The censorship of Iraq-war images by the Bush administration, beginning early on with bans against photography of flag-draped coffins, which continued until President Obama halted those restrictions, is still limited, to this day, as embedded reporters and photographers are kicked out of their units when pictures of casualties are published, and increasingly-impossible restrictions are placed upon the images that are approved for release.  The picture, above, taken by Stefan Zaklin, then with the European Pressphoto Agency, was widely published in Europe and was in a group of casualty photos subsequently, much later, published in a Web slide show by the New York Times.

Publishing of such photos is not motivated by any sort of sensationalism, but rather because there is nothing like such graphic images that can relate the bare truth, invoking thought of the consequences of war and an assessment of the worth of the costs, whatever the level of casualties, under whatever circumstances, surge or otherwise.  In Vietnam, where there were few restrictions on photographers, the graphic photos of casualties helped to arouse the massive, public outcries that eventually forced that illegitimate war to an end.  Is America, as Bush and his Republicans claim, really any more secure for the life this young soldier, and his family, had taken from them?

Sarah Palin is little more than a political monkey in training that can never end, one who while questioning the accountability of others proved she has no sense of dedication or responsibility for seeing through her obligation to voters unless it coincides with her soap-opera standards of celebrity.  She is a tunnel-visioned, deceptive demagogue who stands for everything that hurt the nation in the Bush presidency, and she will never be able to be trusted to stand on her own two feet and answer unscripted questions, which was not even a passing thought as a remote possibility after her speech at the Tea Party convention (a conservative-Republican, religious-right tent revival without the sick being healed), let alone make decisions in the Oval Office that are critical for hundreds of millions of people.

Voters should remember the CBS Katie Couric interview (be sure to click all the segments that are available), because that “I'll try to find you some and bring ‘em to ya” ignorance is the real Palin that will always be beneath the surface of any answer that is eventually pounded into her by her paid consultants and memorized over time.  As one who depends wholly upon that structured process of repetition and upon truth-ignoring, duplicitous speech writers in order to merely grasp at the appearance of an informed mind (an image which eludes her as easily as it did George Bush), how dare she refer to the president’s use of teleprompters as a liability or detraction from the worth of his messages!

Kate Zernike’s New York Times article, reporting on Palin’s appearance at the Tea Party Convention, should have said as much, or should have been published with Joan Walsh’s Salon article alongside, to paint Palin as what she really is, for those who are blind to the paint she clumsily pours on herself, because the stakes are too high to allow any more right-sided Republican conservatives or celebrity hawks to further influence government or collar the ignorant or emotion-dominated, goggle-eyed elements of the U.S. electorate.  Sarah Palin’s best calling is in her past, as a model for hosiery, where her long, shapely legs can allow her to really walk the walk.

The Reagan-Bush appointed, Supreme-Court majority has finally handed the conservative Republicans and their big-business and industry stewards a victory of monumental proportions with their ruling (Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission) tying First Amendment free-speech rights to campaign contributions.  The 5-to-4 ruling is an abomination of the Constitution that puts representative government up for sale or bribe, ripping apart the fabric of The Founders’ concept of democracy.

Conservative spokesmen say the ruling, which sweeps away the Congress’s McCain-Feingold restrictions on campaign contributions (which actually never went far enough) and allows unlimited campaign spending by corporations and unions, restores free speech and equality to that which was always intended by the First Amendment.  To the contrary, the fact is, in the time of the Founders, there was no election machine or industry serving the influence of corporations that depended upon the monetized system of election influence that exists today, or that was any kind of consideration at all for free-speech protections.  The truth of that is in the very words of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and others spoken against the power and ambition of industry to challenge government and take control from the people, and which cry out from his grave against the falsehood of all of the conservative-Republican claims supporting the ruling, and which also prove the highest court in the land no longer stands to protect the Constitution, but rather, to protect and preserve the power of corporate-industrial America, the people be damned.

The majority justices went beyond the scope of the Court in four ways:  first, they ignored precedent; second, they ignored the precept of avoiding a constitutional question, if possible, and then when necessary, ruling on the narrowest constitutional issue that would address the conflict in the case before them; third, they ignored the Preamble of the Constitution, which is just as binding upon them and the other branches as is any section of any article that follows it, and for which the stage for all that follows is set by its proclamation:

“We the People of the United States [not corporations, and corporations are of the state in which they are chartered, not of the United States], in order to [skip to the relevant clause] Secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

“We the People... do ordain and establish,” the Founders wrote, not the corporations; “for our posterity,” they wrote, not the posterity of corporations.  The posterity of corporations, parent companies, are units.

And lastly, the Court majority ignored the Declaration of Independence, which lays the foundation for the Constitution, and which, if there is any doubt as to the interpretation of any part thereof, the Declaration is a necessary and proper arbiter, which in its second paragraph, states:

“WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed...”

Corporations are not “Men.”  Capitalization, by the way, is quoted here in both documents as it was written by the Founders, providing the emphasis which they intended in that literary style of their day.  Corporations are not endowed by the “Creator” which is capitalized, or that which created “Men” (and Women).  Corporations do not pursue “Happiness.”  They pursue profits for their owners, who are men and women, and other organizations, so when they speak, they do so with the motive of profit, which is not the voice of “Men,” who are the “Governed” (capitalized), as those voices are Consensually heard, through the vote (which the Court majority corrupted with its ruling), in a society based upon the precepts of “popular sovereignty” or “democracy,” as is provided by America’s charters and subdued by the Court majority’s campaign-funding ruling.

Popular sovereignty (also spelled “sovranty”) is the birth child of the Declaration of Independence.  It means that government power and authority is vested in and derived from the People, not corporations (or kings), and that government acts according to the will of the People, again, not corporations.  Popular sovereignty is one of the three pillars of democracy, along with political liberty and political equality, all of which are (or were) embodied within the protections and guarantees written into the amendments and articles of the Constitution.  Corporations cannot attain or aspire to political liberty or equality with “Men,” under either the Declaration or the Constitution, and that the Court’s majority chose to do so is what makes their ruling an aberrant abortion of those documents and the intent of the Founders who struggled so eloquently well with their genius to write them.

But this is what you get when an ignorant president (Bush) appoints a conservative-Republican majority to be led by a relative kid as Chief Justice, whose confirmation was in the hands of that president’s conservative-Republican, rubber-stamp Senate, creating an activist majority that abuses the power of the Court, while their congressional peers moan and groan about the activism of the “liberal” Court appointed by Democratic presidents.  The real harm done should now be as apparent as it so well fits into this closing, that the Court failed in its primary responsibility:  to stand for the Constitution, outside of all political considerations.

Only Congress can right this abortive travesty and threat to democracy by passing laws banning all campaign contributions and establishing funding for all elections that is wholly public.  And state legislatures will also have to act to protect the democratic value of their elected offices.  Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) has taken an immediate, important, first step to counter the Court ruling by introducing the American Elections Act of 2010 (S. 2959), which would prohibit campaign spending by foreign-controlled corporations, and Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD) has introduced an amendment to the Constitution, which would make ironclad the democratic assurance of elections for the People.  An amendment, while the best solution, is the most time consuming and difficult to achieve; so, meanwhile, passage of Sen. Franken’s bill and the introduction of subsequent, fast-track legislation to neutralize the disastrous effects of the Court’s ruling and eventually replace the myriad of ineffective campaign-control measures with a ban on all contributions in place of public-funded elections should be the highest priority of the president and the Democratic Congress, even above healthcare and banking-regulation reforms.  Otherwise, the United States of America, as the Founders conceived it, to be an instrument of the People, is dead and going to hell.

Everything killing America begins with an “E”

When President Obama, in his December 1 Afghanistan speech, claimed a withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan would begin in June 2011, in almost the same breath he announced he is sending another 30,000 troops there, he delivered a cheap shot to the American people, which was regrettably delivered again later by Vice President Biden when he wrote in a broadcast e-mail that the president’s speech came “with a firm commitment to begin bringing our troops home in 2011.”  But John McCain, in playing out his war-mongering, opposition role by rote, treated that empty withdrawal promise as legitimate and criticized President Obama’s setting of the meaningless deadline based upon the tried-and-failed concept, “you win a war by breaking the will of the enemy.”  That assessment is as far from true as his assessment of Sarah Palin’s qualifications for high office in the 2008 election.

The will of the South Vietnamese government was not defeated when they and America lost that war, few South Vietnamese had the necessary will, and despite that breaking the communist will was always a voiced objective, as was the false threat that withdrawal would spell the fall, like dominoes, of the region to communism, it was the will of nationalism that overcame South Vietnam and the patience of America.

In WWII, the will of the German people was not broken.  Their ability to wage war was reduced to rubble and their army decimated.  There is no such army to defeat fielded anywhere in the terrorist conflict.

In the trenches of WWI, the will of soldiers on all sides to throw their lives away by rushing machine-gun nests was not broken.  They were, on both sides, overcome with lead, and the leaders on both sides eventually decided the costs were just too great to continue.

The same is true of both al Qaeda and the Taliban.  Their will to fight will never be broken.  And the fact is that, despite McCain’s eagerness to commit America to another endless war, any war has a limit of worth, which is the limit the president chooses to impose upon the U.S. government and the Afghan regime, based upon the evaluation of the threat as it exists now and is forecast, and based upon the reasoned conformity to real limits of capability and objective.

The increased 30,000 U.S. troops, bringing the U.S. total to about 100,000, will not achieve the objective of eliminating the Taliban and al Qaeda.  Some coalition members have agreed to trace additions, but international, public outcry, particularly within America’s strongest allies, Great Britain and Germany, is already loudly opposed.  Perhaps the president realizes this and thus sets a deadline.  It may be successful in building up an Afghan army that can permanently reduce the Taliban to a minority political faction, and it seems it is this objective that the president has decided is worth adding to the troops and effort already in place there to obtain.  The November 2009 report of Taliban resurgence in Kunduz province, where Afghan police presence was cut, and where U.S. analysts expected the Taliban would not to be a factor in the military planning, is a perfect example of why the U.S. cannot win a guerrilla war there, and why sending more troops will not be enough, and will only provide greater opportunities for Taliban and al Qaeda offensive actions.  And aside from proving that intelligence and law-enforcement anti-terrorist efforts, though effective, are still falling far short of where they need to be, the Christmas-day bombing attempt against a Detroit-bound Delta-Northwest Airlines jet, by the self-professed al-Qaeda Nigerian, Abdul Mutallab, is yet another example of how shortsighted it is to wage a military campaign in Afghanistan or anywhere else on the basis of defense against another 911-type al-Qaeda attack, which can and will originate from anywhere al Qaeda or any organized terror exists.

The Taliban will flow like electricity, along the paths of least resistance to deliver shocks, and then pull the plug to disappear again.  Afghanistan will be another case of an enemy that yanks the American chain and, for the most part, cannot be confronted except on their terms.  Going after the Taliban as a tactic to attack al Qaeda is as much taking a sucker punch as is attacking al Qaeda with a fielded army.  If 30,000 will be sent, then another 130,000 will be needed, and when the time-limit the president has set has been reached and extended or not, what will have been gained?  The eradication of al Qaeda?  Not likely.  Or the Taliban?  Again, not likely.  The continued support of the American people or Congress?  Not at all likely.  At best, the Taliban will only be driven underground and reduced to a constant, low level of aggression with occasional but regular spikes in violence, ever a threat to the populace who would dare to betray them and leaders who dare to defy them.  But in the end, after America has taken its losses and left, they will still be there to consolidate their influence, because as is now being seen in Iraq, Afghanistan is their land, not America’s to shape.

All of that, and an era of casual, run-on warfare, with its expanded legions of riddled and shockingly, disgracefully overstretched American military families is the only future that awaits a decision to act against al Qaeda through the Taliban with troops and nation building in partnership with a corrupt, self-interested regime, instead of attacking al Qaeda as organized criminals, with law enforcement, intelligence, limited, precision military action in appropriately advantageous situations, and nation cooperation.  Two examples of where the will of the “enemy” was broken to bring victory were not wars fought with fielded armies (if you discount the CIA):  the Cold War, which was won chiefly by the spies of intelligence and the guns of economics, and the treaty obtained by Great Britain with the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which was brought about chiefly with intelligence, law-enforcement and diplomacy.  And in post WWII Germany, there is another example of fringe violence eliminated without war, there to enlighten any who look for it, and, undoubtedly, many others.  America’s conflict with al Qaeda should be among them.  But after one incompetent, failed, eight-year attempt, the conflict with that Islamist Mafia is set again, through misdirection and misjudgment, to fail to make the list of smartly engaged and settled conflicts.

The withdrawal promise in the president’s speech was a cheap shot because after his speech, the president, through his cabinet and spokesmen, “qualified” his withdrawal date by saying it would be conditional to conditions on the ground, which means there is no withdrawal promise or commitment, and that, in fact, more troops could and will be sent after that date unless the president actually decides to withdraw or Congress forces him to.

Presumedly, if a withdrawal ever happens in the baby-boomer generation’s lifetime, the president will begin the withdrawal and set about to morph the U.S. effort into something more akin to the cooperative intelligence/law-enforcement offense, supplemented with special forces as needed, that Vice President Biden and many others preferred, which will mean a two-year delay to get to where the fight against terrorist-criminals should be focused.  The trouble is that those two years will cost at least $150 billion and the lives of no less than 1,200 more soldiers.

When president after president, Republican or Democrat, and war after war, the will of the people and the majority of Congress is ignored, the message is clear, that democracy in America is broken.  And the factors that stand between the government and the People are no mystery.  President Andrew Jackson, in a spawning industrial, corporate, and banking expansion was warned that, without care, these industries would take over the power of government, a warning echoing Founder and President Thomas Jefferson’s, Abraham Lincoln’s, and most lately echoed by President Dwight Eisenhower’s warning of the dangers of the growing, Cold-War fueled military-industrial complex.  And, 100 years before the end of the Great Depression, Jackson found himself in a struggle with the banks, a struggle in which the Democratic party’s roots were sewn.

Now, from rug-swept high crimes to ceremonial Constitution to shameful abuse of wealth to health care for provider profit to futile war to unrelenting climate change, influence peddlers tied to these factions control the policies that are destroying the future of America, and with global warming, the world.  These interests, mostly exercised through the Republican party’s conservative wing, will trade jobs in one industry or another for eventual disaster everywhere.  In wars, where they no longer need fear the involvement of their own sons or daughters, they press for conflicts to keep the technology of violence progressing and the military involved to use it.  And at the very core of the power that these and other influences have over the People and their representatives, lies the entrenched, enshrined, corrupted, influence machine of elections, which the conservative-Republican majority in the Supreme Court has placed even more solidly in the hands of industry, and apart from the People, with its ruling voiding Congress’s McCain-Feingold limits on campaign contributions.

A Court in control of conservative-Republicans, who are in the control of industry, doesn’t care that a clean electoral process is what lies at the very heart of a true democratic system, and that very core of freedom and choice is at the heart of the Supreme-Court-escalated attack for control by the monied, greed-vested entities from corporate to industrial that see Washington as their own personal cache of money and privilege to be raided at will.  The control has been theirs because of their steadfast, long-term grip on the system of contributions and gifts that buys the advertising that brings the unenlightened mass vote used as the leverage that delivers influence used to sway law makers to the dark side, and as a result, the American democracy is a sham, a front for disguising the true nature of the elitist democracy that really exists and controls the lives and future of all in the nation.  The corruption of campaign finance has become as comfortable as old sweats, so integral to the life of Congress and its members that congressional promotions are based upon fund-raising accomplishments rather than skills that yield intelligent legislation or more enlightened constituent integration with the process of government.

Until all election contributions by both individuals and organizations are banned, and elections are fully, treasury funded, Americans will never get near their worth from the fund-raising-prioritized time and money-influence-prioritized decisions of their elected officials, and they will never be free of unneeded, unwanted wars, suicidal policies against the thin, fragile veil of air that supports all life and dictates whether climates are to be stable, or the whole slew of influence travesties, ranging from pork spending to government ethics that plagues the relationship between Washington and the voters.  And this destructive abuse will continue, unabated until the conceptual America of the Founders is completely dead and gone, along with a uniquely American culture and heritage that will be obliterated by laws pushed aside to allow the invasion of an unacclimated, poorly or uneducated illegal-immigrant horde, whose blindly-granted right to vote, based upon a poorly devised and questionably administered flash-card test, will be cast, subject to manipulation, with the only native knowledge of government they possess, rooted in Banana-Republic abuse, self-service, ineptitude and corruption.

With the administration’s latest moves to block a promised, “greater-transparency” release of military and intelligence documents, and the president’s anti-Peace Prize choices (which he tactfully acknowledged as one of many conflicting factors in his Nobel acceptance speech) to step up Afghanistan deployments and make America the sole NATO hold-out against signing the Land Mine accord, the hope of a brighter democratic future for America and its people, sparked by the campaign and election of President Obama, has dimmed as the changes crossing the face of Washington seem to be limited to little more than a different elocutionary rhetoric, the lining of a few different pockets, a no-different shortchanging of institutional ethics reform, and different points of fruitless military deployment—a headlong, though more shallow plunge into still-darkening directions.

Paul Krugman, in his New York Times column, describes the Senate’s health-care bill (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) as “imperfect.”  I accused him of being either blind to the big picture or generous to a fault, because the correct adjective would be “corrupted.”  The bill is corrupted because it was bought with earmarks for key senators and because it was bled of the public option, drug importation, and an expedient start date, not by senators with legitimate moral, philosophical, or budget concerns, but rather a few senators, including a committee chairman overseeing the bill’s passage, Max Baucus, and the masquerading Joe Lieberman, who have been bought and paid for by the industries that, thanks in large measure to them, under the Senate’s version, remain in control of costs and now also would benefit by a federally mandated and subsidized expansion of their market base... and their profits.

Sen. Max Baucus and Joe Lieberman are excluded from any thanks for the passage of the health-care bill because they directly, intentionally helped change this bill into a profit engine for the insurance industry, rather than have healthcare be removed from the greed-based imperatives of Wall Street businesses.  They deserve no thanks.  And the rest of the Senate, which allowed a minority to abuse the Constitution and the majority with the 60-vote rule, and defeat what should be a true reform bill, also deserve no thanks because the minority, were the roles reversed, would have thrown the 60-vote rule out the window without a second thought.  The Democrat majority let down the voters who sent them to Congress with a majority and a mandate, and hopefully, the discarded public option and drug-importation components will be returned to the bill in conference and then passed by whatever means necessary.  This stranglehold on government, held by the campaign and influence money of profit-motivated industries, must end or it will end American democratic rule forever.

It is important to begin calling a spade a spade if the corrupt election financing, lobbying, and earmarks practices that dictate almost every outcome in Washington are ever to be removed from what should be a money-separated democratic process, even when by doing so, by being bluntly honest, the credit for what still is a meaningful achievement is made less heroic and somewhat tainted, because a less heroic and tainted system is what lies at the foundation of government in America, and it will never be swept away as long as it remains hidden, insulated, and unacknowledged.  Neither Krugman nor the president or the senators who try to justify what their corrupted system has produced, in the process of claiming credit and handing out accolades for producing the bill they are obligated by standard procedure, ego, political objectives, and in some cases, payments received to defend, should shade the truth of the true failure the Senate’s health-care attempt really represents or who the largest beneficiaries of that ultimate travesty really are.

cc via Web forms: White House, Sen. Max Baucus, Sen. Joe Lieberman, Rep. John Murtha, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Sen. Russ Feingold, Sen. Arlen Specter, Rep. Steve Driehaus, Rep. David Obey, House Financial Services Committee office, more... (this cc group really applies to most everything on site.)

U.S.S. America is in steep dive.

Things in the “new, promised” Washington of the populist Obama movement are not looking very Democratic in these troubling times.  Like President Obama’s retracted campaign promise to allow prescription-drug imports, the Ship of State is beginning to take on the pained and retracted look of another Bush/Republican-skippered submarine, its dive plains jammed in the down position with a runaway, full-bore, concocted-money and fear-and-lies-fueled engine pushing it swiftly down into the dark abyss of oblivion, to be crushed by the overpowering pressure of the money and influence that weighs it down and presses all around it.  The lights are dimming, the crew is going blind, and the air they breathe is becoming heavy and stale with the rising pressure and venting pipe bursts of the foul contaminates that have spilled from Washington’s halls over the last half century or more.

The president’s regrettable choice of Afghanistan as the single venue in which to put up a real fight, the failure to address the bloated, favors-for-friends tax code, restore the 2009 estate-tax rules, to eliminate costly, naked speculation in oil, to pass banking regulation that isn’t a Swiss cheese of loopholes and exclusions, to change the structure of banker pay and bonuses from ripped-off, no-down-side handouts and obscene bonuses to performance-based systems with investor control on limits, or to force banks that are now, thanks to the taxpayers’ money, recovering, as President Obama said, to act on “a greater obligation to the goal of a wider recovery, a more stable system, and more broadly shared prosperity,” all verify the downward dive is full-force.  Should not a good banking system aspire to do those things on its own?  If not, should not banks be forced to do those things?  Instead, as the president rightly complains, they slink a forked-tongue, public rhetoric of cooperation while taking the muzzles off their lobbyist jackals on Capital Hill.

Add to that unblowable ballast the Big-Pharma, $20-million-bought-and-paid-for failure to allow pharmaceutical imports, or the Senate’s failure to include a public option (not mandate) in health-care reform, and there is no doubt that the state ship is beset by the most unconscionable of all the failures that will severely stunt that reform, increase its cost at direct benefit to industry pockets, and prove the government of the United States is not by, of, or for the People, but instead buy, bought, and owned by the corporations, industrialists, and monied elite who, with the likes of Max Baucus (who has the gall to stand behind the president’s right shoulder as he addressed the nation to push the diluted, non-public-option health-care-reform bill Baucus torpedoed), John Murtha (king of pork-spending abuse), Joe Lieberman (as unconscionable a Republican as any to ever hide in the Senate), along with the leadership and a large rift of the Republican caucus, have mined a channel that separates the president from his promises and the People from their own Congress as a consequence of the ocean of election-campaign and lobby-money influence poured into lawmakers’ pockets.

Democratic leaders in the Senate, like Harry Reid and Charles Schumer, are falling over themselves backpedaling with the president in the face of the obdurate, bought-out minority and their own turncoat caucus members, now labeling the diluted bill as a “first step,” and defending the cut-out heart and soul of the reform as “components that must not hold up passage” of whatever it is that walks without a heart and soul—a zombie health-care bill?  Instead, as this would not be a case of tyranny over the minority, which the Senate’s 60-vote rule (which makes a supermajority body out of what the Constitution sets up as a majority body) is not needed to protect against in any case, the Democrats should be swatting the minority out of the way with reconciliation to drop-ballast on the unconstitutional 60-vote requirement that is blocking majority rule and the People’s will to trump all the money, lobbyists, and their abusive industries for the sake of shifting the power of health and life where it belongs:  to patients and doctors!  But even if the current zombie bill is killed without bypassing the 60-vote rule in reconciliation to start over, the bill won’t go away for a decade as the fear-mongering says, like a missed ship, not even close, because there are two important differences that separate health care from other issues of tenuous-compromise standing and will keep it a priority on the front burner:  it will remain a strong social demand of growing consensus and, most important, because if it isn’t passed, it has already been made official by leaders on both sides that health care will take down the economy in short order.  Even the most money-injected, green-skinned insurance partisans can’t ignore that to just keep on going with unreasoned, uncompromising opposition, and their constituents would not allow them to continue doing so, assuming the president or anyone in active government would be willing to take them on to openly strip them of their public-service facades.

Just as Jefferson, Lincoln, Eisenhower, and other great, past American leaders warned, until the ilk of these “public servants” who serve up for the public bitterly worsened lives are removed from office, and contributions of any kind are prohibited for all elections, the People will continue to be sunk, their lives and futures pressured under the weight of the money that fills pockets and campaign funds in Washington and state houses alike, sinking the ship and doing no good or constructive thing, only making the rich richer, the powerful more powerful, the corrupt more absolutely corrupted, and everyone else worse off than they should be, which isn’t really too good at all, thanks in larger part than most realize to the sinking demise of America’s popular sovereignty.

Another tasteless college coach joins the swelling ranks of values and player stompers.
or
How American colleges and the NCAA still allow repeated teaching of foul life lessons.

The following letter was sent via White House Web Form.

Mr. President:

I am disappointed to learn that you will be increasing troops under a misguided justification that the U.S. must stabilize the Afghan government.

