9/11 : The Politics of Fear, Religious Fanaticism and Checks & Balances

Posted on September 11, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


‘They’ve attacked us! Turn on your TV!!’
By Thomas Cleaver / The Rag Blog / September 11, 2008

I remember seven years ago today like it was yesterday: the phone call at 0545 pulling me from sleep to hear a friend outside NYC shout “They’ve attacked us!” Shaking my head to wake up “What is this? Who is this? What….” “It’s Steve! Stumbling down the hall to the living room to turn on the TV and see the re-run of the second airplane hitting the north tower. Oh shit! Calling everyone I knew here in LA, many already awake from similar calls. Slumped in my chair the rest of the day, watching the unfolding disaster and telling myself it wasn’t a movie. Where’s the president? What will we do? Being willing to give Georgie the benefit of the doubt when he finally spoke. Singing all how-many choruses of America the Beautiful with Willie Nelson on the telethon. Wanting to see us do something. Understanding the old vet who was interviewed for “Band of Brothers” about why he joined up: “We were attacked!!”

And then everything else since. Losing what we were attacked for out of fear. Fighting the wrong enemy. Losing our allies. Wrecking our economy. To hell with those scummy bastards and their “patriotism.”

It is now clear that 9-11 accelerated the decline in the political character of the United States.

What passes for political discourse in the United States is now riven by the politics of fear, religious fanaticism, and the insidious corruption of the information shaping that discourse, all fueled by intolerance, endemic lying by public officials, and a mainstream media more interested in sensationalism or boosterism than facts or analysis. The debasing effects of these kinds of pernicious influences have been commented upon by people as different from one another as H. L. Menchen, Hermann Goering, Franklin Roosevelt, Edward Gibbon, and James Madison. (see below).

On the seventh anniversary of 9-11, in the middle of a presidential election, facing the prospect of unending war abroad and economic trauma at home, instead of suckered into a trivial debates over questions like whether lipstick on the face of pig is a sexist remark, it might be more useful for Americans to think about what we as a people have become and what we want to be in a representative republic that purports to be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

After considering the content of the quotations below, I urge you to carefully read and think about the larger meaning of the detailed information in the essay by Phillip Giraldi, below.

On the Politics of Fear:

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” — H.L. Mencken

“Naturally, the common people don’t want war…but, after all it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship…Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.” — Herman Goering at Nuremberg trial in 1946

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” — Franklin D. Roosevelt

On Religious Fanaticism:

”Their credulity debased and vitiated the faculties of the mind: they corrupted the evidence of history; and superstition gradually extinguished the hostile light of philosophy and science.” — Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

On the Central Importance of Information to Checks & Balances:

“A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” — James Madison, from a letter to W.T. Barry, August 4, 1822

Chuck Spinney / September 11, 2008

Feeding on Fear
By Philip Giraldi / September 9, 2008

The al-Qaeda attacks on New York City and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, truly changed the United States, and not for the better. National pathologies and suppressed xenophobia have been unleashed as never before, fanned by the belligerent rhetoric coming out of Washington and from the U.S. media. As James Madison put it, “If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.” That enemy has been terrorism.

It is arguable that nearly all the changes that have taken place in the United States over the past seven years have been driven by the fear of terrorism, which has been routinely exploited by politicians of both parties in pursuit of various objectives. As a result, today’s United States would be unrecognizable to the Founding Fathers. Americans now have to live with persistent government monitoring of their private lives, as exemplified by a huge and growing terrorist screening database that appears in various manifestations. The notorious no-fly list has a million entries, including more than 400,000 names of individuals, many of them U.S. citizens. The information on the list is secret and cannot be challenged.

And then there are the two versions of the PATRIOT Act and the Military Commissions Act, all of which combine to strip the liberties that Americans have traditionally enjoyed, including the right to associate freely, to be free from arbitrary detention or harassment, and to enjoy privacy in their personal affairs. The FBI has exploited its ability to investigate willy-nilly by issuing more than 30,000 National Security Letters annually, letters that compel the recipient to provide information on a target without any judicial oversight or due process. To those who argue that the government has not used its enhanced powers abusively to corrupt the judicial system, one need only point to the cases of José Padilla and Sami al-Arian, both of whom were detained without cause and held for years in extralegal limbo. Padilla may have been tortured to force him to confess. When the government was unable to convict him on terrorism charges, it was reduced to charging him with conspiracy and making its case based not on what he had actually said or done but on ludicrous testimony that he had been speaking in code-words to conceal his activities.

Overseas, the fear of terrorism has produced nothing but bad results. The United States has bullied friends and allies to enlist in a Manichean crusade to rid the world of terrorists. Some of the terrorists are more properly national liberation movements, like Hezbollah and Hamas, but Washington’s policy of one-size-fits-all means that there has been no attempt to divide and conquer through understanding that there are legitimate grievances and that all of the groups that the U.S. labels as terrorist are not the same. Fighting terrorism has been the justification of a series of disastrous wars, starting with Afghanistan and continuing with Iraq. It may yet result in a third and even a fourth war in Asia, against Iran and Syria, as some of the most persistent charges made against those countries by the U.S. government and media is that they are supporting terrorists.

