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The Saturday Snapshot
David MacBryde : A Look at Elections and Media in Germany
From our man in Berlin…
By David MacBryde / The Rag Blog / July 19, 2008
BERLIN — Here is a picture of some of us Americans in Berlin having a delightful time on the fifth of July at a street party among thousands of friendly Berliners.
Politically, German preferences are about 78 per cent for Obama to 14% per cent for McCain.
Our media here displays big balloons to attract the attention of other Americans for voter registration. Lots found us.
Contrasting US “winner take all” elections with German proportional voting can lead to interesting insights. But another crucial difference is the media ownership and culture.
The “common good” and “promoting the general welfare.”
In the US Constitution one of the main reasons for founding the USA was to “promote the general welfare”. What is that? (An ontological question.) How do ”we the people” decide what “the general welfare” is? (A political question.)
In Germany (after the defeat of fascism) the founding document starts with the inalienability of human dignity. And there is considerable emphasis on the common good, the power of government deriving from the people for the well being of the people.
In particular, one core tenet in their democracy is for citizens to be well informed, able to have informed opinions. As a practical matter the broadcast media was developed as a decentralized network of public stations with regional socially representative media boards.
It is financed through fees paid by owners of receivers – with the amount set by the federal government but decisions made by regional representative boards in order provide secure financing and to buffer the broadcast stations from censorship and retribution via cuts in financing — by the government or by private corporations or sponsors.
Although there are lots of details, one very important fact is the contrast here between this democratic decentralized public good and the state monopoly broadcast of the (former) East Germany.
Media reform and changes due to the internet.
In Germany there is a huge and growing use of broadband internet activity. And there have been changes in the print media with shifts in advertising budgets. And, interestingly, the potential for interaction between the internet and the decentralized publically owned broadcast network.
Here, as elsewhere, the huge success of internet activity brings with it the realitiy of a flood of information. The Germans make a serious distinction between “public” opinion and “published” opinion – one being the actual opinions of citizens the other being those opinions that get visibility, get seen by the public, become “public” issues. Years ago with few news shows, most people were watching more or less the same news. One hot topic here concerns how to handle the information flood and how to focus on “important” issues in their democracy. The proportional voting system here does mean that innovative ideas as well as issues some feel are important but not (yet) hot or focused on do get into “the news”, do get some public visibility.
And, with work, can become majority opinion. (For example, in some cases the German Greens are suffering from success in the sense that some of their efforts have become mainstream, and taken on by other parties, so are no longer “their” issues.)
Although there are lots of problems here, and there is a need for change, it is my sense that the media ownership and culture, along with the electoral system, does provide the Germans with ways to work out solutions to problems.
In any case, it is sure a pleasure (see the photo) to be here among a lot of well informed citizens, and citizens who consider the opportunity to be well informed to be a public, common good.
I am not sure what all is happening in the United States in the way of media reform. Hope to follow Netroots developments. There is now (in contrast to the times of trauma after 911) at least a lot of information available.
One question: in “growing the commons” might it sometime be possible for bloggers and other actors to cooperate in a web-based Publishers and Journalists and Academics Roundtable???
* So that a range of people involved in the providing of information to get together to focus on issues, making the roundtable accessible on line;
* To raise research questions on issues being worked on — to enable occasional web “teach-outs” on issues ?
That could be powerful. And a nice development for after the elections.
The times, and the media ownership and culture, are indeed a changing. Best wishes from Berlin for “growing the commons” to Netroots 2008 in Austin.
[More photos at www.pbase.com/karenaxe/amerikafest.]
The Rag Blog
There’s No Such Thing As Government Without People
A Government of People, After All
By David Michael Green / July 18, 2008
So, did you hear about the latest bipartisan commission report?
Bet you can’t guess who’s on the thing! James Baker? Check. Warren Christopher? Check. Lee Hamilton? Check. Ed Meese? Check. Brent Scowcroft? Check.
(What, no Henry Kissinger? Guess he was busy fighting war crime extraditions.)
These guys should just go get a room and get it over with, already, eh? Anytime anyone in government needs some mind-numbingly anodyne cover story for the latest word in power consolidation, they bring in this crew – The Center-Right Dinosaur Club. Six words out of Warren Christopher’s mouth alone is guaranteed to render comatose any formerly sentient being. The guy is a human anesthesia.
They did Iraq. They buried 9/11, leaving the Bush administration not only completely unscathed, but completely off the record as well. Explain to me again, wouldya, why the president would only testify with Dickie holding his hand, and not under oath?
In the wake of the imperial establishment’s utter humbling in Mesopotamia, the latest commission project concerns the sticky old question of national war powers: Who’s got ‘em, who doesn’t, and how to deal with that in a supposed to democracy. (Hint: The short version is this: The president does whatever he wants to, and all you other people should go sit in the corner and just shut up.)
This is nothing new. The Founders grappled with it in the same fashion they did most everything else. Their goal was to create a government with just enough power to govern effectively, and no more. So they split powers up as often as they could, and this case is no exception. Congress got the power to declare war and the president got to be commander-in-chief of the military. Not bad, except nobody bothers to declare war anymore. That concept sorta went out with the horse and buggy.
After the lengthy but undeclared war in Vietnam, Congress realized it was holding the short end of a very long stick, and attempted to reel in the imperial presidency’s war-making powers with the War Powers Resolution of 1973. Nixon vetoed the thing, and Congress then mustered a rare and difficult veto override to make it into the law of the land. Well, kinda. You see, the problem is that every president since that time, Democratic or Republican, has rejected as unconstitutional its central provisions requiring the president to withdraw deployed forces within 60 days (90 days maximum), unless authorization for their continued presence has been obtained from Congress.
How can we ever know who is right – those presidents or Congress? To find out, it would require the rather unique situation of a president continuing to pursue a war in defiance of Congressional opposition. Sound familiar? Oh yeah, I guess I forgot one other necessary factor. In such a situation you’d also have to have a Congress with the stones to do something about such an imperious president and his unpopular war. They’d have to at least have the courage to bring a challenge in the federal courts, whereupon the constitutionality of the War Powers Act would then finally be resolved, one way or another. Call me crazy, but somehow I don’t see this as being on Nancy Pelosi’s or Harry Reid’s agenda.
