The Rag Blog

HOLIDAY: Most in attendance support panel’s decision to bar anti-war groups.

LONG BEACH – The 11th annual Long Beach Veterans Day Parade was a smooth and peaceful event on Saturday, despite controversy this week over three anti-war groups that were prohibited from marching.

Veterans for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War and Military Families Speak Out said their First Amendment rights were violated when the parade committee, a nonprofit organization, rejected their application.

Organizers have said the groups were trying to push a political agenda at an event that’s supposed to be free from politics.

With signs saying, “End The War Now,” more than 25 members from all three groups stood quietly on an island in the middle of the parade route on Atlantic Avenue in North Long Beach.

The groups on Saturday morning approached 9th District City Councilman Val Lerch, chairman of the parade committee, in a final effort to participate. Lerch, however, said the parade line-up was set for this year.

“They stood peacefully and honored our veterans,” said Lerch, whose 9th District includes the parade route. “And I thank them very much for that.”

The parade kicked off at 10 a.m. and headed south on Atlantic before it looped back around and spilled into Houghton Park.

The line-up featured more than 100 entries, including marching bands, vintage fire trucks and military jeeps, city officials on convertibles, horseback riders and drill teams.

The event concluded with a vendor fair and special ceremony in the park, which honored the parade’s three Grand Marshals: Military Marshal Col. Lisa Costanza, honorary Grand Marshal Long Beach Fire Department Battalion Chief Dave Kean and Celebrity Grand Marshal Cal Worthington.

A sea of nearly 3,000 parade-goers lined the street, holding up signs and banners and waving tiny U.S. flags.

Allyssa Finch, 8, held up a handmade sign saying, “Your Bravery Makes You A Hero!”

“We want our troops to know we love and support them,” said her mother Diane Finch, who attends the parade every year.

Long Beach resident Joan Noble was dressed head to toe in red, white and blue, complete with a U.S. flag umbrella and blanket.

“I was born on the Fourth of July, so I’m extra patriotic,” she said.

Although they weren’t allowed to march this year, Jason Lemieux, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, said members came anyway to support the veterans.

“We came out today in the spirit of Veterans Day,” said Lemieux, a Marine who served three tours in Iraq.

Member Joe Wheeler, who served in Iraq in 2003, came down from San Francisco with his 4-year-old daughter Ivy.

“Just because we don’t agree with the war doesn’t mean we served our country any less,” Wheeler said. “We have a right to be in this parade.”

“It’s almost symbolic of saying we are not really veterans,” said Eric Estenzo, who also served in Iraq in 2003.

Col. Ann Wright, a member of Veterans for Peace, worked as a deputy embassador for the U.S. embassy in Mongolia, and served in the U.S. Army for 29 years before resigning in 2003 after the U.S. invaded Iraq.

“It’s pretty sad when you have a private group excluding some veterans based on their political beliefs,” she said. “We have our differences, but we have all served our country. Veterans Day is for all veterans.”

Pat Alviso, a member of Military Families Speak Out, said the groups plan to meet with the parade committee in January and will try to march next year.

“Today is a sad day for Long Beach,” Alviso said. “It’s sad that some veterans have to stand off to the side when they could be in the parade.”

Most veterans who came to see the parade on Saturday supported the committee’s decision.

Fred Dunn, an 84-year-old World War II vet who was born and raised in Long Beach, said the anti-war groups should march in their own parade.

“This is to honor the veterans who have served,” he said. “It’s not a political deal.”

“Don’t rain on our parade,” said Shirley Oglesby, whose husband Jack served in Vietnam. “We don’t want war either. But here is not the time nor place.”

The Oglesbys have attended the parade for the last 11 years.

“I wonder what the men who died would think if they allowed protestors to march,” Jack Oglesby said.

“I’m against the war in Iraq too,” said Sasha Kilauren, who served in the U.S. Navy during the Cold War. “But these groups shouldn’t be allowed to march in this type of parade. It’s inappropriate.”

Vet George Kerr, 65, said seeing the anti-war groups on Saturday was reminiscent of the atmosphere in 1967 when he returned home from Vietnam.

Wes Davey, drafted during the Vietnam War, thought America learned a lesson in Vietnam. He never thought he’d spend his 54th birthday in Baghdad, or that a son would serve there, too.

Brandon Day carries the names of 11 dead comrades tattooed on his right arm. But you don’t need to see the tattoos to see his pain. It’s in his eyes.

And Raymond Camper is one of the Minnesota National Guard members who served a longer stretch in Iraq than any other U.S. troops deployed there.

Camper, Davey and Day share more than their time in uniform. They share the anger and disenchantment of many veterans who have returned from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They also share a determination to speak out.

The three are among the founding members of the Minnesota chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War, a group established here in September.

(For more information, visit the website at www.ivaw.org.)

Today is Veterans Day (government offices will be closed Monday), and Iraq Veterans Against the War will join Veterans For Peace near the State Capitol this morning for a reading of the names of Minnesotans who have died in Iraq. Afterward, the antiwar vets hope new members will join them to help get word to other veterans that there is strength in numbers, and in telling the truth.

Drafted as a teenager during the Vietnam era, Davey was a National Guard and Army Reserve soldier who retired with the rank of master sergeant after serving in Iraq at the start of the war.

Now, at 58, he is president of the Minnesota chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Speaking last week at Augsburg College, Davey said the war was based on lies from the Bush administration and that, while servicemen and women and their families have borne the war’s sacrifice, the affluent in the political and corporate worlds are sacrificing nothing and are profiting from the war.

Davey said veterans returning from Iraq — many suffering from undiagnosed or untreated physical and mental problems — are angered by the attitude they encounter when they get back: “You volunteered. Shut up and die.”

Nearly 4,500 Americans have died in Iraq and Afghanistan (this year has been the bloodiest to date, in both countries). Meanwhile, the wounded and maimed return to a country where 70 percent of the public opposes the war but few do anything about it, including the “opposition” in Congress. No wonder there is rising anger among veterans.

Day, 29, enlisted after 9/11 and served two tours in Iraq, the second ending in September 2006. After 9/11, he had an eagle and a flag tattooed on his right shoulder, a sign of his desire to defend America. Now, on that same arm, tattooed dog tags bear the names of 10 soldiers in his company who died in Iraq, as well as the name of a friend who committed suicide after coming home.

The darkness doesn’t go away

“Being in Iraq fills you with a darkness that doesn’t go away,” Day told a gathering at the Cathedral of St. Paul in September, recounting how he pulled another friend’s body from the wreckage of a Humvee. Now studying engineering at the University of Minnesota, Day finds that his outrage at the waste of lives in Iraq fuels his passion to speak against the war.

After four soldiers in his unit were killed in an explosion, he says, an Army psychiatrist counseled the grieving troops. But after two hours, the shrink looked at his watch and said, “Well, I guess we should get out of here.”

After that, Day says, the soldiers decided they couldn’t talk about their feelings. Instead, their attitude became, “The Army broke me, and they can’t fix me.”

Today’s reading of the names of the dead will follow a 10:30 bell-ringing ceremony at the First Shot Memorial on the west side of the Veterans Services Building near the Capitol. Afterward, at noon, the group will meet at Macalester Plymouth United Church, 1658 Lincoln Av., St. Paul. All Iraq-era veterans are welcome. They may also e-mail Minnesota@ivaw.org.

“For the second time in my life, a president has plunged our country into a quagmire where there is no way to win a victory which can be defined,” Davey says.

