An Article V Convention Is Long Past Due

Posted on October 14, 2008 by RagBlog

Ideal:

Reality:

When the Federal Government Fails the People: Our Constitution Has a Solution
By Joel Hirschhorn / October 14, 2008

The hardest thing for Americans to do right now in this presidential election season is to fight distraction and, instead, focus on the failure of all three branches of the federal government. And also to resist the propaganda masquerading as patriotic obligation that voting will fundamentally fix the federal government. The real lesson of American history is that things have turned so ugly that electing a new president and many new members of Congress will at best provide band-aids when what is needed is nothing less than what Thomas Jefferson wisely said our nation would need periodically: a political revolution.

The basis for this view is that the institutions of the three branches have been so corrupted and perverted that they no longer meet the hopes and aspirations embedded in our Constitution.

It is easy to condemn George W. Bush as the worst president in history. The larger truth is that the presidency has accumulated far too much power over the past half century. This has resulted from the weakening of the Congress that no longer, in any way, has the power of an equal branch of government, not that any recent Congress has shown any commitment or capability to execute its constitutional authorities. Concurrently, we have become accepting of a politicized Supreme Court that has not shown the courage to stop the unconstitutional grabbing of power by the presidency and in 2000 showed its own root failure in choosing to select the new president.

Worst of all, modern history has vividly shown Americans that the federal government has usurped the sovereignty of the “we the people” and of the states, and has even sold out national sovereignty to a set of international organizations and the greed of corporate-crazed globalization.

The current economic and financial sector meltdown is just another symptom of deep seated, cancerous disease of government that has sold out the public because of the moneyed influence of the corporate and wealthy classes of special interests. The serious disease is a long festering unraveling of the constitutional design of our government. Each of the three branches of the federal government is totally unequal to each other and completely incapable of ensuring the constitutional functioning of each other. Checks and balances have become a fiction.

These sad historic realities have been produced because of an all too powerful and corrupt two-party political machine that has prevented true political competition and real choices for voters. This two-party system has thrived because of corruption from money provided for Democrats and Republicans to maintain the status quo that is the ruination of our constitutional Republic.

Yet the hidden genius of the Founders and Framers was to anticipate how the Republic would most likely unravel under the pressures of money and corruption. Unknown to nearly all Americans is a part of the Constitution that all established political forces have worked hard to denigrate over our entire history. They fear using what is provided as a kind of escape clause in the Constitution, something to use when the three branches of the federal government fail their constitutional responsibilities. What is this ultimate solution that those who love and respect our Constitution should be clamoring for?

It is the provision in Article V to create a temporary fourth branch of the government – in the form of a convention of state delegates – that operates outside the control of Congress, the President and the Supreme Court, and that has only one single function: to consider proposals for constitutional amendments, just like Congress has done over our history, but that must also be ratified by three-quarters of the states. One of the most perplexing questions in American history that has received too little attention is simple: Why have we never had an Article V convention?

One possible answer might be that what the Constitution requires to launch a convention has never been satisfied. But this is not the case. The one and only requirement is that two-thirds of state legislatures apply to Congress for a convention. With over 600 such state applications from all 50 states that single requirement has long been satisfied. So why no convention?

Because Congress has refused to honor the exact constitutional mandate that it “shall” call a convention when that requirement has been met. Simply put, Congress has long broken the supreme law of the land by not calling a convention, and virtually every political force on the left and right likes it that way. Why? Because they have learned to corrupt the government and fear an independent convention of state delegates that could propose serious constitutional amendments that would truly reform our government and political system to remove the power of special interests and compel all three branches to follow the letter and spirit of the Constitution.

With great irony, the public has been brainwashed to fear an Article V convention despite many hundreds of state constitutional conventions that have never wrecked state governments, and that in countless cases have provided much needed forms of direct democracy that have empowered citizens and limited powers of state governments.

There is only one national, nonpartisan organization with the single mission of educating the public about the Article V convention option and building demand for Congress to convene a convention. It is the Friends of the Article V Convention group that has done something that neither the government nor any other group has ever done; it has been collecting all the hundreds of state applications for a convention and making them available to the public at www.foavc.org.

With a new president and many new members of Congress, now is the ideal time for Americans that see the need for obeying the Constitution and seek root reforms to rally behind this mission of obtaining the nation’s first Article V convention. The new Congress in 2009 should give the public what the Constitution says we have a right to have and what Congress has a legal obligation to provide. Always remember that the convention cannot by itself change the Constitution, but operating in the public limelight it could revitalize what has become our delusional and fake democracy. The main thing to fear is not a convention, but continuation of the two-party plutocracy status quo. Sadly, no presidential candidate, not even third-party ones, has spoken out in support of Congress obeying the Constitution and giving us the first Article V convention.

Joel S. Hirschhorn is a co-founder of Friends of the Article V Convention and can be reached through www.foavc.org.

Source / Associated Content

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Canary in the Mineshaft : Cautionary Tales of Suicide, Bigotry

Posted on October 14, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Was this house worth dying for?
In this July 23, 2008 file photo, the Taunton, Mass. house This was the home of Carlene Balderrama, 53, who fatally shot herself soon after faxing a letter to her mortgage company July 22, saying that by the time they foreclosed on her house that day, she would be dead. Photo by Stephen Senne / AP.

House of horrors: but it’s not Halloween yet.
Los Angeles Police investigators walk to a news conference in front of the home where six bodies were found in a gated community in a San Fernando Valley neighborhood. Karthik Rajaram, 45, a former money manager, fatally shot his wife, three sons and his mother-in-law before killing himself. Photo by Damian Dovarganes / AP.

ONE: Bankruptcies, foreclosures bring rash of suicides
By Kelli Kennedy / Oct 14, 2008

Second tale, Below: Man terrorizes election office, wants to ‘keep the nigger out of office.’

An out-of-work money manager in California loses a fortune and wipes out his family in a murder-suicide. A 90-year-old Ohio widow shoots herself in the chest as authorities arrive to evict her from the modest house she called home for 38 years.

In Massachusetts, a housewife who had hidden her family’s mounting financial crisis from her husband sends a note to the mortgage company warning: “By the time you foreclose on my house, I’ll be dead.”

Then Carlene Balderrama shot herself to death, leaving an insurance policy and a suicide note on a table.

Across the country, authorities are becoming concerned that the nation’s financial woes could turn increasingly violent, and they are urging people to get help. In some places, mental-health hot lines are jammed, counseling services are in high demand and domestic-violence shelters are full.

“I’ve had a number of people say that this is the thing most reminiscent of 9/11 that’s happened here since then,” said the Rev. Canon Ann Malonee, vicar at Trinity Church in the heart of New York’s financial district. “It’s that sense of having the rug pulled out from under them.”

With nowhere else to turn, many people are calling suicide-prevention hot lines. The Samaritans of New York have seen calls rise more than 16 percent in the past year, many of them money-related. The Switchboard of Miami has recorded more than 500 foreclosure-related calls this year.

