The Rag Blog

The Brownshirt Party has chosen John “hundred year war” McCain as its presidential candidate. Except for Cheney, Norman Podhoretz, and Billy Kristol, McCain is America’s greatest warmonger.

In a McCain Regime, Cheney will be back in office with another stint as Secretary of War. Norman “Bomb-bomb-bomb-Iran” Podhoretz will be Undersecretary for Nuclear War with General John “Nuke them” Shalikashvili as his deputy. Rudy Giuliani will be the Minister of Interior in charge of Halliburton’s detention centers into which will be herded all critics of war and the police state. Billy kristol will be chief White House spokesliar.

The whole gang will be back–Wolfowitz, Perle, Wurmster, Feith, Libby, Bolton. America will have a second chance to bomb the world into submission.

With the majority of voters sick of war, sick of lies, sick of fraud from the Federal Reserve and Wall Street, and sick of stagnant and falling incomes, McCain is poised to capture 20 per cent of the vote–the Christian Zionists, the rapture evangelicals, and the diehard macho flag-waving thugs who believe America is done for unless “Islamofacists” are exterminated.

The accumulated lies, deceptions, war crimes, the shame of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons, Bush’s police state assault on civil liberty, countless numbers of Iraqi and Afghan men, women, and children murdered for the sake of American and Israeli hegemony, and the collapsing US economy indicate a political wipeout for the Brownshirt Party. In a country with an informed and humane population, the Republican Party would be reduced to such a small minority that it could never recover.

What will happen in America? Polls show that Americans have had it with Bush, and the 2006 congressional election showed that the voters have had it with Republicans. But the Republicans have seen the message and ignored it, and the people and the Democrats have continued to tolerate and to enable that which they claim to oppose.

Meanwhile Bush holds on to his determination to find a way to bomb Iran, dismissing along with the neocons the unanimous National Intelligence Estimate that there is no Iranian weapons program, just as Bush and the neocons dismissed the Iraq weapons inspectors who reported truthfully that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. What the American people and the Democrats have not understood is that a party with an agenda could care less for the facts.

The Democrats are far from pure, but they lack the fervor and determination that only ideology can provide. The Democrats might have issue-specific ideologies, but they lack an over-arching ideology that makes it imperative for them, and only them, to be in power.

In contrast, the Brownshirt Party is fueled by the neocon ideology of American (and Israeli) supremacy. The neocon ideology of supremacy is more far-reaching than Hitler’s. Hitler merely aimed for sway over Europe and Russia. The neocons have targeted the entire world.

Neocons have prepared plans for war against China. They are ringing Russia with military facilities and paying millions of dollars to leaders of former constituent parts of the Soviet Union to sign up with NATO, which the neocons have turned into a mechanism for drafting Europeans to serve American Empire.

All this work, the neocon Project for a New American Century, the costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the demonization of Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas, the ghettoization of the West Bank and Gaza, the police state measures that Bush has succeeded in putting on the books, the concentration of power in the executive branch, these are successes from which the Brownshirts will not walk away.

Possibly the neocons and their Brownshirt followers are so delusional that they do not realize that their glorious aims are not shared. Maybe they are no different from Americans, maxed out on credit and unable to make mortgage payments, who believe that next week they will win the lotto.

On the other hand maybe the Brownshirts have a plan.

What could the plan be?

They can steal the election with the Diebold electronic voting machines and proprietary software that no one is allowed to check. There are now enough elections on record with significant divergences between exit polls and vote tallies that a stolen election can be explained away. The Democrats have been house trained to acquiesce to stolen elections. The voters, whose votes are stolen, dismiss the evidence as “conspiracy theories.”

Or what about a well-timed orchestrated “terrorist attack” to drive fearful Americans to the war candidate. False flag events are stock-in-trade. Hitler used the Reichstag fire to turn German democracy into a dictatorship overnight.

And what about the widespread spying on Americans? The Bush regime’s explanation for its violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act makes no sense. Bush’s violation of the law is clearly a felony, grounds for impeachment, arrest, indictment, and a prison sentence. Moreover, no intelligence purpose was achieved by Bush’s illegal acts. The FISA law only requires the executive branch to come to a secret court to explain its purpose and obtain a warrant. The law even allows the executive branch to spy first and obtain the warrant afterward. The purpose of the warrant is to prevent an administration from spying for political purposes. The only reason for Bush to refuse to obtain warrants is that he had no valid reason for the spying.

Does this mean that during the presidential campaign we will hear from Attorney General Michael Mukasey that candidate Hillary is under investigation for a Whitewater-related offense, or that candidate Obama is linked to an alleged crime figure or Islamist?

The neocons control most of the print and TV media, and the right-wing radio talk hosts are no friends of Democrats. As Americans have fallen for every other fraud perpetrated upon them, they are likely to be suckers as well for “investigations” or rumors of investigations of the Democratic candidate. Hillary is widely disliked and easy to distrust. Obama is a new face with which voters have little experience. He is partly black and has a funny name.

John McCain is a graduate of the US Naval Academy. His father and grandfather were admirals. On his 23rd bombing mission over North Vietnam in one of America’s orchestrated wars, he was shot down and injured. He was a POW for 5.5 years, and tortured by the North Vietnamese.

McCain has been in Congress and thus in the public eye since 1983. The only scandal with which he is associated is that he was one of “the Keating five,” one of five senators associated through campaign contributions with S&L owner and real estate investor Charles Keating and alleged interveners in his behalf. Keating was entraped by prosecutors, but was later exonerated by a federal judge.

Adolf Hitler never had the support of a majority of the German electorate. In the November 1932 election, he received 33.1 percent of the vote. His peak was March 6, 1933, with 43.9 percent following the Reichstag fire a few days before on February 27, blamed on the communists. Hitler’s minority support in a democracy did not prevent him from becoming dictator of Germany.

Why has the Bush administration been dancing around the question of whether waterboarding is torture?

Waterboarding was one of the most common tortures employed by the Spanish Inquisition for the first half of its 450-year-long history (circa 1480-1834). This has never been a secret. It is attested to by reams of documents – letters, debates, manuals of instruction and copious records of trials that include verbatim accounts of the torture sessions themselves – in the Historical Archives of Spain and Mexico, in which I have worked for the last 30 years. The information about inquisitorial waterboarding has also been available to the English-reading general public since publication of H.C. Lea’s A History of the Inquisition, the last volume of which appeared a hundred years ago this year.