“… the literature on counter-insurgency is so enormous that, had it been put aboard the Titanic, it would have sunk that ship without any help from the iceberg. However, the outstanding fact is that almost all of it has been written by the losers.” – Martin van Creveld, in The Changing Face Of War, 2006

11/09/07 “Asia Times” — — Amid the George W Bush administration’s relentless campaign to “change the subject” from Iraq to Iran, how to “win” the war against the Iraqi resistance, Sunni or Shi’ite, now means – according to counter-insurgency messiah General David Petraeus – calling an air strike.

On a parallel level, the Pentagon has practically finished a base in southern Iraq less than 10 kilometers from the border with Iran called Combat Outpost Shocker. The Pentagon maintains this is for the US to prevent Iranian weapons from being smuggled into Iraq. Rather, it’s to control a rash of US covert, sabotage operations across the border targeting Iran’s Khuzestan province.

With the looming Turkish threat of invading Iraqi Kurdistan and President General President Musharraf’s new “let’s jail all the lawyers” coup within a coup in Pakistan, the bloody war in the plains of Mesopotamia is lower down in the news cycle – not to mention the interminable 2008 US presidential soap opera. Rosy spinning, though, still rules unchecked.

The Pentagon – via Major General Joseph Fil, commander of US forces in Baghdad – is relentlessly spinning there’s now less violence in the capital, a “sustainable” trend. This is rubbish.

Fil cannot even admit to the basic fact that Baghdad has been reduced to a collection of blast-walled, isolated ghettos in search of a city. Baghdad, from being 65% Sunni, is now at least 75% Shi’ite, and counting. Sunni and Shi’ite residents alike confirm sectarian violence has died down because there are virtually no more neighborhoods to be ethnically cleansed.

When Fil says the Iraqi forces are “much, much more effective”, what he means is they are much more ferocious. Terrified middle class, secular Shi’ite residents have told Asia Times Online these guards – Shi’ites themselves – roaming Baghdad with their machine guns pointing to the sidewalks are “worse than the Americans”.

Violence has also (relatively) decreased because the bulk of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army is still lying low, following his strict orders, even though they are being targeted by constant US air strikes on Sadr City.

The falling numbers of US deaths have also been subjected to merciless spinning. Yet already more US troops have been killed in Iraq in 2007 than in all of 2006. This temporary fall is not caused by a burst of Sunni Iraqi resistance good will – even though an array of groups has taken some time out to concentrate forces in these past few months on unifying their struggle (See It’s the resistance, stupid Asia Times Online, October 17, 2007.)

Once again, Baghdad residents, who daily have to negotiate life in hell, reveal what’s going on. Lately, as a Shi’ite businessman says, “We have not seen the Americans. They used to come to my neighborhood almost every day at night, with Humvees and Bradleys. They stopped at the end of September.” This means less US-conducted dangerous “missions” in the Baghdad wasteland – with less exposure to snipers and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) – and more time spent in ultra-fortified bases.

The Pentagon even had to admit that sniper attacks, conducted by real pros, have quadrupled during the past year and could “potentially inflict even more casualties than IEDs”. The US Department of Defense’s Defense Advance Research Projects Agency had to rush a program using lasers to identify snipers before they shoot.

Anyway, whenever there is a mission in Baghdad now it inevitably means an air strike. Mega-slum Sadr City residents confirm the US keeps attacking alleged Mahdi Army “terrorist” haunts – but mostly from the air.

With the US corporate media operating virtually like a Pentagon information agency, the only news fit to print is that as of early this week there were 3,855 American dead in Iraq. But most of all – and never mentioned – there were 28,451 wounded in combat. And as of October 1, there were no less than 30,294 military victims of accidents and diseases so serious they had to be medically sent out of Iraq.

When in doubt, ‘liberate’ from the air Brigadier General Qasim Atta, spokesman for the Baghdad security plan, revealed this week Iraq’s security forces have set up 250 spy cameras across Baghdad – presumably to track the Sunni resistance, the Mahdi Army and remaining al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers operatives. Atta has argued “the terrorists are now forced to resort to kidnappings and planting roadside bombs because our security plan is working”. That’s more rubbish.

Kidnapping is an established industry in Baghdad; with the exodus of the middle classes to Jordan, Syria and beyond, now there’s virtually no one flush enough to be kidnapped. IEDs continue to follow wherever American convoys roam. And since they are not roaming – they stick to base – fewer IEDs are exploding. As for al-Qaeda, it has relocated from Baghdad neighborhoods such as Dora – but it will be back.

With fewer missions on the ground, the Pentagon could not but launch four times more air strikes on Iraqis in 2007 – the year of Bush’s “surge” – than in the whole of 2006. Up to the end of September, there had been 1,140 air strikes. Last month, there were more air strikes than during the siege that devastated Fallujah in November 2004.

Even discounting the criminal absurdity of an occupation routinely dropping the bomb on packed neighborhoods of a city it already occupies, civilians are the inevitable “collateral damage” of these attacks – families, women, children, assorted “non-combatants”. The US Air Force does not even take responsibility – claiming the air strikes are ordered by scared-to-death convoys of Humvees patrolling, say, the mean streets of Sadr City.

The Pentagon talk of “precision strikes” and “reducing collateral damage” means nothing in this context. This appalling human-rights disaster has to be attributed to counter-insurgency messiah Petraeus, the “loser”, according to Martin van Creveld, who wrote the latest book on the matter, The Changing Face Of War.

But for public relations purposes inside the US, Petraeus’ “by his book” approach works wonders. The Pentagon can spin to oblivion to a cowered media that US deaths are falling. Who cares what the Nuri al-Maliki “sovereign” Iraqi government says? Maliki is nothing but the mayor of the Green Zone anyway. Who cares what the “fish” – who support the “sea” of the resistance, Sunni or Shi’ite – feel? 80% of them are unemployed anyway – and they merely struggle to survive as second-class citizens in their own land.

There’s hardly any electricity, fuel or food in Baghdad – everything is rationed – for anyone who’s not aligned with a militia-protected faction. The only other option is to flee. With at least a staggering 4.4 million, according to the United Nations, either refugees or internally displaced, options are dwindling fast. There may be as many as 2 million Iraqi refugees in Syria alone. Damascus, in despair, has tightened its visa rules: only academics and businessmen are now entitled. No less than 14% of the entire Iraqi population has been displaced – courtesy of the Bush administration.

Oh, but the Bush administration is “winning” the war, of course. Counter-insurgency doctrine rules that the enemy must be controlled with social, political, ideological and psychological weapons, and risks have to be taken so civilians can be protected.

The surging Petraeus turned that upside down. Or maybe not – he’s just providing his own scholarly follow-up to the indiscriminate bombings of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s. Petraeus, His master’s voice, might as well call an air strike over the whole of Mesopotamia and then call it “victory”.

11/09/07 “TPMmuckraker” — — After Pervez Musharraf declared martial law this weekend, Condoleezza Rice vowed to review U.S. assistance to Pakistan, one of the largest foreign recipients of American aid. Musharraf, of course, has been a crucial American ally since the start of the Afghanistan war in 2001, and the U.S. has rewarded him ever since with over $10 billion in civilian and (mostly) military largesse. But, perhaps unsure whether Musharraf’s days might in fact be numbered, Rice contended that the explosion of money to Islamabad over the past seven years was “not to Musharraf, but to a Pakistan you could argue was making significant strides on a number of fronts.”

