The Rag Blog

I don’t know why I was so shocked listening to Keith Olbermann’s insulting, degrading and uninformed remarks about President Hugo Chavez yesterday. Perhaps because Olbermann is the only man on commercial television who has so far had the guts to make a frontal attack on Bush and his coterie of war criminals. I suppose I thought his articulate and courageous stand against the Republicans, his criticism of their comrades, the spineless Democrats and other collaborators with the Bush regime, indicated a superior knowledge, analysis and understanding of politics in general. I hoped that his bold commentary indicated a suspicion of a system glued together by massive lies. Sadly, it appears that I was wrong.

On his November 20th program Keith Olbermann referred to a “news” story in which Chavez, trying to make his way to the bathroom past a reporter, reportedly said, “I have to go. Do you want me to pee on you?”

First of all, it’s a tragic commentary on the state of “news” and journalism that bodily functions become major news stories, be they sexual or excretory, especially when people like Chávez have so many more interesting features worthy of discussion, most notably, ideas. That Olbermann would stoop to the news cycle at its most base level is, itself, a disappointment. But his comment after the reference to “peeing on” someone was more so: “Maybe you should have asked that before you started doing that to your own country’s laws and citizens.”

To what is Mr. Olbermann referring when he states that Chávez is “peeing on” the laws and citizens of Venezuela? Is he referring to Chávez’s dozen or so electoral victories, all declared clean and fair by international observers (including ex-President Carter)? Is it Chávez’s stand for the dignity and independence of Latin America? Is it Chávez’s internationalism which has not only taken him to Cuba and Iran but also caused him to discount heating oil for the poor in the U.S.? Could it be the clinics Chávez has set up around the country, Barrio Adentro, guaranteeing Venezuelans free health care? Or the Bolivarian Universities he’s funding to enable three million people, without means, resources, hope or future, to study and win degrees and new possibilities? Was Chávez “pissing on the laws” when he allowed a referendum on his presidency to go through and which he won handily in 2004?

Mr. Olbermann needs to get his facts straight and he could start off by reading Mark Weisbrot and Luis Sandoval’s study published in July of this year by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, entitled, “The Venezuelan Economy in the Chávez Years” (http://www.cepr.net/content/view/1248/8/ ) wherein they show that “Real (inflation-adjusted) GDP has grown by 76 percent since the bottom of the recession in 2003.” Indeed, once the pressures of a U.S. inspired coup, U.S.-backed oil strike and Referendum (all funded by Olbermann’s and our local nemesis, Bush) were soundly defeated by Chávez and his supporters, Weisbrot and Sandoval agree that “it appears that the Venezuelan economy was hit hard by political instability prior to 2003, but has grown steadily and quite rapidly since political stability began improving in that year.”

The economy has grown, but that new wealth has not merely trickled, or gushed, upwards into the pockets of the rich, as it always seems to do in the U.S. In Venezuela the poverty rate has dropped 31% under Chávez, (extreme poverty from 53% to 9.1 percent) but the authors acknowledge that this current poverty rate “does not take into account the increased access to health care or education that poor people have experienced. The situation of the poor has therefore improved significantly beyond even the substantial poverty reduction that is visible in the official poverty rate, which measures only cash income.” This is not to mention, as the authors also point out, the “increased health care benefits to the poor, since in the absence of these benefits, most poor people would simply have gone without health care, and therefore suffer from worse health, lower income, and lower life expectancy.” And those health benefits are substantial: “In 1998 there were 1,628 primary care physicians for a population of 23.4 million. Today, there are 19,571 for a population of 27 million.

Given these facts, and your absence of them, Mr. Olbermann, could you explain exactly on whom Chávez has been pissing? If not, perhaps in the future you could drop the subject or deal with something a bit more substantial when talking about Chávez than urine.

In other words, put up or piss off.

Gertrude Winter, a char lady in her sixties who works at a government office, will have a turkey after all this Thanksgiving. At one stage yesterday, it seemed a close run thing. As she sat in the hallway of the Bread for the City charity a rumour swept the place that they were out of turkeys.

Agitated, another woman said: “The lady says there are no turkeys left, what are we going to do?” In fact the turkeys were already on their way from another warehouse and what might have degenerated into a mini-riot, reverted instead to the good-natured banter of strangers.

Thrown together by poverty and the pinched generosity of the United States, they waited to be interviewed to see if they were eligible for a free turkey and a bag of groceries. Mobile soup kitchens are keeping the homeless on the streets fed, but it is the working poor and those with young and old dependants who patiently line up at Bread for the City. Even with the help of government food stamps, most earn less than $7,000 (£3,400) a year, not nearly enough to survive on. They have long overcome the shame of queuing up every week in public for free food

“I used to come here all the time when my kids were growing up,” said Ms Winter, “and now I’m back because everything is so expensive out there”.

Today as millions of Americans sit down to their turkey dinners with all the trimmings, the safety net of hundreds of food banks and pantries that put food on the table of the nation’s poor is creaking and torn as a result of sharply reduced donations. From New England to California warehouses that should be groaning with surplus foodstuffs are going half empty.

“We’re bracing ourselves for a very tough winter, especially with home heating fuel prices at record highs in the north-east,” said Mark Quandt of the regional food bank in New York. “People living in poverty or near poverty just can’t sustain those types of increases.”

America’s obsession with energy independence from Middle East oil may be to blame. The country’s farmers have brought in the greatest corn harvest since the Second World War, but their surpluses which once were bought by the government and sent to food banks are no longer available. Instead the corn is turned into heavily subsidised ethanol and less land is available to grow food.