Think about it.  If the U.S. were to be responsible to stabilize every impacting emerging government, war would continue to be America’s primary international pastime.  Your choice leaves the nation on that regrettable, unprofitable path, instead of the path of least resistance and, based upon results, greatest effectiveness.

Were you to announce that the terrorists that occupy those and other regions would be attacked as the international criminals they are, which has produced stellar results from mostly other nations’ law-enforcement efforts, your announcement would come from the FBI building or the State Department, not West Point.

As your Justice Department chooses to treat terrorists as criminals, you will choose to treat them as some sort of fielded army.  You are choosing to fight a guerilla war, and you should know it cannot be won with the big stick.  It is probably too late to sway you away from those who wish to always see America in some military tangle, but mark my words:  you will regret this decision as the years pass and the deaths and costs rise in the face of a continuing threat.  The hope was that you would be the president to take America off the path of war and military involvements in the affairs of other nations.  That would have been your greatest accomplishment.

Instead, you are choosing to join in the mistakes of the past which have left little but a history of regret and “if onlys,” viewed from the perspective of ignored hindsight.  Aside from proving that intelligence and law-enforcement anti-terrorist efforts, though effective, are still falling far short of where they need to be, the Christmas-day bombing attempt against a Detroit-bound Delta-Northwest Airlines jet, by the self-professed al-Qaeda Nigerian, Abdul Mutallab, is yet another example of how shortsighted it is to wage a military campaign in Afghanistan or anywhere else on the basis of defense against another 911-type al-Qaeda attack, which can and will originate from anywhere al Qaeda or any organized terror exists.

I published a selection of Joseph Biden as your best possible choice of running mate two months before you made the announcement.  I wish you would listen to him now, because his path is the right one, the only one that can lead to success.  Any half measure will still leave an army in place against an ephemeral foe to build resentment and provide a target.  And there will be more and more deaths, inflicted by an enemy that does not give up Bin Laden for any pile of money, which should tell you something.  As should the fact that international and U.S. forces have been unable to find him.  They know the land, its people, and they know us, and they have an arsenal of advanced weapons they have yet to really employ to do significant damage, which will be done on the path of increasing troops.

This threat of Islamic terrorism is not one that can be defeated by fielding armies.  The proof of that is already in.  You choose to ignore it at the peril of the nation and your legacy.

A long-term Afghan-region victory through occupation?  Go see a psychiatrist!

The health-insurance reform public option is the flag of true freedom from special-interest rule.

The public option is the only way to keep profit-motivated, public insurance and provider companies from doing what they have always been doing:  failing to put patients’ health-care needs and availability in the forefront of their priorities.  There is nothing like a public option except a public option that is entirely divorced from insurance influence, as it would be politically correct to see Congress so divorced.  Co-ops cannot trump the empowered insurance companies and providers to affect lower prices.  Any trigger would only be a meaningless, costly delay.

Reform without an insurance-company-separated public option is not true reform.  It would signal a Congress still in the grip of lobbyists and money instead of the welfare-interests of its constituency, and it would leave insurance companies and for-profit providers in charge, and they will always be ruled by the Wall Street imperative for ever-increasing profit and returns, above all else.  If anything, the public option will, at last, be a step that moves in the direction of acknowledging that health care should not be, primarily, a for-profit business, and that Wall Street firms are, by their nature and mandate, not suited to be properly motivated providers or financiers.  Not everything operating within a capitalist system must be structured to the form and priorities of corporations.  This concept has been proven, this week, as top insurance consultants report that above-usual premium increases, some above 100 percent, are being triggered by a combination of Wall Street pressure on the industry for better profits and the industry’s effort to establish increases before any reform is passed.

And, how can any elected representative even DARE to consider any plan that would fine those who do not buy coverage and at the same time be willing to drop the public option and thereby fail to seize control from the for-profit corporate groups!?

Did The People elect a Democratic government, or not?

Republicans, with a solitary, one-time exception, have refused to compromise, and so they should not be permitted to block the single-most-important element that is the glue of true reform:  the public option.  And Democrats who do not tow the bottom-line on this necessary victory should be rightly let out in the cold for the remainder of their participating terms and the next election.  If these Democrats want to influence the shape of reform, then let them know they must move the Republicans, not sabotage their constituents by plunging a knife into the heart of needed reform.

Democratic and Democratic-leaning Independent voters will not appreciate any final bill, coming from the Democratic Congress they elected, which is tainted by the same minutia of conservative-Republican avarice that devised the “death panels” argument and the hypocritical, mind-control claims protesting the president’s speech to school children, which was an audience also addressed by presidents Reagan and both Bushes, whom they elected.

The president must know that letting the public option go, as he seems too eagerly prepared to do, is not changing the way Washington does business, as he promised he would strive to do.  This would be the same old story of caving to the special interests.  There is no reason, except influence, not to have a non-subsidized public option.  Without it, there is no competition, because the power remains with the insurance industry, where profits rule, not patient care, and co-ops will only be at the mercy of the bottom line they set.  The president will have failed, not only to bring meaningful reform, but also by having the treads of special interests and lobbyists imprinted on his face and his administration for every policy priority to follow.  Those treads are too deep in the skin of Republicans to erase, and President Obama must bring his party into line, make the Blue Dogs realize they will pay the price if they continue to stand with the special interests, not allow them to rule the day, and by precedent, the years to follow.

If Republicans and traitorous Democrats, like Senate Finance Committee chair, Sen. Max Baucus, who have the interests of insurance industry and health-provider profits as their priority want co-ops instead of a public option, then write the bill so that government-employee insurance, their public option, is ended for representatives and senators and require them to move to private or co-op insurance instead.  The problem with the cost of health care is that it is for-profit prioritized, not patient-care prioritized, and the profit motive should be removed from the industry, which would remove the greed-factor, which is the Wall-Street factor.

Enough is enough.

These ignorant, Republican-right protestations are proof enough that the one-sided gift of bi-partisanship the president intended to provide, and still tries to provide to the once-overbearing minority, is misguided, unrealistic, and unattainable.

It is time to let the citizen majority overrule the greed-based, profit-first motives of the health insurance and provider industries.

Frontline’s The Warning, is a masterful accounting of the steps taken along a blindly traveled path leading to destruction, where today, the blinders remain, and the lone, assured, and courageous voice of caution and omen, which was silenced 11 years ago, the agency of that voice’s authority stripped of its regulatory power, speaks out again to say that, despite the carnage, nothing has been done to remove the danger that still threatens to visit again and again.

Brooksley Born, chairperson of the congressionally neutered Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), from 1996-1999, warned of the [still] unregulated OTC derivatives dangers in late 1998, years before Larry Summers (then Deputy Treasury Secretary), Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan (1987-2006), Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (1995-1999, who was succeeded by Summers and later moved to Citigroup), and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Arthur Levitt (1993-2001), served with President Clinton’s economic working group.  They became the four horsemen of the economic apocalypse, pulling the chariot of laissez-faire markets, moving quickly with their power-honed wheel hubs to sideswipe any contender, eventually cutting the spokes out from under Born.

Summers, now President Obama’s financial right arm, as Director of the White House’s National Economic Council, has allegedly been converted to believe in strong market regulation.

After the first, initial collapse, marked by the 1998 rescue of the leading hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), the Federal Reserve Board chairman at the time, Alan Greenspan, testified before Congress that regulation would be “a mistake.”  Ten years later, after the recovery from the latest melt-down, he testified, in October 2008, that his world perspective, as it pertained to unregulated markets, was wrong.  Give back the 2006, Bush awarded, Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Chairman of the Security and Exchange Commission at the time, Arthur Levitt, said, “I didn’t know Brooksley Born... I was told that she was irascible, difficult, stubborn, unreasonable.  I’ve come to know her as one of the most capable, dedicated, intelligent and committed public servants that I have ever come to know.  I wish I knew her better in Washington, and I wish my view of her was more rounded by personal exposure... I could have done much better.  I could have made a difference.”

Trillions of personal wealth and government debt reserve have been destroyed. Millions of citizens have lost homes, jobs, savings and retirements.

A “new normal,” of uncertain futures, constricted credit, retarded growth, a devalued dollar, looming inflation, and double-digit unemployment has emerged from the flotsam of the expertly sunken economy.

But Wall Street bankers, traders, and consultants are still afloat, not weighted down with an iota of public responsibility, pocketing $billions in bonuses under the philosophy that investment and banking professionals are too big and too special to fail to be lavishly, outrageously paid... in many cases with the barge full of taxpayer dollars sent by a Congress, starkly awakened to rescue them.

Those old Horsemen and their groom, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner (Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs, from 1998–2001, under Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers), who are not retired have been given the reins, by a promised, pro-regulator president, to the highest levels of government’s financial structure, one can only assume because of the reputed intrinsic value that is attached to one who confronts and admits his mistakes, and is hopefully less likely to repeat them and best qualified to correct their consequences.

But capitalism is on trial, guilty as hell, ruled by the dark side, where ill-restrained Greed is king and Lust is queen, her hand poised lightly over his wrist, a delicate finger tapping out the rush of his pulse.  And in a Congress with short memory and twin, decade-separated awakenings that were not stark enough, the regulation that Born, in 1998, urged in vein be adopted, and that the Horsemen fought against with all they had, only to recant after the damage was done, has been stalled, assailed by the alien lobbyists of the other-world-based financial sector, still nowhere to be seen, except in contemplation, with a Swiss-cheese outlook, to be riddled with loopholes and exclusions as, for the financial elite, with their bonuses, lobbyists, and arrogance, business stubbornly remains as usual, their fingers, not voters’ ballots, tapping the pulse of Washington.

Recent economic history is sufficient, alone, to prove that naked capitalism is just as bad as naked socialism.  Most of America’s historic success has been due to a successful blending of the two, capitalism’s greed tempered by socialism’s, or more properly, democracy’s restraints (regulation), a compromise which has been ever more lacking over the last decades.  The banking regulation that is finally passed will signal if “change-agent” Democrats lied, instead to allow democratic rule to be subverted by politics and monied influence, as is usual on The Hill.

Still, as before, Brooksley Born’s warning, issued again, this year, echoes into the unprotected future, and hopefully, within the Halls of Congress:  “We will have continuing danger from these markets and we will have repeats of the financial crisis... there will be significant financial downturns and disasters, attributed to this regulatory gap, over and over, until we learn from experience.”

The Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Mr. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, whose visit to the United States, in the last days of September, coincides with the concluding White House reevaluation of Afghan military policy, in his public address, restated that the war in Afghanistan is a war of necessity, and that the NATO nations (contributing about 40 percent of forces there) are committed for the long term.  If President Obama redefines the mission in Afghanistan to isolate on al Qaeda instead of nation-building to destroy the Taliban, then, instead of the additional 40,000 troops Gen. McChrystal says are needed now to prevent mission failure, which would only be a second of many installments to come, more than half the troops now there could be immediately withdrawn.  But if, in the midst of rising U.S. public and congressional uncertainty about continuing the military buildup, and, despite growing, international public resistance to the Afghanistan war, over Rasmussen’s stated convictions, it is decided that the means by which stability is to be attained is through integration of vast forces into the towns and villages on a widespread, continuing basis, while also building the Afghan military and police, providing security for infrastructure projects and other development operations, and while also conducting offensive operations against the Taliban and al Qaeda elements (nation building), then there can be no conclusion other than that McChrystal’s additional troops are necessary if the multi-pronged effort is to be effective, and that, considering American unwillingness to shoulder the majority of the fighting over the long haul of a nation-building effort, additional troops will also be required from other NATO nations.

The die may already have been cast, because unless Rasmussen’s speech was delivered without Obama-administration coordination, as a NATO persuasive argument, which is unlikely, his visit and statements have all the markings of a united posture that will be endorsing an intended, if not proclaimed, U.S.-NATO position to proceed with the costly nation-building objectives.  With these objectives in place, if they are somehow valid, failing to increase troop levels will only delay the date at which a determination can be made as to operational success, adjustments, and eventual withdrawal.  Every day of delay increases the cost in lives, injuries, and money.  It will not be possible for the United States to provide the security necessary to carry out a multi-pronged, civilian-sector effort to develop economic and infrastructure improvements, to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, and build their security resources to fully take on the anti-insurgent campaign unless troop levels are dramatically increased.

Yet, if the multi-national troops will be viewed by the majority of rural Afghans as shielding and validating a corrupt, insulated, and illegitimate central government, then no plan that is dependant upon central authority will succeed, because any central government, good or bad, represents a sea-change for a nation where the vast, non-urban regions have been under the jurisdiction of a disbursed and separatist tribal system, and where heritage and evolved leadership in the hands of elders is respected and endorsed by the people.

If there is any inclination to dismiss the strength or resiliency of the networkable tribal order in Afghanistan, be reminded that it was that system which defeated the Soviet Union’s best, most violent, years-long efforts to take control.  Any form of acceptable central government must find a way to weave the far-flung tribal authorities into its fabric, while also turning those elements away from their profitable, criminal activities, through substitution of rewarding and growth-sustaining enterprises.  Without an acceptable central government, the only real option is to carry out independent military offensives against targets of opportunity, and most al Qaeda targets of effective value are believed to be in Pakistan.

Assuming that keeping the Taliban’s influence in check benefits American security and can be accomplished, it is still going to require the long-term presence of U.S. troops, whether a progressive transition from a strong U.S. military presence to a competent, comprehensive Afghan-security apparatus takes place or not, and an in-check Taliban is not going to translate into an in-check al Qaeda.  Defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan, and any al Qaeda element is left more exposed, but not eradicated, and with its head in Pakistan and its world reach, al Qaeda elements will still operate and continue to threaten from many points around the world.  Therefore, the fact is that, even if there can be success (U.S. withdrawal with secure, effective government in place) in Afghanistan, the perpetrators of 911 and possible future attacks will still remain at large.

If the post-911 purpose of removing those who were behind the attacks on U.S. soil and preventing them from striking again cannot be achieved by force in Afghanistan, as a consequence of al Qaeda’s global ties and mobility, how would the extended deployment of massive military resources there really serve to protect American interests?  How would the end-purpose—the door-opener to exit—be defined?  It seems that the effort against al Qaeda should be primarily offensive law enforcement and intelligence, with targeted military options employed only as necessary and as opportunity and circumstances permit for effective impact, and Vice President Biden’s recommendation is to reduce troops and focus on al Qaeda in Pakistan with special military resources and intelligence, utilizing whatever cooperation is possible with local forces.  This is the right path, and it coincides with current congressional authorizations.  There is no light at the end of the tunnel with a nation-building, war-against-the-Taliban approach in Afghanistan, and there is very little likelihood that those who committed and plot terror against the West will be killed or captured through such extensive, resource-crippling measures.

This common Republican and vested-interest argument, that turning away from the nation-building option in Afghanistan in favor of more directed, far less costly efforts against al Qaeda will result in Afghanistan becoming a haven again for al Qaeda, makes no sense at all; it has no validity.  If the policy is to deny al Qaeda refuge, then that means they will be pursued and attacked wherever they are found, in Pakistan’s border regions, in Afghanistan, in Africa or the streets of London or New York!  Adopting an effective strategy, focused on al Qaeda is not granting a license to establish safe havens and training grounds in those nations where the U.S. chooses not to nation-build.

Safe havens must be targeted, wherever they are, or else the same major mistake of Vietnam will be repeated in the prosecution of al Qaeda, where the enemy retreated, unassailed, to regroup and rearm in Cambodia and Laos.  Neither Pakistan or Afghanistan can be permitted to be out-of-bounds safe havens for any kind of operation, the purpose of which is to find and destroy al Qaeda; otherwise, American lives will be needlessly lost, and the fighting needlessly extended.

Public and broadcast news interviews with unobjective officials are meaningless.  Of course the Afghan ambassador to the U.S., Said Jawad, wants the nation-building option to be U.S. policy, and to be expanded.  It means billions of dollars and guaranteed security to him, through his government, but, certainly, not necessarily to his people.  Of course he will say it is in America’s security interest to prop up his government as the means to attack al Qaeda.  It is in his personal and regime-derived interest to say that.  And when he says “public opinion must be shaped” to coincide with that view, he is promoting effective propaganda for his regime, not any truth that serves America’s security interests.

Whether or not the U.S. is to take the long, hard, costly option to nation-build in Afghanistan as the means to defeating al Qaeda, the Pakistani border areas can no longer be ceded to the enemy.  Pakistan must not be permitted to control or dictate the offensive operations needed to clear the Pakistani border as a safe haven for al Qaeda and the Taliban terrorists, nor can the Afghan government dictate operations there if they are not aggressively doing the job themselves.  Pakistan and Afghanistan must be told, point blank, that they have only three options:

1.  Carry out aggressive and effective operations on their own to clear and keep clear the border regions, and all of their territories, of the terrorists.

2.  Assist the U.S. in carrying out that objective.

3.  Stay out of the way.

There can be NO option that allows them to stall or shield the terrorists in their countries.  Otherwise, American lives are being thrown away, again, for no good purpose.

There is only one real objective for America in Afghanistan: bring to its government sufficient stability (under any form of responsible, humanitarian government) so that no terrorist-based group can make Afghanistan become a threat to neighboring Pakistan, where stability, primarily for its coveted nuclear arsenal, spread throughout the land, is a legitimate security concern for the U.S., Europe, Russia, and the Mid-East.  Yet, it still remains dubious that the objective of Pakistani security should be addressed with troops in Afghanistan.

One has to wonder, if the NATO ministers who, this week, endorsed Gen. McChrystal’s troop-hungry, counter-insurgency plan, would be so anxious to do so if their nations were required to match U.S. troop commitment and deaths, which are guaranteed to be high if the president decides to take the nation-building approach to fight al Qaeda.  The European nations’ peoples will be quick and aggressive to mount prolific resistence to the effort when the dead-and-injured tolls mount, as they will, eventually leaving the U.S. carrying even more and more of the risk and consequences, which are already out of proportion.  The fact is that, if McChrystal’s plan is put into effect, al Qaeda will remain outside of the center-focus of U.S. military activities in the region, in place of a multi-pronged, multi-decades occupation, another Vietnam/Iraq.  And while the justification for launching another generational war are far more substantial for President Obama than they were for Kennedy/Johnson or Bush, where justifications were non-existent, that does not make it the right policy to follow.  They only guaranteed aspect of it is that it will be the policy most costly and damaging to the United States’ long-term prospects for a peaceful stance in the world.

Remember what the Founders’ position was on U.S. entanglements with Europe.  Europe was the international space then, and while the world today was unimaginable to them, it seems clear that they would still advise against any overseas military commitments that do not provide for immediate relief against aggression, and that they would look first to history, where for the U.S., in Afghanistan, Russia is a frightening experience set, and then they would look to other available alternatives, as is the position of the Vice President and many others of great experience, who would rely first on technology, combined with aggressive intelligence, law enforcement, and coordinated special military forces, which they know have amazing capabilities when effectively combined and coordinated with other international, allied assets—capabilities of which are greater than is publicly known.  U.S. history and the troops deserve the opportunity to avoid the mistakes so often repeated by choosing the most violent path, and these alternative resources, in the front line during peace and war, properly funded, staffed, and led, deserve the first crack at the combined Islamic-radical/criminal presence in the Afghan region.  Otherwise, there is no chance for this generation to avoid another label of war that will succeed Vietnam, Iraq, and the already interminable, place-holding non-effort of Bush in Afghanistan, which, at least, has served to provide a preview of what can easily become a Russian repeat mistake.

Americans should be thankful that an unjustified, wasteful war in Iraq, one that continues to reduce American security, is apparently, finally giving way to the increased focus on the more-relevant U.S. security threats in the region, and view that fight, however it evolves, as the premium that is being paid to insure the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, which is a prime example of why preventing and reversing nuclear proliferation is so critical, and so costly when not achieved.

The diplomatic coup of all American history would be if both India and Pakistan could be persuaded to give up their nuclear and biological arsenals in exchange for a tri-lateral, U.S. non-aggression treaty, where if either India or Pakistan attacked the other, they would face a countering U.S. military and economic response, along with reparations.  This would insure the security of both nations, increase U.S. and world security, and then, the Afghanistans of the world could be left alone, as should be the American way, to make and lie in their own beds.

Instead, Iran is being allowed to slowly but surely insert itself into the dangerous equation of irreversible threat and extreme option that now causes the U.S. to stew in Afghanistan as the checksum for the Pakistani factor is debated and resolved.

Whatever the resolution, constitutionally, the determination of objectives and approval for military deployments remain the specified, first-order responsibilities of Congress, not the prerogatives of the president.  But with the abortive delegation of war power between Congress and the executive that is characteristic today, the best outcome that can be hoped for is that if the president’s decision is opposed by a majority of Congress, thet either he or they will act to change it.

• Presented a cabinet for Senate confirmation that historically qualified by experience and accomplishment instead of political or business affiliations.


• Suspended all Bush executive orders and rules for review.


• Instituted unprecedented administration-ethics and lobbyist reforms.


• Froze pay of White House staff.


• Ordered Guantanamo closed in one year.


• Closed secret CIA jails.


• Limited government-wide interrogation methods to those published in the Army Field Manual.


• Gave public notice that attempts would be pursued to initiate talks with Iran in conjunction with U.N. actions regarding Iran’s nuclear ambitions, without setting preconditions.


• Lowered perceptual barriers and opened a dialogue with Muslim-majority nations.


• Made law a bill reversing the Bush, conservative-Republican-appointed, Supreme-Court decision that prevented redress of pay discrimination against women.


• Reversed the Bush, conservative-Republican, parochial, science-regressing, economic- and educational-limiting rules against the use of federal funds for stem-cell research.


• Warned and condemned the “irresponsible, shameful” greed of Wall-Street and Banking executives, evidenced by their taking more than $18 billion in obscene bonus payments from firms they brought to near failure and which receive or applied to receive TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program) funds.


• Blocked the purchase of a $50 million corporate jet by TARP-fund recipient, Citigroup.


• Signed three executive orders reversing Bush, conservative-Republican rules restricting labor rights.


• Extended funding for the State’s Children’s Health Insurance Program, which was twice vetoed by Bush, his vetos upheld by the, then, Republican-controlled Congress, including the veto-sustaining votes against low-income-family children posted by Ohio Senator George Voinovich, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, and Ohio House Representatives Steve Chabot and John Boehner, all of whom also voted against the separate congressional bills multiple times.


• Signed an executive order establishing the White House office of faith-based initiatives, the mission of which is to aid and coordinate with both U.S. and international secular and faith-based non-profits, which the President notes are very well placed to help and to realize the most effective use of taxpayer funds for secular purposes, like addressing hunger, the sick and the homeless.  But unlike Bush’s program, which had few rules and no oversight, President Obama’s order specifically bans any use of funding for evangelism and imposes strict oversight on spending of tax dollars to insure that religious purposes are excluded and that separation of church and state is preserved by not allowing tax dollars to promote or sustain any religious group, but only their secular, social-welfare works.


• Ushered through Congress a compromise economic-stimulus package, the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which is designed to save and create 3.5 million jobs, but which was far too light on tax breaks to the low- and middle-income groups, too light on spending, and which failed to adequately address education, or relief and jobs for veterans and the homeless.


• Directed $634 billion to begin health-care-system reform as a social- and economic-stabilization priority.


• Ordered 17,000 troops to Afghanistan to bolster security in the south.


• Accepts Afghan and Pakistani envoys to participate in strategic-planning process for U.S. actions and deployments in the region.


• Signed executive order establishing the White House Office of Urban Affairs, which will coordinate federal programs, encourage investment and development, oversee urban-spending programs and attainment of goals.  Not specified, but inherent in the order is the availability of a mechanism by which the President can extend and assist the community-organizing practices of which he is so familiar, and through which, his electoral base can be sustained and expanded.


• Conducted an unprecedented economic summit, consisting of break-out sessions, lead by administration appointees attended by leaders in government and business, addressing economic, government procurement, taxation, social security and health-care issues, to identify problems and propose solutions, especially those which can quickly be enacted, and with an emphasis on follow-through.


• Pledged to cut the $1.3 trillion deficit in half by the end of his first term.


• Ended Reagan-Bush-Cheney restrictions against photographing coffins of soldiers being returned for burial.