Terrorism and terrorists were cited repeatedly in soundbites at both the Democratic and Republican conventions and by every candidate, but there never was any serious discussion of the problem of terrorism per se, so it probably would be useful at this point to look at a balance sheet on the issue. There has been no terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11. That is surely somewhat due to improved border security and visa control that makes it more difficult for foreign terrorists to enter the country, but it might also be because there appears to be little sympathy for terrorist movements among Muslims living in the United States. There are many arrests on terrorism charges every year in the U.S., but most of the cases are budget-driven as there is a lot of money available to investigate “terrorists.” It is also career-enhancing for a law enforcement officer to make a terrorist case arrest. Most of the arrests are, however, plea-bargained into immigration offenses or quietly dropped. The successful prosecutions have been ridiculous, in many cases aided and abetted by an “informant” inserted in the group who may have served as a catalyst for proposed terrorist activity. The FBI net has swept up pizza delivery men, landscapers, truck drivers, and the unemployed. Not a single alleged terrorist arrested and convicted in the United States has had the actual capability to carry out an act of terrorism.

In spite of the fact that there is little or no evidence of terrorists actually operating inside the U.S., the federal government is spending in the neighborhood of $100 billion per year in its war against terrorism. Considerable sums are also being spent by state and local governments and the private sector. If one assumes that there are something like 5,000 full-time terrorists scattered around the world, that works out to $40 million per terrorist per year from the federal government alone. Obviously, there is a lack of any kind of accountability in the process. That lack of efficiency is there by design, as the terrorism business keeps many people employed, both among the contractors who feed off the budgets and the bureaucrats who man the vast, new anti-terrorism infrastructure. As the terrorism threat in the United States at least appears to be hugely overstated, isn’t it time to cut those numbers down to size? Europe had a major terrorism problem in the 1970s and 1980s that was defeated by superior police and intelligence work backed up by a judicial system prepared to try suspects without any wholesale dismantling of civil liberties. Terrorists were treated as the criminals they were, arrested, and send to jail. More recently, the last terrorist groups in Europe, ETA and the IRA, have withered away and are on their last legs, all due to effective intelligence and police work. If there are terrorists in the United States, they should have been handled in the same way, not through the creation of a vast, ineffective, and enormously expensive bureaucracy that erodes the rights of every citizen.

And then there is the terrorism problem overseas, the grandiose “global war on terrorism,” which the United States has undertaken as if the rest of the world had agreed that an international policeman was either desirable or necessary. U.S. heavyhandedness over the past seven years has created more terrorists than it has killed or captured, but many of the terrorists are no longer committed ideologues. Many resort to terror to resist the occupation of their countries while others seek revenge for the slaughter of family and friends in the numerous cases of collateral damage that have resulted from the U.S. industrialized military approach to defeat terrorism. Afghanistan is truly in danger of becoming a narco-state run by terrorists, but, Afghanistan aside, no country wants to have terrorists in their midst, and most have taken effective steps to deny them sanctuary and funding. This has forced terrorists to morph into national and local groups that no longer have the resources or reach of a central organization like al-Qaeda once had. The attacks in London and Madrid were carried out by local people using their own resources. This makes it more difficult to detect the terrorists as they are not reliant on money or associates from outside, but it also makes it possible to effectively deal with the problem locally on a case-by-case basis using law enforcement and judicial resources.

Hyping the fear of terrorism should be eliminated from our political discourse. Terrorism is undeniably a global problem, but it cannot destroy the United States unless we Americans do it to ourselves by overreacting to the threat. The terrorist menace has been grossly overstated for political reasons and because it is good business for the many entities that would have no other raison d’être. It is time to make terrorism go away. Constantly citing the terrorist problem empowers the terrorists by giving them free publicity and making them appear to be Third World Robin Hoods. It also is a distraction, making it more difficult to discern the simple and historically proven measures that can be taken to identify, arrest, and imprison terrorists as the criminals that they truly are.

Source / AntiWar.com

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Murder, Corruption, and Intrigue in Israel

Posted on September 11, 2008 by RagBlog

On August 1 the Independent reported claims made in a book by two Israeli journalists that Shaul Mofaz in 2001 called for a death toll of 70 Palestinians a day. Photo: Getty.

Olmert indicted as deputy is accused of war crimes
By Donald Macintyre / September 8, 2008

JERUSALEM — The Israeli Attorney General has been urged to launch a criminal investigation into whether Shaul Mofaz, a leading prime ministerial candidate, ordered “war crimes” to be committed when he was the military’s chief of staff.

A leading Israeli law professor has written to justice officials, calling for the investigation into claims – highlighted by The Independent last month – that during a briefing to army officers in May 2001, after the start of the second Palestinian uprising, Mr Mofaz ordered a daily “quota” of Palestinian deaths.

Last night, Israeli police recommended to prosecutors that the Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, be indicted in a corruption investigation. With Mr Olmert committed to resigning after his Kadima party holds a leadership vote a week today, the recommendation will have no immediate impact on his tenure and does not guarantee an indictment by the Attorney General.

The Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, is the front-runner in the contest for the leadership of Kadima. Mr Mofaz, the Deputy Prime Minister, is his main rival.

David Kretzmer, emeritus professor of international law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, says that accounts of the briefing by Mr Mofaz give rise “to a grave suspicion” that he “committed serious offences, some of which at least, fall into the category of war crimes”.

The letter to the Attorney General, Menachem Mazuz, refers to a book by two Israeli journalists, Raviv Drucker and Ofer Shelah, which says that Mr Mofaz, after ensuring he was not being officially recorded, called for a Palestinian death toll of 70 per day.

Professor Kretzmer tells Mr Mazuz that one lesson of the corruption inquiry into Mr Olmert is that it is best to investigate candidates for high office before they reach it. “Otherwise the public is liable to be exposed once more to the disgrace of having police officers arrive at the Prime Minister’s official residence in order to interrogate him.”

Police have urged Mr Mazuz to indict Mr Olmert on two counts – that he funded personal trips abroad for himself and his family with money secured by the multiple billing of public organisations, and another arising out of claims by a US businessman, Morris Talansky, that he illegally used political donations for personal expenditure. It is up to Mr Mazuz to decide if Mr Olmert should be indicted.