And the corn syrup that turns up in almost every product found on a US supermarket shelf is in short supply. A cheap dollar means that food exports are booming and a crippling two-year drought in the south has left fruit and vegetables withered and useless.

Unnoticed by most Americans, as they drop off their old canned goods and surplus food at schools and church halls for the Thanksgiving food drives, the entire system may be heading for collapse.

A visit to three of Washington’s largest charities – a shelter for 300 men, a community kitchen that feeds 4,000 every day and a food bank that supplies the basic needs of 108,000 people a year – revealed sharply reduced donations and a sense of desperation for the future. In the gleaming workspaces of DC Central Kitchen, half a mile from the White House, fresh vegetables were being chopped by volunteers from Georgetown University Law School. DC Central’s culinary institute turns homeless drug addicts into professional chefs and provides hot meals for thousands of homeless people in shelters all over the city. Mike Curtain, its executive director, could pass muster as a US version of Jamie Oliver. “I don’t think as a nation we are who we think we are,” he says. “When I see the money wasted overseas in Iraq and knowing what it could do here, it makes me sick. I think Bush is a criminal for what he is doing.

“People in the world hate us, and rightly so, because of the way we treat our own people,” he continued, “poverty would soon disappear if we invested some of that money on a living wage, healthcare and education. ”

For now he is looking to the future by diversifying the DC Kitchen’s food sources away from hotels and restaurants by negotiating directly with farmers. “I know donors that look at us as a way to keep their trash hauling costs down,” he said. “Of the 80 trays of food we received from the company, 60 went into the dumpster.”

In the south-east of the city, where the murder rate is rising and substance abuse seems uncontrollable, Jarval Green runs a homeless shelter for 300 people that focuses on addicts. It is funded by a Catholic charity and the numbers seeking emergency shelter keep growing.

“Now we are seeing veterans from the war showing up,” he said, ” the real problem here is poverty especially among men who are substance abusers.”

Part of the reason food banks are running low on supplies is the absence of direct government spending. There is a political culture in the America that abhors spending taxpayers’ money on the poor, even as the amount president Bush is spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan approaches a trillion dollars.

Many Americans are hurting because of the collapse in the sub-prime mortgage market, but the country has never been wealthier. There has been an explosion in the number of millionaire American households in recent years. Those earning $1m, $10m, $100m have more than doubled over the past decade and the wealthy of America are wealthier than most countries, with the top one per cent controlling $17trn.

But none of this wealth seems to have trickled down to the poor despite the promises from supply-side economists that it would.

George Jones, who runs Bread for the City, says the new rich also seem more interested in donating to the arts and universities than in giving their fellow Americans a leg up. Bread for the City is finding that law firms which once gave generously have cut their donations in half.

This week some 35.5 million Americans lined up at soup kitchens and food stamps offices to feed their families for the holiday. The look of panic that flashed across Gertrude Winter’s face, when she though she was not getting a turkey, is being seen elsewhere in the country.

Now the homeless poor are having their ranks swelled further by war veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Nearly 200,000 veterans were homeless on any given night last year and their numbers make up a quarter of the US homeless population – a figure that has been called “shockingly disproportionate”.

Life below the poverty line is seen almost as boot camp for the shiftless. But if American taxpayers have been conditioned to reject any form of social welfare, they seem to accept that they cannot ignore hunger.

As a result a vast and complicated system has grown up over the years – part private charity, part government aid – to help the neediest get fed. The US social welfare system is miserly at best. Food stamps – a maximum of $3 per person a day – are given to the needy. In all it has 15 separate food assistance programmes which go though some $53bn a year, making it America’s largest welfare programme

Now Congress is arguing with President Bush over a farm bill, which both unlocks cash to buy food for the poor and guarantees million-dollar cheques for some food producers.

“We have food banks in virtually every city in the country, and what we are hearing is that they are all facing severe shortages with demand so high, ” Ross Fraser, a spokesman for America’s Second Harvest, the nation’s largest hunger relief group, “One of our food banks in Florida said demand is up 35 per cent over this time last year.”

At the Society of St Vincent de Paul food pantry in Cincinnati, clients now get three or four days’ worth of food instead of six or seven. “We are trying to stretch our resources to help more people,” said Liz Carter, executive director of the society. “But it’s so difficult when you see the desperation and have to tell them you just don’t have enough to give them what they need.”

When George Bush pitched up in southern Virginia this week there was nothing to indicate that food banks were in trouble. The food bank he visited, the media were blandly informed, sends millions of pounds of groceries to needy families each year. Mr Bush walked past stacks of peanut butter, green beans and tinned soup. Then for the cameras he lifted a few crates of oranges, potatoes and macaroni and cheese on to a cart, telling the pastor: ” C’mon man, let’s go.”

Then it was off to the banks of the James river and site of America’s first official Thanksgiving. In 1619 Captain John Woodlief and his crew of 37 men fell to their knees and read a proclamation stating that the day of their ship’s arrival should be “yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God”.

Presidents typically make light work of the Thanksgiving holiday, but Mr Bush decided to dedicate an entire speech to it: “Our nation’s greatest strength is the decency and compassion of our people,” he said. ” As we count our many blessings, I encourage all Americans to show their thanks by giving back.”

America’s working people are increasingly unable to say where their family’s next meal is coming from and demand is so outstripping supply that many food banks have had to cut back on portions. “I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and I can’t believe how much worse it gets month after month,” said Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, of Second Harvest.

