Cook County Sheriff Stands Up to the Bankers

Posted on October 9, 2008 by RagBlog

Sheriff Tom Dart has suspended evictions from buildings that have been foreclosed on like this one in Albany Park. From left: Tenants Mario Hernanzez, Dart, Maria Cruz and Gabriela Maciel with her son Diego. Photo: Al Podgorski/Sun-Times.

Dart refuses to evict tenants when order is aimed at landlord
By Sheriff Tom Dart / October 9, 2008

COOK COUNTY, Ill. — As Cook County sheriff, I am responsible for running a 10,000-inmate jail, providing patrols to unincorporated areas and securing the courts.

But perhaps no part of our job is as difficult as the work done by our eviction units. On any given day, our deputies could be asked to throw a family out of their home, with all of their possessions left on a curb — sometimes pilfered through by those living nearby.

Yet no matter how difficult they are, evictions are part of our job.

What isn’t part of our job, however, is to carry out work on behalf of the multi-billion-dollar banks and mortgage industries.

Too many times, our deputies arrive at a home to carry out a mortgage foreclosure eviction, only to find a tenant — dutifully paying their rent each month — who is unaware their landlord stopped using that rent money to pay the mortgage. They had no fair warning that they were about to be thrown out of their home.

That’s because, in many cases, the banks have done nothing to determine, in advance, who’s living in the building — even though it’s required by state law. Instead, those banks expect taxpayers to pay for that investigative work for them.

That stops today.

We won’t be doing the banks’ work for them anymore.

We won’t surprise tenants with an eviction order intended for their landlord.

I may be held in contempt of court over this. If that’s the case, I’m willing to accept it though I believe most judges in Cook County share my desire to find a solution for this mess.

We’re asking either the state courts or Legislature to order the banks to simply conduct very basic work before requesting an eviction.

I’ve come to this point after spending the last year trying to work with the banking industry, even asking the Legislature to pass a bill requiring them to — at a minimum — let us know if any children, disabled or senior citizens live at the home, so we can connect them with social services. That effort was killed by banking industry lobbyists.

Until the banking industry steps up and does the right thing, I won’t continue to risk violating the law and open taxpayers to further liability.

Source / Chicago Sun Times

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Ron Ridenour: Sounds of Venezuela, Part X

Posted on October 9, 2008 by RagBlog

Oscar Figuera (2nd from right) with colleagues. Photo: ¡Que comunismo!.

Click here to view the entire series.

Sounds of Venezuela
Part X: The Red Letter
By Ron Ridenour / The Rag Blog / October 9, 2008

On my way to town hall, I saw a grass roots organizer talking with Diego at the beginning of Hunger Street. He was explaining that he was tired of periodic failures to adequately fulfill the plan Casas de Alimentación, which provides a hot meal daily for homeless and other needy people. The federal government pays for this with oil profits but it is put into action by municipal governments. This organizer complained that some of the 100 to 150 homeless and most needy were not getting their meal or use of a shower and he was threatening to organize a protest.

In La Victoria, 20 houses are centers for this program. There are 6000 such houses in the country. Housewives volunteer their time and kitchens to make the lunches.

Another connected alimentation plan is in place in public school, currently feeding 60% of all students. Students and teachers eat nutritious meals together, which are prepared locally. Any leftovers are given out the same day to needy persons, including homeless. Diego had recently given me a leftover lunch from his lover’s school. It consisted of paella: chicken and rice, with olives and red peppers; beets and two pieces of bread. Sumptuous!

At town hall’s center, about 80 assembled to celebrate the Communist party 77th anniversary. I read their “Red Letter” leaflet printed in red ink for the occasion.

It clearly supports the Chavez-led Bolivarian Revolution and warns that imperialism, the final phase of capitalism, threatens the revolution as it does all people’s struggle for improvement, for liberation and sovereignty. The leaflet is written in common language and speaks to people’s discontent with local governments backing Chavez, including La Victoria, for failure “to accomplish the expectations generated by its electors”.

The experienced Communist party also calls upon Chavez party forces to align with it in forming a National Anti-Imperialist Front (FNAI), thus broadening the struggle against US imperialism’s real threats from abroad and internally.

Oscar Figuera stood at the podium. Short mulatto with stubby black-gray beard, he is the party’s secretary-general and a deputy from Aragua state in the parliament, one of eight Communists elected in 2005. In the 2006 presidential elections, the PCV received nearly three percent of the national vote, making it the nation’s fourth largest. It added its 342,000 votes to the Chavez Patriotic Alliance for a total of 7.3 million votes. All but 15 of the 167 National Assembly members support the Chavez-led process.

I quote from some of Figuera’s comments.

“Thousands of us Communists have shed our blood on this earth to make a better world, to create socialism. We stand beside President Chavez today…We support the PSUV and we don’t want any of them to leave it for our party, which we must maintain to guide us toward socialism. If PSUV socialists left the party, it would leave its right-wing with greater influence. But we want our parties, and other radical ones, to increase the strength of the Patriotic Alliance, and to join us in creating a massive FNAI.”

There was strong applause when Figuera spoke in support of FARC, which he said the PCV viewed as a legitimate force and a strategic ally. “We don’t condemn the armed struggle as a form of struggle against a state that closes the democratic process.”