The Shelah/Drucker book, Boomerang: The Failure Of Leadership In The Second Intifada, says that while Mr Mofaz’s alleged instruction caused disquiet among some senior officers, a Hebron district commander said that the subsequent fatal shooting of a Palestinian policeman was in accordance with the briefing.

Professor Kretzmer, who also holds a senior academic post at the University of Ulster, says that an order to kill people “by quota” is “not consistent with the norms of humanitarian law”, and that the test of proportionality is especially relevant in cases of military occupation, in which even the actions of armed groups do not “relieve the Army of its obligations to residents of the territory”.

The letter cites reports in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2001 and 2002 which, he says, raise suspicions that Mr Mofaz ordered officers to shoot at every armed Palestinian regardless of the threat posed to Israeli forces.

It points out that at the start of hostilities in 2000, Palestinian police in particular were armed by agreement with the Israeli government, that the military had insisted the conflict was with armed groups and not against the Palestinian Authority or people, and that the Geneva Conventions prohibited killing people not taking part in hostilities.

Noting that countries are obliged to investigate grave breaches of the conventions, he warns that if the Israeli authorities do not do so, “there is a fear that it may be carried out by the authorities of another country”.

Professor Kretzmer has been told his letter has been passed to “relevant persons” in the justice ministry who will read it. A ministry spokesman said this did not mean that it accepted there was a case against Mr Mofaz, or that an investigation would be launched, and it was normal that “any complaint or letter” was studied before a reply was drafted. There was no response from Mr Mofaz’s office.

In 2002, while Mr Mofaz was visiting Britain, the British lawyer Imran Khan, representing a group of Palestinians, presented the Director of Public Prosecutions with claims of other war crimes by Mr Mofaz, including targeted assassinations and the demolition of Palestinian homes. While Mr Khan claimed the DPP had passed the file to Scotland Yard’s “crimes against humanity” section, no action was taken before Mr Mofaz departed.

Source / The Independent

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Truth: Why Bother Anymore in This Nation?

Posted on September 11, 2008 by RagBlog


Evil: It’s the New Good!
By Mark Morford / September 10, 2008

Shut up and drink your high fructose corn syrup, sucker

The devil isn’t evil, he just has lousy PR.

Examples? They are legion. Here’s one the Powers That Be desperately hope you’ll swallow, a nasty piece of marketing gall meant to stab at your intelligence and bitch-slap your intuition, but which is nevertheless being force-fed to you as happy environmental manna, a viciously deformed version of something called “progress.”

Here is “clean coal.” Isn’t it beautiful? Truly, the hell-bound ad agency that coughed up that one even had the nerve to film a commercial featuring Kool and the Gang’s “Celebrate” playing over perky scenes of manic Americans sucking down electricity like John McCain sucks down extra oxygen, claiming that coal is America’s namesake resource and we should therefore kneel before it and worship it like apple pie and horrible sex-ed and Lindsay Lohan’s nipples. Did I mention the coal industry’s PR people are going to hell for this? Count on it.

There is, of course, no such thing as “clean coal.” It’s as impossible as a humanitarian Republican, as insulting as Homeland Security. Even Obama gets it wrong in his support of this lethal oxymoron. There are only two options: Brutally pollutive coal extraction and burning techniques, rapacious strip mining and millions of acres of destroyed forest and contaminated water tables and toxified air and one of the most environmentally destructive energy sources on the planet; or new and slightly less horribly pollutive coal extraction/burn techniques that attempt to rein in a few of the more toxic pollutants, but not including carbon dioxide or, you know, cancer and death. That’s about it.

Translation: “clean coal” is not only one of the most insidious, repugnant oxymorons — right up there with “friendly fire” and “conservative think tank” and “Alaskan teen virgin” — it’s also one of the deadliest.

Not good enough? Don’t you worry.

Here is high-fructose corn syrup. It appears the corporate whiners down at the Corn Refiners Association, unhappy with the billions they’ve already made on the staggering rise of their dreadful product and apparently tired of their gunk getting such a bad rap from every doctor and health mag from here to the Mayo Clinic, have launched a sweet little counter-offensive aimed at proving their goop is, well, slightly less evil than you thought.

Here is their cute little commercial: Two generic moms, one pouring her kids a big, fat glass of bright red HFCS-laden pseudo-juice, as the other frowns and says gosh golly Susan, you feed your kids that crap? That has high fructose corn syrup in it!

And the first irresponsible mom just smiles an ‘oh you stupid bitch’ kind of robotic smile and says hey, HFCS is really no worse than sugar, it’s natural because it’s made from corn, and it’s perfectly OK in moderation, so shut the hell up and drink your nauseating food-colored crap, Marjorie (please note: I might be paraphrasing slightly).

Isn’t that lovely? To be fair, they have a meager point. Despite its highly processed nature, HFCS might very well be exactly as bad for you as plain ol’ sugar (by the way, thanks to the wishy-washy FDA, “natural” is a completely bulls–t term that means nothing; calling HFCS “natural” is like calling Cindy McCain natural). But its manufacture is simply awful, from the tons of pesticides used to grow all that needless industrial corn to the ridiculous and devastating farm subsidies that force farmers to grow far more of it than our country can possibly use.

Which is why HFCS is everywhere and in everything, from soups to whole-grain bread, crackers to ketchup to pickles to tomato paste. Thanks in part to the violent ubiquity of HFCS, bloated Americans now consume a total of 100 pounds of sweetener a year, per capita. Go read your “Omnivore’s Dilemma” or rent the “King Corn” DVD to see just how awful this stuff is. The Corn Refiners Association is praying you don’t.