The shortages being experienced indicate a burgeoning crisis in feeding the poor, caught in a vice of rising food prices, rent, healthcare and petrol. Another problem, says Mr Curtain of DC Central Kitchen, is that food manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers are getting better at managing their surplus food and are donating less to charity.

Mark Winne, author of Closing the Food Gap, says many dump unwanted inedible food on shelters. He recalls his days running a food bank when “no food donation was too small, too strange or too nutritionally unsound to be refused”.

“I remember the load of nearly rotten potatoes that we gratefully accepted at the warehouse loading dock and then shovelled into the dumpster once the donor was safely out of sight.”

At this time of the year Americans are at their most giving. The annual Thanksgiving turkey drive at a food bank Mr Winne founded in Connecticut has had its annual appeal for “A turkey and a 20 (dollar bill)”. It collected 14,000 turkeys and $400,000 from the public in the richest state in the union. “At least at this time of the year they are prepared to give generously but the worry is that a system based on charity will mean that the supply of donated food will always ebb and flow,” he said. ” We may be entering one of those perfect storms where everything goes wrong but if we depend on food charity rather than ending poverty, this is what is bound to occur.”

As Carlos Salgado walked out of the Radio Cadena Voces station in Tegucigalpa around 4 p.m. on Oct. 18, two gunmen fired seven shots at him and killed him instantly.

The murder of the 67-year-old creator of the popular satirical program “Frijol, El Terible” is being seen across Honduras as the latest example of brutal repression of journalists by the administration of president Manuel Zelaya Rosales.

Two weeks after Salgado’s murder, the head of Radio Cadena Voces, Dagoberto Rodriguez, fled to the U.S. with his family after being informed by police of a tip that he would be assassinated within 72 hours. Police reportedly said his would-be assassins were not connected to the killers of Salgado. Though the department obviously has inside knowledge of the planned murder, there have been no arrests made.

Rodriguez said he had been followed by a car with mirrors continuously in recent weeks, and other journalists at Radio Cadena Voces have also reported receiving death threats and harassment from people they believe to be linked to the government.

For example reporter Edgardo Escoto said he got a call on his cell phone while covering a funeral in September saying, “If you carry on pissing us off, we will bury you like this.”

The station’s website was also hacked and sabotaged; at one point the content was replaced with pornography.

Meanwhile on Sept. 7, Channel 13 TV reporter Geovanny Garcia was shot during broad daylight and hit in the hand. Garcia, who left the country after the attack, had reported on official corruption related to street paving and repair contracts.
Also in September, Martin Ramirez, a reporter for La Tribuna newspaper, received multiple threats after running a story on maras (gangs) and their ties to police. The threats intensified after police publicly identified Ramirez.

Journalists and human rights groups in Honduras say the attacks are likely precipitated and tolerated by government officials in response to media reports on government corruption.

“The murder of Carlos Salgado confirms the deterioration in press freedom in Honduras,” says a statement from the Paris-based group Reporters Without Borders. “The worsening and terrible climate between the government of Manuel Zelaya and the media unfortunately contributes to this situation.”

Most Americans have succumbed to tradition and advertising and stuffed their bellies with unhealthy food and stuffed their shopping carts with unnecessary stuff. Now, here are some tough facts about the sad state of the American economy from the late 1960s to the early 2000s, as revealed recently by the Economic Mobility Project.

Anyone who still gives thanks for the classic American dream of rising from poverty to riches is not facing reality. Research has documented that only 6 percent of children born to parents with family income in the bottom fifth of the income spectrum move to the top fifth. The rags to riches story is garbage. Meanwhile, an amazing 42 percent of children born into that lowest fraction remain stuck in that lowly economic class, not even making into middle class status. At the other end, four out of 10 children born to rich parents stay rich.

Looking more generally at economic mobility this is reality: 34 percent of Americans make more than their parents’ family income and move up at least one rung on the economic ladder. But more experience downward mobility, with 38 percent moving down the economic ladder.

What about black Americans?

Only 31 percent of black children born to middle-income parents make more than their parents‟ family income, compared to 68 percent of white children. Almost half (45 percent) of black children whose parents were solidly middle income end up falling to the bottom of the income distribution, compared to only 16 percent of white children.

For every parental income group, white children are more likely to move ahead of their parents’ economic rank while black children are more likely to fall behind.

What about women versus men?

47 percent of daughters born to parents on the bottom rung stay on the bottom rung, compared to 35 percent of sons.

And here is the really bad news for American men: In contrast to data on family income, the personal income of men has been almost perfectly flat for the past three decades. The better incomes of working women have caused apparent increases in family or household incomes.

Inflation-adjusted median income for men ages 30-39 actually fell by 12 percent between 1974 and 2004, from $40,000 a year to about $35,000 a year in constant dollars.

When it comes to America’s democracy and economy, keep dreaming.

More than 40% of the foreign fighters who entered Iraq to join the insurgency in the past year were citizens of Saudi Arabia, America’s key partner in the Middle East, according to detailed information seized from a camp used by them. Documents and computers found by the US army at Sinjar, on the Iraqi-Syrian border, revealed that the other single largest group came from Libya, which is now being rehabilitated as a reliable western ally.

Overall, US officials reported that the number of foreign fighters entering Iraq this year dropped from 80-110 a month in the first half of the year to around 40 in October, partly due to the Sinjar raid.

After the raid the number of suicide bombings in Iraq fell to 16 in October – half the number seen during the summer months and down from a peak of 59 in March. US military officials believe that 90% of such bombings are by foreigners.