• Presented the 2009 budget to Congress, containing a $1.75 trillion deficit, but reflecting costs hidden by Bush-Cheney, including the costs of the occupation in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan.  Republicans objected to it, and lied in doing so, as when House minority leader, Ohio Rep. Boehner, and others said it raises taxes for all Americans, when in fact, only five percent, those making more than $250,000/year, are increased, all others paying less, and don’t go into effect until 2011, along with the other delayed, tax-deduction limitations, which also makes Republican claims that it raises taxes during a recession and hurts charities lies.  And the new increases do not impose any more upon the wealthy than was the case during the Reagan administration, basically eliminating the Bush tax cuts which were only for the wealthy, which is frankly still not enough, still not imposing upon the wealthy their fair share as compared to the ratios paid by the poor and middle class.  The budget also cuts $300 million from medicaid payments by reducing or eliminating excess payments to insurance companies and pharmacies, while also closing abusive Bush-era tax loopholes that benefitted only the wealthy and doing much to reverse the economic inequality that had seen runaway growth under the decades-long Reagan-Bush, Republican policies.


• Recreated executive council on women, abolished by Bush.


• Rejected the Bush objectives of attaining democracy in Afghanistan and opposing the Taliban to that of destroying al Qaeda’s ability to conduct attacks against the U.S. and its allies, employing a multilateral plan of military and civilian-development objectives.


• Lifted family travel and money-transfer restrictions to Cuba, and began working toward opening a formal dialogue with Havana while leaving the embargo in effect.


• Instituted the beginning of a long-needed revamping and shifting of priorities in outrageous defense procurement, acquisition, and contracting, with a funding emphasis on front-line personnel costs, support services, equipment and strengthening over leading-edge hardware projects to better be prepared for conflicts confronting and likely to confront the nation, and to increase Army and Marine manpower while freezing Air Force to bring an end to the use of stop-loss  This includes dropping the cost-overrun, presidential-helicopter-replacement program, increasing funding for the F35 strike fighter as the exquisitely expensive F-22 Raptor fleet is capped and funding for increased theater short-range and sea-born ICBM missile defenses.


• Released Bush administration Office of Legal Counsel policy memos on torture but announced that CIA personnel who, in accordance with those policies, used “harsh techniques” in interrogation will not be prosecuted, which is proper, since they would only be the “fall guys,” as it is the highest-placed officials and their advisors and staff, who created and put in place illegal policies, who should be made accountable for the crimes that resulted.


• Signed $5.7 billion legislation expanding the AmeriCorps urban-improvement volunteer program.


• Led in the efforts toward a successful reorganization of GM and saving Chrysler from dissolution.


• As the chief defender of the Constitution and the laws that are derived from it, President Obama moved to put his agenda above enforcing the law by withholding support for aggressive fact finding into the Bush administration’s violations of the Constitution, of lawful treaties, and the law.  That kind of misplaced priority, for politics over accountability, makes the words he says must have meaning meaningless, demonstrates that when he says, “America has the will to uphold our values and ideals,” that it is just empty words, and his unwillingness to stand for justice against the Bush crimes removes all consequences for those who, to the great harm and even deaths of many others, dared to put themselves above the law and are being rewarded for it.  Tragic, this, business as usual.


• Led the passage of the budget blueprint for FY 2010, to grow the economy, education, and expansion of healthcare.


• Initiated an ultimately successful program to crack open Swiss bank secrecy, allowing prosecution of wealthy U.S. depositors using offshore accounts to evade taxes.


• Failed, within this initial time frame, to address the critical truths behind the speech, below, delivered 17 years ago to the United Nations Earth Summit, by 12-year-old, Canadian, Severn Suzuki, truths, the severity of which, since then have only deepened, the probability to avoid or solve, become less likely.

While there is no doubt that Obama is the white knight to Bush’s black knight, or that Obama-Biden will steer America to a better future, despite the Bush-Cheney minefield left behind, a better future for most Americans than any Republican-conservative clone, it’s never as simple as black and white.  Like McCain, with some of his initial campaign promises, Obama is also slipping on some issues, like NAFTA, and not stepping out on others, like respecting limits on constitutional power, abused by Republican administrations over the last decade.  But Obama promised more, including not to be a candidate who just said what was needed to be elected, a purveyor of empty or even exaggerated promises; yet, now it seems he is to becoming hazy, failing to take a firm stand to:

remove all troops from Iraq within the promised 16 months and obtain restitution from Iraq’s multi-billion oil-surplus fund to, at least, repay amounts lost due to Iraqi fraud, corruption, and abuse, instead, making Bush-administration sounds about “responsible withdrawal,” which could mean another administration falling into lock-step with imperial Republican ambitions.  Getting out responsibly means doing it quickly without risking increased casualties.  The installed Iraqi regime has had all the chances (and American lives) it has needed to get its act together, and America needs to leave and let the internal chips fall where they may.  Any regime will still be subject to American force if it engages in genocide, pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, or supporting terrorism.  An extended American presence is not required to deter those outcomes;

bring down the Washington system of influence and the money-based election machine, which includes ending earmarks and political districting (since this item was listed, Obama has said he would be against earmarks, but he has yet to make the strongest affirmation, as McCain has, that he would veto any bill containing them and not use them himself.);

end the influence of lobbyists to promote their interests over the public interest.
On his first full day in office, President Obama signed an executive order strictly requlating lobbyist activities within his administration, but the president must also push for strict controls in Congress and end influence in the electoral system by changing to full public financing only.

reaffirm that the Constitution does not allow for presidential signing statements;

reaffirm that the Constitution prohibits the executive from raising or maintaining private armies;

reaffirm that only Congress constitutionally determines where and when troops are deployed in non-defensive circumstances;

reaffirm that Congress constitutionally must ratify all international agreements relating to deployment or use of force and trade;

simplify the tax structure, now a tool of political manipulation and advantage to corporations and the wealthy;

balance the benefits and obligations of NAFTA and all trade agreements to reflect standards fair to American workers;

rein in the out-of-control, wild-west, Wall-Street investment/banking operations;

end or reverse the bailouts the Republican-controlled administration and Treasury Department are showering upon financial firms responsible for the current economic climate;

increase Department of Justice resources, now completely inadequate, to investigate and prosecute rampant corporate crime;

hold accountable executives of financial firms being bailed out, who are still on the job, making their millions, who caused the economic failure now bleeding middle- and lower-class Americans;

Only one week short of one month in office, President Obama’s administration has embraced a surprising number of elite members of the broken economic system into its financial inner circle and has displayed an amicability with the industry that is extremely disturbing, seemingly, willing to allow the firms that failed to continue calling the shots and, seemingly, unwilling to assert government power and authority over the attempt by the salary- and bonus-stuffed heads of the financial sector to control the nation’s financial policies, preserving their position and their rewards, regardless of whether their practices succeed or fail, aid or harm.  The President, in particular, and his cabinet, would do well to review the words of Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln, warning of the arrogance of corporate power, which has left its mark well and deep over the last several decades of conservative-Republican rule.  Both presidents also warned that corporate greed and arrogance, much in evidence over the last two months, pose a direct danger to government, and with that in mind, look to see what remnants of that ill-motivated clique have been permitted to infiltrate and influence the effort to regain control over a runaway and rampant banking elite.

repeal laws shielding criminal corporate executives from civil suits, and put in place regulatory requirements for corporations to allow shareholders to approve salary packages of top executives and permit employee choice in retirement-fund investment options;

block corporations guilty of fraud and theft from participating in government-contract processes;

bring to a final, unsquirming end all credit-industry practices attacking those afflicted by poverty, including ending all interest and penalties associated with medical debts;

end all speculation in oil and food commodities and medical services/products;

end the unconstitutional, Bush-initiated distribution of tax dollars to all “faith-based” programs;

reverse the flood of illegal immigration and green-card abuse costing American jobs, job standards, and community heritage, and commit to strictly enforce and actively partner with states to enforce immigration law;

and block any use of public funding and resources for any George W. Bush or Richard Cheney library, and instruct the Department of Justice to investigate grounds for possible criminal charges to be brought forward against them and other members of their staffs.

The blame stops here.

Professor Elizabeth Warren

Bush, Paulson, Banks Condemned by Oversight Panel, Senate Committee

Professor Elizabeth Warren, dubbed as a consumer and middle-class crusader, is the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, the author of many books and papers on finance, and a veteran of government service in the financial sector.  She was appointed by Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reed (D-NV), to the post of Chairman of the Senate Oversight Panel on TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program), where she is urging Treasury accountability for its irresponsible administration of the TARP expenditures during the Bush administration.

In testimony on Thursday, February 5, 2009, before the Senate Banking Committee on the Treasury Department’s Use of Financial Assistance Funds, Prof. Warren was very impressive in her expressed commitment to serve the purpose of congressional oversight by bringing accountability to the disbursements and uses to which assistance recipients put the funds they receive.

Meanwhile, Bush’s former Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson, a former CEO of the once, investment-banking firm, now, bank-holding firm, Goldman Sachs, and Bush’s chief architect of the TARP process, joined Cheney in reaching out from the confines of his dark legacy to speak out, in the press, against accountability by criticizing the Obama administration’s limitations on executive pay for banks receiving assistance, saying that it will discourage banks from using the fund, provoking failures.  The panel, questioned on the likelihood of executives letting their firms fail rather than accept assistance with such conditions attached, advised the committee that Paulson’s conclusions are not realistic, since executives of banks that fail lose their jobs.  Paulson was obviously speaking with the same allegiance he held when working for the people at Bush’s Treasury:  his former banking-executive peers.

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) reflected this view when he spoke harshly against the TARP and Paulson, saying that Congress gave Paulson more power than any Treasury secretary since Hamilton, but that his service certainly did not approach the distinction of Hamilton’s, instead, addressing the needs of his friends when structuring the TARP’s administration.

Prof. Warren reported that experts hired for the panel are not associated with the institutions receiving TARP funds or rating agencies, and that those finance-business professionals are augmented by two academicians, university professors of finance, and lawyers to perform legal analysis.  Her testimony was pointed in that the facts her panel had so far uncovered confirm that the Treasury Department, under Bush, misled the people and the Congress regarding the assignment and use of the TARP funds the Bush administration received.  The Obama administration is also providing spending oversight through a TARP Special Inspector General, Neil Barofsky, whose office is auditing to investigate procedural and criminal aspects of the uses of the funds which have been disbursed.

It is widely reported that Bush, when confronted about the constitutionality of some of his policies, said “Stop throwing the Constitution in my face.  It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”

Spitting upon the mainstay of the American Charters of Freedom is, like flag burning, a right of expression those documents guarantee, no matter the office held.  You can see a search on the phrase, “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper” and draw your own conclusions.  But this is undeniable fact:  Bush’s actions, contrary to law and the will of the people, amount to worse than having said it.  Bush must be legally leashed and caged if not removed from office.  His latest violation of the Constitution’s Bill of Rights,, in the form of another “signing statement,” claiming the authority to conduct warrantless searches of mail, is especially defiant of constitutional protections, particularly in light of the objections which arose after the illegal wiretaps he secretly authorized came to light.

Bush and Cheney are gone, but the Constitution still wears their footprints, and restoring the Constitution’s eroded authority and splintering framework in government remains a necessary and urgent imperative.  In his opening speech to the Senate, the new majority leader, Senator Harry Reid, said, “The foundation of [the Senate] is the committee system.”  He is wrong.  The Constitution, is the foundation of the Senate, as well as the House and the entire platform of government.  The failure to see that is partly responsible for the drastic tilt of the scale of power that has been destroying the government of the Founding Fathers.  The new House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, along with every other newly elected member of the 110th Congress, in January, 2007, took the oath to “uphold and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”  And despite much talk from the new Congress of working together, between the aisles and with the administration, there can be no “working together” when the work of one party is destructive to the life and foundation of a nation.  Bush has shown himself to be a domestic enemy of the Constitution, and the interaction between Speaker Pelosi’s and Sen. Reid’s Democratic leadership, between the Democratic Congress and the Bush administration, can only be, at best, aggressively contentious.

Bush continues to use fear as a means to reach beyond the authority of his office.  He is the incarnation of the Founding Fathers’ and the Constitution’s chief architect, James Madison’s worst fears.  “Listen” to Madison’s words and think of how they apply to today’s evolution of his government.  It begins with multiple expressions regarding the abuse of power, and then goes on to address the careless relinquishing of power in trying times, an issue hotly alive with the concerns of the Patriot Act, the continuing attempts by Bush to grab power with his legislative sign-offs, the use of fear to gain support for accumulating ever greater and farther-reaching powers, and his attacks against the judiciary, supported by other Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is also Pavlov-reflexed to salivate the Bush line on Iraq, ignorantly claiming enthusiastic support for all the harm Bush has imposed and will impose, and that the war there has prevented attacks in the U.S., when, in fact, it has not.  Only limited al Qaeda capability combined with increased intelligence and law-enforcement initiatives and cooperation are responsible for the lack of post-9/11 attacks.  At this point, Madison would be holding his sword to Bush’s breast when speaking:

“All men having power ought to be mistrusted.”

“I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”

“If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”

“Tyranny” meant the more subtle abuse of the minority by the majority—not so much a Nazi or Genghis Kahn type of violent repression and control, though that would be the possible result of an excess allowed to go too far.  Nip it in the bud would be Madison’s strong warning.  He went on:

“The loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or imagined, from abroad.”

“The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.”

“No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

These quotes of Madison are a stern warning and all have bearing upon today’s choices for citizens, Congress, the courts, and Bush’s unfounded claims that power in his hands will keep fighting away from U.S. streets.

The time is past for these legislative sign-offs to continue.  They are unconstitutional.  The Constitution provides that the laws be made by Congress with the signing approval of the president, not that the president can or should, on his own, alter the laws Congress sends to his desk.  His options are only to sign them into law, unaltered; do nothing and, after ten days, with Congress still in session, let them pass into law without his signature, unaltered; or veto them.  This practice of declared signing statements, which Bush has taken beyond all others (who were equally wrong to exercise it) is self-legislation.  If there were any validity to signing statements at all, it would only be if the statements were returned to Congress for its approval, because the role of Congress in writing the law CANNOT be sidestepped or ceded away.  Such is the path to a dictator, and Bush’s dictates, made through the illegal signing statements, are tantamount to “the King’s word is the law!”  That is the blatant inverse of the Founders’ intent for American government!

The egregious sweeping away of the Constitution’s privacy protections, authorized by Bush’s latest signing statement, is irrefutable evidence that the dangerous practice of one-sided executive signing statements must no longer be permitted to continue unopposed, unless the route back to Congress is provided.  The process of creating law contained within the Constitution is sufficiently robust, thought out, and time-tested that no president, particularly not Bush, has any justifiable reason to discard or amend it, and no such authority in any case.  This latest affront to law makes clear that a new priority for Congress and the courts is to shore up the weakened legs of government’s separation of powers, upon which Bush’s signing statements are a decaying form of rot and rust.

Government is many things to different people, systems, and philosophies.  Further, the view of government changes as the leaders of government change.  There are those, in America, who view their government as an interference, a barrier that restricts freedom.  Many of these are criminals, and many own guns, stock supplies for some coming conflagration, and for vacation, or avocation, they play warrior in wilderness camps.  Some few become terrorists, striking against an alien force that has somehow morphed from what was once acceptable into a current abomination.  Many more are businessmen who object to regulation and taxes.

Then, there are those who share the view of government as a barrier, not for what it is, but for who and what controls it.  To some, the barrier is in their face, blocking their path of opportunity, draining their energy and resources as they try to navigate its restrictions.  To others, the barrier is keeping out the riffraff, providing advantage by exclusion, an asset of control and assurance of well being.  These are opposed forces and interests of a more personalized nature, rather than structural.

To systems—industrial, corporate, financial, military, religious—government is different things, but still changing with the change of hands at the helm.  The American, constitutional, democratic government is, to the military, the defining authority and the provider of tools and purpose.  To the religious sector, it is a guardian angel, protecting existence and separatism, and it is also a constitutionally locked box, containing forbidden fruit of worldly power to extend reach, expand congregations, and draw wealth, if the box can be pried open, just a bit, which, with Bush’s disregard of wise and necessary, constitutional separation of church and state, the key has been handed over to favored factions.

To industry and corporation boards, constitutional government is also a guardian, sanctifying property and setting boundaries of interference and control, making it also a tool to be used to greatest advantage in garnering market, resource, and wealth, where it also is a treasure chest to be pried open and raided, and anything else government can do, not contributing to those goals of enrichment, or that seeks to control or allow interference, is an anathema to be removed, by lawyers, elections, persuasion (spin, P.R.), payout, and, too often, when all else fails, by lies, theft, fraud, or worse.

Since the corporate-industrial system derives its protections and restrictions from government and law, lawyers are the principal players in those interactions, and with lawyers, trimmed to this segment, signed contracts are the foundation of operations, transactions, and understanding, and for them, and corporations and industries, all contracts are negotiable.  Perhaps it is this view that allows a president, George W. Bush, who is the servant of corporate-industrial interests, to say that the Constitution is just a Goddamned piece of paper.”

No less, the Bush administration has demonstrated, over six years of closet rule, that, to it, the Constitution is just that:  a piece of paper, to be ignored, contradicted, spun, defied, and cursed.  Of course, liberty’s shelf of constitutional-progenitor documents, from before the Magna Carta to beyond the English Bill of Rights, defies the simplifications and smears that define the Constitution for Bush’s administration, partly, because those earlier documents cost lives to pen and to make into living protections of human rights that are far more meaningful and enduring than just the pieces of paper upon which their aspirations and declarations were written; and, partly because the Constitution, beyond being just a piece of paper, is also beyond just being a framework of difficult, ingenious compromise, signed as a contract between states or between the elected and governed of only a long-ago generation of people.  It is also a legacy of life, and conduct, a statement of hope and aspiration, created not only for the time that belonged to the great and thoughtful men who painstakingly argued and reasoned to write it, but even more, for the times to dawn on future generations who would stand upon their shoulders to build and refine the greatest nation the world would ever know, secured by liberty and the rule of justly conceived law, in pursuit of dreams and ambitions.  That is the great historical conception of civil enlightenment to which the Founders aspired, and the Constitution, and its Bill of Rights, is the product of their best efforts to define and secure that aspiration and future hope, and make it real, as a lasting framework, a government, for the people of a new and great nation, and for their generations to come.

The Constitution was the Founders’ greatest achievement, one like no other, which has withstood the disasters, and wars, and changes in culture and technology, and politics, and lousy politicians, for over 220 years, with only a handful of amendments.  Since 1776, hundreds of thousands of soldiers and statesmen didn’t bleed and die for a so-called piece of paper.  And, while more than 4,300 who died in Iraq didn’t, either, what that “Goddamned piece of paper” stands for is what the Bush administration found useful as an excuse to send them to their deaths there, and that piece of paper is also in there, somewhere, amidst a slew of false justifications and well-spun speaking points to keep them there.  No matter how Bush uses and abuses it, the Constitution is and remains a national treasure, worth the greatest sacrifices made to protect it, and considering what America has done to benefit the rest of the world in that comparably short time, since the Declaration of Independence, it is also a world treasure.

The Bush administration perception, or conduct indicating that the Constitution is just a piece of paper—a contract, to be renegotiated by the unilateral decision of a president, or even any single branch of government, that it can be loopholed, walked on and around, propagandized, and diminished or attacked on basis of standing, relevance, or some lessor authority, or past practice, or any present or future expedience or call to fear, or to make a buck, is the naked, base perception of greedy businessmen or greedy and corrupted lawyers and politicians, like many of those who populate the Bush administration, top down.  It is good that, along with many Republican-administration supporters in Congress, they are finally being seen to be beneath even that stark reduction of respect and value they hold for the instrument of this nation’s rights and strength, particularly in light of Bush’s actions with former Attorney General Ashcroft and the reauthorization of the illegal NSA wiretaps.  Most emphatically, their perception of the Constitution is not that of a patriot, and it cannot be the perception, driving actions, that is allowed to stand alongside a sworn oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, because the oath and defense will fall, as they have, leaving the Constitution, its rights and protections, vulnerable, weakened, and eventually, destroyed.

The Bush presidency (including Bush’s Nixon-administration alumni, who include ties to the murderous, privatized army, Blackwater USA, now called Xe Services) has done more to tear down American democracy and damage the nation than the combined legacy of any of America’s three-most cherished presidents to build it, excluding, perhaps, Madison and Jefferson.  But given another 18 months of the Bush-Cheney White House, even the contributions of those Founders and presidents could be neutralized.  With Bush, the historic chain of democratic strength, and of linked, evolving heritage has been arrogantly, selfishly, and remorselessly broken.  It is safe to say that the Bush administration has no clue of the Constitution’s or the Bill of Rights’ real value, or reverence for their virtues, or respect for more than a dozen references that “piece of paper” provides for impeachment.  It is already regrettably late for Congress to pick up on the latter, but still not too late to act and return America’s government to the hands and vision of patriots.

James Madison

“The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question,
whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.” — James Madison

The non-binding resolution, introduced by Senator Biden, failed to assert the constitutional prerogative and responsibility of Congress, not the president, to initiate non-defensive-response military action.  To senators and congressmen deciding whether or not they would vote to support the resolution, and particularly, if the resolution is the strongest action they should invoke, the quote, above, from the Constitution’s chief architect, would be Madison’s instruction that it was not the role of Congress to sign off on Bush’s initiative in Iraq.  It is for the executive to seek and obtain the initiative for war from the Congress!  The inverse of Madison’s stated intent also leaves it to the judgment of Congress, not the president, to decide whether there is or is not cause for terminating a war, as is written in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 of the Constitution.  The authority to carry out war is not like a serve on the tennis court, with Congress placing the ball in the executive’s court as Rebublican conservatives would have you believe.  It is more like a handoff or pass in football, where the runner or receiver is trusted to carry the ball and advance the team, according to the play called, within the rules of the game, the ball still belonging to the team, which may choose to remove an errant runner or receiver from the game, or change the strategy and plays called as the situation demands.  The authority to determine the objectives and scope of war is never handed to the executive, only the power to direct the military within the authorized scope to achieve the objectives set by Congress is granted.  The course to war in Iraq and its unchecked run over the last four-plus years is a travesty of power as twisted as Madison would be after rolling over in his grave from witnessing it.

Countering the stance of those who argue the meaning of the Constitution’s War Powers clause from the perspective of presidential power, that declaring war is different from the undeclared use of force, the Supreme Court expressly ruled, in 1862, that the Constitution’s exclusion of executive power to “declare” war also extends to “initiate” without declaration.  The presidentialists’ stance that the role of Congress to declare does not exclude undeclared presidential force initiatives because the congressional role to declare was intended simply to be a trigger mechanism for other domestic and international war-related laws is equally invalid.  The legal basis against this view and against the president’s sole authority without congressional declaration is also supported by the Founders, especially Madison’s expressed caution against vesting too much power in one person, and there is no more affecting power than the direction of force of arms, which is assumed to follow a declaration, and which the president is then authorized, by the larger body of the minds and hearts of the elected representatives of Congress, to conduct.  Who can contrive or construe that the Founders, so fearful of the power of force they saw so ruthlessly directed against them by England’s King, would ever conceive to construct a government where that power, for domestic or international purpose, would ever again be vested within one man to threaten?  No, their words and their Constitution bars that, even in the case of an authorized use of force by the president to counter an attack (defend), where, the attack suppressed, any extended, continued use of such force to pursue the enemy would only be constitutional when authorized by Congress.  The further specificity with which the Constitution withholds related war powers from the president (Marque and Reprisal, and the Captures Clauses of Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11), vesting them, as well, only in Congress, reinforces the intent of the Founders that all powers of armed conflict, save initiating immediate defense responses, be so specifically and solely within the power of Congress and not the president.  In Iraq, there never was any element of the 911 attack forces, present or directing, against which any defensive-initiative authority could have constitutionally applied.  And look, there, at the death and mayhem, and at home, the resultant damage, grief, and sorrow one man’s abuse of such power has wrought, as the Founders knew it could!

The Biden resolution failed to address the limited circumstances and conditions under which the constitutional authority for military action in Iraq was transferred, and it failed to take the president to task for stepping beyond that authority when the circumstances put forth to secure it were found to be false and, in the case of the terms of the October 2002 Joint Resolution of Congress, which authorized the president to “enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council Resolutions regarding Iraq,” were also non-existent, because the U.N. Security Council never did authorize the use of force.  In effect, while expressing a departure of accord with the administration’s Iraq-war management, goals, and expansion of forces, the resolution, by failing to assert the lack of authority for military operations, by terms and circumstance, once proposed threats to national security were found not to be present, validates the president’s wayward actions with respect to the use of military force beyond the issue of WMD threats to American security which authorized his invasion.  Beyond the spectrum of harm caused by the war to America expressed in the resolution, the most egregious circumstance of the president’s war in Iraq, not addressed by it, is that Bush’s actions in Iraq redefine the constitutional basis for initiating and carrying out military operations, removing that authority from the collective consent of the people’s representatives, intended by the Founders, to that of one person.  The resolution, having no force of action and imposing no constitutional limit or claim of transgressed rights, thereby silently reinforces the effective ceding of that congressional power to the executive.  The consequences of allowing the power to initiate and define the scope of war to be vested within the singular “belief” of one executive, rather than the collective wisdom, experience, and conscience of the Congress, has already been made clear by the tragic losses in Iraq, which will continue to affect the nation for decades to come.