So, now, along comes this Baker-Christopher Commission to recommend legislative changes, supposedly to avoid another Iraq fiasco. They propose to repeal the War Powers Act (which they describe as unconstitutional) and replace it with “The War Powers Consultation Act of 2009″, which would require the president to “consult” with Congress prior to deploying troops into a “significant armed conflict” (generally, combat operations likely to last more than a week), and would create a new Joint Congressional Consultation Committee comprised of leaders from both houses, and a permanent bipartisan staff with access to national security intelligence. The proposed legislation also calls on Congress to vote yes or no on ‘significant conflicts’ within 30 days. If such a resolution fails, Congress may then legislate against the war, which legislation the president may veto, and Congress may override. Or it may take other actions, such as defunding the war.
This is clearly a step backward. It’s clearly a step in the direction in further empowering an out-of-control executive, at precisely the moment when conditions call for just the opposite tack. And it’s clearly what you’d expect from James Baker and Warren Christopher. Ugh.
It’s all well and good to force consultations, but they mean only as much as the participants want them to, which can range from the pro-forma ticking off of a box on the official Federal War Consultation Checklist Form to genuine negotiations in which assent by both sides is required by both sides in order to move forward. To get a very real and very proximate sense of just how toothless an idea this is, one need only ask oneself how the Bush administration would have conducted such negotiations over Iraq. You know, the very same people who withhold everything from Congress? The ones who refuse to even testify or provide any documentation in cases involving clear wrongdoing, including now the highest law-enforcement official in the land? Yeah, that’s right, Congress is now thinking about holding Attorney General Michael Mukasy in contempt for refusing to turn over information about the politicization of the Justice Department. And he’s the ‘good guy’ who was brought in to clean up after Alberto Gonzales (thanks a lot to ‘liberal’ New York senator Chuck Schumer for arranging that particular disaster).
Yeah, forcing consultations is a wonderful prescription, but no better than forcing a robust round of Kumbaya. Once it’s done and the box checked, the president will proceed to war, laughing all the way down Pennsylvania Avenue as he returns from the Capitol. Think of Warren Christopher, late at night, dentures soaking in the glass of water, gumming up some of the finest plain vanilla ice cream available, and you’ve got a pretty good image of the actual bite of this resolution.
Similarly, in what sense can this legislative formula be considered an improvement over the War Powers Act or the Constitution itself? Let’s just take the most ambitious outcome possible under this scenario, where Congress fails to approve the war, then passes a resolution condemning it, which of course would be vetoed by the president, and then Congress musters enough votes for an override. First of all, what slightest change does that represent from the current scenario, other than to force Congress to vote on the war within 30 days? It already has the power to legislate its disapproval, the president already has the power to veto that bill, and Congress already has the power to override the president’s veto. So what is gained here?
Second, what possible effect does this have on the current impasse over the War Powers Act? The next step which will follow a congressional override will always be the president flipping a finger in the direction of Congress, and I don’t mean a big thumb’s-up. Now Congress would find itself in precisely the same place it does today – quite literally, at the moment (sans the override part) – having to make hard choices in the face of presidential defiance, of which there are pretty much only three. One is to follow the Harry Reid / Nancy Pelosi approach to tough situations, which means to whimper and whine a lot while doing absolutely nothing. The second is to go to the Supreme Court to force the issue, whereupon the president will claim it as an unconstitutional infringement on his or her commander-in-chief powers, regardless of whether a previous president (or even the current one) had signed the legislation that Baker and Christopher propose. (By the way, chances are good that Congress would lose such a suit. If it was brought before the current court, chances are a whole lot better than good. Congress would be about as likely to prevail as would the opposition party in a North Korean election.) The third option is the one ultimately resorted to in the case of Vietnam, which would be to simply de-fund the war.
But if we want to take the full measure of how toothless Baker and Christopher seek to render Congress, we should consider their Trojan Horse in forcing Congress to take a position on the war during its first thirty days. That’s a bit like trying to sell abstinence right in the middle of some rowdy good sex. Let’s just say the incentives are all loaded in one direction. Remember how much bogus noise the right ginned up about ‘supporting the troops’ years after the Iraq invasion was launched, let alone weeks? There is hardly any time when politicians are less likely to oppose a war than the first thirty days after it’s begun. Then what happens after Congress has taken its mandatory vote and, of course, approved some foreign adventure launched by an insane president? It will only have a much harder time, not easier, to shut it off later, when it comes to its senses, or at least when its senses tell it that it is now safe to oppose the war. The president will surely argue that Congress has no business opposing a war it once supported.
Is it possible that the Commission didn’t realize all this? Sure. But it’s also possible that Dick Cheney doesn’t much care for money or power. Is it possible that James Baker – the guy who gave us the Bush Junior presidency by breaking all the rules of democracy in Florida and at the Supreme Court – would use the current desire to reign in a loose cannon presidency to present this plan as an improvement, knowing in fact that it would actually increase presidential power over war policy? Nah. Not Jimmy.
Clearly, this represents a step backward rather than a step forward when it comes to avoiding another Iraq scenario. Just replay the events of the last six years, with the same cast of characters – but this time under the plan proposed by the Baker-Christopher Commission – to see what would happen. The same members of Congress who voted for a bullshit war because they were afraid of the consequences to their careers if they didn’t would be far more inclined to vote for the war three weeks after the invasion began. And they would then have had an even harder time later climbing down off the limb they’d perched themselves on than they already do now. Beautiful. That’s just what we need.
In a very profound way, though, all of this is moot anyhow. So, okay, the president has the commander-in-chief power which is broadly supported (even in Congress), and unlikely to ever be even remotely diminished. This country fought brutal and massive wars in Korea for three years, Vietnam for a dozen, and Iraq will be for easily seven before the earliest we’d possibly get out – all without a declaration of war or any serious question of the presidential prerogative to deploy forces without one. Get the picture? Likewise, however, the one power that Congress possesses in an equally undiluted and uncontested form is the power of the purse. Congress can shut down any expensive war it wants whenever it wants by using that power, as it did finally in the case of Vietnam. All that’s necessary is the will to do so. Purses can be used in many different ways, depending on one’s commitment to doing what is right and one’s courage to follow though on that path, even at the personal cost of career or likability amongst the Cro-Magnon set. Harry Reid’s purse seems to have little use other than for transporting around a bit of eyeliner, some lipstick and maybe a few sanitary napkins. In better hands, it would be used it to flatten George W. Bush and end his Mesopotamian nightmare, pronto.