Here is Lea’s description of the inquisitorial waterboarding:

“The patient was placed on an escalera or potro – a kind of trestle, with sharp-edged rungs across it like a ladder. It slanted so that the head was lower than the feet and, at the lower end was a depression in which the head sank, while an iron band around the forehead or throat kept it immovable. A bostezo, or iron prong, distended the mouth, a toca, or strip of linen, was thrust down the throat to conduct water trickling slowly from a jarra or jar, holding usually a little more than a quart. The patient gasped and felt he was suffocating, and at intervals, the toca was withdrawn and he was adjured to tell the truth. The severity of the infliction was measured by the number of jars consumed, sometimes reaching to six or eight.”

The Spanish Inquisition, unlike many American lawmakers and members of the executive branch, did not waffle about labeling waterboarding a torture. Waterboarding was not invented in Spain: Since the middle of the 13th Century it had been used by European civil and ecclesiastical courts, particularly the Papal Inquisition, in Rome. In Spain no one voiced doubts, as did Michael Mukasey during his October confirmation hearings for U.S. attorney general, and at a hearing just the other day, about whether waterboarding might not technically be torture.

President Bush, on the other hand, has no doubts at all. Unlike his nominee, he spoke with inquisitor-like certainty when he proclaimed that our physically coercive techniques “are safe, they are lawful and they are necessary.” He apparently sees no contradiction in simultaneously insisting that these “classified interrogation procedures” be conducted offshore so as to remove them from the jurisdiction and safeguards of the American judicial system.

The Spanish Inquisition guaranteed to the accused many of the legal protections that the current administration has worked so hard to sweep under the rug. Within the context of their times the Inquisition’s stance, succinctly laid out in its 1561 Manual of Instruction to Inquisitors, was remarkable. Both the prosecuting and court-appointed defense attorneys had access to the substance of all of the testimonies relating to the accused. The accused could disqualify the testimony of anyone whom he or she could prove had animus against them. Inquisitors had to weigh the full arguments of the defense and the prosecution before ordering a torture session. The order required a unanimous vote of the judges. If the defense attorney didn’t accept the decision, he could appeal the ruling to the Inquisition’s Supreme Council (though in practice they rarely did).

Gathered in the torture chamber itself were the inquisitors, a bishop’s representative, and a recording secretary adept at speedwriting, which was the videotaping of its day. The attending doctor could rule the accused unfit to be tortured, and could order the procedure stopped at any time. Once the accused was brought into the torture chamber, he was offered several chances – the average seems to have been about six- to make full voluntary confession. Fear in the presence of imminent pain was generally enough to loosen the accused person’s tongue. It was only when fear alone did not work that torture was applied, with each step of the procedure, each jar of water and turn of the winch, each question and each choked-out answer, duly noted by the recording secretary. None of the participants ever destroyed those documents out of fear of embarrassment or indictment for their actions. Nor did their bosses. The original recordings were archived, and after 500 years are still available.

I am not praising the Spanish Inquisition. I know enough about the real Inquisition – not the cartoon version of Monty Python nor the sensationalist horrors of the Black Legend – to know that the Inquisition was heinous in almost every way. Though debates raged then and still rage among scholars about the reliability of the information elicited by these procedures, there is no disagreement about one fact: Waterboarding was torture. That was its intent, and that, in conjunction with a variety of other torments, was how the Spanish inquisitors used it. Even today popular imagination condemns them for it. For the United States to adopt even one of the Inquisition’s torture techniques exposes us, rightly, to moral condemnation.

The United States has long been a beacon to the world for its ethical principles (even when sometimes these have been honored in the breach). Equal treatment under the law. Habeas corpus. Free and open discussion informed by access to information and a free press. Checks and balances to ensure that these rights are protected.

That the Bush-Cheney administration has squandered our human and material resources in this so-called war against terror is a calamity that will affect us for decades. But that they have blown away our moral capital, that they have compromised the principles that define us as a nation, that is a tragedy.

David M. Gitlitz is a professor of Hispanic studies at the University of Rhode Island.

Well, I have news for y’all: This is not now, nor ever has been, a Christian nation. Article 11 of the Treaty Of Tripoli, ratified by the United States Senate on June 7, 1797, and signed into law by President John Adams, reads as follows:

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

A word of clarification here: Mussulmen and Mahometan refers to Moslems and Muslim nations.

As for waterboarding, the fact that this country sanctions such acts shows just how far we have slid from our moral bearings. If we don’t do something soon to restore our moral grounding in the world, we may as well kiss this country goodbye and march headlong into Empire. And we all know what has happened, historically, to each and every Empire that ever existed on the face of the earth. They have collapsed under their own bloated weight and fallen into long periods of instability. And if that’s not already happening now, well, I don’t know what else to think. But the old saying goes, if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it must be a duck.

If it looks like an Empire and it acts like an Empire, then surely it must be an Empire, only in our case, it is one that is in the throes of decline. I suppose it was inevitable, historical precedent being what it is.

On the streets of Miami, Luis Posada Carriles might look like just one of the dozens of nice, elderly Cuban gentlemen who gather outside the Versailles Restaurant for a strong cup of java. But there is nothing nice or gentle about Posada Carriles. For starters, he is responsible for the 1976 downing of a Cuban passenger plane with 73 people on board-the first act of aviation terrorism in the Western hemisphere. In 1997 he orchestrated the bombing of hotels in Havana that resulted in the death of Italian businessman Fabio Di Celmo. In 2000 he was arrested, and later convicted, in Panama for plotting to assassinate Fidel Castro by blowing up an auditorium full of students.

On a recent trip to Venezuela, I learned of his sordid history of torturing and assassinating suspected leftists when he worked for the Venezuelan secret police. Jesus Marrero, a student leader in 1973, painfully recounted how Posada Carriles supervised his torture, including electrodes to his penis. Brenda Esquivel, captured when she was 8-months pregnant, says Posada ordered his men to “destroy the seed before it was born”–kicking her so brutally that the baby died in her womb. Her sister Marlene, who was imprisoned with her 20-day-old baby, was forced to watch as Posada’s agents burned her baby with cigarettes.

