerry's lackluster campaign had an ounce of sense, they'd be moving on from the nonsensical and largely irrelevant focus on his and George Bush's Vietnam era records, and blasting Bush for the incompetence and corruption that have fatally infected and doomed his splendid little war. Instead of mind-numbing nuanced explanations about his reasons for voting for a war authorization but against the $87-billion war allocation to help pay for it, Kerry should be loudly decrying the way that money has been misused, misspent and misplaced, and saying, "I told you so!"

Meanwhile, progressive and even nominally Democratic voters who understandably may be less than enthusiastic about Kerry, as well as third party voters, should at least recognize the importance of getting to the polls to vote for Democratic senate and house candidates. The magnitude of the Bush disasters--military, environmental, lab or, civil rights and liberties, judicial, educational etc.--would have been far less had even one house of Congress been in the hands of an opposition party.

Independent or third-party candidates should also be backed, if they have a shot at winning, of course, but I would argue that the calculus that is applied to the presidency where third-party voting is concerned, which might justify voting for a protest candidate, is not the same in the case of Congress. While Democratic members of Congress, for the most part, are the same corporate lackeys as their Republican counterparts, there is a built-in dynamic of political opposition in Congress that insures that an opposition party, if in control of a legislative body, will use its power to investigate, to subpoena documents, and to vote or vote down legislation, to undermine and embarrass a president of the opposing party--even if the two parties differ very little ideologically. In other words, a Democratic Congress during a second Bush administration would be much better in aggregate than the sum of its individual members.

The next term, should it be a second Bush administration, will need even tighter monitoring. As long as Congress is run by Republicans, the Bush administration will have a free hand to do whatever it wants, without even any oversight.

The fate of the missing and misspent $87 billion war appropriation is a case in point.
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Monday, September 13, 2004 Corporate America's Plan for the Future: A Nation of Retirees Left for Dead

One of the big non-stories in this election campaign, and in the national corporate media, is how middle-class Americans are losing their healthcare--not so much right now, though that is happening too, and getting some attention--but in the future, when they will be retired.

Not too long ago, it was common for employers to offer retirement coverage to employees--coverage that was designed to be based on, but to supplement, basic Medicare coverage.

The out-of-pocket cost of Medicare has been rising for years, to the point that today, retirees pay more in constant dollar terms for supplemental coverage and co-payments to cover all the gaps and inadequacies in Medicare coverage than they were paying on their own for healthcare before Medicare was created back in the mid-1960s. Now, there is a concerted effort by most American corporate managers to eliminate even what coverage Medicare provides. They have, most recently, collectively lobbied for the Bush Medicare Drugs program, which actually encourages employers to do away with coverage, hastening the process.

This elimination of employer retirement health coverage is being aided by the trend--so outrageously celebrated by George Bush in his nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention earlier this month--towards shorter and shorter job tenure. As workers increasingly become accustomed to being laid off their jobs after only a few years, of seeing the career that they trained for disappear overseas so that they have to repeatedly retrain for some new, and often lower-paid profession, fewer and fewer even ask about retirement plans, much less retirement health coverage, figuring that the likelihood of their reaching retirement with a current employer is next to zero.

But as Pat Wechsler, editor of the trade journal Treasury&Risk Management, writes in an editorial in the magazine's September issue, the wholesale abandonment of employee retirement coverage by cost-cutting executives threatens to "leave this country hobbled by a generation of impoverished older Americans."

Make no mistake. Despite all the denials, the Republican Party is out to destroy the entire Social Security and Medicare system that was built up over the three decades between 1936 and 1966. The Medicare Drug program was a first step in this long-planned wrecking campaign. After November 2, if Bush wins re-election, we can expect to see the further undermining of Medicare, as well as a frontal assault on Social Security itself through the introduction of personal investment accounts. As for the Democrats, they have routinely acquiesced in the erosion of Social Security and Medicare, while claiming to be defending the system by resisting the most blatant attacks on it.

John Kerry has made vague promises not to privatize Social Security, but he has yet to stake out a strong defense of the basic right to health care and retirement security. Democratic voters need to hold his feet to the fire and insist on much more, before they offer him their vote.

A first step would be support for legislation making pensions and health insurance coverage mandatory for all employers, and making both fully portable, so that a worker who is forced to move from job to job year after year doesn't see whatever small pension contribution she or he makes at a given job vanish along with the job with each successive layoff, and so that workers and their families don’t have to face a lack of health coverage every time a breadwinner is between jobs. (Short-time workers get to keep the money they have contributed to a pension, but unless they work long enough to be "vested" in a company's plan, any money contributed by the employer is lost, i.e. kept by the employer, who thus actually has an incentive to let workers go after a couple of years.)

On the healthcare front, American workers should be pushing for a national healthcare solution that would eliminate the need for each worker to separately negotiate some kind of health coverage from recalcitrant employers. Polls consistently show that a majority of Americans favors a nationalized medical system, but the two corporate parties, Republicans and Democrats, ignore this reality with impunity, and keep doing what their financial backers want.

With the Kerry campaign on the ropes, now is the time for progressive voters and for all workers to demand that he come out with a strong, concrete plan for defending retirement security , and for expanding health care for all.
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Saturday, September 11, 2004 Three Years After 9/11: Nothing Has Changed

Remember how, in the wake of the attacks on 9/11, everyone was saying "Everything is different"?

Does anyone still believe that claptrap?

Here we are three years down the road and the same corporate pimps and right-wing zealots are busy trying to eradicate all vestiges of the welfare state and civil liberties. Here we are with the same imperialist military trying to force people in third world countries to buckle under to American domination. Here we are with a Democratic Party that has still forgotten its obligation to ordinary working-class Americans and that is trying desperately to show its fealty to the wealthy and the corporate elites that already own the Republican Party.

In fact, the remarkable thing is that, three years after that disaster, so little is different.

The election that is about to happen is virtually a replay of the one that took place four years ago, with one of the characters actually the same, and the other almost a carbon copy of his predecessor, right down to his inability to stand for anything progressive, and to his singular lack of any common touch that might let him connect on a personal level with the people he claims to represent.

The war the country is mired in over in Iraq is remarkably similar to one that occurred three decades ago in Indochina.

Fights over things that shouldn’t even be issues anymore--abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research and assault weapons--are still trumping the important issues like global warming, the global AIDS epidemic, the abandonment of America's burgeoning poor, and the impoverishment of much of the underdeveloped world, none of which get even a glancing reference in the presidential campaign.

As for the so-called War on Terror--the one thing that unarguably was initiated in the wake of the attacks that didn’t exist before--it has done absolutely nothing to deter future attacks or to get at the root causes for the attacks that did occur, but has managed to destroy two countries, kill tens of thousands of people who had nothing to do with the attacks, and perhaps irrevocably undermine American democracy.

Given that all this was the long-time goal of a cynical group of neo-conservatives around George W. Bush, who actually used the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks as a justification for achieving their ends, it would be fair to say that in fact "Nothing has change".”
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Friday, September 10, 2004 Maybe This Time We're the Silent Majority

Here's an intriguing thought: Maybe opposition to President Bush is much more widespread than anyone suspects, because people are afraid to say what they are really thinking.

This notion occurred to me when I was speaking to a group of people who came to a Borders Bookstore in Villanova, PA last night where I was talking about my new book, "This Can't Be Happening!" Several people there, some who identified themselves as Democrats, and some who somewhat sheepishly admitted to being Republicans, said that they felt intimidated in their own neighborhoods about openly expressing their opposition to the Iraq War and their dislike of President Bush.

I put this together with the ugly picture that ran in the N.Y. Times this morning of a right-wing male Bush backer yanking brutally on the hair of a female anti-Bush protester.

Of course this fear that was expressed to me could just be a local phenomenon, but I suspect it is much more widespread. In fact, fear of stepping out of line, or being critical of the government, is something that the Bush administration, right-wing members of Congress, and of course Attorney General John Ashcroft, have been deliberately promoting, so it should not be surprising if people are responding to their compaign by clamming up.

In the post-9/11 era, FBI and Secret Service agents have been sicced on people who have been reported by neighbors to have posters on their walls mocking or criticizing the president, who have publicly announced plans to attend protests against the president or the war, or who have said things such as that the president is "dumb." High school and even junion high school students have been suspended from school for wearing anti-government or anti-Bush T-shirts, while others have been visited by police or the FBI for making drawings or writing essays that are perceived as anti-war. Teachers have even been fired for allowing students to produce anti-war themes.

It would not be surprising if, in such an intimidating environment, in which the words "treason" or "traitor" are readily bandied about by Republicans in power, ordinary people of good will and reason might feel afraid to express themselves openly--either to neighbors or to pollsters.

If this is the case, there could be a surprise in store for Bush and the Republicans on November 2.

Meanwhile, those of us who are not feeling intimidated need to get out and express our views on the election, the war, the importance of civil liberties, and the other major issues of the day --protecting the environment from corporate rape, protecting women's rights, aiding the poor, properly funding public education, defending Social Security, keeping the courts honest, etc. Silence in the face of intimidation and threats only begets more intimidation and threats.

Speaking out, in homes and churches, at school, at work, at parties, in the supermarket, in letters to the editor, and with posters, T-shirts and bumper-stickers, will embolden others to say what they think too.
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Thursday, September 9, 2004 The Bush Campaign's Dirtiest Election Dirty Trick

The ultimate election dirty trick is being played on the electorate by the Bush administration and the Pentagon: the hiding of the war in Iraq.

Now, with all the news out there about the U.S. death toll topping 1000, you might wonder what they're hiding, but the truth is it could have been, and surely will become much worse after November 2, especially if Bush wins the election.

While the insurgency in Iraq has been steadily growing in both size and sophistication, and the U.S. death toll--as well as the Iraqi death toll, of both insurgents and civilians--is mounting, this is happening at a time that the U.S. military is for the most part hunkered down in secure base camps avoiding combat!
<>p.Sure, American forces have been battling Moktadar al Sadr's Mahdi militia, and taking casualties, but the men they're fighting are largely untrained kids from the Sadr City slums.

In fact, the larger number of U.S. deaths are still the result of attacks by Sunni fighters, who are based in central and eastern Iraq, especially in the area east of Baghdad and around Fallujah, referred to in the U.S. press as the Sunni Triangle.

The point to remember is that this whole region has been essentially surrendered to the insurgents, who are running most cities east of Baghdad openly.

If the U.S. were to try to retake this area, which it surrendered last April, it would find itself up against a serious and well-trained foe, in close urban conflict--a situation which would see battle deaths on both sides soar.

The Pentagon and the Bush campaign both know this, and have thus decided to do nothing in the run-up to November 2, for fear of having the high casualties derail Bush's re-election bid.

That might make good sense politically, but it is both grotesquely misleading and dishonest to the American people, and a betrayal of U.S. troops, since the longer they have to wait before taking on the Sunni insurgency, the more entrenched and better armed it will be, and the more Americans will die or be wounded.

None of this would matter if the U.S. were on the way out of Iraq, but that is clearly not the way things are headed, at least short-term. Bush has set a timetable of January for nationwide elections for a constitutional assembly in Iraq, and such an election would be impossible, or if held, would be a disaster, if Sunni insurgents opposed to the election were in control of the whole Sunni region of the country. Either the election would be held without the Sunni population, which is 30 percent of the country, producing a Kurdish victory in the north, a Shia victory in the south, and nothing in the center, and thus likely a civil war, or the election would be postponed, and the frustrated Shia population would rise up against the U.S. and the puppet government in Baghdad.

This Scylla-and-Charybdis dilemma leaves Bush, if elected in November, with no alternative but to order the U.S. military to fight its way back into the Sunni region and try to oust the rebels from their strongholds. If he does that, expect the number of U.S. dead in this foolish and criminal war to soar quickly into the thousands.

American voters should recognize that this is the true reality of the Iraq War. Major fighting lies ahead--not a wind-down, as the Bush campaign is implying with all the baseless blather claiming the U.S. is "winning" the war in Iraq.

As for Kerry, who continues to waffle on the Iraq War, but who is feeling increasing pressure from the Democratic Party's base to take an oppositional stance, now would be the time for him to declare that the Bush War has been a failure, and that by surrendering central Iraq to the rebels, he has essentially already lost the war. That would allow him to began planning for a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces if he wins the election, since the loss would be Bush's, not his.
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Wednesday, September 8, 2004 Spinning 1000 Dead

With the U.S. death toll in Iraq passing the 1000-mark (a lot faster than anyone, myself included, had expected), the Bush administration and the Pentagon have gone into maximum spin mode.

After all, how do you make the pointless termination of 1000 young lives palatable to an American public that is wearying of all this death and mayhem?

The Pentagon went for proportion, with a Centcom spokesman in Iraq saying that while "every death is regrettable," one had to concede that the losses were small in comparison to the number of people the U.S. has sent into Iraq. And he has a point. If we sent twice as many over there, the casualty proportion would even be smaller, so why not ramp things up and keep the casualty rate low?

Donald Rumsfeld went with the Bush administration's official line, which is the approach of trying to confuse the public about the difference between the 9/11 terror attacks and other terrorist activities on the one hand, and the Iraq invasion on the other, which of course had nothing to do with fighting terror. Rumsfeld's claim: 1000 dead is no big deal. The terrorists have killed far more than 1000 Americans.

This facile argument has the advantage that, as long as the terrorists keep winning, and killing lots of people, it gives Bush and the Pentagon the go-ahead to send more U.S. soldiers into harm's way overseas. All they have to do is keep the U.S. casualty figures down well below the number of terror casualties.

These two approaches to the steadily growing pile of body bags coming home from Iraq may work for the fewer than nine weeks that Bush needs to make it through in order to get past the Nov. 2 election (especially if Osama and his legion of Evil Ones realize that they can help the president out in his hour of need by keeping U.S. terror casualties high with a well-placed bomb in the U.S.).

The 1000-dead story in today's media also has had the beneficial side-effect, from Bush's perspective, of burying the far more dangerous story about how the U.S. is, meanwhile, losing the war in Iraq, having essentially ceded the entire "Sunni Triangle" to Iraqi rebels. This surrender of a key part of Iraq to rebel control is a disaster that is throwing into question plans for a national election set for this coming January-and certainly raises the prospect of much heavier fighting in months to come.

While Democratic candidate John Kerry is belatedly starting to respond to pressure from the Democratic rank-and-file to attack the Iraq War as the pointless endeavor it obviously is, he has yet to draw a sharp distinction between Iraq and the fight against terrorism.

He missed a golden opportunity yesterday as the U.S. death toll passed 1000, offering only words of praise for the dead, but no condemnation of the policy that killed them.

If Kerry doesn't take a more aggressive stand against what should by now be known as Bush's Folly in Iraq, before long, the tally of the dead in Iraq would have to include his lackluster campaign.
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Sunday, September 5, 2004 The Dreadful Prospect: Faux More Years!

Years ago when I was a high school student spending a year in a school in Darmstadt, Germany, there was a little dark-haired man named Hans who was the handyman in my father's host technical institute. Hans once explained that his real name wasn't Hans, it was Adolf, but that during the Hitler years, the Nazis had pressured him to change his name "because they said I was too small and scrawny to have the same name as Der Fuehrer." Of course, Hitler himself was small and scrawny and brown-haired, but the whole thing was image, and the image of the Fuehrer had to be mega-macho.

The same thing is happening now with President Bush.

Here's a guy who was a New England preppy and cheerleader in his youth, who has more recently been "re-positioned," as Madison Avenue likes to put it, as a Texas cowboy, a guy who can make jokes like, "People criticize me saying I swagger. Well we have a name for that in Texas--it's called walking," and who tells insurgents who are killing American GI's every day to "bring 'em on." Here's a guy who supposedly supported the Vietnam war but who, after getting his politically well-connected father to pull strings and get him safely into the Texas Air National Guard, carefully checked a box saying he did "not want" to be available for overseas duty (there are probably a lot of Guard troops in Iraq today who wish they'd had a box like that to check when they signed up). And yet now this faux cowpoke and sometime weekend warrier is being touted as a tough-guy hero while his opponent, John Kerry, who did sign up to go fight in Vietnam, and did go, getting wounded and earning badges for valor under fire, is mocked as some kind of wishy-washy, wimpy New England preppy.