Which really brings us, ultimately to the heart of questions like these. You can spend an entire lifetime, and fill an entire library wing, with treatises and legal commentaries on these grand constitutional questions regarding the distribution of power in a government such as ours. (Most democracies use a parliamentary system, where the issue is moot. There are no checks and balances because there are no separate branches to check or to balance.) At the end of the day, though, you’re ultimately left with words written on ink in parchment. It doesn’t even require a single struck match to destroy their power (indeed, if they have such power, burning the documents will have zero effect). All that is necessary is for good people to do nothing, while monsters like Bush and Cheney drive freight trains through the edifices of Constitutional law constructed over centuries.
And that is precisely what has happened. There will always be Bushes and Cheneys, and history shows there always has been. This was perhaps the single most profound insight the Founders brought to Philadelphia as they engaged in their experiment in political engineering. They sought to design a government that was powerful enough to hold together and to act when necessary – unlike the one provided for in the Articles of Confederation – yet also sufficiently limited so as to protect their liberties – unlike George III’s regime. The Constitution really is a pretty amazing achievement from that engineering perspective. In any case, this concern for finding the correct concentration of power is certainly the motivation for the otherwise fairly bizarre decision they made to divide the government and set the pieces of it against one another.
The Founders also sought to create a government of laws, not men. A great aspiration, to be sure, though inevitably flawed at the end of the day. (I wish, for starters that they had aspired to a government not of people – rather than not of men, but of course it would be 150 years before fully half the population began to get its legal rights.) But their more critical flaw, for purposes of this particular discussion, is the belief that you can somehow take people out of government and leave only laws in their place to govern.
Unfortunately, people are not only the subjects of those laws, but also the keepers, promulgators and implementers. Laws, principles, rules, codes – these are all ultimately what people make of them, not what’s written on paper. If George W. Bush says that it is legal to waterboard detainees at Guantánamo and nobody stops him, that is what’s going to happen. If the majority on the Supreme Court abandon all their vociferously articulated prior principles of states’ rights, judicial restraint and hostility to equal protection claims in order to justify crowning Bush president – and, again, no one objects too strenuously – then off to the White House he goes. And if Congress is supposed to be an equal partner in war-making decisions but hasn’t got the guts to do its job, well then, welcome to Baghdad, soldier.
The whole matter was put rather succinctly by President Andrew Jackson once, when he was angered at a decision made by John Marshall’s Supreme Court holding that the state of Georgia could not impose its laws on Cherokee tribal lands. Jackson is quoted as saying “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it!”, thereby shredding the notion of a government of laws in a mere eleven-word sentence.
The truth is that there is no such thing as a government without people. There is no main-frame somewhere which can dispassionately compute matters of law and policy. It’s up to us, at the end of the day.
Either we stick to our principles – especially in moments of duress – or we don’t.
No oceans of ink applied to mountains of parchment, and certainly no new scheme concocted by James Baker and Warren Christopher, could ever save America’s Congress, or its press, or its opposition party, or its people, from the historical stain which has attached to them forever by virtue of their abdication of responsibility when it came to Iraq.
We had, in October of 2002, and in March of 2003, and today, and on every date in-between, a government of laws. The principles and codes and Constitution were all there.
It’s just the people who were missing.
[David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers’ reactions to his articles ( dmg@regressiveantidote.net ), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.]
Source / Information Clearing House
The Rag Blog
It Is Time for Karl Rove to Face Justice
The Rag Blog / July 18, 2008
Because I Hate Patriotic Bullshit and Because I Love Revolution
Memories of Beer Lovers, Hemp Farmers & Bloody Revolution
by Mike Ely / July 18, 2008
Ok, I admit it. I’m not your usual observer. When I heard that Budweiser had been bought by the Euro-capitalists InBev, I was not concerned.
I don’t care who owns the factories in the U.S. I don’t worry the U.S. heartland is being infiltrated by foreign interests. And certainly, I don’t consider Budweiser a national treasure. The truth is that it’s almost undrinkable.
But my ears perked up when I read how Budweiser’s maker, Anheuser-Bush had roots in St. Louis that went back before the Civil War. Ah, my friends, THERE is a story worth telling. And I’m going to sit back in the damp heat of this Chicago evening, sip on a couple of Fat Tires, and tell it to you, just because I hate patriotic bullshit and because I love revolution.
First, there is nothing American about beer making in St. Louis.
St. Louis in the 1850s was a raw river town situated where the Missouri River and the broad Mississippi met. It was a frontier town in many ways and the jumping off point. It was the “end of the line” for civilization. But it was also one of the first American industrial cities, with one of the heaviest concentration of of factory workers in the country. And these workers were not native-born Americans.
A great many of them came straight from Germany — and formed part of a very large German speaking population that then dominated both the urban and rural landscape from St. Louis to Chicago, to Cincinnati and far into the farmlands of Pennsylvania. And these immigrant workers were a very rowdy and radical bunch. Many were veterans of Europe’s great revolutionary battles of 1848 — the first upheavals when working class and communist revolution emerged as a living threat to the world’s ruling classes.
And, at the same time, surrounding this heavily leftwing, working-class, German-speaking city was a countryside filled with some of the most ugly, racist, pro-slavery forces in the U.S. The Missouri River stretched west from St. Louis, and its shores were lined with slave plantations producing raw materials for twine — a product that shipped downriver to bind the cotton bales of the Mississippi Delta.
The slave owners of Missouri were quite militant. They produced the political gangs called “border ruffians” who crossed the western Missouri border into nearby Kansas territory, where they engaged in armed struggle with abolitionists like John Brown over whether Bloody Kansas would be a slave state or free.
So you can imagine that there was a tension growing through the 1850s between the pro-slavery farmers of the Missouri floodplains and the anti-slavery and often communist workers of St. Louis.
There was a parallel, and little known cultural clash going on at the same time: the German workers arrived as beer drinkers and quite a few of them were first class brewers. There were some Irish among the workers, and they too were fans of the Germans’ sudsy “liquid bread.”
Before long St. Louis was peppered with huge German beer halls, where the often lonely immigrants found community and a feeling of home. For reasons I haven’t yet uncovered, the reactionary political forces of Missouri territory were anti-beer. Maybe they didn’t want this foreign culture to take root. Perhaps they had some early religious prohibitionist logic. But in any case, there was an early political clash when a major push was made to ban beer in St. Louis, and (needless to say) the German workers pushed back.
