| The Mugging Continues |
[Mar. 22nd, 2005|05:07 pm] |
A lot of the problem I have with accepting proposals from President George W. Bush has always had to do with his character. He's never been a man of the people or a hardworking success of any kind, especially in financial matters. Then, there are his family, friends and associates, namely, his brother Neal, the Saudi royal family, and Ken Lay, to name the most conspicuous birds in the flock.
Would you trust them with your money? So what makes Bush the credible spokesperson for the largest legislative reform proposal of the most successful social program in American history?
Nothing. He's got nothing behind him. That is precisely why the "Presidential Roadshow" has become nothing but a sales pitch.
As Jim VandeHel and Peter Baker wrote, These meticulously staged "conversations on Social Security," as they are called, replicate a strategy that Bush used to great effect on the campaign trail. There's a strategy to this sale, and the closing is still a long way off. This is the "set up." Meanwhile the "President" is all about making "the pitch." The White House follows a practiced formula for each of the meetings. First it picks a state in which generally it can pressure a lawmaker or two, and then it lines up panelists who will sing the praises of the president's plan. Finally, it loads the audience with Republicans and other supporters. So, there is never a dissenting voice in the crowd, only a group think monologue that does not approach a public discussion. The "finalists" on the town hall meeting panels insist they are not told what they have to say: "It was just a matter of learning," [one citizen-speaker] said. "We just really talked about what was going on, what the president was proposing and what did we think about it. . . . They didn't prompt me what to say or how to say it." But they don't have to. The few dissenting voices ... [are] quickly silenced or escorted out by security.
The carefully screened panelists spoke admiringly about Bush, his ideas, his "bold" leadership on Social Security.
If the presentations sound well rehearsed, it's because they often are. The guests at these "Oprah"-style conversations trumpet the very points Bush wants to make. Anybody who the White House screening team is unsure of gets dropped. Each "candidate" is examined and re-examined numerous times before they are allowed to speak with the President, to ensure that their words and ideas support his position.
If we are insulted by the unanwered questions of the 9/11 attacks that implicate -- passively or otherwise -- Bush administration complicity, if we are bruised by the recurring newsleaks about the human rights violations in GTMO and through the rendition programs, if we're horrified by the devastation of Iraqi cities like Ramadi and Fallujah and the scores of thousands of women and children who have been killed and maimed for "freedom," hold on to your seats, folks!
The Presidential roadshow is coming to a town near you. In it you will see and hear President Bush and his sidekicks regurgitate the most prepackaged, freeze dried serving of bullshit that ever flew in the face of democratic dialogue in the public interest.
As horror movies go, though, this has been pretty boring for us. But as the mugging of the American mind goes on, Bush and his advisors tell us to wait, there's much much more to come. And if you know anything about George Bush and his crowd, you know the ending is going to be really bad -- worse than you could have imagined. |
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| the siren of Social Security |
[Feb. 17th, 2005|05:25 pm] |
Our old friend, Grover Norquist was quoted today by Peter Wallsten and Joel Havemann in an LA Times article, Bush Shifts Pension Stance.
In the article about a recent statement Bush made to the regional press in New Hampshire, Wallsten and Havemann quoted Bush as saying, "I've been asked this question a lot, and my answer is that I'm interested in good ideas," Bush said, according to the Birmingham (Ala.) News. "The one thing I'm not open-minded about is raising the payroll tax rate, and all the other issues are on the table, and that's important for people to know."
He was drawing a distinction between the amount of earnings subject to the Social Security tax and the 12.4% tax rate, paid half by workers and half by employers, which he is opposed to raising. Then Wallsten and Havemann spelled it out a little more, for those of us Blue staters and other who don't speak Bush, In telling the regional newspapers that he was open to raising the $90,000 wage cap, Bush appeared to contradict previous statements by him and his staff. Does he appear to or does he actually contradict himself?
This is where our helpful and informative authors weighed in with Grover Norquist. Who better with whom to raise George W. Bush's apparent self-contradiction than his greatest ideolgical mentor (besides, of course, Jesus and George H.W. Bush, his dad)? The Director of Americans for Tax Reform is known to heavily influence all Bush's economic plans, goals and policies, to much the same extent the Project for a New American Century influences W.'s foreign policy.