The marketing effort being applied to the Bush candidacy is so intense that, just as the Nazis made my father's technical assistant Adolf change his name to Hans, Bush's own father, George H.W. Bush--former president and World War II bomber pilot--was not invited to speak at the convention. Why this remarkable and insulting omission in a convention that featured references to Bush's "tough-love" mother, Barbara, and to his wife and daughters? Because Papa Bush, with his whiney voice and limp-wristed mannerisms, has always suffered with this image of being a wimp. Who wanted him around?

With the Republican Party, image is everything, and Daddy Bush is clearly an embarrassment to his own son--or at least a threat to the image of his son that's being marketed to the public. Now that's Family Values for you!

Image is everything, and reality is brushed aside. Bush, in his acceptance speech at the convention, spoke of Kerry's campaign promises as representing $2 trillion in new spending, completely ignoring that his own four years in office have actually added $2 trillion to the deficit. He talked of improving the nation's health care, ignoring that five million more people have lost their medical insurance during his term of office. He spoke of improving the nation's economy and adding jobs, when his first term of office has seen a net loss of nearly 2 million jobs--the first such decline during a presidency since Herbert Hoover.

The incredible thing is that such image-making works. No one is interested in hearing about what the reality is.

Just as most ordinary Germans thought of Hitler as an ubermensch, a larger-than-life super Arayan, a god-like leader, many average Americans seemingly believe the bilge being put out there by Bush's marketers, that he is a strong, heroic leader. Like the German public, which turned to the "heroic" Hitler to "save" them from the Jews and Reds who were allegedly threatening to destroy the German nation, Americans are turning to the "heroic" Bush to "save" them from the terrorists and gays and liberals who are allegedly threatening to destroy the American way of life.

Of course, it's only fair to point out that John Kerry has played right into the Bush campaign's hands. He invited the attacks on his Vietnam record, false as they are, by making that record his sole selling point as a candidate. Meanwhile, he may have shown bravery on the battlefield more than three decades ago, but in the political field, he has been no profile in courage, at least in his adult life as an elected official.

To the chagrin of those who are desperate to see Bush defeated, Kerry has behaved like those large nerdy kids in school who attract the little bullies like flies and come home every day covered in bruises because of their unwillingness to fight back.

With less than nine weeks left until Election Day, it may be too late already, but unless Kerry comes out with all guns firing, and exposes the Bush charade, h'e'll be having a lot of time on his hands next year to go wind-surfing.

And America will have to survive another four years of being "led" by a fake cowboy, who tries to prove he's really a tough guy by sending other people's kids to other countries to kill and get killed.

Who knows? Before long, wimpy guys named George may soon find the Republican image squad pressing them to change their names to something innocuous like Tom or Fred.
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Friday, September 3, 2004 Bush's Acceptance Speech--No Surprises, but Warnings and Lies Aplenty

George Bush's bombastic acceptance speech at the conclusion of the Republican National Convention in New York City was remarkable in one way: he managed to read the words that had been crafted for him without stumbling.

Otherwise, it was all very familiar stuff--the deliberate obfuscation about Iraq's being part of the "War" on Terror, the careful avoidance of any mention of terror's mastermind, Osama Bin Laden, the reference to those mystical Weapons of Mass Destruction. Familiar too, was the misrepresentation and lying about the record of the past four years. Bush slid over his disastrous economic record by claiming that his administration had produced thousands of jobs, when the truth is that millions of jobs have been lost during his first term of office. He spoke of improving health care when in fact more people than ever are without health insurance, and he spoke of improving education, when even Republican governors are complaining that his "No Child Left Behind" initiative has never delivered the promised funding. He even tried to describe the massive loss of manufacturing jobs in America, and the decline in earning power that has forced families to hold down two and often three and four jobs to make ends meet as a "wonderful opportunity" for personal growth and development!

The other big lie was the bogus claim that the Bush presidency has been about increasing liberty in America and abroad. The truth? At home, there has been the Patriot Act, which Bush in his speech didn’t mention once--no doubt because so many principled conservatives loath its undermining of basic Constitutional liberties--not to mention many federal intrusions on state, local and individual rights and authority (for example restrictions on the right to abortion and abortion counseling, a ban on the use of medical marijuana, the shutting of schools that don't measure up on government-mandated standardized tests, and of course the call for a constitutional ban on same-sex unions). Abroad there was the government-funded effort to destabilize and overthrow Venezuela's elected government (twice if you include the Bush administration's immediate support for and probably involvement in the failed coup that briefly overthrew President Hugo Chavez), and the continuing support for Israel's brutal military rule in occupied Palestine.

Of course, Bush repeatedly cited Iraq and Afghanistan as two Middle Eastern countries where his policies are supposedly introducing liberty, but this is true doublespeak. Iraq, a land in the grip of a bloody insurrection against an iron-fisted U.S. occupation, can hardly be said to be free or democratic if those words have any meaning, and most knowledgeable observers, including many within the American government and military, concede that even at best, what emerges from that mess will have little resemblance to a democracy. As for Afghanistan, having overthrown the Taliban government, the U.S. has largely abandoned that country to its fate, which means feuding warlords and a resurgent Taliban, not to mention a continued presence of Al Qaeda fighters and their leaders, including the elusive Bin Laden.

Bush offered little in the way of his plans for a second term except for more of the same. He focused primarily on continuation of his vainglorious "War" on Terror, but his promise to make America safer has to be taken in the context of a nation on Orange Alert for virtually the entire campaign. How exactly the invasion of Iraq has made the U.S. safer was not something Bush wanted to discuss, but is something Americans should be pondering over the next 60 days.

His domestic policy offerings were bare bones. Taking a page from President Clinton, Bush offered up some small policy crumbs, such as increased funding for community colleges. Most of the rest of the domestic promises were just that--campaign promises.

The darkest of these were his pledge to continue to appoint judges who "know the difference between personal beliefs and strict interpretation of the law"--a line that everyone who cares about justice, civil rights and liberties should keep etched in their minds since the next president is likely to have a chance to replace three or even four members of the U.S. Supreme Court--and to partially privatize Social Security by allowing young workers to place some of their Social Security taxes into private investment funds--a move which , if allowed, would cause the collapse of the whole system.

All in all it was a speech with few surprises, but many warnings.

So far, the Democratic response has been off-target. In a midnight speech in Ohio responding to Bush, John Kerry still focused on defending his Vietnam record. While he did lay into the record of both Bush and Cheney with uncharacteristic passion and aggressiveness, noting that both men had dodged duty during the Vietnam War, he offered no new positions of his own. Trapped by his own foolish and calculating votes in support of Bush's authority to go to war in Iraq and in support of the USA PATRIOT act, Kerry has been unable to really call Bush's foreign and domestic policies the disasters that they are.
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Wednesday, September 1, 2004 Brightness on the Streets, Dimness in the Garden

Marching down the street in New York City last Sunday, and looking through the fences and the lines of riot-gear-clad police at the Republican delegates at the entrance to Madison Square Garden and in the entrances to some of the hotels along the march route, I realized that veteran New York City journalist and current Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin had it right: the people who are in the Garden coronating George W. Bush are from the "low-IQ states." Breslin's maligning of Republicans may be somewhat geographically bigoted, given that there are some pretty glazed-eyed Republicans in states like New York and Massachusetts, too, but his point is nonetheless on target.

These people, and the vaster populace that continues to hail Dubya as a great leader, are really either willfully stupid, or genuinely ignorant.

The difference between them and the people in the street last Sunday, and in New York in general, is nothing short of striking.

Consider that New York City is the ground zero of this Age of Terror--the place that took the big hit on 9/11. And yet New Yorkers have the sense to know that it was ridiculous for Bush to send the U.S. military into Iraq. They have the intelligence to know that slashing taxes on the rich and corporations and running up a trillion-dollar deficit is madness. And they are savvy enough to recognize that producing the Republican National Convention show in Manhattan is nothing but a sleazy, ghoulish effort by Bush and the Republicans to ride to victory in 2004 on the blood and suffering of those who died in the World Trade Center attacks, and their families.

I say it because my own random survey of marchers last weekend suggested that as many as 50-percent of the half-million people marching up Seventh Avenue, across 34th Street and down to Union Square were from the City, which if true would mean about one in 15 able-bodied New York adults was out there protesting Bush and his gang.

Inside the Garden, and across the red swath of states so gracefully libeled by Breslin, are people so devoid of logic and rational thought that they actually believe that Saddam Hussein and Iraq were behind the 9/11 attacks. Many of them, for that matter, believe that the world began a few thousand years ago and that women were made from Adam's rib.

We're talking serious know-nothingism here, folks.

Not that all Republicans are stupid. Some, I'm sure, are simply good selfish folk who figure that they've got theirs, and they want to keep it, and the rest of the country and the world be damned (there may even be a few misguided Republican intellectuals who actually think supply-side theory works, and that by getting rich themselves they're helping others). But they're not the majority of Bush voters. Mostly, they're his donor base.

I'm not sure what all this means. It could be that a decade of stoopid radio, Fox-TV, Good Morning America, CBS Evening News and USA Today--and a servile and dumbed-down New York Times, too--have made it so that the dim bulbs and authority-worshippers now outnumber independent, thinking adults in this Land of the Free by enough to ensure the election of an idiot savant president who doesn't read newspapers and who thinks (or at least claimes to think) God is working through him.

At the same time, it's important to know that on one level, Breslin was wrong. The other half of the people who were marching last Sunday came from all over the country, including many of those "low-IQ" states. (The mere fact that you live in a tract house, shop in malls and Wal-Marts, and drive everywhere doesn't mean you can't think rationally.)

I'm not going to get into a discussion about John Kerry, who seems in his unwillingness to take a stand on anything of substance to be trying desperately to lose this race the way Al Gore did, and the way Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale did before him.

Kerry is beside the point. To tell the truth, right now, I'd vote for a duck for president over George Bush (at least a duck would be able to eat a pretzel while watching TV).

What is to be hoped is that all the thinking people of this land, as represented by the people who came out to demonstrate last Sunday, will make sure to go to the polls November 2--especially if they live in those "low-IQ" states--and that they will each cast a thoughtful vote (hopefully by paper ballot so that we'll know that it will be counted--or at least that if it's counted wrong or ignored, the fraud can be discovered).
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Tuesday, August 31, 2004 Litmus Test: Time for Kerry and Democrats to Take a Stand for Our Votes

John Kerry and the Democrats running for Congress, have been handed a golden opportunity by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan to actually demonstrate whether they are really standing for the working person, as they like to claim during election seasons, or are just corporate shills like their Republican opponents.

The litmus test offered by Greenspan is Social Security.

Greenspan, this past week, made the outrageous statement that politicians need to tell the Baby Boomer generation (of which I am a charter member at 55) that we aren'' going to get the benefits we were promised and that we worked for all these past three to four decades. He says that to "save" Social Security, our generation's benefits need to be cut.

Now first of all, let me point out--as Kerry and Democratic candidates everywhere should be doing, but aren't because Greenspan is held in reverence by everyone in Washington--that this proposal to knife Baby Boomers in the back is coming from a guy who is already pulling down the maximum Social Security benefit of $1800 a month, even as he earns $200,000 a year at his day job, and who will be collecting an additional $10,000 every month from his federal pension when he finally steps down and moves to a retirement villa in Palm Springs or Beverly Hills with his TV-producer wife.

But beyond the fact that this Marie Antoinette-like central banker has been given a pass by Kerry and the Democrats, his threat to Boomer Social Security benefits is also based on a grotesque lie--a lie that both our corporate media and the supposed party of working people are seemingly afraid to challenge.

The truth: there is no Social Security crisis.

If you call the Social Security Administration and talk to the agency's actuarial people--the civil service guys who just work with the numbers--they'll tell you that all it would take even at this late date with the first Baby Boomers just a decade away from retirement to shore up the Trust Fund with enough cash to cover the entire flood of retires from the Boomer crunch would be to eliminate the cap on income that is subject to the Social Security tax.

Right now, that cap is set at a little over $80,000. If someone makes $120,000, or $200,000 (like Mr. Greenspan), then $40,000, or in Greenspan's case $$120,000 of that income is not taxed at all for the purposes of Social Security.

Tax that extra income of the upper strata of society (and remember, we're not talking about joint family incomes of $80,000 here, we're talking about individual payroll income) at the same rate as lower incomes are taxed, and the Social Security shortfall vanishes completely.

You'd think that this would be a no-brainer for Democrats like Kerry. After all, the vast majority of those making over $80,000 a year are Republicans anyhow, and he'd likely win a huge number of new votes from Republican workers who earn less than $80,000 and who are worried sick about their retirement fund.

So why don't the Democrats jump on this? Because it's not just the rich who'd have to pay more Social Security taxes. It's also their employers. Remember, when you have 7.5 percent taken off the top of your paycheck each pay period for Social Security, so does your boss. So ending the cap on Social Security taxes for the wealthy would also mean a higher payroll tax bill for employers.

And our supposedly worker-friendly Democrats, John Kerry included, are afraid of that constituency. So afraid that they're ready to betray their voter base.

That should tell us a lot about the sorry state of our political system.

So all you Boomers out there. Now's your chance. Don't accept this craven threat from Greenspan to steal your retirement. Demand that John Kerry, and every Democrat running for Congress in your neighborhood, take a stand now in favor of eliminating the cap on income subject to Social Security taxation.

If they won't do it, they don't deserve our vote.
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Monday, August 30, 2004 Half-Million Protesters Defy N.Y. Mayor to Denounce Bush War and Lies
New York--The record march of up to half a million anti-Bush, anti-war demonstrators here on Sunday, on the eve or the Republican National Convention, was an astonishing victory of ordinary people over cynical political manipulation and intimidation.

For weeks, the Republican mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, apparently acting at the behest of the Bush campaign, had sown confusion about how police would handle protesters, and had sought to make a successful march impossible.

The big issue had been what to do with hundreds of thousands of people once they had finished walking. There are few open spaces in Manhattan large enough to accommodate the kinds of numbers protest organizers were expecting and hoping to attract, and the mayor, cynically professing concern about the well-being of the park's grass, was blocking access to the one obvious assembly place that could handle, and that in the past has easily accommodated, over half a million people--Central Park's Great Lawn.

Leaders of the group United for Peace and Justice, the umbrella organization that organized Sunday's protest demonstration, made what appeared to have been a tactical error in caving in to Bloomberg's pressure by agreeing two months ago to an alternative assembly permit to use the lower stretch of the West Side Highway running along Manhattan's West Side, but pressure from constituent organizations and rank-and-file protesters eventually led UFPJ to backtrack and tell the city that the West Side Highway location was unacceptable--as it would have been.

In the end, with no rally permit at all, the official plan was for the march to go ahead anyway, running from 14th Street and Seventh Avenue, up to Madison Square Garden, site of the GOP Convention, across to Fifth Avenue, and back down Fifth Ave. to Union Square at 14th Street, with no concluding rally. But in announcing these last-minute arrangements, organizers and other groups all added, with a wink, that they hoped demonstrators would then make their way independently up to Central Park and the Great Lawn for an informal gathering.

All the while, the city administration and police kept announcing ominouosly that they planned to have 37,000 police on duty, along with many other law enforcement personnel from Postal Inspectors to State Police and federal officials, in reserve. Announcements were also made that police would be armed with rolls of plastic handcuffs, as well as a newly purchased 150-decibel sound generator designed to disable protesters.

The intention of all this information, as well as Bloomberg's adamant refusal to offer a realistic and reasonable assembly point for marchers, was to sow fear and anxiety among potential protesters to keep attendance at Sunday's event as low as possible.

The strategy was a massive failure, as even the New York Times, normally dismissive of protests and quick to diminish the numbers of attendees in its reports, estimated that half a million people marched, making this New York City's largest political rally in the last two decades, and the largest protest at a political convention in history. Indeed, conversations with random demonstrators suggested that as many or more may have turned out for the march because of the mayor's challenge to the important First Amendment right of freedom of assembly, as were scared off by fear of disorder and arrest.