On it goes. Every major oil company has a pseudo-green, false-front “Let’s take care of our planet” BS campaign underway, whitewashing their evils so insultingly it’s like Dick Cheney wearing a PETA T-shirt to a canned pheasant hunt. Even the king of consumer mediocrity, Microsoft, launched a “Vista: It’s not quite as awful as you’ve heard” campaign to help stifle the low-level groans of 20 million bug-addled users.

And recall, won’t you, a couple of years back, when Wal-Mart launched its own ad campaign to counter all the negative press it was getting about its nasty labor policies, the lawsuits and infractions and claims of forced overtime, even lovely hints of sexism and racism and blurry photos of secret underground lairs where 10,000 paunchy middle managers met to skin live kittens and drink the blood of sweatshop workers and sacrifice their dreams as they chant Shania Twain lyrics in their underwear (again, paraphrasing).

Of course, Wal-Mart, rather than actually improve its policies, instead spent millions to make itself merely look friendlier, touting all the (low-paying, often part-time, generally miserable) jobs they bring in to a community, and gosh, just look how happy those cashiers seem to be, and never you mind the vague threats that if anyone tries to unionize, a pale army of sexless managers will follow you home and kill you in your sleep with this 20-pound tub of cheese-coated popcorn. Mmm, wholesome.

But perhaps none of these examples can top the scabrous GOP, suddenly being repackaged and resold to exhausted, Bush-ravaged Americans as “the maverick party,” with John McCain desperately trying to distance himself from the worst and most abusive administration in a lifetime, all the torture and warmongering and pandering to the religious right, even as he so obviously plans to continue it all.

It’s a rather sickening marketing ploy, made even more contemptible by McCain’s choice of VP, not someone of sharp political acumen who will challenge his decisions and offer insight and inspire confidence, but Sarah Palin, former mayor of a piddling, eyeblink of a pee-stop town in rural Nowheresville, a shrill woman of zero political accomplishment clearly brought on board to lure both confused white women and the hard evangelical right, a minor state governor who thinks Creationism is dandy and who just got her first passport in 2007 and who would happily pass a law to force your daughter to have the baby if she’d been raped. Charming.

Truly, Palin is that most dangerous of self-aggrandizing right-wing politico, a potentially very powerful woman full of moxie and nerve and intensely intolerant, extremist views who actually hates women. Really, you can’t get much more Republican than that.

And lo, in the spirit of Wal-Mart and the Corn Refiners Association and the clean-coal cretins trying to make their rampant evils seem slightly less, well, evil, we humbly offer to McPalin this new marketing slogan: “The Republicans: An entirely new kind of contemptible you hadn’t even thought of yet.”

Just trying to help, really.

© 2008 San Francisco Chronicle

Mark Morford’s Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate.com.

Source / San Francisco Chronicle

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ECONOMY : Size Matters When You’re Bailing Out!

Posted on September 10, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

1943 photo of Merchant Marines bailing out of a lifeboat.

What good is money if you can’t spend it on stuff like oil, right?
By Roger Baker / The Rag Blog / September 10, 2008

Since Lehman Brothers investment bank (the type of bank relatively free of federal regulation) is too big to fail, and since South Korea seems disinclined to bail them out, it’s now a matter of conducting an awe-inspiring reorganization to impress potential investors.

If you have $65 billion in bad mortgage assets you have to peddle to prevent the feds from shutting you down, then you can start by sorting through your assets in a new way. This time you can throw out the “toxic waste” for whatever the market wants to pay and relabel the remainder with some investor confidence inspiring labels. Even if you might not care to invest in an outfit like Spinco, it would be harder to resist investing in Cleanco, right? It could work, although the bank stock investors seem to lack enthusiasm.

But if the worst happens, this tale will have a happy ending because the Fed will ride in to rescue the bank, as the lender of last resort for all the giant outfits deemed too big to fail, whoever they are. Then all the Fed has to do is print up enough money or print enough bonds to pacify all the bank creditors and life goes on as usual, right?

Except for the fact that all these newly available bailout dollars and federal IOUs are going to try to buy real stuff. What good is money if you can’t spend it on stuff like oil, right? Here is where that leads and what it implies.

“Due to the bloating federal deficit and the big-dollar promises the politicians have made, but that the US can’t possibly pay, further rapid growth in the money supply lies ahead. And that means more inflation, which means the dollar’s recovery will turn out to be temporary. And more debasement of the dollar equals higher gold.” — Asia Times

Now on to Lehman Brothers.

…The U.S. government cannot let Lehman fail because the systemic ripples would be too big,” said James Hyde, a banking analyst at London-based European Credit Management Ltd., which oversees $27 billion for clients and doesn’t own Lehman debt.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch, the three biggest U.S. securities firms, said yesterday after the close of regular trading in New York that they weren’t backing away from their smaller rival.

“Goldman Sachs is a willing counterparty to Lehman Brothers across all our businesses,” said Michael DuVally, a spokesman for Goldman. Spokespeople for Morgan Stanley and Merrill said their firms continue to trade with Lehman.

Business As Usual

Citigroup Inc., the biggest U.S. bank by assets, UBS AG and Credit Suisse Group AG, the two largest Swiss banks, and BlackRock Inc., the biggest publicly traded U.S. fund manager, said they too continue to do business as usual with the firm.

Lehman has about $65 billion in mortgage-related assets that are losing value with the collapse of the real-estate market. Most of the portfolio, about $40 billion, is tied to commercial real estate holdings, which Lehman may spin off into a new company dubbed “Spinco,” people familiar with the matter said before the firm’s statement yesterday.

