The Rag Blog

1. Summary

— The United States has committed and sponsored the crime of genocide in Iraq.

— Responsibility for genocide rests on specific intent and given or probable consequences of actions. The 2003 US invasion of Iraq was the culmination and intensification of a consistent US policy, spanning over 17 years, of destroying Iraq as a national and state entity.

— The United States attempted and succeeded to destroy the state of Iraq, but has failed and cannot succeed in its attempt to destroy the nation of Iraq.

— The Iraqi people have the legal right to resist occupation, colonialism and genocide by all available means, including armed struggle.

— The national popular resistance in Iraq is combating genocide directly where international law as a preventative and protective mechanism has failed.

— In defence of civilisation, people the world over should rise up in support of the national liberation struggle of the Iraqi people.

— In defence of international law, jurists and law associations should work to bring the charge of genocide against the United States, its leaders and its allies.

15/01/08 “LewRockwell” — – On October 19, 2001, in speaking about the new government controls and heightened surveillance already being clamped on the American people in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney said that the new war “may never end. At least not in our lifetime. . . . The way I think of it is, it’s a new normalcy.” We should have taken his grim forecast more seriously.

The U.S. attack on and occupation of Iraq, represented by the Bush administration as a critical element in the larger Global War on Terror, began nearly five years ago, and it shows no signs of ending soon. Indeed, if John McCain is elected president and (with help from his successors) carries out the not-so-veiled threat to keep U.S. troops in Iraq for a hundred years, then we can confidently expect that the war will not end in our lifetime. Such a prospect is so seemingly preposterous, however, that one’s mind does not readily assimilate it.

It is difficult enough to absorb the reality that the United States has now been at war against the Iraqis for almost five years. An engagement sold to the public as a “cakewalk” and represented just six weeks after it began as a “mission accomplished” has now (as I write) continued for 1,760 days. Compare this duration with the time the United States was formally engaged in World War I (589 days) or World War II (1,365 days). In the 1940s, the U.S. forces (with important allies, to be sure) defeated two major economic and military powers in a globe-circling war in less time than the U.S. forces have been engaged in Iraq.

And after all this time, where does the U.S. venture stand? Evidently it is no closer to the “victory” the president has repeatedly said he seeks than it was immediately after the occupation began. The 901 U.S. troops who lost their lives in Iraq during 2007 were the largest number in any calendar year since the war began. As 2008 begins, we read reports of a U.S. air strike on the outskirts of Baghdad in which B-1 bombers and F-16 fighters dropped 40,000 pounds of explosives, an attack described by Major Alayne Conway as “one of the largest airstrikes since the onset of the war.” The attack came only a day after six U.S. soldiers participating in a major ground offensive were reported killed in the “biggest one-day loss in Iraq since May.” These events do not epitomize minor “mopping up” activities. The war obviously has no end in sight.

Notwithstanding these inauspicious developments and Senator McCain’s bizarre pronouncement, we might well think in a more focused way about what will ultimately bring the war to an end, because it almost certainly will end someday. Given its nature, it cannot be ended as each of the world wars was ended, by the formal capitulation of an enemy state. Loosely organized insurgents and guerrillas do not stop fighting in that fashion. In view of the particulars on the ground in Iraq, it would seem that no complete cessation of armed hostilities can occur there until the United States withdraws its military forces. So the question becomes: What will induce a future U.S. president or a future U.S. Congress to act decisively to bring the troops home?

In the abstract, the answer is easy: U.S. authorities will extract their occupation force when they perceive that doing so is in their interest. Note well that I said, “in their interest.” Whether a U.S. withdrawal serves my interest, or yours, or that of 95 percent of the American people is not necessarily important, because government leaders do not act to serve other people’s interests. Anyone who has advanced beyond infancy in his understanding of political affairs knows that despite all the dutiful claptrap that political leaders and their functionaries spout in public, they invariably pursue their own interests. Those interests may be material, political, institutional, or ideological, but in any event they are their own interests, not yours or mine.

It follows directly that up to this point the continued prosecution of the war has served the leaders’ interests. They may say they are trying to end the war. They may have secured their election or reelection, as many of the Democrats now serving in Congress have, by promising to do whatever they can to end the war. Yet the truth is that they’ve sold the public a bill of goods. When the leaders have considered all the personal consequences they expect to follow from acting to end the war, they have concluded that, all things being considered, doing so does not serve their interest, and therefore they have refrained from doing so.

After all, it’s not as though the U.S. war effort has a mind of its own. Whenever the president wants to remove the troops, he can do so; he has the power. Whenever the members of the majority in Congress want to remove the troops, by stopping the funding to support them there, they can do so; they have the power. The posture of powerlessness that our leaders often affect – my goodness, what can I do? my hands are tied – is a disingenuous pose. They can stop the U.S. engagement in the war whenever they want to do so. Thus far, they simply have not wanted to do so.

What might cause them to reach a new conclusion about what serves their personal interest? Several developments might turn the trick. Nearly all of them work by heightening the public’s anger with their leaders’ decisions.

Historically, the decisive development in similar instances has been the cumulation of public costs, especially the costs in life and limb. In both the Korean War and the Vietnam War, the public’s disfavor of the engagement closely tracked the cumulation of casualties. As political scientist John Mueller showed in his book War, Presidents, and Public Opinion, “every time American casualties increased by a factor of 10, support for the war dropped by about 15 percentage points” in the polls.

One reason the public has continued to tolerate their leaders’ continued prosecution of the war in Iraq is that the casualties have not been nearly so great, by an order of magnitude, as they were in Korea and Vietnam. So far, not quite 4,000 U.S. military personnel have been killed in Iraq. That’s only one death for every 75,000 persons living in the United States, and therefore the loss of life has not cut deeply into the public psyche – most Americans have not been personally acquainted with anyone killed in the war. (The vastly greater loss of Iraqi lives seems to have made even less impression.) Sad to say, the public may not turn decisively against their leaders’ continued prosecution of the war until many more American soldiers have died.

Economic costs have also mounted, and they have loomed relatively much larger in this war than in the earlier wars in Korea and Vietnam. Who says the military leaders never learn? They’ve certainly learned how to increase hugely the financial costs of fighting a war. Estimates of the costs to date vary widely, depending on how one accounts for various joint, indirect, and implied costs, but a total cost to date in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars is not implausible, and later costs, including those associated with decades of care for the war’s legions of physically and mentally disabled, will add enormously to the total.

In earlier wars, even though the costs were relatively greater in blood than in dollars, the public eventually wearied of the economic sacrifices entailed by the financial expenses of continued fighting. Economist Hugh Mosley concluded that the Johnson administration “was reluctant to resort to increased taxes to finance the war for fear of losing public support for its policy of military escalation.” Historian Stephen Ambrose wrote that President Richard Nixon “realized that for economic reasons (the war was simply costing too much) and for the sake of domestic peace and tranquility he had to cut back on the American commitment to Vietnam”; the retrenchment was “forced on [him] by public opinion.”

As the recession that has just begun deepens, the public may well object more strenuously to the government’s squandering of such vast amounts of tax money on a senseless continuation of the war in Iraq. When their purses are not so full, people may resent every additional dollar spent on the war more than they did previously. Ultimately, they may become so angry that they will take actions to punish severely the political leaders who continue to support the war. Serious political challengers may attract a mass following by embracing the example of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who promised in the 1952 campaign to end the enormously unpopular war in Korea and, after he took office, kept his promise expeditiously.

When substantial negative feedback begins to jeopardize the personal job security, not to speak of the respect and fawning, the electorate affords incumbents, they will begin to take notice, and to discount more heavily the contributions from defense contractors, big financial establishments, petrochemical companies, and other high rollers who have encouraged them to stay the hopeless course – though not hopeless for these special interests, of course; for them it has been a bonanza. George W. Bush parlayed a campaign of fear-mongering into his reelection in 2004, but unless another major terrorist attack occurs in the United States, the public will grow increasingly resistant to such appeals and more eager to throw the rascals out as the war’s costs continue to mount.

It is extremely unfortunate that escalating costs in blood and money are the only proven means of bringing the general public to resist strongly their political leaders who are committed to a continuation of unnecessary, unwise, and immoral war. Some of us wish that rational argument, cogent evidence, and humane sentiment would persuade a preponderance of the public to demand an end to the war. History suggests, however, that only personal grief and economic pain will induce the American public to act against their perfidious leaders. Needless to say, if the public remains as passive and as easily bamboozled as it has been during the past seven years, the war will continue, maybe even for the hundred years in which Senator McCain declares that a U.S. occupation of Iraq would be “fine with me.”

Robert Higgs is senior fellow in political economy at the Independent Institute and editor of The Independent Review. His most recent book is Neither Liberty Nor Safety: Fear, Ideology, and the Growth of Government. He is also the author of Depression, War, and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy, Resurgence of the Warfare State: The Crisis Since 9/11 and Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society.

As the news and most bloggers become totally engrossed with the process of selecting the next big kahoona, I received a small check in the mail which reminded me of the original thesis of this blog.

It was a check from my food co-op.

It says, “due to our successful operations this year, the board of directors has authorized a refund of part of our net savings to qualifying member patrons. This check represents a refund of approximately 1.02% of your purchases during the year. This 20% of the total amount allocated in your name, with 80% retained by the co-op to help fund our expansion project. Assuming your purchases were for personal,living, or family expenses, this rebate is not subject to federal income tax.

“Please Cash this Check” and if desired, you can use it on your next shopping trip to the Co-op.

My rebate check is for 12 dollars and 80 cents.

And in all fairness, the 20% return is a pretty good return on my modest investment, not to mention the reductions I enjoyed in all my purchases.

The co-op movement is still very much alive. I also get a small check from my electric co-op membership for my house in the country. In many parts of the country, these electric coops are very important chunks of the electrical infrastructure. In farming areas, large growers band together to own the cotton gin or the grain elevator. Many of these coops such as Pedernales Electric Coop , are large enterprises.

Certainly these organizations can be and often are controlled by a small clique of insiders, but the by-laws and articles of the organization, much like our constitution, are generally inherently democratic.

I started this blog after the Kerry defeat because I felt it was time for us to quit falling for the veneer of democracy that we always fall for every four years. I urged us all to reconsider the amount of energy and money that we invest into a system that has become corrupted and a dangerous diversion from the real work at hand. I urged us all to grow out of our nationalistic tribal cocoons and to emerge as global citizens.

I spoke of giant cyber-coops and of great global aggregations of people and ideas and access. I argued and visioned that someday, in the not so distant future, we would begin to form new inventions of social contract between ourselves and our distant friends and colleagues in cyberspace.

I reasoned that as the world begins to truly grapple with the great issues of the day, that we would do ourselves well by uniting with others in cooperation, rather than counting on the dated idea that competition will most fairly allocate the resources we will seek and require.

True, competition is a pretty good idea in times of wide open spaces, unlimited resources, and a level playing field. But today, we as individuals must compete against the greatest creatures of capital and control that have ever walked on the earth…the multinational corporation. Meanwhile, our finite resources are now recognized to be just that, finite, and our open space is now full of oxydized climate altering carbon.

But don’t fool yourself, the next president (of either party) will represent these corporate leviathons, not the consumers that dutifully stood in the cold and suffered the long lines, and the endless claims of change for a change.

And so now, it is that time again. We are all caught up in the drama. We watch the debates and the returns like a bowl game. We convince ourselves that all we need is a great leader, one who will end the domination of these giant leviathons of wealth.

When, in fact, all we really need is each other cooperating together.

We must flip the system.

Instead of a world of Multinational Corporations and Consumers.

We need a world of Multinational Cooperations and Providers.

Power does not give of itself naturally.

It does not volunteer to distribute itself.

It can be overtaken violently,

or it can be undertaken quietly, steadfastly, bit by bit,

family by family,

Some principles are worth fighting for: like the cherished right of television networks to decide who is and who is not a legitimate candidate for president.0115 03

NBC Universal Inc. is a major media conglomerate. And major media conglomerates have traditionally been able to police the parameters of presidential politics. Any affront to this order of affairs is a threat to the ability of corporations to define the American discourse.

That’s what is at stake as NBC fights to limit the amount of information Nevada Democrats have available to them before the caucuses on Saturday to choose delegates to the Democratic National Convention. So the network has announced that its crack legal team will work through the night to overturn a judge’s order that Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich be included in the last pre-caucus debate between the Democratic presidential contenders.

On the day after the New Hampshire primary, when New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson was still in the race, Kucinich, Richardson, New York Senator Hillary Clinton, Illinois Senator Barack Obama and former North Carolina Senator John Edwards were invited to participate in the debate scheduled to be televised on MSNBC from 9 to 11 p.m. Tuesday.

Debate organizers wanted Richardson in the forum and knew that they could not exclude Kucinich, who was running ahead of the New Mexican in several national polls. So they grudgingly contacted the Kucinich campaign, which participated last week in initial planning discussions for the debate.

But when Richardson dropped out of the race on Thursday, the network yanked the invitation to Kucinich, who has stirred up past forums — and distinguished himself from Clinton, Obama and Edwards — by calling for the rapid withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, advocating for the impeachment of members of the Bush administration, and even discussing the damage done to the political process by media monopolies.

The Kucinich campaign sued NBC over the network’s decision to conduct a closed debate. And Senior Clark County District Court Judge Charles Thompson ruled Monday that the congressman must be allowed to participate. Arguing that Nevada voters — and, by extension, the Democratic nominating process in which they are playing a high-profile role — would benefit by hearing from more than just NBC-favored contenders Clinton, Obama and Edwards, Judge Thompson said, “I don’t think that just deciding that just three is good enough for the state of Nevada is a legitimate basis (for dropping Kucinich).”

“Had it been established at the beginning that they’ll only take the top three for the debates, I wouldn’t have any problem enforcing it,” the judge explained to NBC’s lawyers. “I’m somewhat offended that a legitimate candidate was invited to a debate and then uninvited under circumstances that appear to be that they just decided to exclude him.”

How offended? Judge Thompson told the network’s lawyers that any move to exclude Kucinich would lead him to issue an injunction to stop the televised debate.

This threat to its ability to police the discourse was an affront that NBC would not let stand. “We disagree with the judge’s decision and are filing an appeal,” declared Jeremy Gaines, a vice president for MSNBC, who announced that the cable channel’s parent network would demand an immediate hearing before the Nevada Supreme Court.

Kucinich’s lawyers will battle to preserve Judge Thompson’s ruling, and the candidate’s right to a participate in the forum. They have fewer resources, but are possessed of one commodity that the broadcast and cable network seem to lack: an understanding that democracy is best served by free and open debate.

Once, when my children were young, one of them rushed into me and said: “Mama, so-and-so said the ‘K’ word.” I don’t remember which one of my children was the tattler, or which one was the tattlee, but I remember the ‘k” word. I could never figure out what the “k” word was, because neither of the children would say that very naughty word.

If all one did was listen or watch the corporate media, one would think that “Impeachment” was a naughty word. I did appear on some cable shows over the summer (before my activism transformed into a Congressional campaign) and was able to outline the rationale for impeachment, but since then, there has been a virtual black-out on the word, or concept.

On January 1st, about 400 impeachment activists hit the Rose Parade with impeachment posters and huge banners. There was some local coverage, but the coverage seemed to surround the issue of “politics is ruining the parade” than the issue of accountability. When we marched at the end of the parade with our large copy of the Preamble of the Constitution and our signs and banners, we were the victims of a lot of violence and rage—name calling up to and including projectiles being thrown at us.

A couple of months of go, I called for America to send handwritten letters to Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, via my campaign office. Today was the day that we delivered them to her office. We took over 8,000 letters and over 3,000 signatures on petitions to her office. We had a coalition of Americans represented in the 11,000 total and we had there present: Greens, Progressive Democrats, Peace and Freedom party members, community leaders and activists, and Independents joining hands and hearts to demand what we all think is one of the overriding issues of our time: holding George Bush and Dick Cheney accountable for their crimes against the peace; crimes against humanity; and crimes against the very fabric of what makes America a nation of laws: our Constitution.

Although we had some activists there with cameras and we will be able to put the event up on YouTube, there was not a single representative from the corporate media there to hear from Green Party Presidential hopeful, Cynthia McKinney who was the first Congress rep to introduce articles of impeachment against George Bush before her term expired in 2006.

Not one person from the media came out to hear Minister Christopher Mohammed (from San Francisco’s Bayview Hunter’s Point community) outline the local connection between Speaker Pelosi and her refusal to do her Constitutional duty to impeach George and Dick: she is complicit in the crimes and foxes don’t police the hen house.

That’s okay if the media didn’t show up: it says more about them than us, and we had dozens of patriotic Americans who did show up to help us deliver thousands of letters and we know those people (and more) were there with us in spirit.

Like Cynthia said: We must never give up! When I am elected to Congress and start serving my term, George and Dick will have 17 days to go and I will introduce Articles of Impeachment every day and will not allow them to go riding off into the sunset to enjoy their retirement when they have ruined the lives of millions of people here and all over the world.

The founders of our Representative Republic thought that the “I” word was so important, they included the word six times in the Constitution and the “G” (God) word or “PP” (political parties) word zero times.

Either we have the rule of law or we don’t.

There is still time to support Congressman Bob Wexler (D-Fl) in his efforts to get H Res 799 (Impeachment Articles against Dick) out of committee and off the table and onto the House Floor where they truly belong.

In the agonizingly absurd civil rights “debate” between the supporters of Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, I’m with the Lion of Anacostia.

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress,” declared Frederick Douglass in 1857, in response to those who suggested that the great abolitionist was pushing too hard for an end to human bondage. “Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

Douglass understood that the relationship between struggle and power is definitional for those who seek consequential change in the body politic. Both are needed to bend the arc of history toward progress.

As such, it is boneheaded in the extreme to diminish the role of movements in forcing social and political progress. But it is surely just as silly to suggest that who holds power might be of limited or lesser consequence.

If the candidate Hillary Clinton campaigned for in 1964, Republican Barry Goldwater, had been elected, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement would have suffered a setback. Dr. King believed that it was dramatically better for the movement, and for America, that Democrat Lyndon Johnson won that essential presidential election of 44 years ago.

This would appear to be the point that Hillary Clinton was attempting so clumsily — or so calculatingly — to make when she said prior to the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary that, “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done.”

Unfortunately, while Clinton’s words may have had some truth in them, her comment came across as precisely the sort of crude and self-serving interpretation of history that Americans expect from the lesser of our leaders. And that it was. By so casually referencing the complex role that civil right agitation played in forging racial progress, she invited the firestorm that has come. Obama is not speaking out of turn, or unreasonably, when he suggests that, “Senator Clinton made an unfortunate remark, an ill-advised remark, about King and Lyndon Johnson… And she, I think, offended some folks who felt that somehow diminished King’s role in bringing about the Civil Rights Act.”

The pettiness of the politics that are on display as we mark the 79th anniversary of King’s birth borders on the grotesque. Surely, there is a measure of comfort to be found in the fact that both leading Democratuc candidats for president want to claim a piece of this country’s civil roghts legacy. But there is nothing graceful, nor reassuring, in the way in which the claims have been staked.

Clinton played games with the nation’s civil rights narrative in order to position herself as a stronger presidential nominee for the Democrats, and Obama’s campaign has effectively slammed her for it. Clinton says she is “personally offended” by the signals coming from the Obama camp with regard to her regard for King and the civil rights movement. Obama glibly stirs the pot by suggesting that he is somehow above the fray while saying of Clinton: “She is free to explain (herself).”

Neither candidate matches the charicature that the campaign of the other invites us to accept. At the same time, neither candidate has cut through the thicket of this distorted debate and reached for the higher ground that might distinguish a contender for the presidency as something more than a politician on the hunt.

Where both Clinton and Obama are misguided is in their shared attempt to score political points rather than to step back from the abyss of an ugly discourse and to seek the clarity that is so frequently absent from our politics.

Neither Clinton nor Obama is using history well or wisely. Neither is telling those of us who recognize the significance of the King-Johnson collaboration – and, for a brief shining moment it was a collaboration – what we need to hear. Neither is answering the fundamental questions: How, as president, would they relate to social and political movements? Would they invite the Martin Kings and the Frederick Douglasses of the twenty-first century to the White House? Would either of these two candidates, as president, sit down with those demanding fundamental change, craft policies with supposed radicals, and coordinate political strategies with influential outsiders – as did both Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s and Abraham Lincoln in the 1860s?

Frederick Douglass knew, as did King, that it mattered who held the presidency. An imperfect Lincoln was better than a perfect Jefferson or Jackson. As Douglass explained in remembering the president who signed the Emancipation Proclamation, “We saw him, measured him, and estimated him; not by stray utterances to injudicious and tedious delegations, who often tried his patience; not by isolated facts torn from their connection; not by any partial and imperfect glimpses, caught at inopportune moments; but by a broad survey, in the light of the stern logic of great events, and in view of that divinity which shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will, we came to the conclusion that the hour and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln. It mattered little to us what language he might employ on special occasions; it mattered little to us, when we fully knew him, whether he was swift or slow in his movements; it was enough for us that Abraham Lincoln was at the head of a great movement, and was in living and earnest sympathy with that movement, which, in the nature of things, must go on until slavery should be utterly and forever abolished in the United States.”

King was similarly clear-eyed about Johnson, a Texas politician who came slowly to the cause of civil rights but was crucial to its advancement. Where the administration of John Kennedy had kept King at arm’s length, Johnson reached out to the man who would win the Nobel Peace Prize during the new president’s first year in office. King said Johnson helped him understand that “new white elements” in the American South might be motivated by a “love of their land (that) was stronger than the grip of old habits and customs.” Johnson, in turn, recognized the necessity of maintaining close ties with King and other civil rights leaders, both because the president valued their insights and because he needed their support.

The president got that support in 1964, when King urged African-American voters to use all of their burgeoning political might to block the candidacy of Goldwater, a conservative Republican who had voted with southern racist Democrats against civil rights legislation. Though Johnson and the civil rights movement had been at odds during the course of the campaign — especially over the question of whether to seat black delegates from Mississippi at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City — there was no question about where the most prominent leader of the movement stood with regard to the fall race. Three days before he was awarded the Nobel Prize, in October, 1964, King abandoned the traditional neutrality of the civil rights movement in presidential politics and delivered a historic address at Brooklyn’s Antioch Baptist Church in which the New York Times reported that he said the “negative” attitudes of the Republican presidential candidate on human, political and constitutional questions had compelled him to call for the crushing defeat of Goldwater

When Goldwater’s candidacy was indeed crushed on November 3, 1964, one of Johnson’s first post-election calls was to King, who said that “the forces of good will and progress have triumphed.”

But the civil rights leader said something else. Rather than place his blind trust in the president to deliver on the promise of justice, King described Johnson’s landslide as “a definite mandate from the American public” to take the civil rights movement deeper into the south, to expand its demands on Washington and to generally raise the level of expectations.

Johnson responded by echoing King’s sense of urgency.

In the same week of December, 1964, that the world heard King accept the peace prize – with his memorable description of the honor as “profound recognition that non-violence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time–the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression” – Johnson appeared before civil rights leaders in Washington and declared that, “There are those who say: It has taken us a century to move this far, and it will take another hundred years to finish the job. Well, I am here to say to you tonight that I do not agree. Great social change tends to come rapidly in periods of intense activity and progress before the impulse slows. I believe we are in the midst of such a period of change.

“There are those who predict that the struggle for full equality in America will be marked by violence and hate; that it will tear at the fabric of our society. Well, for myself, I cannot claim to see so clearly into that future. I just do not agree. I know that racial feelings flow from many deep and resistant sources in our history, in the pattern of our lives and in the nature of man. But I believe there are other forces, that are stronger because they are armed with truth, which will bring us toward our goal in peace. There are our commitments to morality and to justice, which are written in our laws and, more importantly, nourished in the hearts of our people. These commitments, carried forward by men of good will in every part of this land, will lead this nation toward the great and necessary fulfillment of American freedom. In this way, our peoples will once again prove equal to the ideals and the values on which our beloved nation rests.”

That was a remarkable statement coming from a just-reelected president. It confirmed Johnson’s commitment to respond to the demands of the civil rights movement, thus assuring that King’s initiatives had not just the prospect but the likelihood of realization.

That is the unique dynamic of the King-Johnson relationship, the dynamic that created the sort of progress Clinton, Obama and others now struggle to define as somehow being more likely to be replicated under one or the other of them.

What we would do well to demand of both these candidates and their campaigns is something more than the cheap positioning of an election season. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both owe it to America to suggest that they could – and would – recreate the King-Johnson dynamic in order to achieve the progress that is still needed not just along the color line that Frederick Douglass and Martin King struggled to move but along lines of gender, class and sexual orientation.

For meaningful progress to be achieved, movements are necessary.

But so, too, are presidents.

It is when a movement has the ear of a willing president that necessity gives way to something more tangible and potentially transformational: the discussion of how to move from an antiquated here to only-dreamed-of there. In a democracy, this can never be a one-sided discussion – as Martin King and Lyndon Johnson, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln and every other great American combination recognized. The ability of a Hillary Clinton or a Barack Obama to articulate that recognition in the language of this moment might well make one of them the next president of a nation that longs not for another history lesson but for the making of history.

John Nichols is a co-founder of Free Press and the co-author with Robert W. McChesney of TRAGEDY & FARCE: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy — The New Press.

15/01/08 “Counterpunch” — — The U.S. public holds Big Business in shockingly low regard.

A November 2007 Harris poll found that less than 15 percent of the population believes each of the following industries to be “generally honest and trustworthy:” tobacco companies (3 percent); oil companies (3 percent); managed care companies such as HMOs (5 percent); health insurance companies (7 percent); telephone companies (10 percent); life insurance companies (10 percent); online retailers (10 percent); pharmaceutical and drug companies (11 percent); car manufacturers (11 percent); airlines (11 percent); packaged food companies (12 percent); electric and gas utilities (15 percent). Only 32 percent of adults said they trusted the best-rated industry about which Harris surveyed, supermarkets. [1]

These are remarkable numbers. It is very hard to get this degree of agreement about anything. By way of comparison, 79 percent of adults believe the earth revolves around the sun; 18 percent say it is the other way around.[2]

The Harris results are not an aberration. The results have not varied considerably over the past five years — although overall trust levels have actually declined from the already very low threshold in 2003.

The Harris results are also in line with an array of polling data showing deep concern about concentrated corporate power.

An amazing 84 percent told Harris in a poll earlier in 2007 that big companies have too much power in Washington. By contrast, only 47 percent said that labor unions have too much power in Washington (as against 42 percent who said labor has too little power), and 18 percent who said nonprofit organizations have too much power in Washington.[3]

These results have proven durable. At least 80 percent of the public has ranked big companies as having too much power in Washington since 1994. In 2000, Business Week and Harris asked a broader question: Has business gained too much power over too many aspects of American life? Seventy-four percent agreed.[4]

The November 2007 poll also asked about support for measures to control corporations. These results are eye-opening as well, though perhaps not in the expected way.

Harris asked which industries “should be more regulated by government — for example for health, safety or environmental reasons — than they are now?” Only oil companies (53 percent), pharmaceutical companies (53 percent) and health insurance companies (52 percent) crossed the 50 percent threshold. Even the tobacco industry managed to escape in the survey with only 41 percent favoring greater regulation. These data trend significantly negative — against greater regulation — over the last five years.

Does this show that while people distrust Big Business, they equally distrust the government to constrain corporate power?

No.

The U.S. skepticism to regulation is only skin deep. When polls present specific regulatory proposals for consideration, U.S. public support is typically strong and often overwhelming — even when arguments against government action are presented.

For example:

* After hearing arguments for and against, 76 percent favor granting the Food and Drug Administration regulatory authority over tobacco, with 22 percent opposed.[5]

* After hearing arguments for and against, 75 percent favor legislation that would significantly increase energy efficiency, including auto fuel efficiency standards, and the use of renewable energy.[6]

* Eighty-five percent favor country-of-origin labeling for meat, seafood, produce and grocery products, and three quarters favor a legislative mandate.[7]

* Seventy-one percent say it is important that drugs remain under close review by the FDA and drug companies after they have been placed on the market.[8]

* And, from a Harris finding a week after the poll showing skepticism about industry regulation in general, the polling agency found that those who think there is too little government regulation in the area of environmental protection outpaced those who think there is too much by a more than 2-to-1 margin (53 to 21 percent).[9]

What the Harris findings on attitudes to regulation do show is that the business campaign against regulation as an abstract concept has been very successful.

It highlights the need for consumer, environmental, labor and other corporate accountability advocates to defend the concept of regulation, and to connect the rampant corporate abuses in society with the deregulation and non-regulatory failures of the last three decades. There’s little doubt that the general public attitude toward regulation significantly affects the willingness of politicians — none too eager to offend business patrons in the first place — to take on corporate power.

Free speech zones. Taser guns. Hidden cameras. Data mining. A new security curriculum. Private security contractors… Welcome to the new homeland security campus

From Harvard to UCLA, the ivory tower is fast becoming the latest watchtower in Fortress America. The terror warriors, having turned their attention to “violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism” — as it was recently dubbed in a House of Representatives bill of the same name — have set out to reconquer that traditional hotbed of radicalization, the university.

Building a homeland-security campus and bringing the university to heel is a seven-step mission:

1. Target dissidents: As the warfare state has triggered dissent, the campus has increasingly become a target gallery — with student protesters in the crosshairs. The government’s number one target? Peace and justice organizations.

From 2003 to 2007, an unknown number of them made it into the Pentagon’s “Threat and Local Observation Notice” system (TALON), a secretive domestic spying program ostensibly designed to track direct “potential terrorist threats” to the Department of Defense itself. Last year, via Freedom of Information Act requests, the ACLU uncovered at least 186 specific TALON reports on “anti-military protests” in the U.S. — some listed as “credible threats” — from student groups at the University of California-Santa Cruz, State University of New York, Georgia State University, and New Mexico State University, among other campuses.

At more than a dozen universities and colleges, police officers now double as full-time FBI agents and, according to the Campus Law Enforcement Journal, serve on many of the nation’s 100 Joint Terrorism Task Forces. These dual-purpose officer-agents have knocked on student activists’ doors from North Carolina State to the University of Colorado and, in one case, interrogated an Iraqi-born professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst about his antiwar views.

FBI agents, or their campus stand-ins, don’t have to do all the work themselves. Administrators often do it for them, setting up “free speech zones,” which actually constrain speech, and punishing those who step outside them. Last year, protests were typically forced into “free assembly areas” at the University of Central Florida and Clemson University; while students at Hampton and Pace Universities faced expulsion for handing out antiwar flyers, aka “unauthorized materials.”

2. Lock and load: Many campus police departments are morphing into heavily armed garrisons, equipped with a wide array of weaponry from Taser stun guns and pepper guns to shotguns and semiautomatic rifles. Lock-and-load policies that began in the 1990s under the rubric of “the war on crime” only escalated with the President’s Global War on Terror. Each school shooting — most recently the massacre at Virginia Tech — just adds fuel to the armament flames.

Two-thirds of universities now arm their police, according to the Justice Department. Many of the guns being purchased were previously in the province of military units and SWAT teams. For instance, AR-15 rifles (similar to M-16s) are now in the arsenal of the University of Texas campus police. Last April, City University of New York bought dozens of semiautomatic handguns. Now, states like Nevada are even considering plans to allow university staff to pack heat in a “special reserve officer corps.”

Most of the force used on campus these days, though, comes in “less lethal” form, such as the rubber bullets and pepper pellets increasingly used to contain student demonstrations. Then there is the ubiquitous Taser, the electroshock weapon recently ruled a “form of torture” by the UN. A Taser was used by UCLA police in November 2006 to deliver shock after shock to an Iranian-American student for failing to produce his ID at the Powell Library. Last September, a University of Florida student was Tased after asking pointed questions of Senator John Kerry at a public forum, his plea of “Don’t Tase me, bro” becoming the stuff of pop folklore.

3. Keep an eye (or hundreds of them) focused on campus: Surveillance has become a boom industry nationally — one that now reaches deep into the heart of the American campus. In fact, universities have witnessed explosive growth in the electronic surveillance of students, faculty, and campus workers. On ever more campuses, closed-circuit security cameras can track people’s every move, often from hidden or undisclosed locations, sometimes even into classrooms.

The International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators reports that surveillance cameras have now found their way onto at least half of all colleges, their numbers on any given campus doubling, tripling, and in a few cases, rising tenfold since September 11, 2001. Such cameras have proliferated by the hundreds on private campuses, in particular. The University of Pennsylvania, for instance, has more than 400 watching over it, while Harvard and Brown have about 200 each.

Elsewhere, it can be tricky just to find out where the cameras are and what they’re meant to be viewing. The University of Texas, for example, battled student journalists over disclosure and ultimately kept its cameras hidden. Sometimes, though, a camera’s purpose seems obvious. Take the case of Hussein Hussein, a professor in the Department of Animal Biotechnology at the University of Nevada, Reno. In January 2005, the widely respected professor found a hidden camera redirected to monitor his office.

4. Mine student records: Student records have, in recent years, been opened up to all manner of data mining for purposes of investigation, recruitment, or just all-purpose tracking. From 2001 to 2006, in an operation code-named “Project Strike Back,” the Department of Education teamed up with the FBI to scour the records of the 14 million students who applied for federal financial aid each year. The objective? “To identify potential people of interest,” explained an FBI spokesperson cryptically, especially those linked to “potential terrorist activity.”

Strike Back was quietly discontinued in June 2006, days after students at Northwestern University blew its cover. But just one month later, the Education Department’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education, in a much-criticized preliminary report, recommended the creation of a federal “unit record” database that would track the activities and studies of college students nationwide. The Department’s Institute of Education Sciences has developed a prototype for such a national database.

It’s not a secret that the Pentagon, for its part, hopes to turn campuses into recruitment centers for its overstretched, overstressed forces. In fact, the Department of Defense (DoD) has built its own database for just this purpose. Known as Joint Advertising Market Research and Studies, this program now tracks 30 million young people, ages 16 to 25. According to a Pentagon spokesperson, the DoD has partnered with private marketing and data mining firms, which, in turn, sell the government reams of information on students and other potential recruits.

5. Track foreign-born students, keep the undocumented out: Under the auspices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been keeping close tabs on foreign students and their dependents through the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS). As of October 2007, ICE reported that it was actively following 713,000 internationals on campuses, while keeping more than 4.7 million names in its database.

The database aims to amass and record information on foreign students throughout their stay inside the United States. SEVIS requires thick files on the students from the sponsoring schools, constantly updated with all academic, biographical, and employment records — all of which will be shared with other government agencies. If students fall out of “status” at school — or if the database thinks they have — the Compliance Enforcement Unit of ICE goes into action.

ICE has also done its part to keep the homeland security campus purified of those not born in the homeland. The American Immigration Law Foundation estimates that only one in 20 undocumented immigrants who graduate high school goes on to enroll in a college. Many don’t go because they cannot afford the tuition, but also because they have good reason to be afraid: ICE has deported a number of those who did make it to college, some before they could graduate.

6. Take over the curriculum, the classroom, and the laboratory: Needless to say, not every student is considered a homeland security threat. Quite the opposite. Many students and faculty members are seen as potential assets. To exploit these assets, the Department of Homeland Security has launched its own curriculum under its Office of University Programs (OUP), intended, it says, to “foster a homeland security culture within the academic community.”

The record so far is impressive: DHS has doled out 439 federal fellowships and scholarships since 2003, providing full tuition to students who fit “within the homeland security research enterprise.” Two hundred twenty-seven schools now offer degree or certificate programs in “homeland security,” a curriculum that encompasses over 1,800 courses. Along with OUP, some of the key players in creating the homeland security classroom are the U.S. Northern Command (Northcom) and the Aerospace Defense Command, co-founders of the Homeland Security and Defense Education Consortium.

OUP has also partnered with researchers and laboratories to “align scientific results with homeland security priorities.” In Fiscal Year 2008 alone, $4.9 billion in federal funding will go to homeland security-related research. Grants correspond with 16 research topics selected by DHS, based on presidential directives, legislation, and a smattering of scientific advice.

But wait, there’s more: DHS has founded and funded six of its very own “Centers of Excellence,” research facilities that span dozens of universities from coast to coast. The latest is a Center of Excellence for the Study of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism, the funding for which cleared the House in October. The Center is mandated to assist a National Commission in combating those “adopting or promoting an extremist belief system… to advance political, religious or social change.”

7. Privatize, privatize, privatize: Of course, homeland security is not just a department, nor is it simply a new network of surveillance and data mining — it’s big business. (According to USA Today, global homeland-security-style spending had already reached $59 billion a year in 2006, a six-fold increase over 2000.)

Not surprisingly, then, universities have, in recent years, established unprecedented private-sector partnerships with the corporations that have the most to gain from their research. The Department of Homeland Security’s on-campus National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), for instance, features Lockheed Martin on its advisory board. The Center for Food Protection and Defense relies on an industry working group that includes Wal-Mart and McDonald’s offering “guidance and direction,” according to its chair.

While vast sums of money are flowing in from these corporate sponsors, huge payments are also flowing out into “strategic supplier contracts” with private contractors, as universities permanently outsource security operations to big corporations like Securitas and AlliedBarton. Little of this money actually goes to those guarding the properties, who are often among the most underpaid workers at universities. Instead, it fills the corporate coffers of those with little accountability for conditions on campus.

Meanwhile, some universities have developed intimate relationships with private-security outfits like the notorious Blackwater. Last May, for example, the University of Illinois and its police training institute cut a deal with the firm to share their facilities and training programs with Blackwater operatives. Local journalists later revealed that the director of the campus program at the time was on the Blackwater payroll. In the age of hired education, such collaboration is apparently par for the course.

Following these seven steps over the past six years, the homeland security state and its constituents have come a long way in their drive to remake the American campus in the image of a compound on lockdown. Somewhere, inside the growing homeland security state that is our country, the next seven steps in the process are undoubtedly already being planned out.

Still, the rise of Repress U is not inevitable. The new homeland security campus has proven itself unable to shut out public scrutiny or stamp out resistance to its latest Orwellian advances. Sometimes, such opposition even yields a free-speech zone dismantled, or the Pentagon’s TALON de-clawed, or a Project Strike Back struck down. A rising tide of student protest, led by groups like the new Students for a Democratic Society, has won free-speech victories and reined in repression from Pace and Hampton, where the University dropped its threats of expulsion, to UCLA, where Tasers will no longer be wielded against passive resisters.

Yet, if the tightening grip of the homeland security complex isn’t loosened, the latest towers of higher education will be built not of ivory, but of Kevlar for the over-armored, over-armed campuses of America.

Michael Gould-Wartofsky is a writer from New York City and a recent graduate of the new homeland security campus. He has written for the Nation Online, Z Magazine, Common Dreams, and the Harvard Crimson, where he was a columnist and editor, and his work has also appeared in Poets Against the War (Nation Books). He was a recipient of the New York Times James B. Reston Award for young journalists and Harvard’s James Gordon Bennett Prize for his writing on collective memory. This piece is also appearing in the latest issue of the Nation Magazine.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — President Bush on Tuesday urged the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to take into account the cost high oil prices were having on the American economy, gingerly touching on an issue that has begun to dominate the presidential election campaign.

Speaking to a group of Saudi entrepreneurs here, Mr. Bush said that he would speak to the Saudi leader, King Abdullah, about the price of oil, which he said was “tough on our economy.”

Mr. Bush meet with King Abdullah on Monday to discuss a range of issues, focused mostly on Iraq, Iran and the prospect of a peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians.

At a second meeting Tuesday evening at the king’s ranch outside of Riyadh, he said he would talk “about the fact that oil prices are very high, which is tough on our economy, and that I would hope, as OPEC considers different production levels, that they understand that if their — one of their biggest consumers’ economy suffers, it will mean less purchases, less oil and gas sold.”

Mr. Bush, nearing the end of an eight-day trip to the Middle East, has not generally been inclined to weigh in directly on economic matters, but with rising energy costs taking a toll, the price of oil has come up in meetings with the leaders of several Persian Gulf states, including Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and now Saudi Arabia.

The response has been muted, according to the presidential counselor, Ed Gillespie. “They talked about the nature of the market and the vast demand that’s on the world market today for oil,” he said on Monday night, referring to the leaders Mr. Bush met. “That was a point that was obviously made in the course of these conversations by our friends, and that’s a legitimate and accurate point.”

As readers will likely recall, Jose Padilla is the first American citizen to be designated an “enemy combatant.” His detention without charge lasted a shocking three-and-a-half years. Although the government dropped its initial claim that Padilla had conspired to create a “dirty bomb,” it recently procured from a Miami, Florida federal jury a conviction of Padilla on other terrorism charges.

On January 4, there was another development in Padilla’s story. In the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, attorneys working with the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School filed a novel civil action on behalf of Padilla against a former Bush Administration official and current Boalt Hall law professor, John Yoo. (Yoo is, ironically, a Yale Law School graduate.)
Click here to find out more!

In this column, I will discuss that suit and its chances of success.

The Tortured History of a Tortured American

Arrested in Chicago on May 2, 2002, Padilla was initially detained in a Manhattan jail, ostensibly to provide information to a New York City federal grand jury investigating the 9/11 attacks.

Shortly after a court-appointed attorney for Padilla filed a motion challenging his detention, President Bush signed an order naming Padilla an “enemy combatant” and authorized the Department of Defense to remove him to a Navy prison in Charleston, South Carolina.

Court-appointed attorneys then challenged Padilla’s “enemy combatant” status and the disturbing lack of due process that went with it–no criminal charge, lack of access to attorneys, held in solitary confinement with no hope of release, and use of interrogation tactics bordering on or amounting to torture. In other words, virtually every due process guarantee that American citizens take for granted was denied to Padilla.

Yet the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, then the most conservative federal appellate court in the country, held that the President, in a time of “war,” had the right to imprison, without charge, anyone, including an American citizen, until the “end of hostilities”–even if hostilities might go on forever.

Padilla’s attorneys took the case all the way to the Supreme Court. Initially, it was dismissed for improper venue. But his attorneys tried again, and on the eve of a U.S. Supreme Court hearing of another Fourth Circuit ruling, the government took Padilla out of military custody and sent him to Miami, where he was arrested and convicted on charges that he conspired to kill Americans here and abroad.

In a prior column for this site, I wrote about those charges and how the government shifted its theory in Padilla’s case. Currently, the sentencing phase of Padilla’s trial is ongoing. Federal prosecutors in Miami are arguing that he should spend the rest of his life in prison.

His attorneys are using some of the claims made in the civil suit against Yoo in an effort to spare him that fate.

The Civil Lawsuit Against John Yoo

The factual basis for the suit is that as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, Yoo crafted policies dealing with enemy combatants and “alternative” interrogation tactics. In addition, it alleges that Yoo personally recommended to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft that Padilla be named an enemy combatant in connection with the alleged “dirty bomb” plot. It claims that in his book War by Other Means, Yoo takes credit for Padilla’s treatment, arguing it was a victory for justice. The suit also alleges that (as has been widely reported) Yoo was a principal drafter of the now-declassified “torture memos,” purporting to provide legal justification for the government’s use of torture.

The legal theory for holding Yoo liable is that Yoo is responsible for the violations of Padilla’s First, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendment rights, including denial of the right of access to court and counsel, unconstitutional conditions of imprisonment, unconstitutional interrogations, and denials of Padilla’s rights to information, association, and religious practice while he was in the military prison.

The suit also draws a connection between Padilla’s treatment as an “enemy combatant” and his criminal conviction in Miami, arguing that the tactics used in his detention made him unable to effectively contribute to his own defense. The suit sets forth specific allegations of torture, including the use of mind-altering drugs, the stress position, and sleep and sensory deprivation.

According to the Yale Clinic’s suit, the government threatened Padilla that if he told anyone what happened to him while he was an enemy combatant, that he would be re-designated an enemy combatant and taken back into Defense Department custody. The suit alleges, as have his defense attorneys, that Padilla’s lawyers were not able to mount as complete a defense as they could have were Padilla not afraid to talk to them for fear of government retaliation. (As I discussed in a previous column, Padilla’s prior criminal-case attorneys had argued unsuccessfully that he was incompetent to stand trial.)

The remedy the suit seeks is nominal damages of one dollar, plus a judicial declaration that these constitutional violations occurred.

Why the Lawsuit Is Unlikely to Succeed, Yet May Have a Positive Effect

Unfortunately, the lawsuit has a limited likelihood of success on the merits, as the Clinic is doubtless aware. But public interest legal clinics don’t necessarily bring cases with the expectation of success–at least not in the current legal climate. They do so in order to bring public scrutiny to bear on government actions that would have been unthinkable just six years ago.

The reason the suit is likely to fail is that government officials generally possess personal immunity from suit for their policy decisions. Were this not the case, government would be paralyzed by something even worse than partisan politics–the constant threat of litigation.

While this immunity has exceptions, when constitutional rights are violated the standards are very high. For example, what may seem to be egregious actions by law enforcement officials still do not lead to personal liability for their actions. Moreover, Yoo is being sued for masterminding policies others applied. Yoo didn’t do anything to Padilla, as the suit admits. Rather, he helped create the means and the methods for other government agents and employees to do the dirty work.

In a similar case brought under different legal theories by enemy combatant prisoners at Guantanamo Naval Base, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled on January 11, 2008 that a suit against former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld could not stand. The Court found that they had immunity from suit because they were acting in their official capacities and, further, did not actually take part in the alleged acts of torture and denial of rights. (In addition, the court ruled that the Guantanamo prisoners did not possess most of the rights alleged to have been violated.)

The same holds true for Yoo. As long as the actions he undertook were a part of his legitimate government employment, he is safe from civil liability.

Finally, the “state secrets” defense, which I discussed in my prior article on Padilla’s conviction, may also protect Yoo. This defense claims that even to allow discovery into what happened to Padilla would put the country at risk. To date, several suits against the government for kidnapping and torture have been dismissed on these grounds.

But this argument is embarrassingly weak. The Administration’s interrogation and internment methods and tactics are widely known, from the reports of non-partisan observers like the International Committee of the Red Cross. Moreover, judges always have the option to close proceedings to the public or even deny the plaintiff access and simply make their own evaluation. Yet, to date, not one Court has allowed a post-9/11 case to proceed when the government throws up this roadblock.

In addition to the state secrets defense, the Bush Administration has advanced — successfully — many other reasons why it cannot be held to account for egregious actions taken against hundreds of prisoners since 9/11. Indeed, the decision in Rasul vs. Myers, mentioned above, lists a litany of reasons, most of which defy not just the laws and Constitution of our own country but international law and treaties.

What’s a citizen to do when aggrieved by his or her government? Sue to challenge the law or policy–but not the maker of the law or policy–and, more importantly, vote to oust the makers of unjust laws and policies from office.

What the Bush Administration Did To Padilla Is A National Disgrace

Even if the Clinic’s suit on Padilla’s behalf does not succeed, it will have called further attention to a national disgrace. Yoo, the other so-called post-9/11 “War Counsel,” and the officials who have carried out the policies of these attorneys have acted outrageously and unconscionably.

For this reason alone, we should be grateful for the Clinic and hundreds of attorneys of a different type–those who have fought not for policies of torture, but for the rights of Padilla and every other citizen to be treated in accordance with American and international laws and principles of human dignity and decency.