It was clear early Sunday morning that Bloomberg's threats against protesters regarding use of the park had been bluster. A beefy police sergeant, eating breakfast before heading for the march route, asked what would happen if marchers headed for the Great Lawn, smiled and said, "Nothing. It was stupid for the mayor to say the lawn would be closed. There's no way even with 37,000 police that we could keep people from getting into the park, and we're not going to try." Adding that the grass would survive, he smiled, "Keep it peaceful!"

In the end, despite having endured hours of trudging along the hot asphalt pavement over a three-mile march route in 90-degree temperatures, thousands of demonstrators made their way to the Great Lawn for a celebratory thumb-in-the-eye rally against the mayor. There, protesters hunted out shady spots, while the more intrepid among them gathered on the grass that the mayor had expressed such concern over to spell out a big "NO"--leaving it to imagination what was being rejected.

Republican campaign committee hopes of a riot and thousands of arrests were dashed as police and demonstrators alike behaved in a restrained manner. (The arrests during the day of some 100 people virtually all involved incidents unrelated to the march, police said.) That didn't stop some in the media from continuing a campaign of distortion. Immediately following the conclusion of the march, Fox TV was focusing on demonstrators who the network said had "gone to Central Park where they are not allowed to be"--a blatant falsehood--while CNN was reporting that "tens of thousands" had marched. Even ostensibly "alternative" NPR, the following day, in a report filed from New York by correspondent Mara Liasson, put march attendendance at a ludicrously low 100,000.

In the end though, besides making the mayor look like an idiot, this massive, peaceful anti-war march in the city where 9-11 happened undermined two central themes that the Bush campaign had hoped to project at the convention--of the president as a unifier, and of his opponents as a nihilistic rabble.

A golden-haired pit-bull, sporting a cape with the hand-lettered sign "Pit Bulls for Peace," epitomized the way this dramatic and disciplined march had defied mayoral and media stereotypes. "She’s all love," said her owner, as the square-jawed dog gently licked any proffered hand.
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Saturday, August 28, 2004 More wasted lives: US faces another stalemate in Iraq, this time in Najaf

Once again the blundering U.S. military in Iraq has shown its ineptness and weakness in the face of Iraqi resistance to occupation.

After weeks of brutal, bloody combat, American forces have had to accept a truce in Najaf that essentially leaves things where they were before American Marines belligerently initiated hostilities with an attack on Mahdi fighters backing radical cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

That is, things are back where they were in terms of al-Sadr's militia still having their arms, and al-Sadr still being free and in charge of his militia and his anti-occupation movement. What's not the same is that Najaf, the holy city of the world's Shia Muslims (rivaling Mecca), is a bombed-out husk, courtesy of U.S. warplanes and tanks.

What's also not the same is the reputation of the three parties to this pointless and totally avoidable conflict: the U.S., the puppet government of Ayad Allawi, and Sheik Moktada al-Sadr.

In the case of al-Sadr, he can now claim to have held out, with his ragtag soldiers, against the world's mightiest military force for the second time in a row, defending the Imam Ali shrine from the American "infidels." His standing in much of the majority Shia community in Iraq has never been higher.

"Prime Minister" Allawi, America's handpicked Iraqi government leader, has been exposed as nothing but an American puppet as all the shots in this battle against al-Sadr were called by the Americans. Though the U.S. media fawningly kept referring the battle for Najaf as being fought by "Iraqi and American forces," the much-touted so-called Iraqi National Guard was in fact relegated to symbolic roles, and in the end, the truce that ended the fighting was negotiated and implemented not by the Iraqi "government" of Allawi, but by another cleric, the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

The Americans, for their part, widely and properly viewed as the aggressor in this battle, have been forced once again, as in Falujah in April, to back off from their attack without any ability to claim victory. Exposed as a paper tiger, the U.S. military is back where it was, with no strategy for improving the Iraqi government's control, or for ending the insurgency, which continues its deadly hit-and-run attacks on frustrated American troops.

Not surprisingly, U.S. forces have responded to this latest defeat of their plans by strutting their power through Baghdad, with armed incursions into Sadr City, where a number of civilians have reportedly been killed by American soldiers. U.S. forces have also launched a major series of aerial bombardments on Fallujah, a Sunni city that is now controlled by Iraqi insurgents. The pointlessness of both these bloody exercises is as obvious as the motivation for them.

Americans back at home meanwhile, are left to ponder what has been gained by the new round of U.S. casualties and Iraqi civilian deaths in and around Najaf, and up in the Sadr City area of Baghdad, which seem to have bought nothing but more strife and more animosity towards the U.S. occupiers.
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Friday, August 27, 2004 Courts Kill Park Rally Idea, But the Park Rally is On

The political establishment has thrown down the gauntlet, and now the anti-Bush protest movement has taken up the challenge.

New York State Supreme Court Justice Jacqueline Silberman ruled late Wednesday against an attempt by United for Peace and Justice to open up Central Park's Great Lawn for a massive rally against the War and President Bush to follow Sunday's march on the RNC convention site at Madison Square Garden.

Sh-h-h-h. Don’t say it too loudly, but the rally at the Great Lawn is on.

Silberman (who faces reelection this year) lined up squarely behind the city administration saying that march organizers had not demonstrated any political motive behind the city's denial of a permit for a rally in the park. She also criticized UFPJ for "waiting" until August 18 to bring its suit. Her ruling followed a similar one two days earlier by a federal court hearing another case by International A.N.S.W.E.R. which wanted a park rally permit for August 28.

Expressing disappointment, though not surprise, at the state court court ruling, UFPJ announced that plans for the march, in which over 250,000 people are expected to go from Chelsea in lower Manhattan up to Seventh Avenue and 34th Street, will go ahead (the march has been granted a permit). Plans now call for the march to turn east at 34th, and to return downtown along Fifth Avenue and Broadway for a rally in Union Square at 14th Street (where protesters initially assembled spontaneously on the evening when the U.S. invasion of Iraq began).

Leslie Cagan, national coordinator of UFJP, condemned the court's decision, saying, "We believe the court is wrong and we believe this is actually a violation of our constitutional right to assemble." She added, "A Republican mayor hosting a Republican convention has done everything designed to undermine the demonstration against policies of a Republican administration."

Cagan acknowledged that many protesters remain outraged at the ban on a park demonstration and that many would probably continue on uptown from 34th Street towards the park anyway. She urged police and city officials not to interfere with their constitutional right to peaceably assemble, and then pointedly said that she herself planned to go to the park immediately following the march to Union Square. A.N.S.W.E.R., for its part, is handing out fliers to New Yorkers, informing them about plans for a informal rally in the park.

The prospect of a sea of protesters angry at Mayor Michael Bloomberg's obstinate refusal to grant permission for a rally in Central Park's Great Lawn, making their way up through the canyons of mid-town Manhattan to the unfenced and very accessible Central Park, whether from 34th Street or from 14th Street, has to be a crowd-control nightmare. Since the park will be open to the public on Sunday, it is unclear how police could legally distinguish between ordinary park-goers and demonstrators--especially if people heed advice being spread on the internet to protesters warning them not to carry large signs or other readily identifiable paraphernalia when going to the park.

The prospect of confrontations between protesters and police, and of mass arrests, looms, and could be complicated by advice from legal advisers to the marchers, including the Center for Constitutional rights and the National Lawyers Guild's New York chapter, that protesters not provide police with their names if asked. Another wild card is the role of the Secret Service, which has taken over the leadership role in "providing security" for the Republican convention, and which thus may in fact be calling the shots in how the city deals with protests. (Ordinarily, at events featuring President Bush, the Secret Service has been instructing local police agencies in how to handle protesters, as I reported last Oct. 16 in an article in Salon magazine.

A similar situation occurred in April 2003 during the height of the U.S. military's drive on Baghdad, when a march down Broadway terminated at Washington Square with no end-of-march rally, and no place for marchers to go. When marchers predictably began to congregate around the square on that occasion, New York Police took up offensive positions and began pressing in on the growing crowds, inciting needless confrontations and making arrests. On that occasion, there was no underlying tension to start with, as there will inevitably be this time because of the denial of the park permit and the presence at the march's northern terminus of Madison Square Garden, where the Republican National Convention will be about to commence.

There is some speculation that Bloomberg's intransigence regarding the park permit (which the mayor--ordinarily no environmentalist--has attributed to a desire to protect the sod on the Great Lawn), is really the work of the Bush campaign, which has made no secret its intention to portray any disorder or violence during Sunday's protests as the work of the Democrats.

In fact, march organizers have bent over backwards trying to meet the demands of police and city officials, who for months simply stonewalled.

Complicating matters, the police themselves are in a bitter dispute with the mayor. NYPD officers, despite being widely hailed as heroes after the 9-11 attacks, have been working without a contract or a pay increase since 2001, and police union activists have been demonstrating daily against the mayor, tailing him everywhere he goes (in a grand irony, the police union has been railing against anti-protest measures such as fences and video-taping that the police have been using against demonstrators themselves). While the city plans to have a record 37,000 cops on duty Sunday and during the four days of the convention next week, how officers will respond to the demonstrators if their own labor dispute has not been settled remains to be seen. There is even the possibility that cops could have their own job action--for example an outbreak of Blue Flu-on Sunday, with large numbers of unionized officers calling in sick.

Bloomberg also has to consider what the impact of a major confrontation between protesters and police could have on his own political future. Polls indicate that 75 percent of New Yorkers support the right of demonstrators to use Central Park as a rally site, suggesting that the blame for any problems might well be laid on Bloomberg's doorstep-and on the Bush campaign.
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Tuesday, August 24, 2004 Be there on Aug. 29, wherever `there' is

Debates over the location of a anti-Bush, anti-War rally in New York City this Sunday, and over what response demonstrators ought to have--passive and acquiescent or militant and assertive--should not overshadow the crucial point: there is going to be a massive demonstration on Aug. 29, and everyone who possibly can should plan on being there!

That’s the word from United for Peace and Justice, the umbrella organization that is organizing the demonstration scheduled for the day before the start of the Republican National Convention.

UFPJ accuses New York's Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has steadfastly refused to negotiate with them over access to the main open space in the city, Central Park's Great Lawn, of deliberately trying to either incite chaos and unrest, which Bush Campaign officials have already said they would plan to capitalize on by blaming the Democrats, or to sow enough confusion that many potential demonstrators won't show up.

Bloomberg has claimed, improbably, that he just wants to protect the grass on the park site, though it has in the past been used for such commercial gatherings as the Paul Simon/Art Garfunkle reunion concert, which drew 750,000 people, far more than are expected even by the most optimistic demonstration organizers.

His gambit for keeping the numbers down may backfire on him. On the internet, in private conversations, on email, one keeps hearing people saying that they hadn't planned on going to New York, but now that Bloomberg is making such a blatant attack on the First Amendment right to freedom of assembly, they "have to go."

Meanwhile, a federal judge on Monday rejected an appeal by two other organizations for use of Central Park for a parallel anti-RNC rally, but this should have no bearing on a lawsuit filed by UFPJ in the New York State Supreme Court, which is hearing arguments today.

In another wrinkle,which could force Bloomberg's hand, the city's police have threatened to go on strike on the day of the rally, because of Bloomberg's hardline stand on their contract negotiation. If that contract isn't settled by August 29, Bloomberg would either have to surrender the park or ask the governor to call up the National Guard.

UPFJ says that in the event that the state's high court rejects the organization's appeal of the city's denial of a park permit, the march, which has a permit, will still be on.

As to what happens on August 29, once the marchers reach 34th Street, where the mayor wants everyone to take a left turn (physically, not politically) and go to the remote West Side Highway to assemble, the UPFJ says, "If we win our court case, we will march to Central Park for an exuberant rally. If we lose in court, we will negotiate with the City for a safe, peaceful, and orderly closure of the day's events. (We will NOT go to the West Side Highway.)"

So the message is "be there!"
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Monday, August 23, 2004 Kerry the War Hero is a Loser; Kerry the War Resister is a Winner

Before I launch into this critique of John Kerry and his appallingly bad campaign for the White House, let me say that the Bush/Rove attack on his Vietnam record is so grotesque and calculating that it's almost enough, on its own, to win my vote in November.

That said, I have to say that Kerry has brought this mess on himself.

His major problem is that because his campaign stands for so little that about all he is telling voters is that they should vote for him because he won a bunch of medals in Vietnam. His Clintonian-style campaign, in which he offers himself as simply incrementally better than his opponent on a bunch of carefully cherry-picked wedge micro-issues, has made it inevitable that he would be challenged on his main selling point--his military record and his courage under fire.

His second problem is that once, way back in 1971-2, Kerry did have the courage to stand up in public and denounce not just the criminality and stupidity of America's war against Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, but his own complicity in the crimes of that war. If he'd been smart, and if he'd retained the strength of his convictions and shown even a modicum of political courage, he would have made that part of his political resume a centerpiece of his campaign. He would have said that as president he would not be afraid to put a stop to a bad policy when he saw one, as he had once done at the height of the Indochina conflict.

People who still support that misbegotten war might fault him and call him a traitor, but they were people who were firmly in the Bush camp already. The undecided, and the Democrats who find Kerry's populist credentials sadly wanting, however, would at least have applauded his willingness to take a stand on principle and to defend his past courageous mea culpa. After all, it was not the young men in uniform in Vietnam who were the war criminals, it was the generals in the Pentagon, and the suits in the White House and State Department--the ones who were setting the criminal policies--just as it is today.

Instead, Kerry on the campaign trail has acted for all the world as if his 1971 congressional testimony against the war had never happened. He has spent all his time talking about his allegedly heroic months on a swiftboat, not about his years afterwards as a war resister.

Now those unrepentant rightwing Vietnam Vets are hounding him, not just about his outspoken opposition to that war as a returned vet, but about the very acts of bravery for which he won his five medals, and Kerry, because he can't stand up and say, "I was right --the Vietnam War was a crime and led to the needless sacrifice of three million Indochinese and 58,000 Americans," is left on the defensive, trying to prove that he earned his medals.

If Kerry were smart, and a little less of a moral coward, he'd march right down to the Vietnam War Memorial, maybe along with the crewmembers who served with him, stand by the spot where the name of his best friend is etched in black marble, and denounce the attack on him that is being orchestrated by a draft-dodger and AWOL. He should be taking this fight to the street, but not as a war hero. Rather, he should be making his attack as one who recognized the error, and the criminality, of that war.

Besides blunting the attack on his patriotism that is now being leveled against him, this would allow him to segue into a more oppositional stance against the current war, which of course is as stupid and criminal as was the Indochina War before it. As long as Kerry continues his "nuanced" stand on Iraq, he can never hope to defeat Bush.
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Friday, August 20, 2004 What is this American Fetish About Military "Experience" for Presidents?

The escalating battle of words and documents over George Bush's National Guard record and John Kerry's Vietnam War record ignore the much more important question: What the hell difference does it make whether either candidate has any "military experience"? Isn't that why we have generals?

Let's assume for a moment, in the face of all the evidence, that George Bush did in fact serve a full hitch in the Texas Air National Guard. What does the ability to do a smart salute, make his bed, and fly a plane have to do with running a country? Actually, we already have the answer in Bush's record. The answer: absolutely nothing. Bush the supposed vet has proven inept at managing the economy, inept at providing leadership of the country (if leadership means anything, it means getting everyone to pull together, and he's only pulled the country apart at the seams), and inept at organizing and running a war.

As for Kerry, we should be asking not whether or not his chest full of medals was earned, and whether he exhibited genuine courage under fire, but what being captain of a little 50-foot motorboat has to do with running a country. Again the answer has to be nothing. In fact, in the area of political courage, while he showed some in 1972 when he turned against the Vietnam War and had the guts to stand up and say so in public, in his mature political life, Kerry has been a classic wimp, parsing positions and avoiding taking a stand. It's characteristic of his entire campaign. In fact the only time he's really gotten tough has been when his medals were questioned.

When will Americans get over this worship of uniforms?