The captured data has been described as an intelligence treasure trove that included biographical details and the hometowns of the more than 700 fighters who entered Iraq since August 2006. Of those 307, or 41%, were Saudis and 137, or 18%, Libyans, senior US military sources told the New York Times.

Saudi Arabia, former home of Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers, has cracked down hard on al-Qaida in recent years. Saudi intelligence works closely with its US counterparts, but there have long been suspicions that the country’s most dangerous jihadis have gone to Iraq. “The border with Iraq is much more carefully controlled than it was 18 months ago,” said one British official. The Saudis also run extensive programmes “re-educating” and rehabilitating fighters who have returned from Iraq or Afghanistan to see “the error of their ways”.

The US, Britain and others have praised the Saudis for their efforts, pointing especially to a recent appeal by the kingdom’s grand mufti, Sheikh Abdulaziz al-Asheik, who condemned “mischievous parties” who send young Saudis abroad to carry out “heinous acts which have no association with Islam whatsoever”.

The presence of a large number of Libyans among the insurgents in Iraq suggests that the regime of Muammar Gadafy has pushed its violent Islamist enemies abroad, having cleaned up its own act by renouncing support for terrorism and surrendering its chemical and nuclear arsenal after the US invasion of Iraq.

11/22/07 “New York Times” — — LAST WEEK, superinvestor Warren Buffett, America’s second richest man, testified before the Senate Finance Committee on the subject of why people like him can well afford to pay taxes. In fact, Buffett is ceasing to be among the very wealthiest because he is giving most of his fortune away to philanthropies while he is still alive.

“Dynastic wealth, the enemy of a meritocracy, is on the rise,” Buffett told the senators. “Equality of opportunity has been on the decline. A progressive and meaningful estate tax is needed to curb the movement of a democracy toward a plutocracy.”

Buffett also proposed higher taxes on the wealthy in order to give working people a break on their payroll taxes, which now cost three Americans in four more than they pay in income taxes. And he supports taxing hedge fund bonuses at the same rate as ordinary income, so that billionaire hedge fund managers don’t pay taxes at a lower rate than the people who clean their offices.

The conservatives on the committee were somewhat nonplussed, since Buffett is a poster boy for capitalist entrepreneurship. He isn’t supposed to hold such views. And indeed, few Americans of great wealth do.

Another one who does is William Gates Sr., who writes in the current issue of the magazine Politico with coauthor Chuck Collins that “Without our society’s substantial investments in taxpayer-funded research, technology, education, and infrastructure, the wealth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans would not be so robust.”

The source of great wealth is not just private entrepreneurs, but the society they inhabit and the public resources on which they build.

Collins, a Bostonian who gave away an inherited fortune while still in his 20s, has organized a new group called Business for Shared Prosperity.

One of the leaders of that group is Jim Sinegal, chief executive of Costco, which offers a business model that radically contrasts with rival Wal-Mart.

Sinegal not only provides decent wages and health insurance for his employees, but was part of a small group of business leaders who actually lobbied for an increase in the minimum wage.

One has to admire citizens like Buffett, Gates, Collins, and Sinegal, patricians who look beyond their own personal fortunes to the fortunes of the Republic and who lay constructive civic roles beyond their business interests.

The problem is that there are not nearly enough of them. And their attitudes run contrary to the gospel of our era that the prime duty of a corporate executive is to make as much money as possible for shareholders, no matter what the cost to employees, communities, or the environment. I recently attended a conference called the Summit on the Future of the Corporation, which brought together enlightened corporate executives and their critics. Half the people attending were corporate leaders convinced that socially responsible businesses could solve everything from environmental degradation to uplift of the poor. As engaged consumers and informed investors reward benign corporations with their pocketbooks, they contended, more corporations will be socially virtuous.

The other half of the room responded that most corporations, even those that want to do the right thing, are largely undermined by the cutthroat competitive environment in which they operate.

Pay decent wages, try to keep good jobs at home, provide good health and retirement benefits, swear off dubious products like junk food for kids – and some competitor who takes the low road is likely to out-compete or underprice you.

Further, much of what passes for socially responsible behavior by large corporations is so much marketing and “green-washing.”

It’s nice that Wal-Mart promotes long-life light bulbs, but when is Wal-Mart going to pay a good wage?

Some businesses like Costco can perhaps do it all (and God bless them). But for the most part, standards need to be set and financed socially.

That project calls not just for discerning consumers and investors but for engaged citizens crusading for public laws and public funds.

Leaders like Warren Buffett should be prized, both as executives whose civic values shame their peers, and as advocates for better tax-and-spend policies generally. If society is to get the resources so that healthcare and secure retirement (not to mention child care and job training) are not left to the whims and public relations of corporations, Congress had better follow Buffett’s lead on tax equity, and restore our ability to finance these benefits as citizens.

Robert Kuttner’s new book is “The Squandering of America: How the Failure of our Politics Undermines our Prosperity.”

11/22/07 “ICH” — — Deep in the bowels of a Washington DC Think Tank, a recent college graduate—selected for her unquestioning and eager embrace of their cynical ideology—labors under the watchful eye of a well-connected political strategist, creating “talking points” for the evening news. The large corporations that so generously fund the Think Tank will pleased with this latest fiction, the strategist muses as he inserts her virulent words into his email and clicks “send”. He is confident that corporate contributions will flow as long as the propaganda flows.