In fact, however, a considerable amount of the money the U.S. gives to Pakistan is administered not through U.S. agencies or joint U.S.-Pakistani programs. Instead, the U.S. gives Musharraf’s government about $200 million annually and his military $100 million monthly in the form of direct cash transfers. Once that money leaves the U.S. Treasury, Musharraf can do with it whatever he wants. He needs only promise in a secret annual meeting that he’ll use it to invest in the Pakistani people. And whatever happens as the result of Rice’s review, few Pakistan watchers expect the cash transfers to end.

About $10.58 billion has gone to Pakistan since 9/11. That puts Pakistan in an elite category of U.S. foreign-aid recipients: only Israel, Egypt and Jordan get more or comparable U.S. funding. (That’s only in the unclassified budget: the covert-operations budget surely includes millions more, according to knowledgeable observers.) While Israel and Egypt get more money, Pakistan and Jordan are the only countries that get U.S. cash from four major funding streams: development assistance, security assistance, “budget support” and Coalition Support Funds. Pakistan, however, gets most of its U.S. assistance from Coalition Support Funds and from budget support. And it’s those two funding streams that have minimal accountability at best.

The “budget support” package is the lion’s share of U.S. economic assistance to Pakistan — and it’s not spent in conjunction with any U.S. agency. “It’s a cash transfer,” says Lisa Curtis, a South Asia analyst at the Heritage Foundation who used to work on the South Asia desk at the State Department and for Sen. Richard Lugar (R-ID). “That goes directly to the Pakistani treasury.” It totalled around $200 million each year until earlier this year, when Rep. John Tierney (D-MA) plucked $75 million of out of it and put it in an education fund for USAID to administer. In theory, budget support is supposed to free up the treasuries of the four countries that receive it for investing in their national infrastructure. But in practice, recipients can do with it whatever they like. “The notion is it gives them greater flexibility on how to use the money,” explains Craig Cohen, vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The trade-off is accountability.”

In Pakistan’s case, the only oversight is an annual agreement, known as the Shared Objectives statement, whereby top State Department and Treasury Department officials receive from Musharraf deputies — usually Prime Minister Shawkat Aziz — an explanation of how Musharraf intends to spend the money. The agreement is reached entirely in secret. “A good question is what are the objectives we’re basing this budget support on,” Cohen says.

Accountability also suffers in the Coalition Support Funds. According to Rick Barton of CSIS, who spearheaded perhaps the most comprehensive report on the murky world of U.S.-Pakistan ties, Pakistan has gotten over $6 billion in Coalition Support Funds since 9/11, with disbursements rising to total about $100 million a month. This, too, is a direct cash transfer. “The Coalition Support funding is basically a sort of a handshake deal between militaries,” Barton says. “We don’t have good sense where it goes. … we don’t ask a lot of questions, and we don’t have a lot of record-keeping. “

Only about ten percent of the $10.58 billion since 9/11 has gone toward development aid and humanitarian assistance, according to the CSIS report — even after Pakistan suffered a devastating earthquake in October 2005. “Close to 90 percent goes to the military-led government,” Barton says. “Some of it is directly into the military, and the other pieces go into the Musharraf government.”

In Pakistan, the military runs not just the government, but major sections of the economy as well. Joshua Hammer recently reported for The Atlantic that the Pakistani military owns large stakes in the country’s “banks, cable-TV companies, insurance agencies, sugar refineries, private security firms, schools, airlines, cargo services, and textile factories.” Mainlining largely untraceable money into the Pakistani treasury helps this system perpetuate itself — even as widespread public discontent, from both moderates and radicals, boils over. It also sends the signal that the U.S. prefers to have relations with Pervez Musharraf rather than the Pakistani people.

With an endless, futile and costly Iraq war, a stinking economy and most Americans seeing the country on the wrong track, the greatest national group delusion is that electing Democrats in 2008 is what the country needs.

Keith Olbermann was praised when he called the Bush presidency a criminal conspiracy. That missed the larger truth. The whole two-party political system is a criminal conspiracy hiding behind illusion induced delusion.

Virtually everything that Bush correctly gets condemnation for could have been prevented or negated by Democrats, if they had had courage, conviction and commitment to maintaining the rule of law and obedience to the Constitution. Bush grabbed power from the feeble and corrupt hands of Democrats. Democrats have failed the vast majority of Americans. So why would sensible people think that giving Democrats more power is a good idea? They certainly have done little to merit respect for their recent congressional actions, or inaction when it comes to impeachment of Bush and Cheney.

One of the core reasons the two-party stranglehold on our political system persists is that whenever one party uses its power to an extreme degree it sets the conditions for the other party–its partner in the conspiracy–to take over. Then the other takes its turn in wielding excessive power. Most Americans–at least those that vote–seem incapable of understanding that the Democrats and Republicans are two teams in the same league, serving the same cabal running the corporatist plutocracy. By keeping people focused on rooting for one team or the other, the behind-the-scenes rulers ensure their invisibility and power.

The genius of the plutocrats is to create the illusion of important differences between the two parties, and the illusion of political choice in elections. In truth, the partner parties compete superficially and dishonestly to entertain the electorate, to maintain the aura of a democracy. Illusion creates the delusion of Americans that voting in elections will deliver political reforms, despite a long history of politicians lying in campaigns about reforms, new directions and bold new policies. The rulers need power shifting between the teams to maintain popular trust in the political system. Voting manifests that trust–as if changing people will fix the system. It doesn’t.

So voters become co-conspirators in the grand political criminal conspiracy. Those who vote for Democrats or Republicans perpetuate the corrupt, dishonest and elitist plutocracy that preferentially serves the interests of the Upper Class and a multitude of special interests–some aligned with the Republicans and some with the Democrats. Voting only encourages worthless politicians and those that fund and corrupt them.

Public discontent leads to settling for less through lesser evil voting rather than bold thinking about how to reform the system to get genuine political competition and better candidates and government.

I understand why sane people would not want to vote for Republicans, based on the Bush presidency. But I cannot understand why politically engaged people think that putting Democrats in power will restore American democracy and put the welfare of non-wealthy Americans above the interests of the wealthy and the business sector. Bill Clinton’s administration strongly advanced globalization and the loss of good jobs to foreign countries. Economic inequality kept rising. Trade agreements sold us out.

And in this primary season talk about reforming our health care system among Democrats never gets serious about providing universal health care independent of the insurance industry. And why should citizens be supportive of a party that favors illegal immigration–law breaking–that primarily serves business interests by keeping labor costs low?

Nor have Democrats stood up to challenge the official 9/11 story that no longer has any credibility to anyone that takes the time to seriously examine all its inconsistencies with what really happened and the laws of physics.

Whoever wins the Democratic presidential nomination will not be free of corruption and lies. He or she will owe paybacks to all the fat-cat campaign donors. Voters will be choosing the lesser-evil Democratic presidential candidate. Is that really the only choice? Is there no other action that can advance the national good?

There seem to be just two other choices. Vote for some third party presidential candidate, but the downside of that is twofold. No such candidate can win in the current rigged system. Worse, voting gives a stamp of credibility to the political system, as if it was fair, when it is not. Voting says that you still believe that the political system merits your support and involvement.