Here is an irony worth thinking about: In the Mississippi river valley, this important historical clash started between beer lovers and hemp growers. And, believe it or not, revolutionary sympathies go with the beer drinkers.
At a time when social organization among immigrants was primitive, the fight over beer helped spur a sense of common identity among the workers, and gave rise to a number of political newspapers. And the movement that emerged from these circles were increasingly active in the fight over slavery. I have on my bookshelf a rare little book that gathers articles and histories from these German immigrant newspapers — and it is clear how they started to articulate deeply revolutionary views that spoke for a highly conscious and engaged working class population.
You may have studied the civil war a little… I know I have always been fascinated by this first, truly revolutionary war on U.S. soil. And one thing to keep in mind was that the so-called “border states” were a key battle ground as the civil war broke out. There was a strip of these states (from Maryland through West Virginia, Kentucky, to Missouri) that had sizable populations of slave owners and slaves but a general political mood that was divided over the issues of secession and war.
And in this fight over the border states, Maryland had a particular importance because it surrounded the Union capital, so that if it joined the slavery confederation, Washington DC would be harder to defend. And the mood was so bad that Abraham Lincoln was almost killed in Baltimore as he traveled from Illinois to DC to assume the presidency. At the other end of the country, St. Louis has a major strategic importance for the war: It was the major anti-slavery center on the Mississippi. (The next river city, Memphis, was a creature of the Mississippi Delta. It was one of the urban nerve centers of the slave empire — filled with slave markets and holding pens.)
And so, as war broke out, all sides prepared to seize St. Louis by force. And if it had fallen to the slavocracy, it would have been quite hard for the Union’s armies to gain a foothold on the Mississippi, and it would have been that much harder to defeat the South.
On the surface, the politics of St. Louis did not look promising. After 1860, the new governor Claiborne Fox Jackson was clearly a pro-slavery diehard, and the bastard was scheming to secede from the Union and pull the state into slavery’s confederacy.
Step by step the tensions mounted, and started to go from political to military preparations. One focus of preparations was the state armory, the largest warehouse of weapons on the frontier. Whoever controlled those guns would be better able to crush their enemies.
Here again beer enters the story. Because the German workers started to prepare for battle. Led by veterans of the 1848 Revolutions, they started to secretly train themselves in discipline and military tactics. Their plan: to rise up against the state government in armed insurrection, to seize the armory, and defeat the governor’s army.
Where did they do their drills? In the cavernous beer halls of St. Louis. At a given time, they would gather. The doors would be sealed and put under vigilant guard. The tables would be cleared away. And cartloads of sawdust would be scattered deep on the beerhall floors.
And with the sawdust muffling the tramp, tramp, tramp of their feet, the workers prepared themselves for war — learning the unit movements so central to the warfare of that day. Outside, on the streets, the many spies of the governor could not hear what was going on within.
I won’t go into great detail about the heroic and fascinating ways that violence erupted. Led by fearless army officer Nathaniel Lyons the anti-slavery forces struck, and struck hard. They seized St. Louis and the armory. And they shattered the schemes of the slave owners. They routed the Governor’s troops in the early battles. And they bottled up the slaveowners of the Missouri River — cutting them off from the Confederacy.
What followed was one of the most bitter civil wars I have ever studied: Missouri was criss-crossed by vicious pro-slavery death squads that carried out horrific murders and mutilations. Their raiders came dressed in a cloud of human scalps sewn into their clothes and bridles — as they spread terror among those who opposed the sale of human beings. If you have ever wondered where the frontier killer Jesse James got trained, it was as a triggerman for one of the most notorious death squads of the slavocracy.
Hemp made its appearance here too, right in the midst of the fighting: in several key battles the Confederate forces build protective breast works out of the hemp bales pulled from their slave plantations, piling up the bundled hemp harvest to protect themselves from Union bullets.
Fighting against the slavocrats were a complex array of forces, and at their core were new Union army units led by radical Republican John Charles Fremont, recruited heavily from among the German workers of St. Louis. The first known actions of communists in the U.S. was the revolutionary armed struggle of these largely German-speaking forces, led in part by Colonel Joseph Weydemeyer, an energetic communist co-thinker of Karl Marx.
These units militantly emancipated many slaves that fell into their hands. This was in direct contradiction with the policy of President Lincoln who, afraid to offend the leading forces of other border states, insisted in the early days of the civil war that slaves should not be freed, but should be treated as “contraband property.” In this dispute, Fremont was removed from the command of the Missouri armies, and these revolutionary working class forces were dispersed into larger armies in order to better control them.
There are, in my opinion, many lessons and insights within this story. And more in the parts I have left untold.
But I tell this story now just to make a single point:
Anyone who thinks that Budweiser and the beer industry of St. Louis is a story of patriotism, Americanism, of all-American “national treasures,” of a whiteman’s “heartland” of traditional values and conservative xenophobia… Anyone who runs that story just doesn’t know.
The story of beer in St. Louis is a story of communist immigrant workers who didn’t speak English, who hated the mistreatment of kidnapped Africans in the United States, who had little love for America’s institutions, and who were willing to die (and kill!) to end the horrific practices of human slavery.
Deal with it. Pass it on.
Mike Ely is part of the Kasama Project and has helped create the new Revolution in South Asia resource. Mike’s email is m1keely@yahoo.com.
Source / Dissident Voice
The Rag Blog
NetRoots Nation: Press the Politicians
We expect to post live material from the conference in the coming days. The intrepid Thorne Dreyer is attending NetRoots Nation in Austin and will one day soon resurface to tell us what happened there. Please stay tuned …
Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog
Netroots Nation at the Crossroads: Move Over MoveOn
by Ronnie Cummins / July 18, 2008
“MoveOn is not a movement although it wants to be perceived as one. It is a brilliant and effective fundraising and marketing machine, but 95% or more of their so-called members ignore any particular email appeal. These 3.2 million people on the MoveOn email list are the object of marketing and fundraising campaigns, but they have absolutely no meaningful or democratic control over the decisions of organization, there is no accountability from the leadership to the MoveOn list members, and those of us on the list are unable to organize and communicate amongst ourselves within the list because it can’t be accessed by the grassroots at the local or state level. MoveOn, the Democracy Alliance, and the various liberal think tanks that have arisen to fight the Right are clearly a force able to raise millions of dollars for Democratic candidates and launch PR and messaging campaigns, but none of them are about empowering a populist grassroots uprising.”