House Minority Leader John Boehner’s announced bipartisan panel proposal, offered as an alternative to Senator Biden’s resolution and as a tool of presidential oversight in Iraq, like the Democratic proposal, has little meaning without a mandate that represents the will of the people as expressed by the new configuration of Congress.  Open-ended benchmarks combined with binding statements for the panel, like, “failure is not an option,” voiced by Boehner, represent nothing more than a mouthing of Bush’s previous statements with regard to his Iraqi policy.  Boehner and other Republicans also fail by too willingly conferring to Bush the right to do whatever he wishes as Commander in Chief, specifying that particular actions cannot be dictated by 535 members of the House and Senate, that responses cannot be slowed by such requirements in the modern era.  No such attempt has been proposed.  And to the contrary, since the Constitution places no need to obtain authorization from Congress when responding to the attack of an enemy, the fast paced flow of events and facts demand that more time be given to the consideration of the use of force in those conditions where there is no overt attack to which a response must be initiated.  The failures in Iraq, Vietnam, and other presidentially initiated and carried-out military adventures reinforce this, and also reinforced is the wisdom of the Founding Fathers which has been ignored, to ill consequence, over the last half century, and now is the time to set the balance of power on the Constitution’s intent for war back to its intended point on the fulcrum.

The powers accorded to the president by the Constitution are not policy-setting powers of war, as Bush has taken them, changing the purpose from WMD, through freedom, to a democracy; they are not powers of scope and scale of conflict, allowing him to draw without end or accountability upon troops and resources; and they are not powers to define the goals of any conflict beyond that for which authorization was granted, which was to remove the threat of WMD.  The president’s powers are restricted to directing America’s military assets within the scope of operations that are determined and authorized by Congress, and for which Congress may, at its discretion, and at any time, alter or withdraw.  If the president wishes to operate with use of force beyond that authority, it is up to him to make his case to Congress to grant him further latitude and renewed authority.  The Constitution never specifies or implies that it be within the purview of any one man to commit the nation and its soldiers to war or risk of conflict by such placement of troops by any circumstance, other than as authorized by Congress.  That right is reserved solely to the collective judgement of the elected representatives of Congress, and the sooner that Congress responds to America’s demands, issued by proxy of ballots in the last election, that the scope of war be returned to its constitutional limits, the better will be the outlook for America’s future, long term and immediate.  The Constitution does not specify that the Congress must act as a full body in administering its war powers, and so it would be appropriate for constituted segments of Congress to take on designated responsibilities during any conflict for which it has authorized the president to engage—such formed directives would still represent the collective voice of a majority of legislators and not the will or “belief” of a single man.

Bush’s war in Iraq is unconstitutional.  The Constitution’s Articles cannot be altered or sidestepped with legislation or by presidential directives.  They can only be changed or removed by the purposefully difficult process of amendment.  The War Powers Act is unconstitutional, and the cost of allowing presidential discretion with war powers beyond constitutional limits has cost Americans dearly, most recently, the cost of more than 4,300 lives and fast increasing; it has set back American foreign policy, has created more hatred and more opportunity for enemies who are not confronted in Bush’s war to gather the forces to be launched against America that will cause irrevokable harm to American society and the American way of life.  It is time for Congress to put Bush on actionable notice that he has overstepped the authority he was conditionally granted.  It is time to end his adventure and its cost in lives and resources sorely needed elsewhere.  The time for political games and adventures must be ended.  The allowances they assume have for too long strayed to quash the tried-and-true guidelines and restraints, which constitute America’s heritage, contained within the Constitution and its associated wealth of documents and written history.  As has already been proven, it is foolhardy to continue to ignore them.

Ex-secretaries of State James Baker III and Warren Christopher, who headed a bipartisan commission looking into war powers, have released the National War Powers Commission Report, which announced a determination that the War Powers Resolution (Act) of 1973, which sought to reenforce the restraints placed upon the executive by the Constitution (and as such, from a legal standpoint, was unnecessary) should be replaced.  But as a tool to reassert the authority of Congress and, after the unnecessary loss of 58,000 lives in Vietnam, to remind of the limitations placed upon the executive by the Constitution, it was a necessity, and with the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the creation of a civilian army in Iraq by Bush (a congressional-only power), it still points to the increasing imperative that Congress assert its authority over the executive with respect to war.

Baker, speaking as a presidentialist, calls the War Powers Act “a bad law,” saying that it “undermines and damages the rule of law” because it is so questioned or ignored, and that it is not efficient or a convenient means of exercising constraint on executive authority.  But that is a continued failure of Congress, not the Act or the Constitution, and his commission’s proposed replacement would not, as he claims, preserve any constitutional balance, but would serve to loosen the restraints imposed by the 1973 resolution, which, though unconstitutional, would also be a deleterious evolution because the War Powers Commission proposal, at minimum, implies that there is a prerogative for the executive to initiate military actions independently, it would provide no requirement for congressional consent, and it would dilute the absolute authority of Congress by subjugating it to executive-veto power and by limiting its actionable authority to funding alone.  The Supreme Court spoke, indirectly, to this issue in 1983, when it ruled, six to three, in INS v. Chadha, that the procedural safeguards of the Constitution cannot be sidestepped by either house of Congress or the president.  Justice Burger delivered the ruling, excerpted below:

“The bicameral requirement, the Presentment Clauses, the President’s veto, and Congress’ power to override a veto were intended to erect enduring checks on each Branch and to protect the people from the improvident exercise of power by mandating certain prescribed steps.  To preserve those checks, and maintain the separation of powers, the carefully defined limits on the power of each Branch must not be eroded.  To accomplish what has been attempted by one House of Congress in this case requires action in conformity with the express procedures of the Constitution’s prescription for legislative action: passage by a majority of both Houses and presentment to the President.

“The veto authorized by 244(c)(2) doubtless has been in many respects a convenient shortcut; the “sharing” with the Executive by Congress of its authority... is, on its face, an appealing compromise.  In purely practical terms, it is obviously easier for action to be taken by one House without submission to the President; but it is crystal clear from the records of the Convention, contemporaneous writings and debates, that the Framers ranked other values higher than efficiency...

“The choices we discern as having been made in the Constitutional Convention impose burdens on governmental processes that often seem clumsy, inefficient, even unworkable, but those hard choices were consciously made by men who had lived under a form of government that permitted arbitrary governmental acts to go unchecked.  There is no support in the Constitution or decisions of this Court for the proposition that the cumbersomeness and delays often encountered in complying with explicit constitutional standards may be avoided, either by the Congress or by the President.  With all the obvious flaws of delay, untidiness, and potential for abuse, we have not yet found a better way to preserve freedom than by making the exercise of power subject to the carefully crafted restraints spelled out in the Constitution.”

Yet, Baker says, “...polls show this [executive-leaning replacement of the War Powers Resolution] is what Americans want to see.”  That would be a poll he has interpreted wrongly, because to the contrary, Americans, fearing power abused, like the Founding Fathers, want to see that no president has sole authority to commit troops to battle, but rather, only that authority bestowed by Congress, according to the Constitution.  The past abuses of the executive have all been grounded in an inappropriate expanding of the defining role of Commander in Chief, invoking upon that “title” powers that are totally within the constitutional context of the congressional authority to “declare war,” when, in fact, the Constitution is merely designating the executive as the facilitator of congressional intent with respect to the goals and authority it receives for engaging in military conflicts.

The proposal of the commission seeks to amend the Constitution by proxy, as opposed to the War Powers Resolution, or the recent Senate resolution to prohibit unilateral actions against Iran, which sought to reenforce the Constitution, and no law is constitutional that would alter the power of Congress to decide when and where America’s blood will be spilled.  Only an amendment to the Constitution can accomplish that end, which Baker says “isn’t going to happen,” and so, as Republican administrations have guided Japan’s government in ignoring its constitution’s Article 9, absolute prohibition against creating a military, Baker’s commission report seeks to end-run the U.S. Constitution’s delegation of war power to Congress, at what would be the loss of more soldiers’ lives in conflicts either premature to diplomacy or unrelated to America’s defense or security.  Of merit, however, is the joint House and Senate committee the commission proposes, to oversee military activities after authorizations are granted, because this committee, as proposed, would be a responsive tool for oversight of congressional authority with immediate potential to curb any expansion beyond the intent of Congress in exercising the authority it provides to the executive.  As to Baker’s justification that the proposed law would clarify who in Congress the president should consult, with respect to war, it is a shallow front for another attempt to imply or plant the seed that consultation is a sole requirement for what would then be unconstitutional, unilateral executive action without the formal authority of Congress required by the Constitution.  Any high school or college student who has studied government would know that, in any issue, the president should consult with the designated leaders of each party in each house, and the chairs of House and Senate committees affected by the issue.

In the end, only the voice of the American people, expressed through contact with their representatives, can affect an initiative for Congress to properly exercise and oversee its authority over the executive and ensure that America’s military will be a tool for defense of liberty and not that of any president’s whim, acting as a king or dictator, without regard or obligation to the will of the people, as Bush, walking over the Constitution and a prostate Congress, has endowed upon himself as “The Great Decider.”  That travesty is intended to be prevented in war matters by the Constitution’s provisions of congressional authority over the executive.  The election of a president does not bestow upon that person such power or authority, and it never has.

Aside from the discarded constitutional imperatives and historical guidance which are at the core of such a wrong move, as Iraq, and the wrong motives for invading, No End in Sight documents how, after all the basic wrongs, the wrong deed is also wrongly executed by America’s wrong choice for a Republican president.

Courts under attack.  Justices cite disturbing threats from Republican right.

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.  The lie can be maintained only for such time as the state can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie.  It thus becomes vitally important for the state to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the [authoritarian] state.

— Joseph Goebbels, Adolph Hitler’s Chief of Propaganda

It turned out to be correctly leaked that Bush’s troop surge would be couched in a grand-sounding emphasis on rebuilding (when contractor corruption and accountability are an aid and comfort to the enemy) and tied to a meaningless troop-level-match promise from the Iraqi P.M. Maliki, who is self-interested against Bush’s plan and who has no reliable troops to match, especially when you consider that Bush’s plan aims just to gain control of the capital, with no accounting for the far-larger surrounding country.  This will only invoke a delay and set up Maliki as the fall guy when it goes wrong, as it will, as enough military and administrative people with knowledge and experience have said it is likely to.  The chance for success, except in getting increasing numbers of U.S. troops killed (by mid April, before the surge to control Baghdad is even complete, members of the Iraqi parliament in the fortified green zone were killed, and U.S. troop casualties in Iraq increased 20 percent) is about a great as the truth behind the phrases with which Bush opened and closed his speech:  “The new strategy I outline tonight will... help us succeed in the fight against terror,” and “We go forward with trust that the Author of Liberty will guide us...”  How can there be any success in the war against terror when, thanks to the diversion in Iraq, al Qaeda and its supporting Taliban are growing in strength in their homelands, and with al Qaeda also gaining strength in the Iraqi provinces?  “The Author of Liberty [God] will guide us?”  Bush has long been claiming a communion with God, and the evidence is that God is either busy elsewhere or isn’t listening.  The fact is that the war in Iraq has no moral basis with which to call upon any Divine sanction, except that good men and women are dying carrying out the duties prescribed by the reckless, ill-motivated leader of a God-fearing nation.  Ever since Bush claimed victory on the carrier, his way in Iraq has gone from stagnant to worsening, ever more costly and more deadly.  His real plan is probably that this surge is to be a holding action until his announced increase in the troop levels of the Army and Marines (90,000) is a reality upon which he can then further draw, which, as this sentence is extended in post-script, has proved to be true, under the guise of support.

As was expected at the onset of the Bush administration’s announcement of the “surge,” as a facilitator of “clear, hold, and build,” it has unfolded to be an undeniable failure, pushing violence to new areas and inducing a selective pause by al Qaeda and insurgents that can outwait any plan, still with no end in sight at its evaluative state, at the end of August and September 2007, or at any subsequent date, and today, no victory, with casualties still level with the lowest ever before the surge, only serving to extend the nation-building plans of an insatiable president, with the sole return being that of escalated casualties, the blood of whom all will spill upon the Bush administration’s lies and demented objectives, pursued in blind and unknowing defiance of the best advice and warnings of America’s Founders.  Congress will owe the fallen and maimed patriots, the principal administration victims, unassuageable apology for its apathetic opposition to a criminal regime, for failing, despite its election to the majority, and consequently, for being as onerous in its vision and performance against the national interest as the administration it was tasked to rein in.

The sacrifice of soldiers and their families in Afghanistan is not forgotten, at least, not from this quarter, despite that the commitment of the volunteer military is more separated from that of the rest of the nation than any other global war in America’s history, a circumstance which speaks volumes between the lines.  Nonetheless, that front is the regrettable but necessary consequence of a just prosecution of America’s enemies:  those who repeatedly attacked the U.S., and those who aided and abetted the attacks, cumulating with the fall of the WTC towers.  But, even these deaths would have been reduced, had Bush put the resources and resolve into destroying the Islamic militancy that attacked the U.S., there, instead of into his special-interest war and occupation in Iraq.

This site emphasizes the unnecessary deaths of 4,300 Iraq-deployed, duty-bound soldiers, deaths no less honorable than any others, the misery of their families and families of the thousands of wounded, and the death and maiming of untold tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi, including women, children, and the elderly.  These are the sole consequence of a greed-based, premeditated, Bush-administration grab for resources and positioning to gain resources for necessary infrastructure services and provisions, worth billions upon billions of dollars, if not trillions, to the industries that hold the Bush administration’s first loyalty and interest, all the while, putting the war against the real U.S. embassy/Cole/WTC Islamic-radical perpetrators in Afghanistan, where there are no corporate-industrial riches to raid, on the back burner.

“Al Qaeda will fight us wherever we are,” was the only truth within the propaganda and speaking points Bush spread over the spring, 2007, grass of the White House lawn.  And that’s why a small part of the opposition in Iraq is al Qaeda:  because Bush is occupying Iraq to nation build.  If Congress pulls troops out of the cities in Iraq to secure, isolated, unapproachable, border staging areas, al Qaeda will then concentrate on Afghanistan and wherever else the West goes to fight against them and their supporting regimes.  Al Qaeda should not, nor should any other organization be exaggerated or fear-mongered into a cause that justifies and facilitates aggression, death, maiming, destruction, and exploitation on a grand scale, at the expense of an end to progressive social growth, in all of its many areas of need, in the most advanced nation in the world.  In addition, such abusive focus, and its cost, hampers confronting the changing climate, reduces the capability to be prepared for and recover from inevitable natural disasters, or benefit others in need of assistance, and it diverts from ending the outrages of dictatorships and oligarchical regimes that deal in death and foster crimes of genocide, rape, slavery, and terror, which, to bring to an end, are goals worthy of what, in Iraq, is an unwarranted and unwanted intrusion into violence and mayhem, which is only prolonged by the Bush policy of exploitation and control, and its inherent prerequisite for long-term occupation, with no assurance of an end.

Iraq is not, as Bush would have you believe, the lynchpin in the struggle of the 21st century, because if it were, a full commitment would have been made with wide public, legislative, military, and international concurrence, which, like the struggle against fascism in WWII, would not have diminished until, at any cost, the threat was put down.  And if Bush really had the advantage of righteous vision or support, Iraq would not now be a four-plus-year-long bloodbath.  If anything, Iraq is the latest in that long string of wars, recorded in every century of mankind’s history, that are justified, motivated, and/or prolonged by a religious argument.  The significant struggle of the 21st century, on a par with environmental preservation, is overcoming abusive and criminal administration of democratic government, not scrapping society’s resources on a tunnel-visioned, fear-mongered, false-fronted war against a drug-financed, cell-phone-and-internet-connected group of radical, religious revolutionaries who can best be dealt with using effective, cooperative law enforcement and intelligence, reserving the military to remove aiding-and-abetting governmental regimes, not to remain as police for occupation and corporate/industrial-motivated nation building.

Senator John Warner (R-VA) has proposed to attach appropriation penalties for construction funds as a consequence of a failure by the Iraqi regime to meet benchmarks, which would be attached to the war-funding bill.  This proposal, from a leader in the Senate Armed Services Committee, is a particularly harsh slap across the face of soldiers.  While Bush refuses a small pay increase for soldiers, Warner’s proposal, instead of ending or even reducing the exposure and risk of troops, places a lowly price on their lives by withholding what would be corruptly managed and ineffectual Iraqi aid dollars, for a failure that, with Bush’s lock-vision arrogance, and Warner’s proposal, would only extend their presence, the danger to which they are exposed, and their toll of dead and wounded, as increasingly more of them are deployed there, no matter what the Iraqi regime does or how it fails.

Tragic effect of illegal war, countering American interests, authoritatively confirmed.

Stating that the U.S. military will break because of being engaged in the dual wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is going too far.  While the latest 16-agency National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report does substantiate the obvious—that military readiness is damaged by the Iraq war, and that the illegal war is aiding the growth of the Islamic-terrorist movement—the military will not break.  But the damage is nonetheless bled-dry serious, chiefly in that the resources of manpower, materials, and money are being spent in an effort that does not affect U.S. security, and more important, it prevents the needed application of those resources against those threats, like Iran, that do directly threaten American security and American lives, abroad and in the homeland, and the ability to effectively react to quick-response scenarios is degraded.  These disadvantages are not worth suffering for the war that creates them, and America’s activities, since precipitating that war and its liabilities, through Bush’s hand, must quickly end.

A portion of the NIE report Bush declassified (10 percent of it), which he and his party have grasped upon as a nullifying factor against the report’s overwhelming verification of the harm precipitated by the Iraq war, was the assessment that:  if the growing Islamic-terrorist recruits are unsuccessful in Iraq, they may diminish.  This possibility is hardly as concrete an outcome as the undeniable harm Bush has inflicted upon that nation and his own; nor does that speculation address the cost that will be paid to discover if such success could ever be achieved.  Finding justification for what has been done in the name of Bush’s beliefs, which even if true, is as elusive and improbable a prospect as the flip-side NIE assessment Bush revealed and to which he so desperately clings.

Iraq is not the lynchpin for success in the war against terror.  Iraq is America’s—Bush’s— incarnation of terror.  Ask the families who have had their doors broken down in the dead of night.  Ask the thousands of unfortunate, in the wrong place at the wrong time, the limbless, the orphaned, the widowed, the grieving parents of lost children of all ages, men and women, boys and girls; the thousands falsely imprisoned; the population with no security and no real hope for any kind for peace or growth in Bush’s shadow, only the false hope of a powerless regime that exists inside a walled fortress in the heart of one city.

Bush’s moral high ground in Iraq

        Blackwater USA President Gary Jackson    

Blackwater, indeed, reflecting the tug of power between occupation and government in Iraq.

In an alleged, Sunday, September 16, 2007, firefight on a Baghdad street, employees of the American private-security contractor, Blackwater USA (apropos name, since theis scandal, renamed Xe Services), fired assault weapons from diplomatic-convoy vehicles that the company claims had come under attack from small arms, contributing to the killing of at least 17 Iraqi civilians and the wounding of scores more.  Initially, Iraqi officials claimed nine deaths at the hands of Blackwater’s gunmen, and on the following Wednesday, Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki had upped the claim to 11 Iraqi civilians killed, and he said there was no bombing of the convoy.  The next week, the state minister for national security affairs, Shirwan al-Waili, said the Iraqi investigation was nearly complete and, “The shots fired on the Iraqis were unjustifiable.  It was harsh and horrible.”  The preliminary report of a tri-ministry joint investigation was severely worded, saying, “The murder of citizens in cold blood in the Nisour area by Blackwater is considered a terrorist action against civilians just like any other terrorist operation.”  The report also reiterated the statement of Interior Ministry spokesmen that those Blackwater employees charged would be “referred to the Iraqi court system.”  Iraqi officials also say they have received no information from American officials about their investigation.  These investigations did not interview several Kurdish witnesses to the slaughter with military backgrounds who later told news sources what they saw.  They are deemed credible because they are supportive of America and because they observed the incident from a rooftop out of the line of fire and its psychological, emotional effects.  They insist there was no opposing fire at all, and that the Blackwater mercenaries actually initiated a second unprovoked attack against a bus filled with women and children after the fatal firing into the crowds in the square had at first come to an end.

American officials claim they have no knowledge of Iraqi plans to prosecute Blackwater employees, and neither Blackwater nor U.S. officials conducting their own investigation have detailed exactly what happened in the Nisour incident.  Official spokespersons for Blackwater, of course, defend the actions of their mercenaries.  According to witnesses, Iraqi military personnel became involved in the firing, and more-indiscriminate fire was also coming from a pair of Blackwater helicopters shadowing the convoy, although a Blackwater spokesperson denied that the helicopters contributed to the carnage, or that anyone shot by their mercenaries were not armed, an impossible statement to believe, since the truth of who was behind all the deaths and wounded will likely not even be fully revealed by a planned forensic investigation.  An October 3, 2007 congressional hearing into this and previous incidents involving Blackwater operations, questioning Blackwater’s CEO and tight-lipped senior State Department officials, failed to shed any new light, beyond the disparate cost of private security vs. conventional military, while a Department of Justice F.B.I. investigation into possible crimes and charges continues.  Two days later, the House passed legislation, over the objection of the Bush administration that will bring all contractors in the Iraq war zone under U.S. criminal jurisdiction, with cases to be investigated by the F.B.I.  On November 14, 2007, the New York Times reported that the F.B.I.’s investigation into the September 16 shootings found that 14 of the 17 deaths Blackwater inflicted were not justifiable.  A Blackwater statement, in response, said, “If it is determined that one person was complicit (sic) in the wrongdoing, we would support accountability in that.”  This stated agreement to accept conditional accountability is an example of the arrogance by which these Republican-formed, quasi-armies operate, and it is a sign of how far-reaching corrective measures must be.  Fundamentally, the use of private armies are another Bush slap at the Constitution, to which Congress turns its cheek.  Private, military-type units, employed by the executive to carry out military objectives in America’s name are outlawed, and their use by Bush must be either halted or placed under strict congressional approval and oversight, because otherwise, they are just a loophole that the executive branch uses to avoid and sidestep the constitutional restriction that rightly places the creation and deployment of military war power solely within the authority of Congress.

The incident is continuing to increase the tension on the already strained relationship between the al-Maliki government and the Bush administration, and it is revealing more of the truth about how much governing power Iraq’s government really has under the terms of the occupation.  An Iraq Ministry of Interior spokesman said, early on, that the license for Blackwater had been canceled and that those who fired on the civilians would be prosecuted, and on the Saturday following the Nisour shootings, the spokesman added that ten murders in six previous Blackwater incidents are also under investigation.  But Iraqi prosecutions would be contrary to an immunity law that shields American contractors, issued by the U.S. governing authority in Iraq before supposed sovereignty was handed over.  And, according to State Department spokesmen, no action by Iraq on revoking the licenses had been taken by Tuesday; yet, by week’s end, American officials in Baghdad have remained restricted to the Green Zone (this century’s incarnation of Fort Apache) because the refusal of the Iraq government to permit further Blackwater operations is at least having a temporary hold while officials struggle with the issue in private.  There is undoubtedly great pressure upon the al-Maliki government to restrain from attempting to make such action permanent because of the inordinate dependence State Department and other U.S. personnel have upon the private-security contractors in order to carry out the occupation, particularly Blackwater, which is contracted to provide the security needs of the occupation’s highest-priority officials.  Because civilian authorities who would normally conduct the U.S. investigation are restricted by the halt of Blackwater operations, U.S. military units, who have their own security resources, have been reported to be conducting the investigation and carrying out interviews, which is attributed to slowing the investigation and the release of information obtained about the facts of the incident.  Blackwater is also reportedly being investigated by federal authorities for unrelated weapons-smuggling or theft charges.  Two former employees have already been convicted of federal weapons charges.