All they really do is divert us from the real issues.

In fact if you look down through history, the record of the presidents who had a military background--even those who were generals--is not particularly encouraging.

If the New York Times and Washington Post would devote even half the time and effort that they've put into covering the Kerry/Bush war records story into covering their records of on more important issues--energy, healthcare, welfare and poverty, education, economy, labor rights, etc.--we'd have a much more significant campaign and probably a lot higher level of interest among the electorate.
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Thursday, August 19, 2004 Ideological Blindness Leads U.S. Business to Hurt Itself by Opposing National Healthcare

A page-one story in today’s New York Times says that the high cost of health insurance--estimated at about $3000 per worker--is keeping companies from adding new workers even as their business picks up.

Now logically, you'd think that big business would be responding to this crisis the way it usually responds to a crisis--by demanding that the government pick up the tab. In fact, that's exactly what governments in Canada and most of Europe and Japan have done. They have socialized health care, removing that cost entirely from employers.

Why doesn'' that happen here? Big business got the government to socialize the costs of hazardous waste clean-up. It got government to socialize the cost of transporting raw materials and finished products through the railroads and highway network. As big companies abandon their pension plans, leaving people to survive after retirement on their meager Social Security checks, it's even socializing the pension program. So why the resistance to socializing health care?

In large part, I think it's pure ideology. Socializing transportation made sense to the corporate elite because it's basically a matter of government doing something that directly helps them and boosts profits. Socializing hazardous waste clean-up made sense because having to pay for their misdeeds themselves could bankrupt many companies. But socializing healthcare would be getting the government to do something that primarily would directly benefit the people, and only indirectly benefit companies.

That said, the American approach, which forces employers to bid against each other not just on salary but on health care benefits in order to attract workers, ends up making U.S. firms wildly uncompetitive compared to similar businesses overseas. In Canada, for example, a typical car can be made in Windsor, Ontario at a cost several thousand dollars lower than the same car in across the river in Detroit, simply because the plant in Windsor doesn't have to pay employee health costs.

You'd think that the business elite--the folks at the National Chamber of Commerce or the National Association of Manufacturers for example--would wake up and start clamoring for socialized medicine. But it won't happen.

Instead, we face years more of the corporate lobbyists trying to get Congress to clamp down on rising health costs through such things as laws limiting liability of employers in case of medical malpractice, and corporate managers trying to cut costs by chipping away at workers' health benefits and increasing their paycheck deductions for coverage.

If American business leaders are too ideologically blinkered to see their own interest in moving to socialized medicine, American workers should to it for them.

Wednesday, August 18, 2004

Don't Take it to the Streets: Uncle Todd's Revisionist History

The mass demonstration in New York City planned for Aug. 29 on the eve of the Republican National Convention, the first full-scale protest against Bush policies and especially the War against Iraq in well over half a year, promises to bring upwards of half a million people into the city's narrow streets.

With the city's mayor, Republican Michael Bloomberg, hell-bent on on blunting that protest and creating a crisis by shunting marchers off onto the West Side Highway, which runs, unshaded and remote along Manhattan's left flank, Todd Gitlin, former SDSer from a bygone era and in more recent years self-styled critic of the "radical left," and John Passacantando, executive director of Greenpeace USA and another one-time radical turned old softie, have offered their "words of wisdom" to the young and the restless.

"Let dissent with dignity win the day," they intone in a Nation article, sounding like wizened old uncles. "Red-hot rage may seem in order when the country's values have been trampled upon by a government with a dubious claim to legitimacy. Yet the theatrics of rage can easily play into Bush's hands.

Righteousness, if not rooted in humility and focused on results--on persuasive power--will offend more than it attracts and fall victim to its own arrogance, as surely as arrogance undercuts Bush."

In warning against violent or destructive behavior, Gitlin and Passacantando raise the specter of the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, suggesting that the violence in the streets at that event was the work of government provocateurs and that the current movement could be vulnerable to the same tactics.

They go on to invoke the Civil Rights Movement marchers of an even earlier time, saying, "Consider the brave young men and women of the civil rights movement, sitting with dignity at lunch counters throughout the South. In film footage of the time, you can see them attacked by uncivilized whites, who curse them, beat them--and thus reveal themselves as bullies and cowards. The civilly disobedient cover themselves in self-defense but never raise their hands in anger. They appeal over their adversaries' heads to the majority who, they believe--they have to believe--will see the justice of their cause."

This has long been Gitlin's shtick, of course. When International A.N.S.W.E.R. was doing the yeoman work of organizing mass rallies against Bush's rush to war back in early 2003, pulling hundreds of thousands to the Mall in Washington, Gitlin was out there on the public airwaves undermining their efforts, redbaiting their Marxist influences, and trashing their inclusion of the Palestinian State as an issue, and the movement to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, the long-imprisoned Philadelphia black journalist on Pennsylvania's death row.

Now he's raising the bugaboo of "protest violence."

But Gitlin and Passacantando, in their missive, offer us a sepia-toned, revisionist view of the '60s. The Gandhi-inspired marches and protests of the Civil Rights era were indeed powerful tools in the struggle for African-American civil rights, but it was the riots in Watts, Detroit, Newark and elsewhere, and the threat of a much more militant Black Power movement, as promoted by the likes of Stoakley Carmichael, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton and others that led President Johnson and the Establishment to decide they had to cut a deal.

The same is true with the anti-war movement. To hear Gitlin, you'd think it was all those clean-for-Gene kids who walked door-to-door during the teach-ins that brought the Vietnam War to an end. In fact, it was the growing unrest in the cities, the collapse of morale and near insurrection among the troops in Nam, the street confrontations of 1968 and 1972, and the slayings at Kent State and Jackson State, not to mention the victories of the Vietnamese resistance, that forced the U.S. to give up that war.

Sure there were plenty of people in Nixon's "Silent Majority" who were upset at all the chaos and disruption of the late 1960s and early 1970s, but in the end, they tired of the government's lies and its violence and forced the power structure to back down. Nixon was forced to resign, his secret police state effort (Cointelpro) unraveled and was exposed to the light of day, and laws were passed creating, at least for a time, a more open government.

For whatever reason, Gitlin and Passacantando find this reality troubling, so they ignore it.

No doubt they are right that violent behavior and wanton destruction by demonstrators, should it take place during the RNC, will sway some undecided voters to the Bush camp in November, just as such behavior in 1968 and 1972 surely turned some voters to Nixon. But Gitlin and Passacantando are dreaming if they think that a less militant civil rights and peace movement in the 1960s would have brought about the Civil Rights Act, the War on Poverty or the end of the Indochina War. And they are libeling the organizers of the August 29 action and the hundreds of thousands who plan to protest in New York by implying that they are primed for violent conflict.

They also ignore a signal difference between Chicago in 1968 and New York in 2004: In 1968, demonstrators were protesting a Democratic administration in a city controlled by a Democratic mayor, Richard Daley, and Republican challenger Richard Nixon was able to paint them as a dangerous rabble for which the Democrats could somehow be blamed (a not illogical conclusion since it was a police riot ordered by Mayor Daley that instigated the Chicago riots). Today, demonstrators are protesting a Republican national administration in a Republican-led city. If marchers are driven to defend their rights, or even to riot, it should be clear to most honest observers that it was the Republican Mayor, no doubt acting at the behest of the national Republican Party and the Bush White House, who, by denying them a permit to assemble in Central Park, will have created a wholly avoidable confrontation with police. If anything, it should be the Democrats who benefit from the ensuing chaos. (And Democrats, including presidential candidate John Kerry, should be pointedly criticizing Bloomberg right now and warning about the likely result of his pig-headedness.)

This is not to endorse violence and destructiveness for its own sake. Rather, it is to say that if some protesters, denied by Mayor Bloomberg the right to peaceably assemble and seek to make their voices heard (without being shunted off onto a remote highway), react in a militant manner and end up in a confrontation with police, it will be on Bush’s and Bloomberg's head.

Gitlin and Passacantando should be offering their "sage advice" to Bloomberg, not the demonstrators.
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Tuesday, August 17, 2004
Be Afraid: Scared of political controversy at the local library

Word that Attorney General John Ashcroft has sicced already thinly stretched counter-terror forces of the FBI on protesters planning for peaceful protest against the Republicans and the Bush administration during the Republican National Convention shows how far this nation has gone down the road to thought police and the undermining of the basic freedoms on which the country was founded.

I got personal lesson about how deeply the fear of dissent has permeated society when I went to my local library in Upper Dublin, Pennsylvania, with a copy of my new book "This Can't Be Happening!" in hand, to offer to do a signing and discussion for interested local residents.

The librarian took my book and said she'd be in touch.

A day later, I got an email from her saying, "As a local author with a timely subject, this program would be appropriate. However, as a library, we must retain our neutral position on all subjects, and we are concerned that a discussion of topics that people feel so passionately about could quickly become inflammatory. Therefore, I was wondering if you could provide me with the contact information for two or three of the libraries at which you've spoken previously."

As of now, I'm not sure whether the library will decide to host a session on the book or not. Hopefully they'll buck up and go ahead, but the nervousness being expressed already is disturbing enough.

The idea that a library would be anxious about presenting a talk by an author of a politically controversial book simply boggles the mind.

It makes you wonder how libraries would have responded back in 1777 or 1778 to an offer by Tom Paine to give a reading from his book "Common Sense," or an offer by Thomas Jefferson to give a reading of the "Declaration of Independence." By the looks of things, Upper Dublin's library might have passed on both.

Upper Dublin is no hotbed of right-wing looniness. A suburban bedroom community just north of Philadelphia, it is populated by educated and fairly socially liberal families, both professional and working class, and is fairly evenly divided politically between Republicans and Democrats, with Republicans having a slight edge.

If a librarian is afraid of controversy in a community like this, one shudders to imagine how their counterparts are handling controversy in communities in the South or the Midwest.

Ashcroft, Bush and Cheney are certainly having an impact on the level of permissible discourse in America.

It's a sad day when the Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores have more courage than the local library.
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Monday, August 16, 2004
Bush Iraq Policy in Shambles, But Can Kerry Challenge It?

When Bush announced the June 30 date for a handover of "sovereignty" to Iraq, it was clear that this was a political deadline aimed at pushing the war out of the news pages during the campaign season, not a logical date based upon democratic progress in the country.

Now it is clear that the critics of that PR tactic were right. There is no Iraqi government--just a puppet regime that does the bidding of its U.S. masters.

Ayad Alawi, the U.S.-picked "prime minister" and former CIA asset, can only look to the U.S. military to defend his regime's authority in Baghdad and southern Iraq. His claim of independence is further exposed as a fraud when he is compelled to "authorize" the U.S. attack on Muktada al-Sadr's militia in Najaf.

From the beginning, the U.S. game plan has been to marginalize the Shites, whom the Bush Administration and its neo-con "thinkers" have always considered to be too close to Iran, but that is a doomed strategy. With Iraq 60 percent Shia, the only way to keep them out of power is by repression--the same kind of repression that was long practiced by Saddam Hussein.

So as in Vietnam, but for different reasons, our soldiers are now mired in an unwinnable war, forced to bomb and terrorize innocent civilians, all the while creating, through their efforts, an ever-larger resistance.

The colossal disaster that Bush has managed to produce in three and a half short years is truly mind-boggling.

One would think that at this point he'd already be packing his bags and making arrangements for the move back to Crawford, Texas.

That this is not the case is a tribute to both the remarkable ineptness and moral vacuity of the Democratic candidate to replace him, John Kerry, who simply cannot bring himself to say that this whole enterprise is and has been insane, and to our corporate media, which continue to lie for the administration--for example still talking about the "Iraqi National Guard and the U.S. military fighting in Najaf," as if the U.S. troops there were just assisting the home team. In fact, 10-20 percent of the Iraqi troops brought to Najaf to fight with U.S. soldiers have refused, saying they wouldn't kill other Iraqis, while the others, poorly armed and poorly trained, have been doing little, and are basically there for show.

Just consider: the Pentagon's plan is to have Iraqi troops do the dirty business of attacking al-Sadr and his troops in the Imam Ali Mosque, the holiest of Shia shrines, the theory being that this will somehow insulate the U.S. from the inevitable anger of Iraqi Shias. But what Iraqi soldier would want to commit this sacrilege? Does anyone really think Iraqi troops will do this?

You wouldn't know any of this to watch network news or CNN, much less Fox-TV, or even by listening to NPR, the supposedly alternative radio network--all of which are talking as if Iraqi troops are playing a significant role in the fighting in Najaf.

Facts, however, are stubborn things, and it's beginning to look like Bush's plan to bury the Iraq War story until after November 2 is a failure.
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Saturday, August 14, 2004
Aug. 29 Could Be a Long Day, So Bring a Toothbrush

On Wednesday evening, exiting the EasyPass lane and preparing to enter the Lincoln Tunnel in Hoboken, I had to brake suddenly to avoid running over a wayward traffic cone. The guy behind me in the Volvo SUV, who was tailgating and not paying attention, slammed into me, sending my right signal assembly to taillight heaven. It wouldn't have been so bad--no one was hurt and the other driver acknowledged his fault and gave me his insurance info and phone number, offering to pay for the damage--but then two cops from the Port Authority then came over and said they wanted to write up an accident report.

45 minutes later, the SUV driver and I were both still waiting for what, ultimately, was a short form with all the complexity of a parking citation.

If it took two cops this long to handle such a simple matter as an uncontested fender bender, how are New York Police going to handle the thousands of arrests that can be expected on August 29 should Mayor Michael Bloomberg persists in his Ahab-like obsession with forcing protesters to accept a rally site down near Chambers Street on the West Side Highway instead of the natural and appropriate site on the Great Lawn in Central Park?

Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people who plan to march August 29 are expressing their anger at the mayor's intransigence, with many saying they plan to ignore him and make their way to the park, permit or no permit, police or no police.

To make things more interesting, New York's heroes in blue, the guys everyone loved after 9/11--along with the city's fire fighters--are taking advantage of the looming crisis to demand a big fat raise from the city, threatening a strike during the rally and the Republican convention if they don't get what they want.

Besides offering the delightful possibility that the Republican delegates from Middle America---what Jimmy Breslin calls the "low-IQ states"--might have to actually face the city alone and unguarded, the prospect of a police job action raises several other possibilities. You could have disgruntled police simply not interfering as protesters pushed through their lines and headed to the park. You could have police decide to have a slowdown, making the booking process in arrests even more slow and painful for arrestees and for the city. Or you could have a Blue Flu, with cops simply not showing up on the job on the appointed day, or during the convention, which might force Gov. George Pataki to call up the National Guard.

My guess is Bloomberg, a Republican mayor obviously acting on behalf of President Bush and his Republican campaign handlers (who, no doubt, are hoping to have a lot of rampaging protesters down right near the site of the World Trade Center attacks to point to during their convention), will ultimately cave in, or be forced to give in by the courts, and the estimated 250-500,000 anticipated anti-Bush demonstrators will be able to peacefully make their way up Broadway and Seventh Avenue to the Park.

If he doesn't, and persists in his loony stance, my experience at the Lincoln Tunnel suggests that the city's police stations and the courts will be clogged for weeks as New York's finest and the city's lumbering legal system try to book, arraign and untangle the arrests of thousands of people who only wanted to peaceably exercise their constitutional right to protest an unelected usurper and the war he tricked the nation into.

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Friday, August 13, 2004
Nader Shows Guts that Bush and Kerry Lack

Let's hear it for Ralph Nader!

Whatever you may think about his potential spoiler role in the current presidential election, he has performed an important service by boldly stating the obvious: right-wing Israeli politicians and their backers in the U.S. at AIPAC and the Anti-Defamation League have a lock on national politics and even on domestic media coverage of Israel and Palestine.

The ADL is fuming that Nader's charge "smacks of bigotry," but there is nothing anti-Semitic about saying that U.S. politicians and U.S. editors and publishers are beholden to right-wing Israeli politics.

There is, as Nader points out, far more open debate about what needs to be done to solve the Israeli-Palestinian crisis in Israel and in the Israeli media than there is in the U.S.