“A lot of people are telling us they are losing everything. They’re losing their homes, they’re going into foreclosure, they’ve lost their jobs,” said Virginia Cervasio, executive director of a suicide resource enter in southwest Florida’s Lee County.

But tragedies keep mounting:

• In Los Angeles last week, a former money manager fatally shot his wife, three sons and his mother-in-law before killing himself.

Karthik Rajaram, 45, left a suicide note saying he was in financial trouble and contemplated killing just himself. But he said he decided to kill his entire family because that was more honorable, police said.

Rajaram once worked for a major accounting firm and for Sony Pictures, and he had been part-owner of a financial holding company. But he had been out of work for several months, police said.

After the murder-suicide, police and mental-health officials in Los Angeles took the unusual step of urging people to seek help for themselves or loved ones if they feel overwhelmed by grim financial news. They said they were specifically afraid of the “copycat phenomenon.”

“This is a perfect American family behind me that has absolutely been destroyed, apparently because of a man who just got stuck in a rabbit hole, if you will, of absolute despair,” Deputy Police Chief Michel Moore said. “It is critical to step up and recognize we are in some pretty troubled times.”

• In Tennessee, a woman fatally shot herself last week as sheriff’s deputies went to evict her from her foreclosed home.

Pamela Ross, 57, and her husband were fighting foreclosure on their home when sheriff’s deputies in Sevierville came to serve an eviction notice. They were across the street when they heard a gunshot and found Ross dead from a wound to the chest. The case was even more tragic because the couple had recently been granted an extra 10 days to appeal.

• In Akron, Ohio, the 90-year-old widow who shot herself on Oct. 1 is recovering.

A congressman told Addie Polk’s story on the House floor before lawmakers voted to approve a $700 billion financial rescue package. Mortgage finance company Fannie Mae dropped the foreclosure, forgave her mortgage and said she could remain in the home.

• In Ocala, Fla., Roland Gore shot his wife and dog in March and then set fire to the couple’s home, which had been in foreclosure, before killing himself.

His case was one of several in which people killed spouses or pets, destroyed property or attacked police before taking their own lives.

“The financial stress builds up to the point the person feels they can’t go on, and the person believes their family is better off dead than left without a financial support,” said Kristen Rand, legislative director of the Washington D.C.-based Violence Policy Center.

Dr. Edward Charlesworth, a clinical psychologist in Houston, said the current crisis is breeding a sense of chronic anxiety among people who feel helpless and panic-stricken, as well as angry that their government has let them down.

“They feel like in this great society that we live in we should have more protection for the individuals rather than just the corporation,” he said.

It’s not yet clear there is a statistical link between suicides and the financial downturn since there is generally a two-year lag in national suicide figures. But historically, suicides increase in times of economic hardship. And the current financial crisis is already being called the worst since the Great Depression.

Rising mortgage defaults and falling home values are at the heart of it. More than 4 million Americans were at least one month behind on their mortgages at the end of June, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

A record 500,000 had entered the foreclosure process. And that trend is expected to continue through next year, despite the current programs from the government and the lending industry to refinance delinquent homeowners into more affordable loans.

Counselors at Catholic Charities USA report seeing a “significant increase” in the need for housing counseling.

One counselor said half of her clients were on some form of antidepressant or anti-anxiety medication. The agency has seen a decrease in overall funding, but it has expanded foreclosure counseling and received nearly $2 million for such services in late 2007.

Adding to financially tense households is an air of secrecy. Experts said it’s common for one spouse to blame the other for their financial mess or to hide it entirely, as Balderrama did.

After falling 3 1/2 years behind in payments, the Taunton, Mass., housewife had been intercepting letters from the mortgage company and shredding them before her husband saw them. She tried to refinance but was declined.

In July, on the day the house was to be auctioned, she faxed the note to the mortgage company. Then the 52-year-old walked outside, shot her three beloved cats and then herself with her husband’s rifle.

Notes left on the table revealed months of planning. She’d picked out her funeral home, laid out the insurance policy and left a note saying, “pay off the house with the insurance money.”

“She put in her suicide note that it got overwhelming for her,” said her husband, John Balderrama. “Apparently she didn’t have anyone to talk to. She didn’t come to me. I don’t know why. There’s gotta be some help out there for people that are hurting, (something better) than to see somebody lose a life over a stupid house.”

Source / AP / Yahoo News

TWO: ‘Keep the Nigger out of office’

Cops: Man threatened voter officials over tardy registration card

QUACHITA PARISH, La. — Angered by a delay in the receipt of his voter registration card, a Louisiana man today threatened election officials, claiming that he urgently needed to cast a ballot to “keep the nigger out of office,” according to police.

Wade Williams, 75, was arrested this morning on a felony terrorizing charge after allegedly calling the Registrar of Voters and warning that he would come to the state office and empty his shotgun unless he got his registration card. Using profanity and racial slurs, Williams told a state official “about needing to vote to ‘keep the nigger out of office,” according to an Ouachita Parish Sheriff’s Office affidavit, a copy of which you’ll find here. Though the document does not name the candidate to which Williams is so violently opposed, it seems likely he was referring to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

After being arrested at his Monroe home, Williams was booked into the Ouachita Correctional Center, where the mug shot [above] was snapped. En route to the jail, he “continued his ‘tirade’ about niggers and also stated that he had a shotgun, but had it hidden at his residence,” reported Lt. Michael Judd.

Source / The Smoking Gun / Oct. 8, 2008

[Editor’s note. The Smoking Gun site spelled the offending word “n*gger.” I choose not to soften the blow. –.td]

Thanks to Jesse James Retherford / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

El Salvador : Human Rights Abuses and the Role of the US Government

Posted on October 14, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

This mural of the “four churchwomen” is one of many in El Salvador that honors the martyrs who were killed while peacefully advocating for human rights during El Salvador’s violent Civil War. The churchwomen were asassinated by the National Guard on December 2, 1980. Human rights abuses, however, are not ancient history in El Salvador.

Report cites human rights violations and threat to 2009 elections.
By CISPES / October 14, 2008

A recently returned delegation to El Salvador has published a report on human rights abuses, the potential for fraud and intervention in the 2009 Salvadoran elections, and the role that the US government has played in the cited injustices.

The delegation was organized by the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) and was made up of 17 US citizens and residents. The introduction to the report explains its intended purpose of “offer[ing] elected officials, the media, and concerned citizens a description of the deterioration of human rights in El Salvador…[and] the potential impediments to true democracy faced by the Salvadoran people as they approach a crucial election period in their country.”

Callie Arnold, a delegate from Seattle, stated “We feel that US citizens and residents should be aware of and concerned by the injustices carried out in El Salvador — particularly the many that our government has a hand in — and we hope this report will get people talking, increase media coverage, and encourage elected officials to take action.” The Human Rights section of the report cites evidence that the existence of the International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA) — a police training institution in San Salvador that is funded and administered by the US — has coincided with “an increase in repression, including arrest and torture of citizens involved in peaceful protests.”

