I’m a little puzzled as to why people would allow the press or the political pro’s to dictate who they vote for. Amazingly, most Democrats seem reconciled to the fact that they have a choice between Clinton and Obama. The argument is that if you vote for somebody who isn’t a front runner, because they were able to raise $500 million from corporations like Exxon and Pfizer, you’re wasting your vote.
An email from the Dennis Kucinich campaign today mentioned an interesting thing: there are some who think the New Hampshire upset for Hillary was something less than an expression of the will of the voters.
There’s a long tradition in Washington of pork barrel politics: when one member votes for another’s federal dollar giveaway, he gets to call in one of his own. When you read the “newsletters” of our politicians, they’re filled with self-congratulation for the pork that they’ve “brought home.” In a little place like Humboldt County, a couple of million is considered a lot of money. In Washington, it is, as Everett Dirkson used to say: “A million here, a million there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”
"But the dictionary definition of populist is: 'A member or adherent of a political party seeking to represent the interests of ordinary people; a person who holds or who is concerned with the views of ordinary people.'
--R. Limbaugh
The Times-Standard Editorial this morning trumpeted “Populism is back in America”.The editorial talked about how the Iowa caucuses showed how “populist” candidates had done so well. Sen. Barack Obama, who so far has collected $80 million in his race for the presidency, and Rev. Mike Huckbee are considered populists.
Actually Obama and Huckabee won because they had money and/or organization. Huckabee won because there are a lot of Christians in Iowa, and the Christian right is VERY well organized and very rich. And he’s their guy.
Obama won because he has spent even more money than Hillary: $44 million to her paltry $40 million. The $64 million question is: where did that money come from? If you know who paid it, you know who owns him. And I know it wasn’t me or other people putting in $25 here and $25 there. Opensecrets.org points out that 47,643 people donated more than $200 to Obama. By contrast, Dennis Kucinich has raised a little over $1 million, he has 908 $200 plus donors, and 69% of his donors gave less than $200.
Continue reading "Populists Win, People Happy, Film at 11" »
Seven years ago, when Dick Cheney seized power, I had a funny feeling that something was wrong. Bill Clinton, with his support of NAFTA, lies about Monica and amnesty to Mafia donors, didn’t do much for me, but like most Americans, I was becoming accustomed to crooks in power. But I thought there were still honest reporters, honest members of Congress, and honest judges to see that the Constitution protected us.
I was wrong.
Continue reading "The Lesser of Two Weevils is Still a Weevil" »
In an apparent attempt to prove they can keep up with the ER, the TS ran a column by Morton Kondracke that was right up there with O’Reilly at his raving best. The headline calls Democrats Bush haters, and does the usual equating freedom of speech with treason. He goes on to note that Bin Laden is still at large, and worries that the Democrats’ irrational doubting of Bush means planes are aimed at skyscrapers in Keokuk and Long Beach at this moment.
And this guy is the editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capital Hill. No wonder Congress is so screwed up.
One would think that members of Congress who are Democrats would support peace, human rights, and the Consititution. But no.
Continue reading "If You're in a Hole, You Need a Ladder, Not a Shovel" »
For those of you who just got out of the bath, the Arkleyville Reporter has done an abrupt about face on their editorial content. It could be just a little internal ethnic cleansing, or it could be the wolf taking off its sheepskin.
The budding dictatorship HAS really made some revolutionary changes in the American system of government, beyond giving the Vice President the steering wheel and institutionalizing torture as foreign policy. They’re also found a way to make voting irrelevant, while piously assuring us that being able to “vote” is what makes us different from the enemy.
It turns out there are ways to disenfranchise people beyond simply taking away their right to vote. There are at least three other options: dilution, reduction, and mind control.
We’ll talk about vote-rigging another time.
Like many of the people I know, I've been struggling with how to cope with a government that is increasingly out of our control. It's one thing to say we should end the war, we should stop kidnapping and torturing people, we should stop invading other countries to steal their resources and kill hundreds of thousands of their citizens, we should start taking care of our own people, and we should get the press and those in public office to pay attention to the electorate rather than the corporations who give them money. The real challenge is how do we do this?