Any American politician--or journalist--who dares to suggest that Israel is committing war crimes or genocide against Palestinian civilians, or that its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, or its settlements in those areas are illegal, or that pro-Israel lobbyists in the U.S. are unduly influencing U.S. policy or the U.S. media coverage of the Palestine-Israel crisis, is immediately labeled anti-Semitic (or the code-word "bigoted." when in fact being critical of Israeli government policy has nothing to do with being anti-Jewish. Even American Jews who make such a charge--and there are many--end up being accused of being "self-hating."

Now consider the situation with regard to Cuba. There, it is a commonplace to read in the paper that Republican politicians take a hard-line position against Fidel Castro in order to curry favor and win the votes of Cuban exiles in Florida, a key state in presidential electoral politics. If someone criticizes such political pandering, she or he is not instantly accused of being anti-Latino. Try exactly the same thing with regard to politicians and U.S. policy towards Israel and the Jewish vote in Florida or New York, though, and the anti-Semitic charge immediately gets made.

Nader is making that point in a very courageous way, and if he does nothing else this election than put that issue out in the open, he will have done a very useful thing.

It is nothing short of a tragedy that in this election, the two major candidates, Bush and Kerry, are vying with each other to be more uncritically supportive than the other of the most uncompromisingly right-wing Israeli policies against Palestinians--policies which guarantee more violence and bloodshed against both Arabs and Israelis, and which, moreover, are certain to further inflame the anti-American sentiments of Arabs and Muslims around the world.

While tens of thousands of Israelis denounce and protest the building of a wall to separate the West Bank from Israel, cruelly separating Palestinians from family members and livelihoods, and call for the complete return of occupied lands to Palestinians and a removal of all the illegal settlements which have stolen land from Palestinians and made creation of a viable Palestinian state impossible, Bush and Kerry both support the current government's policies without question.

Nader, in his campaign, deserves credit for exposing this cowardly behavior.
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Wednesday, August 11, 2004
Kerry Is Feeling the Heat of Anti-War Sentiment

John Kerry finally has told us what his plan is for Iraq: "Significant" troop reductions by next August.

Now let's try and understand the logic here, such as it is. Sen. Kerry says he supports the war and occupation in Iraq, the goal of which, according to the White House, is to establish democracy in that tormented land.

But so far, despite nearly 1000 U.S. fatalities, thousands of U.S. casualties, and well over 10,000 Iraqi civilian deaths and counting, all America’s invasion of Iraq seems to have produced is a budding new dictator, famously corrupt, whose forces have already begun torturing his people, who is relying on 160,000 foreign troops to prop up his regime, and who has signaled his disdain for democracy by closing the only independent Arab news organization in the country, Al Jazeera, and establishing a new martial law statute, complete with a restoration of the death penalty.

Given all this, on what basis does Sen. Kerry come up with a date of August 2005 for "significantly" reducing American levels in Iraq?

Does he anticipate the country being much more peaceful and orderly and democratic a year hence? If so, on what grounds? Nobody else seems to see that happening, least of all the officers on the ground.

If, as is surely the reality, he doesn't have a clue, and in fact there is little likelihood at all that Iraq will have joined the quiescent democratic fold by then, Kerry's pledge to "significantly" reduce U.S. troop levels in Iraq is really a pledge to give it up and go home, because if the U.S. military can't pacify the country with 138,000 troops, along with some 40,000 other foreign soldiers and high-priced mercenaries, it certainly won't be able to do the job with fewer troops later on.

So now the question for Kerry is one he once, as a soldier himself, asked the members of Congress: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

That, after all, is what it comes down to isn't it?

We see Iraq in flames as insurgents--now they're being appropriately called rebels, as they fight against both the U.S. military and the American puppet regime of Iyad Alawi--capture control of city after city outside of Baghdad, much as the Viet Cong did some 35 years ago. It is, in fact, becoming a bad joke to try and claim that Iraq today is "better off" than it was under the hated Saddam Hussein, as President Bush is wont to do. And that's quite a trick. Who in his right mind would have thought that even Bush, back in March of 2003, could have actually made things worse than they already were in Iraq?

The American troops under fire, and the ones who will inevitably be sent to Iraq as replacements over the coming months, whether Bush or Kerry is president, will know that they are going into that maelstrom of anti-Americanism and centuries-old tribal hatreds simply to provide political cover for the guy in the White House.

Not much of an incentive, is it?

Still, that said, it's an indication of the growing power of the anti-war movement in the U.S. that Kerry has been forced to declare that he will not simply continue with the war and occupation he would inherit from Bush if he wins in November.

While it doesn't say much for Kerry, the fact that he has been pressed by popular sentiment into moving away from his earlier unqualified support for an indefinitely continued war and occupation is a positive sign.
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Tuesday, August 10, 2004

Tune In, Turn Up and Take It to the Great Lawn

Now here's a brilliant idea, courtesy of Prof. Sharon Gifford of the Rutgers University Department of Finance and Economics.

Noting that it's completely legal for people in Central Park to play radios, as long as they aren't turned up to excessive volume, she suggests that a clever strategy to challenge Mayor Michael Bloomberg's outrageous banning of protest on the Great Lawn would be for thousands or tens of thousands of demonstrators on August 29 to head for the prohibited venue--as individuals--carrying radios which could all be tuned to a cooperative station (WBAI perhaps?) that could broadcast speeches to them, either from the rally grounds, or from some other location.

If large numbers of park-goers were to simultaneously turn up their radios while tuned to a station reporting live on the march, it would be the same--perhaps even better--than having a big PA system--and the police would have no legal way to respond.

I heard about a comical version of this idea being put to work when the financially troubled Connecticut city of Willimantic, one recent July 4, was treated to a march by the local Windham High School marching band, sans instruments. Their program cancelled by budget cuts, the students dressed up in their marching uniforms but, instead of playing the instruments they were no longer getting instruction in, they all held up transistor radios tuned to martial music being broadcast by the local radio station. It was a marvelously creative and funny protest.

Now the ban on an anti-RNC demonstration in Central Park is no laughing matter. It is, in fact, one of the most egregious assaults yet on the First Amendment freedom of speech and assembly by a president who has made it official policy during his entire term of office to fence in and remove protesters from any public venue at which he is featured. This latest effort, thanks to the ready assistance of Mayor Bloomberg, could see half a million protesters denied the right peaceably to assemble and announce their grievances with this administration.

Bush's and Bloomberg's scheme to control the images Americans receive of the Republican Convention could be thwarted if a significant number of demonstrators decide to challenge the ban on the park gathering and head for the Great Lawn instead of passively accepting the city's wholly inadequate offer of the remote highway location.

Gifford's clever idea could make it possible for those demonstrators to do more than simply wander around matting down the grass about which the mayor professes to be so terribly concerned.

This could be a huge and inspiring demonstration of people power.

I should note that United For Peace and Justice today reversed itself and announced that it is rejecting as dangerous and unsuitable the city's offer of a West Side Highway rally. Under pressure from rank-and-file protesters, and on advice of its medical advisers, UFPJ announced that it is again demanding a park permit from the city. The likelihood is that marchers on Aug. 29 will not turn left off Broadway ontyo 34th Street as instructed by police, but will continue on straight to Central Park, permit or no permit.

Meanwhile, lawyers for the National Lawyers Guild today filed suit in federal court on behalf of A.N.S.W.E.R., seeking to have the park ban overturned and a permit issued for a rally on the Great Lawn.

Stay tuned.
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Monday, August 9, 2004
The Bloomberg Bash: Protest Party or Police Riot?

Things are shaping up towards a confrontation of sorts in New York this Aug. 29.

Call it the Bloomberg Bash.

Since the Republican mayor has taken the anti-civil liberties position that a protest rally can’t be held on Central Park's Great Lawn--traditional site of such major political events--many of those who want to gather to protest the Bush administration have concluded that this is exactly where they ought to go.

After all, much of the anger at Republicans and Bush is over his administration's assault on basic civil liberties, such as freedom of speech and assembly.

The main protest organization that has been working for over a year on the anti-RNC march and demonstration, United for Peace and Justice, recognizing that Bloomberg and his police department were committed to stonewalling their permit application for the Great Lawn, finally agreed to the mayor's offer of a rally site along the lower portion of the West Side Highway, a multi-lane artery that runs just along the edge of the Hudson River. Clearly, a highway is no place for a rally, since it forces the estimated several hundred thousand to half a million anticipated demonstrators to stretch out along over a mile of hot pavement.

The alternative, which is being discussed and promoted on numerous websites and chat lines--and advocated in the mainstream newspaper New York Newsday by columnist Jimmy Breslin---is for people to just make their way spontaneously to Central Park, which after all will remain open to the public (short of instituting martial law and bringing in the National Guard, it would be almost impossible for city police to close the park, especially given the numbers of cops who will have to be sent to the West Side Highway for the official rally).

What ultimately happens on August 29 will depend to a great extent on the decisions of individual demonstrators and marchers. If people melt away from the march as it moves uptown from Chelsea to Broadway and West 34th Street, where plans call for it to turn west and cross over to the West Side Highway, and large numbers of people make their way to the park, to be joined by large numbers who have entered over the course of the morning on their own, the city would be forced to decide whether to fight a guerrilla war in the park (at the risk of hurting many innocent bystanders just there to relax), or to cave in and allow a rally.

If the numbers who decide to go to the park are small, they may simply be ignored by the city--that is unless Mayor Bloomberg is trying to make a name for himself as a municipal Ashcroft.

One question that really can't be answered is what impact a real Bloomberg Bash, should one occur, would have on the presidential election campaign. The police riot in Chicago in 1968 probably worked to the advantage of Richard Nixon and hurt the campaign of Hubert Humphrey. Public sentiment against the Vietnam War was still growing, but had not peaked, and for many people, the violence in the streets, which much of the media wrongly blamed on demonstrators instead of Democratic Mayor Richard Daley and the Chicago police, was just the thing that Nixon's "law and order" campaign was addressing.

The difference this time is that first of all, opposition to the Iraq War is far more widespread, and crosses age, race and class lines much more than in 1968, and secondly, it is the Republicans who are in power, both in Washington and the convention host city.

It is quite possible that a Bloomberg crackdown on an impromptu, permit-less Central Park protest could backfire and garner more support for the anti-war, anti-Bush movement.

See you in the park! (Oh, and if you are planning on heading to the Great Lawn, bring along some grass seed---preferably crab grass!---to sprinkle around before you leave the site. Let's show Mayor Bloomberg that we're more concerned about the well-being of the lawn than he is)

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Sunday, August 8, 2004
Nothing Changes: Bush Still Hyping Terror, Kerry Still Trying to be Bush, and the U.S. is Still Losing in Iraq

One of the nice things about going on vacation for a week is coming back to find that there have been dramatic changes in the world--especially if the news is for the better. No such luck for me. I left Aug. 1, with the U.S. at war in Iraq, with Bush hyping his "War on Terror" and with Kerry trying to act like Bush. I came back Aug. 7 to find Bush hyping terror even harder than ever with the national alert upped to orange, probably for the rest of the campaign, with Kerry still trying to out-Bush Bush, and with the U.S. army still at war in Iraq, only more so.

Since the Orange Alert is clearly bogus and just another effort to get Americans all in a tizzy in time for the Republican National Convention, the big news has to be that once again the Mahdi Army and its leader, Moktada al-Sadr, have demonstrated that the American occupation of Iraq is a failure waiting to be recognized.

Arrayed against the most powerful military machine the world has ever known, al-Sadr's untrained fighters, with their hand weapons, have held their ground, forcing the U.S. to resort to bombs and heavy weapons to maintain any control at all in Najaf. Other cities in Iraq--as many as five, not counting Fallujah, which is controlled by Sunni fighters--and a large section of Baghdad itself, are totally controlled by Shite militiamen and are simply off limits to American soldiers, and to the puppet army being set up by American forces to take the bullets in battles with insurgents.

As usual, the U.S. is boasting that it is causing massive casualties among the enemy--over 300 at last count--with only a couple of U.S. soldiers getting killed. But with al-Sadr claiming to have lost only 40 of his fighters, it's a safe bet that as has often been proven to be the case later on, many of those 300 casualties claimed by the U.S. will probably turn out to have been innocent civilians caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

What such fighting demonstrates is that the U.S. cannot win this battle. If the occupation army fights with everything it's got, it will kill many, many innocents and arouse the hostility of the entire country. If it doesn't fight with heavy weapons, gunships and air strikes, the only options are heavy U.S. casualties (a political disaster for President Bush) or surrender of more urban areas to the insurgents, both Sunni and Shite.

This will all change after November 2. If Bush wins the election, it is almost a certainty that he will have the U.S. military switch to option 1, attacking rebel-held areas with the whole might of the U.S. arsenal. Not that this would work. The only losers would be the Iraqi people.

What Kerry would do if he found himself taking over the Iraq mess in January is less clear, as he has so far hidden behind a Nixon-like "secret plan" for Iraq. If he were smart, he'd declare victory and pull all U.S. troops out. Sadly, Kerry may well opt for the same futile approach as Bush, unloading on Iraqi cities that show any resistance, though given his demonstrable record of trying to split the difference on virtually every issue of substance, he could well opt for the other losing strategy of pulling U.S. troops back into well-defended base areas, essentially surrendering most of the country to the insurgency and leaving the U.S. mired in a messy civil war for years to come.
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Saturday, July 31, 2004
Shame of the DNC, and a Foretaste of President Kerry on Dissent

The free speech cage at the site of the Boston Democratic Convention should be left standing permanently as a monument in this city that is awash in symbols of the founding of the nation. It should be left where it is to remind future generations--and maybe people in contemporary America--how far we have moved away from the ideals of the Bill of Rights because of the current campaign of fear, a campaign that has now been adopted whole-heartedly by the Democrats under the leadership of John Kerry.

There was absolutely no justification for the Democrats of the DNC and the Democratic mayor of Boston to adopt the shameful strategy of the Bush Presidency for dealing with protest--fencing it in behind razor wire.

The protests planned for the DNC, mostly by A.N.S.W.E.R., have been and were going to be peaceful.

The alleged threats of terror, emanating from the Bush Department of Homeland Security and the Bush Department of Justice were absurd--a warning that the media would be attacked! Warnings of attacks on public transit! Look out! It was all calculated to embarrass the Democrats and, incredibly, it worked.

The fact that the Democrats fell for this kind of paranoia-inducing hockum shows how far into madness the American public has descended.

But the price for such lack of principle and of such cowardice and idiocy is high. A new low has been set for a Democratic Convention violating the right of free speech when even a silent protest in the hall led to a demonstrator's being dragged out in handcuffs.

Bostonians will be paying for the $50 million in extra costs the city had to pay to put an extra 5000 cops needlessly put on the street for the four-day convention, just as Boston business owners will have to eat their losses after a frightened public decided to just stay home for the duration.

But we will all pay for this next step down the road of repression of dissent.

With Bush, Cheney and the Republicans, we've come to expect the jackbooted response to protest, the shunting of demonstrators off into fenced in detention facilities out of sight of the media, the arrest of those who refuse to be so muzzled. If Kerry and the Democrats now adopt the same approach to dissent, the only response will have to be massive civil disobedience.

If Kerry wins the presidency this November, progressives had better gear up for a return to the Johnson era of heavy police response to protest. Kerry has made it clear that he intends to prosecute the war in Iraq for years to come, and if he does so, he can count on an antiwar movement to challenge him in the streets of Washington.

The Democratic Convention gave a preview of how we can expect a Kerry administration to respond to such a challenge--with cops and razor wire, teargas and arrest.

Now it's on to New York, to watch how the RNC and a Republican mayor deal with dissent and protest.
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Friday, July 30, 2004
Kerry's Speech: Vacuous and a Recipe for a Failed Administration

As speeches go, Kerry's was pretty uninspiring, and deliberately so. His campaign strategy seems to be designed to offer little in the way of specifics, to toss a few bones to the hard-core Democrats and progressives, and to try and attract the undecided with code words like values, strength, and family.