The section of the report entitled “2009 Elections and the Electoral Process” further calls into question the role of the US government in the Central American country. It cites instances leading up to the 2004 presidential elections in El Salvador in which the US “interfered with the ability of Salvadorans to choose their preferred candidate.” It goes on to discuss “similar patterns of US political involvement in the period leading up to the 2009 elections.”

Andrew Kafel, a delegate from New York, says, “The current state of the economy in El Salvador is dire. The Central American Free Trade Agreement has devastated the country and the 2009 elections offer Salvadorans an opportunity to bring about democratic change that will better the state of their country. This is why it is so important that they be allowed to freely choose their next government.” On January 18, 2009, El Salvador will hold municipal and legislative elections; on March 15 presidential elections will take place. The leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) holds a significant lead in presidential polls over the ruling right-wing Republican National Alliance (ARENA). Kafel went on, “It is clear the people of El Salvador want change and we believe it is of utmost importance that the US stay out of their elections and allow for self-determination.”

The report also describes a meeting with US Ambassador to El Salvador Charles Glazer as “a highly rhetorical and hostile propaganda exercise with the delegates.” Rosa Lozano, a delegate from Washington D.C., stated, “The Ambassador’s behavior and demeanor was troubling, but it was especially surprising that when directly asked about US involvement in the 2004 elections, he admitted that the US had intervened. That is why it is so important that this report be published and for US citizens and residents to pressure our government not to repeat this intervention in 2009.”

[CISPES is the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador.]

The complete report can be downloaded here.

For more information go here.

Source / Upside Down World

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Report from Nicaragua : Repression in the Revolution

Posted on October 14, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega when he was a leader of the Sandinistas

‘I met Martin Vega just after the Nicaraguan revolution when we all saw such promise there.’
By Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte / The Rag Blog / October 14, 2008

Below is a dispatch from Martin Vega about conditions in revolutionary Nicaragua followed by remarks by Rag Blog contributor Ron Ridenour.

I am lucky that Martin Vega has been a close friend for almost 30 years. He is a University of Texas alum with a MA in Business. I usually stay with him and his family when I visit New York. I have always admired his personal and political ethical life.

I met him just after the Nicaraguan revolution when we all saw such promise there. When I met him he was working to help Nicaragua realize that promise. He was in the Foreign Ministry, having gone there from his home in San Francisco to help in the Revolution. He was eventually a key staff member with the Nicaraguan Ambassador to the United States.

He recently spent several months there with a funder trying to bring some assistance to the nation. His news below is so disheartening that I pass this along with a hope you can help with his request to let others, especially press people and human rights advocates, know about these abuses.

Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal: Government has frozen his bank account and threatened to jail him.

Repressive tactics in revolutionary Nicaragua
By Martin Vega / The Rag Blog / October 14, 2008

I never thought I would see the day when the forces of the current Nicaraguan government would be used in such a coercive and repressive style as I have observed today. [As has been reported in El Nuevo Diaro and El Prensa], the judicial, fiscal bodies as well as the police forces of the state have been unleashed and are being instrumentalized for political ends to attack and denigrate members of civil society, the opposition press and political parties, the intelligentsia and cultural artists, etc. In the past few months the government has ostensibly closed most avenues of free expression while resorting to increased levels of intimidation and violence against those it deems its “enemies”.

Until today I had refrained from making any type of comment on the worsening situation in the country hoping that officials within the Nicaraguan government would reflect and seek some form of accommodation and dialogue with its growing opposition. But quite the contrary, the government has seen fit to falsely accuse persons of Carlos Fernando’s stature of “laundering” money; it has denigrated Nicaragua’s revered poet Ernesto Cardenal threatening to jail him and frozen his bank accounts; it has falsely accused one of Nicaragua’s most competent journalists, Sofia Montenegro of being a “CIA dupe” given her critical position towards the government’s corruption; it has declared Nicaragua’s main feminist organization, MAM to be “illegal” merely because it has advocated for women’s reproductive rights and taken a critical stand against the government’s prohibition on abortion rights; it has eliminated Nicaragua’s two main opposition parties via legal fiat and through the control of the Electoral Council; and just two weeks ago, it unleashed virulent attacks against a civic and political rally of the opposition, resorting to the use of mortars, machetes, clubs and the burning down cars.

Because of these and other untoward developments, I feel that I have a moral duty not to remain quiet but let all of you know of my serious concerns about the Nicaraguan situation and ask that you move your consciences in any way possible towards the alleviation of this aggression against the Nicaraguan people. I ask that if any of you have any contacts in human rights organization, press associations, etc. that you please make known your outrage at this type of behavior and request that the Nicaraguan government cease committing arbitrary acts such as those outlined above. I would also be important for you to express your solidarity towards Carlos Fernando Chamorro B. who is being threatened with jail for merely expressing his views as as a renown and widely-respected journalist and intellectual.

Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo (in Gucci?) wave to the press Nov. 6, 2006, in Managua. Photo by AFP / Getty Images.

‘The problem is: Nicaragua is so divided into so many factions and not one of them is trustworthy.’
By Rod Ridenour / The Rag Blog / October 14, 2008

[Prominent writer Ron Ridenour, who wrote a series of articles on Venezuela for The Rag Blog, has expertise in Latin American politics. He provides these remarks as historical perspective.]

I was unaware of these events but they don’t surprise me too much. I know [Nicaraguan President] Daniel Ortega and his aristocratic wife, for whom I worked as PR director when she was head of the ASTC, cultural workers association, in 1984. I wrote the book, “Yankee Sandinistas” (Curbstone, 1986), about which Ernesto Cardenal, then cultural minister, wrote a lovely blurb. I knew Tomas Borge and thought he should have been president. The Ortegas have always been suspects in that they lie, love the wine and dining life, the fancy houses, etc.

Ortega lost the 1990 election, in part, because he offered a hand out to the rich one day and then another hand to the workers another day. He hired a New York political spin doctor firm to run his campaign and bought Gucci clothes and expensive sunglasses in NY while the Yankees were murdering his people. To re-win at all costs the high post of president, Ortega has stooped lower than any politician, at least on the left, that I know of. He hired a vice-president who had been a torturing-murdering contra; he kissed the ass of the worst cardinal in current times; he rejected the right of women to decide over their bodies.

The problem is: Nicaragua is so divided into so many factions and not one of them is trustworthy, as I see it from far far away now. The original FSLN, which had three main factions somewhat united for a good many years, broke into opposing groups and none of them — including the best of guerrilla leaders – ended up being revolutionary, rather they went towards the right. Ortega’s FSLN, what is left, was the “best” of evils. But I knew from the day he won that something rotten would occur in his regime.

The next problem is that Ortega is supported by Fidel and Chavez. He uses the rhetoric they use when he is with them and in context of ALBA etc.