A few weeks ago I got into a little contretemps with my congressman on the op-ed pages of the Times-Standard. I was frustrated by the fact that he and other Democrats SAY they oppose the war and various crimes the Cheney admininistration has committed, but they haven't done anything concrete to end the war most of us voted against last Novemeber, and they refuse to even consider impeaching Bush and Cheney. Despite the fact each of them took a "solemn oath" to protect and defend the Constitution, the lawless gang running this country has disregarded the will of the people, lied to them, and taken bribes from corporate donors to back this illegal and futile war, sweep away consititutional and human rights, and make our country the most hated and feared entity since Nazi Germany.
I went to see Michael Moore's movie "Sicko" last night (which was excellent, by the way), but that's my last trip to that theater, or any other in this county. From now on any movies I watch will be in the comfort of my own living room, or not at all. It’s not the movies that are the problem: I avoid 9 out of 10 of them already, since there are only so many fights, murders, explosions and breasts I’m willing to pay $13 to see ($8.50 plus $4.50 for a small popcorn). Nor does “product placement” (read subliminal advertising. . .when the stars smoke the audience smokes, which is why tobacco companies invest in movies) bother me. Bruce Willis is not my role model.
“Iraqi Freedom” has a different meaning since the Johns Hopkins study was published in the Lancet last fall. Something around two and a half percent of all Iraqis have died since the US invaded, and one can safely assume that another 10 percent have been injured, and a whole lot more have lost their homes. Over a million people free of life, heath and home: that’s something to be proud of, America.
This morning’s paper was full of examples of how The System works, but the best was yet another story about Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, aided and abetted by a “Democratic? state legislature, starting up yet another slush fund (through an “officeholder committee?) which in two months netted him $180,000. That’s on top of the $246,000 that his re-election campaign has taken in since November. . .for a reelection bid he can never make. That’s almost half a million dollars in two months. Then there’s the $1.3 million from millionaires and corporations he’s gotten for his second inaugural celebration, most of which he’ll miss with a broken leg from a skiing accident.
And, by the way, do you think he paid for the skis he fell from, the lift ticket that got him up the hill, or the private jet that took him to Idaho? Think again.
Seventy years ago the German people allowed an evil group to seize control of their country. Using fear and racism, the Nazis unleashed a holocaust of oppression, destruction and death that left Europe and Russia depopulated and in ruins, tens of millions of innocent people dead, and even more lives shattered. Their victims vowed that never again would this be allowed to happen.
Six years ago the American people allowed an evil group to seize control of their country. The Cheney-Bush administration has violated treaties, trampled international law and human rights, set up torture camps in foreign countries and invaded sovereign states, unleashing a campaign of oppression, destruction and death that has killed three-quarters of a million people, ruined the lives of many more, and made our country’s name an object of fear and loathing throughout the world.
The imminent re-election of Arnold Schwartzenegger as governor of California is a lesson in three Achilles heels in our electoral system: first, the gullibility of the electorate that such a clown could have been elected in the first place; second, the black-hole vacuum of decent candidates in the Democratic Party (witness the Gray eminence he replaced AND the one running against him now); and third, spectacular success of Ahnold in raising money, the mother’s milk of politics. Even in the golden cesspit of the American government, $113 million ain’t exactly chump change. That’s as of November 3, and it goes up by $95,000 a day. This from the guy who said “Here’s how it works: money comes in, favors go out, and the people lose.?
That was then, this is now.
It’s September 11th again. The newspapers, the television, the radio, and even the movies are full of 9/11 headlines, stories, and images. And speculation. And profitmaking. Like so many modern occurrences, the actual events and the people involved in them have become more symbolic than real. The connotation of the events of that day, the flag-waving, the hyperbole, the deification of innocent working people killed in the course of doing their jobs, dwarf the actual historical significance.
It’s time we put September 11, 2001 behind us.
A friend recently told me to google the word “failure? for some interesting results. What came up was “Biography of George W. Bush.? There was also a disclaimer from Google that the link wasn’t their idea, that the search engine had been “googlebombed.? They go on to explain that “determined pranksters? can skew search results by linking words to certain sites. The explanatory blog, dated September of 2005, blames “a number of webmasters? for this googlebombing.