The trouble is that, as with Clinton before him, and Gore, whose presidency we never got to see, such an approach leaves us, should he win in November, with a president who is a blank slate and who has no mandate to do anything.

There were a few specifics, to be sure. Kerry said he would never privatize Social Security. That’s good.

He said he'd give retirees a real prescription drug plan instead of the current gift to the pharmaceutical industry.

He said he'd revoke the tax breaks the Bush administration gave to the well-to-do while cutting taxes for the middle class, and he said he'd add 40,000 people to the military (not in Iraq) and end the back-door draft of the National Guard.

Some of those concrete promises are good and some are bad. What they have in common is that they are so few in number.

The rest of the acceptance speech was vague and noncommittal.

He blasted the Bush administration's assault on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, but he failed to note that he himself had voted along with almost all the Senate, for the notoriously anti-democratic USA PATRIOT Act. He said nothing about letting that horrific threat to democratic freedoms vanish in 2005 by refusing to renew it. Nor, ominously, did Kerry say (or do!) anything about the aggregious violations of civil liberties undertaken in his name by the DNC, which had protesters barred from the convention floor and even taken away in handcuffs, and by the city of Boston, which tried to fence protesters into a razor-wire-enclosed "free-speech" cage--until now a signature method developed by the Bush administration.

He vowed to pursue the so-called, and misleadingly named "War" on Terror, without once promising to put an end to the Bush Administration's extralegal methods of arrest and detention without trial.

He barely mentioned the Iraq War itself and what he would do about getting the U.S out of that mess, referring instead in vague terms about not sending our troops into harm's way unless it was absolutely necessary.

All of this suggests that Kerry plans on running the same kind of issue-dodging, vacuous campaign that Al Gore ran against George Bush last time.

Kerry's campaign strategy might work (Bush is viewed much more negatively than he was in 2000), but the likelihood is that it won't. Unless he gives the left--both Nader supporters and those who have simply written off voting--some reason to vote for him and convinces undecided voters he really does stand for something besides vague platitudes, it's quite likely Bush will squeak in again--especially given Republicans' demonstrated willingness cheat on the actual balloting ballot-counting, and given their huge advantage in control over states' electoral machinery.

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Thursday, July 29, 2004
Murder Not So Foul

In this law-and-order era of George Bush and John Ashcroft, when a majority of Americans still say it's right and proper to have the state execute people for the crime of murder, even if there may be a few mistakes made and innocent people killed, when is murder not murder?

The answer: when it's committed by a guy in uniform against somebody from another country.

Look at the record.

Last January, a group of four U.S. soldiers deliberately pushed two Iraqi civilians who were completely under their control into the river and then allegedly watched as one of them, 19-year-old Fadel Hassoun, drowned. The men lied about what they had done, and subsequently, when that didn't work, claimed that they'd acted under orders from unspecified higher-ups.

The military charged three of the men not with murder, but with "involuntary manslaughter"--the same charge you might get if you negligently hit and killed someone with your car in an accident. A fourth soldier in the group was charged with assault for pushing the dead man's cousin, 23-year-old Marwan Fadel Hassoun, into the river (he managed to swim to safety and to report the crime, which is the only reason there's any prosecution at all).

The explanation for the "involuntary manslaughter" charge is that these liars said they didn't know the men were drowning, and in the words of one, "wouldn’t have left the scene" if they'd known that was happening. (Several of the commanders of the three men's platoon have been handed "non-judicial" punishments, which do not involve any jail time.)

Imagine if this same situation had occurred among civilians here in the U.S. In fact, don't imagine it. We have cases--for example one in Pennsylvania recently where a kid dropped a chunk of ice of a bridge onto an interstate, which shattered the windshield of a car, killing the driver. The local DA immediately went with a murder charge, not manslaughter.

If anything, the absolute control that American occupying troops have in Iraq over the people they capture should demand a higher standard for behavior, not a lower one. Instead, this kind of cover-up--all too typical--is just what encourages some young American soldiers to become modern incarnations of the jack-booted German SS of World War II.

It's a fair guess that the punishment faced by the only American soldier facing murder charges for the killing of an Iraqi, Capt. Rogelio Maynulet, 29, whose case is currently being investigated in a hearing in Germany, will ultimately be similarly brushed under the rug. Maynulet allegedly killed a wounded Iraqi after a car chase last May. His former commander, at the hearing yesterday, reportedly praised him as "special, trustworthy and honest."

The problem is that such virtues, even if true, are completely irrelevant in a war situation. People who might be absolute saints in their treatment of fellow soldiers and their countrymen, can still act monstrously towards those they perceive as the enemy. I’m sure many of the worst SS troops in the Nazi army were upstanding citizens in their home communities, and model soldiers in dealing with their compatriots, even as they butchered Jews, Gypsies, and enemy soldiers. Such testimony from Maynulet's commander should be heavily discounted by tribunal members hearing his case--but probably won't be.

An army of occupation is automatically viewed negatively by those who are being occupied. Even after American troops liberated Western Europe from the Nazis in 1945, American troops were often resented by those they had rescued. But with American war crimes and criminals in uniform being given such license now, even as captured alleged combatants are being hooded, raped, humiliated, tortured and even killed, i''s little wonder that our 140,000 troops in Iraq and 15,000 troops in Afghanistan are hated, feared and viewed so widely not just as unpleasant overlords, but as the enemy.

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Wednesday, July 28, 2004
Slip-Sliding Away: Kerry May Waffle on the Death Penalty, But He's a Far Cry from Bush the Executioner

It is hard for progressives to get excited about John Kerry. He supports the War in Iraq and actually wants to send more troops in, voted for the Patriot Act, voted for NAFTA and on and on. Yet there is one issue where Kerry stands in stark contrast to his opponent, George Bush: the death penalty.

As with everything else involving Sen. Kerry, he's not 100 percent here. In this case, back 2001, he backed away from his abolitionist stance on the death penalty, to take the popular position that he would support penalty for "foreign terrorists."

Since one of his arguments against the death penalty in the past has been that he doesn’t think it can be fairly administered and mistake-free, you have to wonder why he thinks that in the case of alleged foreign terrorists, those problems wouldn't exist. Indeed, given the fevered state of the nation where terrorism and Islam is concerned, it's likely that any failures in the quality of justice of the American legal system would be most in evidence in a trial of a foreign terrorist suspect. Just imagine trying to get a fair and impartial jury to consider the fate of Osama Bin Laden, or anyone connected with the 9/11 attacks. (It's also worth pondering just what is meant by the terms "foreign" and "terrorist." The current administration and Attorney General John Ashcroft have been applying the term terrorist rather broadly, such that it might well be applied to people who exercise their right to protest at military bases or presidential appearances. And does Kerry include among "foreign," those people who are in the U.S. on green cards?)

A second troubling thing is that Kerry voted for the notorious 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. Recall that this dreadful anti-democratic piece of legislation, sponsored by Sen. Bob Dole, and supported and signed into law by President Clinton, was drawn up in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, at a time when everyone was being told (incorrectly as we learned) that that bloody act of terror was probably the work of Arab terrorists. Kerry, ever a politician to go with the popular flow, went along with this bill, which besides adding terrorism to the list of crimes that qualified for the federal death penalty (five years before Kerry actually said he favored death for foreign terrorists), also made it much more difficult for anyone sentenced to death to appeal their sentences. For example, it limited such condemned prisoners to one habeas corpus appeal.

How Kerry can justify making it more difficult for condemned women and men to challenge their sentences and convictions at the same time that he claims the death penalty is unfairly administered and fallible is beyond me, and I'm sure beyond him too.

Still, all that said, in Kerry, the Democratic Party has a candidate who almost totally opposes the death penalty, running against George W. Bush, a man who holds the record for number of people executed under his governorship, and who has actually laughed at and mocked some of those people executed on his watch.

With over 3487 Americans awaiting death at the hands of the state (fully half of them non-white), that is a significant policy difference on an important issue.

At this point voters should hold Kerry's feet to the fire and make him explain his vote on the Effective Death Penalty Act, and also on applying the flawed death penalty system to "foreign terrorists."

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Tuesday, July 27, 2004
Finally standing for something might even help Kerry win some Republican votes

I had an interesting experience yesterday, getting to know the "undecided" voter.

In my alter ego as mild-mannered reporter for Business Week, which publication occasionally asks me to go out and do some reporting around the Philadelphia area, I was scaring up undecided and so-called "swing" voters to interview about Bush and Kerry.

What I managed to find were some people who described themselves as basically conservative on economic policy, but quite liberal or libertarian on social policy, and almost unanimously anti-war.

On the topic of the economy, all but one of the voters I talked to--all of whom had voted for Bush last time around, but nearly all of whom were on the fence or leaning towards Kerry now--said that they thought the economy was doing poorly, especially for those with lower incomes. But most of them also said they really didn't care that much, because they themselves were doing all right. They liked Bush's tax cuts as policy, and weren't bothered that they favored the well off either, some because they thought that it was only fair that if people managed to earn a lot of money, they ought to be able to keep it, and some because they thought that helping the rich eventually trickled down to help the poor.

These were comfortable people. They didn't get excited about things as we discussed them.

Until we got to social issues and the war. All of these wavering voters were opposed to restrictions on abortion, even one guy who said he opposed abortion himself. They were also upset at Bush for proposing an amendment to the Constitution banning gay marriages, and for not opposing an amendment banning flag burning. What united these people was their dismay at Bush's blatant use of religion in government policy.

As one middle-aged, life-long Republican woman put it, "I find his use of religion to define social positions to be not acceptable."

As for the war against Iraq, I couldn't find a single swing or independent voter who supported it, though all of them felt that, wrong or not, the U.S. couldn't simply pull up stakes and leave after having destroyed the place.

The other thing they all agreed on was that they were not excited about Kerry. Some expressed open dislike or distrust of him, because of what they considered his lack of conviction on issues and his vacillation, which struck most as pandering.

It would seem to me on the basis of this little unscientific survey that the Kerry/DLC campaign strategy is off target. The chance of his winning any of the hard right voters for whom the election is defined by such things as abortion, flag-burning, closing the borders, etc., is zero. Where a Democrat has a shot at attracting actual Republican voters is on issues like separation of church and state, and imperialist aggression. It is the thinking Republicans that can be reached, not the yahoos, and what these thinking Republicans want is not soft-pedaled Democratic positions, it's strong traditional Republican ones.

Instead of staying fuzzy and non-committal on major issues like the war, abortion rights and gay marriage, Kerry should come out with a firm plan to get the U.S. out of Iraq and out of future wars of choice, and he should state firmly and unequivocally that he wants a clear dividing line between church and state.

This all might be beyond Kerry, who seems incapable these days at least of taking a firm stand on anything except a preference for the Red Sox over the Yankees. But if he were to take such strong positions on what are, after all, some very traditional American values, he might well find a surprising number of disenchanted Republicans jumping the fence this November.

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Monday, July 26, 2004

Get Busy American Workers! Globalization's Gonna Eat Your Lunch

It's all well and good that John Kerry is calling for a hike in the pathetically low minimum wage, though his proposal still would leave tens of millions of American workers below the poverty level despite their working fulltime.

But who in the Democratic Party, which claims to be the party of the working person, is talking about the ongoing speed-up that is seeing Americans lucky enough to have a job working ever-longer hours for ever lower pay?

For that is the dirty secret of the globalization that John Kerry, as ardently as George W. Bush, advocates.

Today, the once widely hailed reform establishing the 40-hour week is history. The average American now works 42 hours a week--;longer than in any other industrialized country except for South Korea or the Czech Republic.

Vacations are also getting shorter.

Our pensions are also being taken away. For some time now, corporations have been substituting "defined contribution" pension plans, where the payout on retirement is based on how much a worker put in and how well the company invested the assets, for the traditional "defined benefit" plans that set benefits based upon a worker's length of service and final salary. The new plans, particularly in an era of stagnating stock markets, are a bad joke.

Few of today's American workers will likely be able to retire even at the new delayed retirement age of 67 set by the Social Security Administration. They'll have to keep slogging away to pay the rent, food bills and medical expenses until they die.

All of this can be directly attributed to globalization, which enables U.S. companies to extort longer hours and reduced benefits out of workers by making the threat to move production or jobs overseas.

Until American workers wake up and return by the millions to the trade unions that won the 40-hour week, pensions, and paid vacations generations ago (only 9 percent of U.S. workers are currently unionized, down from some 35 percent during the early 1950s), and until they demand that elected officials start acting in their, instead of corporate interests, this slide will continue, and probably accelerate.

Today it's 42 hours and a bad pension. As other companies follow the lead of United Airlines, which last week announced it may do away with company contributions to employee pensions, it will soon be 42 hours and no pension.

Can a six-day week and child labor be far behind?

Welcome to the 19th Century folks!

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Friday, July 23, 2004 Farce or Dirty Tricks?

It's hard to know whether to say we are entering dangerous times, or just an era of high farce.

The breathless news yesterday, trumpeted all over Fox, CNN, and the radio waves, that some unspecified "domestic" terrorists were planning an attack on media vehicles in Boston during the Democratic National Convention, is a case in point.

Granted that people on the left are frustrated that the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, John Kerry, is a dud on progressive issues, and particularly a massive disappointment on the matter of the War against Iraq, it's hard to imagine any organization, left or right, trying to mess with the convention because of that.

But come on! These days there simply are no domestic terrorist groups on the left operating in the U.S. The Weather Undergrounders are all teaching or being lawyers. And it seems doubtful that right wing groups would see Kerry and the Democrats as particularly worthy of such an attack either. They're more worried about Ashcroft's black helicopters than they are about Kerry's new spooks.

That leaves us with two possibilities. Either this is just a hoax being played by some merry prankster, or it's something much more sinister—an attempt by the Bush Administration to raise the level of anxiety in the country, and perhaps to encourage both the Boston police and the media to take a harder line on DNC protesters.

The hoax theory seems quite plausible, given how dumb the threat itself sounds. Attacking the media is, after all, a pretty stupid idea to start with. But the earnest, hyped coverage given to the story by the media itself, and the media’s own response, which included, reportedly, some media organizations hiring armed guards for their TV remote crews and offering flak jackets to their staff, has lent the story a credibility it doesn’t deserve.

As for the other theory, why not? The Homeland Security Department has been using its silly color-coded alert system to keep the public on edge now for several years. And Ashcroft, over at the Justice Department, would have us believe that there are terrorists living in our neighborhoods, ready to strike with everything from poison pens to anthrax in our water fountains. Only recently the government announced, without providing any details whatsoever, that there were Al Qaeda plans for an attack on the U.S. that could be "even more catastrophic" than the 9/11 attacks in 2001. How easy to add this latest threat against the media to the mix. And the media just revel in this stuff, which makes for great ratings.

And there lies the danger. This administration, down in the polls, clearly will stop at nothing to win another four years in office. Look what we know they're doing--trying to zap blacks from the voting lists in Florida, while keeping Latinos on, talking about cancelling the election altogether, thinking of ways to "suppress" the black vote in Detroit. And one good way to prop up Bush is to hype the terror threat to the max, and if possible, to make the media even more pro-administration than it already is.

All these silly warnings about alleged Al Qaeda threats disappear into the memory hole within weeks of their being announced—remember the so-called Al Qaeda plans to blow up bridges, to hijack ferries, to attack small towns, to use James Bond-style poison pens, to poison reservoirs, etc., etc.? All nonsense, and all forgotten. And probably all made up.

While my inclination is to say this is all a farce--and certainly the response of the media is laughable and pathetic--I suspect that what is happening probably does have its origins in the White House, and has to be taken much more seriously than that.
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Friday, July 23, 2004
A Bloody, Losing Cause

The true nature of the new "sovereign" Iraqi government headed by "Prime Minister" Iyad Alawi is becoming increasingly apparent as the U.S. conducts a campaign of terror bombing in Fallujah in his name and with the express blessing of this admitted former CIA asset.

For the seventh time in the past several weeks the U.S. sent a plane to bomb a house in the insurgent-held city of Fallujah despite a supposed cease-fire negotiated between U.S. forces and the armed force in that largely Sunni city. As before, a number of people were killed by the rocket attack, including three children, with no evidence that the insurgents or "foreign terrorists" alleged by U.S. military authorities to have been there were hurt--or were even there.