And, all the three dailies are (were) run by the Chamorro family, which split into three factions. And when one of them, El Nuevo Diario (for which I did some writing), calls what is happening now “worse than Somocismo” so are we really down in the pits of bullshit and exaggeration. As I read the situation today no one has been tortured, jailed or murdered, and that was daily occurrence in Somoza’s time.

Of all the many original leaders very few remain by Ortega’s sleazy side, but Tomas Borge is his ambassador to Peru, I think. At least he was. He was one of the few I trusted. Martin Vega I do not know. He lives in New York. We need some voice(s) we can trust who is (are) in the struggle within Nicaragua to give validity to what is going on.

That will take some time. If I were you, I’d wait a bit and find some backup, find some balance. This is quite delicate but I am not recommending throttling the matter. This is the kind of situation where [activist, writer and Latin American expert] James Petras would have a strong argument.

The Rag Blog decided to publish Martin Vega’s dispatch, along with Rag Blog contributor Ron Ridenour’s comments, but we will also seek other input on the situation in Nicaragua. We do not believe in uncritical support, even for a revolutionary movement. We encourage the readers to add their comments to this post.

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Playing With Fire : McCain and the Raging Right

Posted on October 14, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


‘McCain’s own campaign is playing with powerful extremist themes to denigrate Obama’
By E. J. Dionne Jr. / October 14, 2008

McCain pastor tells rally that non-Christians want Obama victory. Story and video, Below.

Are we witnessing the reemergence of the far right as a power in American politics? Has John McCain, inadvertently perhaps, become the midwife of a new movement built around fear, xenophobia, racism and anger?

McCain has clearly become uneasy with some of the forces that have gathered around him. He has begun to insist, against the sometimes loud protests from his crowds, that Barack Obama is, among things, a “decent person.”

Yet McCain’s own campaign is playing with powerful extremist themes to denigrate Obama. When his running mate, Sarah Palin, first brought up Obama’s association with 1960s radical Bill Ayers, who has become a centerpiece of McCain’s attacks, she accused Obama of “palling around with terrorists.” What other “terrorists” was she thinking about?

Since Obama was a child when Ayers was part of the Weather Underground, and since even Republicans have served on boards with Ayers, this is classic guilt by association.

Ayers has been dragged into this campaign because there is a deep frustration on the right with Obama’s enthusiasm for shutting down the culture wars of the 1960s.

Precisely because Obama is not a baby boomer, he carries none of that generation’s scars. Most Americans (including most boomers) are weary of living in the past and reprising the 1960s every four years.

Yet culture war politics is relatively mild compared with the far-right appeals that are emerging this year. It is as if McCain’s loyalists overshot the ’60s and went back to the ’50s or even the ’30s.

What we are witnessing is the mainstreaming of the far right, a phenomenon that began to take shape with some of the earliest attacks on Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

False claims that Obama is Muslim, that he trained to overthrow the government and that he was educated in Wahhabi schools are a standard part of the political discussion. These fake stories come from voices on the ultra right that have dabbled in other forms of conspiracy, including classic anti-Semitism. McCain and his campaign do not pick up the most extreme charges. They just fan the flames by suggesting that voters don’t really know who Obama is, hinting at a sinister back story without filling in the details. That is left to the voters’ imaginations.

The tragic irony here is that McCain was the victim of some of the very same extremist forces in the 2000 South Carolina primary.

To bring McCain down, some of George W. Bush’s supporters on the far right peddled all manner of falsehoods about McCain, raising despicable charges about his time as a POW and suggesting (again falsely) that he had fathered an illegitimate child of color. In the past, McCain publicly condemned some of the very people who are now going after Obama.

McCain cannot be blamed for all of the crazies who see in Obama a chance to earn fame and fortune by concocting lies about him. And yes, we should defend the speech rights even of those whose views we find abhorrent.

But the angry McCain-Palin crowds, and particularly those who threaten violence or shout racist epithets, should be a wake-up call to McCain. The dark hints about Obama that McCain’s campaign is dropping dovetail too nicely with the nasty trash floating around the Internet and the airwaves.

We are in the midst of what could become — and here’s hoping it doesn’t — the worst economic downturn in decades. The last thing we need is a campaign that strengthens fanaticism, tarnishes the authority of the next president and whips up the worst kinds of prejudice. This works both ways: Obama should not be delegitimized if he wins, and McCain should not want to win in a way that would undermine his own capacity to lead.

When Christopher Buckley, a novelist and former speechwriter for George H.W. Bush, announced last week that he would vote for Obama (his first vote ever for a Democrat), he referred to words once spoken to him by his late father. “You know,” the conservative hero William F. Buckley Jr. said, “I’ve spent my entire lifetime separating the right from the kooks.”

McCain has an obligation, to his own legacy and the country he has served, to separate himself and his campaign from the kooks. Extremism in defense of liberty may be no vice, but extremism in pursuit of the presidency is as dysfunctional as it is degrading.

Source / Washington Post

Rev. Arnold Conrad speaks before McCain rally : A Christian Crusade?.

Pastor at McCain rally says non-Christians want an Obama win
By Tasha Diakides / October 11, 2008

DAVENPORT, Iowa -– A minister delivering the invocation at John McCain’s rally in Davenport, Iowa Saturday told the crowd non-Christian religions around the world were praying for Barack Obama to win the U.S. presidential election.

“There are millions of people around this world praying to their god—whether it’s Hindu, Buddha, Allah—that his opponent wins, for a variety of reasons. And Lord, I pray that you will guard your own reputation, because they’re going to think that their God is bigger than you, if that happens,” said Arnold Conrad, the former pastor of Grace Evangelical Free Church in Davenport. . . .

Source / Political Ticker / CNN

Thanks to Roger Baker / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Butcher Bloc Bingo

Posted on October 14, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

aztecskullvoodooonglue / Amazon painting by Giulio Baistrocchi.