Chavez had ceased criticizing the PCV for not merging into the PSUV, which had been his position. The PSUV had recently rejoined the shaky Patriotic Alliance, which also included the Party for All (Partido Para Todos), a second generation split off from the PCV. But, in July 2008, once Chavez had called upon FARC to dissolve and inexplicably invited Uribe to Caracas as a friend, the PCV exercised its political principles by conducting street demonstrations against the narco-trafficking, para-militarist Uribe. Chavez rebuked the PCV for this, something many Chavez supporters considered ingenuous.

When Figuera ended his speech, I spoke with Murillo Baez. At 73, he’d been a member of the PCV for 47 years. He had witnessed an act of carnality committed by Latin America’s most infamous terrorist, Luis Posada Carriles.

“Yeah, Bambi Carriles, as we knew him. He was the worst,” the gray-haired black man drawled, remembering the living nightmare. “I read he’s still a terrorist running loose in Miami with the rest of them. And Bush says those who assist terrorists are terrorists!”

“It was in late 1960s. Carriles was a high official in Venezuela’s secret police, the dreaded DISIP. Another right-wing Cuban exile working with the CIA was DISIP chief for some years [Orlando García Vázquez]. I don’t know if Leoni Otero or Caldera Rodríguez was president. It didn’t matter, really. They were all under the US government, and their secret police was run by the CIA with gusano agents [Cuban right-wing exiles].

“Our party was prohibited and many were in the mountains. I was the president of the local CTA union and was in our office in La Victoria when we heard the screams and shots. Some unionists and underground comrades were meeting up the block. Somebody must have tipped off the DISIP. Carriles led the murder of 10 people. Some were ripped up. One pregnant woman gave birth under the attack. They burned the baby with cigarette butts. We couldn’t do anything. We had no weapons and the secret police were well armed.”

As Baez and I spoke, Carriles was a free man walking the streets in Miami where he would soon be honored, on May 7th, by 500 fellow Cuban Americans. He had been released a year before from a Texas jail cell when a Bush-appointed federal judge dismissed the only charge against him—making false statements to immigration officials. He came to the United States illegally after being pardoned in Panama, in 2004, by Bush-friendly President Mireya Moscoso. He had been captured in 2000; tried and sentenced for attempted assassination of President Fidel Castro when he was to deliver a speech to students in Panama. The Panama Supreme Court recently ruled that pardon unconstitutional. [See this.]

The United States Attorney General refuses to even answer Venezuela’s request for Carriles’ extradition, thus abrogating the mutually signed extradition treaty. Carriles is wanted as a fugitive from one of the worst acts of terrorism: the bombing of a Cuban airliner, October 6, 1976, in which all 73 passengers and crew were killed. It was the first political air terrorism “hit” in the Americas. Released FBI archives show that Carriles had informed his Washington DC handler that an upcoming “hit” would occur against a Cuban airliner. [See this.]

Luis Posada Carriles is good friends with the rich and powerful in Miami and with Florida’s governor, Jeb Bush. Among his most powerful associates is co-master mind of the 1976 bombing, Orlando Bosch, also a free man living in Miami. Both had been imprisoned in Venezuela for their role in the airline bombing, but the CIA assisted their escape in the mid-1980s. Another powerful ally was former CIA agent Jorge Mas Canosa, now deceased. He became wealthy in related economic activity as a CIA agent. After his part in the Bay of Pigs invasion, he founded the Cuban-American National Foundation. CANF helped finance many acts of terrorism both within the US and in Cuba. Among them were explosions at tourist hotels in Cuba and bombing plans against museums. Carriles bragged to the “New York Times” (July 12-13, 1998) about these acts of terrorism, in which one man was killed and 11 wounded. [See this and this.]

Cuba was concerned about this sabotage. Not only was it lethal, it injured their primary income. Leaders believed (strangely) that the FBI might be interested in cooperating to stop the terrorists in Miami. Over 300 acts of sabotage and assassinations had been committed inside the United States by these terrorist groups since 1959 when Cuban exiles began operating there. Cuba had experienced thousands of terrorist acts, which had killed more than 3000 of their people and seriously wounded nearly as many. To defend their country, Cuban intelligence agents had infiltrated these circles over many years. (See my book about 27 of them: Backfire: The CIA’s Biggest Burn, published, in 1991, by Editorial José Martí, Havana: www.ronridenour.com). Just in the years 1990 to 1998, 170 planned acts of sabotage and assassinations had been prevented by these brave men and women, among them were: Gerardo Hernández, Ramon Labanino, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González and René González.

In June 1998, the FBI was invited to Havana where they were given copies of Cuban intelligence documents in the hope the FBI would keep its promise to put a stop this terror. As Fidel later said, some of the material given included, “14 phone conversations from Luis Posada Carriles in which he provided information about terrorist attacks on Cuba. Information was provided on how to locate Posada…”

The FBI did study the material and was able to ascertain how Cuba had acquired such valuable knowledge. On September 12, 1998, the FBI arrested a dozen Cuban agents who were informing Cuban authorities about plans of terrorism against it. Five of them (named above) were sent to isolation cells for 17 months and then sentenced on “conspiracy against national security” charges to a total of four life terms plus 75 years. The Cuban Five pointed out in defense that they were only monitored the actions of Miami-based terrorist groups, in order to prevent terrorism against their country.

The PCV participates in an expanding international campaign to free the Cuban Five while demanding that the US government honor its own extradition treaty with Venezuela and return the convicted terrorist/mass murderer Luis Posada Carriles to Venezuela for completion of his prison term.

The Cuban Five’s are not terrorists, and their actions were never directed at the U.S. government; they never harmed anyone nor had weapons while in the United States. The only crime they committed was to operate as agents of a foreign government without having registered, for which one can be imprisoned for one to three years. They are still in prison ten years later simply because they acted to defend their homeland against US-baked terrorism.