Lehman plans to announce it will sell a package of mostly British residential real-estate assets, the Wall Street Journal reported today, citing people it didn’t identify. The remaining portion, divorced of the most-distressed property assets, will be called “Cleanco,” the newspaper added…

Lehman’s Fuld Faces Pressure to Land Deal After Drop by Yalman Onaran / Bloomberg / September 10, 2008.

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Honoring the Dead : ‘Eyes Wide Open’

Posted on September 10, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Photo of Eyes Wide Open on the Mall in Washington DC by AFSC.

Boots on the ground in Austin this weekend
By Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog / September 10, 2008

In February 2005, the display of combat boots and civilian shoes called “Eyes Wide Open” came to Austin, where it was assembled on the grounds of Zilker Park at the Peace Grove. At dawn on a misty morning, I joined a crew of volunteers to lay out the boots and shoes. It was a profound experience.

The exhibit drew visitors from the moment the boots and shoes were set down to the night we had to pack them up due to rain chances. Viewers followed the exhibit to the indoor location where it was set up the following day.

Now, three and a half years later, the number of combat boots and shoes representing soldier and civilian lives taken by the invasion and occupation of Iraq has grown so much that the exhibit has been divided by state.

Eyes Wide Open is scheduled to be displayed at Auditorium Shores this weekend along Lady Bird Lake near the hike and bike trail opposite Butler Park. A special program will be presented on Saturday night. It’s not a partisan event. Everyone is invited.

Here are the particulars, as posted at Eyes Wide Open / AFSC.

An Exhibition On The Human Cost of the Iraq War

Eyes Wide Open, the American Friends Service Committee’s widely acclaimed exhibition on the human cost of the Iraq War, returns to Austin.

The exhibit features a pair of boots honoring each Texas military casualty, a field of shoes to memorialize the Iraqis killed in the conflict, and a display exploring the history, cost and consequences of war. To view past Eyes Wide Open exhibits, visit the website http://www.afsc.org/eyes/.

When? The Weekend of September 12 – 14, 7AM-7PM

Where? Auditorium Shores West

Special candlelight remembrance: Saturday, September 13th, 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. (If you would like to sit during the candlelight vigil, please bring your own chair.)

Hospitality tent for veterans, active military, and their families
Veterans are welcomed to wear medals in solidarity with the fallen

Rain Location:
Central Presbyterian Church
200 E. 8th St.

[Susan Van Haitsma posts as makingpeace on Statesman.com. ]

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Thomas Cleaver Goes Hollyweird : Who Would Play Sarah Palin?

Posted on September 10, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Tina Fey could play Sarah Palin. Not.

‘Reese Witherspoon, reprising her role as Tracy Flick in Election, who despite her angelic face is vindictive, manipulative…?’
By Thomas Cleaver / The Rag Blog / September 10, 2008

OK, I am sure all of you will go “Oh, no, shallow Hollyweird stuff!!” but what can I say? — you’ve got a (not-so) shallow Hollywood screenwriter on the blog now, so you’ll just have to put up with it.

In last Saturday’s LA Times, entertainment reporter Robin Abcarian asked the question, “Who would be the right actress to play Sarah Palin in the biopic of her life?”

Surprise, it’s not Tina Fey, despite the casual physical resemblance.

M.A.S.H. co-creator Larry Gelbart says “Personally, I’d vote for Demi Moore because she could really capture Palin’s mixture of sensuality and dominatrix.” And Ashton Kutcher would have no trouble playing “First Dude” Todd Palin.

Republicans would go for a gender-switched “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” or an update of “Kisses for my President” (for you non-film buffs, the 1964 movie about women banding together to elect the first female president, played by Polly Bergen). Democrats would likely go for an update of either “The Candidate” or “The Manchurian Candidate.”

Several A-list screenwriters were asked how they would pitch such a story. Most demuerred because it was “too unbelievable for Hollywood.” Gary Ross (writer of “Dave” and “Pleasantville”) said “If you created a character who was an evangelical Christian and hunted caribou with a machine gun, people would say it’s too broad for even satire.”

The ever-omniscient Larry Gelbart (truly one of the smartest guys I ever met in my life), says “It’s not a movie, it’s a TV reality show. A TV reality show is what I think would be closer to the mark for telling her story, the proliferation of this form of entertainment having so whetted the American public’s taste for amateurs.”

Robin Abcarian says it should be Reese Witherspoon, reprising her role as Tracy Flick in “Election,” who despite her angelic face is vindictive, manipulative, and would do anything to become president of her high school class. She even updates Tracy’s prayer to God that she win the election:

“Dear Lord Jesus, I do not often speak to you and ask for things, but now I really must insist that you help me win the election tomorrow because I deserve it and (Barack Obama) doesn’t… Now I’m asking that you go that one last mile and make sure to put me in office where I belong so that I may carry out your will on Earth as it is in Heaven. Amen.”

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Alice Embree : Lipstick on a Capitalist Pig!!

Posted on September 10, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Long Live the Capitalist Pig / Tattoo art by Eduardo Lecleres / Pure Body Arts, Brooklyn

‘It’s not about the lipstick, friends. It’s about the pig’
By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / September 10, 2008

OK. So maybe people in other parts of the country haven’t heard about putting lipstick on a pig before. It’s not about the lipstick, friends. It’s about the pig.

Pigs!! Remember? Capitalist Pigs; Male Chauvinist Pigs.

The people who get in the trough and eat voraciously. Muscle out everyone else; make off with profits to places they can’t be taxed; take jobs and leave factory skeletons behind; milk the housing market and depend on the government to assume all that private risk they crow about. The pigs in the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, the new robber barons, making money hand over fist while people can’t get health care.