(Once for a Thousand Years)

Once a long time ago things got so very slow
Went down to Guantanamo and built me an Alamo
Built me an Alamo down in Guantanamo
To stand for the status quo to Tierra del Fuego

Saw a land called Chile, a man named Pinochet
Who was dancing that way thanks to our CIA
Saw a ghost named Allende behaving so friendly
He was killing me gently ever so absently

Took one look at Brazil, the USA off the pill
Indigenous still to kill, still adding the bill
Saw Rio de Janeiro from the ground in a turbo
All the tinshack condos on Free Enterprise Row

Sailed to old Venezuela on the back of a white whale
Left a petroleum trail delivering the U.S. mail
Then dancing a cumbia went to Colombia
Quoting Rumi and creating Vietnamia

Cruised into Guyana on the back of a piranha
An unshaven bwana to gather the manna
Saw the old Amazon fight the personal liaison
From the side with the jam on for the battle with Mammon

Went to El Salvador found out what’s the dollar for
Fill the rich and kill the poor in a capitalist liquidating holy war
Inside new Honduras where our best people assure us
It’s safe for the tourists they’ll scarcely endure us

Just got back from new Grenada acted like the Marquis de Sade
Used tiny island for cannon fodder, killed a bunch of sons and daughters
Ran into St. Stanislaus on his way back from Panama
Reading George Bernard Shaw on his way to the Mardi Gras

Learned all about Cuba while watching the tube
A brainwashed boob sitting there in my cube
Tried to starve them out and poison their trout
That’s what we’re about since the rise of our Old South

Given a stick and carrot and forced then to bear it
Which one has more merit and which one would just tear it
Then consider it’s your mother with no choice and no druther
And the same for your brother would you choose the other

Out in the sideyard strolled the National Guard
Where the scenery is marred because justice is barred
Out in the sideyard do not let down your guard
Some Alabama wild card bayonet you real hard

Back in the frontyard all the media bards
Show you all the marked cards fill your head up with lard
Back in the front yard there are feathers and tar
Put your bod behind bar put your mind in a jar

Saw the gringos with guns fill up Greyhounds with nuns
Leave the land of the huns to sell hamburger buns
Met a man named Sam lost a gonad in Nam
Lost his nerve in Iran has a head like a frying pan

Met a great nation of sheep still fast asleep
Listening to some new creep up on top of the heap
Met a man named boy thought he was Tolstoy
Often mad and annoyed with some other paranoid

Met a history of lies of indivisible size
With footnotes and asides in whispers and cries
Met a humankind nearly out of its mind
Always out for behind taking what it can find

Met some fading dreams in some mixed-up schemes
heads dunked in a stream still trying to scream
Met an angry pacifist married to a happy fascist
Who together found bliss reading Reader’s Digest

Overheard an old gringo who’d been living as a dingo
Reinvent a war game and call it Butcher Bloc Bingo
Gringo gringo gringo all in the name of jingo
You butcher people anywhere you can learn the lingo
Uncle Sam is damned so damned for its Butcher Bloc Bingo

B is for the butchery. I is for the Ingles. N is for the Nihilism.
G is for the Gold. O is for the Oil we suck from Venezuela
Colombia and Mexico

Butcher Bloc Bingo
Soon you see where the young men go
Where they will get shot and get jungle rot
Where freedom is not there’s cheap coke and great pot
And to boot United Fruit’s corporate criminal roots
And muy mucho toot for the generals’ mucho loot

It’s colonial booty our imperial duty
It’s ready fire aim in a genocidal shame
It’s a freeze frame of guilt and sleazy blame
With specific events and specific names
It’s Butcher Bloc Bingo

It’s still cavalry versus Indians
And Calvary for peasants and nuns
A gift from the glorious pale nation
In its latest manifest dustbin mutation

It’s no wonder the peasants run
Here come the haughty free press puns
Bananas and nuns cocoa and the runs
There must be some other way to have fun
Than Butcher Bloc Bingo

Why the guaranteed calamity
and planned chaotic infamy
with zealous Christian infantry
so jealous of infinity
all counting each extremity
each with a banjo on each knee
while playing all the not-so-free
plain acting like a Yanqui

Yanqui, Yanqui, Yanqui
More stubborn than a donkey
You get the drools such able fools
And continue till you are the ghouls
Strangling your own freedom rules
And tearing down with all your tools
Gone to lengths that are so honky
Why are you like this Yanqui
Too fond of hanky panky?
Which are you Drac or Frankie
Have you lost the art or lost your heart
You’re leaving out the peaceful part
Why are you like this Yanqui
are you asking for a spanky
What makes you so blamed cranky

and not to shout but to leave no doubt
our path to war is a Southern states route
if you want to know what our wars are about
just hear the fears from a good ol boy’s mouth
it’s the enemy this and the hatreds they tout
if they don’t get wars soon just watch them all pout
peacetime for them is a long hard drought

and they’re not alone just pick up the phone
dial a number at random turn over that stone
most people believe what they most want to hear
especially the things that they most want to fear
they’ll listen all day to a rational voice
and later that night make irrational choice
and that’s how our own Confederate South
became Sherman’s Marching Yankees
that’s how our own Confederate South
became Sherman’s Marching Yankees

Butcher Bloc Bingo (Once for a Thousand Years)

Larry Piltz, 1984 & 2008
Indian Cove / Austin, Texas

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Memories of What Columbus Day Really Means

Posted on October 14, 2008 by RagBlog


A Columbus Day Message
By Samuel Worcester / October 13, 2008

I know that many modern day people, even those from the Christian Right, like and or admire “Indians”, Native Americans. They think it is sad that the white people nearly killed every last one of them. There are other US citizens that believe the Indians were “savages” and the white man was just God’s hand eliminating a people that did not worship the one true God. One thing I know for sure is that at a critical moment in the Indian’s survival they were hated, without question, by the most powerful nation on earth. Some of us look back, as we read the accounts of the atrocities committed by the US upon the Indians, and shake our heads and think “how could our ancestors be so cruel?”

I do not find our ancestor’s cruelty very hard to imagine at all. All I have to do is listen to present day conservatives advocate the death and destruction of Muslims. They praise the destruction that the US has rained down upon Afghanistan and Iraq. I don’t have to step back in time to hear liberals denounced as “enemies of the State” for daring to think that killing civilians might be wrong. They are alive and well, front and center, both then and now, the conservatives are in a blind rage for the blood of “our enemies”.

Kurt Vonnegut mentioned Indian’s in an article he wrote called “Cold Turkey” in May, 2004. The article is about the US’s reaction to having to go off of oil dependency cold turkey. His comparison of Iraq and Native Americans is appropriate here:

“We’re spreading democracy [in Iraq], are we? Same way European explorers brought Christianity to the Indians, what we now call ‘Native Americans’. How ungrateful they were! How ungrateful are the people of Baghdad today. So let’s give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That’ll teach Bin Laden a lesson he won’t soon forget. Hail to the Chief.

That chief and his cohorts have as little to do with Democracy as the Europeans had to do with Christianity. We the people have absolutely no say in whatever they choose to do next. In case you haven’t noticed, they’ve already cleaned out the treasury, passing it out to pals in the war and national security rackets, leaving your generation and the next one with a perfectly enormous debt that you’ll be asked to repay.

Nobody let out a peep when they did that to you, because they have disconnected every burglar alarm in the Constitution: The House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the FBI, the free press (which, having been embedded, has forsaken the First Amendment) and We the People” (Vonnegut 3).

We justified the killing-off of the Native American’s as “God’s will” even though the real motive was profit “Manifest Destiny”. There was money to be made by the handfuls if the Indians would just get out of the way! What better way to justify getting the Indians out of the way than by labeling them “savages” and killing them in the name of God? Now we are trying to kill off the Muslims for all of the same reasons and they know it. They know it better than the average US citizen. The US citizens are all glued to the Fox TV being taught that we are all hated by Muslims “for no reason”. I’m sure God is delighted with us all for using Him as an excuse to kill for profits.