The give-away about what is really going on came in a statement from the U.S. military’s Central Command, quoted in an Associated Press story, which said the latest attack, along with six earlier ones that have also demolished homes in Fallujah, "have eroded Zarqawi's base of support and ability to carry out terror attacks against security forces and the people of Iraq."

Note the wording here. It's the "base of support" that these bombs and rockets are really aimed at, not the actual insurgents. In other words, by blowing up women and children in their homes in Fallujah, the U.S. is hoping to convince the people of Fallujah to stop hiding and providing assistance to the insurgents in their midst who are allegedly being led by the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Aside from the fact that such deliberate targeting of civilians is a war crime, it is a tactic doomed to failure.

The same strategy was used in Vietnam over three decades ago, and we know how successful that was. The U.S. would bomb or napalm villages in territory controlled by the Viet Cong, killing innocent civilians in droves, and also burning down and chemically poisoning and defoliating their crops, in hopes that they would turn on the Viet Cong in their midst, and stop supplying them with aid and cover.

It never worked. Instead, the tactic just created new converts to the struggle against the American invader.

The same thing is now happening in Iraq.

Alawi and the Iraqi government cannot hope to challenge the insurgency with the hastily cobbled-together security force that is being groomed to take over from the U.S. That task will necessarily be up to the 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, and especially to the air force, which can bomb with virtual invincibility from the air, keeping politically damaging U.S. casualties to a minimum. This will be true for years to come.

Meanwhile, in order to maintain the fiction that the Iraqi government is sovereign and that the U.S. military in not an occupying force, but rather an invited ally, Alawi has to claim that he is ordering these "precision" bombings, as well as other aggressive actions by U.S. forces.

But the more he does this, the more he is seen by Iraqis as a stooge of the U.S.

Eventually, a line will be crossed, and Alawi will become seen by the majority of Iraqis as the villain. Then, as happened repeatedly in Vietnam, he will be removed by the U.S.--and probably packed off to exile with a bundle of cash hustled up while he was head of state--to be replaced by a new leader who will in turn be presented as being a true leader of Iraq.

All the while, American soldiers, and Iraqis in much larger numbers, will be dying. The American media continue to play along with this bloody, criminal charade, just as they did during the Vietnam War. So does Kerry, who at least back in the early 1970s had the sense and the guts to call it for what it was.

Now, even though it should be obvious that the whole "sovereignty" thing in Iraq is an election ploy by George Bush to try to get out from under the colossal blunder of his invasion of Iraq at least until November 2, Kerry is playing along, pretending right along with Bush that there is a real government now in Baghdad, and that the U.S. is acting at its behest.

Most people grow wiser with age. Kerry seems to have merely grown more craven.
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Thursday, July 22, 2004
Urgent Call: Be in New York August 29 to Protest Bush!

Now that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has done George Bush's hatchet work, and, in a grotesque insult to the First Amendment and to the city's tradition of protest, refused a permit for protesters against the Republican National Convention to use the Great Lawn of Central Park, it is more important than ever that everyone who wants to send the message "The World Says No to the Bush Agenda of War, Greed, Lies and Hate!" be there on Aug. 29.

There, instead of the Great Lawn, will be a march from 14th Street up Seventh Avenue, directly past the front of Madison Square Garden, site of the RNC, across 34th Street, and down the West Side Highway to a rally site back in the Chelsea area.

Bring plenty of water if it's a sunny day, because there won't be any trees or other sources of shade on the highway, where the city has granted the permit.

More daring souls may heed the call of some more militant protesters who are calling for marchers, instead of turning west on 34th Street at the Garden, to turn away and head for Central Park, to liberate the Great Lawn. Call to Reclaim the Park. In that case, handkerchiefs, not water, should be packed, as the police are likely to try to block such an effort to defend Free Speech.

United for Peace and Justice, the umbrella organization that had struggled to win a permit for the park for the past year to no avail, finally threw in the towel Wednesday. The city had cut off negotiations, and UFPJ was convinced that they would not win in court, even if they could get a hearing in the next five weeks. A Federal District judge and a panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Bloomberg's refusal to grant a march permit to the same group back in February 2003, showing that the Bush judges are gaining increasing power to slash and burn the Constitution.

UFPJ spokesman Bill Dobbs told "This Can' Be Happening!" that there was concern that the "clock was ticking" and failure to secure any permit might deter people from attending the march and rally.

Republican Bloomberg's win marks a major victory in the Bush Administration's four-year campaign of shunting protests away from Bush/Cheney venues and from the media that so slavishly cover them, and of fencing in demonstrators, a strategy that began with the 2000 RNC convention in Philadelphia.

The good news is the Aug. 29 march and rally are on.

Whether you're coming with water bottles or kerchiefs, be there!

Tell Bloomberg he may be worried about the grass in Central Park. We're worried about the Bush in Washington--and illegal clear cutting in the Bill of Rights.
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Making small donors count: No more free money for Kerry!

Are you outraged and frightened by the Bush presidency? Tempted to toss some money to the Democrats in hopes of getting Bush tossed out of office before he can do any more damage, yet frustrated that the Kerry doesn't offer much of a choice?

Stop! Hold on to your wallet! Don't squander that cash! Politics in America is all about money. It talks, it buys politicians, and it buys access.

But the problem is, money only has this power when it comes in large denomination bills, and the most you can probably hope to come up with is a Hamilton or a C-note.

The hope was that with campaign finance "reform," big corporate money would be eliminated and small donations would take over. In reality, big money still flows in by the back door--posing as "party development" support, single-issue support, etc.

Meanwhile, small donors in record numbers are pouring record amounts of money into Democratic Party and Kerry for President campaign coffer, but with absolutely no return on their investment. Unfortunately, only the big money counts, in terms of influencing the candidate.

Why? Because a big donation to the party or the candidate comes in marked bills. It has an identity tag. Kerry knows that Chevron or Pfizer or Time-Warner has given him or the DNC a five-figure cash wad--and he knows what he's supposed to deliver in return. If one of us gives him $100 or even $1000, he doesn't even notice. Nor does he feel he owes us a thing.

That means that even if 300,000 people give him $100-$1000 each, as they have been doing, he still won't give any of them or their issues the time of day.

Now this gives me a great idea. We little people should be putting our money in a collective escrow account. We set up a fund for John Kerry, and establish a binding set of rules. Donors can put their money in, stipulating that it will only be sent on to the candidate once the fund reaches some significant level--say $100,000. Furthermore, it will not be forwarded until Kerry makes a clear public commitment to do what we, the donors, want. There could, for example, be an anti-war fund. Kerry would be notified of the fund's existence, and of the amount of money in it, and would be told that this fund would only go to his campaign if and when he began calling for a withdrawal of American troops from Iraq by, say, March 1, 2005. If he never made that pledge, the money would simply be returned to the donors on the day after Election Day, Nov. 3, 2004. (With credit card donations, that's easy to do. Rental car agencies and other businesses do this all the time for deposits from customers.)

A similar fund could be established for, say, protecting and strengthening Social Security. Money could be collected and promised to Kerry if he would pledge to eliminate the cap on income subject to Social Security taxation, and to disavow any plans to "privatize" the system.

The possibilities for such grass-roots financial pressure on Kerry are almost endless. Single-issue groups could come up with their own goals and funds. The big difference between this kind of campaign money and the stuff that comes from corporate interests is that the demands of anescrow fund would be public, where the corporate money is cutting private deals.

My suggestion is that MoveOn.org, or some of the other Internet-based groups that have been pushing for donations to the effort to defeat Bush, stop simply asking people to donate money, and use their already existing fund-raising lists to develop these escrow campaign donation accounts instead. Trade unions, who have squandered millions of dollars in members' contributions over the years on Democratic candidates who have turned around and screwed them repeatedly should take the same approach, holding their funds in reserve until they get iron-clad, publicly announced commitments from Democratic candidates to concretely support their specific agendas.

If we start holding out the promise of money in amounts that rival the Chevrons and Pfizers and Time-Warners--all of whom we know attach specific conditions and strings to their donations-- we may start to get the same kind of support for our progressive agenda that those corporations have been getting for their reactionary ones.

So my recommendation is this: Stop giving any money to Democratic politicians and especially to John Kerry! Only put your money in a fund that is collective, to enhance your voice, and that is escrowed and contingent upon the recipients' doing exactly what you want them to do.

PS-If you like this idea, pass it along.
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Wednesday, July 21, 2004
With Berger out as his national security adviser, Kerry should change tack on Iraq

With Sandy Berger, the former National Security Adviser to President Bill Clinton, and main foreign policy adviser to Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry now formally out of the Kerry campaign because of charges he filched secret documents while reviewing them in the national security archive, maybe there's a small chance Kerry will wake up and stop trying to outdo Bush as a war hawk on Iraq. Berger is the guy who has been saying that the U.S. should plan on having troops in Iraq for "at least" another three years, and that the U.S. needs more, not fewer troops in Iraq. No surprise there. He was also behind Clinton's illegal bombings of Afghanistan and Sudan, and the bloody U.S.-led war in Kosovo. The man is and has been an unabashed advocate of U.S. empire. Perhaps not as clumsy and brutish as the Bush neocons, but I'm sure he'd be perfectly comfortable sitting over coffee in a room with Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. Of course, the likelihood is that Kerry himself thinks the same way as Berger does. Why else would he have taken on Berger as his campaign national security adviser? But at least Berger's troubles with the FBI give Kerry an opportunity to reassess his politically foolish strategy of trying to dodge the issue of the war in Iraq. Even if he does want to continue promoting imperialist schemes abroad as president, Kerry ought at least to realize that the American public has soured on Iraq, and that he is losing votes and support as long as he continues to back more war and occupation. Now, with Berger out, would be a great time for progressive Democrats to send that message to the DNC.
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Tuesday, July 20, 2004
Pelting Linda Ronstadt

The over-the-top reaction of the pot-bellied gambling addicts at The Aladdin in Las Vegas to singer Linda Ronstadt's pre-concert recommendation that they all go see Michael Moore's movie, "Fahrenheit 9-11," is an indication of the desperate state of Bush backers, whose numbers continue to dwindle with each new soldier's death or dismemberment.

The Moore movie may offer a flawed analysis of the causes of the Bush invasion of Iraq, but it sure does a great job of exposing Bush himself as a dimwit and a pawn.

You can pick apart some of Moore' arguments--for example his claim that plans for the World Trade Center attack were not detected in advance because of the Bush family's close ties to the Bin Laden family, or that the invasion of Afghanistan was motivated by a desire by Unocal for an oil pipeline from the Caspian to the Indian Ocean--but nobody can challenge his clips depicting Bush as the unreconstructed ignoramus and bullying frat brat that he was and still remains.

When confronted by such a damaging and yet undeniable charge, the typical schoolyard response is usually a punch in the snoot, and that is what the yahoos at The Aladdin, and the Aladdin's manager, Bill Timmons, basically did to Ronstadt, pelting the stage with olives and whole drinks, shouting her down and, in Timmons' case, canceling her contract.

Not terribly bright, these guys. They wasted their drinks, and Timmons, no doubt, will be paying Ronstadt handsomely now for a show she won't be providing. But then these folks are in Las Vegas blowing wads of cash on games and slot machines that they ought to know are, like a Florida election, massively rigged in management's favor, which shows just how astute they are.

If the president and his party were riding high, if the war were still popular, and Ronstadt had gone on stage with the same endorsement of the film, the folks in the audience would probably have just snickered, hanging on to their drinks.
It's a shame John Kerry doesn't have as much moxie as Linda R. When Max Cleland, Kerry's campaign co-manager, said that Bush had taken American into a war against Iraq based on a "pack of lies," Kerry, instead of supporting the triple-amputee Vietnam War vet and former U.S. Senate colleague in this rather obvious assertion of fact, had his campaign send out a message to his backers and spokespeople to tone down the anti-Bush rhetoric.

Little surprise there. Kerry says he is planning on continuing Bush's Mid-East war if he is fortunate enough to take over the Oval Office after November 2, so he hardly wants to admit he'd be assuming the responsibility for a policy based on lies. No doubt he'll be telling plenty of his own whoppers once in office. His recent call for doubling the number of U.S. spies overseas assures us of a whole term's worth of new lies and deception. My guess is that Linda won't be singing the national anthem at a Kerry inauguration either.

For my review of Moore's film, please go to This Can't Be Happening! Reviews .
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Wednesday, July 14, 2004
Kerry Must Stand or Take a Fall

John Kerry just doesn't get it.

I am sure that deep in his Boston Brahmin heart, this calculating child of privilege really feels more comfortable among the tonier set, but even so, you'd think someone on his campaign staff would have enough contact with ordinary people to know that he would benefit from taking an uncompromising progressive stand on a controversial issue or two.

My read here in a swing county in the swing state of Pennsylvania--one which has plenty of suburbanites and working class people in it, black and white--is that average Americans want the U.S. out of Iraq, want national health insurance, want tax breaks for the rich ended, want the Constitution left alone, don't want the Patriot Act renewed, and don't believe "free trade" is good for anyone.

Why doesn't the Democratic candidate take a stand on any of these positions?

Okay, his rich corporate doner base and his Democratic Leadership Council strategists don't want to touch the free trade issue. But national healthcare would be a boon not just to the public, but to corporations that would no longer have to foot the bill for employee healthcosts--a burden that has long put them at a competitive disadvantage to companies overseas, particularly in Canada and Europe (check out how much more cheaply a Detroit car company can build a vehicle in Canada, with its national health plan, than in the U.S., where they have to fund the health care for their employees).

And the war? Now that everyone agrees the evidence on which the U.S. attacked Iraq was false, what does Kerry have to lose by renouncing his 2002 vote authorizing an invasion and saying it's time for the U.S. to pull out, perhaps with a repeat of his famous line about the Vietnam War: How do you tell a young man he has to be the last one to die for a war that is wrong?

On taxes, Kerry has made vague noises about eliminating the Bush tax cuts for those making over $200,000, but those rich Americans, the vast majority of whom are Republicans, were getting obscene tax breaks before the Bush cuts. Why can't Kerry say that, and announce a policy that would push their taxes up? And while he's at it, why doesn't he say he'll eliminate the cap on Social Security taxable income so that wealthy people pay in on all their income, instead of just the first $80,000? That would allow him to put forward a claim that he would eliminate any threat to the benefits of future retirees, with no increase in payroll taxes.

If these things are just too bold for a man who follows the teachings of Bill Clinton (think small and don't carry a stick)--who in fact voluntarily went to war and killed people in a conflict he didn't even believe in--he could at least come out four-square for the integrity of the Constitution, boldly denouncing Republican efforts to undermine it with things like a gay marriage ban amendment or a flag-burning amendment, or with measures like the USA Patriot Act or the appointment of right wing ideologues to federal judgeships.

Because he can't take a stand on anything of significance (even the appointment of judges!), Kerry runs the risk of blowing this election, which should be his in a walk, given George Bush's low ratings.

I mean, geez, even when a story came out over the weekend in Newsweek saying that Bush cabinet officials were scheming up plans to abort the November election if there were some unspecified terror attack, all Kerry could say was that it was "too soon to comment"!

The problem is that the other thing John Kerry doesn't realize, having been traveling in Martha's Vineyard and Georgetown circles for so long, is that most average Americans hate vacillators. That's why the polls show that despite their dislike of his policies--economic and foreign--a majority of Americans still say they like Bush's "decisiveness". President Ronald Reagan benefited from the same perception.

Progressives and liberals can groan all they want about the illogic of such reasoning, but there it is: Americans want a president who is a leader.

Kerry, like Al Gore, living in his DLC cocoon and his wife's mansion, seems unaware of this.

If he doesn't come out and take some real stands on the issues that matter, he is likely to be joining Al on the talk circuit next year, where like Al, he can finally start taking some stands--when it no long matters and when nobody gives a Dick Cheney any more what he thinks.