The second option is to boycott voting to show total rejection of the current political system and the plutocratic cabal using the two-party duopoly to carry out its wishes. When a democracy no longer is legitimate, no longer is honest, and no longer serves the interests of ordinary citizens, then what other than violent revolution can change it? When the electoral system no longer can provide honest, corruption free candidates with any chance of winning, what can citizens do? Either stay home or just vote in local and state races and for ballot measures.

I say remove the credibility and legitimacy of the federal government by reducing voter turnout to extremely low levels. Show the world that the vast majority of Americans have seen the light and no longer are deluding themselves about their two-party democracy. A boycott on voting for candidates for federal office is a form of civil disobedience that has enormous power to force true political reforms from the political system. This is the only way to make it crystal clear that the presidency and Congress no longer represent any significant fraction of the people. This is the only way to show that America’s representative democracy is no longer representative and, therefore, is no longer a credible democracy. Just imagine a federal government trying to function in the usual ways when only 20 percent of the eligible voters actually voted.

It takes more courage to boycott voting than to vote for lesser evil Democrats and in the end this is the only way for people to feel proudly patriotic. This is the only way to not contribute to the ongoing bipartisan criminal conspiracy running the federal government.

We have broken government because the spirit of Americans that gave us our revolution and nation’s birth has been broken, in large measure by distractive and self-indulgent consumerism. It is better to recognize that those who vote suffer from delusion than to criticize those who do not vote as apathetic. Non-delusional nonvoters recognize the futility of voting.

Democrats will not restore our democracy. That is the painful truth that most people will not readily accept. Such is the power of group delusion. Voting produces never-ending cycles of voter dissatisfaction with those elected, both Democrats and Republicans. It is time to break this cycle of voter despair. Voters that bitch and moan about Congress and the White House have nobody to blame but themselves, no matter which party they voted for.

If it looks like a recession and feels like a recession …

“Quite frankly,” said Senator Charles Schumer, peering over his glasses at the Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, “I think we are at a moment of economic crisis, stemming from four key areas: falling housing prices, lack of confidence in creditworthiness, the weak dollar and high oil prices.”

He asked Mr. Bernanke, at a Congressional hearing Thursday, if we were headed toward a recession.

An aide handed the chairman his dancing shoes, and Mr. Bernanke executed a flawless version of the Washington waffle. He said: “Our forecast is for moderate, but positive, growth going forward.” He said: “Economists are extremely bad at predicting turning points, and we don’t pretend to be any better.” He said: “We have not calculated the probability of recession, and I wouldn’t want to offer that today.”

With all due respect to the chairman, he would see the recession that so many others are feeling if he would only open his eyes. While Mr. Bernanke and others are waiting for the official diagnosis (a decline in the gross domestic product for two successive quarters), the disease is spreading and has been spreading for some time.

The evidence is all around us. Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland told Mr. Bernanke that many members of Congress are holding forums in their districts “to help people who are coming to our doors, literally with tears in their eyes, and trying to figure out how they’re going to manage a foreclosure that’s right around the corner.”

The housing meltdown is getting the attention, but there’s so much more. Bankruptcies and homelessness are on the rise. The job market has been weak for years. The auto industry is in trouble. The cost of food, gasoline and home heating oil are soaring at a time when millions of Americans are managing to make it from one month to another solely by the grace of their credit cards.

The country has been in denial for years about the economic reality facing American families. That grim reality has been masked by the flimflammery of official statistics (job growth good, inflation low) and the muscular magic of the American way of debt: mortgages on top of mortgages, pyramiding student loans and an opiatelike addiction to credit cards at rates that used to get people locked up for loan-sharking.

The big story out of Mr. Bernanke’s appearance before the Joint Economic Committee was his prediction that the economy was likely to worsen. Only the people still trapped in denial could have believed otherwise.

This is what Representative Maurice Hinchey of upstate New York told the chairman:

“This economy is not doing well. And the example of the mortgage closures on 2 million people — and maybe a lot more than that as time goes on — is really not the cause of the economic problem we’re facing, but it’s just a factor of it. It’s a factor of the weakness of this economy.”

In an interview after the hearing, Representative Hinchey discussed the disconnect between official government reports and the reality facing working families. He noted that the unemployment rate does not include workers who have become so discouraged that they’ve given up looking for a job.

And the most popular measure of inflation, the Consumer Price Index, does not include the cost of energy or food, “the two most significant aspects of the increased cost of living for the American people.”

The elite honchos in Washington and their courtiers in the news media are all but completely out of touch with the daily struggle of working families. Thirty-seven million Americans live in poverty and close to 60 million others are just a notch above the official poverty line.

An illness, an auto accident, the loss of a job — almost anything can knock them off their rickety economic perch.

We hear over and over that consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of the gross domestic product, but we seldom hear about the frightening number of Americans who are trying desperately to maintain a working-class or middle-class style of life while descending into a sinkhole of debt.

“We have an economy that is based on increased debt,” said Mr. Hinchey. “The national debt is now slightly above $9 trillion, and ordinary working people are finding that they have to borrow more and more to maintain their standard of living.”

“The average now is that people are spending close to 10 percent more than they earn every month. Obviously, that can’t be sustained.”

Which psychological torture would you rather not have to endure (bearing in mind that you don’t know how or when it will end):

1. Being made to wear panties and chained to a heap of fellow prisoners while rude foreigners insult you. Or,

2. What Ronald Bradley Naulls endured after his house and his Corona, California cannabis dispensary were raided by the DEA July 17?

Naulls’s torment was amplified because his wife Anisha was put through it, too, and their children were the very instrument by which it was applied. On the day of the raids Aaliyah, Amaiyah, and Aryanna Naulls -ages 5, 3, and 1, respectively- were taken from their home and placed in foster care at a location undisclosed to their parents. In the name of “family values” these healthy, well-cared-for little girls – impressionable, frightened little girls- were taken from their mother and father because the raiders had found edible marijuana stored in a refrigerator in the Naullses’s garage.

The rip-off of the Naulls kids was described to your correspondent on July 26 by an outraged attorney named James Anthony -a former assistant city attorney in Oakland who had helped Naulls fight a move by Corona politicians to close his dispensary. According to Anthony, Naulls had gotten a retail-business license and opened “Healing Nations” in April 2006, just before the city imposed a moratorium on cannabis dispensaries. He joined the Chamber of Commerce, donated to charities, got on well with his neighbors in a nondescript Corona strip mall. Anthony thinks the city’s attempt to close Healing Nations signaled the DEA that a raid would be welcome by the local power structure.

Anthony regrets having advised Naulls to pay taxes to the state Board of Equalization. When Healing Nations was raided a DEA agent told the media that it had grossed $1.2 million in nine months; the tax statement was the apparent source of the info. All the Naullses’s assets were seized, including accounts from a computer consulting company and a property management firm that Ronnie had started in years past. Financial ruin and prison was the worst-case scenario Anthony had foreseen for Naulls -not losing the kids.

Naulls is 27. Anthony described him as “a Republican, a church-goer, a computer nerd, a small business person. He looks like Will Smith. Anisha’s a beauty queen. The kids are cute as buttons. There was no trauma in their lives until the cops showed up and kicked the door in at six o’clock in the morning. They rousted everybody out of bed, waved shotguns around, handcuffed mommy and daddy and put them in separate police cars with helicopters overhead. Now the kids are in the clutches of Riverside County Health and Human Services and their mother is being held to answer on felony child endangerment charges.