Squeezed in a featureless cubicle in the middle of a sprawling over-lit newsroom, a young reporter is struggling to ensure his article conforms with the worldview of his boss’s bosses, leaders of a large corporation with billions in government defense contracts. His computer chimes. He retrieves the Think Tank’s “talking points” from his inbox and begins to read. If you want to get along, you gotta go along, he whispers to himself. He presses Command-Shift-C on his keyboard and proceeds to infect his own work with the diseased words.

Seated behind a desk on a cheap plastic office chair in a crowded suburban high school, an American history teacher bites her lip as she recites to her class from the authorized textbook. She must restrain herself from commenting on the narrow interpretations and overt omissions. No Child Left Behind dictates that her students must learn these fictions or her school will lose its federal funding. A bell rings and the students escape to the next class, where they will be infected with more fictions.

A 30-something copywriter in a major advertising agency rubs his eyes as he stares at his flickering computer screen. It is late and he wants to go home, but he must find some compelling reason for consumers to buy another drug, another game, another heavily processed food for which there is no true need. The packaging warns it may be harmful to the buyer’s health. He wonders if they mean a physical or psychological health, but dismisses the concern; there is no room for moral misgivings in the world of business. He touches his keyboard and continues to spread fiction.

Collapsing onto the sofa after a long commute home and an even longer day at the office, an exhausted middle-age couple turns on the TV and the husband begins to surf through the endless stream of violence, murder, and angry talking heads barking half-truths and Think Tank talking points. Numbed, the man reaches his favorite “reality” show and the couple settles in for an evening of fiction. Real reality is far too messy and complicated; they trust their Congressman to discern fact from fiction and vote in their best interest. That’s why they elected him.

Covering a phlegm-choked cough, a Congressman picks up his phone and dials the CEO of a large corporation to reassure him that their generous campaign contribution had paid off handsomely. A bill, written by the corporation’s lobbyists and submitted by the Congressman, had passed without question or comment. Its diseased language had been buried deep in an omnibus defense appropriations bill submitted for a vote late the previous night. The opposition was given a single hour to review the legislation before a vote was called. Not having time to read the bill and not wanting to appear weak on defense, the opposition party rubber-stamped the legislation, much to the pleasure of the Congressman. He was very good at transforming these fictions into cash, very good. He coughed again.

It is 8 pm and a poll worker closes the door of the polling place and turns the lock. Until a few minutes ago there had been a long line of people wanting to vote, but they had been turned away. Once again, peculiar problems with the voting machines had caused delays. Someone thought it might be a computer virus. These problems were compounded by an fraudulent mailing announcing a change in the polling place. Voters who traveled to the address discovered it belonged to an empty lot. And then there had been a large number of felons trying to vote again this year. Most denied any crime more serious than a parking ticket and demanded the right to vote, but the list of authorized voters supplied by the state clearly indicated they were felons. Although the head of the state’s elections board is a politician with ties to the private company that created the list, the state is certainly not in the business of tampering with elections, she assures herself.

A military band marches by at the Flag Day parade, snapping out crisp salutes to the procession of American flags waving bravely ahead of them in the early summer breeze. Young fathers instruct their children to place their right hand over their breast in a sign of solemn respect. Elderly veterans in VFW hats wipe tearing eyes as the band begins to play another rousing march on gleaming instruments. This is the best country in the world, we are reminded. We are the most blessed by God and the most free. We have such an abundance of freedom that we proudly export it to other countries, along with arms and cash to help compliant regimes put down insurrection and squash dissent among its citizens. So they can be free like us.

A mother cries as the body of her son is lowered into the grave. He was only nineteen and full of promise when he heard his nation calling and enlisted in the National Guard. He was quickly trained and armed with a rifle, a Vietnam-era flak jacket, and desert boots. His first letter home bore his pride and the conviction that he was bringing democracy and freedom to an oppressed and backward nation. He claimed the battle for hearts and minds would soon be won and he would return to a grateful nation a hero. His next letter confessed the indiscriminate killing, the fear, and the hatred of an entire culture. The conquered, he said, must accept freedom and democracy, even if it is at the point of a gun. There was no third letter. Only a knock on the door and a painfully short visit by two Marines who brought with them the few miserable effects of their son. Nothing of him was found after the car bombing. The father comforted his wife in her misery as he thought back to Vietnam, when a fiction had spread and killed 52,000 other sons.

An old and inconceivably wealthy man produces a weak cough without covering his mouth. He smiles in false apology then generously waves a carefully manicured hand over the captains of industry assembled in the rich, mahogany-lined boardroom. This has been a very good year, he reminds them. Corporate profits are up, labor costs continue their downward slide thanks to foreign workers flooding into the country. New opportunities are opening up in the cheap labor markets of China and India. In an era of dwindling resources we are quietly conquering countries that possess the cheap fuel and raw materials our voracious economic engine demands. Globalization is inevitable, irrefutable, irrepressible: it is like a virulent disease for which there is no cure. We have removed the few remaining obstacles to unimaginable wealth; gone are the regulations on the products we sell, the restrictions on which lands and workers we may exploit, and the inconvenient laws that stand in the way of our progress. At last, he proclaims, the markets are in command—and we are in command of the markets. We, who were destined to rule, will use our power to create an even an richer life. For ourselves. And those below us will be grateful as surplus droplets of our success trickle from our fingers and down into their bleating mouths.