John Stauber, Center for Media & Democracy, July 2008
The energy crisis and Peak Oil. Bank failures and economic recession. Climate chaos, crop failure, and unpredictable weather. The health crisis. The food and farming crisis. An endless, murderous, multi-trillion dollar war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Patriot Act, Homeland Security, an evermore-powerful Shadow Government. An ongoing, pre-meditated assault on Constitutional liberties. An epidemic of social and psychological malaise, hopelessness, and ethical disorientation. Bought and stolen elections and an indentured mass media. Out-of-control politicians, corporations, and technology. Self-destructive hyper-consumerism and the Wal-Martization of the economy. Institutionalized robbery by a billionaire class oblivious to growing poverty and misery… Will we look back on 2008, as the year we tried to change drivers, but still couldn’t stop the car from going over the cliff?
Millions of Americans, especially the “netroots,” those drawing their information and inspiration from the open sources of the internet, are finally connecting the dots between the burning issues, moving beyond limited concerns to radical awareness. A politicized new majority is waking up to the fact that the proverbial “end” is near. We must move beyond “business as usual” and tepid reform. We must link together our burning issues, unite our heretofore-fragmented forces and communities into a qualitatively more powerful current, and press and confront the Fortune 500 and the nation’s thousands of elected public officials — before it’s too late. In these dangerous, careening times we have no choice but to grab the wheel from Democratic Party hacks and fake netroots and grassroots leaders, make a sharp radical turn, and accelerate along the path of grassroots and netroots resistance, from Main Street to Manhattan, from City Hall to the Capitol.
The crazed neo-con project for world domination, aided and abetted by profit-obsessed multinational corporations; countered feebly by the “loyal opposition” of centrist Democrats, single-issue public interest groups, and top-down “progressive” organizations like MoveOn, have brought us to the precipice. Radical crises demand radical remedies. The “road to the right” that the Democrats and Obama are taking is suicidal. Either we mobilize a revitalized Movement to take to the streets and the suites of the corporations and the politicians or we’re going over the cliff. Move over MoveOn. We will not sit by and watch our Netroots Nation devolve into a nation of sheep and lemmings.
Linking Issues & Constituencies: From Protest to Resistance
A potentially world-changing segment of the body politic is finally waking up to the fact that single-issue politics and limited-focus organizing cannot address the current Crisis. Facing a generalized breakdown of the political and economic System and a rapid degradation of global life-support systems, it is obviously insane to keep repeating, “My issue and my organization or my blog is more important than yours,” or to wait for the Democratic Party and its latest middle of the road messiah, Barack Obama, to save us. Watering down our life-or-death concerns and urgency in the mistaken belief that we will attract the “silent majority,” is a dangerous illusion. The doomsday clock is ticking. The climate, food, health, political, economic, and energy crisis already impacting our lives, and the lives of everyone on the planet, will soon become catastrophic.
The multi-trillion dollar war for oil in the Middle East can no longer be separated from the energy crisis nor the climate crisis, nor the growing global food crisis, nor the erosion of Constitutional liberties, nor the lack of funding for health care, housing, jobs, education, clean energy, infrastructure repair, and public services. In order to avoid economic and climate meltdown, and to secure the funds to make our emerging green economy the economy, we must force the Democratic majority in Congress to use their Constitutional power of the purse to cut off all funds for the war, with or without the support of Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama. “Live Wire” grassroots leaders in our movements for peace, justice, sustainability, health, and democracy must subordinate our tactical or secondary differences, reach out to the disenfranchised majority, connect the dots between the burning issues, and create a massive new netroots and grassroots synergy.
Pledge of Resistance
And lest we forget. We haven’t seen the last of the Bush Cheney gang. Before leaving office, evidence is mounting the maniacs in the White House are preparing to carry out two final maneuvers to derail democracy and advance their insane project for world domination: stealing the 2008 elections with voter suppression and electronic vote theft, and precipitating or fabricating a terror attack or other incident, and then attacking Iran.
What is to be done? Again my friend and fellow activist, John Stauber, hits the nail right on the head:
“If and when populist forces build an email list as big as MoveOn’s — and most of that list was built by MoveOn’s posturing as an ardent anti-war organization, which it is not — and harness it for real grassroots empowerment, that is when we might see some exciting political developments that combine the Netroots and grassroots for fundamental change. I’d love to see a MoveOn-type organization that would actually trust and empower the millions of people on its email list so that the decision making, organizing and money benefit the grassroots and grow power from there upward, one in which the structure at the top is accountable to and elected by the members. It’s hard to have a political democracy when we don’t even have democratic organizations or movements. I’ve talked with some of the leadership of MoveOn about this, but they have no intention to democratize and will remain a top-down marketing and fundraising organization.”
Here are five, immediate steps to head off catastrophe and to begin to build a radical populist alternative to MoveOn:
1. Move beyond single-issue politics and embrace a multi-issue, radical but practical, platform. You can read and comment on the 40-point Grassroots Netroots Alliance (GNA) platform and Candidate Survey at www.GrassrootsNetroots.org.
2. Join up and help GNA build up a multi-million email list, a netroots army of multi-issue progressives and radicals, who understand the need to transform the System and literally overthrow the dictatorship of corporations and indentured politicians. The Grassroots Netroots Alliance (with 200,000 people currently on our email list) is currently approaching a dozen or so large, like-minded networks with comparable lists to jump-start this process.
3. Press the politicians to take a clear stand on all the burning issues. You can send the GNA Candidate Survey to all of your elected officials and candidates for office — local, state, and federal — at www.GrassrootsNetroots.org.
4. As we “press the politicians,” we need to consciously and deliberately integrate electoral insurgency and netroots lobbying with non-electoral resistance — including boycotts, strikes, civil disobedience, and other pressure tactics. In the face of an unprecedented Crisis, we must move beyond polite protest to resistance.
5. Sign the Pledge of Resistance. We must prepare now to roll back the next aggressive moves by the Bush/Cheney gang: stealing the elections and attacking Iran. If you are willing to sign up to take collective action in your community in the weeks following another Republican theft of the elections on November 6, or in the event of an attack upon Iran, send an email to pledgeofresistance@grassrootsnetroots.org.