Regardless of what one may think of Mr. Bush personally, more and more people are coming to the realization that the war in Iraq, and, by extension, the War on Terror, have failed in their stated objectives. However, they have succeeded in doing what they actually set out to do: enriching a small number of powerful people and providing an excuse to suspend treaties and the Constitution, and providing the APPEARANCE of protecting Americans from external threats.
“The government appears to argue here that. . .because the President is designated Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy he has been granted the inherent power to violate not only the laws of Congress, but the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution itself.
We must note that the office of the Chief Executive itself has been created, with its powers, by the Constitution. There are no hereditary kings in America, and no powers not created by the Constitution. So all “inherent powers? must derive from that Constitution.?
--Hon. Anna Diggs Taylor
When we as a society are immersed in immediate self-gratification, and all our wishes are anticipated, controlled, marketed and fulfilled, it is often difficult to remember why the men who set up this country went to a lot of trouble to create a thing called the Constitution. And why the President must swear to “preserve, protect and defend? it before he is given the power of office.
They’re doing it again! This time it’s the people who run Israel: somebody does something bad to them, so they start whacking on a third party. In this case, Hezbollah, a group of people within Lebanon, kidnaps two Israeli soldiers, and the next thing you know, Israel is destroying airports, bridges, UN observers, and forcing tens of thousands to flee (being strafed along the way). They’re going after Hezbollah, but they’re going after the Lebanese, too, in places where there are no Hezbollah, presumably to terrorize the Lebanese into kicking the Hezbollah out.
The only problem is, the Israelis are doing exactly what the US did in Iraq (who learned from whom, I wonder), and the outcome is clearly going to be the same: a whole lot of innocent people killed, and their survivors are so incensed they’ll become your enemies. Bombing roads and airports, trashing entire cities, targeting powerplants and even UN observers who have been there for years.
While Guantanamo is hardly anything America can be proud of, it still hasn’t achieved the ignominy of Manzanar. From 1942 until 1945, over 110,000 men, women and children of Japanese descent, mostly American citizens, were deprived of their property and imprisoned without charge in Manzanar and nine other hastily built prison camps. American citizens.
There are, they tell us, no Americans being held at Guantanamo. Yet. But the people who are there, picked up from various places around the world and imprisoned, without charge, have been beaten, tortured, harassed and humiliated, some for as long as four years. There is no guarantee of a trial, the “quaint? Geneva Conventions don’t protect them, and there is no hope for any of them. Is it any wonder there have been at least 40 attempted suicides there?
Two Associated Press articles recently put the immigration issue into focus: they both had to do with current immigration laws that are simply not being enforced. The first was about an internal Border Patrol report that told of a 19 year-old entrepreneur caught three times in two months smuggling illegal aliens into the country in a stolen car. In each case he was released without charges. The report went on to say that only 6 percent of the 289 smugglers caught by the border patrol were actually prosecuted.
This comes after reports that only three prosecutions of employers hiring illegal aliens occurred last year. At least 11 million of them are working here, and only three of their employers were prosecuted.
Congress has just gone through another round of “reform?, and, as always, they found nothing worth fixing. It’s very much like the corporations, with their boards of directors who are CEO’s from other companies, who decide to pay THEIR CEO’s 15 million a year so they will get the same treatment. Since everybody from Tom Delay to Hillary Clinton took money from Jack Abramoff, even though he and they have broken laws, they don’t see anything wrong with that.
Apparently neither do you.
The recent police shooting death of Cheri Moore is a whole lot more complicated than it appears. With dozens, maybe hundreds of people in Humboldt County dependent on chemicals to keep them even close to sane, no one wants to see the army of people who at any time can “quit taking their meds? and go completely wacko. Only then do they legally move into the world of 5150 (dangerous to themselves or others). Only then do we decide to do SOMETHING with/to them, right or wrong.
The fact we are tripping merrily down the road to “dictatorship? (Sandra Day O’Connor’s word) isn’t in itself so surprising or even interesting (many others have tried to nudge us down that path) as is the question of HOW we have gotten past the watchdogs, the courts, the press, and pluralism.