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Monday, July 12, 2004

Hooray for the Philippines!

In order to save the life of a hostage being threatened with decapitation by Iraqi insurgents, the Philippine government has agreed to a demand that it withdraw its 2000 workers--most of whom, in keeping with long-standing colonial tradition, work as custodial and kitchen staff for the U.S. military--from Iraq.

There will be the usual blather from conservative warhawks here in the U.S. about "surrendering to terrorism" and all, but the truth is, the Philippines simply chose between two extortionists, and the U.S. came out the loser.

The Philippines never belonged in Iraq in the first place. This impoverished island has such a hard time taking care of its own people that tens of thousands of them--including many people with college degrees--end up traveling to wealthier countries all over Asia and the Middle East to work as domestic workers or manual laborers--or workers in the sex industry.

The country is also so beholden to the U.S., (which took the islands as a spoil of war at the end of the Spanish American War, and kept it as a colony for decades, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Filipino freedom fighters along the way), that it had little choice but to agree to be part of George Bush's "Coalition of the Willing" in Iraq. Had it not done so, the U.S. would have cut foreign aid, stopped backing loans that keep the economy barely afloat, and who knows, maybe even encouraged yet another military coup against the current civilian democratic government.

So here was a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't, and clearly, as far as most Filipinos were concerned, surrendering to the Iraqi insurgents' demands and saving the lives of a countryman made more sense than continuing to submit to American extortion.

The loss of the Filipino workers will be a big blow to the U.S. for two reasons. First, it will encourage the insurgents to capture and hold hostage troops and workers from other countries in that motley group of mostly poor and weak nations that buckled under American pressure and sent token units to join the "Coalition of the Willing." Faced with the same choice as the Philippines. many of them may make the same choice and pull out of the country.

Second, it forces the U.S. to take its already thinly stretched troops and put several thousand of them on KP duty full time.

If morale among American troops was already low, just wait until they're spending their days cleaning latrines and scraping plates.

At some point, maybe we Americans will have enough sense to get Washington to do what Filipinos have gotten Manila to do--bring them all home.

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Hear no Evil

Forget about where is the outrage. Where is the news?

On Sunday, the news agency Reuters reported that Newsweek magazine had a story saying that Tom Ridge, secretary of the Homeland Security Department, had asked the Justice Department to look into ways that the national presidential election set for Nov. 2 could be postponed in the event of a terrorist attack.

On Monday, there was no word of this shocking threat to American democracy in the nation's self-styled newspaper of record, the New York Times.

There was no mention of it in my local paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, either.

There was no condemnation of the idea from Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry or his shining-faced vice-presidential choice, John Edwards. Kerry was quoted as saying it was "too early" to comment! Now there's a ringing defense of democracy!

This news blackout about a major threat to our system of government should have everyone angry and worried.
There is absolutely no justification for delaying a presidential election--a point that Kerry and Edwards should be making right now, loudly and resolutely.

Security? Does anyone seriously believe that Al Qaeda has the capability of threatening the voting process in the world's most powerful nation? Maybe they could blow up a voting station or two, but is that any reason to shut down the process?

Fear of terrorists influencing the outcome of the vote? Well, I have no doubt that a major attack on a U.S. target by Al Qaeda anytime between now and election day will have an impact on voters, but whether it would make them more inclined or less inclined to vote for President Bush is anyone's guess. It could go either way. In any event, that's the breaks.

Just as the U.S. continued with a national election in the dark days of 1864 as the Civil War was raging, and in 1944 when the U.S. was at war around the globe, it can go ahead and hold an election in the face of a terrorist threat.

The real question we should be asking is why the Bush administration is so anxious to set up a mechanism for halting the election process.

My guess is that they are worried about the election, and want a fallback strategy they can use if things go badly in the coming campaign and it looks like they're going to lose.

With a law in place to postpone the election, then all they would have to do is have Attorney General John Ashcroft lean on his FBI to overlook some Al Qaeda plot, let an attack slip through, and then halt the election, giving Bush's campaign a chance to rally voters to him.

People in the corporate media may consider such thinking paranoid (though given the way this administration lied us into a huge war they should be more skeptical than that at this point), but that doesn't excuse them for the clearly political decision to ignore the enormous story here:

A sitting president's cabinet officers for security and justice are plotting ways to halt a national election for the first time in the history of the United States.

In other countries, we'd call that a coup in the making. (Heck, American authorities in Iraq even pressed "prime minister" Iyad Allawi to drop talk of possibly postponing elections in war-torn and terrorism-plagued Iraq, and that was considered news here in the U.S.)

When the same kind of thing happens in this country, it's apparently not even news.

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Sunday, July 11, 2004

Progressive Choice Limited

In the ongoing debate among progressives over the relative merits of working within the Democratic Party or going outside and trying to develop a third party, Dennis Kucinich has shown, once again, the weakness of the inside pressure strategy.
Kucinich, who never managed to make any headway in the primaries and remained stuck in the asterisk category, despite his have the most well articulated and honest positions on the key issues of the war, civil liberties, jobs, the economy and health care reform, soldiered nobly on through the entire campaign for the nomination, even after John Kerry had it locked up.
Kucinich and his supporters insisted that they needed to stay in right to the convention in order to pull Kerry to the left.
In the end, however, even Kucinich has fallen for the unity argument, with his partisans agreeing to drop their earlier insistence on a party platform plank calling for a U.S. pullout of troops from Iraq. Instead of such a ringing call, the war plank will feature Kerry-speak, saying that the troops should be pulled out of Iraq "when appropriate."

This cave-in on what was really the driving issue in Kucinich"s campaign is a sad end to what started out as an inspiring effort. It is bound to be disheartening to the many antiwar activists who had cheered Kucinich's strong condemnation of Bush's criminal invasion and his strategy of "pre-emptive war."

Meanwhile, the third party option is also in trouble. With a split between the Greens, who have opted for a half-hearted effort this year that would only challenge the Democrats in states where it won't matter, and with Ralph Nader off on his own, taking help from cynical right-wing Republicans, there is little likelihood of either having much impact on the November election.

Kerry and the conservative corporatists who run the Democratic Party these days will ignore the Greens as long as they don't contest Kerry in swing states like Ohio or Pennsylvania. As for Nader, once he starts dissembling, as he did on NPR on Friday, pretending coyly and entirely unbelievably that he doesn't know that Republican backers of his campaign are doing it to help Bush, he becomes not much different from other politicians. Better for him to simply acknowledge the Republican tactic and to tell supporters he'll take the help wherever he gets it and whatever its motives.

As it is, I suspect Nader will fade to asterisk status like Kucinich by Nov. 2.

Progressives and anti-war voters in the end will have to decide whether to forget the presidential ballot this year, or hold their noses and vote for Kerry.

I suspect I'll probably be one of the ones wearing nose plugs.

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Saturday, July 10, 2004

Psst! Wanna Buy a Bridge?

So the Senate Intelligence Committee has decided that the CIA provided flawed and false intelligence about Iraq in the lead-up to the war.

Anyone who believes that, and that the Bush administration and the sycophants in Congress who voted for the war (Kerry and Edwards among them) were simply snookered by the incompetents in Arlington probably also believes that George W. Bush's National Guard records during the period he was AWOL from duty just mysteriously and innocently got destroyed with no copies left, as the Pentagon is now claiming.

The truth? The CIA is a bureaucracy that operates under the direction the White House. There is simply no way that a bureaucracy, including the Central Intelligence Agency and its head George Tenet, go off on their own and do something like promote a war. Bureaucrats and bureaucracies do what is expected of them and don't make waves.

If the CIA provided flawed and false intelligence information about the alleged dangerousness of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, it clearly did so at the direction of the White House.

What do people think Vice (boy, there's an appropriate title!) President Dick Cheney was doing making all those visits to the CIA when it was compiling that information?

Friday, July 16, 2004

NAACP backs Mumia: Case Strong, Movement a Mess

The NAACP, after years of ducking taking a public stand on the case of Pennsylvania death row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, voted on an "emergency resolution" near the end of its annual convention in Philadelphia Thursday to call for a new trial for the black journalist/activist, and to urge local NAACP chapters to work toward that goal.

The resolution didn't come easily. Mumia supporters found that delegates who had hoped to introduce the measure had been decertified and barred from the convention, which met in the Philadelphia Convention Center. They also found that a planned panel on the death penalty, at which they had intended to raise Abu-Jamal's case, had been unexplainably cancelled. Only when MOVE activist Pam Africa and some other MOVE supporters threatened to picket the convention and even attempt to crash the delegates assembly, holding a white flag, did the organizatio--the nation's oldest civil rights group--relent. Even then, a behind-the-scenes bureaucratic effort was made to water down a draft resolution of support by removing the specific call for a new trial and making it a call for a review of all death penalty cases. Finally, with the help of several delegates, including David Graham Du Bois (a descendent of W.E.B. Du Bois) and Mayor John Street's son Sharif, NAACP Chair Julian Bond was persuaded to endorse and sign a resolution draft that made the specific call for a new trial.

The NAACP's endorsement of the call for a new trial is an important victory for Abu-Jamal, whose 23-year-old case is moving forward into the last stages of his appeal--this time in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. For while the venerable civil rights organization has supported Abu-Jamal in the courtroom--it filed an amicus brief in 2000 in support of his federal appeal--it had not until now put the organization on record as demanding for a new trial.

Abu-Jamal, though his attorney, noted the support which the NAACP has offered in his case over the years, and said, "I am humbled by and very grateful for the NAACP's support. The NAACP has taken stands through the years on behalf of so many people who have been victimized in society because of their race. I hope this resolution will help many others in situations similar to mine."

His lead attorney, Robert R. Bryan, added, "I think to have the support of the oldest and largest civil rights organization in the U.S. is of enormous importance to this case. Along with my client, I am very grateful to the NAACP for taking this stand."

In fact, while support for the resolution on the floor--it passed with one dissenting vote--was overwhelming, the NAACP leadership had to be dragged kicking and screaming into taking such a public position on this case. This despite the fact that this case was so cruelly and obviously contaminated by racism (the presiding judge was overheard, on day one of the trial, saying he would "help them fry that nigger" as he left the courtroom, and 11 qualified black jurors were barred from serving by the prosecution's use of peremptory challenges, ultimately leaving Abu-Jamal facing a jury with only two black members in a city that was 40 percent black).

Perhaps more important, this episode is also evidence of how weakened Abu-Jamal's support organization has become. Only Pam Africa's tactical skill at holding NAACP leaders' feet to the fire by threatening them with an embarrassing incident on the day Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry was speaking to the gathering managed to win the day and get the resolution to the floor.

Back in the mid to late 1990s, whenever there was a Mumia demonstration in Philadelphia, organizers could count on bringing out thousands, even tens of thousands of supporters, both local and bussed in from around the country. Today, Free Mumia demonstrations in Philadelphia--like the rally and march on Abu-Jamal's birthday back in April---are lucky to attract a few hundred people, half of them pulled in from New York and elsewhere.

What has happened?

The case, certainly, is as outrageous and compelling as ever. Abu-Jamal, who always has and continues to maintain his innocence, was convicted on the basis of the testimony of two key witnesses, a white taxi driver and a black prostitute, neither of whom was seen at the scene of the crime by any other witnesses (no one even recalled seeing the taxi, which was supposedly parked directly at the scene of the 1981 shootings of police officer Daniel Faulkner and Abu-Jamal--except for the prostitute, who said she saw it after the shooting, but not before). Both of those witnesses had grave credibility problems, too. Robert Chobert, the taxi driver, had been driving his cab on a suspended license, and unknown to the defense, had asked the prosecutor if he could help him get his license back--a request for a favor that makes his entire testimony seriously suspect. Cynthia White, the prostitute and star prosecution witness, had been repeatedly arrested and questioned--or coached--by detectives, in the weeks following the shooting of police officer Daniel Faulkner, and her story of what happened had evolved over those weeks to conform with the story ultimately presented by the prosecution. Suspiciously, of all the witnesses picked up at the scene on Dec. 9, 1981, only White, supposedly the prosecution's key eyewitness, was not brought to the paddy wagon to identify Abu-Jamal as the shooter, suggesting that police knew she probably couldn't.

The other evidence that played a key role in convincing the jury to convict was testimony by a hospital security guard and a police officer that they had allegedly heard Abu-Jamal confess to killing Faulkner in the Jefferson Hospital emergency room--but both had waited two months to report this stunning alleged confession to detectives. Neither said a thing about what would have been dramatic evidence of guilt to police investigators at the time of the shooting investigation. In fact, the police officer who was guarding Abu-Jamal at the time the alleged confession occurred told investigators the day of the shooting that Abu-Jamal had made "no comment" during his entire time in the ER.

Some "open and shut" case!

As I wrote in my book, "Killing Time," the prosecutor, Joseph McGill, also managed to purge 75 percent of the qualified black jurors from consideration during jury selection--exactly the percentage of black jurors he routinely managed to keep off juries during six other murder trials he handled as an assistant DA. That's a dreadful record of unconstitutional racial bias in jury selection that the NAACP should have been publicly denouncing for years, especially since it was ignored by the federal judge who considered Abu-Jamal's appeal in 2001. It's also the main basis for his appeal of his conviction before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, currently pending.

Why has there been so little public pressure for a new trial? Why weren't masses of people outside the NAACP demanding that the organization support Abu-Jamal? Because there's almost no one left to do it.

The throngs of people who used to come out to demand a new trial for Abu-Jamal have faded away as his case, over the past several years, was taken over by ideological lawyers and others who managed to convince Abu-Jamal to make his case a political attack on the entire legal system, instead of dealing with the key issues in his trial that offered the best chance to get him a new hearing.

They dredged up a whacked-out "witness," Arnold Beverly, who claimed he, and not Abu-Jamal, had shot Faulkner. Though Beverly’s story was incredible, sounded coached, though no other witnesses had seen him at the scene, and though his story conflicted with the evidence presented in court by Abu-Jamal's own witnesses in key ways, Jamal's then attorneys, Eliot Grossman and Marlene Kamish, ploughed ahead, sowing dissension in their wake, viciously maligning anyone in or out of the movement who questioned the strategy or their tactics, libeling Abu-Jamal's prior attorney Leonard Weinglass (about whom they sketched wild and unfounded conspiracy theories), making factual errors in their filings, and needlessly annoying judges before whom they needed to plead his case. In the end, Abu-Jamal's defense fund dried up as key supporters like Ossie Davis and Michael Farrell backed away from this train wreck.

In the past year, Abu-Jamal has finally seen the light. Dropping his flakey and woefully inexperienced legal duo (neither attorney had any federal death penalty appellate experience at all), he has hired the San Francisco-based Bryan, an acknowledged death penalty litigator and appellate pro, for his lead attorney.

He has also dropped the Arnold Beverly appeal, though many of his more ardent backers seem still to have missed--or ignored--this important development.

For his part, attorney Bryan has been reaching out to people and groups that had backed away from the movement in recent years. "I'm convinced that Mumia is innocent. Not everyone agrees with that, but this movement is open to anyone who feels that there has been a miscarriage of justice and that Mumia deserves a new, fair trial," he says.

Unfortunately, Abu-Jamal has not yet spoken out publicly against the sectarianism and personal ego-tripping that have poisoned his splintered movement, so it remains in ruins, as the latest campaign to persuade the NAACP to support him, and the small turnout at the April demonstration, amply demonstrate.

Meanwhile there is still a massive, unified government and law-enforcement campaign to see Abu-Jamal executed. The Fraternal Order of Police, the Philadelphia District Attorney's office, and even Governor Ed Rendell, who was D.A.--and McGill's boss--when Abu-Jamal was prosecuted in 1982, are all committed to seeing him die.

Until Abu-Jamal himself insists on seeking to rebuild a broader coalition, and openly condemns the sniping and character assassination that has been going on in his name outside the prison, he will pretty much be fighting his legal battles alone, with his attorneys and a few highly energetic supporters, but without any mass base.

Which is pretty unfortunate for him, and also for the many thousands of others on death row and in prison, for whom his case could be a clarion call for reform of a criminally corrupted justice system.

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