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Austin’s Fontaine Maverick Tells CNN Why McCain and Palin are no Mavericks

Posted on October 9, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Hey John McCain, you’re stealing our name! Jeanne Moos interviews Fontaine Maverick about the great Maverick family of Texas: The real and original Mavericks.

For more on The Rag Blog about the Maverick family and the theft of their good name, see McCain a Faux Maverick : Stealing a Texas Tradition by Paul in Austin / The Rag Blog / September 13, 2008

And Fontaine Maverick : John McCain is no Maverick! by Fontaine Maverick / The Rag Blog / August 31, 2008

And This Maverick The Real Deal by Joe Holley / The Rag Blog / March 1, 2008

Thanks to Mariann Wizard / The Rag Blog

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Garrison Keillor : Juicing Up the Ticket With Sarah

Posted on October 9, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


Dishonest, cynical men put forward Sarah Palin for national office, but the truth emerges: The lady is talking freely about matters she has never thought about.
By Garrison Keillor / October 8, 2008

We are a stalwart and stouthearted people, and never more so than in hard times. People weep in the dark and arise in the morning and go to work. The waves crash on your nest egg and a chunk is swept away and you put your salami sandwich in the brown bag and get on the bus. In Philly, a woman earns $10.30/hour to care for a man brought down by cystic fibrosis. She bathes and dresses him in the morning, brings him meals, puts him to bed at night. It’s hard work lifting him and she has suffered a painful hernia that, because she can’t afford health insurance, she can’t get fixed, but she still goes to work because he’d be helpless without her. There are a lot of people like her. I know because I’m related to some of them.

Low dishonesty and craven cynicism sometimes win the day but not inevitably. The attempt to link Barack Obama to an old radical in his neighborhood has desperation and deceit written all over it. Meanwhile, stunning acts of heroism stand out, such as the fidelity of military lawyers assigned to defend detainees at Guantánamo Bay — uniformed officers faithful to their lawyerly duty to offer a vigorous defense even though it means exposing the injustice of military justice that is rigged for conviction and the mendacity of a commander in chief who commits war crimes. If your law school is looking for a name for its new library, instead of selling the honor to a fat cat alumnus, you should consider the names of Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, Lt. Col. Mark Bridges, Col. Steven David, Lt. Col. Sharon Shaffer, Lt. Cmdr. Philip Sundel and Maj. Michael Mori.

It was dishonest, cynical men who put forward a clueless young woman for national office, hoping to juice up the ticket, hoping she could skate through two months of chaperoned campaigning, but the truth emerges: The lady is talking freely about matters she has never thought about. The American people have an ear for B.S. They can tell when someone’s mouth is moving and the clutch is not engaged. When she said, “One thing that Americans do at this time, also, though, is let’s commit ourselves just every day, American people, Joe Six-Pack, hockey moms across the nation, I think we need to band together and say never again. Never will we be exploited and taken advantage of again by those who are managing our money and loaning us these dollars,” people smelled gas.

Some Republicans adore her because they are pranksters at heart and love the consternation of grown-ups. The ne’er-do-well son of the old Republican family as president, the idea that you increase government revenue by cutting taxes, the idea that you cut social services and thereby drive the needy into the middle class, the idea that you overthrow a dictator with a show of force and achieve democracy at no cost to yourself — one stink bomb after another, and now Gov. Palin.

She is a chatty sportscaster who lacks the guile to conceal her vacuity, and she was Mr. McCain’s first major decision as nominee. This troubles independent voters, and now she is a major drag on his candidacy. She will get a nice book deal from Regnery and a new career making personal appearances for 40 grand a pop, and she’ll become a trivia question, “What politician claimed foreign-policy expertise based on being able to see Russia from her house?” And the rest of us will have to pull ourselves out of the swamp of Republican economics.

Your broker kept saying, “Stay with the portfolio, don’t jump ship,” and you felt a strong urge to dump the stocks and get into the money market where at least you’re not going to lose your shirt, but you didn’t do it and didn’t do it, and now you’re holding a big bag of brown bananas. Me, too. But at least I know enough not to believe desperate people who are talking trash. Anybody who got whacked last week and still thinks McCain-Palin is going to lead us out of the swamp and not into a war with Iran is beyond persuasion in the English language. They’ll need to lose their homes and be out on the street in a cold hard rain before they connect the dots.

[Garrison Keillor is the author of a new Lake Wobegon novel, “Liberty” (Viking).]

© 2008 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Source / salon.com

Thanks to Doug Zabel and Shelia Cheaney / The Rag Blog

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Daniel Ellsberg and the Concept of Freedom of Conscience

Posted on October 9, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Daniel Ellsberg at UT-Austin, Oct. 7, 2008. Photo by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.

Report-back on Daniel Ellsberg speaking at the University of Texas on Tuesday: ‘Truth can free us from war.’
By Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog / October 9, 2008

When I attended the presentation at the University of Texas at Austin on Tuesday evening by Daniel Ellsberg, the concept of freedom of conscience was already on my mind.

A few days prior, I had gone to a special commemoration of Gandhi’s birthday, where conscience was posed as a religious freedom issue by one of the speakers, a local war tax resister. Souvenir bookmarks containing Gandhi quotes were distributed around the tables, and the one I happened to pick up read, “In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place.”