The elderly waiter clearing the soiled gold-rimmed dinner plates of the well-satisfied men seated around the boardroom table dares not make eye contact with his betters, for he fears his thoughts will betray him. This must be a fiction, he thinks, for it is too terrible to be true. These men—these self-ordained rulers—would condemn us to feudalism. They will succeed if we do not act; history has proven this too many times. But when he shares his fears with the other waiters, they laugh and dismiss his concerns as the mutterings of a silly old man.

The old man, who has lived a very long time and seen much, is far from silly. He is one of many people who see the evil that is happening but judge themselves powerless to stop it. The old man knows that until Americans reject the fiction and discover a courage for the truth this nation shall be condemned to live as sheep in a society run by a pack of diseased wolves.

As his bare hand scrapes the slop from the rich men’s dirty dishes, he remembers something his mother once told him: You are what you eat: Swallow the fiction you are fed and your life will be yours no longer.

11/22/07 “ICH’ — — Institutionally unwilling to consider America’s responsibility for the bloodbath, the traditional media have refused to acknowledge the massive number of Iraqis killed since the invasion.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s flirtation with those who deny the reality of the Nazi genocide has rightly been met with disgust. But another holocaust denial is taking place with little notice: the holocaust in Iraq. The average American believes that 10,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the US invasion in March 2003. The most commonly cited figure in the media is 70,000. But the actual number of people who have been killed is most likely more than one million.

This is five times more than the estimates of killings in Darfur and even more than the genocide in Rwanda 13 years ago.

The estimate of more than one million violent deaths in Iraq was confirmed again two months ago in a poll by the British polling firm Opinion Research Business, which estimated 1,220,580 violent deaths since the US invasion. This is consistent with the study conducted by doctors and scientists from the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health more than a year ago. Their study was published in the Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal. It estimated 601,000 people killed due to violence as of July 2006; but if updated on the basis of deaths since the study, this estimate would also be more than a million. These estimates do not include those who have died because of public health problems created by the war, including breakdowns in sewerage systems and electricity, shortages of medicines, etc.

Amazingly, some journalists and editors – and of course some politicians – dismiss such measurements because they are based on random sampling of the population rather than a complete count of the dead. While it would be wrong to blame anyone for their lack of education, this disregard for scientific methods and results is inexcusable. As one observer succinctly put it: if you don’t believe in random sampling, the next time your doctor orders a blood test, tell him that he needs to take all of it.

The methods used in the estimates of Iraqi deaths are the same as those used to estimate the deaths in Darfur, which are widely accepted in the media. They are also consistent with the large numbers of refugees from the violence (estimated at more than four million). There is no reason to disbelieve them, or to accept tallies such as that the Iraq Body Count (73,305 – 84,222), which include only a small proportion of those killed, as an estimate of the overall death toll.

Of course, acknowledging the holocaust in Iraq might change the debate over the war. While Iraqi lives do not count for much in US politics, recognizing that a mass slaughter of this magnitude is taking place could lead to more questions about how this horrible situation came to be. Right now a convenient myth dominates the discussion: the fall of Saddam Hussein simply unleashed a civil war that was waiting to happen, and the violence is all due to Iraqis’ inherent hatred of each other.

In fact, there is considerable evidence that the occupation itself – including the strategy of the occupying forces – has played a large role in escalating the violence to holocaust proportions. It is in the nature of such an occupation, where the vast majority of the people are opposed to the occupation and according to polls believe it is right to try and kill the occupiers, to pit one ethnic group against another. This was clear when Shiite troops were sent into Sunni Fallujah in 2004; it is obvious in the nature of the death-squad government, where officials from the highest levels of the Interior Ministry to the lowest ranking police officers – all trained and supported by the US military – have carried out a violent, sectarian mission of “ethnic cleansing.” (The largest proportion of the killings in Iraq are from gunfire and executions, not from car bombs). It has become even more obvious in recent months as the United States is now arming both sides of the civil war, including Sunni militias in Anbar province as well as the Shiite government militias.

New Rule: The president can’t pardon just one or two turkeys this Thanksgiving. He’s got to let them all go.

It’s probably too much to expect from the man who wanted “no child left behind,” then vetoed health care for kids. But think of the upside. Freeing the turkeys might help the president’s credibility when he says things like, “We don’t torture.”

Take a look at this video, shot just last month at a typical American turkey slaughterhouse, and this one, shot undercover last year at a Butterball slaughterhouse by investigators from PETA, and you’ll see that my use of the word is no exaggeration. Butterball employees, taking a page out of the Abu Ghraib handbook, laughed while they kicked, punched, stomped, and even sexually assaulted turkeys.

These people should be arrested. They would be if the turkeys were dogs or cats. Too bad our animal protection laws make about as much sense as fighting a war against a country that doesn’t have an army. Even though 98 percent of the land animals Americans eat are turkeys and chickens, the federal Humane Methods of Slaughter Act specifically excludes birds from protection. I’m not kidding.

The Butterball plant in the video slaughters about 50,000 turkeys every day. Fifty million turkey corpses will go into American ovens this Thanksgiving. More than 9 billion turkeys and chickens are killed in the U.S. each year. But not one of them is guaranteed a painless death, as documented in this video that was narrated by my fellow animal-lover and HuffPo Blogger, Alec Baldwin. The Senate can find time to vote to condemn an advertisement, but not to add birds to humane slaughter laws.

So in the face of this surreal situation, in which, once again we can’t put our faith in the president, I ask you to do what I’m going to do and pardon a turkey this Thanksgiving. It’s not hard. Just eat something else (ideas here and here). Not someone else, because it doesn’t seem fair to spare a turkey and roast a hunk of pig or cow instead. If we can bow our heads in gratitude for our families, our friends and our big screen TVs, and then carve into a creature who lived a miserable life and died a horrible death, then our ethics are about as sensible as Britney’s parenting skills.