Ronnie Cummins is National Director of the Grassroots Netroots Alliance.
Source / Common Dreams
The Rag Blog
We’re Profoundly Sickened by the Extent of This
Records show police spied on activist groups
Danny Jacobs / July 17, 2008
Maryland State Police officers spied on dozens of meetings and rallies held by social activist groups and provided reports to databases accessible by local and federal law enforcement agencies, according to documents obtained by the ACLU of Maryland.
Officers with MSP’s Homeland Security and Intelligence Division covertly spent at least 288 hours primarily at anti-war and anti-death penalty protests between March 2005 and May 2006, according to the redacted documents released Thursday.
The state branch of the American Civil Liberties Union received the documents after filing suit against MSP last month for not releasing the reports under the Maryland Public Information Act. The ACLU originally requested the documents in 2006 in connection with the trial of peace activists arrested during a protest outside of the National Security Agency in Fort Meade.
“It is incomprehensible to investigate the most all-American of activities without a scintilla of evidence that something criminal was going to happen,” said David R. Rocah, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Maryland, during a news conference Thursday.
The ACLU sent a letter to Gov. Martin O’Malley asking for a full investigation of the MSP’s practices, Rocah said. Further legal action will depend on how the state responds, he added.
“It would be extraordinarily surprising if what is revealed today is the full scope,” Rocah said
The governor’s office directed questions to state police officials. Col. Terrence B. Sheridan, superintendent of the Maryland State Police, said in a statement the department does not violate civil liberties of law-abiding protesters or organizations.
“No illegal actions by State Police have ever been taken against any citizens or groups who have exercised their right to free speech and assembly in a lawful manner,” he said. “Only when information regarding criminal activity is alleged will police continue to investigate leads to ensure the public safety.”
Breeding distrust
The reports read like meeting minutes, with attendance figures and recaps of events held by groups including the Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore, the Baltimore Coalition to End the Death Penalty, the Committee to Save Vernon Evans (who was granted a stay of execution by the Maryland Court of Appeals in February 2006), the D.C. Anti-War Network and International Socialist Organization.
On Jan. 28, 2006, for example, an undercover officer attended an anti-death penalty rally in Annapolis.
“There were approximately 70 people at the rally which lasted approximately 1½ hours. The group met at church circle, walked around the Governor’s Mansion and then finished the rally at Lawyer’s Mall with speeches,” according to the report entered Feb. 20, 2006. “No intelligence about any disturbances at upcoming protests in the run-up to the execution was discussed.”
The reports specifically mention they were shared with police officers from Baltimore, Annapolis, Anne Arundel and Baltimore counties and the National Security Agency.
“This isn’t just that local and state police have it. It’s accessible by the national intelligence community,” said Michael German, a policy counsel with the national ACLU based in Washington and a former domestic terrorism official with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Similar reports of police spying have occurred in Denver and Northern California, according to the ACLU. German also pointed to the Los Angeles Police Department earlier this year adopting a system of officers reporting suspicious activities in their regular investigative reports, which can later be analyzed.
Rocah, who called MSP’s actions “unacceptable” and “stupefying,” said the problem is not just that spying has occurred but that it led activists to be suspicious of one another.
“It breeds distrust from within, which is exactly the point,” he said.
Maria Allwine, a member of Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore, said members of her group would not turn on each other. The organization is part of a national network that seeks to end the war in Iraq.
“We will not succumb to this,” she said. “We’re going to do what we’re going to do.”
The group holds open meetings Monday nights at the American Friends Service Committee building off York Road. Allwine said she noticed informants at meetings in 2003 and 2004, “provocateurs” who may have been “a little too enamored with the military” or blatantly walked across the street afterward to use their cell phones. The group assumes it’s still being spied on, she added.
The ACLU’s findings were not shocking, Allwine said, but seeing the detailed reports still had an impact.
“I’m profoundly sickened by the extent of this,” she said.
Source / The Daily Record / h/t OB Rag
The Rag Blog
FILM : Michael Reynolds: "We Shoot from the Hip"
Earthship Enterprise: The Ultimate Eco-House
by Rob Sharp
They are eco-friendly, bizarre-looking bolt holes, and have earned the name “earth ships” for the simple reason that they appear to have landed from the future. But these homes are more than just wacky props. They are a blueprint for our future living habits.
The ziggurats – constructed from refuse such as beer cans – are the brainchild of Michael Reynolds, an eco-architect who has spent most of his professional life perfecting the concept, which derives its name from the earth-filled tyres that make up the walls. He built the first example in Taos, New Mexico, in 1988 and, 20 years later, still lives there.
Due to his hard work, there are more than 1,000 “earth ships” across New Mexico, and the word has spread; hundreds more are springing up in the US, in Scotland, Normandy, Spain and even Siberia, and in April 2007, permission was granted to build 16 in Brighton. Now, Reynolds’ life and work are celebrated in Garbage Warrior, a documentary screening in cinemas around the UK.
“Imagine a home that heats itself, that provides its own water, and grows its own food,” says Reynolds. “Imagine that it needs no expensive technology, it recycles its own waste, and it has its own power source. And now imagine that it can be built anywhere, by anyone, out of the things that society throws away.”
The documentary was the idea of Oliver Hodge, a Brighton-based director who met Reynolds in May 2003. The architect and his “crew” had come on a two-week visit to build a prototype earth ship in Brighton. “When I met Mike I was so inspired and I could see that he would be able to create a strong story. I realised that he had won and lost all these battles: that he is a frontline activist for social change.”
In November that year, the filmmaker took a team to Reynolds’ US base. Soon, he realised he had arrived “in the middle of something massive”, so spent the next three years jetting between the UK and New Mexico, following his man around. Reynolds was a perfect subject, says Hodge: “He would do anything for me. Sometimes I even got him up at five o’clock in the morning.”
The film is the latest chapter in Reynolds’ colourful life. He graduated from architecture school in 1968, and soon produced a house made from beer containers, which upset the national bricklayers’ union so much, he had to can it.
Inspired by the nascent green movement, Reynolds came up with a building that promoted several tenets: it should be “off-the-electricity-grid” (which could be achieved by solar power); it should be made from used car-tyres (common landfill material) and incorporate rainwater-recycling facilities, too.