Then, over the weekend, an inaugural conference was held in Austin, organized chiefly by the pastor and congregation of the Austin Mennonite Church. The National Assembly to Honor Freedom of Conscience featured guest speakers Walter Wink (noted theologian and nonviolence trainer), Gene Stoltzfus (former director of Christian Peacemaker Teams) and Ann Wright, whose book, “Dissent: Voices of Conscience” was published this year and includes a foreward by Daniel Ellsberg. Conference panelists included conscientious objectors and GI resisters whose stories parallel those in Wright’s book.

Ann Wright spoke also at a book signing event at BookWoman on Monday, where matters of conscience, government, law, risk, family and the military were discussed by those present, including, again, several conscientious objectors. The week seemed to come full circle with Ellsberg’s Austin appearance the following evening.

In conjunction with a UT conference planned for the coming weekend, Ellsberg was asked to compare what was happening in 1968 with what is happening now. He packed a lot in – dates, names, places and people – while his primary message echoed what I had heard all week: truth can free us from war.

Ellsberg did not talk much about the tragedies and tumult of 1968, but rather focused on what he saw and experienced as a government insider. “1968 is a year I don’t like to relive,” he admitted. He spent most of his time describing events leading up to that year, beginning with the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964 and the tangled web that was spun from it and later documented in the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg also recounted something about the less tangible factors that led to the escalation of the Indochina War – the human strengths and frailties of the political and military actors at that time, including him.

Ellsberg spoke with an intense clarity of memory, recounting the details of who said what when, what they probably meant and what they probably did or didn’t know at the time. I sensed that in spite of the strange mix of pariah/hero status he attained following the publishing of the Pentagon Papers, he still is proud of the insider position he once held and perhaps even misses the feeling of closeness that resulted from being loyal to powerful people and knowing their secrets. In fact, he said that being called a traitor is something he has never gotten used to.

In his talk, Ellsberg didn’t fully explain his inner change of heart, the private crisis of conscience that led him to shift from personal loyalty to the president and joint chiefs of staff to a more abstract loyalty to the Constitution and international law. But, as he wrote in an article in Harpers in 2006 (quoted by UT’s Evan Carton during his introduction of Ellsberg),

I had long prized my own identity as a keeper of the president’s secrets. In 1964 it never even occurred to me to break the many secrecy agreements I had signed, in the Marines, at the Rand Corporation, in the Pentagon. Although I already knew the Vietnam War was a mistake and based on lies, my loyalties then were to the secretary of defense and the president (and to my promises of secrecy, on which my own career as a president’s man depended). I’m not proud that it took me years of war to awaken to the higher loyalties owed by every government official to the rule of law, to our soldiers in harm’s way, to our fellow citizens, and, explicitly, to the Constitution, which every one of us had sworn an oath ‘to support and uphold.’ It took me that long to recognize that the secrecy agreements we had signed frequently conflicted with our oath to uphold the Constitution.

More about the role of conscience in Ellsberg’s moral conflict can be found in a passage I read about ten years ago in Daniel Hallock’s collection of writings and interviews, Hell, Healing and Resistance: Veterans Speak. The book includes an interview with Ellsberg in which he recalls these pivotal personal events in 1968 and ’69:

Now, two things affected my life at that point. I’d been reading Gandhi since the spring of ’68, when I happened to meet people from the Quaker Action group at a conference in Princeton. I had gone there to study counter-revolution, and they were there as nonviolent revolutionaries. So I started reading MLK, Stride Toward Freedom, and Barbara Deming, who wrote an essay called Revolution and Equilibrium. I read and reread many times a book by Joan Bondurant called The Conquest of Violence, on Gandhian thought, which converted me very strongly, very impressively.

Then, in late August 1969 I went to a conference of the War Resisters League – they were founded by World War I CO’s; Einstein was once their honorary president – and in the course of this conference I was induced to go to a vigil for somebody who was going to prison for draft resistance, which was a very unusual thing for me to be doing. There I was, standing in the street outside the Philadelphia post office, passing out leaflets. This was not the sort of thing the GSA Team did. It seemed, you know, rather undignified – giving away your influence and your access in such a ridiculous way, just handing out leaflets like a bum.

Then, at the end of this conference, I met another young man, Randy Kehler, a Harvard college graduate who had gone on to Stanford but then stopped his studies to work for the War Resisters League. He gave a talk and at the end he announced that he was also on his way to prison for refusal to cooperate with the draft. And this came to me as a total shock. It just hit me that it was a terrible thing for my country that the best he and so many others could do was go to prison. I went to the men’s room and just sat on the floor and cried for about an hour and thought, ‘My country has come to this? We’re eating our young. We’re relying on them, to end the war and to fight the war?’ And I felt it was up to me. I was older. I was thirty-eight. It was up to us older people to stop the war.

Ellsberg realized his tool was information and his sacrifice was the loss of his insider position and a risk, like that of the draft resister, of imprisonment. MLK’s April 4, 1967 admonition, “A time comes when silence is betrayal,” gained special meaning for him.

Ellsberg feels we are in a similarly critical time now. It’s a time that calls for greater risk-taking. He said that Obama, for example, could risk standing against an escalation of the Iraq war into Iran, Afghanistan or Pakistan. Links ought to be made between the economic crisis and the war. “Can we afford to murder people at this cost indefinitely?” is the question we must ask, he says. He pointed out that in the five years after 1968 – when the Indochina war had lost almost all popular support, four times as many bombs were dropped in Southeast Asia as were dropped prior to 1968. He fears the same kind of enlargement of war could easily happen again. “Power doesn’t learn from history,” he said. “Power follows its own dictates; power doesn’t give up its power.”