The “Indian” nations lasted 20,000 years, or rather 19,500 years until the introduction of the Europeans. From the European’s perspective, a “new world” was opening up for profits, same as Iraq is being opened up for new profits. From the first moment that whites laid eyes upon the North American aborigines their thoughts were…, well, since we have them, let me reproduce them so the words can speak for themselves. From Christopher Columbus’ log:

“They…brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned… They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features… They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane… They would make fine servants… With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.” (Zinn 1).

Columbus saw a use for the “Indians”. However, by 1868, the same time that African-American’s were being lynched across the South due to their “inferiority to whites”, the whites could no longer see any use for Indians. After 20,000 years of existence the Indian’s fate rest in the hands of a nation pulsing with capitalistic greed. When the Indian, Tosawi, surrendered to General Sheridan, Tosawi tried to impress Sheridan with his English. Tosawi spoke his name and added two words in broken English, “Tosawi, good Indian.” Sheridan’s reply summed up the Indian’s fate, “The only good Indians I ever met were dead” (Brown 171-172). The words were refined into a US slogan that could be pulled out for any enemy, just fill in the name of the enemy de jour: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Today it is: “The only good Muslim is a dead Muslim”.

The Indians were simply in the way of Manifest Destiny. It was “nothing personal”; it was just their time to die. Whether one calls it God’s judgment upon them or just the white man fulfilling his destiny in the natural order of society, the Indians became “good Indians” and died. Now it is the Muslims turn, and dog-gone-it they just don’t seem to want to comply. But, with God’s help, we’ll show ‘em: “might makes right.”

The US society of supposed “men of God” failed to take action to stop the Indian massacre. Only a few stepped forward and tried to shame the US into stopping the genocide of Indians, but these people, as always, were dismissed as “liberal nuts”. Some say that genocide is just democracy in action: if the majority of the people want genocide then genocide it is! Same as with today and the Laissez-Faire idea that the stock market is a haven for democracy: if stocks go up due to job cuts, it means the people want the job cuts. It is all madness from which the conservative Christians offer no relief, only support for the madness. To this day the conservative Christians do not go after the white supremacist in this country the way they go after homosexuals. Hatred of a minority group or race of people seems to always be justified in their minds.

I heard Kurt Vonnegut, on The Daily Show, talking about the US bringing its brand of democracy to Iraq and that it is appropriate when rationalizing both the genocide of the Indians and the slow development of democracy in Iraq. Mr. Vonnegut said that we must be patient with Iraq, because they are trying to learn the US’s style of democracy. This means that after about 100 years you abolish slavery, then you have genocide for races you don’t like and after 150 years you let women vote.

Well, I suppose it took the US awhile to have a “good democracy” because it was not under the guiding influence of God. Oops, I forgot, the Christian Right claims that we were indeed under the benevolent hand of God. It so hard to figure out where God’s hand ends and man’s greed begins. Hardest of all to understand is the Christian Right’s desire to connect the two and their insistence upon giving God “credit” for the US’s brand of “democracy”. I don’t think God is so evil. I don’t think conservative Christians believe that our treatment of Native Americans, Blacks and women have been evil, so how can they possibly think that bombing and killing thousands upon thousands of Iraqis is “bad”? Conservative Christians certainly hate anyone who dares to say that US treatment of any of these groups was “bad”.

References:
Brown, Dee. Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee. New York: Holt, 1970.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Cold Turkey. May. 2004 .
Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.

Source / Information Clearing House

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Fidel: The Developed Capitalist System Is in Crisis

Posted on October 14, 2008 by RagBlog


The Law of the Jungle
By Fidel Castro / October 13, 2008

Trade, within a society and among countries, is the exchange of goods and services produced by human beings. The owners of the means of production appropriate the profits. As a class, they are the leaders of the capitalist state and they boast of fostering development and social well-being through the market. This they worship as an infallible God.

In every country there is competition between the strongest and the weakest; those with more physical energy, those who are better fed, those who learned how to read and write, those who attended school, those who have more accumulated experience, more social relations and more resources, and those in society who do not have these advantages.

Among countries: those with a better climates and more arable land, more water and more natural resources in the area where they are located, when there are no more territories to conquer; those that master technology, have greater development and handle unlimited media resources, and those that, in contrast, do not enjoy any of these prerogatives. These are the sometimes enormous differences between countries described as rich or poor.

It is the law of the jungle.

There are no differences among ethnic groups in terms of human beings’ mental faculties. This has been thoroughly proven by science. Today’s society is not the natural evolution of human life, but a creation of mentally-developed humans; without that society, their life would be inconceivable. Therefore, what is at stake is whether or not human beings will be able to survive the privilege of possessing creative intelligence.

The developed capitalist system, epitomized by the country privileged by nature to which European whites brought their ideas, dreams and ambitions, is today in crisis. But, it is not the usual crisis that happens once every certain number of years, or even the traumatic crisis of the 1930s; rather, the worst of all since the world started to pursue this model of growth and development.

The current crisis of developed capitalism is taking place as the empire is about to change its leadership in the elections that take place in 25 days; it was the only thing that remained to be seen.

The candidates of the two main parties who will decide these elections are trying to persuade the bewildered voters — many of whom have never bothered to cast a vote — that as presidential candidates, they can guarantee the well-being and consumerism of what they describe as a middle-class people, without the least intention of making real changes to what they consider to be the most perfect economic system that the world has ever known. It is the same world, of course, in the minds of each and every one of them, which is less important than the happiness of some 300 million people who account for less than five percent of the world population. The fate of the remaining 95% of humanity, war and peace, air that may be the fit to breathe or not, will depend to a great extent on the decisions of the empire’s institutional leader, whether or not that constitutional office has any real power in a period of nuclear weapons and computer-controlled space shields, in circumstances where every second counts and ethical principles are increasingly less important. Still, the more or less disastrous role played by presidents of that country cannot be overlooked.

Racism is deeply rooted in the United States, and the minds of millions of white people cannot accept the idea of a black man, with his wife and children, occupying the White House, which is precisely what it’s called: White.

It’s a miracle that the Democratic candidate has not met the same fate as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and others who dreamed of justice and equality in recent decades. Moreover, he tends to look at his adversary with serenity and to laugh at the dialectic predicaments of an opponent who gazes into space.

The Republican candidate, on the other hand, who cultivates his reputation as a belligerent man, was one of the worst students in his class at West Point. He has confessed that he knows nothing about Mathematics, and presumably far less about complicated economic sciences.

There is no doubt that his rival surpasses him in intelligence and serenity.

Something McCain has the most of is age, and his health is not at all secure

I mention this information to indicate the eventual possibility — if anything should happen in terms of the candidate’s health, given that he is elected — of the rifle lady, the inexperienced former governor of Alaska, becoming president of the United States. It is obvious that she knows nothing about anything.