“Grandma wants to take the kids,” said Anthony. “She’s a real estate broker, Japanese-American. But they won’t let her until they’ve completed a background check because grandpa has a 19-year-old DUI… The California Supreme Court has said that marijuana should be treated like any prescription drug. If CPS has some other evidence that somebody is abusing the kids, fine, step in and see that they’re protected. But the presence of medicine is utterly irrelevant. Is the county going to take children out of every home where there’s a prescription drug? Why not put a padlock on the school at 3 o’clock and keep them all?”

Don’t give them any ideas, James.

After the raids, Ronnie Naulls’s mother had put up her house to secure his release. The process took six days and he didn’t emerge from a federal detention center in Los Angeles until July 23. In addition to consoling his wife and agonizing over his daughters (with whom they would have brief supervised visits in a Riverside County office building on Wednesday mornings), Naulls had to focus on his looming federal prosecution and Anisha’s felony child endangerment case –how to find lawyers, how to raise funds to pay them, what approaches to take. He also had to make ends meet, i.e. get a job.

Anisha recounts: “They took my SUV. I’d had it for a year before Ronnie started [the dispensary]. We were told that the DEA had given it back to the bank. I called the bank and asked to get my car back. The bank said ‘Sure,’ but then they called the DEA and the DEA said ‘If you give them the car back, we’ll take it right back from them again.’ So the bank got scared and wouldn’t give it back. So it’s like ‘Wow, can you leave us alone, we’re trying to move on!'”

Ronnie and Anisha Naulls went to Riverside County Superior Court July 27 seeking custody of their children. They were represented by Geoff Gerber, a local family law specialist. According to James Anthony, who debriefed Gerber, “The judge got it that both parents are out of custody now and seem to be okay parents, so why not give the kids back to them? He looked to the social worker for guidance. ‘Oh, right the parents are pot smokers!'” The judge authorized CPS to return the children when the parents showed declining THC levels. This condition may not be legal, says Anthony, who wished he had the resources to argue to an appellate court that the parents’s THC levels were irrelevant.

Anthony described an episode that had ratcheted up the Naullses’s terror level. While Ronnie was still in jail, DEA agents had come to their house unannounced to return the computers confiscated during the raid. Anisha told them to leave everything on the porch. The agents tried to assure her that their intentions were benign but she would let them in the house. The next day, Anthony said, “a social worker called to say that the DEA had informed them that Anisha was being resistant and uncooperative. The social worker said ‘You have to cooperate with any government official who comes by your house, otherwise it looks like you have something to hide and you’re not a fit home for these children.’ The county is being used by the DEA to increase their leverage. ‘We have your children so you have to throw your doors open to the DEA without a warrant.’ Anisha’s position was correct.”

Ronnie had been ordered to undergo drug testing by two separate tentacles of The System: federal pretrial services and county social services. “Ronnie had to do drug testing for pretrial services up in Orange County and we had to do drug testing for social services in Corona,” Anisha expalined. “We had to call a number every day and if it said our color, we had to go in. It’s overwhelming.” Ronnie Naulls naively figured that going to a job interview took priority over going to a drug test. He had been asked back for a follow-up after an initial interview with a local company in the computer field –“a good-paying job and they really liked him,” according to Anisha. “Ronnie thought they were going to hire him.” Instead, he was picked up and returned to federal detention on August 23 for having missed two pee tests (the second miss being on a day he went to court in an attempt to get the girls back) and failing to keep his ankle bracelet charged. Middle-class people who have had little contact with The Syste, often think they can explain to an understanding supervisor, that common sense will prevail, that exceptions will be granted; poor people tend to be conversant with The System and to know better.

Naulls had made another foolish move after the July 27 hearing when he went to greet well-wishers who were holding a rally in front of the Healing Nations dispensary. He was observed by government agents. “The DEA got on the phone with Ronnie’s mom,” according to Anisha, “and told her, ‘You’re about to lose your house and your son doesn’t care, he’s out there protesting.’ Ronnie’s mom called and she’s crying. They put Ronnie through hell. Even the judge noticed, he said ‘These things they brought you back on are very minor … it’s kind of silly but I have to go along with it.'”

Ronnie Naulls’s folks came from Kansas. They are not related to the great UCLA basketball player Willie Naulls (a question he gets asked all the time). Ronnie discovered the analgesic effects of marijuana after fracturing his neck and shoulder in an auto accident; large doses of Ibuprofen and Naproxen had caused bleeding in his stomach. He decided to open a dispensary when his father was diagnosed with prostate cancer. “It seemed absurd that you would pay for a card and there’s nowhere to get your medicine in the county,” Naulls said. He did research on the internet and hired attorney Robert Raich to help him create a non-profit. The pent-up demand turned out to be enormous. At the time of the raid, Healing Nations had almost 3,000 members and Naulls was attempting to repeat his success in an underserved area north of San Diego.

“I thought that in America if you don’t infringe on anyone’s life, liberty or property, the government would stay out of your business,” Naulls said when we spoke on Friday, Aug. 10. He was dreading the prospect of federal prosecution but hopeful about getting the girls back soon from the county –maybe that very afternoon. During their once-a-week supervised visits the children seemed “bewildered,” Naulls said. They didn’t know why they had been taken from their home and he and Anisha were not allowed to explain it to them. How could you, honestly? “The plant that mommy and daddy smoke that makes them feel better, some people think it’s very, very bad … “

RN: Our five-year-old thinks she’s she’s being punished. She promises to be good. She doesn’t understand why she can’t come home.

CP: What do you tell her?

RN: The social worker won’t allow us to tell her anything. All I can tell her is that Jesus teaches us to be patient and to pray and daddy promises that you will come home. But I can’t say you’re going to be home soon or anything with regard to the time frame.

CP: That must be torture.

RN: It’s absolute torture.

CP: Do you know anything about whose house they’re in?

RN: No. All we know is that they’re with a foster parent. We don’t know where they are or who they’re with. Nothing.

CP: Is it just your three girls living there or is there a bigger group?

RN: From what I gather they have other kids there. Aaliyah says that the kids are being mean to her. They don’t allow her to use the night light -she had a night light at home. My one-year-old has a diaper rash, which she never had before. Amaiyah had a scratch on her arm.

CP: What’s the criterion for the decision to let them come home? James Anthony said they were going to drug test you and if your THC level was going down, that would be a factor.

RN: My levels have been going down. But the social worker said that the criminal investigation could curtail them from coming home.

CP: Any sense that the social worker is sympathetic?

RN: No. They’re treating it like another drug case. I can tell by his demeanor, we’re just “drug people.” I gave him a copy of my doctor’s recommendation, but… Our lawyer is trying to be tactful and not offend the social workers. We’re afraid if we make any demands they’ll say ‘you’re not cooperating’ and they’ll keep them longer.

On Aug. 13 Naulls told CP that the girls were still in foster care.

RN: We still haven’t gotten our kids back. The social worker came by on Friday afternoon to inspect the house and make sure it was safe for the girls, so we got our hopes up. He went through the house, said he would make his decision today. He told us to call him at 3. We were still trying to reach him after 4. The fact that we couldn’t get ahold of him told me the news wasn’t going to be positive. Then he finally called back and said that their decision was not to give us the kids back because of the pending criminal investigation. He told Anisha, “You have an open case and Ronnie has an open case and what if you go to jail?” She said, “It’s not up to you to decide whether we go to jail.” So we go for another hearing to ask a judge to overrule Child Protective Services.

CP: How often does that happen?