Ellsberg concluded, “This country needs to advance in another direction.” Directed by conscience and moved by the acts of conscience of others, people can change course. His life is a case in point. Truth can stand up to power, and a bum with a leaflet can change the course of history.

[Susan Van Haitsma also blogs as makingpeace at Statesman.com.]

Also see Daniel Ellsberg, Kathleen Cleaver Headline Austin ‘1968’ Conference by Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / Oct. 7, 2008

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Mark Rudd : Thoughts on 2012

Posted on October 9, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

‘The Republicans are leaving Obama with a mess…’ Drawing by Doug Potter.

Obama’s second term: ‘a diverse group of people are working on a progressive agenda within the Demo Party that demands a second New Deal.’
By Mark Rudd / The Rag Blog / October 9, 2008

I’m thinking a lot about the 2012 election, for Obama’s second term. All of his advisors are Clintonites, ie., Republican lite. They did nothing to reverse the privatization, anti-union, free market trend begun under Reagan, quite the contrary. They laid the basis for the current wars, accomplishing next to nothing toward diplomacy and international law. They will inevitably fail to rescue the economy from depression and will win no war in Afghanistan or anywhere else.

But meanwhile, a diverse group of people are working on a progressive agenda within the Demo Party that demands a second New Deal (with disarmament and international law). That’s our four year goal. It will take that long to set up an infrastructure for the Demo Party that will do what the right-wing think tanks did for the Republicans. They took power and held it for twenty years and dominated the intervening eight with a network that included university endowments, publications, prizes, fellowships, radio and tv stations, internet outlets. They even had whole universities of their own with schools to feed them.

Of course one big difference is that the Repubs for the last 35 years have had a single unifying concept, to shrink government (except for the military) and let the markets rip. The strategy was to create a coalition of ideological conservatives and Christian conservatives. What’s the left’s unifying concept? What’s its winning strategy? The most common formula I hear is the reversal of Reagan’s dogma: the state, as the concentration of the democratic whole, has the responsibility to use its resources to help the citizens and the planet. The coalition to achieve power for this concept is much less clear.

People in the progressive political class are beginning to build a progressive infrastructure in the Demo party. Good examples are Media Matters, the Center for Independent Media, with a network of ten statewide online newspapers. There are funding organizations coming into existence behind them. Many other institutions and outlets are in place, mostly small and on the young side, which is great. But this infrastructure needs to expand very quickly to challenge the center-rightists of the party, who have been in power since at least 1992, actually longer. They’re a legacy of the McGovern defeat of 1972. At the Democratic National Convention in Denver I saw no indication that this new progressive infrastructure was even noticed by those in power. Not even a tip of the hat. Tom Hayden says that not one Obama foreign policy advisor is an anti-interventionist or of the peace camp.

The Republicans are leaving Obama with such a mess that free-market, trickle down remedies will fail and will have been exposed as bankrupt, corrupt, and insufficient: the wars will continue, at least in Afghanistan, if Obama makes good on his campaign promise. So the reelection campaign four years from now will be an historic opening for the progressive agenda. This will be equally true if, perish the thought, McCain/Palin are elected. But in that case the right-wing populist movement—racist and militarist—will be much stronger than had it not been nurtured by the government.

Sooner or later there will be a power struggle within the Demo party between the progressives and the rightists, the Clinton/DLC wing. It won’t be pretty, but it has to be, just as the conservatives had to wrest the Republican party away from the Rockefeller wing. It’s still not clear who “we” are. This election will go far to solving that problem.

For over a year, Tom Hayden’s been urging people to think about the movement necessary to push Obama to the left. That’s our goal. The Obama field campaign has been making good progress at building actual grass-root electoral organization. I haven’t seen the peace movement do anything comparable in the last five years, have you? The top down, progressive infrastructure model has zero chance of working unless there’s a movement at the base. Obama has built that structure and will maintain it. We’d better be in it or near it or we’re out in the cold.

Is all this obvious and known by everyone, or does it bear further discussion?

The Rag Blog

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Fairie Tale About the Economy : You Gotta Believe

Posted on October 9, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


‘Healing our sick economy is going to take the power of faith.’
By Roger Baker / The Rag Blog / October 9, 2008

Interestingly enough, those who understand the mysteries of the US economy advise us that once we have faith in the political and business leadership — then will our capitalist economic system have what it takes to recover. Thus it was with Tinker Bell the Fairy; only when the children believed could she recover. I believe the same principle applies to faith healing at prayer meetings and religious revivals.

Healing our sick economy is going to take the power of faith. Do you sincerely believe in our leaders in Washington? And the bankers too?

…The market — and the economy — will improve only once investors have confidence in the political and business leadership again. Unfortunately, that may take months or even years. The United States has entered uncharted territory, and there are no easy answers or solutions.

Getting a Grasp On the Crisis by Glenn Kessler / Washington Post / Oct. 9, 2008

You gotta believe.

…In the story if not enough people believe in fairies, Tinker Bell will die from drinking poison. The resulting plea by Peter calling out to children everywhere to sustain her, is a moment of childhood realisation that Tinkerbell should be immortal and is just too hard to believe especially as Peter has an everlasting childhood in which real death and sadness cannot exist. Long live Tinkerbell is the cry and has meant that many versions of this little fairy has inspired artists all over the world to create their own ‘Tink’ and for many children this is their introduction to the wonders of Fairyland…

Fairies World

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Conservative Columnist David Brooks Calls Sarah Palin a ‘Cancer’

Posted on October 9, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

David Brooks. Getty Images.