Our reporters, Wallsten and Havemann, set up their quotation from Grover Norquist with a reasonable premise. But Bush's potential embrace of a higher wage cap could anger conservatives who have pushed for private retirement accounts.
Grover Norquist, a leading anti-tax activist and advisor to the White House on Social Security, said he did not believe that Bush would agree to raising the $90,000 cap, despite the apparent shift in his public negotiating position. But he acknowledged that the president's remarks would rattle some conservatives.
"Should it make us nervous when somebody says, 'I would think about cutting off your fingers,' even if you don't think he really would? Yes. It makes one nervous," Norquist said. "I understand that it's his job to say, 'Let's come to the table and have a conversation.' He's counting on the fact that once you get in the room, the American people will demand personal savings accounts, and they will not demand higher taxes." George Bush will do ANYTHING to get people to support his privatization scheme. That's what he's good at. If you look at George W. Bush's record since he was in the Texas Air National Guard, you will see the record of someone who has never done anything well enough or honestly enough to earn the people's trust.
But, he just keeps going. His Social Security Privatization Tour (also known as the "Bamboozlepalooza"), has been extended to nine, now, from the originally scheduled four states! George is talking, talking, talking his was up and down the whole country, telling the people to get private social security accounts.
True, the other details of his plan are murky, and, as Wallsten and Havemann show, appear to shift from time to time. But anybody who knows George W. Bush knows he's not going to shift at all. That's what Grover Norquist said today, and he knows George W. Bush as well as anybody.
There isn't going to be any tax increase, tax-cut rollback or tax cap rise to pay for the corporatized Social Security accounts George W. Bush is selling to the good people of the United States right now. He's so sure people won't want more taxes that he can appear to entertain the idea, but just long enough to get the needed handful of wavering Democrats to the table.
"This reminds me of an old story," a certain old Republican president used to say.
I wonder what Lincoln would have thought of Bush's proposal, and of Bush himself, for that matter.
But surely both Grover Norquist and Bush are familiar with Homer's description in Book XII of the Odyssey: First you will come to the Sirens
who enchant all who come near them. If any one unwarily draws in too
close and hears the singing of the Sirens, his wife and children
will never welcome him home again, for they sit in a green field and
warble him to death with the sweetness of their song. There is a great
heap of dead men's bones lying all around, with the flesh still
rotting off them. Therefore pass these Sirens by, and stop your
men's ears with wax that none of them may hear... |
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| X-files Meets Punchinello |
[Jan. 7th, 2005|12:36 pm] |
Tom DeLay stole the show on Thursday during the challenge to Ohio's electors. He made his curtain call, introduced by "coach" Denny, and sang a paen of outrage. I was moved as I watched him gesticulate on CSPAN streaming video on my office computer. Never has a Republiclown looked and sounded more ridiculous.
Tom DeLay doesn't get it. They accuse the president — who, we are told, is apparently a closet computer nerd — of personally overseeing the development of vote-stealing software. This is probably the least salient point -- if it can be indirectly deduced at all -- from the Conyers report. I just searched the PDF for "nerd" and it came back: 0 matches. So, Honorable Mr. DeLay, didn't you have time to read the report? It was dated January 5, 2005: yesterday. It was only 102 pages!
"Closet computer nerd?"Many observers will discard today’s petition as a partisan waste of time, but it is much worse.
It is an assault against the institutions of our representative democracy; it is a threat to the very ideals it ostensibly defends. Tom DeLay, this sounds like a claim of extra-legal actions on the part of the challengers, when, in fact they followed the letter of the law. Where's the threat to ideals: rigorous honesty, accountability, equal rights?The Democrat Party was once an idealistic, forward-looking policy colossus.
The New Deal, the Marshall Plan, the Great Society, the space program, civil rights … And yet, today, one is hard-pressed to find a single positive, substantive idea on the left.