Meditating on the current U.S. public debt that President Bush is laying on the shoulders of the new generations in that country — $10.3 trillion — it occurred to me to calculate the time it would take somebody to count the debt that he, Bush, has practically doubled in eight years.

Somebody working eight hours per day, without missing a second, at the rapid pace of 100 one-dollar bills per minute, in 300 days of work per year, would need 715,000 years to count that amount of money.

I could not find a more graphic way of describing the volume of that sum of money that is now mentioned almost every day.

In order to avert a general state of panic, the U.S. administration has declared that it will secure deposits that do not exceed $250,000. It will administrate banks and sums of money that Lenin, with his abacus, could never have imagined counting.

We might be wondering now about what contribution Bush’s administration might make to socialism. But let’s not entertain any illusions. Once banking operations go back to normal, the imperialists will return the banks to private enterprise, as some other countries in this hemisphere have already done. The people always foot the bill.

Capitalism tends to reproduce itself under any social system because it is based on egotism and on human instincts.

Human society has no other alternative but to overcome this contradiction; otherwise, it would not be able to survive.

At this time, the flood of money being poured into world finances by the central banks of developed capitalist countries is dealing a heavy blow to the stock exchanges of countries that are trying to overcome their economic underdevelopment by resorting to these institutions. Cuba has no stock exchange. Undoubtedly, we will find more rational and more socialist ways of financing our development.

The current crisis and the brutal measures of the U.S. administration to save itself will bring more inflation, more devaluation of national currencies, more painful losses in the markets, lower prices for exports and more unequal exchange. But they will also bring to the peoples a better understanding of the truth, more awareness, more rebelliousness and more revolutions.

We will see now how the crisis develops and what happens in the United States in 25 days.

Source / Granma

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Palin Mixes State With Religion, Adds a Dash of Extremism

Posted on October 13, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Tattoo art by Flames – Skin Flixx Ink.

She used state money to pay for religious activities; has ties to Dominionism and Alaska Independence Party
By Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / October 13, 2008

Sarah Palin has said that she would not let her religious views “bleed over into politics,” but she has done just that. Many have seen the video of Governor Sarah Palin addressing a graduation class of young missionaries. She had every right to do that. The problem was she charged the trip, plane fare and per diem, to the state. That speech cost the taxpayers of Alaska $639.50.

So far, she and her family have spent about $13,000 in state funds attending religious events, including a meeting with Reverend Franklin Graham. Some of these events included other stops, so to be fair we can trim that figure to $3022, which applies entirely to religious events. Even the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty has raised questions.

When she was mayor, she used the prestige of her office to join a hospital board to see that abortions were not performed there. Lloyd Eggan, an Anchorage advocate of the separation of church and state, worries that her Alaska Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives had not done enough to see that its funds do not pay for ministry.

Palin has ties with three churches that are clearly part of the Dominionist New Apostolic Reformation. As Dominionists, these people are completely opposed to the separation of church and state. In 2006, Palin said that the tax code provision preventing ministers from endorsing candidates should be repealed.

Dominionists also look forward to the day when the United States will be a theocratic state. They also do not have a favorable view of other religions, particularly Roman Catholicism. Yet, the Palin administration did spend $20,000 of its $500,000 budget helping a Catholic charity.

Sarah Palin was never a member of the secessionist Alaska Independence Party, but she had close ties to it, attending some of its conventions and winning its support in 2006. The Alaska Independence Party has close ties with neo-Confederate and white supremacy groups in the lower 48 states.

Her husband, Todd, was a member from 1995 to 2002. As we know, he has great influence with her and played a major role in Troopergate. When Max Blumenthal and David Neiwart visited Wasilla, they were told that “Sarah Palin is far more intimately associated with the extreme right-wing fringe of Alaska than the media has acknowledged or that she is willing to acknowledge.” Palin used Alaska Independence Chairman Mark Chryson and John Birch Society actrivist Steve Stoll, whom locals “Black Helicopter” to launch her local and state political careers. She attempted to reward Stoll by appointing him to her old council seat, but another council member blocked the move, fearing that Stoll would be a “violent influence.”

In her first campaign for mayor, these men steered an ugly campaign of character assasination against the incumbent. Sounds familiar?

This woman has extremist connections, and probably extremist beliefs. Combine those with a tendency to abuse power, and we have a recipe for disaster.

Sherman De Brosse, the peudonym for a retired history professor, is a contributor to The Rag Blog and also blogs at Sherm Says and on DailyKos.

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Jokers Wild

Posted on October 13, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Cartoon by Joshua Brown

Thanks to S. R. Keister / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Liberals Sneaking Into Canada : Border Officials Concerned

Posted on October 13, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Liberal sociology professor sneaking into Canada

‘Canadian border farmers say it’s not uncommon to see dozens of sociology professors, animal-rights activists and Unitarians crossing their fields at night.’
Updated October 13, 2008

The flood of American liberals sneaking across the border into Canada has intensified in the past week, sparking calls for increased patrols to stop the illegal immigration. The actions of President Bush are prompting the exodus among left-leaning citizens who fear they’ll soon be required to hunt, pray, and agree with Bill O’Reilly.

Canadian border farmers say it’s not uncommon to see dozens of sociology professors, animal-rights activists and Unitarians crossing their fields at night.

“I went out to milk the cows the other day, and there was a Hollywood producer huddled in the barn,” said Manitoba farmer Red Greenfield, whose acreage borders North Dakota. The producer was cold, exhausted and hungry. He asked me if I could spare a latte and some free-range chicken. When I said I didn’t have any, he left. Didn’t even get a chance to show him my screenplay, eh?”

In an effort to stop the illegal aliens, Greenfield erected higher fences, but the liberals scaled them. So he tried installing speakers that blare Rush Limbaugh across the fields. “Not real effective,” he said. “The liberals still got through, and Rush annoyed the cows so much they wouldn’t give any milk.”

Officials are particularly concerned about smugglers who meet liberals near the Canadian border, pack them into Volvo station wagons, drive them across the border and leave them to fend for themselves.

“A lot of these people are not prepared for rugged conditions,” an Ontario border patrolman said. “I found one carload without a drop of drinking water. They did have a nice little Napa Valley cabernet, though.”

When liberals are caught, they’re sent back across the border, often wailing loudly that they fear retribution from conservatives. Rumors have been circulating about the Bush administration establishing re-education camps in which liberals will be forced to drink domestic beer and watch NASCAR races.

In recent days, liberals have turned to sometimes-ingenious ways of crossing the border. Some have taken to posing as senior citizens on bus trips to buy cheap Canadian prescription drugs. After catching a half-dozen young vegans disguised in powdered wigs, Canadian immigration authorities began stopping buses and quizzing the supposed senior-citizen passengers on Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney hits to prove they were alive in the ’50s.

“If they can’t identify the accordion player on The Lawrence Welk Show, we get suspicious about their age,” an official said.