RN: We’re told it’s 50-50. They look at the situation and also if we’ve been following Child Protective Services’ requests, like I am not using medicine and my THC levels are declining and my wife doesn’t have any THC in her system at all. We’ve been testing every other day.

On Aug. 16 the Naullses went to court and prevailed –they got their kids back after 30 days of separation, fear, and uncertainty– but there is no happy ending. Ronnie is facing federal charges for selling a controlled substance and may have to rely on a public defender. Federal law doesn’t acknowledge that cannabis is a medicinal herb or that California voted to legalize it. In the land of Common Sense there would be a “this-family-has-suffered-enough” defense; but we live in the land of Mandatory Minimums.

In the land of Common Sense the Naullses would have been given a warning of some kind instead of having their kids ripped off. The Naulls girls seem to be overcoming their ordeal. Some forms of torture leave no visible marks but cause nightmares down the line. We can only hope that their foster home was one of the good ones and that, having had each other throughout the five-week separation from their parents, they pulled through in tact. This is Anisha’s take on things after the girls had been home about five weeks:

“They told the girls that they were at the babysitters. And that we were working. So, that’s what they think. And they’re just kind of like: ‘Why did it take so long?’ And we say, ‘Well, we were trying to get things together for work.’

“They’re adjusting to being back home. It’s a process. They have a little bit of separation anxiety right now. My oldest will wake me up, ‘I had a nightmare the police took you.’ When Aaliyah started back to school -she had to miss a week of school- one of her classmates came up to her and was like ‘My mommy said that your mommy’s in jail.’ So Aaliyah comes home and says,’Mommy, my friend says that you were in jail. Is that what you were doing when I was at the babysitters?’ And I’m like ‘Wow, no. Mommy wouldn’t go to jail. Why would mommy go to jail? Your friend doesn’t know what she’s talking about.’ We’ve had a few conversations like that.

“My three-year-old will say, out of the blue, if I’m leaving, ‘Please don’t leave me on the freeway.’ And I’m like ‘Wow, mommy’s not going to leave you on the freeway.’ So … But they’re okay, they’re getting back to normal.”

Anisha had just learned that Riverside County is charging her with three counts of felony child endangerment -one for each of the girls, including Aryanna who could barely walk back in July, let alone get into the refrigerator in the garage. “These people are not nice,” says Anisha.

The False Premise of Endangerment

The premise on which government snatched the Naulls girls is as fraudulent as the premise on which the government invaded Iraq. In the extremely unlikely event that the girls went into the garage and the parents didn’t hear the alarm and the girls opened the refrigerator and found the marijuana edibles and unwrapped them and proceeded to gorge themselves, they would experience a cannabis overdose, which involves a very unpleasant torpor that can last for eight hours (some of which is typically spent asleep). There is no subsequent adverse effect. The most likely longterm reaction to an overdose of edible cannabis is an aversion to cannabis in any form. Just as there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, there is no poison in cannabis. The government promulgates whatever lies and policies are needed to advance corporate interests. War in Iraq: good for the oil companies. War on pot: good for the drug companies. War by any lies necessary.

The vote by more than 5 million Californians for Prop 215 was above all a testament to its safety, not its efficacy. Most people who smoked pot in social settings in the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s were unaware of its medical effects, let alone that it had been widely used in tinctures produced by Eli Lilly, etc.. But they did know that they and their friends never experienced reefer madness or any other health problems. Even most people who never smoked pot have known people who did and observed that its impact is negligible compared to alcohol and tobacco. The Prop 215 vote was a message from the people to the government that marijuana is relatively benign.

The government’s response has been, “Our mind is made up, don’t confuse us with the facts.” It is not just the feds who treat cannabis as if it causes grave harm; Riverside County’s Department of Social Services is operating on the same false assumption. After Prop 215 passed, Tod Mikuriya, MD, warned that implementation would hinge on state, county, and city agencies revising their protocols. Tod implored Ethan Nadelmann of the Lindesmith Center (now the Drug Policy Alliance) to conduct or underwrite what he called an “audit” that would involve contacting, advising, and pressuring every agency that had to adjust to marijuana becoming legal for medical use. Nadelmann said no, his group would be devoting its resources to funding medical marijuana initiatives in other states.

You don’t have to study Clausewitz or Sun Tzu on the art of war to know that sometimes a victory has to be consolidated before you try to gain more ground. The danger with advancing too soon is that your forces get overextended and you’re unable to defend what you’ve won.

Contributions to the Naulls Defense Fund can be made on a tax-deductible basis through Green-Aid.

The U.S. now has an Attorney General, Mr. Michael Mukasey, who does not know if waterboarding is torture. One wonders what else escapes the knowledge of the Mr. Mukasey.

Is he aware that U.S. law forbids the practice of waterboarding, as do numerous international treaties? He has stated that he must withhold judgment on it until he receives more information. Will he continue to ‘withhold judgment’ on this practice, that he himself calls ‘repugnant,’ until some nation starts waterboarding U.S. soldiers? One may well ask why other countries, especially those with whom the U.S. is at war, should hesitate to waterboard their prisoners if the U.S. will not refrain from doing so. The answer is common decency, but with the world’s most powerful nation not demonstrating that trait, one cannot long expect other nations victimized by the United States to exhibit it.

Since this so-called ‘interrogation technique’ has been banned by domestic law, why, one could reasonably wonder, is there any debate about it? The answer is because for some bizarre reason, domestic law does not apply to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and President Bush has refused to say whether or not he has allowed that agency to practice it. At least he is not denying its use, as he originally and vehemently denied the existence of CIA-run prisons in foreign lands that don’t even bother to discuss the morality of torture. Perhaps Mr. Bush can hold his head high with the knowledge that in the U.S., that beacon of peace, freedom and morality, the ethics of whether to torture or not to torture prisoners is discussed publicly in the hallowed halls of Congress. That the debate comes down to a quasi-conclusion of ‘well, it’s probably not all that bad as long as we call it something else’ does not seem to diminish Mr. Bush’s pride in the moral leadership of the United States.

If Mr. Bush, Mr. Mukasey and certainly Vice President Dick Cheney are, if not warm proponents of waterboarding, at least willing to consider its use, it might be helpful to know what the brouhaha is all about.

This particular ‘interrogation method’ is not new. It was very popular during the Italian Inquisition five-hundred years ago and has appeared now and then since. The Japanese used it at least sporadically during World War II, as did U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. More recently the Khmer Rouge used it on prisoners in Cambodia. And following the high moral standards set by Italian, Japanese and Cambodian torturers, the CIA listed waterboarding on its list of approved ‘enhanced interrogation techniques.’ My, my, what a pretty term!

This ‘enhancement’ involves strapping an individual down face up so he or she is completely immobile, on an inclined board with the person’s feet raised above the head. The victim’s face is covered, sometimes wrapped with cellophane. Sometimes the victim is gagged. The torturer then pours water repeatedly onto the person’s face. This gives the impression of being submerged under waves and the victim believes he or she is drowning. The gag reflex activates as the person involuntarily tries to save him or herself from drowning. The experience, as related by those who have so been tortured, is terrifying.

This tame, academic description does not convey anything close to the enormity of the experience. Some information from the CIA which, for a time, waterboarded some of its employees as part of their training, may be beneficial. Those trainees lasted an average of fourteen seconds before begging to be released. And these were people who knew for a fact that they were not being drowned.