While al-Maliki and other government officials have political responsibility to act with outrage, as they have over the incident, it seems clear that the same Bush defiance, confronting all attempts by Congress to restrain his administration with respect to the occupation, will also eventually prevail over the Iraqi government’s posturing.  So much for Bush’s touted Iraqi freedom, and the integrity of the Iraqi government, and the lost American lives that have made it, and that will continue to be lost to make it as robustly independent as it so far seems it isn’t.  And so much for another handful of Iraqi innocents who, regardless of what happened, are victims of Bush’s occupation and America’s mercenaries.

It isn’t usually effective or accurate to draw simplistic, exaggerated parallels between Bush and Hitler, but the new facts on the September 16 killings reveal that Bush is leading an occupation in Iraq that is hardly less horrific in its acts (not scale) as Hitler’s in Poland during WW2.  But there can be no excuse for lack of scale to diminish the severity of the situation and its effects on the Iraqis and America’s world standing and historical legacy, which must be sharply delineated from that of Bush and Cheney’s, and which is a paramount reason that impeachment is both necessary and justified, and also because, like Hitler, there is no accounting from Bush with respect to this and the other “incidents” involving the shoot-first mercenaries profiting from the misery Bush has ignited and fans in Iraq.

Eric Prinz, Blackwater CEO and founder, tries to deflect the use of the term “mercenary,” by saying his employees are “Americans working for America,” not for a foreign power.  In fact, by the first definition of Webster, a “mercenary” is any person who is “hired into foreign service.”  Blackwater employees also meet the second definition of “one that serves merely for wages.”  So the use of the term is wholly correct and justified, and not subject to the tactic Prinz, like Bush, attempts to employ, of writing his own definitions and language to redefine the atrocities he tries to cover up on behalf of his employees and his company.

The American conscience and world view demands much more than the latest Senate effort of amendments to funding bills, creating commissions to look into contractors.  Despite rules left by departing pre-sovereign political appointees, there can be no license to kill with indiscretion inherent or implied in such political dictates, and if the military has jurisdiction over American citizens in war zones, the Department of Defense, or if not, Justice, must be compelled to bring the killers to the bench.  The Iraqis have called the killings “terrorist acts,” and America stands accused of facilitating and shielding “murder” and “massacre.”  If the Bush administration will not act, then it must surrender the shooters to the International Court.  The Bush administration cannot wash its hands of this, and it must be clearly held accountable for the deaths, since they have resulted from the same incompetent approach to the details of occupation that has cost lives in the past, and also here at home, in Katrina, and lessor incompetence and corruption that is reflected throughout the resignations (the latest being HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson) that mark Bush’s administration, each leaving some form of mayhem in its wake.  These acts of barbarism cannot be allowed to be swept under the rug and answered as “mistakes,” paid for with simple resignations or political explanations based in evasion and persuasion, as has, in fact, turned out to be the case, again, with the resignation of Ambassador Richard Griffin, who headed the operations of the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, and who was criticized in a report on those operations subsequent to the massacre.  This resignation is totally inadequate to answer for the lives lost at America’s hand in this instance and previous contractor-initiated killings.  The subsequent indictment of five Blackwater mercenaries also does not take justice to the source of the transgressions.  Secretary Rice should have resigned, as well, since this failing, for which she and Bush are finally responsible, has caused effects inverse of the State Department’s mission, devastating effects which could not be reversed in the remainder of her term.  America cannot afford to shield its agents from acts so brutally inhuman and unwarranted.  Under the shroud of this unanswered bloodletting, America and freedom no longer seem so synonymous.

Shortly after Barack Obama was sworn in, the Iraqi provisional government banned all Blackwater presence in the country by refusing to grant them license, and it has since come to light that the company authorized illegal, secret payments of $1 million in bribes to Iraqi officials to secure licenses to continue Iraqi operations.

In a final affront to the murdered and to American justice, on the last day of 2009, to add to the clouded decade’s failures and unaccounted crimes, a federal judge dismissed, on technicalities, all charges against five Xe Services (formerly Blackwater) guards, indicted for their part in the September 16, 2007 massacre of 17 Iraqis in Baghdad.  Again, the Bush administration’s disdain and contempt for law was at the root of the dismissals, as the judge, in an unusually lengthy opinion, cited, “reckless violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights,” by the involved Bush-administration agencies.  Vice President Biden, during a January 2010 trip to Baghdad to consult with Iraqi P.M. al Maliki, said that the dismissal would be appealed.

Meanwhile, unaccountability remains the common result of the most severe possible of government and constitutional abuses.

Lehman Brothers Chief Executive Officer Richard Fuld, who received as much as $500 million in compensation during the past eight years, painted himself as the victim when testifying this week before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, blaming the collapse of his company on anything but himself, including rumor, out-of-date rules, and regulators.  The Democratic-led congressional panel countered Fuld’s claims that “no one could see it coming” by producing internal documents, dated September 11, well after the disaster was upon the economy, and the taxpayers, that Lehman planned to approve special payments worth more than $18 million for two terminated executives, and $5 million for one who resigned.  Fuld’s false, defensive claim also repeats the shove into the shadows by Congress of the first early warner of the coming collapse, Brooksley Born, the former Commodities Futures Trading Commission director.  Yet, Fuld dramatically said he would take to his grave questions of why the government chose not to bail out his company.  It would be more appropriate for him to wonder why he and his board are not in jail and liable for fines to strip them of their unfounded wealth in order to repay investors they deceived and from whom they profited.

Also exposed by the House committee hearing, as being ripe for jail cells and pay-backs, were AIG top executives who callously treated themselves to a company-paid, $440,000 luxury-resort weekend; this... celebration of abuse and disconnect, raped from the treasury within a week after receiving their taxpayer $85-billion bailout.

Unabated fuel-price increases (except when reversed prior to Republican-incumbent elections) in the face of record oil-company profits and a $400-million-retirement package for the CEO of Exxon, speak to the knowing assurance of the corporate-industrial lobby, to which Bush panders, and of which his administration is a part, that it can rake the public with impunity and without restraint, which it continued to do until the 2006 mid-September campaign season began, which saw prices suddenly drop by one-third, for no reason related to speculation, supply or demand, only to ease the anger and the issue directed by voters against Bush and his industrialist government.  And look at where politically-dropping prices headed after the election, even as Republicans lost control of the Congress.  Way back up, while that industry is still is able to gouge over the remaining two years of Bush’s term.  Bush claims that the law of supply and demand is responsible for the runaway fuel costs, but supply has not diminished so greatly, in so short a time, to account for the spate of increases over the last several years of his administration, or increased to account for the political-campaign-season falls.  These increases and drops are provoked by a manipulating force external to market controls and sanctioned by the Bush-Republican controlled government to both increase profits and influence votes.  And the Republican leaders would love nothing better than further subsidizing the oil industry with tax dollars by dolling out rebates or setting aside tax revenues to pacify voters while leaving bloated industry pockets unscathed.  Even Democratic control of Congress has not halted this interest-group abuse while Bush sits in the White House.

“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

— Founding Father and President Thomas Jefferson, November, 1816

“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country... corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

— President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864 (in a letter to Col. William F. Elkins)

Jefferson and Lincoln were right, as was Andrew Jackson when he confronted the growing power of the bankers, and the lawless greed of industrial power centers in America still marks a trail in history well-blazed from his time forward.  Bush and Cheney’s oil cronies, who benefited from Bush directives to the Department of the Interior that forced cutbacks on audits and enforcement while pushing to open up exploration and drilling in the Gulf and national refuges, are no exception.  The New York Times reported the scandal, when the big firms being prosecuted, not by Bush’s Justice Department, but under a whistle-blower law, for defrauding the government by skimming hundreds of millions in royalties due for oil and gas extractions from public lands (and more millions from private land owners) started negotiating and paying out settlements:  Mobil was the first to settle and paid more than $40 million in 1998.  Chevron paid $95 million.  Shell paid $110 million.  By 2002, 15 oil companies had paid a total of almost $440 million.  If any citizen wanted to invoke consumer’s punishment against the guilty companies, as was done to Exxon for the way they handled the Valdes disaster, the only recourse would be to sell the gasoline car and buy an electric or corn burner, because Republican administrations do not, by design, properly administer or prosecute laws affecting them.

The latest in greed-based industrial treachery, the level to which Jefferson never could have imagined, was in March, 2007, when defense contractor ITT Industries was found to be selling secret night-vision technology to China (called “sharing” by media), threatening U.S. soldiers’ lives and reducing one of their most important war-time tactical advantages.  This treason (for which, instead of hanging or prison for responsible persons, there was only a $100 million fine against the public corporation, half of which was forgiven for future business) preceded another defense contractor’s traitorous greed, detailed in the early September, 2006 NBC-investigative report on the withholding from Army troops of a viable, available-then-and-now, Israeli-produced, rocket-propelled-grenade defense system, in order to allow Rumsfeld’s DOD-in-bed partner, Raytheon, to take fives years and millions in tax dollars to develop a system from scratch, with no guarantee that it would match the 98-percent effectiveness of the Israeli system, called Trophy, and no care, whatsoever, for the number of soldiers who might be saved from death and injury in those five years at the hands of the favorite weapon of the Islamists as a direct result of delaying deployment for the sake of sweetheart Raytheon’s dollars.  Add to Jefferson’s and Lincoln’s warnings that of former president and WWII allied commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who spoke specifically of the dangers, posed by the military-industrial complex, that began mushrooming in the years following the war during his presidential term.  It is true that defense companies, like Raytheon, are valuable assets to American security.  But that does not justify this kind of crime, for which the responsible executives and generals remain unpunished.  Not only is the process that has allowed this to happen corrupt, it is treasonous, and it could not have happened if the Bush administration was not in the service of the corporate-industrial lobby, of which, the military-industrial complex is a key component, and there are decision makers at the highest levels who deserve to be behind bars if not executed for this atrocity of greed, injury, and death.

The truth, further revealed by the ITT and Raytheon abuses, and the Enron crimes, to which Republican conservatives abscond, is that there are some critical and strategic economic sectors, like energy, food, defense, and health care, that should not be left unregulated and in the control of speculators and those motivated only by greed or profit, including an unrealistic stock-market expectation for ever-increasing gains, no matter what the condition of the other factors of interchange with which these critical industries, so speculated upon, must co-exist.  The playground of the industrial capitalists and monied investors must be cleared of those toys that can harm others, and herein lies the Utilitarian path to meaningful legislation to affect a solution.

The Republican claim, as they defend their special-interest speculators, that market demand alone is responsible for the rise in the price of oil, is as ludicrous as their constant claim that free trade and exported jobs and plants, without consideration of American worker and safety standards, is good for those workers and America, a claim they continued to make as the middle class began to die from their multi-tentacled economic suffocation.  Is anyone really surprised that the cost of fuel has dropped so precipitously in the last weeks before the election?  Bush, no doubt, has more kisses for the King.  Market demand cannot account for the amount of the increase and the spectacularly short time in which it has occurred!  Many financial analysts have said that there is an “oil bubble” that will burst, sharply dropping prices, as may have begun to happen in August.  Bubbles, be they in oil, housing, or Dot-coms, are caused by speculation driving prices beyond value, not by supply and demand.  And finally, in early summer, 2008, as the average price of a gallon of regular gas exceeded $4.00, Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) joined with other senators and spoke on the floor of the Senate in support of legislation to end speculative trading of oil contracts.  The pig-like squeal of the fatted speculators, hedge-fund managers, their markets and trading firms that make millions, and their Republican supporters, paid with lobby money taken from the pockets of struggling Americans, is becoming loud and constant in the ears of a Congress reaching for either a leash or a knife to finally confront them, and legislators must be contacted and encouraged to support measures ending greed-based oil speculation and extend them to protect food commodities, and health-care products and services, by ending speculation, moving them out of the public-ownership sector and banning prescription-drug advertising (already done in Europe), all of which artificially raise the price of these critical goods and services.

But the GREED runneth forth, as Midwest floods ran into the first days of the 2008 summer, with the more than 400 mortgage-fraud related arrests by the FBI, to include two Bear Stearns hedge-fund executives, Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, who took more than $2 million from the fund they knew was failing, even as they continued to suck in more investors with lies and deceptions that would make Bush and Cheney proud, sinking their firm and its investors just as surely as the Bush-Cheney gang has sunk America.  Just as surely as killing, greed-based earmarks and criminal defense contractors, like MZM, continue to sink America.  MZM, whose president bribed Congressman Duke Cunningham with expensive luxuries, and contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to campaigns, received millions of dollars from Cunningham through earmarks to the company that Cunningham was able to keep secret.  The contractor, MZM, hired one-third the number of employees called for and lacked required experience, failing to meet any standards for a contract seeking to reduce troop casualties from improvised explosive devices (IEDs).  Military intelligence officers are convinced this earmarks-based corruption cost soldiers their lives, and Cunningham, the complicit MZM officers, and anyone else tied to this criminal treason should be so charged, tried, and executed.  As should those war profiteers at Houston-based KBR, which the New York Times uncovered has received untold millions in construction funding, and whose negligently-faulty electrical work throughout Iraq has caused and contributed to the deaths of soldiers there.

Add to this old story of the most wealthy, like Martha Stewart, still not having enough to keep them from cheating and stealing to get more at the expense of those far less fortunate, and there is the UBS AG, Swiss-bank case, where evidence has shown that U.S. millionaire and billionaire clients were regularly assisted by bank managers in defrauding the U.S. government of tax money (on $21 billion in funds they probably gained illegitimately) by opening haven accounts in offshore banks under fictitious names, and through the smuggling of diamonds in toothpaste tubes to facilitate billionaires’ money transfers through customs.  UBS bankers, cooperating with prosecutors, report the bank pocketed $200 million annually from such activities, for which, the Swiss bankers probably opened 1940’s tutorials on shady-services procedures, written by their WWII predecessors who processed Nazi loot, some of which still remains in Swiss vaults.

Sen. Ted Stevens, the long-time Republican, representing Alaska (if you can call it that, when he supports the Bush/Cheney-oil interests in opening up drilling in that state’s protected areas), has, according to an indictment by the Justice Department, actually been facilitating his influence in the Senate for state companies that have provided him with a quarter-million dollars in home improvements to his vacation house, selling the peoples’ vote for his own gain, the most onerous offense of trust any citizen can commit, short of treason.  Stevens has now been found quilty on all counts, forced to resign from the ranking-Republican positions he held on the several committees on which he was assigned, and through which, no doubt, an investigation would show he was an earmark and lobbying-influence leader.  And, as he joins his fellow, departed Republicans of the Bush years, also caught betraying their public trust and the law, and knowing how icebergs are, the ones that sink ships or governments, it is difficult not to believe these charges are just the tip of the iceberg of abuse and corruption that Stevens has been getting away with over much of the forty years he has been in the Senate.  America, the Senate, and the people of Alaska will be better off with him gone, and there are many other senior lawmakers who are deep in the influence-peddling recesses of government and who also need to be expelled by voters to bring the fresh breath of air of Democracy back into the halls of the people’s government, now owned by the lobbyists, full-time electioneers, and those elected officials who have turned their public trust into a ticket to the money game that has ruined the effectiveness of and trust in government.

And, add these to Enron’s crimes, those cited above, and the long list of other corporate and corporate-executive crimes and abuses, going back to before Thomas Jefferson’s loud warning as to the unscrupulous nature and national threat posed by the wealthy industrialists, and who can wonder why the elitist wealthy are so easy to loathe and their institutions and assurances so difficult to trust?  It has finally been reported that without oil speculators, the price of oil would plummet by at least 50 percent, almost immediately.  An OPEC minister said the price of oil, based on market demand, should only be $70 per barrel, and speculation in oil has reported to have increased by 40 percent over the last year.  Whenever it is reported that the price of oil rises due to “concerns” about, or the “belief” that, or the “possibility” of..." anything, the translation is “speculation,” which is the external, greed-driven force that is actually driving up the price!  And the media-propaganda battle is fully engaged, with those who speak, often covertly, for the interests of the speculators and their markets claiming that market forces are behind the increases, when in actuality, the only step that can be taken that will derive an immediate drop in the price of oil is to outlaw the speculative markets.  Congress and other Western governments cannot act quickly enough to put an end to the speculators’ markets in critical commodities, products, and services, not only in oil, but in food grains, as well, where the greed of a few causes hunger and threatens destruction of the national economy and the collapse of world economic stability, as prices react not only to speculation’s artificially-inflated, upward pressure, but also to its rumors and its embedded greed, with its innate uncertainties and fears, which drive prices up with any possible threat, from a hurricane to a facility maintenance take-down.  Enterprises that promote higher intrinsic values without producing tangible, end-product goods or services of material value should be afforded the least consideration when determining economic rules, goals, and priorities, because they contribute the least toward building, in fact, often retard meaningful, beneficial economic growth.  The evidence of history and current events shows that those who are in the business of making money without making anything else of value, such as day traders, paper multipliers, and speculators, are especially not to be trusted, because their motivation to enter such pursuits is based upon greed and the unattractive career goal of excelling only at making money, by whatever system they can exploit or invent to do so.  From that which has already been uncovered, it is clear that the FBI should hire at least another 500 agents to pursue the plague of greed-based crime that runs rampant through the American corporate landscape.

Greed, at every level, from being the hidden motive behind dead soldiers, environmental obstructionism, the mortgage collapse, most of the economic woes preceding it, the voracious cash appetites of the 24-7-365-campaign prioritized political parties, and a never-ending cascade of corporate-suite and hall-of-government crime throughout history, remains unaddressed, the price of its damage underestimated, as it stands large as America’s greatest threat, the threat from within, taken least seriously, and it is bringing a grand national dream and valiant history to a darkening end.  Only the strongest measures against the most obscene transgressions will effectively deter future crimes and adequately serve justice.  Ridding the government of greed-ridden Republicanism will be a very good start.

The mid-2007 revelation that GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK) type-2 diabetes drug, Avandia, carries a 43 percent increased risk of heart attack and a 64 percent increased risk of death, increases over those published with its release in 1999, points out the unequivocal need for increased safety rules within the Food and Drug Administration (FDA—a Bush-appointed-leadership agency, subject to the political whims of the huge drug- and other industry-interest-group lobbies that the administration serves) to more tightly regulate and monitor drug company manufacture, trials, and follow-on studies.  The new risk assessments, obtained by doctors through mega-analysis of more than 40 separate studies, were rushed to publish in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), and the response by the FDA, so far, has been to do nothing, except issue an advisory to the public to discuss their use of the drug with their doctors.  GSK responded with a slew of study figures unrelated to the mega-analysis to dispute its conclusions, which is all that can be expected, since any indication of awareness could carry criminal implications.

The fact that GSK initiated a comprehensive and expensive study of Avandia in 2000, not to be completed until 2009, indicates that the private concern of the company for possible later liability was considerable, yet its higher concern for profits prohibited it from either delaying release, increasing the risk assessments, or issuing a general alarm to doctors and the public, and this brings to light a dangerous weakness in governmental regulation over the self-interest of the drug industry (democracy balancing capitalism), for which Congress is responsible, having caved in to the drug lobby in the past over drug regulation and, in early May 2007, supporting their cash-heavy-lobbying opposition to defeat a bill that would have provided lower-cost alternatives.  The lack of disclosure by GSK also echoes the crime of another drug company, Purdue Pharma L.P., recently prosecuted and detailed below, to deliberately deceive the public regarding the safety of OxyContin, its profitable and widely used pain drug.

The figures in the report below do not separate out the amount the drug companies spend on their political lobbying and contributions, but that considerable resource, obtained through artificially elevated prices and creation of consumption, will again be focused at Congress when it debates passage of a new FDA reform bill (HR 1561) in the coming weeks.  It will take a strong public-interest conscience for Congress to defy the drug lobby and leave meaningful safety measures contained within the bill’s draft intact, a conscience which history indicates members of Congress (Republicans) can only be expected to put foremost in their priorities if feeling the pressure of their constituents.  And so it is necessary for voters to exercise their political rights to express their expectations to their representatives.  Click on or paste this link https://secure.npsite.org/cu/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=1513 into your Web browser to use a convenient contact form, or contact your representatives in any way best suited to you.  Below are links for contact directories in the House of Representatives and the Senate.

United States Senate Directory

United States House of Representatives Directory

The creation of consumption that generates profits to be, in these cases, illicitly protected, depends upon over-the-counter and prescription-drug advertising, targeting a range of afflictions (allergies, psoriasis, Alzheimer’s, CAD, COPD, PAD, RA, RLS, ED, etc.), and which is baseless fear mongering, inducing a nation of hypochondriacs and costing consumers billions.  The ads are also sickening to watch, again and again, diarrhetics, and “male organ” enhancers over dinner, in front of the kids, over news, movies, over the attempts to drift off to sleep or just live without some other outside source of repetitively induced worry.  And, if you include the non-prescription drug advertising, it becomes clear that the drug industry targets and promotes an affliction for nearly every man, woman, and child in the nation, and intends to make dedicated drug consumers of them all.  Why are drug companies allowed to advertise drugs that must be prescribed by doctors anyway?  Objective studies indicate that more is spent by drug makers on ads than on R&D*, and it’s spent just to promote sales and doctors’-office visits (a probable silent conspiracy), to create consumption, regardless of need, value, cost, or effect.  But it doesn’t end with the pharmaceuticals, because creating consumption is a disease that afflicts every industry and is spread by them to every segment of the population, from the old and sick to the kindergartener!  And no one cares if more than 93 percent of the costs induced are unnecessary, particularly not the suits leading the white coats or Republicans in Congress.  But the drug makers/pushers will, no doubt, defend their profit-driven motives by saying that they are attempting to inform the public of serious problems that can be alleviated if acted upon promptly, and that they are trying to save lives, and reduce suffering.  What else can they say?  But swallowing that could put you at double the risk for heart attack or stroke.

Trying to shape and control the mind of the public with advertising is an objective that goes hand-in-hand with the drug industry maintaining a grip on the future decision makers it depends upon:  medical students.  The New York Times scratched the surface on the $billions the drug companies have spent to exert influence over university administrations, faculty, and students in an effort to establish a med-school-student mind set of preference for their products, an influence which the Times reports is most poorly countered at one of the nation’s leading medical-training resources, President Obama’s alma mater, Harvard.  Along with doctors’ perks and drug advertising, the drug industry’s medical-school, brain-turning program is a significant factor inflating drug prices to the consumers and social networks left with little choice and few alternatives but to pay up.

If humanitarian prioritized, why don’t the legalized drug pushers do a better job of making their AIDS cocktails more affordable here and in the third world?  Why, then, do they oppose efforts to allow lower-cost drugs to be imported from Canada, or why even sell here at a higher cost?  Part of the answer is that many are driven by the unrealistic Wall Street imperative, which dictates a constantly raising profit margin, even if the market growth is stagnant, which it isn’t, and which, along with obscene advertising costs, adds to the costs consumers must pay, contributing to the run-away cost of health care.  The pharmaceutical industry’s trade group, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), likes to blame rising costs on R&D outlays (already said to be less than the ad budget*) the figures for which, tied to their agenda, bop around like the CEO’s yacht lashed to storm-swept dockage.  Prescription-drug ads and public ownership (Wall Street) of pharmacies, whose products are necessary for public safety and to relieve suffering, should just be outlawed.  Americans cannot afford the higher costs that result, and neither, they say, can employers and providers.

But greed is another factor in high and rising costs, and even privately held companies are in the business of giving the business to get it, as amply demonstrated by the admissions of private drug maker Purdue Pharma L.P.’s president, Michael Friedman; top lawyer, Howard Udell; and chief medical officer, Paul Goldenheim, in their guilty pleas, on misdemeanor-misbranding charges, that they knowingly gave false information to Purdue’s sales net and the public about the addictive nature of its pain-killer drug, OxyContin.  That deception was tied to use of the drug that cost 146 lives in 2002, says the DEA, and was a factor in another 318 deaths; yet, no murder or manslaughter charges are pending, just a company fine of $600 milllion, a statement accepting responsibility (as with Bush and his crimes and transgressions) and promises from Purdue Pharma to implement changes (no mention of heart surgery), and fines of 11 million dollars distributed against each of the three executives, which may force them to sell their yachts or airplanes and their summer homes, downsize their vacations, and, as is likely with wealthy white-collar criminals, draw on money stashed in offshore accounts.  They deserve what the average criminal gets who is implicated in the malicious death of another:  a felony conviction and long-term jail.  They also deserve, wherever they go, what Cincinnati Tri-State restaurateur Jeff Ruby gave to O.J. Simpson when the unrepentant murderer showed up at one of his eateries on Kentucky Derby weekend:  the boot.  Or, should I have said, “the sole?”

