The Rag Blog

Dear Tom Petty folks,

I am a musician, writer and political activist, and a longtime Tom Petty fan. I am writing to tell you that I am very distressed by the fact that Tom is planning to perform at the Super Bowl this Sunday. The biggest cause of this distress is the fact that the main sponsor of the half-time event is, as I am sure you are aware, Bridgestone/Firestone. Perhaps you are unaware that Bridgestone/Firestone operates the largest rubber plantation in the world in Liberia, where it has employed child labor for much, if not all, of the past 82 years. Currently, workers there receive as pay the equivalent of $3.19 per day. Most live in company housing with no running water, in buildings that have not been renovated since they were constructed in 1926. The workers (and their families) are routinely exposed to toxic chemicals. Recent attempts at unionization have been brutally suppressed by police, in violation of internationally recognized labor and human rights.

Of course, Bridgestone/Firestone, the largest tire manufacturer in the world, is looking to raise its visibility and improve its image with the American public. I can hardly believe that Mr. Petty would participate in this effort by lending his name and talent in support of this despicable corporate misbehavior if he were to be made aware of the issues involved.

Mr. Petty has been (to this point) associated in my mind with rebels, rock and roll, and also loosely with a spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood that emerged from the activism and camaraderie of the global peace, justice and solidarity movement of the 1960s and ’70s. But his association with Bridgestone/Firestone and scheduled participation in this Super Bowl is giving me a new impression.

I know there is a great deal of money to be made from exposure to such a mass audience, but at what cost? I am willing to assume that lending tacit support to the brutal exploitation of the labor of desperate people trying to make a decent life for themselves is not something that Mr. Petty would support were he to be made aware of the extensively documented antisocial and brutal behavior of his corporate sponsor.

Here are just a couple of links. Please take a moment to review this material:

* “Super Bowl of Shame” (by Jamie Menutis, Foreign Policy in Focus, 1/28/08)

* “Stopping Firestone: Getting Rubber to Meet the Road” (by Roxanne Lawson and Tim Newman, Foreign Policy in Focus, 12/7/06)

I would very much appreciate it if you would pass this message, these links, or a synopsis of this plea to Mr. Petty.

Actions, they say, always speak louder than words, or song lyrics, or images of rock and roll rebellion. I really don’t want to believe that Mr. Petty values money and career advancement over the lives and welfare of children in Liberia, or of working people anywhere. That is why I have taken the time to try and make Tom Petty and your entire organization aware of the harsh realities that these desperate workers and their families face at the hands of the folks at Bridgestone/Firestone.

To my way of thinking, a rock and roll hero that knowingly lends a hand (or his good name) to corporate abusers is no hero at all, and deserves to have his image adjusted accordingly.

Unquestionably, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers would receive a career boost from exposure to a huge Super Bowl audience. I cannot help thinking, though, that their legacy would be better served if Petty were to announce his intention to back out of participation in the Super Bowl in order to better stand for principle over profit. That would be my idea of an action worthy of a respectable rock icon.

Thanks for your time and consideration,

Paul Dean
Sebastopol, CA

In Thursday night’s Democratic presidential debate, Hillary Clinton lied again about Iraq.

At the forum in Los Angeles, Hillary Clinton declared, “We bombed them for days in 1998 because Saddam Hussein threw out inspectors.”

That statement was totally false. The bombing campaign had been planned for months and the inspectors were not thrown out. They were ordered out by President Bill Clinton in anticipation of the four-day U.S.-led bombing campaign.

The chronology, which is on the public record, is as follows:

In early 1998, the Clinton Administration began to raise concerns about Iraq’s refusal to allow inspectors of the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) to visit so-called “presidential sites,” a liberally-defined series of buildings and grounds across the country that Iraq claimed were used by government officials. Even though subsequent evidence has revealed that the Iraqis had nothing to hide, since all proscribed weapons and weapons material had long since been eliminated, Saddam Hussein held firm. Given that a number of prominent American political leaders from both parties had called openly for assassinating him, however, the Iraqi leader’s reluctance to allow Americans into presidential palaces may have been a result of concerns that such access would make him and other top officials personally vulnerable. Furthermore, the Iraqis had complained that, despite a stated policy of avoiding staffing UNSCOM with experts from “intelligence providing states,” there was a disproportionate number of Americans involved in the inspections, who would deliberately prolong the process and could potentially provide information to the U.S. military. The Iraqi dictator also reportedly had an obsessive compulsive disorder which led him to order that his palaces be kept meticulously clean and made him particularly reluctant to allow large groups of foreigners to move about his homes.

The Clinton administration’s insistence upon raising this issue at that time was rather suspect: Such Iraqi restrictions on these “presidential sites” had existed since the beginning of the sanctions regime nearly seven years earlier without any concerns publically expressed by United Nations officials. Yet suddenly, in January 1998, the Clinton administration decided that it had become an intolerable violation of UN Security Council resolution 687, which called upon Iraq to verify its disarmament, and warned Iraq that the United States – despite the lack of Security Council approval as required – would engage in a sustained bombing campaign against their country if the Iraqis did not allow these inspections of presidential palaces to go ahead. By February, a large-scale U.S. military assault seemed likely. However, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan was able to broker a deal late that month that opened the presidential palaces to UN inspectors, but with an additional diplomatic presence in recognition of the sites’ special status.

The disappointment by Clinton administration officials that the bombing campaign would not be able to go ahead as planned was palpable. Clinton did not give up on its search for an excuse to attack Iraq, however.

At the end of October, Iraq imposed new restrictions on UNSCOM as a result of revelations that the United States was indeed illegally using UNSCOM as a vehicle for spying on the Iraqi government. On November 10, in response to pressure from President Clinton, UNSCOM chairman Richard Butler announced his decision to pull UNSCOM out of Iraq without the required authorization from the Security Council. Iraq then reversed itself and agreed to allow the inspectors to resume their activities. The United States, however, was eager to launch military action, particularly by mid-December in order to take advantage of overlapping American military units on rotation in the Persian Gulf, which made it a particularly auspicious time for major air strikes.

According to former chief weapons inspector Scott Ritter, Clinton’s National Security Advisor Sandy Berger – now a major advisor for Senator Clinton – met with Butler on November 30, when the UNSCOM director was instructed to provoke Iraq into breaking its agreement to fully cooperate with UNSCOM. Without consulting the UN Security Council as required, Butler announced to the Iraqis that he was nullifying previously agreed-upon modalities dealing with sensitive sites that limited the number of UNSCOM inspectors. He chose the Baath Party headquarters in Baghdad as the site to demand unfettered access, a very unlikely place to store weapons of mass destruction but one very likely to provoke a negative reaction. The Iraqis refused to allow the large group into their party headquarters, but did allow them unrestricted access to a series of sensitive military installations.

At that point, Butler and the Clinton Administration unilaterally ordered UN inspectors out of Iraq in order to remove them from the risk of being harmed by the massive U.S. air and missile strikes that were forthcoming. Back in New York, American officials then helped Butler draft a report blaming Iraq exclusively for the impasse in a late night session at the U.S. Mission across from the United Nations headquarters. As the UN Security Council was meeting in an emergency special session on how to implement a unified response to Iraq’s non-cooperation, the United States – with support from Great Britain – launched an unauthorized four-day series of sustained air strikes against Iraq in what became known as Operation Desert Fox. In response, Iraq forbade UNSCOM from returning.

Surely Senator Clinton knew all this, since she has emphasized as evidence of her supposed experience in foreign affairs her close consultation with her husband and his national security advisors during these crises. Her claims during the debate, then, that the bombing took place because Saddam Hussein “threw out inspectors” is a boldface lie to rationalize for a four-day bombing campaign that killed hundreds of people, many of whom were innocent civilians, and which gave Saddam Hussein an excuse to refuse to allow inspectors to return to Iraq for the next four years. A number of strategic analysts (including me) publically warned prior to the December 1998 attacks that launching such massive air strikes would result in an end to the UN inspections and would result in reducing Iraqi compliance from 95% to 0%. President Clinton clearly wanted the inspections regime to end, however, presumably because – as Senator Clinton has acknowledged – the administration had shifted U.S. policy from containment of Iraq to regime change. Indeed, the resulting absence of inspectors became the principal rationale for President George W. Bush, Senator Clinton and others to support an invasion of Iraq four years later.

Indeed, in Thursday night’s debate, Senator Clinton claims that she voted to authorize war against Iraq in October 2002 because “we needed to put inspectors in.” However, this was also a lie, since Saddam Hussein had by that time already agreed for a return of the weapons inspectors. Furthermore, Senator Clinton voted against the substitute Levin amendment, which would have also granted President Bush authority to use force, but only if Iraq defied subsequent UN demands regarding the inspections process. Instead, Senator Clinton voted for the Republican-sponsored resolution to give President Bush the authority to invade Iraq at the time and circumstances of his own choosing regardless of whether inspectors returned. Indeed, unfettered large-scale weapons inspections had been going on in Iraq for nearly four months at the time the Bush administration launched the March 2003 invasion that Senator Clinton had voted to authorize.

This is part of a longstanding pattern of Senator Hillary Clinton misleading the American public about Iraq in order to justify her militaristic policies. It is important to remember that, back in October 2002, despite widespread and public skepticism expressed by arms control experts over the Bush administration’s claims that Iraq had somehow re-armed itself, Senator Clinton was insisting that Iraq’s possession of biological and chemical weapons was “not in doubt” and was “undisputed.” She also claimed, despite the reports of the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iraq’s nuclear program had been completely eliminated, that Iraq was “trying to develop nuclear weapons.”

This inevitably raises concerns that if Hillary Clinton is elected president, she will have no qualms about lying once again to the American people in order to justify going to war.

Ever since the President’s illegal warrantless eavesdropping program was revealed by the New York Times‘ Jim Risen and Eric Lichtblau back in December, 2005, there has been a faction of neoconservatives and other extremists on the Right calling for the NYT reporters and editors to be criminally prosecuted — led by the likes of Bill Kristol (now of the NYT), Bill Bennett (of CNN), Commentary Magazine and many others. In May, 2006, Alberto Gonzales went on ABC News and revealed that the DOJ had commenced a criminal investigation into the leak, and then “raised the possibility [] that New York Times journalists could be prosecuted for publishing classified information.”

That was one of the more revealing steps ever taken by Bush’s DOJ under Gonzales: the administration violated multiple federal laws for years in spying on Americans, blocked all efforts to investigate what they did or subject it to the rule of law, but then decided that the only real criminals were those who alerted the nation to their lawbreaking — whistleblowers and journalists alike. Even Gonzales’ public musing about criminal prosecutions could have had a devastating effect — if you’re a whistleblower or journalist who uncovers secret government lawbreaking, you’re obviously going to think twice (at least) before bringing it to light, given the public threats by the Attorney General to criminally prosecute those who do.

Eighteen months have passed since Gonzales’ threats, and while there have been some signs that the investigation continues — former DOJ official Jack Goldsmith, for instance, described how he was accosted and handed a Subpoena by FBI agents in the middle of Harvard Square, demanding to know what he knew about the NSA leak — there had no further public evidence that the DOJ intended to pursue Risen and Lichtblau. Until now.

Yesterday, the NYT reported that Jim Risen was served with a grand jury Subpoena, compelling him to disclose the identity of the confidential source(s) for disclosures in his 2006 book, State of War. The Subpoena seeks disclosure of Risen’s sources not for the NSA program (for which he and Lichtblau won a Pulitzer Prize), but rather, for Risen’s reporting on CIA efforts to infiltrate Iran’s nuclear program. Nonetheless, Risen’s work on State of War is what led to his discovery that the Bush administration was illegally spying on Americans without the warrants required by law.

The issuance of a grand jury Subpoena to a reporter seeking the disclosure of confidential sources is one of the most serious steps the DOJ can take. If the reporter refuses to disclose his source(s) — as reporters feel duty-bound to do, and, independently, as their future ability to uncover government secrets requires — the reporter can be held in contempt and consigned to prison (Risen has indicated he will not comply). Judy Miller’s refusal to disclose her sources in the Libby case, in response to a grand jury Subpoena, is what led to her imprisonment for 85 days, until she finally relented and revealed her sources. Had she not done so, she could have (and likely would have) remained imprisoned indefinitely.

Risen’s book, State of War, was published in early January, 2006 — more than two years ago. Why is it now, suddenly, that he is being subpoenaed to reveal his sources?

Issuing a Subpoena to a journalist poses such serious First Amendment threats that the DOJ has promulgated guidelines for what must occur in order for that to happen. Pursuant to Section III(A)(2)(l) of those guidelines — “Subpoenas to the Media”:

If the investigation involves media news gathering functions, the staff should first attempt to obtain the necessary information from non-media sources before considering subpoenaing members of the news media. If these attempts are unsuccessful and news media sources are the only reasonable sources of the relevant information, the staff should attempt to negotiate with the news media member or organization to obtain the information voluntarily. If such negotiations fail, the staff must seek the express approval of the Attorney General before issuing a subpoena.

Although one can’t say for certain, it seems rather likely that what has led to the issuance of this grand jury Subpoena to Risen is that Michael Mukasey has apparently decided to make criminal investigations of such leaks one of his top priorities, and is prepared for a massive First Amendment fight with Risen and his publisher, Simon & Schuster, which likely will include a willingness to imprison Risen if he fails to comply — just as the Neoconservative Right, still seething over Risen’s role in exposing the President’s NSA lawbreaking, has been demanding for some time.

One of the leading theorists of the “Imprison-the-NYT” movement has been Gabriel Schoenfeld of Norm Podhoretz’s Commentary Magazine. He wrote a widely-cited article back in March, 2006 arguing that Risen, Lichtblau and even NYT Editor Bill Keller should all be criminally prosecuted under the Espionage Act and other statutes for publishing the NSA story:

The real question that an intrepid prosecutor in the Justice Department should be asking is whether, in the aftermath of September 11, we as a nation can afford to permit the reporters and editors of a great newspaper to become the unelected authority that determines for all of us what is a legitimate secret and what is not. Like the Constitution itself, the First Amendment’s protections of freedom of the press are not a suicide pact. The laws governing what the Times has done are perfectly clear; will they be enforced?

On his Commentary blog yesterday, Schoenfeld gloated about the Subpoena to Risen and suggested a possible connection to not only Risen’s work on the NSA story, but also Schoenfeld’s own agitating for the imprisonment of these journalists. Schoenfeld wrote (referring to himself in the third person by the name of his blog, “Connecting the Dots”):

Finally, action. A federal prosecutor has issued a subpoena to James Risen of the New York Times, one of two reporters at the paper who compromised the National Security Agency’s (NSA) Terrorist Surveillance Program in December 1995 (sic). . . .

Why is this investigation proceeding now? Connecting the Dots has no inside information. But Connecting the Dots was seated at the same table as Michael Mukasey and his wife at two dinners in the last three years, back when the future Attorney General was still a mere federal judge. The leaks in the New York Times did not come up for discussion, but Mukasey made plain he was a close reader of COMMENTARY.

Did he read a certain article in COMMENTARY entitled Has the New York Times Violated the Espionage Act? That’s a question James Risen — and Bill Keller, too — should be thinking about.

It’s entirely unsurprising that Michael Mukasey sat socially with our nation’s most extremist neoconservatives and declared himself a “close reader of COMMENTARY.” After all, before his nomination was formally announced, the White House chose Bill Kristol to announce his selection and, in a lengthy article, to vouch to conservatives for what a fine AG Mukasey would make.

Mukasey was a long-time supporter of the neocons’ favorite candidate, Rudy Giuliani and, prior to becoming Attorney General, was part of the Giuliani campaign. And it was Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer — both with neoconservative leanings (war supporters both, among other things) — who jointly enabled Mukasey’s confirmation by becoming the only Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee to vote in his favor.

Although there are still facts missing — such as whether this Subpoena was actually approved by Mukasey rather than Gonzales — it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the Grand Jury Subpoena was done at least with Mukasey’s assent. It seems rather clearly to signify the intent of his Justice Department to more aggressively pursue reporters who disclose information embarrassing to the President.

It’s hard to overstate how threatening this behavior is. The Bush administration has erected an unprecedented wall of secrecy around everything it does. Beyond illegal spying, if one looks at the instances where we learned of lawbreaking and other forms of lawless radicalism — CIA black sites, rendition programs, torture, Abu Ghraib, pre-war distortion of intelligence, destruction of CIA torture videos — it is, in every case, the by-product of two forces: government whistleblowers and reporters willing to expose it.

Grand Jury Subpoenas such as the one issued to Risen have as their principal purpose shutting off that avenue of learning about government wrongdoing — the sole remaining avenue for a country plagued by a supine, slothful, vapid press and an indescribably submissive Congress. Mukasey has quickly demonstrated that he has no interest in investigating and pursuing lawbreaking by high government officials, but now, he (or at least the DOJ he leads) seems to be demonstrating something even worse: a burgeoning interest in investigating and pursuing those who expose such governmental lawbreaking and turning those whistleblowers and investigative journalists into criminals.

Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book “How Would a Patriot Act?,” a critique of the Bush administration’s use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, “A Tragic Legacy“, examines the Bush legacy.

The Stepford Wives tells the chilling story of once smart, independent women who get abducted and turned into tamed, mindless robots.

I have a theory about a similarly subversive process that turns grown men once capable of independent and reasoned thought into robotic extremists. Call them Stepford Republicans. The nefarious transformation always occurs before the individual gets close to becoming a Republican president or vice president.

Stepford Wives become robotically subservient only to their husbands; they pose no threat to the rest of us. But Stepford Republicans become subservient to right-wing forces of corporatism, war and prejudice. Once converted into mindless ideologues, Stepford Republicans are a threat to us all.

The prototype of a Stepford Republican is PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN. After his apparent abduction and alteration, he became an instrument of corporate power in the White House: union-busting, downsizing, cutting school lunch funding. This is the Reagan many remember: champion of the overdog.

But when Reagan was still a sentient being, he was actually a bleeding-heart advocate for working people. He denounced budget cuts (“millions of children have been deprived of milk once provided through the federal school lunch program”) and tax cuts that “benefit the higher income brackets alone.” He assailed corporate profiteering, and labeled a top Republican “the banner carrier for Wall Street.” He hailed unions and complained that “labor has been handcuffed by the vicious Taft-Hartley law.”

In other words, before he was robotized, Ronald Reagan could be a warm, compassionate human being — and I offer a remarkable tape to prove my theory.

Many Americans have long suspected that VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY is an android. What they may not know is that — before being Stepfordized into a neoconservative drone — he was capable of non-ideological thought that would allow him to choose a peace option over war, able to use human reason to figure out why invading Iraq would inevitably lead to “quagmire.” This short video clip offers compelling evidence.

Today, MITT ROMNEY is such a robotically rabid spouter of social-conservative dogma that he’s won the praise of radio rightists like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. Offered as evidence of his Stepfordization is this video revealing a once human and tolerant Romney who seemed to care deeply about women’s rights and abortion rights, and resisted any connection to the policies of Reagan-Bush. It was this pre-abduction Romney who boasted that he would do more for gay equality than Ted Kennedy.

JOHN MCCAIN was also horrifically rewired toward servile courtship of the Religious Right. Dramatic evidence of McCain’s Stepfordization is caught on video: “Before” footage shows you a strong human speaking bravely against right-wing “agents of intolerance” like Jerry Falwell; “after” footage reveals a lifeless, docile tool of those same forces.

Perhaps you can’t accept my theory — despite the powerful taped evidence I offer — that these Republican icons are victims of Stepford-like abduction and transplant.

If so, I’d like to hear an alternative theory as to why these individuals betray their own principles or intellect — why they turn themselves into fawning servants of economic forces or ideologies or social movements they once abhorred.

The blind pursuit of power, you say? I’m simply unwilling to believe that human beings — even top Republicans — are so inherently opportunistic and corrupt.

The biggest news of the record $3-trillion-plus federal budget that President Bush plans to propose to Congress on Monday may be the potential deficit that comes with it.

After years of White House boasting that it is getting the deficit under control – cutting it by $250 billion during the past two years – the administration appears ready to concede that the deficit will rise to $400 billion or more in the coming year. That’s a near-return to the record $413-billion deficit reached in 2004…

The cost of the war has driven much of Bush’s spending. The president already has secured more than $600 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with “supplemental budgets” sought outside the parameters of the normal federal budget, and is seeking nearly $200 billion more for the year ahead.

“What we’ve seen this year is the continuation of another pattern of outright dishonesty,” Ornstein has said. “This has not been an effort to achieve a rational dialog about national priorities and fiscal discipline… We’ve had funding for the war drawn through the back door of supplemental and emergency spending… It’s one thing if you have an emergency, but this has been funding the traditional cost of the wars in a way that tries to disguise the spending in the eyes of the public.”

The average annual growth in defense spending has run 5.7 percent on Bush’s watch – a greater rate than any post-World War II president achieved, the Cato Institute has found. It was down 1.7 percent a year, on average, during Clinton’s terms. Johnson, waging a war in Vietnam, had boosted it by 4.9 percent a year.

Yet this president hasn’t always paid for the war at the expense of social programs: Bush has bought guns, and butter, too. But in the balance, the share of the federal pie for the Pentagon has grown far greater than the share for domestic spending.

Defense Department has grown by more than 60 percent since the start of Bush’s presidency. Between fiscal 2002, the first year over which Bush had full control of the budget, and last year, national defense spending grew to $572 billion, up 64 percent….

In response to a Marine Corps recruiting office established in Berkeley last year, local activists are trying to make it more difficult for future recruiting centers to open in the city.

If passed by a majority of Berkeley voters, a proposed initiative would require military recruiting offices and private military companies in Berkeley to first acquire a special use permit.

To obtain this permit, a business must hold public hearings and a public comment period.

If the initiative passes, recruitment offices could not be opened within 600 feet of residential districts, public parks, public health clinics, public libraries, schools or churches.

Currently, a recruiting office is held to the same standards as most other businesses, which do not require a public hearing or have limits on where offices can be established.

The author of the initiative, Berkeley-based lawyer Sharon Adams, modeled the initiative after current zoning law that restricts the location of adult-oriented businesses.

“In the same way that many communities limit the location of pornographic stores, that’s the same way we feel about the military recruiting stations,” said PhoeBe sorgen, an initiative proponent and a member of the city’s Peace and Justice Commission. “Teenagers that really want to find them will be able to seek them out and find them, but we don’t want them in our face.”

The initiative lists complaints against the military including the invasion of Iraq, abuses at Abu Ghraib, discrimination based on sexual orientation and recruiters who mislead potential recruits about benefits and duties.

Recruiters from the office declined to comment.

The primary purpose of the new zoning law would be to protect young people from undue influence from military recruiters, supporters say.

“We feel that as a community we need to protect the youth,” Adams said. “We’re trying to level the playing field.”

Berkeley Councilmember Dona Spring said she supports the wording of the initiative, but said she would prefer the issue be passed by council so it can be enacted faster rather than waiting for the initiative to be placed on the ballot in November.

“I think we should just go ahead and pass it,” she said. “We can’t take everything to the voters.”

But some proponents are hesitant to pass the ordinance through the council because they feel it might be watered down by other council members.

In addition to making it more difficult for future military recruiting centers to be established, Spring also said she would support action that would remove the current office, which is in her district.

“I do want to do something, whatever we can do, to shut down an agency that offends our public standards,” she said. “It’s a detriment, it’s a danger to the public.”

Code Pink has staged demonstrations against the recruitment center every Wednesday in front of the center on Shattuck Avenue since Sept. 26.

The Marine Recruitment Center, which has been located in Berkeley since mid-2007, is the only military recruitment center in Berkeley.

Proponents hope that this ordinance will become a template for communities around the country to follow.

Another giveaway to the rich by Congress, White House

The “economic stimulus” plan agreed to by the Democrats in Congress and the Bush White House is another giveaway to the rich.

There is a mini one-time payment of $300 to $600 to anyone who is employed. That’s not a significant amount, considering that the average rent for an apartment in the U.S. is $1,027 a month. (Business Week, Jan. 17)

If you are jobless, you get no payment; a minimum yearly income of $6,000 is required to get the one-time rebate. The jobless don’t even get an extension of unemployment benefits, which usually adds 16 weeks of payments, or food stamps. Adding those to the plan would have put thousands of dollars in the pockets of the people who need it most.

Unlike the one-time rebate, which won’t happen for months, an extension of jobless benefits and food stamp increases would put money into the economy immediately.

The original plan proposed in the House of Representatives included an extension of benefits for the jobless and an increase in food stamp money for the 35 million low-income households eligible for payments. In a logic-defying statement, top Democrat Nancy Pelosi claimed the Democrats agreed with Bush to drop those benefits in order to help “the middle class.” (New York Times, Jan. 24)

The “stimulus” plan also includes more than $50 billion in tax breaks for businesses.

The mini payment and the tax break for businesses have gotten most of the publicity. But neither of them is the really big item in the package. Most significant is a bailout of the banks and mortgage companies and a giveaway of a housing loan guarantee to the rich.

The details of this part of the plan can’t be found in either the White House statement or the Democrats’ summary of the plan; the inside story is hidden in the financial pages of the media.

“The plan tries to make it easier to secure or refinance mortgages for more expensive homes. First it would allow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, for a year, to buy loans of up to $729,750. The current limit is $417,000. The package would similarly increase the $362,790 limit on loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration, while making it easier for borrowers to qualify,” USA Today reported in its business section on Jan. 24.

The report adds that the plan also shifts the “risk” for financing the more expensive loans to working people, whose taxes will now be used to insure the loans for expensive houses.

The plan was falsely labeled a stimulant in order to pass it through Congress quickly, without any further review.

But could any plan really be a stimulant and stop the spiraling economic downturn?

Dangers of the military stimulant

The current capitalist cycle started its upward climb following the stock market crash in 2002, often referred to as the bursting of the Internet bubble. The U.S. was in a recession; the economy was stagnant with no recovery in sight. The massive military buildup that started then, estimated at over $2 trillion over the last five years, was a huge stimulus.

But a military stimulus is not the same as normal capitalist production. Military expansion by no means guarantees an economic recovery with full employment. In fact, its expansion may well spell a deepening of the economic crisis and may be depressing the economy instead.

The cyclical capitalist upturn that began after the crash in 2002 has been one of the weakest recoveries on record. It has frequently been described as a jobless recovery, meaning that while profits for the rich recovered, there was not the usual rise in employment that goes with a rising economy. Unemployment didn’t increase, but jobs didn’t grow in the way usually seen during a recovery.

Now the unemployment rate is starting to increase. The official figure, which by design underreports the levels of joblessness, for December showed a significant increase to 5 percent.

“An uptick of this magnitude (up 0.3 percent in December),” says the Economic Policy Institute, “has historically been either a symptom or a harbinger of recession. Moreover, the increase in unemployment was not isolated among any one group—joblessness increased significantly among all demographic groups.” (www.epi.org)

In a recession, the first thing that happens is that people lose their jobs; the reserve army of unemployed workers grows. The length and depth of the recession determines the severity of the unemployment, the spread of homelessness and loss of food.

For the working class—the ones that bear the brunt of a recession—the most important issue is jobs. For the capitalist, the only issue is profits. Government “stimulus” plans are aimed at restoring profits.

For anyone but the rich, what is needed is a rescue plan—a guarantee of a job, no evictions/foreclosures and adequate food. Any plan that isn’t about jobs, housing and food isn’t responding to the real crisis.

Crisis of overproduction

A recession is most often the result of what Karl Marx called a capitalist crisis of overproduction. Capitalist overproduction is poorly understood, partly because the capitalists want to obscure the reasons for recessions and the misery they cause.

A crisis of overproduction comes because the capitalists, in chasing after profits, try to get a market advantage by lowering the production cost of each individual item. This is most often done by introducing labor-saving technology that can turn out more products at the same or a lower overall cost. Capitalists are driven to constantly accumulate new machinery, new technology in order to compete.

Each capitalist tries to outdo the others in revolutionizing the means of production and lowering the unit price of the products—be they computers or clothing or corn. But eventually the new technology becomes the norm and many more products are being produced by fewer workers. This crisis of overproduction then reveals itself as an inability to sell at an acceptable rate of profit all that’s been produced. Bankruptcies, layoffs and shutdowns follow.

Marx showed that all new value comes from the direct application of labor power in the production process. Unlike raw materials and plant and equipment, labor power is the only commodity that, in the course of being used up in the production process, creates new value.

This dual character of labor power—that workers get paid only what it takes to keep them alive as a class, while at the same time they produce much more than that in new value—is the basis for exploitation and the immense profits taken by the capitalists.

Marx also explained why the rate of profit drops as the proportion of investment in machinery and technology—Marx calls this constant capital—keeps rising in relation to wages, or variable capital. Variable capital is the source of profit, but it becomes a smaller part of the total investment.

Overproduction of capital, for Marx, is the over-accumulation of constant capital.

When over-accumulation sets in and profit rates fall, capitalists begin to shift the investment funds at their disposal out of machinery, technology and labor and into financial assets. Eventually there is a shortage of profitable financial investment outlets.

When that happens, capitalist investors often bid up the prices of various social goods without increasing the real wealth in society or expanding productivity. The sub-prime loan crisis is exactly such a scheme, aggravated by easy credit.

The economic downturn that is now unfolding can’t be prevented by acts of Congress. Short of getting rid of capitalism, there is no means to prevent such economic disasters. But Marx did show that the workers, through struggle, can lessen the devastating impact of such crises on their lives and also gain the consciousness and organization to begin to challenge the system itself.

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.