While the CIA will not classify waterboarding as torture, many CIA officials think it is useless because the victim will tell the ‘interrogator’ anything he or she wants to hear in order to stop the torture. In fact, this is one reason why torture is seen as unacceptable; information obtained in this way is generally useless.

As the term ‘waterboarding’ slowly found its way into the American consciousness, some interesting facts about its history were exposed. In 1947 the U.S. charged a Japanese army officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for using the technique on an American citizen. He was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor. It appears that the U.S. view on waterboarding has changed considerably since that day. Will the U.S. now acquit Mr. Asano posthumously?

So this cruel practice is now, if not acceptable, at least not unacceptable, in the land of the free and the home of the brave. One wonders how long this archaic, savage and barbaric ‘interrogation method’ has been practiced by the United States. One further wonders what other such methods are and have been used since the U.S.’s immoral, illegal and obscene invasion of Iraq. Is it possible that U.S. soldiers have attached electrodes to the genitals of Iraqi prisoners? Have they stripped them and led them around with collars and leashes like dogs? Did they force naked prisoners to form human pyramids, and then photograph themselves standing in front of them, grinning happily? No, such cruel and inhumane behaviors are never tolerated by the United States; military training and shared accountability is such that these and/or similar practices would never occur. Oh wait, one forgets that all those things were perpetrated by U.S. soldiers on Iraqi prisoners in Baghdad. Well, slap a few low-level U.S. military wrists and we’ll forget the whole thing.

Which seems to be just what the Democratic-controlled U.S. Congress has done. As they blathered on about Mr. Mukasey’s refusal to term waterboarding torture; as they stood in righteous indignation that the highest law enforcement officer in the country would not endorse U.S. and international law; as they spluttered and dithered and then sought reasons to justify voting for him they apparently forgot not only their mandate, but their duty as well.

Mr. Bush had threatened to appoint an ‘acting’ Attorney General if Mr. Mukasey were not confirmed. Such an appointment would not require Congressional approval. Is Congress so deficient in clout, or perhaps it is spine that it lacks, that this action by the president would stand? Are the members of that governing body so willing to submit to presidential blackmail that they will confirm as the highest law enforcement officer in the country a man who will not support U.S. law that forbids waterboarding?

Mr. Bush, of course, has always bought into the jingoism that he personifies: any measure to protect the corporate interests of the exalted U.S. is justified. After all, this is the U.S., which can operate by different rules than the rest of the world. That seems to be sufficient reason to allow the torture of prisoners; the wiretapping of U.S. citizens; the dismissal of due process; restrictions on the rights to free speech and assembly, and a host of other measures Mr. Bush has taken in the name of freedom. One must give him credit: he has somehow caused Congress to interpret ‘supporting the troops’ as continuing the war for them, and equally as bizarre he has convinced them and many U.S. citizens that the best way for them to keep the rights of which they are so proud is to surrender them.

One naively looks to the next presidential election for some significant change. This will only mirror the disappointment of the last Congressional election that swept the war-mongering Republicans from office and replaced them with the war-tolerating Democrats. It took many years for the U.S. to learn important lessons from the mistakes of Vietnam, and not so many for them to forget them all. The confirmation of an Attorney General who condones torture is the latest in the U.S.’s long history of disgraceful injustice.

Editor’s Note: My two correspondents in Venezuela provided me with the following report based upon their meetings with government officials earlier today. -LMB

14 DEPUTIES IN NATIONAL ASSEMBLY COME OUT AGAINST THE GOVERNMENT

14 deputies are expected to go to the opposition side in the National Assembly between now and the December 2nd National Referendum to approve the constitutional reforms.

3 LEADERS, FORMERLY LOYAL TO CHAVEZ COME OUT AGAINST HIM

After ex-General and former Defemse Minister, Raul Baduel came out against the constitutional reforms earlier this week, the Attorney General, Isaias Rodriguez and Comptroller General of the Republic, Cloudosbaldo Russian are expected to publicly pronounce their opposition to the Constitutional Reform proposals. Such traitorous actions will weaken the cohesive authority of the State and hence Central Government.

VENEZUELAN MILITARY PENETRATED

Raul Isaias Baduel, former Four Star General and Minister of Defense shocked the population when he came out against constitutional reforms last Monday, November 5, and is now working hand-in-glove with Podemos (political party now firmly in the opposition camp). Baduel has now joined forces with Ismael Garcia (General Secretary of Podemos) who consistently opposed the constitutional reforms alleging that they would constitute a single political line of thought in Venezuela. His position clashes with the pluralistic, democratic Articles 1 and 2 of the 1999 Constitution, so prized by the people. Plans have already been laid to launch candidates for mayors and governors in the 2008 local elections. This would be the new opposition to Chavez were it to succeed.

The 4th Armed Division in Maracay, formerly under of the command of Baduel is said to be loyal to him. Moreover, the current minister of Defense, Gustavo Briceno Rangel has been a close personal friend of Baduel for 30 years just as Baduel has been a close personal friend of President Chavez for the same number of years. In a seminar with oil workers in 2003, Baduel stated that he had been offered $1 billion to instrument the overthrow of Chavez and he stated that he turned it down out of loyalty to the Bolivarian project. Is this now about money or power? Earlier this week, in a public broadcast on VTV, Chavez stated, “Baduel is a traidor not only to Chavez – but to the people of Venezuela”. In massive marches supporting Chavez this week, signs appeared everywhere declaring “Baduel – Traidor a la Revolucion!”

Baduel took an oath with President Chavez on December 17, 1982 in Maracay to create a Bolivarian Republic and overthrow the corrupt oligarch system which kept 80 % of Venezuelans in poverty for 40 years. Baduel also stood by Chavez and saved the day during the 2002 coup attempt. This is the first hard evidence that the US-backed opposition may have penetrated the existing standing Army after the 2003 non-violent purge of the Venezuelan Armed Forces by former Defense Minister, Humberto Prieto. How did they do it? We suggest money and the desire for power now that petroleum has almost reached $100-barrel.

Millions of dollars of US taxpayer money is being used through the auspices of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED-Washington) to buy the loyalty and consciences of all these men. In addition, a pronouncement by at least one high-ranking active military officer against the constitutional reform and against Chavez personally is expected in coming days.

SPAWNED IN JOINT MEETINGS BETWEEN THE U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT AND VENEZUELAN OPPOSITION IN PRAGUE, the CZECH REPUBLIC.

This is all U.S.-planned and supported following the meeting in Prague when Paul Wolfowitz, Madeleine Albright and Venezuelan opposition leader, Humberto Celli from the discredited Democratic Action Party (AD) met earlier this month.

MONEY DOESN’T SPEAK – IT SWEARS – BOB DYLAN

In addition to these dramatic findings, Carabobo State Governor Luis Felipe Acosta Carlez, one of the heroes in helping to break the opposition-inspired food shortages of economic sabotage of 2002-2003, has been bought off by NED funds in Washington and is expected to resign as governor after making a deal with rancid oligarchy in Valencia.

The Washington-spawned plan is also bent on blocking major routes to cut off distribution of food supplies in order to bring the population to its knees and with the hope they will demand Chavez’ resignation.

URIBE’S PARAMILTARY SPAWN PLANTED IN VENEZUELA?

The plan also includes the use of Colombian paramilitary cells in Venezuela to arbitrarily kill innocent civilians and create chaos which they have been doing for the past month vis-à-vis the bourgeois student protests.

This plan involves another economic sabotage – the closing of factories to lock out workers – just as they did in the national managers’ strike in 2002-2003.