Comparing her anti-intellectualism to that of President Bush, Brooks called Sarah Palin a ‘fatal cancer to the Republican party.’
By Danny Shea / October 8, 2008

See Video of interview with David Brooks, Below.

David Brooks spoke frankly about the presidential and vice presidential candidates Monday afternoon, calling Sarah Palin a “fatal cancer to the Republican party” but describing John McCain and Barack Obama as “the two best candidates we’ve had in a long time.”

In an interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg at New York’s Le Cirque restaurant to unveil that magazine’s redesign, Brooks decried Palin’s anti-intellectualism and compared her to President Bush in that regard:

[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he’d rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn’t think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I’m afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.

Brooks praised Palin’s natural political talent, but said she is “absolutely not” ready to be president or vice president. He explained, “The more I follow politicians, the more I think experience matters, the ability to have a template of things in your mind that you can refer to on the spot, because believe me, once in office there’s no time to think or make decisions.”

The New York Times columnist also said that the “great virtue” of Palin’s counterpart, Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden, is that he is anything but a “yes man.”

“[Biden] can’t not say what he thinks,” Brooks remarked. “There’s no internal monitor, and for Barack Obama, that’s tremendously important to have a vice president who will be that way. Our current president doesn’t have anybody like that.”

Brooks also spent time praising Obama’s intellect and skills in social perception, telling two stories of his interactions with Obama that left him “dazzled”:

Obama has the great intellect. I was interviewing Obama a couple years ago, and I’m getting nowhere with the interview, it’s late in the night, he’s on the phone, walking off the Senate floor, he’s cranky. Out of the blue I say, ‘Ever read a guy named Reinhold Niebuhr?’ And he says, ‘Yeah.’ So i say, ‘What did Niebuhr mean to you?’ For the next 20 minutes, he gave me a perfect description of Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought, which is a very subtle thought process based on the idea that you have to use power while it corrupts you. And I was dazzled, I felt the tingle up my knee as Chris Matthews would say.

And the other thing that does separate Obama from just a pure intellectual: he has tremendous powers of social perception. And this is why he’s a politician, not an academic. A couple of years ago, I was writing columns attacking the Republican congress for spending too much money. And I throw in a few sentences attacking the Democrats to make myself feel better. And one morning I get an email from Obama saying, ‘David, if you wanna attack us, fine, but you’re only throwing in those sentences to make yourself feel better.’ And it was a perfect description of what was going through my mind. And everybody who knows Obama all have these stories to tell about his capacity for social perception.

Brooks predicted an Obama victory by nine points, and said that although he found Obama to be “a very mediocre senator,” he was is surrounded by what Brooks called “by far the most impressive people in the Democratic party.”

“He’s phenomenally good at surrounding himself with a team,” Brooks said. “I disagree with them on most issues, but I am given a lot of comfort by the fact that the people he’s chosen are exactly the people I think most of us would want to choose if we were in his shoes. So again, I have doubts about him just because he was such a mediocre senator, but his capacity to pick staff is impressive.”

Source / The Huffington Post

Video of Interview with David Brooks shot by Rachel Sklar

Thanks to Fontaine Maverick / The Rag Blog

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Afghanistan: Not a ‘Good Fight’ Against Terrorism

Posted on October 9, 2008 by RagBlog


Time To Face The Facts On Afghanistan
By Eric S. Margolis / October 6, 2008

TORONTO — For those who savor historical irony, the Soviet Empire collapsed in the years 1989-1991 because of an implosion of its economy brought on by a ruinous arms race with the United States and the heavy costs of occupying Afghanistan.

Seventeen years later came the turn of the world’s other great imperial power, the United States. Lethally bloated by runaway debt, and burdened by 50% of the world’s military spending, the house of cards known as the US economy finally collapsed.

The doomsday news from New York and Washington has obscured most other world affairs. This is unfortunate because for the first time there is a flicker – and I mean only a flicker – of light at the end of the Afghanistan tunnel. It may only be an oncoming truck bomb.

The US-installed Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, revealed last week he had asked Saudi Arabia to broker peace talks with the alliance of tribal and political groups resisting Western occupation collectively known as Taliban. Saudi Arabia had been one of the few nations to recognize the Taliban government and retains considerable influence in Afghanistan and remains a loyal friend of Pakistan.

Taliban leader Mullah Omar quickly rejected Karzai’s offer, and claimed the US was heading toward the same kind of catastrophic defeat in Afghanistan that the Soviet Union had met. The ongoing financial panic in North America lent substance to his words.

The US economy is in grave peril and its big three automakers may soon face bankruptcy. In a crazy sidebar, as Wall Street and the Us banking system faced meltdown, the insouciant Pentagon just announced it would spend $300 million with American `contractors’ to spread pro-US propaganda in Iraq. This remarkable idiocy notwithstanding, Washington could soon run out of money necessary to keep paying for operations in Iraq, and bribing Pakistan with $250-300 million a month to wage war against its own rebellious Pashtun tribes people along the Afghanistan border.

The able and forthright US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, urgently called for at least 10,000 more troops. US and NATO forces in Afghanistan are increasingly on the defensive, hard pressed to defend vulnerable supply lines in spite of massive fire power and total control of the air.

Attacks on US and NATO convoys are even beginning at the port of Karachi. The prospect of the US spreading a war it can’t win in Afghanistan into Pakistan is military and political madness.