The U.S. Justice Department has called Posada “an unrepentant criminal and admitted mastermind of terrorist plots and attacks. ” When he was being held in a U.S. immigration detention center in 2005 for having sneaked into the country with a false passport, the Department of Homeland Security said that due to his long history of criminal activity and violence, his release from detention would “pose a danger to both the community and the national security of the United States.”

So why, then, does Luis Posada Carriles live freely in Miami, eating lechón asado at the Versailles Restaurant, socializing at the Big Five Club, exhibiting his paintings at the Miami Art Museum? Why isn’t he behind bars?

That’s the question that was on our mind when six of us from the women’s peace group CODEPINK went to Miami on January 12 to launch a campaign calling for Posada’s arrest. Armed simply with postcards and a banner asking the FBI to put him on the most-wanted list, we were attacked by a violent mob of Posada supporters as our vehicle moved along Calle Ocho in the heart of Miami’s Little Havana. The next day we were pelted with eggs and water bottles. Appearing on a Spanish-language TV program, I was told by fellow panelist Enrique Encinosa that I was “an enemy of the Cuban-American community” and that I shouldn’t be surprised if someone cracked my head open like a coconut.

Posada Carriles and his violent followers who impose their views in Miami through fear and intimidation are relics of the sordid history of U.S. policy in Latin America. Just as in the anti-Soviet efforts in Afghanistan where the U.S. government nurtured the Mujahadeen “freedom fighters” who fought the Soviets, so it trained, financed and provided shelter to those fighting left-leaning governments in this hemisphere, even democratically elected ones. Posada was trained by the U.S. Army and worked as an operative and asset of the CIA from 1960 to 1976. “The C.I.A. taught us everything. They taught us explosives, how to kill, bomb, trained us in acts of sabotage, ” Mr. Posada told New York Times reporter Ann Louise Bardach in 1998. “Now they call it terrorism,” he added.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous remark about Nicaraguan dictator Somoza-”he may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch”-seems to apply to Posada Carriles. Indeed, Posada Carriles may be “our terrorist,” but allowing him to live freely in Miami makes a mockery of the war on terror. On February 8-10, CODEPINK’s anti-terrorist team will return to Miami. We will distribute cards calling for Posada’s arrest, show a documentary film on this man’s violent history, and ask locally elected leaders to join us in calling for Posada to be extradited to Venezuela, where he is wanted on 73 counts of homicide, or detained and prosecuted here in the United States. Unlike our last visit when the Miami police failed to protect us, this time-having ample warning–we expect the police to guarantee our constitutional right to free speech and free assembly.

Vice President Dick Cheney said that “Any person or government that supports, protects, or harbors terrorists is complicit in the murder of the innocent.” President Bush has repeatedly stated that “we will not rest until we eliminate the terrorists and rout them out.”

We understand that some members of Miami’s Cuban-American community consider Posada Carriles a hero for his anti-communist actions. But no cause is so noble that it justifies killing civilians. There is no such thing as good terrorism.

It is time for some moral consistency in this war on terror. Whether Osama bin Laden or Posada Carriles, we must bring all terrorists to justice.

Morning Edition, February 7, 2008 · A document from the Department of Veterans Affairs contradicts an assertion made by the Army surgeon general that his office did not tell VA officials to stop helping injured soldiers with their military disability paperwork at a New York Army post.

The paperwork can help determine health care and disability benefits for wounded soldiers.

Last week, NPR first described a meeting last March between an Army team from Washington and VA officials at Fort Drum Army base in upstate New York. NPR reported that Army representatives told the VA not to review the narrative summaries of soldiers’ injuries, and that the VA complied with the Army’s request.

The day the NPR story aired, Army Surgeon General Eric B. Schoomaker denied parts of the report. Rep. John McHugh (R-NY), who represents the Fort Drum area, told North Country Public Radio, that “The Surgeon General of the Army told me very flatly that it was not the Army that told the VA to stop this help.”

Now, NPR has obtained a four-page VA document that contradicts the surgeon general’s statement to McHugh. It was written by one of the VA officials at Fort Drum on March 31, the day after the meeting. The document says Col. Becky Baker of the Army Surgeon General’s office told the VA to discontinue counseling soldiers on the appropriateness of Defense Department ratings because “there exists a conflict of interest.”

When contacted by NPR, Baker referred an interview request to the Army Surgeon General’s spokeswoman. The spokeswoman rejected requests for interviews with Baker and Schoomaker.

The document says that before the Army team’s visit, people from the Army Inspector General’s office came to Fort Drum and told the VA it was providing a useful service to soldiers by reviewing their disability paperwork.

According to the document, joining Baker on the Army team at the Fort Drum meeting was Dr. Alan Janusziewicz. He retired as deputy assistant surgeon general for the Army in October.

“I was part of the team, and I was probably instrumental in the surgeon general denying that the Army had instructed the VA” to stop reviewing soldiers’ Army medical documents, Janusziewicz told NPR in a phone interview.

There has been a remarkable consistency among George W. Bush’s attorneys general in one respect. All three of them have openly argued for breaking the law and have proceeded to do so on a daily basis.

Here is Michael Mukasey, currently taking his turn as our nation’s chief law-breaking officer:

Also Thursday, Attorney General Michael Mukasey told lawmakers he will not open a criminal investigation into the CIA’s use of waterboarding on terror suspects.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers asked Mukasey bluntly whether he was starting a criminal investigation since Hayden confirmed the use of waterboarding.

“No, I am not, for this reason: Whatever was done as part of a CIA program at the time that it was done was the subject of a Department of Justice opinion through the Office of Legal Counsel and was found to be permissible under the law as it existed then,” he said.

Mukasey said opening an investigation would send a message that Justice Department opinions are subject to change.

“Essentially it would tell people, ‘You rely on a Justice Department opinion as part of a program, then you will be subject to criminal investigations … if the tenure of the person who wrote the opinion changes or indeed the political winds change,’” he said. “And that’s not something that I think would be appropriate and it’s not something I will do.”

This last paragraph might sound reasonable to someone unfamiliar with the law: Gee, officer, the Justice Department said it was okay. Go give them the ticket.

But under the law it is not okay at all. Mukasey’s own Justice Department will ship you off to jail if that’s the best excuse you can offer for committing a felony. And they do it every day.