It’s about the pigs. The ones in the White House. The mean ones like Karl Rove who enjoy trough politics. The ones who take us into opportunistic wars, outsourcing to Halliburton and Blackwater as they go, declaring “Mission Accomplished” when they topple a statue. The ones who’ve let the bodies stack up for eight years – in Iraq, in New Orleans.

They win when the entire media is talking about “lipstick politics.” This is about pig politics.

Frankly, I’m getting tired of nice guy, reasonable responses. Pigs don’t understand them. I don’t understand them. The guys in power should be run out on a rail. The reasonable thing to do with them is have them stand trial, but stupid diversions about “lipstick politics” are making me feel entirely unreasonable.

The Rag Blog

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Mariann Wizard : ‘Palin Will Go Down in Flames’

Posted on September 10, 2008 by RagBlog

Yeah. Yeah. We know this image is probably photoshopped. And?

Palin Implosion Inevitable
By Mariann Wizard / The Rag Blog / September 9, 2008

As even more evidence comes to light of Gov. Sarah Palin’s anti-scientific, anti-feminist, and anti-democratic views, I am reminded of the classic “time travel” paradoxes: either the time traveler imperils her/his present existence by tinkering with the past conditions which produced life as s/he knows it; or meets her/his past self, triggering an encounter between matter and anti-matter in which the contradictory selves implode.

I predict a similar fate for Palin’s candidacy, and, if she is not careful, for her political future even in Alaska.

Palin’s career has clearly benefited from the feminist movement of the late 20th century. She would never have been elected mayor of Wasilla, much less Governor of Alaska, without the issues raised, and struggles waged, by the women’s liberation movement. Paramount among those struggles, and reaching back to our Suffragette foremothers, a uniting principle of feminism has been the right of women to control their own reproductive organs, by any means necessary. Yet Palin embraces a patriarchal view in which abortion should not be allowed even following rape or incest — two criminal acts that are, by the way, epidemic in Alaska! In Palin’s vision, information, including birth control and human sexuality information, would be subject to censorship. Abstinence would be the birth control method “of choice”, a position no longer held by anyone, especially not by educators, outside of a religious minority which believes it their responsibility to further overpopulate the world in order to hasten its end!

Lack of safe, reliable, effective birth control methods and prohibition of abortion are important factors in keeping women housebound — and political nonentities — when economies have less room for women in the workplace. But especially in our faltering economy, work is not an “option” for most mothers, or for most women, married, single, and/or childless; it is a necessity. Whether gutting fish in a ‘factory ship or plucking chickens in Georgia, running for political office or running a business office, American women can’t go back to a fantasy past of stay-at-home Moms, raising 6 kids with a just kitchen garden and a gutting knife. There is no “there” to go.

While Palin’s nomination is a cynical attempt to manipulate feminists disappointed by Hillary Clinton’s exclusion from the Democratic ticket — and, more importantly, white women looking for any reason not to vote for Obama, the “racist feminist” contingent — the idea of electing a women to one of the two highest offices in the land still exerts strong feminist appeal. Until one of our daughters really does grow up to be “anything she wants to be” — more than one, I’d say; until it becomes routine for the US to have female heads of state, as it is in Europe and even Africa — this is a goal unmet, tantalizing in its elusiveness, still something to strive for. But the Executive, for all its vaunted power, is a figurehead. This goal is not worth casting away the victories that have been won, and are in too many instances today very precariously held, as in reproductive freedom; it is not worth casting away the opportunity to make significant gains in other yet-unrealized goals of critical importance to women, as in health care, childcare, Social Security, and equal pay for equal work.

In Sarah Palin’s vision, the conditions necessary for her rise to power — or any woman’s — would not exist. She thinks she’s Governor because she’s “special” — perhaps one of the Elect, as well as the elected. American women know better. We know that every woman has a story different from every man who ever stood for election. We know that every woman is special, but no woman succeeds alone. (We’ve licked the envelopes and made the coffee in enough campaigns to know that the candidate doesn’t do all the work.) We know that Sisterhood is powerful, and we need to turn that power now onto scrutinizing this nomination, and exposing it for a fraud, and John McCain’s election as unacceptable.

In all probability, Palin’s selection by the Republican Party is an admission that they don’t expect to win in November — although they hope for some freak occurrence, like this novelty selection, to make voters disgusted with eight years of Republican rule think that voting Republican will bring change. Rather than waste the time and credibility of a more valuable team player (read: party hack) like Romney, Hutchison, or even Huckabee, on a losing effort, they’ve put forward a “rising star”. She is not well-liked by the Alaskan Republican establishment, however; she exposed some of their more blatant corrupt dealings and defeated a sitting Republican governor in whom they had a long-term investment. If she does well for McCain, she may survive the experience, win or lose. But if she does poorly, she’s expendable; she is, after all, only a woman. In my opinion, when the implicit feminism of her candidacy meets the explicit anti-feminism of her positions, Palin will go down in flames.

The Rag Blog

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A New Blog with a Clear Purpose

Posted on September 10, 2008 by RagBlog


Women say NO – Part 15
September 8, 2008

I don’t support Sarah Palin as a candidate for Vice President because I don’t want my grandchildren to live in a nation that, in accordance with her political views, would deny them environmental protection and alternative energy development or sex education, and a right to chose. The last administration has shown us how effective the VP can be in circumventing the Constitution.
-Juanita L., 61, Lancaster, PA

Sarah Palin may be a mother and she may be a fighter, but she is fighting for herself, not for us. She will take out others for her own interests and beliefs whether or not they reflect our needs. From trying to ban books to firing people who disagree with her, to being part of a secessionist group in Alaska – Sarah Palin is a self-serving religious fundamentalist who would rather spend state money and time on personal feuds than governing for the good of all. Her extreme beliefs regarding abstinence-only education did not work even for her own daughter! and yet she wants to force it on our daughters! We will not have it. We can do better, there are stronger, more thoughtful and fair minded women in this country who are fit to run it.
-Aquene F., 26, Milwuakee, WI