Canadian citizens have complained that the illegal immigrants are creating an organic-broccoli shortage and renting all the good Susan Sarandon movies. “I feel sorry for American liberals, but the Canadian economy just can’t support them,” an Ottawa resident said. “How many art-history majors does one country need?”

In an effort to ease tensions between the United States and Canada, Vice President Dick Cheney met with the Canadian ambassador and pledged that the administration would take steps to reassure liberals. A source close to Cheney said, “We’re going to have some Peter, Paul & Mary concerts. And we might put some endangered species on postage stamps. The President is determined to reach out.” he said.

Source / Manitoba Herald / Blue Funk Blog

Thanks to Jeff Jones / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Towards Market Fascism : America’s Political Cannibalism

Posted on October 13, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Even got too hot for John: McCain takes the microphone from a woman at a rally Friday in Lakeville, Minn., after she said: “I don’t trust Obama. … He’s an Arab.” Photo by Jime Mone / AP.

This should be read by everybody, IMHO. The social dynamics of fascism and its origin in economic crisis, from Polanyi’s important book, are outlined below.

Roger Baker / The Rag Blog

‘The rage bubbling up from our impoverished and disenfranchised working class, glimpsed at John McCain rallies, presages a looming and dangerous right-wing backlash.’
By Chris Hedges / October 13, 2008

It is no longer our economy but our democracy that is in peril. It was the economic meltdown of Yugoslavia that gave us Slobodan Milosevic. It was the collapse of the Weimar Republic that vomited up Adolf Hitler. And it was the breakdown in czarist Russia that opened the door for Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Financial collapses lead to political extremism.

As the public begins to grasp the depth of the betrayal and abuse by our ruling class, as the Democratic and Republican parties are exposed as craven tools of our corporate state, as savings accounts, college funds and retirement plans become worthless, as unemployment skyrockets and as home values go up in smoke we must prepare for the political resurgence of a reinvigorated radical Christian right. The engine of this mass movement—as is true for all radical movements—is personal and economic despair. And despair, in an age of increasing shortages, poverty and hopelessness, will be one of our few surplus commodities.

Karl Polanyi in his book “The Great Transformation,” written in 1944, laid out the devastating consequences—the depressions, wars and totalitarianism—that grow out of a so-called self-regulated free market. He grasped that “fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function.” He warned that a financial system always devolved, without heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism—and a Mafia political system—which is a good description of the American government under George W. Bush. Polanyi wrote that a self-regulating market, the kind bequeathed to us since Ronald Reagan, turned human beings and the natural environment into commodities, a situation that ensures the destruction of both society and the natural environment. He decried the free market’s belief that nature and human beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market. He reminded us that a society that no longer recognizes that nature and human life have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic worth beyond monetary value, ultimately commits collective suicide. Such societies cannibalize themselves until they die. Speculative excesses and growing inequality, he wrote, always destroy the foundation for a continued prosperity.

We face an environmental meltdown as well as an economic meltdown. This would not have surprised Polanyi, who fled fascist Europe in 1933 and eventually taught at Columbia University. Russia’s northern coastline has begun producing huge qualities of toxic methane gas. Scientists with the International Siberian Shelf Study 2008 describe what they saw along the coastline recently as “methane chimneys” reaching from the sea floor to the ocean’s surface. Methane, locked in the permafrost of Arctic landmasses, is being released at an alarming rate as average Arctic temperatures rise. Methane is a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. The release of millions of tons of it will dramatically accelerate the rate of global warming.

Those who run our corporate state have fought environmental regulation as tenaciously as they have fought financial regulation. They are responsible, as Polanyi predicted, for our personal impoverishment and the impoverishment of our ecosystem. We remain addicted, courtesy of the oil, gas and automobile industries and a corporate- controlled government, to fossil fuels. Species are vanishing. Fish stocks are depleted. The great human migration from coastlines and deserts has begun. And as temperatures continue to rise, huge parts of the globe will become uninhabitable. The continued release of large quantities of methane, some scientists have warned, could actually asphyxiate the human species.

The corporate con artists and criminals who have hijacked our state and rigged our financial system still speak to us in the obscure and incomprehensible language coined by specialists at elite business schools. They use terms like securitization, deleveraging, structured investment vehicles and credit default swaps. The reality, once you throw out their obnoxious jargon, is not hard to grasp. Banks lent too much money to people and financial institutions that could not pay it back. These banks are now going broke. The government is frantically giving taxpayer dollars to banks so they can be solvent and again lend money. It is not working. Bank lending remains frozen. There are ominous signs that the government may not be able to hand over enough of our money because the losses incurred by these speculators are too massive. If credit markets remain in a deep freeze, corporations such as AT&T, Ford and General Motors might go bankrupt. The downward spiral could spread like a tidal wave across the country, especially since our corporate elite, including Barack Obama, seem to have no real intention of bailing out families who can no longer pay their mortgages or credit card debts.

Lenin said that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch its currency. If our financial disaster continues there will be a widespread loss of faith in the mechanisms that regulate society. If our money becomes worthless, so does our government. All traditional standards and beliefs are shattered in a severe economic crisis. The moral order is turned upside down. The honest and industrious are wiped out while the gangsters, profiteers and speculators amass millions. Look at Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld. He walks away from his bankrupt investment house after pocketing $485 million. His investors are wiped out. An economic collapse does not only mean the degradation of trade and commerce, food shortages, bankruptcies and unemployment; it means the systematic dynamiting of the foundations of a society. I watched this happen in Yugoslavia. I fear I am watching it happen here in the United States.

The Patriot Act, the FISA Reform Act, the suspension of habeas corpus, the open use of torture in our offshore penal colonies, the stationing of a combat brigade on American soil, the seas of surveillance cameras, the brutal assaults against activists in Denver and St. Paul are converging to determine our future. Those dark forces arrayed against American democracy are waiting for a moment to strike, a national crisis that will allow them in the name of national security and moral renewal to shred the Constitution. They have the tools. They will use fear, chaos, the hatred for the ruling elites and the specter of left-wing dissent and terrorism to impose draconian controls to extinguish our democracy. And while they do it they will be waving the American flag, singing patriotic slogans and clutching the Christian cross. Fuld, I expect, will be one of many corporatists happy to contribute to the cause.

This is a defining moment in American history. The next few weeks and months will see us stabilize and weather this crisis or descend into a terrifying dystopia. I place no hope in Obama or the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is a pathetic example of liberal, bourgeois impotence, hypocrisy and complacency. It has been bought off. I will vote, if only as a form of protest against our corporate state and an homage to Polanyi’s brilliance, for Ralph Nader. I would like to offer hope, but it is more important to be a realist. No ethic or act of resistance is worth anything if it is not based on the real. And the real, I am afraid, does not look good.

[Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize winner and a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is the author of “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” His column appears Mondays on Truthdig.]

Source / truthdig

Thanks to CommonDreams / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment