The Rag Blog

Brad DeLong once said that “‘Nobody could have foreseen ______’ is the Bush administration’s version of ‘The dog ate my homework.'” It does seem to be their handy-dandy Swiss Army Knife, all-purpose explanation for the various disasters that have happened on their watch.

We first heard this excuse all the way back in May 2002, when Condoleezza Rice blithely dismissed Congressional queries about 9/11 by saying, “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.”

A nation of Tom Clancy fans — and those who remembered Sam Byck’s too-close-for-comfort White House flyover back in the 70s — wondered what on God’s green earth these idiots were thinking. But the Bushies decided they were onto something.

In fact, they liked this excuse so much that they trotted it out again after Katrina. As New Orleans’ Ninth Ward vanished under the mud of Lake Ponchartrain, W went on the national airwaves to insist, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breech of the levees.”

That was wrong, too, of course: everyone from the City of New Orleans to the Army Corps of Engineers had seen this one coming for decades. In fact, the New Orleans Times-Picayne had done an entire series on just this subject as recently as 2002. You’d think that the coast-to-coast derision that followed might have alerted Bush and crew they were reaching for an excuse that no self-respecting third-grader would touch.

But, instead, they clung to an earnest, childlike hope that the third time might be the charm. So, when Hamas took power early last year, Condi was out there pitching it one more time: “I’ve asked why nobody saw it coming. It does say something about us not having a good enough pulse.”

Close, Condi, but not close enough. This excuse is really a serious admission that America’s legendary facility with foresight and planning has all but vanished under 30 years of conservative rule. From the very beginning, we’ve been some of the biggest dreamers and most effective planners the world has ever seen. For better or worse, we settled up a continent, crossed it with railroads and interstates, dammed the West, dominated the skies, got water and power and phone lines into the most remote towns, fought a war in two theaters, and put men on the moon. Say what you will about the consequences of these endeavors; but they are not the achievements of a people who were afraid to look far ahead and imagine big things, who were unable to see all the possibilities, or who were ineffective at bringing those dreams into reality.

With Wall Street capital disappearing as fast as foreclosures are climbing, one foreign head of state had an epiphany. French President Nicholas Sarkozy advanced the idea recently that the global financial system is “out of its mind.”

To develop this theory further, I’ve reconstructed below some of the mileposts on our journey to this financial loony bin.

Exhibit One: Commit-a-Felony-Get-a-Bonus Contract.

Back in 2002, Mark Belnick, who had previously been one of the legal go-to guys for Wall Street as a rising star at corporate law firm Paul,Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, found himself transplanted as General Counsel at fraud-infested Tyco International. Mr. Belnick inked a retention agreement for himself and it was duly filed without fanfare at the top corporate cop’s web site, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The agreement guaranteed Mr. Belnick a payment of at least $10.6 million should he commit a felony and be fired before October 2003.

Very prescient fellow, Mr. Belnick was indeed charged with a few felonies like grand larceny and securities fraud by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. Mr. Belnick was acquitted of those charges and the SEC let him off the hook for aiding and abetting federal violations of securities laws with a $100,000 penalty payment and a prohibition against serving as an officer or director of a public company for five years. Mr. Belnick agreed to the SEC settlement without admitting or denying the charges. Mr. Belnick did not lose his law license and continues to practice law.

While Mr. Belnick was drafting his “felony bonus” agreement with Tyco, he was also teaching a law course at Cornell on ethics. Today, his agreement is available at the FindLaw.com web site as a “sample business contract,” raising the suspicion that we as a society have become desensitized to financial insanity.

Exhibit Two: Supreme Insanity.

On December 7, 2006, Wall Street was elated to learn that the U.S. Supreme Court had agreed to hear its case requesting that a no-law zone be drawn around its financial borders for acts of collusion and commercial bribery, such as those so well documented in the issuance of new stock offerings during the tech/dotcom bubble. Calling the matter an alleged “epic Wall Street conspiracy,” the U.S Federal Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit had earlier turned down Wall Street for its requested grant of immunity.

The Wall Street firms and their legions of lawyers appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that the SEC (which, by the way, has no criminal powers) should have sole authority to regulate it and, therefore, it should be immune from other U.S. laws governing collusion and commercial bribery. (Credit Suisse First Boston Ltd. v. Billings.)

On June 18, 2007, the Supreme Court issued its opinion giving Wall Street everything it wanted, concluding that the SEC was doing a good job. The Court wrote: “…there is here no question of the existence of appropriate regulatory authority, nor is there doubt as to whether the regulators have exercised that authority.”

The sweeping ignorance of that statement is breathtaking. Whether it was Wall Street firms price fixing on NASDAQ for decades or the orchestrated rigging of the market for new stock issues in the late 90s or the current institutionalized system of credit fraud, the SEC always has its lens fogged until some college professors or investigative reporters publish a step by step playbook, disseminate it widely, and force the SEC to take action to save face.

Worse yet, when the SEC finally does take action, it imposes fines of millions for stealing billions, making crime one of the most productive profit centers on Wall Street.

This 2007 decision from the Supreme Court comes exactly 20 years and 10 days after the 1987 Supreme Court decision in Shearson/American Express Inc. v. McMahon. Under this ruling, Wall Street has been able to run a private justice system called mandatory arbitration to hear the cases of the investors or employees it defrauds (with the exception of class actions). The instruction manual for this private justice system explains that adherence to the law is not required; arbitration panel members, many on Wall Street’s payroll, can just go with their gut.

In other words, the highest court in our land is telling Americans that the reward for serial lawlessness is immunity from the law.

Exhibit Three: Banks’ Secret Profit Center: Your Death.

Few Americans are aware that for at least 16 years big business and banks have been secretly taking out millions of life insurance policies on their rank and file workers and naming the corporation the beneficiary of the death benefit without the knowledge of the worker. The individual policies are frequently in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. If the employee leaves the company, no problem; big business is still allowed to collect the death benefit and they track the employee through the Social Security Administration to keep tabs on when they die. These policies are commonly known as “dead peasant” or “janitor” policies because they insure low-wage earners including janitors. Some of the largest corporations in America have been boosting their income statements by including cash buildup in the policies as well as receiving the death benefit tax free.

In 2003, the General Accountability Office (GAO) released a study with the startling findings that companies were taking out multiple policies on the same individual and that 3,209 banks and thrifts had current cash values in these policies totaling $56.3 Billion.

But instead of a congressional revolt against this revolting practice, it remained in place for at least 16 years after Congress first learned about it.
Then along comes the worker-friendly sounding Pension Protection Act of 2006 submitted by our Congress and signed by the President. Buried deep within this massive document was the grandfathering of the millions of previously issued policies with a little tinkering at the edges of tax and reporting issues on newly issued policies.

Exhibit Four: They Keep the Money; You Get the Slogan.

Around the time the stock market was in the process of losing $7 trillion of investor wealth in ill-conceived techs, dotcoms and telecoms, aided and abetted by Citigroup and its Wall Street cronies, I was driving on Charles Lindbergh Blvd. in Uniondale, Long Island when a bizarre billboard caught my eye. The giant billboard read:

He who dies with the most toys is still dead.
Live Richly.

(Citigroup logo: “Citi” and angelic red halo.)

I had never worked on Madison Avenue but I knew a lot of ad folks and I was pretty sure advertisements typically involved children, pets or other warm and fuzzy things. Citigroup telling me to ponder my own death seemed, well, “out of its mind.”

I knew there had to be more behind this campaign. According to Citigroup’s web site, the “Live Richly” campaign was meant to communicate “that Citi is an advocate for a healthy approach to money. Citi is an active partner in achieving perspective, balance, and peace of mind in finances and in life for its customers.”

The ad agency was Fallon Worldwide and it clearly had Citigroup confused with a social responsibility fund, not the firm that named its trades after its real motives like the “Dr. Evil” trade that disrupted the European bond markets or the “Black Hole” mechanism associated with the bankrupting of Italian dairy giant, Parmalat.

Here’s a sampling of the insanity taking place inside Citigroup as they spent millions extolling the public to evolve as better human beings and, more subtly, pay no mind to the $7 trillion of investor wealth that’s evaporating behind our curtain of kindness.

Citigroup slogan: People with fat wallets are not necessarily more jolly.

Citigroup reality: Sandy Weill, Citigroup’s CEO, earned “$785 million in total compensation over five years: more than any chief executive in America, and by a wide margin.” Dan Ackman, Forbes, April 26, 2001.

Citigroup slogan: Holding shares shouldn’t be your only form of affection.
Citigroup reality: “A recently unearthed ‘highly confidential’ Citigroup memo openly discussed the ‘pressures’ keeping research analysts from providing investors with honest research. In the 2002 memo, John Hoffman, then global research chief for Citi’s Salomon Smith Barney division, advised Salomon Smith Barney CEO Michael Carpenter of the internal view that ‘implementation and enforcement of clearer and more accurate ratings is in conflict with certain paramount goals of our firm’-namely, maximizing underwriting fees.” Peter Elkind, Fortune, November 23, 2005

The memo was obtained as a Florida law firm attempted to get restitution for what Salomon Smith Barney clients were increasingly holding: worthless shares.
Cumulatively, all of these examples suggest that a strong argument could be made that unfettered greed finds its ultimate expression in systemic corruption which is frequently indistinguishable from insanity.

Please note just how much of this insanity can be placed at the doorstep of self-regulation.

01/02/08 “ICH” — — It looks as if the 2008 Presidential campaign may be over at my house. I am considering what other things I can find to do in order to be busy on election day. The choices have been winnowed down until I can find no reason for hope with any of the remaining candidates. I realize that there is much fodder for the talking heads on television as the pseudo rivalry continues but I have now lost interest.

So Rudy bowed out in favor of John McCain. Big deal. Rudy wasn’t going anyplace anyway and he would have been a disaster in the White House. The great loss was John Edwards. With the withdrawal of Dennis Kucinich, he was the last best hope for any chance for the common man to receive any real consideration in the future policies of our government.

It is reminiscent of the summer months in television entertainment. All that we have to anticipate is a choice among reruns. On the Republican side, we are left with a Southern Baptist preacher who would prefer that we return to the dark ages, with witch-burning and stocks in the public square. Then there is John McCain who has nothing more to offer than the old men on Memorial Day, stuffed into their uniforms and trying to look as if they are ready to take the next hill. In addition, of course, there is the son of “what’s good for General Motors is good for the country”. We can choose our reruns between the forties, the fifties or of the Puritans at the Salem witchcraft trials.

It is little better on the Democratic side. Now that Obama has been favored by the Kennedy family, we can look forward to living again in the sixties, to being inspired by eloquent speeches of hope and progress only to be faced with another war for another “good reason”. In order to be just a bit more current, we could boost Hillary Clinton and get more rhetoric about lifting up of the poor which will not happen because of the same knuckling under to the opposition that disappointed us in her husband and that she, herself, has so ably demonstrated during her time in the Senate.

Of course, there is still time for a third party to take shape and get sufficient footing to provide a choice in November, ideally Edwards and Kucinich at the head of a Progressive Party, but it is not likely since the establishment candidates have already sucked up all the money available for their campaigns. We are faced once again with the spectacle of our White House once more being up for auction. As President Bush again tries to prop up a dying economy by donating more borrowed money to the taxpayers while ignoring the plight of the truly needy and the Fed cuts interest rates so we can borrow even more, as the Middle East, the Orient, and Europe devalue and debase the dollar and we owe ever more of them to those same entities, we find ourselves facing the same fate as out parents and grandparents suffered at the end of the Hoover administration.

Nothing short of a total overhaul of the government in the manner of Franklin Delano Roosevelt is going to correct the mess that George W. Bush has made of our government and none of the remaining candidates appear to have the intelligence and the drive to do what must be done to save the nation from it. Senator Clinton can’t seem to make up her mind whether we should withdraw our troops from Iraq immediately or whether we should leave a large contingecy there to “protect our embassy”, that sprawling, fortified monstrosity that contractors built at great expense for no conceivable reason. Barrack Obama says that he wants to bring the troops home “as soon as possible” but hasn’t voiced any plans for what might happen next. Of course, the election of any of the Republicans means eternal war in the hope that the fiscal mess will not catch up with us.

It’s time to plow up the back yard for a vegetable garden and order tomato plants to put in the flower beds in the spring. It’s going to be a long time before stability is restored to this benighted land. I cast my first Presidential vote in 1952 for Eisenhower and have voted dutifully in every election since, even if I had to hold my nose while voting for the lesser of two evils. But now I am old and I am tired. Why should I get in a snit because the rest of the country is more interested in the squabbling children playing at debate? If the youth of today are willing to choose those who will be in charge of their future by a remake of “An American Idol”, is it not their right?

My generation had ambitions to leave to our children a free nation with honorable leaders in a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, living peacefully with equality. It is saddening to find that this ambition is not to be and, unless someone is elected who is able to restore the rights and freedoms which we have lost. I will spend election day sitting at home with a tall cold drink!

It was nearly three in the morning, on a recent Saturday, when the door of a Washington DC jail cell slammed closed with me inside. After an already grueling day in police custody that began at 1:30pm and included being handcuffed for eight hours straight at one point, the ability to move freely (albeit in a 5×7 cell) was a welcomed relief.

I climbed up to the top bunk, which was more like a cold metal shelf, and sat with my legs pulled in toward my chest for warmth. “When will I get out of here?” I despaired. “Will I get out of here? What if something goes wrong and they just forget about me?”

Several hundred miles away, my parents wondered the same things, except that unlike many detainees and their families, they had been expecting my arrest. I decided to participate in a nonviolent action on the steps of the Supreme Court to protest the beginning of the seventh year that prisoners are being held in Guantánamo Bay without habeas corpus rights and subjected to torture.

These prisoners, once referred to as “the worst of the worst,” are virtually all innocent. By the Pentagon’s own estimate, 92% have not committed any crime against the United States. In fact, foreign bounty hunters were paid by the U.S. government to capture many of those who are now detained. It was this information, along with the horrid stories of physical beatings, forced stress positions, and trickery (such as guards posing as lawyers) that convinced me that resistance was necessary.

Although it was my first time taking such a risk, I was joined by a group of civil disobedience veterans who had a good idea of what to expect. Wearing orange jumpsuits with black hoods, we ascended the steps and then knelt silently halfway up, where we were arrested for the ironic violation of “speech at the Supreme Court.” We expected to be held in custody for a few hours until being issued a citation, similar to a traffic fine. Just about everyone who had risked arrest before, including those who had done so a dozen times or more, said it would be rare to spend the night.

Seeing as how we thought it would probably be over before they could begin to worry, I decided full disclosure with my parents was the best option. Little did I realize, however, that arrests and jail time are never that innocuous when they’re actually happening to you or someone you know.

It wasn’t until I was shivering away in that cell, recapping the day’s events, and pondering with complete uncertainty what would happen to me, that I began to really understand the horrors of torture and imprisonment. What I went through is only a pinprick compared to the evils faced by the near 800 men and boys who have passed through Guantánamo, but it is surprising how little it takes to set someone over the edge both mentally and physically.

After eight hours of being handcuffed behind the back, my arms started to throb with constant pain and fatigue, while my wrists got sore and cut-up. The guards wouldn’t help. Often times they adjusted the cuffs so that they hurt more than before you complained. All the while, it was a struggle to get just a few sips of water. There was even a sign outside one cell I was in that read: “Do not ask for water.” And forget about food. Even though our lawyers told us that we should have been offered some every 12 hours, I went all 30 hours of my incarceration without a morsel.

I was able to tough out these hardships, especially as one of the youngest protesters in the group. But of the 82 who were arrested, most were twice my age or older – with some even in their eighties. So, it was not surprising that a good many were suffering from nausea and dehydration. That’s not to say I was lucky, however. My age and inexperience worked against me at times, as I was most unprepared for the psychological aspects of imprisonment that I encountered.

For starters, there’s the waiting. It took one police jurisdiction hours to figure out how to ship us off to the next. The lines of communication between precincts are tangled in an intricate web of bureaucracy that ends up having more to do with when you get released than the actual charges you might be facing. Once I realized this, I felt consumed by complete helplessness. Not only did I lose control of my destiny, but some unknowable inhuman force was also controlling it.

Then again, there’s nothing human about the entire process. Officers referred to us as “prisoners” and “bodies,” showing the line of division between them and us, like we were some kind of subspecies. However, there was one saving grace: the camaraderie of friends who had been through similar situations-even if many did admit that this was their worst experience.

I spent the morning of my court hearing at a different jail, reunited with the rest of the group. Although we were divided up into four consecutively cramped cells and branded with leg shackles, the community experience is what helped me turn the corner and remember what it was that we were doing.

We sang songs of solidarity with words like “Ain’t afraid of your jail ‘cause I want my freedom” and listened to stories by the group’s elders about their years of resistance work. I began to feel less focused on my own situation and more inspired by the rich history of nonviolent direct action that I was now a part of.

Gandhi said nonviolence was “as old as the hills” and Dr. King described it as “the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time.” None of that has changed. So many invaluable rights and freedoms were gained over the last century by the work of people who were willing to oppose hatred and oppression with love and forgiveness.

With that in mind, we each took to the court room and gave the judge not only our own names, which most had refused to speak up to that point, but also the name of a Guantánamo prisoner, marking the first time any of these captives have ever been mentioned in a US court. But while those men stayed locked away, we were all set free. Many (including myself) will soon have the record of that arrest dismissed thanks to our courageous lawyers from the National Lawyers Guild, who struck an agreement with government prosecutors.

Despite the feelings of personal achievement, the grim reality is that even if Guantánamo is shut down-and many top US officials have spoken publicly in favor of such an action, including President Bush and Defense Secretary Robert Gates – there’s no telling what will happen to the remaining 275 prisoners. Some could be extricated with little hassle, much like the more than 500 released or transferred out over the last few years, while others face an ironic legal snafu that prevents the deportation of foreign nationals to countries where they face the risk of torture. Those prisoners may have to wait for the US to find a country willing to grant them asylum, which will not be an easy task so long as our government refuses to share the burden.

Even more unknown is the fate of the 80 or so prisoners the government actually intends to prosecute – no more than 40 of which, according to various intelligence estimates are genuine terrorists. Trials may take place in Guantánamo before military commissions, a procedure the Supreme Court deemed in violation of international law in 2006, but was then reinstituted by the Military Commissions Act months later. If these commissions fail, prisoners could be transferred to the US mainland, where they would face trials in actual US Courts. The one problem being that prosecutors may guide the juries to overlook torture not only as an unreliable means of gathering evidence, but as an illegal act committed by our military.

According to a recent Pew Research poll, nearly two-thirds of Americans can justify torture under certain circumstances. Perhaps that is because most people have never experienced imprisonment. Those who have know that even the most seemingly innocuous jail stay has enough moments to convince you that the only real line between stress and non-stress positions is the one crossed upon leaving court a free person.

When I passed over that line back into the “real world,” my first act was to call home and relieve my parents of their anguish. Even though they later admitted that everything went pretty much like I told them it would, I’ll always remember how I felt sitting in that cold lonesome cell and the email my mother sent me around the same time. It said, “We are sick with worry.”

Imagine how sick the families of those remaining prisoners are after six years, receiving messages from their husbands telling them to move on, or hearing about the force-feeding, waterboarding and suicides. We should all be sick by now, sick enough to find more ways of expressing our solidarity with those who continue to suffer. It may be the least we can do, but it has the potential to lift spirits and carry imaginations to a future where torture is extinct and empathy reigns supreme.

Remember the “ownership society,” fixture of major George W. Bush addresses for the first four years of his presidency? “We’re creating…an ownership society in this country, where more Americans than ever will be able to open up their door where they live and say, welcome to my house, welcome to my piece of property,” Bush said in October 2004. Washington think-tanker Grover Norquist predicted that the ownership society would be Bush’s greatest legacy, remembered “long after people can no longer pronounce or spell Fallujah.” Yet in Bush’s final State of the Union address, the once-ubiquitous phrase was conspicuously absent. And little wonder: rather than its proud father, Bush has turned out to be the ownership society’s undertaker.

Well before the ownership society had a neat label, its creation was central to the success of the right-wing economic revolution around the world. The idea was simple: if working-class people owned a small piece of the market–a home mortgage, a stock portfolio, a private pension–they would cease to identify as workers and start to see themselves as owners, with the same interests as their bosses. That meant they could vote for politicians promising to improve stock performance rather than job conditions. Class consciousness would be a relic.

It was always tempting to dismiss the ownership society as an empty slogan–“hokum” as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich put it. But the ownership society was quite real. It was the answer to a roadblock long faced by politicians favoring policies to benefit the wealthy. The problem boiled down to this: people tend to vote their economic interests. Even in the wealthy United States, most people earn less than the average income. That means it is in the interest of the majority to vote for politicians promising to redistribute wealth from the top down.

So what to do? It was Margaret Thatcher who pioneered a solution. The effort centered on Britain’s public housing, or council estates, which were filled with die-hard Labour Party supporters. In a bold move, Thatcher offered strong incentives to residents to buy their council estate flats at reduced rates (much as Bush did decades later by promoting subprime mortgages). Those who could afford it became homeowners while those who couldn’t faced rents almost twice as high as before, leading to an explosion of homelessness.

As a political strategy, it worked: the renters continued to oppose Thatcher, but polls showed that more than half of the newly minted owners did indeed switch their party affiliation to the Tories. The key was a psychological shift: they now thought like owners, and owners tend to vote Tory. The ownership society as a political project was born.

Across the Atlantic, Reagan ushered in a range of policies that similarly convinced the public that class divisions no longer existed. In 1988 only 26 percent of Americans told pollsters that they lived in a society bifurcated into “haves” and “have-nots”–71 percent rejected the whole idea of class. The real breakthrough, however, came in the 1990s, with the “democratization” of stock ownership, eventually leading to nearly half of American households owning stock. Stock watching became a national pastime, with tickers on TV screens becoming more common than weather forecasts. Main Street, we were told, had stormed the elite enclaves of Wall Street.

Once again, the shift was psychological. Stock ownership made up a relatively minor part of the average American’s earnings, but in the era of frenetic downsizing and offshoring, this new class of amateur investor had a distinct shift in consciousness. Whenever a new round of layoffs was announced, sending another stock price soaring, many responded not by identifying with those who had lost their jobs, or by protesting the policies that had led to the layoffs, but by calling their brokers with instructions to buy.

Bush came to office determined to take these trends even further, to deliver Social Security accounts to Wall Street and target minority communities–traditionally out of the Republican Party’s reach–for easy homeownership. “Under 50 percent of African Americans and Hispanic Americans own a home,” Bush observed in 2002. “That’s just too few.” He called on Fannie Mae and the private sector “to unlock millions of dollars, to make it available for the purchase of a home”–an important reminder that subprime lenders were taking their cue straight from the top.

Today, the basic promises of the ownership society have been broken. First the dot-com bubble burst; then employees watched their stock-heavy pensions melt away with Enron and WorldCom. Now we have the subprime mortgage crisis, with more than 2 million homeowners facing foreclosure on their homes. Many are raiding their 401(k)s–their piece of the stock market–to pay their mortgage. Wall Street, meanwhile, has fallen out of love with Main Street. To avoid regulatory scrutiny, the new trend is away from publicly traded stocks and toward private equity. In November Nasdaq joined forces with several private banks, including Goldman Sachs, to form Portal Alliance, a private equity stock market open only to investors with assets upward of $100 million. In short order yesterday’s ownership society has morphed into today’s members-only society.

Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor in the Clinton I administration, made a remark recently that bears serious consideration. We should not, Reich suggested, pick a presidential candidate by making a list of salient issues and ticking off positions one by one, finally settling on the candidate who agrees with us the most. All of the challenges facing the country this year are interrelated, and more important than any one of them is how a candidate is able to understand and explain those connections and deal with each problem in a way that does not make too many others worse.

Some Indians claim that only Indian issues matter in their feelings toward the presidential contest, but those Indians are few for a couple of reasons. First, Indian country is not exempt from economic downturns or global warming or the military misadventures that our people always wind up fighting in disproportionate numbers. Second, there are few enough policy wonks for what Robert Odawi Porter calls “American Indian control policy” that most candidates’ positions could have been spit out of the same copier.

Reich says our troubles all fit together. My son just got back from Iraq, so the war has been worrying me, the war of choice in Iraq where the issue appears to be the identity of the proper Caliph at the time Mohammed ascended to heaven. This is the theological dispute between Sunni and Shi’a. I was raised to think, contrary to the Bush II administration and the debate in the Republican primaries, that the United States has no public policy on theological issues.

Everyone but a purblind Bush II sycophant knows it’s about oil. As is the economic downturn about oil – both the rise in energy prices and the funding of the oil war on credit rather than by raising taxes like countries normally do when they fight a war. As is the global climate change problem. Our reliance on fossil fuels and the growing economies of China and India doing the same lead directly to the destruction of habitat that is ruining subsistence hunting for Inuit and Athabascan Indians.

There is another American Indian side to the energy policy issue that is not so bleak. Most people agree that one solution is to remove the incentives (read “corporate welfare”) for fossil fuels and replace them with incentives for renewables, except the Libertarian Ron Paul, who thinks the market can fix it all magically because if climate change is really a problem every single consumer will pay to stop it on an individual level whether that individual has any money or not and in spite of the fact that government has spent over 100 years tilting the playing field the way it is now – in favor of Big Oil.

Should national energy policy move to renewables – solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, biomass – Indian country is well positioned in every way except for having transmission lines to become a major source of clean power. Tribal governments have the authority to issue tax-free revenue bonds for governmental functions such as power generation. The trick is to issue bonds to power the reservation and build in a manner that allows the tribe to feed the U.S.-Canadian electrical grid. It’s not that hard, since power generation is normally built in modules to accommodate growth.

Turning energy policy to renewables is far more important to much of Indian country than an increase in social spending. With such a turn we could prosper far beyond the Bush I policies that depended on the fact that a rising tide lifts all boats and certainly beyond the Bush II policies that depended on the fact that a rising tide lifts all yachts.

It’s a cliche to call 2008 a change election but it’s not an empty cliche. A Clinton II administration or an Obama administration or even a McCain or Romney administration will at the very least have to change back to what Karl Rove, deputy chief of staff under Bush II, disdainfully called “reality-based politics.” His disdain was based on the conviction that power defines its own reality, as when the administration was able to find several grown men with college degrees who would profess not to know whether waterboarding is torture.

If Rove had been in charge during the Reagan administration, ketchup would now be a vegetable in the eyes of the school lunch program because the evidence we used to beat back that nonsense would have been inadmissible. What Bush II has given us that could never have happened even under Bush I is a government where facts don’t matter, where employees of the National Park Service tell tourists that the Grand Canyon is evidence of Noah’s flood and where there is no moral distinction between a glob of human cells and a human being.

The biggest change we can anticipate in 2008 with any candidate except perhaps Mike Huckabee is that we can negotiate differences because we once more agree on the nature of reality and we once more feel a shared obligation to explain our values to each other. Huckabee is now only a player for the vice presidency on a McCain ticket.

Even with McCain/Huckabee or Romney and whoever, I think we are about to re-enter a time where evidence matters and persuading others to our positions is more important than being able to bludgeon anybody who dissents. Former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo used to say we run in poetry but govern in prose.

For many years, the United States has been awfully short of political poetry, the importance of which traditional Indian leaders certainly understood. It often takes an orator to create consensus. Sen. Barack Obama’s speech upon winning Iowa was political poetry of the highest order and those who complain that “change” is not a platform miss the point. That speech recalled Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 and for those of us who remember a vision of what might have been. The recollection was strong enough in me to awaken assassination fears, so it’s ironic that Obama’s base appears to be young people who can’t possibly have such memories.

So while Robert Reich is correct that our problems are interconnected and involve all our relations, I do not join the cynics who claim that “change” is by its nature an empty promise. When electoral cynicism is the subject, I remember Vine Deloria Jr.’s bon mot that Indians tend to elect crooks and white people tend to elect morons. Not this election. Coming off eight years of reality defined by power, there is little room to be more crooked or more moronic than the status quo. When a candidate calls for “change,” most voters of all ethnicities understand we are so far down that any change is up.

Perhaps a global political apocalypse has already arrived.

Activists and dissidents should understand that evil forces and tyrannical governments have evolved. Just as human knowledge and science expand, so do the strategies and instruments used by rulers, elites and plutocrats. By learning from history and using new technology they have smarter tools of tyranny. The best ones prevent uprisings, revolutions and political reforms. Rather than violently destroy rebellious movements, they let them survive as marginalized and ineffective efforts that divert and sap the energy of nonconformist and rebellious thinkers. Real revolution remains an energy-draining dream, as evil forces thrive.

Most corrupt and legally sanctioned forms of tyranny hide in plain sight as democracies with free elections. The toughest lesson is that ALL elections are distractions. Nothing conceals tyranny better than elections. Few Americans accept that their government has become a two-party plutocracy run by a rich and powerful ruling class. The steady erosion of the rule of law is masked by everyday consumer freedoms. Because people want to be happy and hopeful, we have an epidemic of denial, especially in the present presidential campaign. But to believe that any change-selling politician or shift in party control will overturn the ruling class is the epitome of self-delusion and false hope. In the end, such wishful thinking perpetuates plutocracy. Proof is that plutocracy has flourished despite repeated change agents, promises of reform and partisan shifts.

The tools of real rebellion are weak. Activists and dissidents look back and see successful rebellions and revolutions and think that when today’s victims of tyranny experience enough pain and see enough political stink they too will revolt. This is wrong. They think that the Internet spreads information and inspiration to the masses, motivating them to revolt. This is wrong. They await catastrophic economic or environmental collapse to spur rebellion. This too is wrong.

Why are these beliefs wrong? Power elites have an arsenal of weapons to control and manipulate social, political and economic systems globally: corruption of public officials that make elections a sham; corporate mainstream media that turn news into propaganda; manipulation of financial markets that create fear for the public and profits for the privileged; false free trade globalization that destroys the middle class; rising economic inequality that keep the masses time-poor and financially insecure; intense marketing of pharmaceuticals that keep people passive; and addictive consumerism, entertainment and gambling that keep people distracted and pacified.

The biggest challenge for dissidents and rebels is to avoid feel-good therapeutic activism having virtually no chance of removing evil and tyranny. Idealism without practicality tactics without lofty goals, and symbolic protests pose no threat to power elites. Anger and outrage require great strategic thinking from leaders seeking revolution, not mere change. And social entrepreneurs that use business and management skills to tackle genuine social problems do nothing to achieve political reforms. To the extent they achieve results they end up removing interest in overthrowing political establishments that have allowed the problems to fester.

What is the new tool of tyranny? Technological connectivity achieved through advanced communications and computer systems, especially the rise of wireless connectivity. The global message to the masses is simple: Buy electronic products to stay plugged in. Connectivity may give pleasure, but it gives even more power to elites, rulers and plutocrats. It allows them to coordinate their efforts through invisible cabals, to closely monitor everything that ordinary people and dissidents do, and to cooperatively and clandestinely adjust social, financial and political systems to maintain stability and dominance.

In this dystopian world all systems are integrated to serve upper class elites and the corporate state, not ordinary people. When ordinary people spend their money to be more shackled to connectivity products, they become unwitting victims of largely invisible governmental and corporate oppressive forces. They are oblivious that their technological seduction exacerbates their political and economic exploitation. Though some 70 percent believe the country is on the wrong track, they fail to see the deeper causes of the trend. And if Americans were really happy and content with their consumer culture, then why are they stuffing themselves with so many antidepressants, sleeping pills and totally unhealthy foods? In truth, the vast majority of people are in denial about the rotten system they are trapped in (aka The Matrix). They are manipulated to keep hope alive through voting, despite the inability of past elections to stop the slide into economic serfdom.

Increasingly, the little-discussed phenomenon of economic apartheid ensures that elites live their lavish lives safely in physically separated ways. Concurrently, economic inequality rises, as the rich extract unusually high fractions of global wealth. When the rich get richer, the powerful get stronger. Does some economic prosperity trickles down to the poorest people? Perversely, the middle class is moved into the lower class. In this new physics of evil, wealth transfer is not from the rich to the poor, but from the middle class in wealthier countries to the poor in developing nations, where a few new billionaires join the global plutocracy.

Some data on economic inequality: The after-tax income of the top 1 percent of Americans rose 228 percent from 1979 through 2005, while middle class income remained flat over the last 4 decades. The richest 0.01 percent of earners made 5.1 percent of all income in 2005, up more than 300 percent from just 1.2 percent in 1960. Bad economic times like the present just exacerbate inequality. Even as most Wall Street companies lost billions in the sub-prime mortgage debacle after they had already made billions, they gave obscene bonuses to their employees: the average topped $180,000 for 2007, tripling the $61,000 in 2002. Scholars used to predict that high levels of economic inequality like we have today would lead to rebellion. But there are now insufficient tools and paths for rebellion, because the plutocracy has eliminated them. Instead, citizens are offered elections whose outcomes can be controlled and subverted by the ruling class.

The New World Order is getting what it wants: a stable two-class system, with the lower class serving the elitist upper class. The paradox is that along with rising economic inequality and apartheid is mounting consumerism and materialism that is used to pacify, distract and control the masses. That’s where easy credit and cheap products from low-wage nations are critical. The poor can have cell phones, 24-7 Internet access and increasingly cars, while the bejeweled upper class travel in private jets and yachts, vacation on private islands, and have several gated mansions maintained by servants and guarded by private police. We have a technologically advanced form of medieval society. It is working in the US and China and most other places. Elections just mask economic tyranny and slavery.

The ruling class knows how to maintain stability. Keep the masses distracted, fearful, brainwashed, insecure, and dependent on government and business sectors for survival. Train people to see themselves as relatively free consumers. Maintain the myth that ordinary people can become wealthy and join the ruling class, which theoretically is not impossible, but of no statistical significance for the masses.

There are no easy paths to restore power to the people. But here are three strategies worth considering. First, the real power of the masses is as consumers, not as voters, workers, activists, or Internet users. Weakened unions, globalization, technology, and illegal immigration have sapped the power of workers. National economies, especially the US, depend on consumers. Suspensions in discretionary consumer spending used as a political weapon could force reforms. But curbing personal spending and saving money has become a rare form of civil disobedience. Consumers buy stuff when they want it, not when they can afford it. Rulers have replaced chains with debt and no political leader in a very long time has championed economic rebellion.

Second, because they are more a tool of tyranny than rebellion, the masses should stop giving credibility and legitimacy to faux democracies by boycotting elections. Plutocrats cleverly equate patriotism and good citizenship with voting while at the same time ensuring that no genuine change agents can succeed even if elected. All election results can be subverted by the forces of corruption. Those promising change, like Barack Obama, do not pose a lethal threat to forces of evil and corruption. Sadly, refusing to vote in corrupt political systems is another worthy but unpopular form of civil disobedience. The compulsion to vote is a political narcotic that sustains democratic tyranny.

The 2008 Republican race has left a bitter legacy of sloganeering against Muslims. It may well haunt the party this November.

Feb. 1, 2008 | For much of January, one might have thought that the Republican candidates for president were already competing against a single opponent. Not one called Hillary or Barack, but with a moniker even more chilling in the eyes of hard-line Republicans: Islamic fascism.

The American public, worried about mortgages, recession and a seemingly interminable war in Iraq, was unimpressed — those who fear-mongered the most about Muslim terrorists have faltered at the polls. Even the remaining front-runners, John McCain and Mitt Romney, have said bigoted things about Muslims and their religion. But Islamophobia as a campaign strategy has failed, and it may well come back to haunt the Republicans in the general election.

Back when the GOP presidential field was still flush with tough-talking right-wingers, no one was more outrageous in targeting Muslims than Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado, who suggested that Muslim terrorists inside America were plotting the imminent detonation of an atomic bomb on U.S. soil. How to prevent this Tom Clancy scenario? “If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina,” Tancredo declared. “Because that’s the only thing I can think of that might deter somebody from doing what they otherwise might do.”

That sort of wild-eyed bigotry only fuels the cycle of mistrust and vengeance. One can only imagine how much more difficulty Tancredo generated for U.S. diplomats attempting to explain to America’s Muslim allies why a presidential candidate was talking about nuking Islam’s holiest cities, the larger with a population nearly that of Houston.

But the failure of Islamophobia as a campaign strategy is no better illustrated than by the spectacular flame-out of Rudy Giuliani. Throughout his campaign (deep-sixed after his dismal showing in Tuesday’s Florida primary), the former New York mayor evoked the Sept. 11 attacks at an absurd rate. Giuliani and his advisors appeared to revel in demonizing Muslims. They also reveled in their own ignorance — never learning the difference between “Islamic” and “Muslim.”

“Islamic” has to do with the religion founded by the prophet Mohammed. We speak of Islamic ethics or Islamic art, as things that derive from the religion. “Muslim,” on the contrary, describes the believer. It would be perfectly all right to talk about Muslim terrorists, but calling them Islamic terrorists or Islamic fascists implies that the religion of Islam is somehow essentially connected to those extremist movements.

Giuliani complained that during their debates, Democratic rivals “never mentioned the word ‘Islamic terrorist,’ ‘Islamic extremist,’ ‘Islamic fascist,’ ‘terrorist,’ whatever combination of those words you want to use, [the] words never came up.” He added, “I can’t imagine who you insult if you say ‘Islamic terrorist.’ You don’t insult anyone who is Islamic who isn’t a terrorist.”

But people are not “Islamic,” they are Muslim. And one most certainly does insult Muslims by tying their religion to movements such as terrorism or fascism. Muslims perceive a double standard in this regard: Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols would never be called “Christian terrorists” even though they were in close contact with the Christian Identity Movement. No one would speak of Christofascism or Judeofascism as the Republican candidates speak of Islamofascism. Muslims point out that persons of Christian heritage invented fascism, not Muslims, and deny that Muslim movements have any link to the mass politics of the 1930s in Europe.

Giuliani’s pledge to take the United States on an offensive against Islamic fascism, which he also said would be a long-term battle, failed to excite the imagination of voters. It may well have alarmed them in a way different from what Giuliani intended: If, by Giuliani’s logic, the United States is only on the “defensive” now, with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, what would being on the offensive look like? Would Giuliani have started four wars? Interestingly, Giuliani did especially poorly in Florida among retired and active-duty military personnel.

Giuliani was also hurt when the co-chair of his veterans’ campaign in New Hampshire, John Deady praised Giuliani for being able to stop “the rise of the Muslims,” an effort necessary to continue, he said, until “we defeat them or chase them back to their caves, or, in other words, get rid of them.” When asked if he was really condemning all members of the religion, Deady replied, “I don’t subscribe to the principle that there are good Muslims and bad Muslims. They’re all Muslims.” Deady was forced to resign after a video of his remarks was put on the web by the Guardian. Other Giuliani advisors have had some bigoted things to say about Muslims as well. Rep. Peter King of New York complained that “unfortunately we have too many mosques in this country.” Daniel Pipes, a professional Islamophobe advising Giuliani, once said it would be dangerous to let American Muslims vote.

Meanwhile, Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who has done well among evangelicals but has had difficulty attracting votes from other segments of the Republican Party, had a revealing response to the assassination of Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto. “I am making the observation that we have more Pakistani illegals coming across our border than all other nationalities except those immediately south of the border,” he said. He added, “And in light of what is happening in Pakistan it ought to give us pause as to why are so many illegals coming across these borders.” In fact, there are almost no Pakistani illegal aliens to speak of in the United States. Only 13 percent of the estimated 12 million persons in the United States illegally are estimated to be Asian, but almost all of them are East Asian. Pakistani and Indian immigrants, moreover, are among the wealthiest immigrants in the country.

Current GOP front-runner John McCain has been prone to hyperbole and has let some bigoted statements escape his lips as well. He has said that the threat from Islamic extremism is greater than the one presented by the Soviet Union. Recently, McCain proclaimed, “I’m not interested in trading with al-Qaida. All they want to trade is burqas… ” The senator seemed to be relating the Muslim custom of veiling to terrorism. The Detroit Free Press, whose city has one of the largest Muslim populations, reported on Jan. 12 that McCain’s remarks were hurtful to American Muslims. “Local Muslims say that criticizing al-Qaida is legitimate, but wonder why he would make a snide remark about a dress? The remark was especially bothersome, some said, considering that McCain’s adopted daughter, Bridget McCain, is from one of the biggest Muslim countries, Bangladesh.” One would think that raising a daughter from the Muslim world in the United States today would be difficult enough, even without the adoptive father’s denigrating the customs of the women from that culture.

On another occasion, asked whether a Muslim candidate for president would be acceptable, McCain replied, “I just have to say in all candor that since this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles … personally, I prefer someone who I know who has a solid grounding in my faith. But that doesn’t mean that I’m sure that someone who is Muslim would not make a good president. I don’t say that we would rule out under any circumstances someone of a different faith. I just would — I just feel that that’s an important part of our qualifications to lead.”

But according to Article IV of the U.S. Constitution, “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” Secularists and Jews joined American Muslims in condemning McCain’s assertion that the United States was founded on Christian principles, and that Christian faith could be a key determinate for taking the Oval Office.

McCain’s misconceptions about Muslims and perceived hostility toward them predates his 2008 presidential campaign. In 2005, he said on “The Charlie Rose Show” that a Muslim had killed the Indian political and spiritual figure Mahatma Gandhi. In fact, the assassin belonged to a radical Hindu organization, the RSS.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has, like his peers, regularly invoked the dangers of “Islamic fascism.” He allegedly told one Muslim-American he would not put a Muslim in his Cabinet, since there were not enough Muslim-Americans to justify it. (Romney later denied the charge).

Why might all this rhetoric targeting Muslims be unwise? For one thing, allowing the Christian conservative base to set an agenda that demonizes Muslims contains the danger of turning off more moderate segments of the GOP and American voters at large. McCain’s comment on the importance of a president’s being Christian appeared to have backfired on him in precisely that way.

Moreover, Muslim-Americans and Arab-Americans are swing voters in key states such as Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Florida. While they tended to vote for George W. Bush in 2000, by 2004 these groups overwhelmingly supported John Kerry, and the heavy-handed and bigoted rhetoric of the Republican candidates may drive them away from the GOP altogether.

WASHINGTON (Jan. 31) – President Bush’s 2009 budget will virtually freeze most domestic programs and seek nearly $200 billion in savings from federal health care programs, a senior administration official said Thursday. The Bush budget also will likely exceed $3 trillion, this official said.

Bush on Monday will present his proposed budget for the new fiscal year to Congress, where it’s unlikely to gain much traction in the midst of a presidential campaign. The president has promised a plan that would erase the budget deficit by 2012 if his policies are followed.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey sipped his water nervously. It was the first time he was testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee since his controversial confirmation. At issue then and now: torture. Does he consider waterboarding torture? Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., made it personal: “Would waterboarding be torture if it was done to you?” “I would feel that it was,” Mukasey responded. Though he deflected questions, before and after Kennedy’s, his personal answer rang true.

Our attorney general should not have to be waterboarded to know that it is torture. Likewise, Americans should not have to suffer under a brutal dictatorship in order to know that it is wrong to support dictators abroad.

Take, for example, the long-reigning dictator of Indonesia, Suharto. He died this week at the age of 86, an age that most of his more than 1 million victims never reached. Suharto ruled Indonesia for more than 30 years, shored up by the most powerful country on Earth, the United States. Suharto rose to power in 1965 in a coup backed by the CIA, which provided him with lists of dissidents whom the Indonesian military then killed, one by one. He was forced from power in 1998, in a pro-democracy uprising.

Throughout Suharto’s reign, U.S. administrations-Democratic and Republican-armed, trained and financed the Indonesian military. In addition to the million Indonesians killed, hundreds of thousands were also killed during Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor, a small country 300 miles above Australia. It is a country I know well, having covered it for years. On Nov. 12, 1991, when I was covering a peaceful Timorese procession in Timor’s capital, Dili, Suharto’s occupying army opened fired on the crowd, killing 270 Timorese. I got off easy: The soldiers beat me with their boots and the butts of their U.S. M-16s. They fractured the skull of my colleague Allan Nairn, who was writing for The New Yorker magazine at the time. And that massacre was one of the smaller ones in Timor. Nevertheless, President George H.W. Bush, followed by Bill Clinton, continued to try to supply Indonesia with weapons. Only a grass-roots movement in the United States stopped the U.S. military sales.

Aside from being unimaginably brutal, Suharto was also corrupt. Transparency International estimated Suharto’s fortune to be between $15 billion and $35 billion. The current U.S. ambassador to Indonesia, Cameron Hume, praised Suharto’s memory this week, saying, “President Suharto led Indonesia for over 30 years, a period during which Indonesia achieved remarkable economic and social development. … Though there may be some controversy over his legacy, President Suharto was a historic figure who left a lasting imprint on Indonesia and the region of Southeast Asia.” Imprint? Yes, if he means pulling out people’s fingernails, disappearing Indonesian dissidents, or wiping out a third of the population of East Timor, one of the great genocides of the 20th century. But clearly, that is not what Hume meant.

Whether it’s waterboarding, waging an illegal war or holding hundreds of prisoners without charge for years at Guantanamo Bay or at CIA black sites around the world, I am reminded of Mahatma Gandhi, one of the world’s greatest nonviolent leaders. “What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless,” he asked, “whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?”

The Mukasey hearing happened to take place on the 60th anniversary of Gandhi’s assassination. Also on this day, Rudolph Giuliani and John Edwards dropped out of the presidential race. In his exit speech, Edwards said, “America’s hour of transformation is upon us.” As the race narrows, it is a key moment to reflect: One leading candidate, John McCain, was actually tortured (unlike Mukasey, although McCain supported his confirmation). McCain predicted we may be in Iraq for 100 years. He is up against Mitt Romney, who said he would double the size of Guantanamo. Neither of the remaining leading Democratic candidates calls for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Yes, it is a key moment to reflect on the teachings of Gandhi. When asked what he thought of Western civilization, Gandhi responded, “I think it would be a good idea.”

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 650 stations in North America.

It’s been a year since Molly Ivins died, leaving us to slog through the political landscape without her sanity-saving blend of insight, humor and outrage. Unlike Maureen Dowd, who delights in snippy wordplay, with Molly you felt the words erupting from her soul, ricocheting off her funny bone and then passing through her brain to be arranged in a way that made sense — an enormous challenge when dealing with the non-sense of the president she called “Shrub.”

As Super Tuesday closes in with the fate of — oh, just about everyone — at stake, I keep wishing I could open my paper and find Molly’s take on it all. What fun she would have had with the entire Republican slate, from the moribund-on-arrival Fred Thompson to the 12th-century worldview of affable Mike Huckabee to the transformation of “America’s Mayor” to America’s meltdown.

And she wouldn’t have let John McCain’s resemblance to an ermine — a short-legged weasel who changes color with the seasons — go unnoticed.

On the other side I imagine she’d have taken a few jabs at Dennis Kucinich for toe-tapping with a UFO and at John Edwards for his pricey girly-man haircuts — yet slapped them a high-five for the truths they dare to speak. She encouraged veracity no matter how eccentric the package; she just couldn’t tolerate “clever straddling,” as she put it.

She would have donned a hazmat suit to deal with the hydra-like beast called Billary that clawed its way to defeat in South Carolina. She was clear on where she stood on the Clintons, calling Bill “as weak as bus-station chili” and writing in January 2006, “I’d like to make it clear to the people who run the Democratic Party that I will not support Hillary Clinton for president. Enough. Enough triangulation, calculation and equivocation.”

So as millions of us trudge off to caucuses and primaries next Tuesday, I’m wondering: What Would Molly Do?

Referring to the death of Gene McCarthy in that same 2006 column, she gave a pretty good idea of where she stood.

“There are times a country is so tired of bull that only the truth can provide relief. If no one in conventional-wisdom politics has the courage to speak up and say what needs to be said, then you go out and find some obscure junior senator from Minnesota [or Illinois — my add] with the guts to do it.”

Well, McCarthy didn’t win, but he also wasn’t much of a candidate. I knew and admired Eugene McCarthy, but I think it’s safe to say he was no Barack Obama. But by coalescing the young and the antiwar voters, he forced those who did win to put an end to America’s other mistake of a war.

So Molly would rail at us not to let Bush Co. — and any lily-livered so-called leader who is up for election — tell us that this war is no longer an issue.

With plans for permanent military bases throughout Iraq and likely Republican candidate John McCain’s comfort with 100 years of occupation — not to mention the obscene daily loss of life and treasure — we are a nation that will continue to bleed out until we die.

So do what Molly would do. Go to your precinct caucus on Feb. 5, not because your candidate’s political future depends on it, but because your nation’s future depends on the candidate you choose. Go with Molly’s words ringing in your ears: “We want to find solutions other than killing people. Not in our name, not with our money, not with our children’s blood.”