To achieve this vision, he moved in the early Seventies to the desert near Taos, where tolerant planning laws and sympathetic local government enabled him to experiment: some houses looked like castles, others like pyramids. Over the next 25 years, he created an energy-independent community, but his flouting of regulations landed him in hot water: and, in 1997, his communities were shut down.
The documentary joins the architect soon after, and charts his long battle with planners. “In my opinion, the planet situation is so critical we need to be doing anything we can,” he explains. “My rationale is that any little roof leak or system glitch in one of my single family homes, compared to the alternatives, is nothing. To me it’s important to go for it and make a few mistakes.”
Frustrated by his lack of progress, in early 2005 Reynolds heads to the Nicobar Islands in the Indian Ocean, which had been devastated by the Asian tsunami. His hope? That the lack of infrastructure would render the “bureaucratic niceties” irrelevant. “We shoot from the hip,” Reynolds says of the excursion. “We are always out of our depth whenever we go abroad, which happens three or four times a year. It may not be to local codes or ready to sell to a millionaire, but it will be shelter which will keep people comfortable. We have a method.”
Now, back in Taos, the architect is focusing on his latest project, “the Phoenix”. He says it will house a family of four, will keep them alive in “every way”, with its sewage treatment facilities as well as sustainable water, electricity, and food supplies. “There’s no question that after you’ve gone down a trail you might find a better way of going down it,” he concludes. “I would make alterations in my path, but it wouldn’t be that much different. I don’t think it’s possible to do anything without getting into a little trouble.”
‘Garbage Warrior’ is showing now at selected cinemas; www.garbagewarrior.com.
© 2008 The Independent
Source / The Independent
The Rag Blog
Howard Zinn: Is Not War Itself Terrorism?
Memo to Obama, McCain: No One Wins in a War
By Howard Zinn / July 17, 2008
Barack Obama and John McCain continue to argue about war. McCain says to keep the troops in Iraq until we “win” and supports sending more troops to Afghanistan. Obama says to withdraw some (not all) troops from Iraq and send them to fight and “win” in Afghanistan.
For someone like myself, who fought in World War II, and since then has protested against war, I must ask: Have our political leaders gone mad? Have they learned nothing from recent history? Have they not learned that no one “wins” in a war, but that hundreds of thousands of humans die, most of them civilians, many of them children?
Did we “win” by going to war in Korea? The result was a stalemate, leaving things as they were before with a dictatorship in South Korea and a dictatorship in North Korea. Still, more than 2 million people — mostly civilians — died, the United States dropped napalm on children, and 50,000 American soldiers lost their lives.
Did we “win” in Vietnam? We were forced to withdraw, but only after 2 million Vietnamese died, again mostly civilians, again leaving children burned or armless or legless, and 58,000 American soldiers dead.
Did we win in the first Gulf War? Not really. Yes, we pushed Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, with only a few hundred US casualties, but perhaps 100,000 Iraqis died. And the consequences were deadly for the United States: Saddam was still in power, which led the United States to enforce economic sanctions. That move led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, according to UN officials, and set the stage for another war.
In Afghanistan, the United States declared “victory” over the Taliban. Now the Taliban is back, and attacks are increasing. The recent US military death count in Afghanistan exceeds that in Iraq. What makes Obama think that sending more troops to Afghanistan will produce “victory”? And if it did, in an immediate military sense, how long would that last, and at what cost to human life on both sides?
The resurgence of fighting in Afghanistan is a good moment to reflect on the beginning of US involvement there. There should be sobering thoughts to those who say that attacking Iraq was wrong, but attacking Afghanistan was right.
Go back to Sept. 11, 2001. Hijackers direct jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing close to 3,000. A terrorist act, inexcusable by any moral code. The nation is aroused. President Bush orders the invasion and bombing of Afghanistan, and the American public is swept into approval by a wave of fear and anger. Bush announces a “war on terror.”
Except for terrorists, we are all against terror. So a war on terror sounded right. But there was a problem, which most Americans did not consider in the heat of the moment: President Bush, despite his confident bravado, had no idea how to make war against terror.
Yes, Al Qaeda — a relatively small but ruthless group of fanatics — was apparently responsible for the attacks. And, yes, there was evidence that Osama bin Laden and others were based in Afghanistan. But the United States did not know exactly where they were, so it invaded and bombed the whole country. That made many people feel righteous. “We had to do something,” you heard people say.
Yes, we had to do something. But not thoughtlessly, not recklessly. Would we approve of a police chief, knowing there was a vicious criminal somewhere in a neighborhood, ordering that the entire neighborhood be bombed? There was soon a civilian death toll in Afghanistan of more than 3,000 — exceeding the number of deaths in the Sept. 11 attacks. Hundreds of Afghans were driven from their homes and turned into wandering refugees.
Two months after the invasion of Afghanistan, a Boston Globe story described a 10-year-old in a hospital bed: “He lost his eyes and hands to the bomb that hit his house after Sunday dinner.” The doctor attending him said: “The United States must be thinking he is Osama. If he is not Osama, then why would they do this?”
We should be asking the presidential candidates: Is our war in Afghanistan ending terrorism, or provoking it? And is not war itself terrorism?
Howard Zinn is author of “A People’s History of the United States.”
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company
Source / The Boston Globe
The Rag Blog
The Sustainability Folks Are Our Comrades
Sustainability
By Paul Spencer / July 17, 2008
Here is a diary that was posted on Open Left by Syrith last year. (Some data in my comments were under-stated, and I have better information now.) It is well-said, but, unfortunately, it did not get much play at that time. IMO this is a term that is very important to a segment of our potential base that we rarely reach – or touch might be a better term. In the final analysis, all political organizations and movements are coalitions, and the Sustainability folks are very much our comrades.
Supporters of sustainable resource development are almost a missing link in the left/progressive movement at present. Yet this is a true middle ground that can yield agreement, rather than adversarial relationships, among our likeliest allies. Now – I hope that this doesn’t earn me the nickname of the Supply-Sider of Sustainability, or some such – but I think that the supply/production side has to be embraced, as well as the consumption side, when we try to define the boundaries of sustainability.