* SEC Edgar, 10K filings report that, in 2000, when drug advertising on TV alone was nothing like it is today, Merck, Pfizer, Bristol, and Abbott drug makers averaged just above 10%, or $2.5 billion, of $25.5 billion in revenues ($4.4 billion in earnings), on R&D, compared to $6.5 billion/26.5% of average revenues on marketing, making it unlikely that media conglomerates are anxious to shine the light on the abuse of funding aimed at swelling their margins.

For all of the World Bank Wolfowitzes (middle-left in toilet), and Enron Lays and Skillings (middle, below sump and middle-right in toilet)...

For all the Purdue Pharma, drug-death-dealer Udells, Goldenheims, and Friedmans (bottom-edge in the toilet, L to R), and and ITT secrets-trafficking defense contractors...

For all the education-robbing banks, like student-loan-raider Chase, only one among many banks which, with the aid of blind “monitoring” by the Bush, hands-off Education Department, were allowed to abuse the loan mechanisms of the Higher Education Act with egregious payoffs and inducements, grabbing nearly $billion in unwarranted student-loan funds, until the 2006 election forced the White House to instruct Education Secretary Margaret Spellings to finally initiate rule making, because it was then clear that the Democratic majority would bring congressional oversight, dead for six years, back to life; and for Bank of America, which reaches from the black heart of its greed to shred the heritage of a nation by aiding and abetting criminals when it condescends to openly provide financial services for illegal immigrants...

And, then, for the royalty-skimming Gulf, Mobile, Chevron, Shell (all over the toilet), and scores more oil companies, and still more corporations and industries, far more than have just been enumerated, spanning from yesterday to before the White House of Thomas Jefferson, committing crimes against the people and the nation, ranging from, at least, manslaughter and treason to fraud and self-enrichment...

For all of these revealed leeches and roaches, there remain, still, a horde of greedy robber barons who hide behind smiling masks, within the dark dazzle of their granite and steel castles, and those for whom the mask is no longer seen or felt, all bleeding the public, like vampires, and all who remain to be exposed to the light and punished—but by an incompetent and boot-licking attorney general?  The crimes uncovered have been revealed through the dedication of responsible federal prosecutors, like the ones Bush’s appointee to oversee them, Alberto Gonzales, had removed from their offices; or, the crimes were uncovered by relentless departmental inspector generals who are unattached to the Bush administration’s marionette strings.

How could American voters ever elect an administration that rides on the beck and call of this garlanded group, where self interest is no longer connected to the altruistic component of capitalism, where creating consumption, regardless of need, value, cost, or effect, is paramount?  History teaches, with pointed and specific warnings from the Founders, and a punctuation mark on the Bush administration, that corporate-industrialists lack the necessary compassion, and too easily subjugate people beneath profit, carved stone, and their innately self-postured superiority, to ever be allowed to control a democratic government.  It is a lesson America has yet to learn, that capitalism without the balance of democracy’s control and oversight, is a self-feeding tyrant, and the people suffer—those who vote and those who do not.  These corrupted “captains” wear the same brand that is worn by the likes of Tom Delay (top-left in toilet), a son of the petroleum and natural-gas-industry culture, turned pesticide businessman who preceded his election to the House of Representatives by not paying payroll and income taxes, and before that, by being expelled from Baylor University for vandalism, and who, after spreading his poison as a representative, was finally indicted as the most corrupt and manipulative majority leader the Republican party ever crowned.  The voters only got what they asked for, what was there for them to see and what they ignored.  His brand, and that of the rest of his ilk of industry brats, is that of the centrist-and-conservative right of the Republican party, and to the vast sea of citizens they feed upon, it should be unmistakably recognized as a scarlet letter of disdain and reproach—a non-dilutable, unquestioning anticatalyst for public-office votes.

According to the inverted Bush (top-right in toilet)-Cheney (in toilet sump) brand of justice and rights, once accused, you’re guilty until proven innocent.  It is both fair and appropriate, then, to apply that brand of justice to those corporate-industrial elite from whom the Bush administration is spawned, those who are not responsible corporate-industrial leaders, those who make corporate and industrial into dirty words, and who still stand, undiscovered, wearing their golf spikes, treading upon the torn backs of others; and who, having more than they need, lust insatiably for still more; who measure the value of society by the balance of their bank accounts and how easily they can be padded by the sweat and constant worry of others with few resources and uncertain futures, be it through outright fraud or allegiance to nation-sacrificing economic ideologies and practices.  These sub-humans trade in the same currency as weapons dealers, slave traffickers, and drug dealers:  human misery, but they usually do it at arms distance, in suits, white-collared shirts, and ties, with the insulation of pressure-molded middlemen and underlings, manipulating, twisting, and breaking rules and laws, spitting on the greater society, reducing it from behind masked social superiority and, as those unmasked have shown, even faux, benevolent charity.  Until they prove otherwise, they deserve no rights or benefit of doubt, any more than has been afforded the brain-washed Islamists, and collateral innocents, who are kidnaped, caged, beaten, and dehumanized by order of the corporate raiders’ subservient administration, wallowing in their ignominious and defiant occupation of the White House.

Wishful remembrance vs. the ABC Presidential “tent-revival” debate (?)

Thanks to the lying, murdering, tobacco-industry executives, who feed their greed with the lives of those who matter so much to so many, as the moderators of the April 16, 2008, ABC circus (or tent revival) debate(? — one of the most abused words on TV news), there were George Stephanopoulos, who had an early news post, but who has since been a public-relations and show-host personality, and Charlie Gibson, who is NOT a journalist, and who do not know what it means to represent the people and confront authority or would-be authority, and so there was little hope of anything except a vent on trivial, late-night-talk-show minutia which, combined with the ad-revenue, bottom-line priority of ABC, left only a commercial-ridden, ineptly conceived and executed waste of time and opportunity, squandered by a production in service to the glib interests of a self-interested, establishment media, which it would be safe to say caused Peter Jennings (and the Founders) to turn in their graves to another channel, and a presentation which seems to have been in line with the interests and realizations of the masses who elected George Bush, Tricky-Dick Cheney, and a gang of Republican congressional rubber-stampers to repeated terms in office.

The religious right, on the other hand, are no doubt delighted at the level to which constitutional, religious autonomy and equality were gang-raped and mutilated during the proceeding.

Thanks to the likes of Republicans (above) Sen. Mitch McConnell, Rep. Steve Chabot, and Sen. George Voinovich
Columbia astronauts’ deaths are turned into a big payday for wealthy landowners.

An Exposé report on the PBS broadcast of Bill Moyers Journal, Cash Cows and Cowboy Starter Kits exposed how well-organized agro-business lobbies have bought Congress and its agriculture-committee members with $80 million in lobbying.  The result is manipulative farm subsidies that pay from tens of thousands to ten-million dollars to each of the organized, wealthy landowners who have gross incomes, separate from subsidies, of from $125,000 to several $million, living in mansions, on farm land where no crops are grown, just because their counties have been declared a disaster area for some reason, including for recovery of destroyed space-shuttle parts, despite that they, the privileged beneficiaries of America’s widening wealthy-poor economic gap, suffered no losses.

Kentucky Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, who has towed the Bush corporate-wealthy line throughout his Senate career, who was elected by and is supposed to represent citizens in one of the nation’s poorest states, leads the placement and support for this kind of immoral abuse in a farm-subsidy system that pays wealthy land owners instead of helping poor farmers who really need the help.  And into the current farm bill, which contains further unwarranted increases, and which is now being debated for passage, this term, with no consideration by leaders on either side for reductions in wasteful abuse, McConnell has extended his taxpayer handouts to the wealthy with his subsidized steeple chase, which will benefit the owners of race horses.  The Republican government of Bush-Cheney, in concert with rubber-stamp, elected officials like McConnell, the Ohio delegation’s Republican Senator Voinovich and Republican Representative Steve Chabot, have converted the deaths of the seven Columbia astronauts into a Livestock-Compensation-Program-payment windfall of $5 million to their wealthy contributors, through their facilitation, since 2001, of more than $15 billion in abusive, unwarranted farm-subsidy payments, one-sixth of the national farm-subsidy total during that period.  And there will be no chance for honest, representative government, free of greed-based, blood-sucking influence peddling until they and their ilk are thrown out office for good.

Finally, Congress has handed Bush the setback he richly deserves, killing any passage of the unworkable immigration amnesty/surrender bill he hoped to make into another ornament on his black mantle of special-interest achievements.  Had the cloture motion on the second coming of Bush’s immigration bill succeeded, and the bill passed, Bush would have called it a major domestic-policy achievement, and like with his claim, that Iraq is the core of the fight against terror, he would have been wrong, celebrating a travesty and a lie.

The bill that a Democrat-led coalition twice tried to rush through the Senate would have unsheathed a scalpel to cut into the heart of America’s being, and it still remains for Americans to make clear to their elected officials that this immigration invasion, now overwhelming America, must be reversed, can be reversed, and that the law must be strengthened and enforced, to include insuring that the quality of citizenship, and the vote that comes with it, that determines the national course, is preserved, not eroded by an amnesty of any kind.  That is the only solution to the problem that does not entail surrendering the identity and future of the nation to those who have no real sense of its heritage or ideals, and nothing to contribute.  The poor and downtrodden that America must be concerned with, in the here-and-now of corporate-America’s global-economic-bled nation, are the growing number of citizens within its borders, the deteriorating middle class, and the diminishing rewards for jobs that do remain here for citizens, not aliens whose corrupt governments refuse to adopt responsible policies to lift their own peoples’ futures.  And, legislators must not be allowed to permit America to remain the relief valve for those governments, turning it into the world’s lifeboat, or it will flounder and sink, taking the free world with it.

In a last-gasp effort to resurrect the corporate-workforce, sanctioned-invasion, immigration bill, Bush lied to Americans again, claiming that America faces a workforce crisis.  Workforce crisis?  Yes, with unemployment near 5 percent, with wages and benefits stagnant and declining, with hundreds of thousands of jobs taken by illegal aliens and excessive green-card imports, and as many American jobs exported to exploit cheap labor overseas and across the Mexican border, there is a job crisis in America.  But not the one Bush claims of unfilled jobs that will unwind the economy.  That would be evident by unemployment at lower than 4 percent, and by rising wages and increasing benefits instead of disappearing ones.  Rather, it’s the decades-long program of Republican-party government in service to the corporate-industrial special interests that has created the crisis that threatens the welfare of the heart of America’s workforce, and as a side dish, the loss of America to the encouraged and aided invasion that, like the red, Martian vegetation of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, creeps to cover the land and forever strangle the culture, heritage, and lifestyle that it replaces.

The threat of giving away America remains, so long as voters elect legislators who shout for amnesty instead of for enforcement of the law, who argue for maintaining the invaded status quo, rather than, with the sole exception of family-based appeals, turning back the invasion, and then, only then, looking at what level of workers should be permitted to return in a no-road-to-vote work program, tied to the unemployment rate.  The ONLY path to citizenship should be through the legal process and quotas that define a heritage-based priority for immigration by acclimation, NOT an invasion of convenience, facilitated by a wide border and a deliberate lack of enforcement for the sake of cheap labor to benefit employers, or for the sake of pandering votes to benefit any party.  That is not where the national interest lies.

Citizens who, in the face of the ongoing illegal invasion threat, continue to act with the apathy of the silent majority, will only be holding the door open to becoming the silenced minority.  The set-aside of the Senate immigration-reform bill was only a temporary success that desperately needs even more voices to keep the push going.  Do not believe the propaganda that the invasion can’t be turned back!  No new law means that the law now on the books must be enforced, which, to date, it has not been, particularly with stiff enforcement against employers and landlords, rather than chasing 12-plus million illegals.  With no welfare, jobs, or housing, they will leave or surrender for deportation, then a clean-up of holdovers can be started and quickly completed.  Public voice must also grow stronger within state and local governments for enforcement and cooperation with federal immigration services.

The Congress might as well have gone back to Tokyo Harbor, on September 2, 1945, traded places with the defeated Japanese, and convened on the deck of the battleship, U.S.S. Missouri, to pass an immigration-reform bill that would have allowed invaders to stay and become citizens with the vote, a bill which would only symbolize capitulation to the conditions of defiant illegals’ opposition that still confronts all citizens.  Only when the invasion is beaten back can a peace treaty (immigration-reform bill) be proposed that will preserve American heritage and be meaningful, workable, and respected.  Legislators who pander the Hispanic vote by supporting immigration bills that surrender national sovranty to invaders do their constituents and the nation a grave disservice, and they should not be elected.  The ongoing, illegal-immigration invasion represents a greater, more-present danger to America’s present and future than even Republican special-interest wars, and the people have told Congress that this invasion must be answered with determination for enforcement, not with surrender and amnesties.

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The images of the flags, above and at the top of the article, were taken at an immigration protest, at Montebello High School, California, where Hispanic protestors raised the flags on the school’s flag pole.  The subordination of Old Glory, and its upside-down display, are often-used tactics by those who have demonstrated against immigration enforcement, of which the Montebello display was just another disrespectful expression of takeover.

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The indian nations could not stop the invasion that cost them their lands, their heritage and their way of life.  America has been a nation only a fraction of the time they ruled over this land, and it is being more quickly lost.  But unlike the invasion which vanquished them to a faded history, reservations and casinos, this global-concept, illegal-immigration invasion can still be turned back.

In a White House speech, only several days before the first attempt to end Senate debate and vote on the immigration bill failed, Bush said that now is the time for legislators to show “courage” to solve the immigration problem, which can only mean courage to defy their constituents—“We the People,” because those citizens who are facing the real threats and consequences of the illegal invasion (which mixes like milk and vinegar with the Republican global-economic revolution of exported plants, jobs, and imported, cheaper workers) are definitively against the bill, against the wave of change, and against the Bush vision of a separatist, Hispanic America that the bill would all but guarantee for the future.

Bush said “the system causes people to be exploited.”  The fact is that the failure to enforce the law is what breaks the system and creates exploitation.  Bush did enter his area of expertise when he addressed opponents of the bill using “words... that frighten,” referring to “amnesty,” in an attempt to defeat the bill.  He says, in true cut-and-run form, of the millions of illegals here, that their leaving “just ain’t going to happen.”  That is only looking at one side of the coin, failing to address enforcement of laws against employers and landlords, quite doable, that would make it happen.

And he finally talked about the past welcoming of immigrants, who are now all Americans, assimilated, again ignoring the other side of the coin, that this Hispanic, largely Mexican invasion is not assimilating, that, combined with Hispanics from Central and South America, it is of another scale and kind, and that it is not enriching multi-ethnic culture, like in the past, but rather, it is taking resources and taking over, changing the face of American culture and heritage in the wrong direction, toward a bi-polar and far less-unified, less-refined civilization, where such back-civilized practices as animal blood sports, though illegal, like the rampantly ignored immigration law, are defiantly practiced as, is said, “a symbol of who we are.”  For example:  if not for the Hispanic takeover, there would be no Miami Animal Police TV show on the Animal Planet cable network.

Today is not the past, and America, today, is not the America of our fathers, in great part because of Republicans and their decades-long push for the corporate-global world and its attendant hunger for shattered boundaries and restrictions (also called less government), cheap (taxpayer subsidized) labor, and high profits at any cost, be it heritage, country, or people.  As Senator Chip Rogers (R-GA) has said, pointing out that only five percent of workers in America are illegal, this economic point of view on immigration as a labor valve is not valid and is not what concerns Americans.  The facts, the recent history of cultural and economic change in America, and the voice of citizens to kill the Bush invasion-sanctioning bill bears that out.  The point is not, as illegal-immigrant supporters say, to beat-up on illegal immigrants.  The point is to deport them and control their entry, as a primary claim, obligation, and responsibility of both national security and identity.  Only American citizens can halt the degradation, if they have the courage to stuff political correctness and see the enemy in their backyards and at the helm of their decayed, adversarial government.

When your nation’s and your community’s security, heritage, and future are threatened, whether politically, culturally, by military force, or by government sponsored (U.S. by non-enforcement; Mexico by blind eye and civil intrusion of consulates) illegal immigration, the solution is simple:  you enforce the law, by all means possible, meaning border security to prevent invasion, and strict enforcement against employers and landlords to remove incentive and opportunity.  Legal, controlled, civic- and culturally-assimilating immigration is good—illegal invasion is not.  And contrary to the contentions of the defeated bill’s supporters, allowing up to 20 million illegal aliens to stay and have a path to citizenship, not only would encourage another 12-to-20 million to cross, but would also not “fix” the problem.  It would degrade the political base and erode American heritage and culture.

If Mexico crossed the border with its army, the U.S. would spare no cost to drive every one of them back.  America has now shouted to hard-of-hearing legislators that this illegal immigration is no less threatening and no less displacing of American sovereignty, culture, and presence in its own territory, and the people have sent the message to Sen. Kennedy and the rest of the Congress that the only acceptable solution is to turn back the invasion—end it, not repeat the same mistake of 1986.  This is the brink, where illegal immigration and the retention of American culture is concerned, and the people are telling the government to not cross the line again.

Now, the U.S. government must take action against the Mexican government’s sponsorship of its citizens’ illegal crossing of our borders by forcing the closure of the consulates it has opened across the nation to serve the illegal aliens.  It must also act against corporations, like Bank of America, that openly defies the law by providing services to illegal aliens.  And the government must begin, in earnest, to find and deport illegals that do not voluntarily leave or surrender, which can easily be done with continued raids on suspected employers and on events where illegals mass, and by strictly penalizing employers and landlords who harbor illegal aliens.  Despite the lack of a national ID card, there are sufficient means for anyone to determine if a prospective renter or employee is a citizen or legal immigrant, and there is no need to be concerned about a lawsuit if the evidence provided is dubious to the employers’ or landlords’ interests in not violating the law, because illegal aliens have no standing to sue.  In those rare cases where a legal prospect is refused, the uncertainty of an employer or landlord over the validity of presented documents, or the lack of language skill an applicant demonstrates, represents sufficient cause to counter any claim of refusal by intent to discriminate.

Now that the free ticket to illegal aliens has been defeated, corporations will spend millions of dollars and lobby hard for an expansion of work-visa programs that will further cut into the number and value of American jobs.  Do not forget that the number of legal work visas provided combines with the effect of outsourced jobs and plants that the Republican Reagan and Bush administrations have allowed to become the norm, in conjunction with trade policies that favor importers, not American workers and their families.  The only way to know that the government is protecting Americans instead of serving corporate special interests is if any new work visa law ties the number to the nation’s unemployment rate, by sector, and citizens must lobby their representatives to insure that a solid reference like that is tied to the number of work visas that will be allowed.

Finally, local governments and law enforcement must now begin to enforce the law activist-affected legislators sought to overturn, but that now still stands, and for which, enforcement is long overdue.  This is what citizens have demanded, and this is the only avenue of addressing illegal aliens that will preserve America’s security, heritage, culture and future.  And time has already run out for border states, its communities now regular victims of Mexican crime as the violence of that drug culture digs into U.S. soil.  In Tucson, Arizona, alone, home invasions by illegal, Mexican criminals have totaled more than 200 since just 2008!  At the same time, Mexican cartels, and those from other points south, are expanding and integrating their networks in U.S. cities from coast to coast, their operatives often also drawing on social welfare and committing crimes unrelated to their drug activities, characteristic of a growing and coordinated, organized-crime network with street-gang culture.

This second Senate success, in blocking passage of the immigration bill, leaves existing law in effect, which requires that the borders be secured and that illegal immigrants surrender to authorities or leave the country to return through legal process.  With no amnesty bill passed, the government remains responsible to do what it has so far not attempted to do:  enforce the law, curtail availability to all welfare and non-emergency medical services, police employers and landlords, and end the invasion.  Only continued pressure from citizens on their legislators, and on their local governments and law-enforcement agencies, can insure that the illegal invasion does really end, because otherwise, government will remain immobile, and alien-backed activist groups will succeed in their efforts to have the law neutralized and the border effectively, retroactively opened with little or no restrictions.

Bush (and many Democrats) want more than 12 million to stay.

The immigration system is broken because Bush believes that not enforcing the law, and rewarding those who break it, by passing the proposed immigration amnesty bill, is the “right thing to do.”  Bush also said, in a late-spring, 2007, speech, that supporting the slack bill is “patriotic,” which makes the usual accusation against the majority of citizens, opposed to the bill’s lenient measures, that they are unpatriotic.

The immigration system is also broken because it allows U.S. heritage, culture, the streets and the workplace, to be diluted with alien priorities which have no reverence for law, local culture, language, and heritage, or for the unique democratic system that establishes American rights and law.  Experience in unassimilated conclaves, like southern Florida, has proven that, when allowed to vote, the process and outcome of elections will reflect that lack of reverence, introducing characteristics of the corrupt homeland political systems which are ingrained into the culture of many illegal aliens, including election fraud and votes cast in guided self-interest, fracturing the continuity and strength of the constitutional system citizens have inherited from the Founders, rather than elections advancing the values inherent with educated community and national concern.  And there is the undeniable economic effect of reducing the number and value of citizen jobs, also impacted by excessive H1B visas, as well as driving down real estate values while driving up rents, and the social impact on health services, crime, and education.

The late May 2007, N.Y. Times/CBS national poll, which found that about 65 percent of Americans (+/- 3%) favor guest workers and fine-based amnesties (which only the drug dealers and a small percentage of more highly paid plant-and-construction-segment workers could afford), is a picture from a fish-eye lens, and did not tie the guest-worker question to the number the proposed bill would allow.  The flaw in the poll is that it is national, where the experience of Americans on the problems of the issue is more largely remote and second hand, and the numbers of those displaced and impacted by the problem is fewer.  And, if immigration is left unchecked, the poll’s favoring numbers can only decrease as the problems created spread to directly affect more and more communities.  The poll certainly does not even reflect the opinion in northern states where enclaves have been established and caused problems significant enough to push city governments to pass laws aimed at getting the illegals out.  The results would have been severely different if the poll were limited to, say, only those citizens in the sunbelt states.

Senators are also looking at the issue through the same, short-sighted lens of the poll, compounded by their isolation from the street-real effects of unenforced, over-run illegal immigration.  To citizens directly affected by the mass of illegals, it is impossible to believe that the votes coming from the Senate on the “joke” immigration bill and its amendment proposals are from a body elected by the citizens of the United States.  To them, it looks like the U.S. Senate was elected by illegal immigrants, businesses that employ them, the Latin nations south of the border that send them, and landlords who house them, ten or more to a two-bedroom apartment, and for these citizens in the breech, no immigration measure should be supported that allows the illegals to stay, carte blanche, or that does not provide harsh fees for landlords and employers, and that does not provide for meaningful strengthening of the government, history, and language requirements for citizenship (questions like, what is an immigration form number, are idiotic and irrelevant), along with stricter oversight of the citizenship testing and approval process, eliminating the corruption that now allows citizenship and voting by those who cannot even converse in English with others in the voting line!  New legislation should also remove the illegal-immigrant-birth loophole, in order to remove another incentive to invade, and no bill should increase the number allowed to come in the future.

The legislation now proposed by the Senate compromise does not fix the system, but rather does the reverse, sanctioning, again, the law-breaking and all the problems the broken system has introduced, granting blanket amnesty, again, to all who are here and can get here in time, and sending a reenforced signal that, when passed, the same cycle of building illegal presence can begin again, despite any new restrictions, to eventually be met with the same non-solution of bowing to the invasion.  Or, if the line drawn by any new law is finally upheld, as it should be now, the same violence and scars will be inflicted as would be if the current law were enforced, except that more than 12 million illegal aliens would not have already been handed the enforcement sword in surrender.  No new federal law would be better than the Bush-legacy, sell-out-compromise proposal of the Senate, because, at least, continued border strengthening, enforcement of current law against employers and landlords, and new laws and enforcement by states and cities to increase prosecution of illegals and their aiding-and-abetting supporters, will all contribute in reducing the number of illegals here as well as the incentives for more to come.

If you allow more than 12 million illegal immigrants to stay with the opportunity for citizenship...

What happens to the value of citizenship and the quality of the vote when the full rights and privileges of citizenship are given away to unfounded demands?  Bush would not have been elected without his pandered, non-assimilated Hispanic voting block, most of whom could not pass a high-school U.S. history and civics test, and many of whom hardly speak English and have been pushed through loosely managed citizenship programs by sympathetic activists.  The harm that vote has cost America will be affective for decades to come.

How do you stop the next highly encouraged and motivated 12 and 24 million from coming?  Might as well serve justice and give Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and southern California back to Mexico, or maybe to a consortium of Mexico and the other Central and South American countries—a good solution, except that it wouldn’t work, because it would create more border, and even then, the invasion still would not stop its push north and from sea to sea, not as long as there are unchallenged jobs and housing waiting.  Why not just throw the whole concept of nationalism and national identity out the window, just as many illegals have been seen to toss their garbage?  That’s what the illegal immigrants and their supporters are really demanding—no borders, no requirements, no assimilation, no planning or control, as there was with the past immigrant generations.

Increased border security will stop more illegals, but far more will be encouraged to come and will get through, knowing that if they stay and breed and protest that, eventually, the U.S. will be theirs.

Flags of Our Fathers?

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Castro is better for America than Felipe Calderón

Bush was dead wrong, again, when he said Mexico’s business-dominated government, handed off from Vicente Fox to Felipe Calderón after a close, fraud-tainted election, is a friend to the U.S.  It is not.  With its corruption, allowing the drug trades to flourish and use its territory as a conduit to poison America’s citizens with its product and its violence, with Mexico’s refusal to curb the flow of illegal immigrants, who drain American resources and diminish the quality of American culture, while returning dollars to Mexico’s economy and relieving it of social-support responsibility for its illegal-immigrant citizens, Mexico is a greater threat to American security and America’s future than is Cuba!

The time is past when America should begin to tie its immigration problems and policies to its relations with Mexico.  They are irrevocably intertwined, and the problem on this side of the border cannot be solved without attacking the problem on the other side.  Should America cede the lands it took in the Mexican-American War for illegal-immigrant use and clamp down on enforcement only outside of those areas?  America might as well return those lands to Mexico, then, because without application of political pressure to Mexico, to cause it to do its share of deterrence and enforcement, there are no realistic cures for the problem, except to surrender by allowing the millions here illegally to remain and by failing to remove the carrots and end the incursion—to surrender means an unacculturate, Hispanic nation for the future.  Without taking these measures, there is no other future possible.  Look to the communities in California, Arizona, Texas, and South Florida, among others, to see the changes:  the failure (refusal) to integrate, the isolation, the south-border styled, corrupted local governments, streets renamed from honored local heritage to those with no ties to anything or anyone indigenous to America, and this is just where the native populations have been displaced.  There is also the use of lawns for garbage, thrown out of windows—an imported practice now seen as far north as Cincinnati; the architecture of barred windows; the freedom-is-one-way intolerance of the critical, free speech of others; loud, imposing, inconsiderate community-life manners, to name only a few that are secondary to the crime, the loss of the nature and heritage of traditional communities, and the thankless drains on local resources.  Even if a president could get all the funding needed to stem illegal crossings and eradicate the drug trade from Mexican and South- and Central-American sources that flow through Mexico in a unilateral attempt to end the influx, it couldn’t be done unless the U.S. also invaded and occupied Mexico.  The only way to eradicate the violence and deterioration of American life that stems from the Mexican drug trade and illegal-immigrant invasion, without spending Americans’ dollars and lives, is to use all means of federal, state, and local enforcement possible, in conjunction with giving the Mexican government a strong incentive to do what it can do itself and should have been doing all along.  Mexico can eliminate corruption and the drug cartels on its own, if it sees an incentive to do so, though it would, on request, continue to receive U.S. drug-enforcement assistance.  Action to seal the border and impose trade and traffic prohibitions, as has been done with Cuba, will quickly provide that incentive.

The American people will not stand for, and their government should not tolerate and support a situation wherein the F.B.I. makes the outrageous statement, as it did in the third week of May, 2006, that the only way the Mexican drug violence on U.S. streets will diminish is when one of their cartels takes control!  The F.B.I. is thus revealed to be as much in need of leadership as is the government.  The Mexican-imported violence has now gotten so bad that kidnapping and home invasions are being carried out in Arizona cities and towns, 200 in Tucson since early 2008, and more than 700 in Phoenix since 2007!  The loss of Spring-break destinations, trade, and corporate expansionism that would result from Cuba-like restrictions against Mexico during the short term that it would take for the Mexican government to finally pick up the ball and play responsibly to lift the restrictions is not the most important issue.  America will survive that—it will not survive business as usual, with drugs, illegal immigration, and exporting plants and jobs as it has been over the last three decades!  New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a Republican mouthpiece for Bush, who wants to welcome the immigrant law breakers, should be aware that the solution for shrinking-workforce support of increasing social-security needs, that he alleges so concerns him, is not to bless the low-wage, unskilled, criminal-ridden, social-service- and education-draining illegal-immigrant invasion, but rather to damn the legal exportation of good jobs and plants that idles American workers and sends them overseas to compete against foreigners for U.S.-corporation-owned jobs, a relevant factor he chooses not to mention!  New York, like Washington, is in dire need of more leaders and fewer politicians.

States and cities cannot rely on the federal government, under control of the Bush administration or this Congress, to do its job with border control.  Both have already demonstrated their willingness to ignore the purpose of legal quotas and sell-out American culture and citizen-needed social services for a vote and a dollar.  Every state and city must follow the lead of pioneering officials in Arizona and Pennsylvania jurisdictions, like Hazleton, which have passed effective laws with jail time for the illegal aliens before deportation and tough, hurtful fines and/or imprisonment for employers and landlords who harbor them.  Illegal is illegal, and these cities have charged their police to enforce and trusted their prosecutors to judge intent when prosecuting those laws, and every city that is now a foothold for illegal aliens must do the same.  The illegal dollars those aliens who are ignored send home are the strongest advertisement that cities without laws and enforcement are havens to be targeted for stepped-up invasion.

In large part, to facilitate the export of illegally paid U.S. dollars, Mexico operates more consulates in the U.S. than any other nation, and unlike others, who primarily are here to aid their nationals with legal problems or to promote trade and commerce, the Mexican consulates are primarily here to end-run American-immigration law, providing a form of Mexican I.D. card that the Mexican government is strongly lobbying banks, police departments, and others to accept in lieu of legal, immigration-identity papers, facilitating illegal immigration and entrenchment in America.  The Bush administration, it is no surprise to learn, will not lift a finger to block the use of the cards by illegals, or the program to issue them by the Mexican government, speaking from deep beneath the profits-cured, corporate cement in which he is entombed to say, “flexible standards” must be provided in identification matters for businesses.  That is like saying that flexible standards for printing of currency would not harm efforts against counterfeiting!

A 31-year-old, illegal-immigrant-construction worker, from Mexico, Ramiro Givara, best expressed the loss of American identity that illegal immigration, Bush, and the Mexican government foster when he said, of the card and the consulates,  “This is so much easier for us.  It is like having part of Mexico here.”  And, that, is the essence of the problem for America.

Finally, it is important to look ahead to the time, in the not-to-distant future, when the inward migration that will be forced upon coastal states by climate-change precipitated, rising sea levels begins, where illegal immigrants and their offspring will be a significant factor in the high cost, extreme difficulties, and widespread violence that will accompany that coming era of change and displacement, and which, unrelated to the coming, forced migration, has already begun.  For that on-the-horizon reason, and for all the reasons of current and increasing negative impact upon American culture, integration, unity, and quality of life, America should not be concerned with the self-serving objections of its neighbors, or its politicians, when it comes to protecting and insuring its sovereignty.  Yes, America has a responsibility to the world community, but its first responsibility is to itself, and mark the words of Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tx.), iterated in the Senate chambers, concurrent with the F.B.I.’s defeatist conclusion on border violence, and Sen. McCain’s (R-Az.) support of a deceptive, non-temporary Guest Worker Bill, that if America does not see to its own interests first, the interests of all free and democratic nations will eventually, along with those of American citizens, pay the toll of that negligence.  In that, he is correct.

U.S. Hispanic population seven years ago. Source,
2000 census. Illegal immigrants are NOT included.

America stands at a critical crossroad of heritage and culture.

“Invade:”  1. to enter for conquest [residency, ownership, citizenship, the vote] or plunder [welfare, jobs]; 2. to intrude upon, infringe, encroach upon, violate; 3a. to spread over or into as if invading; 3b. to affect injuriously and progressively.

What do Syria and Jordan have in common with America?  How about an immigration problem, where the two Mid-East countries complain about the exodus of Iraqis through their borders, and the attendant strain upon their social services and change upon the face of their cultures and social landscapes.  What’s a difference separating Syria and Jordan from America?  America isn’t asking for aid from other nations in dealing with its overwhelming invasion of illegal Hispanic immigrants, not even from the home nations which spawn and encourage it.  It is fortunate that the Bush administration has turned the same deaf ear it has on children’s health to the Iraqi refugees, in their case, by restricting the number allowed to immigrate into the U.S., because another post-war-debacle influx of a foreign population is the last thing America needs, especially in this instance, when the immediate domestic invasion has yet to be confronted, and where, to compound America’s immigration woes, it would never be possible to identify or know the number of al Qaeda sleeper-cell members admitted by any such large admission of another separatist culture as the Muslim Iraqis.  Just look to the problems now plaguing England, France, and the Netherlands if you doubt the pitfalls.

But the Bush administration, in a reverse-psychology effort to ratchet-up Hispanic immigrant-group pressure on Congress and the states, has begun to take some immigration and enforcement measures, including a cut-off of state-matching funds for medical services that do not meet the strict definition of “emergency services,” a move that is drawing the anticipated response from not only the immigrant-support groups, but also from some states already entrenched by large numbers of the invaders, up to 500,000 or more, that are increasingly bending over to provide the services that unfailingly draw more illegals into the U.S.  Since free health services, especially pediatric, are a primary magnet for illegal immigrants, it is proper to deny funding for them, especially since growing their population into a majority is a primary objective of the illegals’ “invasion” plans, and it is working.  Without a change in immigration policy, to include removing the illegal-birth citizenship loophole, and enforcement to reverse the trend of influx, it is destined to transform all of America into an Hispanic nation.

Most articles on immigration costs and problems, and most speeches made by legislators on the senate and house floors, fail completely to address the Mexican government, whose illegals are the vast majority, and which is openly supporting the invasion through its foreign and domestic policies, and with numerous consulates spread throughout America, relieving themselves of social responsibility for millions of their citizens.  What would happen if the states and federal government billed Mexico and other nations for reimbursement of medical costs and other social costs for their citizens here illegally?  Why isn’t this on the trade-talks tables?  Why is Mexico not being told to close their multi-state, invasion-post consulates, except in Washington and, acceding to the invasion’s effects, one other, only, in Arizona, which would be more central to their population centers in California and Texas?  Though, even this is a reluctant concession, since those populations should be eliminated by deportations enforcing the law and a self-determined departure imposed by the removal of access to jobs and services.  Why isn’t anyone else asking or even trying to make Mexico and other nations accountable, let alone prevent them from assisting the invasion?

A growing trend in the nation, another “Hispanic Heritage” week, is nearly upon the Queen City, where, according to the promotions being run on Cincinnati Local 12 television, native, resident citizens are invited to take the initiative to “bridge the divide” Hispanics create when they immigrate illegally and do not try to assimilate.  Local 12 also encourages the invasion by maintaining a Spanish web site that not only serves the non-English-speaking Hispanics, but also reaches south, across the border into internet cafes to, in effect, say, “Look, here, even if you don’t speak English or belong here, Cincinnati will bend over backwards to make it easier for you to be welcome here, regardless, so come ahead, legally or otherwise.  Our schools, clinics and hospitals, welfare offices (and jails) are waiting for more of you, and our look-the-other-way employers appreciate that you do not require a living wage and will gladly defer employing our citizens to get you.  And you’ll really appreciate that our emergency services now require some employees be bilingual, so you won’t even need an incentive to speak our language to call 911.  Please, make your language our language.”

There are those who believe the invasion has already gone too far, that a Hispanic, dual-language, dual-culture, bi-polar America is inevitable.  Hillary Clinton says, “It wouldn’t be such a bad thing,” adding that it would be good for Americans to speak two languages, which indicates how fine a grip she has on the problems of households, she says she supports, making ends meet with multiple jobs, tight budgets, and all the time in the world to learn another language while competing for immigrant-displaced jobs and pushed-down wages.  If she is president, it seems the takeover would be inevitable, but otherwise, and with active public involvement, even with her in the Oval Office, this would not be the case, not if the same resolve to enforce the law, deport, and curtail services is employed as the apathy which prevailed to allow the Reagan and Bush Republican governments, and the Clinton administration, to ignore the border, the law, and encourage the invasion.  To be truly comprehensive, meaningful, effective, and acceptable, the next immigration bill must address many shortcomings.  Removing the social-benefits magnets combined with enforcement will alone quickly turn the tide.  It only takes the active resolve of citizens upon their local and federal elected officials (and TV stations) to begin, as was done with the initial, tentative step of defeating the amnesty bill presented by the 110th session of Congress.

Studies have shown that the cost of finding and deporting the illegal populations that do not leave on their own will be less than the medical, welfare, social-services, and law-enforcement costs of their growing presence, costs that fall upon the cities, counties, states, and the federal government.  It all comes from the pockets of citizens, and without enforcement, the costs citizens pay to surrender their country only increases.  The immigrant lobby used fear to forecast farm disaster if the law is enforced; yet, it has already been seen, since the amnesty bill failed and a partial, weak enforcement effort ensued, that enterprising farmers have successfully moved their seeds to fields south of the border, where they report a workable situation, with none of the labor problems that confront them here.  A simple choice, when the other side of the coin is a nation lost to illegal invaders.  Until a guest-worker program is created, one without a path to citizenship, that is tied to the jobless rate so as not to impose upon the citizen workforce for the sake of corporate interests for cheap labor, the export of farming is only a cost of preserving the face of the nation, and it is not too great a cost to pay.  The next immigration-reform bill must have limits on guest workers and green-card imports that reflect the income standards for American workers, not a corporate-interest-group-defined system that grants a boon to industry, and to aliens and their nations, at the expense of citizen workers and their families.

Citizenship requirements must be tightened.  The current citizenship test is a joke, the lines of which are simply committed to flash cards and learned by rote, without providing any real insight into America’s history, the forces that caused the Founders to frame the Constitution as they did, or each citizen’s place in preserving the rule of law and the freedom provided them under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  Now, citizenship requirements are only another factor eroding the foundations of rights and freedom.  Simply put, the educational-citizenship program, and the test, must be such that the applicant demonstrates the same knowledge and appreciation of American history and civics as any C-student graduate from a public highschool.  Any less standard makes for a criteria that is of less value at the polls, diluting and diminishing the American character.  Popular sovereignty was still a radical idea in the mid-to-late-eighteenth-century world, and the Founders designed the new American government with built-in protections against the ignorance of the masses their Constitution made sovereign, and as the quality of education has grown and spread throughout America over the centuries, those protections have been altered and removed, leaving the nation vulnerable to any influx of immigrants that is not properly schooled to meet the current standards.  That is why any amnesty for illegal immigrants which would provide a path to citizenship, under the current, slack, citizenship standards, requirements, and testing, is an unqualified disaster in the making for the future.  It is also why oversight of the education and testing program must be tightened, to prevent the corruption that has resulted in instances where immigrant populations have grown sufficiently to take power, resulting in local, Hispanic officials and government employees, acting as sympathetic activists, allowing many of their immigrants to be granted citizenship despite that they could not even speak English, beyond a few memorized phrases, let alone having any learned appreciation for the history and responsibility that stands behind citizenship and the vote.  For them, the vote is little more than a tool of self-service in the hands of their political bosses, a mimicry of the corrupted governments of Central and South America.  George Bush would not have been elected without the Hispanic voting blocks in Florida that contain many of these kinds of voters, to whom he and his brother in Florida pandered, along with many Democrats who also pander them and are too eager to spill the national heritage for what they perceive as either easy or possibly-lost votes.

Laws against employers must be stiffened and enforced in active cooperation with states and municipalities, and those laws must be extended to landlords.

Financial programs by corporations, like Bank of America and Wal Mart, designed to service illegals must be halted.

There must be political and trade consequences for Mexico and other nations which do not do enough to control their borders and their imported crime.  Mexico must be made to remove its network of invasion-post consulates.

Finally, America must share the burden left by the failure of a string of Republicans in the White House, and the Congress, to enforce and provide properly effective and protective immigration law.  Because of their failure, and the apathy of citizens, it is now morally necessary to provide resident amnesty, but never citizenship, to the immediate parents and guardians (NOT whole families) of the citizen-children born of illegals.  But any viable immigration reform must do away with the birthing loophole, which is not only a powerful magnet for illegals, but is also a self-defeating factor for enforcement, as well as a means of garnering political power to eventually breach immigration policies and dominate the government, which will result, starting in the communities, with travesties like the retraction of laws against practices like animal blood sports, and the creation of a whole category of public-funds-exploitative, Hispanic-preservation and -recognition laws and programs.  That has been the history elsewhere where native populations have been displaced.

The future for America’s melting pot has two faces: one, based in responsible, enforced immigration law, that preserves American ideals, culture, and heritage as it has for four generations of American citizens still alive today, until the mid 1980’s; or, there is the face of the Hispanic invasion, promoted by foreign governments, irresponsible and unenforced immigration law, and local apathy, that is already changing the life of the nation and draining its resources, from schools to health care, at the expense of every citizen’s future, ranging from the burden of higher taxes for fewer-citizen/more-immigrant services, to the quality of education for citizen children being reduced to meet the educational and language deficits, and the sheer numbers of the unacclimated illegal immigrants crowding their classrooms.  Hispanic-immigrant activists, interest groups, and their supporters, including Bush, label the former as “protectionism,” and it is, and there is no wrong in it, because the American way of life being lost is worth reclaiming and protecting.  The label for the latter option is “surrender,” of the heritage and future of what has been labeled by presidents as “the greatest nation on Earth.”

Today, that phrase, “the greatest nation...” can only refer to either the past, or to the current level of America’s capacity to spend and destroy, characterized by thought surrendered to Madison-Avenue persuasion, leading to borrowed, gluttonous consumption and instant gratification, prioritized short-term investment and attention spans, quick-money bottom lines, celebrity- and entertainment-driven higher interests, all eclipsing greater values.  And most damning:  a pattern of Republican policies that place the goals of corporatism and industry above all else, fronting an American government that subsidizes the lavishly wealthy with tax cuts and symbolic contributions to Social Security, while its president turns his back on—no, worse, raises a wall in answer to the health needs of children because, while spending $200 billion in Iraq (2008 appropriation), $88 billion wasted on fraud and corruption, he says he doesn’t want to subsidize the middle class, revealing a government without a heart that starts illicit wars and shreds democracy in its own name to impose colonial occupations upon other nations and its own citizens to meet its special-interest objectives, and a growing, unregulated, mass influx of self-interested, non-acclimating, isolationist Hispanics who, determined to stake their claims and change America beyond recognition or reclamation, could care less about the twisted direction in which America is plummeting.

Which face for the future?  It seems to be an easy choice to make.  And it is a choice that only requires an eye on your politicians and a pointed letter or phone call, tied to a voting memory, when they begin to stray away from the interests of the citizens and the nation toward those of the invaders and the interest groups.

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The following response to the position on Mexico was received, reply following:

"Hi, I am writing a paper on popular sovereignty and I was looking at your website.  I was agreeing to everything you were saying until I got to the Mexico part.  I am Mexican but I go to college in Florida.  I think its ridiculous that you say that Calderon is a bigger threat than Castro, that shows how you dont know anything about Mexico.  That was one of the dumbest things Ive ever heard in my life.  You should do some research before doing a website!" — Fernando R.

The writer stopped reading, where the charge was justified by specifying Mexico’s refusal to enforce its borders, provide a viable economic environment for its poor, and to stop the drug trade that both originates in Mexico and passes through it, all of which makes its leaders more dangerous than Castro, and makes it a nation doing more harm to America than Cuba, which has done nothing to poison America’s streets since the wave of invasions begun in the mid-1960’s.

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Right click on the highlighted link in this sentence and choose the "save link as (or target as)" menu option to download a virus-free, single-page, MS-Word-formatted immigration flyer you can mail, e-mail, and/or print and distribute in your neighborhood grocery, malls, post offices, and government centers.

The answer to southwest and western states providing college-educational assistance to mostly Mexican illegal immigrants, or for any state, or to any nationality, especially if they are exceptional academicians, is to send them back to Mexico, or to whatever nation they belong, because their countries and the futures of their countries need them more than America, which cannot afford them and has more demand from citizen students than can be addressed.  The only acceptable solution, other than deportation, is for their countries to pay for their educations, where enrollments are available without denying citizen applicants, on the assurance that after graduating in America the students will return to their countries to work and help them become better places for all of their citizens.  These outstanding illegal-immigrant students are leaders who can help improve conditions in their countries, reducing the trend to immigrate illegally, but who, if they remain, only diminish opportunity for American students and graduates, and it is both as wrong and as much a disservice to both America and their home nations for American states to fund them or to allow employers to exploit their post-education talents as it is to diminish citizen-student opportunity to educate them in competition against citizens in a climate of increasing cost and diminishing college-application acceptances.

Meet the Bastards
The abusive Burmese military junta (above left) and its boss, Senior Gen. Than Shwe (above right).

Burma’s military “government” is committing nature-assisted genocide on its country’s people.  The military generals of that abusive regime sit in isolated splendor and refuse post-typhoon aid at what will be the cost of thousands of additional lost lives, contorting a natural disaster into a man-made affront to humanity.  No ruling structure such as theirs should be permitted to exist anywhere in the world.

If Bush had stopped, in Iraq, at the removal of Saddam, instead of pursuing his special-interest, nation-building agenda, a simple warning to the Burmese ruling criminals would likely have been sufficient to force an alteration of their pattern of greed and corrupted power toward their people.  Bush and Cheney, in throwing out the “might for right” mantle that was in America’s grasp after 9/11, by their abuse of power in Iraq, are also responsible for the lives lost at the hand of the Burmese junta, which they otherwise may have stayed.  The isolated Burmese regime’s compound should be invaded, the rulers who are not killed should be extradited for trial by the World Court to answer for the dead they have caused, and a more humanely-oriented military officer, with approval of the remaining echelon of the military command, should be designated to lead the country, with notice that if the relationship of the government to its people and the world remains unchanged, that the new leadership will also be removed.  And so would end another abomination in the life of the world.

Islamic militants, mere organized-crime punks, are hauled away by police.

Last year’s arrest of three radical-Islamic terrorists by German authorities, stacked on top of previous, recent, European interdictions into the criminal activities of radical-Islamic groups, again demonstrates that the domestic war against this radical movement is effectively waged with cooperative, international intelligence and law enforcement, not armies, which are only effective to remove supporting regimes and to pursue and confront massed, organized forces.  So, when Bush or any Republican candidate lies that the Bush occupation of Iraq (which was, actually, always intended to create a corporate-safe, exploitable investment and operating environment) keeps America safe, don’t you believe it!

Nuclear defense moves played out on an invisible board.

Smoglympics likely to set no records except for asthmatics, civil and press harassment.

                                  
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Memorial to be Communist Chinese Product

Art, be it music, painting, or sculpture, is the language of the heart, the expression of the soul.   Who will ever know how the carved stone of Dr. Martin King, Jr., crafted by a foreign artist with foreign materials, so unconnected to Dr. King’s ideals and history, not a beneficiary of his struggle, will differ from that which would look out upon the crowds with eyes crafted by one so moved to express his appreciation and reverence, and one who, so connected, feels a binding obligation, not only to the art, but to the man and the citizens who are a part of his legacy?  The Statue of Liberty was a gift representing a common virtue from a country that shares that virtue, and it employs America’s icon to represent it.  Such is not the case with the proposed King memorial.  The corporate expansionism of the one-world economy has limits which are not recognized by the Bush administration or those who selected communist China to craft Dr. King’s memorial.

Bush trade policies allow China to poison consumers, undercut domestic manufacturers

If U.S. cannot competently [Bush antonym] police content of all imports from China, none should be allowed.

Unfairly standardized China trade jeopardizes more than safety.  Making it easy for China to be an American-corporate, off-shore-manufacturing haven and importer also helps America’s biggest fuel-consumption competitor drive up fuel prices for Americans.  Since the Bush administration will not enforce safety, or end trade with the exploitive, repressive, communist state, it is up to consumers to send the message to China, through boycott, which will require the government to, at least, require labeling so consumers can know when what they’re buying is Made in China.

Did Peanut Corp. of America sell out to Chinese investors?

The Georgia company acts like it did, according to reports, intentionally shipping salmonella-tainted, peanut-process goods.

Previous Republican, industry-friendly rules did NOT require the company or state inspectors to notify FDA about salmonella-positive test results, and they didn’t—more than 1,300 sickened, nine dead, criminal investigation in progress.  China is executing top executives in its food-processing industry whose greed caused deaths and jailing others for 20 years.  Lock the door and throw away the key!

President Obama announced that he will be appointing a new FDA commissioner, an oversight process to supervise stricter regulatory controls, and a possible merger of FDA with USDA.  Bush’s FDA Commissioner, Andrew von Eschenbach, slithered out of office just before Obama was sworn in.  A Cleveland cardiologist, Steven Nissen, is reported to be a top contender for the slot.  He's an Obama advisor and wants FDA to be more enforcer than industry promoter, and he had raised the red flag on several major-pharmacy-firm drugs, making him an unfavorable candidate for the pharma lobby.  Other possibilities for the post include Duke cardiologist, Robert Califf, and industry consultant, Mary Pendergast, who is a lawyer, and who, although working for the industry, has a record of balance and is respected by important Democrats.

The corporate-industrial-globalization theology

What’s so good about it for corporate-industrial America?

• Everything that’s bad for America’s lower- and middle-class citizens.
• It uses its unrivaled lobbying power and control of the White House to push through unfair trade agreements.
• It imports, through excessive visas and unenforced immigration law, low-cost labor to replace workers in America.
• It exports good jobs to cheap-labor markets south and overseas.
• It exports plants to cheap-labor markets south and overseas.
• It imports goods from those foreign plants with which true American companies, paying living wages, cannot compete.
• It avoids taxes true American companies pay.

What’s so good about it for working Americans?

• Nothing, except for the short-sighted, who have Wal Mart.
• It allows unchecked foreign investment to raise select-area home and commercial values above the reach of citizens and small businesses.
• Everything listed in the first section, above.

What’s so good about it for America?

• Nothing.
• It bleeds the middle class into the poor, rewards the wealthy elite, reducing the economy into a widening, bi-polar, economic divide of citizens and wealthy, foreign investors and consumers.
• It compromises national security, increasing avenues to import dangerous Islamists, weapons, and diseases.
• It compromises law enforcement, providing expanded opportunities for traffickers in drugs, sex, and slavery.
• It encourages and facilitates the dilution and ultimate eradication of national identity and heritage.
• It imports dangerous, unregulated goods from corrupt, oppressive, unfriendly countries.
• It diminishes revenues for American local governments, reducing services.
• It encourages and facilitates foreign ownership of American companies.
• It diminishes America’s global, per-capita, economic standing.
• It diminishes America’s consumer strength.
• It diminishes America’s workforce.
• It diminishes America.

GM strikers are confronting a threat to America’s future.

The auto-workers’ strike against General Motors took a hard stand against the single-most growing and dangerous corporate practice facing America.  While GM proclaims its pride in preserving the American experience by sponsoring the PBS series, “The War,” and other Ken Burns films, their automotive workforce was striking against them because the company insisted upon continuing the desiccating practice of moving production out of the country, a practice which is not only a direct threat to America’s middle class, through the loss of jobs, but to the nation, through weakening of the national economy and manufacturing base.  While the UAW, through past excesses of featherbedding and corruption, had contributed to wasteful costs in the American labor market, their gains have been diminishing over the last decades, and American workers and consumers are not to blame for the competitive disadvantage by which GM or the other U.S. auto makers find themselves challenged.  They have put themselves at risk because of poor market and design decisions and inferior quality, costly mistakes that are slowly being corrected.  But GM wants a path of less grade and shorter return, because while speaking with one face to make high-sounding advertising claims, at the expense of the American worker—its workers—and the nation’s economic future and lifeblood, GM is looking with its real face farther down the path taken by them and the growing number of firms which are turning their backs on American needs and imperatives while improving the economies of foreign lands for the sake of cheap-labor-based profits.  GM calls it preserving their competitive options, but what will there be worth preserving of the American experience if this exporting of plants and jobs is allowed to continue, if corporations are permitted to do whatever they wish for the sake of their bottom lines (executive pay options and parachutes)?

Although one might think the corporations are signing their own death warrants by gutting the middle-class heart of the American workforce and consumer market, they are willing to do it because the world-consumer market is a far larger and more-valuable commodity, now in corporate sights thanks to decades of Republican trade programs and executive orders that have opened the floodgates to third-world expansionism and exploitation.  If the slow death of the American middle class is to be the real cost of the new-world, corporate, Republican vision of competition and global economics, then a little protectionism, in the form of regulation to control foreign investment and offshore manufacturing, and tariffs to offset the low-wage/benefits cost advantage of foreign and American offshore manufacturers, is definitely in order for America.  Given the past excesses of organized labor or the monster of exported plants and jobs they now confront, theirs is the lessor of two evils.  And if GM is willing to cut into the heart of America to make a buck, then they deserve to be struck, and perhaps, the most dire predictions of consequence.  In either case, their workers, having then slain the dragon, would also be losers, along with many others.  The threat has passed, for now, but it remains to be seen whether GM and other corporate giants will begin to alter their destructive tendencies, which have already cost some the lost confidence of toy consumers, those sales being replaced with the costs of recalls and rebuilding reputations, only one way in which a penny pinched has not turned into a penny saved by exporting the American employment infrastructure into the hands of cheap labor and foreign-management oversight in corrupt and unregulated environments.  There are far worse consequences possible, and without abatement, they will be certain to appear over the horizon.

Tasers kill and their use must be more strictly regulated.

Legal firm’s get-a-divorce advertisement gets used-car class taste review—and new clients.

“The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating.”

That is the ominous first sentence of the just-released Iraq Study Group Report on the Iraq war.

“It is an opportunity to come together and work together on this problem,” was Bush’s initial, delay-fraught, non-sequitur interpretation of and response to the Report’s opening statement and its expected, flat-out-and-direct condemnation of his Iraq policy.  Bush continues to arrogantly set himself and his self-interest-motivated agenda above the voice of the nation and the bipartisan Iraq Study Group’s ten-member panel, which was populated by what could rightly be called “the best and brightest”—men and women far better then he, including:  James A. Baker III, former Secretary of State under George Bush, Sr., and Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman, who are the group’s leaders.  The other eight panel members, all of whom were unanimous in the report’s conclusions, and, Mr. Baker stresses, unanimous in their bipartisan support of every one of the report’s 79 recommendations, include two Democrat veterans of the Clinton administration, Leon E. Panetta and William J. Perry, and a Clinton adviser, Vernon E. Jordan Jr., Charles S. Robb, former Democratic governor of Virginia, and Alan K. Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, Sandra Day O’Connor, a former Supreme Court justice who was nominated by President Reagan, Edwin Meese III, who served as attorney general under Mr. Reagan, and Lawrence S. Eagleburger, also a former secretary of state under Bush’s father.  Mr. Eagleburger was a replacement for Robert M. Gates, Bush’s Secretary of Defense replacement for Rumsfeld.

The Report addresses remedial steps, all promised to be unpleasant, difficult, for the Iraq occupation in two areas:  external and internal.  Externally, the thrust of the Report is summarized by the following two sentences, contained within the Report’s executive summary:

“No country in the region will benefit in the long term from a chaotic Iraq.”

“Given the ability of Iran and Syria to influence events within Iraq and their interest in avoiding chaos in Iraq, the United States should try to engage them constructively.”

These statements are lynch-pinned on an assumption that Middle-Eastern countries, particularly Iran and Syria, antagonistic to the West, and particularly to the U.S., have an interest and desire to see stability evolve in Iraq during any U.S. presence there, when in fact, quite the opposite seems to be in clear evidence.  For one instance, Iran and Syria sponsor suicide squads, active in Israel, Iraq, and throughout the region and the world.  The psychology and political intent of the suicide spawned by these factions hardly speaks to support any assumption of a nation state that puts its own interests ahead of its religious/political goals against the U.S. and the West, even when those goals clearly point to the self-infliction of harm against what the West and the U.S. usually value as nation-state interests.  A simple example is Iran’s taunting and provocative leadership, which is practically daring the U.S. and Israel to attack it over its nuclear-weapons development, despite that such an attack would, carried out to completion, bring an end to the regime and its programs.  This alone invalidates any solution that calls for a continuing presence of U.S. troops in Iraq in any capacity, particularly as police occupiers.  Any such presence not only conforms to Bush’s discredited desires, but will only serve to prolong the violence and extend the number of U.S. casualties and those of the Iraqis, as well as divert attention and resources from areas where U.S. adversaries in the region would rather the U.S. not venture.  In fact, on the Report’s tie-in of an Iraqi solution with the Israeli-Palestine initiatives of 2002, recent events seem to make clear that there will be little chance of a resolution there, or for Lebanon, until the regime in Tehran is eliminated; so, the delay to pursue diplomacy and extend troop presence proposed by the Report for Iraq also amounts to an extension of the violence in Palestine and a continuation of Iran’s provoked and mounting civil pressure against the democratic government of Lebanon and the flare-ups that will continue to occur there.

If a rapid removal of troops from the populated, live areas of Iraq is to be accomplished, ending U.S. involvement in the fate of the people and the government structure that exists in the green zone, and also ending the death and depletion of U.S. forces, the Report’s concern for three major goals for the U.S., also expressed within the executive summary, must be answered:

“[If the recommendations are successfully adopted] America’s credibility, interests, and values will be protected.”

These three concerns are obviously affected, negatively, when the death toll mounts or a scandal comes to light, and over continuing time of the U.S. occupation, but would they really be adversely affected by a prompt pull-back from populated areas?  America’s credibility was protected when Saddam’s statue fell in Baghdad.  The U.S. confronted a threat, false though it was, it laid down ultimatums, and it followed through to do what it said it would if the ultimatums were not met in the specified time.  Credibility doesn’t get any more demonstrable than that.  Everything that happened after that was more lies and the ambitions of Bush, and he was wrong, and his actions were wrong, and what began as undeniable credibility has suffered because of it.  Admitting that also lends credibility, and no plan seeking to ignore this, turn day into night and make America right can succeed, because America, where Bush is concerned, was not right.  Bush miscalculated by invading Iraq, as greatly as Saddam Hussein miscalculated by invading Kuwait 13 years earlier.  Despite Bush’s outrageous 2003 claim, made in a meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, “God would tell me, ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq …’ And I did,” he had no business invading, no business dissolving the structure of civil authority, and no legitimate business remaining after Saddam’s regime was gone, and by getting out of the lives of Iraqis now, many of whom express a desire for that outcome, that error will be corrected, and the civil strife will eventually and more quickly find a violence-ebbing balance of stability on its own.  America still has real threats to its people, beyond the regime in the White House, brewing in the weapons labs of the regimes in Iran and North Korea, and there will be enough opportunity for America to again demonstrate its capability, resolve, and credibility there, when it really has to, and it will begin to do so again when it drops the ambitions of Bush in Iraq and turns to face its enemies.  But that will not happen, because the demands of the American electorate, Congress, military leaders, common sense, and intelligence cannot trump the marching orders from God that echo in Bush’s mind!

America’s interests?  Bush’s delusional beliefs aside, what are America’s real interests in the region?  If the answer is peace, then why?  If the answer is peace brings stability, then again, the question is, why?  Because stability promotes commerce.  And commerce, buried beneath the sands in oil, and in archaic and ruined infrastructure is where America’s interests in the region lie.  Now that the interests the Report addresses have been identified, how does America seek to influence and secure those interests?  In the case of Bush, it’s by force, to bring an economic democracy to the region, particularly the oil-rich parts of it, like Iraq, the circumstance there, which, under Saddam and with the help of a little skewed intelligence, presented an open-door invitation, with the U.S. military as host and the U.N. excluded, that his circle could not resist.  Many others within industrial America would be happy simply to gain spots as middlemen or to eliminate the middlemen, working within the framework of whatever dictator or monarch or religious zealot or council rules the land.  One thing is overriding, so far as the oil market goes:  no matter who or what rules the sands, the oil beneath will find the market.  The question is whether the interests of greed, which have no objection to using lives to gain controls over that market, or the interests of those who are willing to pay what the market demands without the influence of spilled blood will prevail.  The former are the interests of power driven by money, as evidenced by Bush sidekick Cheney’s foreign-interventionist statement, “The good Lord didn’t see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratic regimes friendly to the United States... You’ve got to go where the oil is,” and his ties with Halliburton and Anadarko Petroleum, which has been found to be cheating the U.S. out of millions of dollars of royalties for carbon gold extracted from taxpayers’ lands.  A quick review of the New York Times report on skimmed funds recovered before oil-sticky Bush-Cheney took office in 2001, compared with post 2001, tells the undeniably stained White House special-interest story:

Auditing and compliance review had generated an average of about $176 million annually in the 1990s, with an extraordinary peak of $331 million in 2000, according to data from the Congressional Budget Office and the Interior Department.  But from 2001 through 2005 [Bush’s first term], a period when energy prices soared to new highs, enforcement revenue averaged about $46 million a year.

And, in noting the passing of Saddam, the little historical piece, which will play when the screen below is clicked, tells even more of the special-interest story surrounding Iraq, Saddam, and the play of “American interests,” going where the oil is, under the death-dealing hands of the industrialist-aligned Republican administrations:

The investigation of Anadarko Petroleum’s acquisition, Kerr-McGee, uncovered fraud through a shell-game, and high officials for the Bush government thanked the auditing by thwarting efforts to uncover and pursue the criminals by dissolving offices and firing employees.  It is clear that interests are wide-ranging when it comes to the highly competitive and sparsely seated control of oil, but in Iraq, and for the latter-referenced, non-greed-based Americans, the working ones, white and blue collar, including the oil industry’s rank and file, their interest in the region around Iraq is limited to a fair price for gas and heating oil and a few religious and historic tourist destinations where a ride in a bus doesn’t end up in an ambulance or a hearse.  These interests, none of them (except the money-powered companies working the oil and other contracts through the violence), are served by prolonged violence (prolonged U.S. presence) in Iraq.

That leaves the values, which is really the easiest goal of all to address, and which presented itself in the comparison of interests, above.  Americans also addressed it in the 2006 election, when they said what’s happened and is happening in Iraq is wrong.  If a vote to impeach Bush was on the ballot, he would have been removed from office along with the rest, because Americans, also voting against corruption, do not share his or their values and do not see the value in continuing in Iraq as he has and as he intends to go on.  The support in aid, in food, medical and building supplies, which will be unendingly available, and in the U.S. lives already given to provide Iraqis a chance after Saddam, which cannot remain available any longer, hold up America’s values as a light for the world that will not be diminished by ending the occupation and deaths in Iraq quickly.

There is another goal to address, somewhat glossed-over in the Report’s executive summary:

“Our most important recommendations call for... a change in the primary mission [suicidal training re-deployments] of U.S. forces in Iraq that will enable the United States to begin to move its combat forces out of Iraq responsibly.”

A “responsible reduction or withdrawal” of forces has been mentioned a lot, from a lot of mouths.  It has hardly been defined, but is assumed to mean, coming from those in the Bush alliance who most often use the term, a withdrawal that leaves a democratic government in place, complete with a military strong enough to insure its continued existence.  That definition, coming from Republican administration flunkies and spokespersons can be quickly expressed with three overused, worn-out words:  STAY THE COURSE.  This is also Bush’s nonnegotiable definition of “victory in Iraq,” no matter the toll, and for which there can be no substitute that does not bear the label, “defeat.”

The Report intentionally shuns the use of contentious, politically-edged terms like “victory” and “defeat,” substituting “success” and “failure,” and the avoidance of the more contentious terms is important because they represent goals in the propaganda and sound bites of administration officials and those in Congress and the media speaking from their platforms.  The problem is that the terms are not defined, inducing a fill-in-the-blanks emotional sway for the target listener to attach to the intended persuasive objective of the speaker.  Senator McCain calls the Report a recipe for defeat in Iraq, and from the Republican point of view and definition of “defeat” found in Bush’s dictionary, it is, as is any solution that calls for a pull-out without a self-sustaining government of choice in place.  The problem is, it won’t be a government of choice of the factions who hold the historical power in the country or the region.  When Bush, or anyone else from his camp speaks of victory in Iraq, they do not mean the attainment of the Report’s success-objectives of interests, credibility, values, and the others, unless those goals are harnessed to the flatbeds of industrial trucks that supply the pipelines and pumps within an economically supportive and cooperative regime.  No one from that perspective is satisfied with the attainment of a just trial for a ruthless dictator, or a nuclear/threat-free state because these were never the goals, and for them, there can be no victory in Iraq unless it is defined in terms of their initial and pervasive goals of resource and economic control and influence.  So, undefined words will continue to be a weapon of public manipulation as delay and deception continue throughout the “constructive conversations” to pepper the remainder of Bush’s term.

Does the Report have a different meaning for a “responsible reduction or withdrawal” of forces?  Indirectly, the Report’s executive summary says, “If the situation continues to deteriorate, the consequences could be severe.  A slide toward chaos [already there] could trigger the collapse of Iraq’s government [does it really belong there, then?] and a humanitarian catastrophe [again, already there].  Neighboring countries could intervene [already there, cross-border infiltration and weapons transfers and Iran’s unilateral diplomacy, and now Iran and Syria are being invited to intervene diplomatically, as a Report recommendation], Sunni-Shia clashes could spread [my, but... to where else that matters?].  Al Qaeda could win a propaganda victory [even if true, is that worth American lives to prevent?] and expand its base of operations [again, already in the smoke of simmering Afghanistan, on the back burner in Bush’s war kitchen].  The global standing of the United States could be diminished [yes, already there].  Americans could become more polarized [only with Bush in the White House and the occupation continuing in Iraq].”

There are a lot of bad things to avoid contained within that paragraph of the Report, implied to accompany any quick, irresponsible withdrawal, but which can also be called goals, many of which, as noted in brackets, are already lost and only stand to improve with an ending of the occupation.  And unless Bush was just talking through his hat, shakin’ his rattle when he said, “You’re either with us or against us,” and nations harboring terrorists are our enemies, then it will be clear, and it will be again made clear, anyway, to whatever regime rises out of the dust and blood in Iraq after the U.S. leaves, that if it harbors, supports, or engages in terrorism, genocide, or WMD production or trafficking, that it will be removed.  That’s pretty plain and simple.  Is there any reason for any cleric or dictator to believe their regime would not be so dealt with?  Libya’s el-Qaddafi believed it, and on the coattails of that early post-Saddam credibility, America enjoyed a bloodless removal of one serious security threat—the major post-benefit of toppling Saddam’s regime.  Whether el-Qaddafi or anyone else would believe it now is as questionable as a Bush adoption of or a successful outcome for the Report’s recommendations.  Yet, for Bush’s part, why not adopt them?  For him, the Report is a sanctioned delay process that leaves him in control.  Heat from the new, opposition Congress is beat, the troops get to stay, the force-protected commercial exploitation continues, and Bush gets to look like he’s adapting with change that matters, as if he’s showing the flexibility he began talking about just before the election.  But, the chances for any Qaddafi-like success in Iran and elsewhere disappear with delays and with Bush’s continuing zeal to bring his evangelistic Monopoly board to Iraq, continuing to ignore those who do so engage in the three sins (Terror, WMD, or genocide), which has been the case during the Iraq war and the subsequent, long-lasting occupation, along with increased tolls for U.S. and coalition forces against the real enemies in Afghanistan:  al Qaeda and the Taliban, which have gained steadily in strength and reach while on Bush’s back burner!  Against this backdrop, the Report’s caution of the possibility of an expanded base for al Qaeda in Iraq holds little validity.  To the contrary, al Qaeda will have more on its hands with increased U.S. resources available to direct against it, once the executive obsession and military strain of the Iraq occupation is removed.

As far as goals, the Report also speaks to “an opportunity for a better future [for Iraqis],” with no mention for American families, except to promise, correctly, that they will lose more loved ones; nor is there mention for those who struggle under an economy that is being squeezed by the occupation’s demands, not to include congressmen, like Senator Byron L. Dorgan, the North Dakota Democrat, who vent on that issue, complaining that they can’t deal in corruptive pork spending like they want to because of the drain of the occupation (though, they call it “the war”).  But “opportunity for a better [Iraqi] future”?  How much chance is any nation entitled to have at the cost of lives from another, now at 4,300 and counting, not to mention the far lower but no less significant coalition losses?  How much of America’s future is being mortgaged with the $billions daily spent there?  The report continues with, “[if the recommendations are successfully adopted] terrorism will be dealt a blow, stability will be enhanced in an important part of the world,” a part of the world that meant nothing to anyone except religious scholars and archeologists before the invention of the internal-combustion engine.  And then the Report lists the “credibility, interests, and values” already quoted.  It is already acknowledged that al Qaeda is a minor factor in the violence in Iraq, so there is little consequence for it under terms of any kind of peace.  Indeed, with the occupation gone, its minor component will have no reason to remain, and will have no invitation from a government that wants no excuse to bring U.S. regime busters back to Iraqi soil.  And, as already noted, above, in the defining of America’s interests, stability is the end of violence, no matter the reason, no matter who or what remains in control.  The only factor that matters is, the quicker the better.

All in all, the executive summary describes a report that was begun with a capitulation to Bush’s refusal to consider any troop withdrawal and, with an invalid conformity to consensus, lays out a path of continued violence bet against a change of tack in diplomacy and military objectives in a costly, life-taking gamble that will not pay off because of Bush’s tactical and diplomatic intractability, tied to his political and spiritual goals, and most important, because the antagonists don’t want it to work and do not hold the interests dear that the Report makers seem to assume they do.  All of the options are difficult because of the insane premise that America has the need or obligation to remain there, within the urban, control-vying, breathing, fighting, and objecting populations; that doing so is somehow tied to what will happen throughout the region.  In Iraq, Bush’s invasion has already harmed what is happening throughout the region.  What America does in facing the threats that neighboring Iran directs against the region, and against Americans, will determine the future, not whether America continues an occupation in Iraq, based upon the tired, politically-correct, generations-long embedded habit of past occupations, past wars, and past mistakes.  The best answer remains the same course that has been persuaded by PopularSovranty since the force-splitting, greed-motivated invasion of Iraq began:  end Bush’s terror (now considered America’s mistake) by ending the occupation while leaving open the door for conditional assistance to any government that arises.  The violence will end sooner than if the occupation remains, under any plan, and the U.S. can turn its attention to the snakes that have real fangs and venom for the U.S.  That is the only path to a victory that will immediately contribute to avoid far-greater, catastrophic defeats in the not-so-distant future.

Cleric Moqtada al-Sadr — must be appeased or removed.

The string of late 2006 meetings between Bush and Iraqi Shia factional leaders, like Prime Minister Maliki and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim were, in no small part, designed to address the consequences of an earlier blunder on Bush’s part, which increased the strife and the opposition to both the occupation and the U.S.-sanctioned coalition government.  There is an inherent discrepancy in organizing and conducting democratic elections while, at the same time, suppressing the freedom of speech of a major political segment of the occupied country’s electorate.  This is what Bush did in 2004, promoting free elections in speeches and statements to U.S. citizens, while in Iraq, U.S. forces concurrently shut down the presses of Baghdad’s Shiite cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, who is aligned in the parliamentary coalition with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most powerful Shiite cleric.  Al-Sadr is also the leader of a powerful militia group, called the Mehidi Army.  The suppression of his communications subsequently led to demonstrations and multi-city, deadly strikes against elements of the U.S. occupation, which in turn led to then U.S. administrator, Paul Bremer, issuing a criminal warrant for al-Sadr.  More important, the U.S. suppression, shutting down al-Sadr’s occupation-critical newspaper, arresting his aides, points out two facts:  that silencing free speech leads to violence, and that the Bush administration has no interest in a freely elected Iraqi democracy, but only in a so-called democracy that is controlled by chosen brokers who will not oppose U.S. policies and involvements, who, according to Iraqi reporters, because of the inability of Maliki and the parliament to end the violence between the factions are now pushing the consideration of forming new alliances outside of the government, making it even more of an empty shell than it is now.  It is also true that Bush’s attempts to gag important critics is not the path to greater understanding, tolerance, or cooperation, especially in a democracy, and as a result, the problems Bush faces with al-Sadr are, like most of his problems, self-made.  In Bush lexicon, Iraq ain’t big enough fer both of ‘em.

Unlike most Shia leaders, al-Sadr, the son of the revered Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq Sadr, who was assassinated by Sunni factions during Saddam Hussein’s rule, has little appreciation that the occupation-grown government provides and san