Wayne Uff explained the process for us several months ago, as former attorney general John Ashcroft’s was doing his best to let our largest telecomunications companies off the hook for the illegal wiretapping they did at George W. Bush’s request.

Uff, a retired federal prosecutor himself, makes an argument that may seem counterintuitive to the layman. It is, however, the law, and the law is what Torture Boys Ashcroft, Gonzales and Mukasey swore an oath to uphold.

In this article former Attorney General John Ashcroft defends immunity for the telephone companies who turned over wiretap information without warrants in reliance on the government’s say-so that it was legal. Ashcroft argues that:

Longstanding principles of law hold that an American corporation is entitled to rely on assurances of legality from officials responsible for government activities. The public officials in question might be right or wrong about the advisability or legality of what they are doing, but it is their responsibility, not the company’s, to deal with the consequences if they are wrong.

Small problem: he’s wrong on the law. Companies that deal with the government in fact are not entitled to rely on promises made by government officials, and it is common for companies to lose major legal cases despite the fact that they relied on what they believed to be valid advice from government officials.

What Ashcroft wrote probably sounds like a reasonable rule to the average person: it’s not fair for a company to be penalized for doing something the government told it to do. The real rule, at least as reasonable as Ashcroft’s, is exactly the opposite. That rule is described, elaborated, and relied on in hundreds of cases, mostly government contract cases. Contrary to Ashcroft’s teaching, the rule is that businesses who deal with the government are not entitled to rely on a government official’s promises that their behavior is legal. A government official cannot make an act legal simply by erroneously telling a citizen the act is okay. The problem that these cases address is that government officials are human, and can make mistakes in interpreting laws. Or, officials can even be corrupt, or otherwise purposefully misinterpret the laws. A mistaken or corrupt government official does not have the power to make an illegal act legal.

A company that deals with the government is required to make its own, independent analysis of whether or not the actions proposed by the government are legal, and where a government official gave wrong legal advice, the company can lose the lawsuit.

There are hundreds if not thousands of these cases out there. And, it is very common for the citizen who relies on an erroneous representation by a government official to get to get the shaft, high and hard. Here’s just one that I found in a minute on Google:

As to “actual authority,” the Supreme Court has recognized that any private party entering into a contract with the government assumes the risk of having accurately ascertained that he who purports to act for the government does in fact act within the bounds of his authority. Fed. Crop Ins. Corp. v. Merrill, 332 U.S. 380, 384 (1947); accord CACI, Inc. v. Sec’y of the Army, 990 F.2d 1233, 1236 (Fed. Cir. 1993) (“A contractor who enters into an arrangement with an agent of the government bears the risk that the agent is acting outside the bounds of his authority, even when the agent himself was unaware of the limitations on his authority.”). ….

But even if the Secretary of the Air Force himself had said to the recruiters that they could and should promise free lifetime medical care to aid in recruitment, those promises would be a nullity because, as shown below, the pertinent regulation provided to the contrary.

And, even on fairness, the rule that the letter of the law governs – and not the flawed interpretation of a government official – has much to recommend it. One of the rationales for this rule is that “The People” passed the laws, and it is the people’s law that governs, not the imperfect officials who may mistakenly interpret the law. It is not fair to force the people to abide by the perhaps twisted and erroneous interpretation of their laws by the imperfect individuals who hold office temporarily. It is not the people’s fault that their laws were misinterpreted by an official, and it is not fair to penalize the people for the mistakes of public servants. Remember the old saw about ours being a government of laws, not men? This is exactly what is meant: actions aren’t made lawful by the president’s saying they are lawful; actions are lawful if they are within the law.

One corollary to this legal rule: anyone who is shafted by relying on the mistaken legal interpretation of a government official usually cannot sue the government for relief because the sovereign is immune from suit, but such an injured citizen may have a legal recourse: a suit against the personal assets of the government official who made the mistake.

Over the past few weeks, numerous undersea data cables providing data access to large portions over the Middle East have been severed. Five separate cable cuts have been detected since January 23, a rash of incidents that some have blamed on wayward fishing trawlers, while others are suspecting terrorism. Regardless of the cause, the scope of the damage is just now becoming known, with 85-million users said to be currently unable to connect to the Internet.

Post-Katrina Redevelopment Excludes “poor and working-class black New Orleanians from returning home”

It took Kawana Jasper over a year, and all the stubborn will she could muster, to get back to New Orleans. Broke and exhausted, she arrived in the city last spring from Houston, only to find that the last leg of her journey-back to her apartment at the St. Bernard housing project-would be the toughest yet. Her home survived Hurricane Katrina, but it will crumble under the city’s plan to demolish low-income housing in the name of “redevelopment.”

To the 33 year-old single mother of three, the officials pushing to raze St. Bernard are carrying out disaster by design. “How could they just get away with it?” she asks.

The pending demolition of the St. Bernard, B.W. Cooper, C.J. Peete, and Lafitte projects has confirmed the fears of the city’s poorest, blackest, and hardest hit communities: that New Orleans’ “recovery” in the wake of the storm is built on the city’s old demons of racial and class strife.

Residents have responded to the demolition plans with street demonstrations and heated outcry at public meetings. But the government has continued to steadily advance its redevelopment scheme. Late last year, a district court thwarted a legal challenge to the demolitions in a class-action civil-rights lawsuit. In December, the newly elected, majority-white City Council voted to approve the redevelopment proposal, while outside, police clashed violently with throngs of protesters locked out of the meeting.

Audrey Stewart, an advocate for displaced residents with the Loyola University Law Clinic, says the destruction of public housing reflects a wholesale abandonment of the city’s most vulnerable. “We just see it as a pattern of excluding poor and working-class Black New Orleanians from returning home – from participating in the process of rebuilding their neighborhoods.”

Crippled Homes

Katrina’s fury swept Gloria Williams further from home than she’d ever been. But after a few weeks stranded in rural California, the 61 year-old grandmother boarded a bus back to Louisiana, determined to return to her cozy apartment at C.J. Peete, her home of over twenty years.

But the Housing Authority of New Orleans has barred Williams and other residents from moving back. Their outrage boiled over last year, when she and some neighbors temporarily reoccupied the worn but sturdy units, unauthorized, to show they were still habitable. Now, the redevelopment plans threaten to settle that dispute by tearing the whole project down.

Williams today clings to a modest house on the West Bank, scraping by on disability income and a rental voucher provided by the government. On a typical afternoon, she stays in bed, battling emphysema and heart trouble, wondering what she’ll do when the last few eggs in her refrigerator are gone.

“Our people are slowly dying,” she says, noting that many people from her community are already living on the streets. “They don’t want the black people back in New Orleans,” she says, “That’s why, that’s the problem.”

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which took control of the New Orleans housing authority in 2002 due to management failures, estimates that around 5,100 families lived in public housing prior to Katrina. Many of these solid structures emerged from the hurricane relatively unscathed.

But local and federal housing authorities say the old projects were cesspools of crime and poverty, which both tenants and the city would be better off without. Officials want to demolish about 4,500 units and replace them with “mixed income” developments, which supposedly promote economic integration.

When redevelopment is finished in 2010, HUD projects, New Orleans will have roughly 3,300 low-income public housing units-a reduction of a few thousand -plus around 1800 voucher-subsidized apartments and a comparable number of HUD-developed “market rate” units.

But under the mixed-income rubric, politics and profit motives may ultimately determine the distribution of higher- and lower-income homes. Activists say the concept often masks segregation as progress, as development interests gentrify neighborhoods and price poor families out.

So far, according to a funding analysis by the housing think-tank Policylink, the redevelopment projects now underway would abandon more than 60 percent of HUD’s pre-Katrina affordable housing stock-homes within reach of families earning under $15,900 per year. Meanwhile, since the hurricane, average market-rate rents have jumped by nearly 50 percent.

ACORN, an advocacy group that is helping rebuild storm-battered working-class communities, questions the human costs of reconfiguring neighborhoods to achieve a certain income “mix.”

“You have people who lived in these neighborhoods for generations,” says ACORN organizer Tanya Harris, who herself is from the Lower Ninth Ward, a tight-knit and historically rooted black enclave. “The strength of my community came from the fact that we had a history and a bond, that we knew each other, and that we were linked together through our experiences. That was a beautiful thing.”

Julie Andrews, a resident of the Abundance Square housing complex, temporarily settled with her family in remote Alabama after the storm, but couldn’t bring herself to stay. In New Orleans, she knew she’d have little to start over with-but something called her back.

“Maybe it wasn’t perfect before, but at least you knew your neighbor,” she says.

That sense of community is missing from the prevailing view of “development,” she says: “‘Bricks and mortar’ does not bring a better quality of life to people, when their economic status and their moral status has not been increased.”

Redevelopment or Exclusion?

HUD claims it is working diligently to provide housing for displaced residents who want to return. The agency has moved some families into vacant public housing units and issued several thousand vouchers to help people rent apartments at the current inflated rates.

Aside from former HUD-housing residents, the agency subsidizes rent for thousands of other families through the Disaster Housing Assistance Program. The government will be decreasing these payments, however, to push households toward “independence”-basically, forcing people to pay $50 more each month until their subsidy disappears.

In the long term, critics argue, vouchers and subsidies will barely dent the overwhelming need for affordable housing. They point out that landlords are under no obligation, and often refuse, to rent to low-income voucher holders, and that thousands of families were on the waiting list for voucher-assisted housing before the storm.

Katrina pummeled nearly 51,700 rentals in the area. More than 29,000 affordable-rent units vanished. The social-service coalition UNITY estimated last year that homelessness had roughly doubled to about 12,000 people across New Orleans and neighboring Jefferson Parish.

Yet HUD has opposed a recent proposal in Congress to mandate that all demolished units are comparably replaced in the redevelopment process. Meanwhile, using HUD’s data, advocates estimate that restoring the projects would cost less than demolition and redevelopment.

The underlying assault on the city’s poor, critics say, is the free-market philosophy that drives the politics of rebuilding and aims to dismantle public resources.

The Brookings Institute, a centrist think tank, reports that over two years since Katrina made landfall, the area still counts among the casualties about two fifths of its public schools and two fifths of its hospitals. Of over $2 billion in federal funds allocated for infrastructure restoration in Orleans Parish, only about 30 percent has actually been distributed to projects.

“It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy on the government’s part,” says Anita Sinha, an attorney with the Advancement Project, one of the groups litigating the class-action suit. “They’re making it such that people can’t come home.”

From the Ground Up

While officials move forward with demolition, community groups are launching alternative rebuilding efforts: small initiatives that articulate a grassroots counterpoint to the material focus of conventional development schemes.

Tanya Harris, who is working on restoring her neighbors’ homes as well as her own, says that although the government offers funds for reconstruction, returnees need more global supports, to ensure that once they come home, they have the means to stay.

“It’s very difficult, I think, for a lot of people who are putting out the funds for rebuilding, and who also are staring down the barrel of: ‘Will my utilities be out of control? Will my insurance be out of control? I can put this house back together, but can I afford to live in it?’”

ACORN has created a redevelopment plan focused on preserving communities like the Lower Ninth Ward, through measures like a job-training project, expanded resources for local public schools, and a rent-stabilization program.

The volunteer-led Common Ground Collective has mobilized New Orleanians through both political organizing and a grassroots social-service infrastructure. Since 2005, the organization has seeded free clinics and legal aid, environmental-restoration programs, and an alternative energy project. To foster economic self-sufficiency and youth development, the group also trains local young people in housing-restoration work.

“There is so much to be done,” says Common Ground volunteer Sakura Kone. “There’s no will on the part of the power structure. It’s only grassroots like ourselves that are making a difference in their lives.”

Local residents, too, see the housing struggle as a test of self-will.

Knowing that she didn’t fight her way back to New Orleans just to founder at her own doorstep, Kawana Jasper doesn’t plan on going anywhere.

“Sometimes I feel like, ‘What I came back for?’ Because they don’t want us here,” she says. “But I’m not going to give them what they want.”

Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does-and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government, which alarms the ACLU. But there may be more to it than that. One business executive, who showed me his InfraGard card, told me they have permission to “shoot to kill” in the event of martial law.

InfraGard is “a child of the FBI,” says Michael Hershman, the chairman of the advisory board of the InfraGard National Members Alliance and CEO of the Fairfax Group, an international consulting firm.InfraGard started in Cleveland back in 1996, when the private sector there cooperated with the FBI to investigate cyber threats.

“Then the FBI cloned it,” says Phyllis Schneck, chairman of the board of directors of the InfraGard National Members Alliance, and the prime mover behind the growth of InfraGard over the last several years.

InfraGard itself is still an FBI operation, with FBI agents in each state overseeing the local InfraGard chapters. (There are now eighty-six of them.) The alliance is a nonprofit organization of private sector InfraGard members.

“We are the owners, operators, and experts of our critical infrastructure, from the CEO of a large company in agriculture or high finance to the guy who turns the valve at the water utility,” says Schneck, who by day is the vice president of research integration at Secure Computing.

“At its most basic level, InfraGard is a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the private sector,” the InfraGard website states. “InfraGard chapters are geographically linked with FBI Field Office territories.”

In November 2001, InfraGard had around 1,700 members. As of late January, InfraGard had 23,682 members, according to its website, www.infragard.net, which adds that “350 of our nation’s Fortune 500 have a representative in InfraGard.”

To join, each person must be sponsored by “an existing InfraGard member, chapter, or partner organization.” The FBI then vets the applicant. On the application form, prospective members are asked which aspect of the critical infrastructure their organization deals with. These include: agriculture, banking and finance, the chemical industry, defense, energy, food, information and telecommunications, law enforcement, public health, and transportation.

FBI Director Robert Mueller addressed an InfraGard convention on August 9, 2005. At that time, the group had less than half as many members as it does today. “To date, there are more than 11,000 members of InfraGard,” he said. “From our perspective that amounts to 11,000 contacts . . . and 11,000 partners in our mission to protect America.” He added a little later, “Those of you in the private sector are the first line of defense.”

He urged InfraGard members to contact the FBI if they “note suspicious activity or an unusual event.” And he said they could sic the FBI on “disgruntled employees who will use knowledge gained on the job against their employers.”

In an interview with InfraGard after the conference, which is featured prominently on the InfraGard members’ website, Mueller says: “It’s a great program.”

The ACLU is not so sanguine.

“There is evidence that InfraGard may be closer to a corporate TIPS program, turning private-sector corporations-some of which may be in a position to observe the activities of millions of individual customers-into surrogate eyes and ears for the FBI,” the ACLU warned in its August 2004 report The Surveillance-Industrial Complex: How the American Government Is Conscripting Businesses and Individuals in the Construction of a Surveillance Society.

InfraGard is not readily accessible to the general public. Its communications with the FBI and Homeland Security are beyond the reach of the Freedom of Information Act under the “trade secrets” exemption, its website says. And any conversation with the public or the media is supposed to be carefully rehearsed.

“The interests of InfraGard must be protected whenever presented to non-InfraGard members,” the website states. “During interviews with members of the press, controlling the image of InfraGard being presented can be difficult. Proper preparation for the interview will minimize the risk of embarrassment. . . . The InfraGard leadership and the local FBI representative should review the submitted questions, agree on the predilection of the answers, and identify the appropriate interviewee. . . . Tailor answers to the expected audience. . . . Questions concerning sensitive information should be avoided.”

One of the advantages of InfraGard, according to its leading members, is that the FBI gives them a heads-up on a secure portal about any threatening information related to infrastructure disruption or terrorism.

The InfraGard website advertises this. In its list of benefits of joining InfraGard, it states: “Gain access to an FBI secure communication network complete with VPN encrypted website, webmail, listservs, message boards, and much more.”

InfraGard members receive “almost daily updates” on threats “emanating from both domestic sources and overseas,” Hershman says.

“We get very easy access to secure information that only goes to InfraGard members,” Schneck says. “People are happy to be in the know.”

On November 1, 2001, the FBI had information about a potential threat to the bridges of California. The alert went out to the InfraGard membership. Enron was notified, and so, too, was Barry Davis, who worked for Morgan Stanley. He notified his brother Gray, the governor of California.

“He said his brother talked to him before the FBI,” recalls Steve Maviglio, who was Davis’s press secretary at the time. “And the governor got a lot of grief for releasing the information. In his defense, he said, ‘I was on the phone with my brother, who is an investment banker. And if he knows, why shouldn’t the public know?’ ”

Maviglio still sounds perturbed about this: “You’d think an elected official would be the first to know, not the last.”

In return for being in the know, InfraGard members cooperate with the FBI and Homeland Security. “InfraGard members have contributed to about 100 FBI cases,” Schneck says. “What InfraGard brings you is reach into the regional and local communities. We are a 22,000-member vetted body of subject-matter experts that reaches across seventeen matrixes. All the different stovepipes can connect with InfraGard.”

Schneck is proud of the relationships the InfraGard Members Alliance has built with the FBI. “If you had to call 1-800-FBI, you probably wouldn’t bother,” she says. “But if you knew Joe from a local meeting you had with him over a donut, you might call them. Either to give or to get. We want everyone to have a little black book.”

This black book may come in handy in times of an emergency. “On the back of each membership card,” Schneck says, “we have all the numbers you’d need: for Homeland Security, for the FBI, for the cyber center. And by calling up as an InfraGard member, you will be listened to.” She also says that members would have an easier time obtaining a “special telecommunications card that will enable your call to go through when others will not.”

This special status concerns the ACLU.

“The FBI should not be creating a privileged class of Americans who get special treatment,” says Jay Stanley, public education director of the ACLU’s technology and liberty program. “There’s no ‘business class’ in law enforcement. If there’s information the FBI can share with 22,000 corporate bigwigs, why don’t they just share it with the public? That’s who their real ‘special relationship’ is supposed to be with. Secrecy is not a party favor to be given out to friends. . . . This bears a disturbing resemblance to the FBI’s handing out ‘goodies’ to corporations in return for folding them into its domestic surveillance machinery.”

When the government raises its alert levels, InfraGard is in the loop. For instance, in a press release on February 7, 2003, the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Attorney General announced that the national alert level was being raised from yellow to orange. They then listed “additional steps” that agencies were taking to “increase their protective measures.” One of those steps was to “provide alert information to InfraGard program.”

“They’re very much looped into our readiness capability,” says Amy Kudwa, spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security. “We provide speakers, as well as do joint presentations [with the FBI]. We also train alongside them, and they have participated in readiness exercises.”

On May 9, 2007, George Bush issued National Security Presidential Directive 51 entitled “National Continuity Policy.” In it, he instructed the Secretary of Homeland Security to coordinate with “private sector owners and operators of critical infrastructure, as appropriate, in order to provide for the delivery of essential services during an emergency.”

Asked if the InfraGard National Members Alliance was involved with these plans, Schneck said it was “not directly participating at this point.” Hershman, chairman of the group’s advisory board, however, said that it was.

InfraGard members, sometimes hundreds at a time, have been used in “national emergency preparation drills,” Schneck acknowledges.

“In case something happens, everybody is ready,” says Norm Arendt, the head of the Madison, Wisconsin, chapter of InfraGard, and the safety director for the consulting firm Short Elliott Hendrickson, Inc. “There’s been lots of discussions about what happens under an emergency.”

One business owner in the United States tells me that InfraGard members are being advised on how to prepare for a martial law situation-and what their role might be. He showed me his InfraGard card, with his name and e-mail address on the front, along with the InfraGard logo and its slogan, “Partnership for Protection.” On the back of the card were the emergency numbers that Schneck mentioned.

This business owner says he attended a small InfraGard meeting where agents of the FBI and Homeland Security discussed in astonishing detail what InfraGard members may be called upon to do.

“The meeting started off innocuously enough, with the speakers talking about corporate espionage,” he says. “From there, it just progressed. All of a sudden we were knee deep in what was expected of us when martial law is declared. We were expected to share all our resources, but in return we’d be given specific benefits.” These included, he says, the ability to travel in restricted areas and to get people out.
But that’s not all.

“Then they said when-not if-martial law is declared, it was our responsibility to protect our portion of the infrastructure, and if we had to use deadly force to protect it, we couldn’t be prosecuted,” he says.

I was able to confirm that the meeting took place where he said it had, and that the FBI and Homeland Security did make presentations there. One InfraGard member who attended that meeting denies that the subject of lethal force came up. But the whistleblower is 100 percent certain of it. “I have nothing to gain by telling you this, and everything to lose,” he adds. “I’m so nervous about this, and I’m not someone who gets nervous.”

Though Schneck says that FBI and Homeland Security agents do make presentations to InfraGard, she denies that InfraGard members would have any civil patrol or law enforcement functions. “I have never heard of InfraGard members being told to use lethal force anywhere,” Schneck says.

The FBI adamantly denies it, also. “That’s ridiculous,” says Catherine Milhoan, an FBI spokesperson. “If you want to quote a businessperson saying that, knock yourself out. If that’s what you want to print, fine.”

But one other InfraGard member corroborated the whistleblower’s account, and another would not deny it.

Christine Moerke is a business continuity consultant for Alliant Energy in Madison, Wisconsin. She says she’s an InfraGard member, and she confirms that she has attended InfraGard meetings that went into the details about what kind of civil patrol function-including engaging in lethal force-that InfraGard members may be called upon to perform.

“There have been discussions like that, that I’ve heard of and participated in,” she says.

Curt Haugen is CEO of S’Curo Group, a company that does “strategic planning, business continuity planning and disaster recovery, physical and IT security, policy development, internal control, personnel selection, and travel safety,” according to its website. Haugen tells me he is a former FBI agent and that he has been an InfraGard member for many years. He is a huge booster. “It’s the only true organization where there is the public-private partnership,” he says. “It’s all who knows who. You know a face, you trust a face. That’s what makes it work.”

He says InfraGard “absolutely” does emergency preparedness exercises. When I ask about discussions the FBI and Homeland Security have had with InfraGard members about their use of lethal force, he says: “That much I cannot comment on. But as a private citizen, you have the right to use force if you feel threatened.”

“We were assured that if we were forced to kill someone to protect our infrastructure, there would be no repercussions,” the whistleblower says. “It gave me goose bumps. It chilled me to the bone.”

Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine.

Feb. 7 (Bloomberg) — Joe Ripplinger took out a $184,000 mortgage in 2006 and makes his payments every month.

Now he owes $192,000.

The 66-year-old Minneapolis house painter has a payment-option adjustable-rate mortgage. It allows him to write a check for $565 a month even though he owes $1,300. The difference is added to the mortgage, and when his total debt reaches $212,000, or after five years have passed, he said his monthly minimum could jump to about $2,800, which he can’t afford.

“We’re barely making it right now,” Ripplinger said.

The estimated 1 million homeowners with $500 billion of option ARMs are beyond the help of interest-rate cuts by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke. While subprime borrowers face an average increase of 8 percent or less when their adjustable- rate mortgages reset, option ARM homeowners may see their monthly payments double after their adjustments kick in.

“We call them neutron loans because they’re like a neutron bomb,” said Brock Davis, a broker with U.S. Express Mortgage Corp. in Las Vegas. “Three years later the house is still there and the people are gone.”

Once option ARM borrowers’ loan balances reach a predetermined limit, called a negative amortization cap, usually 110 percent to 120 percent of the mortgage amount, their payment rates immediately increase. They also automatically shoot up after five years. Otherwise, increases typically are capped at 7.5 percent of a borrower’s initial payment per year.

One in Five

“These could be called long-fuse, exploding ARMs,” said Kathleen Keest, former assistant Iowa attorney general and now senior policy counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending in Durham, North Carolina. “I’ve heard people say they are the most complicated product ever offered to consumers. They are the real liar loans.”

The loans accounted for 8.9 percent of the almost $3 trillion in U.S. home loans made in 2006, up from 8.3 percent in 2005, according to an estimate by industry newsletter Inside Mortgage Finance. Originations of option ARMs fell 50 percent during the first nine months of last year, the newsletter says.

One in five option ARMs packaged into bonds last year required less than 10 percent down payment and no proof of a borrower’s income, according to a Jan. 22 report by New York- based analysts at UBS AG, Europe’s largest bank by assets. Two percent required no down payment at all from the borrower, the analysts said.

Better Scrutiny

Delinquency rates on option ARMs tend to be low in the early years, misleading some investors to think they will remain safe, said Sean Kirk, a debt trader at Seaport Group LLC, a New York- based securities firm focused on bonds of distressed or restructured companies.

Four types of home buyers typically get option ARMs.

Speculators, who plan to sell the property quickly, made up 12 percent of all option ARMs packaged into bonds last year, according to UBS. That included only borrowers who identified themselves as investors and not residents, who get lower mortgage rates. Wealthy people have used the loan for its flexibility, according to Thornburg Mortgage Inc. in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Dead soldiers, peak oil and mind-boggling profits; praise Jesus, the machine’s still working

06/02/08 “SFGate” — – Surprisingly moving Barack Obama music videos? The potential end of the writer’s strike? Cute young deer being saved by helicopters? No no no no no. Here are your most deeply inspiring news stories of the month:

A flurry of pink slips fluttered over the job sector as corporate payrolls were sliced like sour pie. Foreclosures are skyrocketing and new home sales across the nation are plummeting faster than Britney Spears’ serotonin levels. A nasty recession is either creeping or flooding in, depending on your perspective and how recently you purchased your home and/or tried to dump your Google stock.

Meanwhile, the largest corporation in the world, the one which has consistently raked in the largest and most appalling profits of any organization on Earth, a company so powerful and deeply influential to the machinations of our own nation, our government, the globe, so ingrained and unstoppable that no president, no administration, no nuclear warhead to its CEO’s home planet stands a chance of slowing it down or altering its behavior in any significant way because there is simply far, far too much money involved in its nefarious endeavors, has recently posted the largest profit of any company in American history.

Yes, the Exxon Mobil corporation sucked in a staggering $11.7 billion in a single quarter (more than $40 billion for the year, a new record for an American company) thanks largely to record-breaking prices for a barrel of oil, which are of course only record-breaking because, well, the Bush administration has essentially engineered the economy and launched a bogus war and desiccated the American idea exactly so they would be.

Oh yes, two more trifling stories, buried beneath the nauseating Exxon headlines and the tales of looming economic struggle: More U.S. soldiers are dead in Iraq as a result of Bush’s failed war, U.S. military spending in 2009 will reach its highest levels since WWII ($515 billion), insurgents have taken to strapping suicide bombs to mentally retarded women and nearly 100 more civilians are dead in another bombing in Baghdad because the U.S. troop surge is working so well. Oh wait.

Do you feel the righteousness? The inspiration? Can you sense the deep connection between these stories? Because the truth is, they merely add up to the heartwarming conclusion that, without a doubt, American capitalism is still firing on all cylinders. Praise!

Yes, the system is working just exactly as those in control of the nation right now wish it to be working, with the most dominant, ruthless corporations in the world (Exxon joined by Shell, Chevron, BP, ConocoPhilips et al) still making the most money in the most destabilizing and environmentally devastating manner possible, while poor uneducated kids die like chattel in unwinnable wars trying to secure a tiny bit more of the source of their profit.

And somewhere in between, the nation’s overall health and well-being are sacrificed like dazed lambs to an ignorant god, with our government offering up only the most meager, desultory efforts to keep it functional so as to not induce all-out fire-and-pitchfork revolt.

Is that too simplistic? Too reductive? Not even close. Hell, you can distill it down even further. For if you understand, as most sentient creatures on the planet now do, that this “war” is merely a particularly bloody chunk of a particularly brutal, fraudulent national energy policy spearheaded by Dick Cheney and beloved by Saudi Arabia and Halliburton and most of Texas, then it is no stretch at all to say that we are sending American kids to their deaths exactly so Exxon can continue to make $3 billion in a single month (or: $100 million per day, $4 million per hour, or more than $1,000 every. Single. Second).

Or how about this for dark math: $40 billion for the year, 4,000 dead U.S. soldiers … that’s a cool $10 million in pure profit for every American soldier BushCo has thrown to the wolves of petroleum, just for 2007 alone. Even if you factor in the 20,000 wounded, paralyzed and brain damaged U.S. soldiers — not to mention the record number of military suicides — on a body-by-body basis, you’ve still got yourself one hell of a sweet profit margin. See Dick Cheney’s vile, crooked little grin? Now you know where it comes from.

This, you might argue, is perhaps the bleakest way to look at American capitalism, as an instrument of war and death and gluttony that serves only the most cretinous corporate masters at the expense of, well, everyone else. This is the capitalism of the hard right, a particularly ruthless type that happily sacrifices quite literally everything — the environment, health, human life, God, national identity, the stability of future generations — for the sake of immediate and unchecked profit.

It is the kind of system, furthermore, that brings with it a huge, nauseating sense of shame for how we have approached the world, pouring a vague disgust over the nation like a cancerous sludge. This is perhaps BushCo’s cruelest gift of all: tragically convincing us that this strain of capitalism, a furious weapon of greed and disgrace, inviting all manner of corruption and destruction as it brings out the absolute worst in the human animal, is the only flavor there really is.

But then again, no. Maybe there’s something else, a flipside we’ve forgotten amid the insane oil profits and dead bodies and global mistrust. It’s the awkward truism that American capitalism is potentially capable, despite its dark core of profit, despite its frequently poisoned heart, of tremendous creative opportunity and ingenuity. Like porn, like God, like wisdom and plutonium and very, very dark rum, it’s all in how you use it.

Here, then, is perhaps the most dominant question surrounding the upcoming big transition, as the nation prepares over the next year to finally rid itself of the cancer of Bush: Are we still capable of reshaping the capitalist demon, injecting it, on a national scale, with something like conscience and compassion and responsibility, sans the need to sell your mother, rape Alaska, or bomb ancient cities and kill pathetic foreign dictators in a pitiable attempt to vindicate your dad? Is such a turnaround even possible anymore?

Because this nasty truth remains: Bush or no, Exxon and its nefarious, insanely powerful ilk are ramming full speed ahead, undertaking more incredibly brutal, land-raping techniques as you read these very words to get at the Earth’s remaining supply of oil, sucking up tar sand and coal and anything else possible to maintain profit and power. They are, and will continue to be, utterly relentless and, at least for a number of years to come, quite unstoppable.

There is no eliminating the dark side of capitalism, the gluttony and the greed and the violent underbelly. There is only minimizing, shifting the emphasis, changing the pitch and angle of approach, trying to take what is, at its very heart, a flawed and self-destructive system, and making it into something proud and interesting and vibrant, something actually worth defending.

Can it be done? Is it still possible? No matter how many poetic Barack Obama speeches, no matter how many pragmatic Hillary Clinton promises, it’s a question that seems far bigger than both of them. And the truth is, it’s really the only question that matters.