Twenty-five years ago in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest (my county is 80% GPNF), the timber harvest was on the order of 400 million board feet per year – primarily of Douglas Fir and Western Hemlock. A percentage of that harvest was “old growth” timber, meaning large-diameter logs with a more-dense cell structure and few knots. Environmentalists led legal challenges to this old-growth logging on the basis of harmful impacts to endangered forest species: e.g., the Northern Spotted Owl. Based on federal Endangered Species legislation, the federal courts stopped almost all such logging – almost in an instant. With their legal strategy realized, the environmental organizations then tied up virtually all federal log sales with litigation – or threats to litigate. The ramifications for loggers and forest-related businesses were close to catastrophic.
OK – a side-bar, if you will – the business situation in the early-1980s was generally poor in the U.S., and this was particularly true in lumber-dependent fields. So – to some degree this industry used this time period and this legal embroglio to write off their old, fully depreciated, and worn-out mills and equipment – much of it built in the 1940s. They could blame the environmentalists – and the government – to take the heat off of their managers and owners for loggers’ job and income losses. Then some mill-owners consolidated operations in new or rebuilt plants with CNC milling equipment designed to optimize use of the smaller 2nd-growth and 3rd-growth logs. When their business improved, they were back to work with ¼ of their former mill employees, producing more product per plant. Wow – win-win-win – write off the antique mills; blame the ‘greens’ and the Feds; build new and automate; and, when the market rises, your work force is trimmed in ways that you could not have imagined under the former conditions.
Back to sustainable harvest – the old logging days, where clear-cut was followed by replanting (somewhat rigorously applied on the federal forest lands), had created plantations of 2nd and 3rd growth forests. In the intervening years of little or no logging, these plantations have been putting on more than 60 million board feet of growth in our county’s share of the federal forests per year – according to silviculturists who work for the federal Forest Service. I suggest that a minimum of 50 million board feet of this annual growth can now be harvested with essentially no negative impact on these forests. (In addition ‘thinning’ operations are needed to improve forest health, increase forest-land biological diversity, and reduce fuel. This activity would substantially increase actual harvest for some years to come, just in order to ‘catch up’ with the suppressed operations from the last 18 years.) Going forward, some of the ‘surplus’ (growth minus harvest) can be mapped into the remaining ‘wilderness’ forests to enlarge their range, which would in any case continue to be off-limits to all logging.
There are other questions/issues associated with this argument, but these are exactly the true province of democratic politics – i.e., the negotiation of threshold levels of agreement between competing interests. For instance, does a clear-cut per se cause harm to the forest ecology? I say ‘definitely not’. Either by harvest or via fire, open space (meadows) will be formed. Elk, bluebirds, voles, coyotes, huckleberries, balsamroot daisies, indian paintbrush, and a host of other organisms depend on the meadow. Douglas Fir is a pioneer species, not a climax species – no meadows, after awhile, Doug Fir becomes an endangered species.
There are other points/issues for scientific study and political negotiation. Does fire suppression in the forest create conditions for worse harm? How far should we allow home-building penetration in the big, contiguous forests? The point for this discussion is that sustainable logging should be – or could be – the rubric that will allow adversarial factions to find a solution, if not quite common ground.
OK – this is just one example of the Sustainability issue/question. It’s a large part out here in the Pacific NW, but maybe it doesn’t resonate for you. But the concept should. Sustainability is the pivot point, and it takes ongoing Science to update and sharpen our understanding of the balance. After that, it’s all about this diary by redstar on the European Tribune.
That’s where we determine distribution of the ‘fruits’ of our efforts.
The Rag Blog
Will It Never End !!??
Thanks to Mariann Wizard / The Rag Blog
Emblematic of the Gang That Can’t Shoot Straight
Some people worry too much about the wrong things. For instance, Bush’s security people have created a watch list with a million names on it. How could that possibly be useful in counter-terrorism, a million names? Most of them are probably just peace activists. Terrorist groups are small and wily. You can’t get at them scattershot this way. But there are some things worth worrying about and doing something about. Dirty bombs, where radioactive material is packed in with a conventional bomb, causing contamination of wide swathes of e.g. a city, now that is a good candidate for action. But while Mr. Bush was fiddling around adding Americans to the watch list on a massive scale, the way celebrities add people to their Facebook friends list, he wasn’t bothering to take care of the important stuff. Emblematic of the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.
Juan Cole / Informed Comment
Report: Gov’t tardy securing radioactive material
By Eileen Sullivan / July 15, 2008
WASHINGTON – The government is taking too long to secure radioactive materials across the country that could get into terrorists’ hands, according to a government report.
Radioactive material used for legitimate purposes in medical equipment and food, for instance, could be used to create an explosive device known as a dirty bomb. Experts believe such an attack would be contained to a small area but could have significant psychological impact and have serious economic consequences because of cleanup problems.
The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks prompted the government to do a better job of securing nuclear and radiological materials. And nearly seven years later, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says these materials are much more secure. But congressional investigators say it’s not enough.
According to a Government Accountability Office report released Monday, new requirements to ensure that a person purchasing or carrying radioactive materials has a reason to do so is more than three years behind schedule. In a probe last year that set up a bogus company, investigators said they were able to obtain a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that allowed them to buy enough radioactive material for a small dirty bomb. Officials hope the licensing requirements will prevent this from happening again.
NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said a pilot program was completed in May, and the commission expects final guidance next month.
Further, a system to track radioactive materials as they are transported across the country has also faced multiple delays. The NRC says the system should be in place at the end of this year, but it will not be a real-time tracking system, such as used by some package delivery services.
The system will report transfers within one business day, Sheehan said. And if material goes missing as it’s transported, an alarm system will notify officials, he said.
On the inspection side, government investigators found that most Customs and Border Protection officers across the country were never told of 2006 radioactive material reporting requirements by the agency’s Washington headquarters. In May 2006, Customs and Border Protection changed its policy to require that officers contact authorities if they detect “more than incidental” amounts of radiation. But this was never communicated to officials in the field.
The GAO also found that there is not enough personal radiation detection equipment for Customs officials at land borders. In 2003, 8,000 out of 18,000 officers and agents had personal radiation detection devices. Currently only about half of the agency’s agents and officers have the equipment because of budget constraints, agency spokesman Lloyd Easterling said.
Getting these materials secured has been a longtime goal of Minnesota Republican Sen. Norm Coleman. Coleman says he’s happy there’s been some progress, but it’s taking too long, and it’s not enough.
“I’m still not convinced they fully grasp the psychological and economic impact that even a small dirty bomb attack would have on the American public,” Coleman said of the NRC.
Source / Yahoo News
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