Amnesty is defined as “an act of justice by which the supreme power in a state restores those who have been found guilty of an offense against it to the position of innocence. It includes more than ‘pardon’ inasmuch as it obliterates all legal remembrance of the offense.? The root is the Greek word for “oblivion?.
Not long ago columnist Molly Ivins wrote an article criticizing the “D.C. Democrats? for providing poor examples of leaders for Democrats nationally. “I’ve had it with every calculating, equivocating, triangulating, straddling, hair-splitting SOB up there, and that includes Hillary Rodham Clinton,? she says.
The amazing lack of support by Democrats of Senator Russ Feingold’s bill to censure George Bush for his administration’s lawlessness is even harder to understand than their support of “Patriot? Act, the illegal occupation of Iraq, the continued operation of torture camps, or even (in the case of Hillary Clinton) Jack Abramoff. What are they thinking of?
Among the many stains America has acquired since the ‘election? of 2000, the torture camp of Guantanamo is among the worst. The camp has been decried by the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations, called by Amnesty International “the Gulag of our times?, denounced as a place of “cruel and inhuman treatment illegal under the U.S. Constitution." Nothing since the forced internment of whole families of American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II has earned this country such fear and loathing in the eyes of the world.
Having just returned from a trip to the Red state in the lower right hand corner, just 90 miles from Gitmo, my main piece of advice is: avoid Miami. We won’t go into how I ended up at the Miami airport. . .we’ll just say it was a lapse in judgment. . .but I can say that I learned it’s a place to be avoided. The hard way.
It’s about time somebody made some positive suggestions about how to clean up the mess we have with our government and electoral system. Since the problem is systemic, we’ll need some serious changes.
First, since the root of the endemic corruption is the overwhelming power of corporations and their control of elected officials, and since the courts have interpreted the constitution as seeing corporations as “persons? with the same rights as humans, we need a constitutional amendment to clarify, once and for all, that corporations are artificial constructs designed to make money for their owners. As collective entities they are not covered by the Bill of Rights.
Among the many things I don’t understand is the issue of the “sanctity of life.? People who oppose abortion say that life is sacred, even potential life, and that man has no right to interfere with it. But most of these people also support the death penalty, often citing the line in Exodus “He that smiteth a man, so that he die, shall surely be put to death.? None would have any problem with having Osama Bin Laden killed.
The announcement recently that the internet search engine Google has decided to censor searches for its Chinese viewers wasn't so surprising or frightening: Despite their "Don't be evil" motto, they ARE a corporation, after all, and whatever it takes, lying, torture, mass layoffs, downsizing, profiting on their emplyees' deaths, etc, is all part of the game. When a reporter for the London Times pointed out to the head of Google's European branch that search engines like Wikipedia have refused to go into China because they refuse to kowtow to Beijing, he replied "Well, how much do THEY make?".
It’s money that matters
Now you know that it’s true
It’s money that matters
Whatever you do.
-Randy Newman
The recent revelations about Jack Abramoff and his friends "relations" with half of
America’s elected officials (including an unrepentant Hillary Clinton),
underscore a well-established fact of American life: money is the
mother’s milk of politics. ""Big Daddy" Jesse Unruh said it decades ago, but it got truer.
Recent stories about Ford and others laying off tens of thousands of American workers to try and save companies circling the drain are disturbing. A story in the paper last week said Kraft Foods, “the nation’s largest food manufacturer?, plans to lay off 8,000 workers and close as many as 20 plants, this on top of earlier cuts. At the same time, Kraft reported it’s fourth quarter earnings rose 23 percent, beating even Wall Street estimates.
The recent announcement of indictment of 11 “eco-terrorists?, featuring Alberto (The Torturer) Gonzales and FBI director Robert Mueller, was more than a little scary. The scary part wasn’t the unveiling of a
conspiracy that goes back over four years and involves the destruction of millions of dollars worth of property. The scary part is how people who conspire to set lab animals and horses free, monkey-wrench power lines and meat processing plants are lumped in with the people who destroyed the World Trade Center. And coming from Gonzales, the guy who thought the Geneva Accords were “quaint? and could be ignored, this is serious. It means anyone who harms property in the name of ecological civil disobedience is subject to extraordinary rendition (kidnapping), indefinite imprisonment, torture, and death.