THE GROUNDWORK IS BEING LAID

The private media (mainly Globovision) is up to its neck in this conspiracy against the legally and constitutionally-elected government. Reruns of Baduel’s speech and Ismael Garcia’s interventions in the National Assembly plus raising the profile of Israel Rodriguez are currently being shown over and over again. We are certain that this is a matter of laying the groundwork for an attempt to overthrow the government. This groundwork is being laid to give media credibility to these men. The opposition believes that the people in the barrios will abandon Chavez for a new government under the leadership of traidores like Baduel, Garcia and Rodriguez. Also, they hope that the people will be intimidated to believe “there is no other way”. This is directly out of the CIA handbook.

On a regional level, some who have claimed to be die-hard Chavez supporters have also been bought off to facilitate chaos on a local level and to disarticulate the influence of Central Government in cities and towns in all 24 Venezuelan States.

SOURCES

This information came from Arturo Rosales and Ramon Santiago directly from Venezuelan military intelligence. This information has been known for at least 3 weeks by the government. Proof: The same sources knew that Former Minister of Defense Raul Baduel would come out against the reforms before he made is speech on Monday, November 5. Therefore, while we are not making any hard predictions, our best intelligence indicates that some or all of the destabilizing actions described above will take place within the next few days or weeks.

Once again the opposition plans do not take into account the political awareness of the people (“el pueblo”). This was the major error of the opposition in the April, 2002 coup attempt and the economic oil sabotage of 2002-2003.

This week, Chavez held 3 pro-reform rallies trans-Venezuela before going to Chile, in Carabobo, Maracay and Charallave and hundreds of thousands of people poured into the street to see and support their beloved president. Chavez obviously knows about the opposition/Washington plan and these mega marches were designed to serve as a warning to the Venezuelan, undemocratic bourgeoisie.

There is a very real possibility that a “flash-point” will occur, in the midst of these actions or to launch this plan such as hasn’t been seen since the April 11, 2002 coup attempt, when President Chavez was kidnapped by the US-backed coupsters. In world history, there has been no humanistic Head of State comparable to him. Period!

The fact that Chavez is fully aware that this mega-conspiracy is not an objection to the constitutional reforms, but in reality, is another attempt to eliminate a democratically-elected Head of State. His awareness tells us that element of surprise has already been defused and his administration has plans in place to neutralize the actions of the US fascist opposition.

THE RISKS FOR THE OPPOSITION

The former Chavez supporters, bought off with millions of dollars by NED do not realize the risks they are incurring. If these plans go forward, “el pueblo” may not respond as peacefully as they did in the 2002 coup-attempt when Chavez told them to go back to their homes and be calm. Caveat Emptor! (Let the buyer beware!).

Editor’s Note: In this breaking news article references are made to other articles in the featured section of www.axisoflogic.com

Editor’s Comment: In recent weeks we have been watching Venezuelan students gathering in Caracas for noisy protests against the Constitutional Reform slated for a vote on December 2nd. Two days ago they marched to the National Assembly where they presented a paper documenting their rejection of the reforms. While they performed loudly, the demonstration was carried out without violence. The police and national guard quietly provided security on the perimeter of the crowd without any intrusion into the crowd and without any form of suppression. All of this stands in stark contrast to the many anti-war demonstrations in the U.S. where police brutality and oppression of free speech are commonplace. The participants in these protests are primarily drawn from upper middle class and upper class students who otherwise benefit enormously from the Chávez administration. In an Axis of Logic interview yesterday, Venezuelan journalist Arturo Rosales stated, “These are the people who would have been leaders in government had it not been for the defeat of the U.S.-backed oligarchy in the nonviolent, democratic Bolivarian Revolution.

These Constitutional Reforms have been debated and considered in many open, public meetings throughout Venezuela for months with full participation by the people, members of all political parties and the Deputies from the National Assembly, consistent with Venezuela’s existing democratic constitution. The student protests are broadcast and magnified on a daily basis on Globo-Vision and other anti-government television stations and print media. Meanwhile, authorities have informed us that the people will respond with a massive pro-government demonstration that will dwarf the few hundred students this Sunday in Caracas. Over a million people are expected in this pro-government march and demonstration but we can rest assured that the anti-government media here and in the U.S. will provide little to no coverage of events.

The student protests and media coverage are funded by the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington within the framework of CIA strategies being advanced to interfere in the domestic affairs of Venezuela. This U.S. funding and support for the student demonstrations reveals the continuing attempts by Washington to discredit and bring down the government that has been democratically elected by an overwhelming majority of the people. Most recently, this interference by the U.S. government can be traced directly to the meeting held in Prague by Condaleeza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz and others working for the U.S. State Department.

We thank investigative journalist, Jesús Moreno (author) and Iris Buehler (Tlaxcala translator) for this report.

– Les Blough, Editor

November 9, 2007 – When the capitalist economy turns downward and the government, run by the rich, seeks to scrounge up more money, where does it turn? To the workers, who are already reeling from layoffs, slashed wages, and the loss of health benefits and pensions.

This time around it’s the city of New York that says it is short of cash. On Oct. 30 Mayor Michael Bloomberg imposed a hiring freeze on all government agencies as a solution to declining revenues. No discussion, no way for city employees or residents to debate what to do. The mayor did it by decree. He also told city commissioners to find ways to cut spending by 2.5 percent this fiscal year, which ends June 30, 2008, and by 5 percent next year.

What’s the reason for the city’s financial problems? News reports cite the crisis in credit and housing, a lack of large real estate transactions and a decline in Wall Street profits as factors for the city’s declining revenues. But city officials are trying to scapegoat the unions.

The officials recently submitted a revised spending plan to the Financial Control Board, which oversees the city’s finances, stating that labor costs will be responsible for 65 percent of the revenue deficit by 2011, while a decline in tax revenue will be responsible for 34 percent. (New York Times, Nov. 3)

Bloomberg “has agreed to more generous pay raises for union after union, leading to expenses that stand to outpace revenue, especially toward the end of the city’s four-year spending plan,” the article stated.

For the mayor to complain that workers are making too much money is particularly outrageous, given Bloomberg’s status as one of 946 billionaires in this country. This year he moved to No. 25 in Forbes magazine’s list of the 400 richest people in the U.S., with a net worth of $11.5 billion.

Bonuses to Wall Street executives last year hit a record $23.9 billion—more than 15 times what the city expects to save over the next two years through the budget cuts. (Bloomberg, Oct. 31) (Yes, THAT Bloomberg. The mayor owns this huge financial news network.)

Wall Street and the financial corporations located in the city are the mechanism for the transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars in profit, squeezed every year out of workers all over the world, to the idle rich.

Such problems as a budget deficit in a major city don’t exist in a socialist society, where the wealth is publicly owned. But in the meantime, workers can demand that, instead of eliminating jobs and slashing services, the city officials go after the corporations that make huge profits off the labor of workers while avoiding paying taxes.

Two years ago, Citizens for Tax Justice did a study of state corporate income taxes paid by 252 of the largest and most profitable corporations in the country. A portion of these taxes go to the cities. It found that 71 of these companies had not paid any state income taxes for at least one year from 2001 through 2003. And some companies, including giants AT&T, Boeing, Eli Lilly and Merrill Lynch, paid no net state income tax over the full three-year period.

Companies that did pay state income tax on average paid taxes on only 2.3 percent of their U.S. profits.

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