Former Vice President Al Gore should be the first to take the meat-free Thanksgiving pledge. Since raising animals for food generates more greenhouse gases than all the cars and trucks in the world combined, is it too much ask Mr. Gore to stop gazing at his Oscar and his Nobel Prize long enough to read the United Nations report that calls the meat industry “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global”?

For those of you who believe that the war is just and that global warming is a figment of the elite liberal media’s imagination, here’s the straight poop:

* Turkeys and other animals raised for food produce 130 times as much excrement as the entire U.S. human population — all without the benefit of waste treatment systems. Sewage spills, waste-filled waterways and underground aquifer contaminated with e coli are the meat industry’s gift to Americans this holiday season.

* Turkey meat has just as much cholesterol as the pieces of cow and pig called “red meat.” Eating meat is linked to heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity, some cancers, and diabetes.

So do the right thing. Instead of stuffing a turkey this year, stuff the tradition of turkey for Thanksgiving right where it belongs — in history’s trash can.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a column that resonated with a lot of people.

Since 2001, I noted, “We’ve lost our right to see an attorney, to confront our accusers, even to get a fair trial. Government agents have kidnapped thousands of people, most of whom have never been heard from again. Bush even signed an edict claiming the right to assassinate anyone, including you and me, based solely on his whims. Torture, the ultimate sign that civilized society has been replaced by a police state,” has been legalized.

None of the major presidential candidates are currently promising to do what it would take to restore democracy: close Gitmo and the CIA torture chambers, get out of Afghanistan and Iraq, revoke the protofascist USA-Patriot and Military Commissions Acts, obey the Geneva Conventions and turn over Bush, his torturers, his Congressional allies and his top civilian and military officials to an international war crimes tribunal for their role in the murders of more than one million Afghans and Iraqis.

The politicians are too timid to do what’s right. But we can bully them into it. Let’s begin America’s long slog toward moral and political redemption by demanding that our next president’s first act be to declare the Bush Administration null and void. Every law and act carried out between 12 noon on January 20, 2001 and January 20, 2009 should just…go…poof.

My readers are cranky, distrustful and smart. (You can read their comments at tedrall.com.) Rallblog readers are all over the place politically: old-school Democrats, Goldwater Republicans, libertarians, socialists, anarchists, even neoconservatives. But they’re speaking out as one about my call to expunge the legacy of the Bush Administration: Yes. Yes. Hell, yes!

Let’s make it happen!

Now is the time. Write (an actual letter, not email) to your favorite presidential candidate and declare that you are a single-issue voter. Swear that, if he or she agrees to sign the following Pledge, your vote is assured. If not, promise to stay home or vote for someone else.

“I, ______________, hereby solemnly pledge that my first act upon assuming the office of President shall be to sign an American Renewal Act of 2009, which shall declare all laws, regulations, executive orders, treaties and actions undertaken by the federal government during the illegitimate and unlawful administration of George W. Bush to be null, void and without effect.”

Sound crazy? So did Thomas Paine in 1775. As a practical and legal matter, however, consigning Bush to the dung heap of history makes more sense than revolting against the British.

First, the law.

George W. Bush’s January 20, 2001 inauguration was unconstitutional. This isn’t because Bush lost the popular vote. Nor is it because he lost Florida and thus the electoral vote. The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to hear the Florida recount lawsuit, Bush v. Gore, violated the U.S. Constitution. It’s a states’ rights issue. Elections fall under state law; the highest court that may resolve a legal challenge about an election is a state supreme court. The U.S. Supreme Court–a federal body–didn’t have jurisdiction in the case.

An American Renewal Act is merely a confirmation of two centuries of standard practice.

There are precedents. After France was liberated in 1944, incoming president Charles de Gaulle declared the collaborationist government of Marshall Henri-Philippe Pétain null and void. (It was a stretch. Unlike Bush, who carried out a judicial coup, Pétain came to power legally.) In any case, Pétain vanished from textbooks. Numerous laws passed between 1940 and 1944, dealing with matters like taxes and construction projects, had to be debated and passed all over again.

The Southern secession of 1860 was perfectly legal, yet laws and currency issued by the Confederate government in the South were invalidated by the victorious Union in 1865.

The main argument for erasing Bush and his nefarious deeds is a legal one: official acknowledgement that the 2000 election was stolen gets the U.S. back on the path to democracy. (Should Al Gore should be allowed to serve the term he won in 2000? I don’t know.)

There’s also an ethical principle at stake. As de Gaulle said about Pétain’s partnership with the Nazis, the Bush Administration so disgraced itself and our nation that we have to renounce it in order to restore our moral authority, to be able to face citizens of other, less despicable, countries in the eye.

Another argument is based on power. Imagine that Gore had seized power in 2000 instead. Now imagine that he had turned as rabid as Bush, that he had ruled as far to the left as Bush has to the right. Businesses would have been nationalized. Healthcare would have been socialized; doctors would be federal employees. Taxes on the rich would have soared while the poor got off scot-free. Republican protesters at the Democratic National Convention would have gotten beaten up and thrown into filthy internment facilities for days on end. Crazy Gore would have apologized for foreign policies that provoked the 9/11 attacks. To prove he meant it, he would have sent troops to overthrow the world’s most heinous dictators, all U.S. allies, in Uzbekistan, Pakistan and elsewhere.