Instead, the Democrats have replaced statecraft with stagecraft, substance with style, and not a very fashionable style at that. Well, as majority leader, Tom is going to be putting forth more colossal Democratic policies, just not about voting rights, this year.The petitioners claim they act on behalf of disenfranchised voters, but no such voter disenfranchisement occurred in the election of 2004 or for that matter, the election of 2000.
Everybody knows it. The voters know it. The candidates know it. The courts know it. The evidence proves it. This is the coda to Tom DeLay's Vesti la Giubba of January 06, 2004. Not only is history written and erased and then rewritten with a sweep of a sweaty palm, but it's okay with America because voting doesn't matter. And besides, there wasn't any disenfranchisement.
Yes, Mr. DeLay, this is serious. But you made me laugh, in spite of everything. No matter how grave the issue, I just can't take you seriously. You are the Prince of the Republi-Clowns!
Looking forward to your next schtick. |
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| Headbangers |
[Jan. 6th, 2005|10:26 am] |
The Informed Citizen's Guide To The 2004 Election, by Georgia, yesterday, on Daily Kos.
It's unbeleivable how wimpy Americans are. Nobody wants to challenge Bush's reelection: but the evidence shows that Ohio was dirty. Because it was dirty, no one can truly say what the outcome actually was or would have been. Why? Because the authorities have been arguing over "if" and not "how" ever since November 3rd. They ran out the clock, but the fact remains that Ohio's election was tainted and should be thrown out, like Ukraine's. How can the American people and their representatives stand for this?
Gonzales: Must be a joke I just don't get. After all, nobody seems to get my jokes either. Oh well, I guess I'll just keep smiling ... |
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| Energy < Demand = collapse |
[Jan. 4th, 2005|03:10 pm] |
Peak Oil
There is a great film at http://911busters.com/video/IQ1_20_END_OF_SUBURBIA_VIDEO_24.2_.html.
I heard about it on "Morning Sedition."
Of course, the problem has been explained for at least two decades already, to anybody who is interested, on sources such as Culture Change. Those of us who voted for Barry Commoner, the Constitutional Party candidate in 1980, had the whole story early.
George Soros mentions in Chapter 4 of The Bubble of American Supremacy, The true motives for the Bush administration's determination to overthrow Saddam Hussein remain shrouded in mystery. It is possible to conjecture what these motives were, but it is impossible to identify them with certainty, because they have never been discussed.
... the real motives [for the invasion of Iraq] remain shrouded in mystery but nation building could not have ranked high among them.
Everybody knew it was oil, even though we told them weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, freedom and so on. The point is that we are at peak oil now. Without an increase in our source of energy, we can have no economic growth.
Social Security
So, since the administration never came clean about their true motives for going into Iraq, is there any reasonable expectation of truth behind other public programs, like "saving" social security.
Edmund L. Andrews gave us some vivid foresight into what the Bush administration's lines of credible reasoning and justification for colossal decisions in his editorial White House officials say it is reasonable to treat the expected transition costs separately, because they will eventually be repaid as the government's obligation to pay benefits declines sharply after 30 or 40 years.
"These aren't costs, they are savings," said Scott McClellan, Mr. Bush's spokesman, at a recent news conference.
This deliberate misleading of the public is a familiar pattern now, but can anyone see where these blind men are leading us?
privatizing Social Security may get the government off the hook for having to repay the Social Security Trust Fund after the economy collapses due to Bush's energy policy. People won't be able to blame Bush for not paying money that his friends on Wall Street have blown speculating on phony energy companies with inflated balance sheets. And maybe when the crunch comes he'll be able to raise taxes on the rich in order to keep up the corn dole. But it may also be that he's trying to prop up the financial services industry in order to shore up ebbing capital in the American global financial marketplace.
As Bob Somerby noted today, discussing Bill Frist's appearance on the Sunday talk shows But so what? Frist--presented with a mark--just kept misleading the voters.
Yes, Frist was eager to "mislead non-experts" when he played the pimp on This Week. But then, it's something the "press corps" has allowed Bush to do on every sort of budget matter--a fact which explains why he's willing to pimp that ludicrous plan for "halving the deficit."