Startlingly, Gen. McKiernan appeared to break with Bush administration policy by proposing political talks with Taliban and admitting the war had to be ended by diplomacy. The military men know this war cannot be won on the battlefield. McKiernan’s predecessor told Congress that 400,000 US troops would be needed to pacify Afghanistan. There are currently 80,000 western troops in Afghanistan, many of them unwilling to enter combat.

By sharp contrast, I recently asked Karl Rove, President Bush’s former senior advisor, how the US could ever hope to win the war in Afghanistan. His eyes dancing with imperial hubris, Rove brightly replied, `More Predators(missile armed drones) and helicopters! Then we’ll go into Pakistan.’

Which reminded me of poet Hilaire Beloc’s wonderful line about 19th century British imperialism that I use in my new book, `American Raj:’ `Whatever happens/we have got/the Maxim gun* /and they have not.’

*Maxim gun – early machine gun

Though Karzai’s olive branch was rejected, the fact he made it public is very important. By doing so, both he and Gen. McKiernan broke the simple-minded Western taboo against negotiations with Taliban and its allies.

Let us remember that Taliban is not a `terrorist movement,’ as claimed by western war propaganda, but was founded as an Islamic religious movement dedicated to fighting Communism and the drug trade.

Taliban received US funding until May, 2001. In fact, CIA keep close contacts with Taliban, many of whose members were US-backed mujahidin from the anti-Soviet war of the 1980’s, for possible future use against the Communist regimes of Central Asia and against China. The 9/11 attacks made CIA immediately cut its links to Taliban and burn the associated files.

In recent years, Western war propaganda has so demonized Taliban that few politicians have the courage to propose the obvious and inevitable: a negotiated settlement to this pointless seven-year war. A noteworthy exception came last April when NATO’s secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who admitted the war could only be ended by negotiations, not military means.

The Karzai government cannot extend its authority beyond Kabul because that would mean overthrowing the very same Uzbek and Tajik drug-dealing warlords and Communists chiefs that are its base of power. There is no real Afghan national army, just a bunch of unenthusiastic mercenaries who pretend to fight.

The current war in Afghanistan is not really about al-Qaida and `terrorism,’ but about opening a secure corridor through Pashtun tribal territory to export the oil and gas riches of the Caspian Basin of Central Asia to the West. The US and NATO forces in Afghanistan are essentially pipeline protection troops fighting off the hostile natives..

Both Barack Obama and John McCain are wrong about Afghanistan. It is not a `good’ fight against `terrorism,’ but a classic, 19th century colonial war to advance western geopolitical power into resource-rich Central Asia. The Pashtun Afghans who live there are ready to fight for another 100 years. The western powers certainly are not.

As that great American founding father Benjamin Franklin said, `there is no good war, and no bad peace.’ Time for the West to face reality in Afghanistan.

[Eric S. Margolis is an award-winning, internationally syndicated columnist. His articles appear in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Times of London, the Gulf Times, the Khaleej Times and Dawn. Visit his blog – http://www.ericmargolis.com/. ]

Source / Information Clearing House

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He’s Not Heavy…

Posted on October 9, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Cartoon by Joshua Brown.

Thanks to S. R. Keister / The Rag Blog

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The Truth About War Between Georgia and Russia

Posted on October 8, 2008 by RagBlog


I survived the Georgian war. Here’s what I saw.
By Lira Tskhovrebova / October 8, 2008

I blame Georgia’s leaders.

Tskhinvali, South Ossetia – In a speech before the United Nations last month, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili implored world leaders to set up an international investigation to find out the truth about the war in South Ossetia.

I couldn’t agree more. But I think the results of an honest investigation would reveal a very different “truth” than what President Saakashvili claims.

I know this because I was in Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, on Aug. 7 when Georgian troops marched into the city and killed my friends and neighbors. I huddled with my family in terror for three nights while Saakashvili’s tanks and rockets destroyed hundreds of our homes, desecrated cemeteries, gutted schools and hospitals.

I also have good reason not to trust what Saakashvili says. For three days before the attack I had been getting calls from many Georgian friends warning me to get out. They said Saakashvili was planning an attack. Most of the Georgians living in South Ossetia left because they knew what was coming.

On the night of Aug. 7, Saakashvili went on television and assured the frightened civilian population of South Ossetia that he would not attack us. This was long after the time Saakashvili now claims Russians had begun “invading” Georgia.

Ossetians went to bed relieved and thankful for a peaceful night.

Less than two hours later, according to credible international accounts, his artillery, bombers, and three brigades of ground troops unleashed what I can only describe as a fierce hell on our city. In the moment, we knew only our fear as we hid. Afterward I spoke with hundreds of Ossetians to find out what was done to us.

My friend’s elderly father tried to douse the flames set by Georgian fire on the home he had built with his hands. His leg was severed by shrapnel from Georgian weapons. He bled to death while his disabled wife crawled from their burning home.

Ossetians saw Georgian tanks firing into basements where women and children hid for safety They saw fleeing families shot down by Georgian snipers. We learned that the Georgian military had used Grad rocket systems and cluster bombs against Tskhinvali.

Yes, I would very much like to see an international commission investigate the truth of what happened.

When I came out from hiding, thanking God that the Russians had saved our lives, I was dismayed by the reaction of the international media to what had happened. There was nothing about Ossetian deaths and the unprovoked horrors inflicted by Saakashvili’s military. It made my heart sick.

The truth has been crushed by Georgia’s powerful public relations machine as mercilessly as Georgian tanks rolled over the defenseless civilians of Tskhinvali.