Now imagine that, over the years, Gore’s policies had ruined the economy and mired the military in endless, losing wars. That people had turned again him to the same degree that they’ve rejected Bush. As Frank Rich writes in The New York Times, only 24 percent of Americans approve of the Bush Administration–almost as bad as the image of the U.S. in Pakistan.

You can bet that the Republicans, after they took back power, would carry out the mother of all rollbacks. Gore, the rogue president, would probably wind up in prison. There’s no reason to treat Bush and his policies any more gently.

“We are a people in clinical depression,” writes Rich. “Americans know that the ideals that once set our nation apart from the world have been vandalized, and no matter which party they belong to, they do not see a restoration anytime soon.” Anyone who reads Tim Weiner’s “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA” knows the U.S. was damned far from perfect before Bush came along. But Rich’s broader point is correct. Falling short of lofty ideals is better than forgetting about them.

Demand that the major presidential candidates sign the Pledge for American Renewal. We know the woman and half-dozen men who are leading in the polls want to rule us. But will they lead?

Ted Rall is the author of the new book “Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?,” an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America’s next big foreign policy challenge.

I received an email last week. Almost two pages long and with only enough sentence breaks to count on one hand, it was coming from a place I knew all too well and recognized instantly ­ the heart of a military wife who wanted to lose control but knew she was all that stood between her husband and heartbreak.

She told of a nightmare reminiscent of one I had lived through just a short time ago ­ with added trauma I have come to understand. I have learned there are many forms of combat, not all on the frontlines of a battlefield, but all can manifest themselves in ways only those who have lived through them will ever fully comprehend.

Serving with the 4th Infantry Division, her husband had deployed to Iraq in 2005 and spent a year in combat before returning as someone she was no longer sure she recognized. As he struggled to find his way back to her, he continued to work on post, and to ask for the help he knew he needed in dealing with the nightmares, the anger, the uncontrollable rages, mood swings, and the suicidal feelings. His commander said there was nothing wrong with him another combat tour wouldn’t fix, and didn’t do much more than tell the couple they needed marriage counseling. On R and R from Iraq for the birth of his child, he attempted suicide with the anti-depressants he had been prescribed while he was in Iraq. A judge ordered him to a military behavioral hospital and when he was released the mood swings, rages, nightmares and anger only grew worse.

He was again told he would be sent to a military hospital for treatment, and his wife was told she would be able to follow him shortly thereafter. He was sent to Ft. Stewart, Georgia, where he was immediately placed in the behavioral unit of the Army hospital on post. The doctor there, rather than recognize the problem, saw the soldier as the problem, accused him of “malingering” (a common military command practice) and told the soldier he could not get out of deploying to Iraq. The soldier’s request for conscientious objector status was not even considered, and he called his wife to let her know he would rather die in the states confined to his barracks room than return to die in Iraq; he was holding the rest of his pills and refused to tell her which barracks he was in.

She could have broken down, and after enduring months of nightmares, abusive behaviors and rage by her husband, she could have walked away ­ her heart was stronger than all of that and she began making phone calls, getting no answer at the number listed for the ambulance service or the staff duty desk. Finally she reached the MP station and they were able to find him. He was placed in the hospital and the ridicule continued. Seeking guidance from many organizations who offered to help, she soon learned she was on her own. An attorney managed to have the soldier released. At first he was ordered to stay on a cot in the battalion headquarters, unable to remove his uniform or even shower. The day before she contacted me, he faced a summary court martial and was given 30 days confinement and a less than honorable discharge. He managed a quick call to her to let her know it was almost over, and wasn’t able to say anymore. She was left on her own to find out where he was incarcerated and how he was doing. He eventually contacted her. He’s safe and being cared for, and with time off for good behavior this soldier is almost home.

For this couple, the worst is over, or is it just beginning??

I know the nightmares, I know the anger and I know the mood swings. I also know how it tears your heart when you realize how little most people understand. Watching the changes that come to a soldier who has waged a war for peace that is far more difficult sometimes than the battles fought on the ground in Iraq, it sometimes feels as if all sides are working against that peace ever taking hold.

We watched our love ones go to war, knowing the apprehension, but loving them for doing what they believed they must to keep us safe, to give to their country and to honor the service of those who came before.

We ached for them while they were gone; never sure when a phone call might come and when they did return alive we ached again, wondering when the rest of the person they had left behind in the war zone would finally catch up and come home too.

The price they paid for their freedom was greater than most will understand and theirs is a freedom many others will fight to dampen, afraid of what that freedom represents.

It’s not about who is to blame for an immoral, unjust war. It’s not about who is responsible for ending the war, or who should receive credit for the work that eventually brings us peace. It is about recognizing our personal responsibility in the madness and about accepting our role in bringing about the changes needed to repair the damage.

It’s not about why a soldier enlisted to serve, not when their conscience is torn apart by the abuse of that service; abuse from all sides until all sides begin to work together to end the war and put into place programs for reconciliation and recovery for all those affected by what we have faced in the name of freedom and human rights.

It is about reconciliation. It is about recovery. It is about doing what is right within ourselves to see that the changes we implement have a lasting impact for peace, and for healing.

It’s about understanding what has been given, setting aside what can be taken, working together to make things right.

It’s about the need for peace.

Monica Benderman is the wife of Sgt. Kevin Benderman, a ten-year Army veteran who served a combat tour in Iraq and a year in prison for his public protest of war and the destruction it causes to civilians and to American military personnel. Please visit their website, www.BendermanDefense.org to learn more.