So, Bush may not be orchestrating a meaningful dialogue and planning for solutions to the upcoming energy and financial trainwrecks, but he is working very hard at one thing, at least as important as anything else (from a GOP perspective): avoiding the blame for the collapse! |
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| back to the main issues |
[Dec. 28th, 2004|10:23 pm] |
The Star Tribune has a nice summary of questions and comments about recount observations in Ohio:
Last update: December 28, 2004 at 7:11 PM
Mark Halvorson and Kirk Lund: We may never know what happened in the Ohio vote
Halvorson and Lund introduce their thesis in the first paragraph by stating: The right to vote and to have each vote count is the cornerstone of democracy, but deep cracks are showing in this cornerstone.
This is an interesting remark. Their subsequent recitation of facts lends a lot of support to the "deep cracks" part of their thesis. Those facts are well known and summarized very succinctly by the Nashua Advocate. Many others have detailed this list of offenses to the American electorate, so I don't want to revisit familiar ground ad nauseum.
The particulars of the Ohio election legal battle are still being contested in lawsuits by some dedicated Americans, including the Green and Libertarian candidates. Today the Columbus, Ohio Free Press ran this column -- faithfully keeping us informed about the latest legal developments and voter complaints. While the "little people" battle it out in the trenches below the radar of the national media and beyond the ennui threshold of the average American, some stunning -- and perhaps historically significant -- cultural shaping is taking place.
The question is, "Is the right to vote the 'cornerstone of democracy?'" If it is, does our apathy about voting signal the death of democracy in America?
Clearly, the state of voting in America is substandard, as evidenced by this past election. Does it matter? To whom?
Many of us believe that it is our individual responsibility as citizens to actively participate in community self-government at the local, state and federal levels. This participation goes beyond voting, to actively communicating with elected officials, participating in campaigns and all aspects of fair elections. Otherwise, this mandate for citizenship marches beside the banner of "Civic Duty." It can mean volunteer work with children or the environment, auxiliary police, any community service work or public activism. This is the ingredient in American society that de Tocqueville saw as the sine qua non of our vital civilization. Without volunteer citizen action, we would be indolent and vulnerable to corrupt political and economic forces.
So, public action is important. Public involvement is key in preserving a healthy society. Does that necessarily mean we have to bust our chops about elections? Can't we delegate that to "the proper authorities?"
As quoted before on this weblog, Alexander Keyssar documents the contested history of democracy in America. In the flood of suffrage expansion throughout our history, racist and sexist beliefs and attitudes, ethnic antagonism, partisan interests, and political theories and ideological convictions, along with class tension, linked the health of the state to a narrow franchise. (Keyssar, Alexander, The Right to Vote, Basic Books, NY 2000; p. xxi).
The forces of "voter suppression," as they are termed today, are associated with the Republican party and are considered by most as partisan. But these are embodiments of historically important and powerful forces that have worked to limit voting throughout our history. In other words, the "right to vote" has always been a matter of strong contest in the United States. The "suppression" we experience now is only a flickering shadow of the gloomy blackness of disfranchisement that covered the country in past centuries.
So we are living in a cross section of dynamic conflict over suffrage that has played on the stage of American politics since the beginning of the colonial era. The wealthy have always sought to limit the right to vote and the poor have always tried to expand it. One group fears the loss of responsibility and commitment among the voting population, the other fears exclusion from the political process.
This conflict is very much an element on the landscape of the 2004 election. To pretend that it isn't a factor in Ohio, Florida and all the swing states -- if not in the red and blue states -- would be blindness to history.
So the issue is, "How do we monitor the process of these historical forces at work today in our election?"
Is there any way to get an objective bearing on what the events of the 2004 election say about fairness, justice and progress in the United States?
We rely on the media. |
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| mooning the u.s. government |
[Dec. 27th, 2004|11:59 am] |
Yahoo news offered this tidbit about the Washington Times. It is a profile of News World Communications, Inc. News World is the publisher of the WT.
The question everyone should be asking, but of course isn't, is, "What is the relationship between Sun Myung Moon  -- the owner and publisher of the Times -- and the Republican Party?
Perhaps there's an explanation in this report about an incident in the Dirksen Office Building last Spring. Gorenfeld's Moon watch is still surviving here.
There are some inscrutable but fascinating remarks from Rev. Kwak on what took place in the Senate office building last May. These remarks come to us courtesy of True Parents
I'm beginning to suspect that driving the vast majority of Americans into poverty and destitution through loss of medical insurance, social security privatization, environmental destruction, and war is to provide membership for Reverend Moon's family.
More on Fascism
Tomtech is continuing his informative series over at Dkos. His offering this week is the abbreviated for the holidays version. The highlights are about the ACLU email discovery linking the White House to sanctioning torture. He points out that if the President issued an Executive Order permitting use of certain torture techniques, then use of the techniques was "within the law."
The blogger also does some introspective blogging on the question of exploitation of women, women's rights and sexism in the Bush regime. What he will have to say on this subject, he admits, depends somewhat on his own education and sensitizing to the issues women are dealing with now.
Of course, the great contribution to this school of thought is still the Orcinus treatise, or "essay," as he calls it. I have continued to read it, and find it engrossing. I will have to go back to the beginning of Part I and start all over again, as soon as I am finished. His links serve as a kind of bibliography, but there are too many to follow right away. So there will be at least one additional course through the essay for running through the links, too. |
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| sounds like ... |
[Dec. 22nd, 2004|04:44 pm] |
According to OpEd News, our President has taken to quoting a former German Chancellor:"Protect the homeland" is the SAME phrase that Hitler used when he proposed the creation of the Gestapo in Nazi Germany. Hitler said, "An evil exists that threatens every man, woman and child of this great nation. We must take steps to ensure our domestic security and protect our homeland."
All American Patriots
This new website looks like a CIA storefront for the Republican Veterans of Desert Storm. Supposedly, they are not officially launched yet, but I would appreciate your checking them out and getting back to me on who they hell you think they are and what the hell you think they're doing on the internet.
Election Reform 
FairVote.org is launching a Right to Vote Initiative along with a number of other grass roots, non-partisan, public activist organizations. This is clearly the issue of the decade and will be -- as it has been for the last two months -- the main line of this writer's screed. The FairVote initiative is originating under the auspices of Right to Vote Initiative, The Center for Voting and Democracy, contact Andrew Kirshenbaum at vote@fairvote.org / (301) 270-4616 /
www.fairvote.org.
I first read about the Initiative in an editorial by Steven Hill and Rob Richie at Truth Out. They posted Kerry and Brokaw's comments on the need to fix the election system, and then included detailed versions of the Fair Vote Initiative's points.
I will have much more to say on this in the days ahead, holidays notwithstanding, but for now a couple of salient features stand out and require comment.
The Fair Vote Initiative does not mention anything about campaign finance reform. In my view, campaign finance reform is an indispensable ingredient to any formula for fair elections in America. Right now, the people are voting on the corporate candidates, not the peoples' candidates. Congress is supposed to be our lobbying organization, but they have been completely bought off. Without meaningful campaign finance reform -- taking corporate money out of the elections -- we will not be to "pry open our democracy" to more representative candidates.
The other issue is that voting in the United States is a state-level right. Enfranchisement is not guaranteed by the Federal government because originally, the union was formed by compromises that left a lot of questions of sovereignty and liberty to the states. Otherwise, the framers of the Constitution would never have been able to cobble together a deal. Every state had different rules for who gets to vote.
Eventually, as states competed for settlers, taxpayers, professionals, farmers, tradesmen, and skilled and unskilled laborers, they began expanding the franchise. First it went to anyone who owned enough property, then people with the correct pedigree who paid enough taxes, then people who fought in the army, then people of color, then women, and then young adults. This movement was seen as a way of insuring involvement of local interest groups in politics, as well as insuring the state credited constituencies for the contributions they made.
To propose a Federal law guaranteeing the right to vote will be such a revolutionary departure from the expansion process that the franchise has thus far undergone that it will be very hard to force it to gain traction in Washington. Indeed, Washington is the last place we can expect any support for such a movement. Washington is the locus of the most concentrated political and economic power in the country. Any dilution of that concentration is going to be rejected by lawmakers. The only way the right to vote has ever expanded in the United States is by local and state governments seizing upon the issue through grass roots activism, and then indirectly forcing other localities and states to do likewise by a form of "confederate pressure."
One of the main obstacles to popular reforms in any area of American society since Vietnam has been the disparate effort of reformers in the teeth of an ever more unified conservative, corporate financed and media controlled public discourse. If we try to change the system from the top down, we may play right into the hands of the Republican/corporate hegemonies. Freedom is messy. Let's keep it that way and start the national movement for fair elections on the state and local level, so we can REALLY bury the powers in Washington beneath an irresistible and surging tidal wave of popular support for democratic reforms. |
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| charity |
[Dec. 21st, 2004|05:39 pm] |
I had to search for ten minutes before I was able to find the key quotation by Jesus about humility and self. I was looking for the teaching about being a guest at a great feast, where the lesson is to sit in the lowest place and be called up to a higher one by the host. Don't sit in the highest place and then be asked to move to a lower one by the host when someone of greater dignity and virtue than you arrives.
Then in Luke 14:11 we read the verse that we should all remember, but that I only record here because I stumbled upon it in my search for the teachings about where to sit at the feast.For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, but whoever humbles himself will be exalted.
How could I have forgotten this?
Todd Huffman jogged my memory with This Christmas, Where is Our National Conscience? in Common Dreams. This is one of the more penetrating essays I have read this season. Huffman begins by invoking God and the blessings He is commonly understood to have bestowed upon the United States, and that we have learned to take our good fortune for granted. But the essayist goes on to inveigh thatas a nation obsessed with money and possessions, celebrity and sport, we are not advanced morally or spiritually. He iterates that we have "established monetary criteria for success or failure ... and increasingly misuse[] religion as justification for intolerance and division."
He criticizes us for "silently tolerat[ing] widespread poverty and blatant inequalities."We give tax cuts to the wealthy, and budget cuts to the poor. We allow forty percent of our fellow citizens to go without health care. We demand lower levels of government spending, thereby allowing higher levels of economic inequality. All this, even thought he provision of decent subsistence, shelter, and health care are well within our national capacity to provide.
He tries to remind us that religion is for helping us "rediscover" the value of each individual, our inter"connectedness" and "the common good." He wants us to be conscientious about caring for each other, not about assuming a holier-than-thou posture from which to accuse one another of immorality or unworthiness.
He quotes Jacob Marley, Ebeneezer Scrooge's old, haunting business partner in his claim that living on earth, "Mankind was my business."
Huffman opens the piece with FDR's statement that, "The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much. It's whether we provide enough for those who have too little."
These are ideas that have vanished from the national conscience today in America. We seek to defend ourselves, to righteously vanquish our enemies no matter the cost in suffering and misery to them. We seek to hold others to an ideal standard of morality that we choose for ourselves but seek to impose by any means necessary upon those who disagree with our "moral values."
But love, generosity, or what the Apostle Paul called, "charity," is only something that can be given by those who feel an abundance of grace. If we live in the richest country in the world, blessed beyond proportion of any people in history, we can still live like scrooges and act like curmudgeons. Being good requires being grateful to God for what we have, and for the less fortunate with whom we can share and know God better by becoming more like Him. |
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| Ohio Election Challenge Refiled |
[Dec. 21st, 2004|11:41 am] |
Cliff Arnebeck and 40 Ohio voters have refiled a challenge to the state's November 2, 2004 election results. The Free Press has a page with both filing links, the second of which is this one.
Medina County
It's looking as if most of the counties in Ohio are trying to skimp on the recount. This blog records just such an instance in Medina County yesterday.
Mahoning County
Counterpunch has a very comprehensive article by Ann Harrison from December 8th, in which she mentions numerous electronic voting irregularities. The one that seems to be the story with the biggest impact is the Mahoning County counting anomaly. That story is picked up for detailed analysis by our old friend, the lyric poet, Dr. Phillips. |
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