If the Republican ticket wins, our country would be effectively destroyed in terms of our economy, the direction of the Supreme Court, and the elimination of rights we currently hold dear.
We need to prevent this woman from pretending to be a voice for women and realize she is just a shill for the far right.
-Andrea D., 45, Rogers, Arkansas

I am completely offended by the idea that today’s woman would vote for Sarah Palin on the basis of her gender. I supported Hillary because she was the strongest and most qualified candidate for President, and would never equate her with Sarah Palin. Her positions on the key issues of the day are uninformed and ill-advised, and I will do whatever I can personally to make sure she does not become the VP of the United States. Her nomination is appallingly negligent on the part of the Republican party. Big surprise.
-Angela L., 45, Austin, TX

I am appalled at the thought of Sarah Palin in the No. 2 spot in this country. McCain says he wants ‘change,’ but his downright hypocrisy in choosing her is shining through. McCain has finally, openly, shown his disdain for the intelligence of the American woman, and surrendered his vaunted maverick title to the Bush/Cheney/Rove ultra-Conservatives.
Does McCain really think that the women of America will vote for a Sarah Palin who agrees with those policies and worse, just because she’s a woman???
-Portia D. (I’m 76, and thought I’d seen the worst in all these years. Wrong!), Staten Island

We have nothing against Sarah Palin, but it is inconceivable that the Republicans have chosen her instead of other qualified women as a Vice-Presidential candidate, if in so doing, they were trying to make history, they may well do it with frightening consequences.
-Sophia G., 53, Norwalk, CT

I oppose Sarah Palin because she is John McCain’s running mate. John McCain, the man who laughed when one of his supporters called Hillary Clinton a b*tch. The man who has promised to nominate extreme right-wing judges to the Supreme Court. It doesn’t matter what Sarah Palin stands for (though in fact she stands with McCain on these issues), because you wouldn’t be voting for Palin for president, you’d be voting for McCain.
-Janet L., 44, Palo Alto, CA

I am a 53 year old woman living in Illinois. I oppose Palin as a V.P. because I believe she represents a move backward, not forward. America needs to shift our approach to meet the challenges. We face a strong China, a growing India and an energy crisis. We need to get out of Iraq. We need a health care system that works for all. We can not use a 1950’s mentality of shoot first ask questions later. We can not just keep talking about Vietnam- new world order is here- we’ve got to move forward not backward.
-R.M., 53, IL

Is Ms.Palin really the best the Republican party has to offer in terms of a female? I guess there are slim pickings for a woman who will support an antiquated and sexist Republican agenda. Please know that Hillary supporters supported her for more than being merely biologically female. The women who have supported Hillary Clinton did so because of her track record, experience and progressive platform, not because she was simply “a woman”. Typical interpretation from a party that is clearly a boys club.
-Kristen C., 30, Los Angeles

I say no to Palin because I want all children to be able to attend public schools where the teachers are well paid and trained. I want everyone to have access to health care. There’s nothing I think is more crucial, yet this woman and her party disagree.
-H. A., 36, Northampton, MA

I remember the days of back room abortions. And I want the government out of my private business.
-Carole B., SC

She represents nothing but repressive ideas of education, family, government and the US as a part of an International community. The cruel irony of Senator Clinton blooding herself on that glass ceiling only to have a puppet escorted through on the arm of a warrior…
Get out and vote.
Kay J., 57, NYC

Source / Women Against Sarah Palin

Thanks to Diane Stirling-Stevens / The Rag Blog

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Another Bank Fails (And There’s a McCain Involved)

Posted on September 10, 2008 by RagBlog


Silver State Bank Goes Belly Up
By Cookie Jill / September 8, 2008

Guess Andrew McCain learned “economics” from his dad.

Regulators on friday shut down Silver State Bank, saying the Nevada bank failed because of losses on soured loans, mainly in commercial real estate and land development.

It was the 11th failure this year of a federally insured bank.

…Andrew K. McCain, a son of Republican presidential nominee John McCain, sat on the boards of Silver State Bank and of its parent, Silver State Bancorp, starting in february but resigned in july citing “personal reasons,” corporate filings with the securities and exchange commission show. andrew mccain also was a member of the bank’s audit committee, responsible for oversight of the company’s accounting.

The younger McCain, who is the chief financial officer of Hensley & Co., the beer distributorship of which Cindy McCain is chairwoman, is the Arizona Senator’s adopted son from his first marriage. – ap and ft

Silverado … silver state … lots of taxpayer bailouts for the financial failures caused by those with the silver spoons.

Source / Skippy the Bush Kangaroo

Thanks to Diane Stirling-Stevens / The Rag Blog

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Junior’s Legacy Revealed

Posted on September 9, 2008 by RagBlog

Bush’s Legacy Memo Leaked to Press
By Lee Camp / September 9, 2008

Click the graphic to read it

Source / 23/6

Thanks to Diane Stirling-Stevens / The Rag Blog

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Howard Zinn : ‘US Influence Is Declining, Its Power Is Declining’

Posted on September 9, 2008 by RagBlog

Howard Zinn is the author of, most notably, A People’s History of the United States, a National-Book-Award-nominated text that investigates US history from the standpoint of the oppressed. Other books by Zinn include Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology and his 1995 autobiography, You Can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train.

Zinn: US ‘In Need of Rebellion’
September 9, 2008

Al Jazeera speaks to Howard Zinn, the author, American historian, social critic and activist, about how the Iraq war damaged attitudes towards the US and why the US “empire” is close to collapse.