I know that Americans are a generous and fair people. But Americans haven’t been told the truth about what happened to us. Americans don’t understand that Ossetians are an independent, Christian Orthodox people with a deep history in our land. The world talks only about Georgian freedom. What of freedom for my people? Does our suffering, do our voices, mean nothing?

I don’t blame the Georgian people for what happened to us. The vast number of Ossetians and Georgians want to live in peace. I blame Georgia’s leaders.

Saakashvili has persuaded the world that he is a “beacon” of democracy and openness. But he won’t even tell his own people the truth. My Georgian friends weren’t allowed to see any Russian news sites during the conflict because all of those sites were blocked by Saakashvili’s government.

I know we are a small people, and I make no claim to understanding the experts in geopolitics with their theories and pronouncements about the great powers. But I have fought for women’s rights in Ossetia for 12 years and I believe in the truth.

In a recent article, Saakashvili cynically dismissed Ossetian suffering and deaths because, he said, Russia had “lied” about how many of my people were killed by the Georgian military.

It breaks my heart to even engage in this discussion. No one – including Saakashvili – knows how many Ossetians were killed by his Army. I have friends who buried loved ones in their backyards because there were no alternatives. Many people are still missing.

Does Saakashvili believe his vicious attack on a civilian city was justified if he only killed a few hundred rather than a few thousand? Do Americans realize that a military trained and equipped by the US government attacked a civilian population as they slept in their beds? Can they justify sending another billion dollars to Georgia and nothing for those Georgia attacked?

I have made an urgent appeal to the world for humanitarian relief for our people at the website helpossetianow.org. I beg the United States and the world to find out the truth. Please hear our voices.

• Lira Tskhovrebova is the founder of the Association of South Ossetian Women for Democracy and Human Rights and has worked for more than a decade to improve relations between people of Georgian and Ossetian descent in the Caucasus.

Source / Christian Science Monitor

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Seeing the Crime in Guantanamo Slowly Stopped

Posted on October 8, 2008 by RagBlog


Judge orders 17 Chinese Muslims released from Guantanamo Bay
By David G. Savage / October 8, 2008

U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina is to decide where in the U.S. the men can be released. The Pentagon cleared most of them of wrongdoing four years ago.

WASHINGTON — For the first time, a federal judge has ordered the Bush administration to release prisoners held at the U.S. military facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, ruling Tuesday that 17 Chinese Muslims must be brought to his courtroom by the end of the week so that they can be set free.

U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina said that the government’s authority to hold the men had “ceased” and that they were entitled to be released.

He said he would hold a hearing to decide on the conditions for releasing the men. Several religious and social groups, including 20 church leaders from Tallahassee, Fla., said they would help the men resettle in their community.

The 17 are Uighurs who fled persecution in the far western reaches of China. U.S. authorities, fearing what Chinese officials would do, have refused to send them back to China, and no other country has been willing to take them.

The judge’s order came more than six years after the men were sent to Guantanamo and more than four years after the Pentagon cleared most of them to be released. The Supreme Court ruled four months ago that judges can order the release of prisoners wrongly held at Guantanamo.

Soon thereafter, a federal appeals court reviewed the case of one of the Uighurs, Huzaifa Parhat, and ruled that the government had no basis for believing he was an “enemy combatant.” That decision set the stage for Urbina’s ruling Tuesday.

Civil liberties advocates hailed the order.

“This is a historic day for the United States,” said Emi MacLean, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights. “Finally, we are beginning the process of taking responsibility for our mistakes and fixing them.”

But Bush administration lawyers have insisted that judges have no authority to interfere with the handling of foreign military prisoners. On Tuesday, they also argued that immigration laws prohibit the release into the United States of individuals alleged to have terrorist ties and asked for an emergency order to block the release.

Administration officials “are deeply concerned by and strongly disagreed with” the decision to release the men, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said in a statement.

Human rights lawyers have described the 17 Uighurs as among the most egregious examples of wrongful imprisonment at Guantanamo. Natives of an area they call East Turkistan, the Uighurs fled from oppression by the Chinese government, including its policy of forced abortions, and settled in Afghanistan in 2001.

But after U.S. bombing raids hit their camps, they fled to Pakistan, where they were taken into custody by locals, who turned them over to U.S. troops offering $5,000 bounties for suspected foreign fighters. The U.S. military alleged that the Uighurs had received military training, and they were suspected of ties to the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, which the State Department had designated a terrorist group.

But the Uighurs strongly denied any ties to the Taliban, Al Qaeda or other enemies of the United States; their only enemy, they said, was the government of China. They said they had initially welcomed being in U.S. custody, hoping they would be safe and treated humanely.

Instead, 22 Uighurs were imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay in 2002. Five were released and sent to Albania two years ago, but the rest remained in custody because no country was willing to accept them. Lawyers spent years in court arguing for their release.

“The U.S. government has long recognized these men did not pose, and really never posed, a threat to the United States,” said Jennifer Daskal, a lawyer for Human Rights Watch. Tuesday’s ruling was significant, she said, because a judge “rejected the Bush administration’s theory that its own determination can trump judicial review and constitutional rights.”

Neil McGaraghan, a Boston lawyer who worked on the Uighurs’ case, said the men would be released from military custody Friday, barring a last-minute order from the appellate court.

Since 2002, the Pentagon has approved the release of more than 500 prisoners from Guantanamo, including the five Uighurs sent to Albania. More than 250 are still being held, including about 60 who would be freed if the U.S. government could find countries willing to take them.

Source / Los Angeles Times

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