Q: Where is the United States heading in terms of world power and influence?

HZ: America has been heading – for some time, and is heading right now – toward less and less world power, less and less influence.

Obviously, since the war in Iraq, the rest of the world has fallen away from the United States, and if American foreign policy continues in the way it has been – that is aggressive and violent and uncaring about the feelings and thoughts of other people – then the influence of the United States is going to decline more and more.

This is an empire which is on the one hand the most powerful empire that ever existed; on the other hand an empire that is crumbling – an empire that has no future … because the rest of the world is alienated and simply because this empire is top-heavy with military commitments, with bases around the world, with the exhaustion of its own resources at home.

[This is] leading to more and more discontent and home, so I think the American empire will go the way of other empires and I think it is on its way now.

Q: Is there any hope the US will change its approach to the rest of the world?

HZ: If there is any hope, the hope lies in the American people.
[It] lies in American people becoming resentful enough and indignant enough over what has happened to their country, over the loss of dignity in the world, over the starving of human resources in the United States, the starving of education and health, the takeover of the political mechanism by corporate power and the result this has on the everyday lives of the American people.

[There is also] the higher and higher food prices, the more and more insecurity, the sending of the young people to war.

I think all of this may very well build up into a movement of rebellion.

We have seen movements of rebellion in the past: The labour movement, the civil rights movement, the movement against the war in Vietnam.

I think we may well see, if the United States keeps heading in the same direction, a new popular movement. That is the only hope for the United States.

Q: How did the US get to this point?

HZ: Well, we got to this point because … I suppose the American people have allowed it to get it to this point because there were enough Americans who were satisfied with their lives, just enough.

Of course, many Americans were not, that is why half of the population doesn’t vote, they’re alienated.

But there are just enough Americans who have been satisfied, you might say getting some of the “goodies” of the empire, just some of them, just enough people satisfied to support the system, so we got this way because of the ability of the system to maintain itself by satisfying just enough of the population to keep its legitimacy.

And I think that era is coming to an end.

Q: What should the world know about the United States?

HZ: What I find many people in the rest of the world don’t know is that there is an opposition in the United States.
Very often, people in the rest of the world think that Bush is popular, they think ‘oh, he was elected twice’, they don’t understand the corruption of the American political system which enabled Bush to win twice.

They don’t understand the basic undemocratic nature of the American political system in which all power is concentrated within two parties which are not very far from one another and people cannot easily tell the difference.

So I think we are in a situation where we are going to need some very fundamental changes in American society if the American people are going to be finally satisfied with the kind of society we have.

Q: Do you think the US can recover from its current position?

HZ: Well, I am hoping for a recovery process. I mean, so far we haven’t seen it.

You asked about what the people of the rest of the world don’t know about the United States, and as I said, they don’t know that there is an opposition.

There always has been an opposition, but the opposition has always been either crushed or quieted, kept in the shadows, marginalised so their voices are not heard.

People in the rest of the world hear the voices of the American leaders.

They do not hear the voices of the people all over this country who do not like the American leaders who want different policies.

I think also, people in the rest of the world should know that what they see in Iraq now is really a continuation of a long, long term of American imperial expansion in the world.

I think … a lot of people in the world think that this war in Iraq is an aberration, that before this the United States was a benign power.

It has never been a benign power, from the very first, from the American Revolution, from the taking-over of Indian land, from the Mexican war, the Spanish-American war.

It is embarrassing to say, but we have a long history in this country of violent expansion and I think not only do most people in other countries [not] know this, most Americans don’t know this.

Q: Is there a way for this to improve?

HZ: Well you know, whatever hope there is lies in that large number of Americans who are decent, who don’t want to go to war, who don’t want to kill other people.

It is hard to see that hope because these Americans who feel that way have been shut out of the communications system, so their voices are not heard, they are not seen on the television screen, but they exist.

I have gone through, in my life, a number of social movements and I have seen how at the very beginning of these social movements or just before these social movements develop, there didn’t seem to be any hope.

I lived in the [US] south for seven years, in the years of the civil rights movements, and it didn’t seem that there was any hope, but there was hope under the surface.

And when people organised, and when people began to act, when people began to work together, people began to take risks, people began to oppose the establishment, people began to commit civil disobedience.

Well, then that hope became manifest … it actually turned into change.

Q: Do you think there is a way out of this and for the future influence of the US on the world to be a positive one?

HZ: Well, you know for the United States to begin to be a positive influence in the world we are going to have to have a new political leadership that is sensitive to the needs of the American people, and those needs do not include war and aggression.

[It must also be] sensitive to the needs of people in other parts of the world, sensitive enough to know that American resources, instead of being devoted to war, should be devoted to helping people who are suffering.

You’ve got earthquakes and natural disasters all over the world, but the people in the United States have been in the same position as people in other countries.

The natural disasters here [also] brought little positive reaction – look at [Hurricane] Katrina.

The people in this country, the poor people especially and the people of colour especially, have been as much victims of American power as people in other countries.

Q: Can you give us an overall scope of everything we talked about – the power and influence of the United States?

HZ: The power and influence of the United States has declined rapidly since the war in Iraq because American power, as it has been exercised in the world historically, has been exposed more to the rest of the world in this situation and in other situations.

So the US influence is declining, its power is declining.

However strong a military machine it is, power does not ultimately depend on a military machine. So power is declining.

Ultimately power rests on the moral legitimacy of a system and the United States has been losing moral legitimacy.

My hope is that the American people will rouse themselves and change this situation, for the benefit of themselves and for the benefit of the rest of the world.

© 2008 Aljazeera.net/English

Source / Al Jazeera English

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