The Rag Blog

Two thousand Iraqis are fleeing their homes every day. It is the greatest mass exodus of people ever in the Middle East and dwarfs anything seen in Europe since the Second World War. Four million people, one in seven Iraqis, have run away, because if they do not they will be killed. Two million have left Iraq, mainly for Syria and Jordan, and the same number have fled within the country.

Yet, while the US and Britain express sympathy for the plight of refugees in Africa, they are ignoring – or playing down- a far greater tragedy which is largely of their own making.

The US and Britain may not want to dwell on the disasters that have befallen Iraq during their occupation but the shanty towns crammed with refugees springing up in Iraq and neighbouring countries are becoming impossible to ignore.

Even so the UNHCR is having difficulty raising $100m (£50m) for relief. The organisation says the two countries caring for the biggest proportion of Iraqi refugees – Syria and Jordan – have still received “next to nothing from the world community”. Some 1.4 million Iraqis have fled to Syria according to the UN High Commission for Refugees, Jordan has taken in 750 000 while Egypt and Lebanon have seen 200 000 Iraqis cross into their territories.

Potential donors are reluctant to spent money inside Iraq arguing the country has large oil revenues. They are either unaware, or are ignoring the fact that the Iraqi administration has all but collapsed outside the Baghdad Green Zone. The US is spending $2bn a week on military operations in Iraq according to the Congressional Research Service but many Iraqis are dying because they lack drinking water costing a few cents.

Kalawar refugee camp in Sulaymaniyah is a microcosm of the misery to which millions of Iraqis have been reduced.

“At least it is safe here,” says Walid Sha’ad Nayef, 38, as he stands amid the stink of rotting garbage and raw sewage. He fled from the lethally dangerous Sa’adiyah district in Baghdad 11 months ago. As we speak to him, a man silently presents us with the death certificate of his son, Farez Maher Zedan, who was killed in Baghdad on 20 May 2006.

Kalawar is a horrible place. Situated behind a petrol station down a dusty track, the first sight of the camp is of rough shelters made out of rags, torn pieces of cardboard and old blankets. The stench is explained by the fact the Kurdish municipal authorities will not allow the 470 people in the camp to dig latrines. They say this might encourage them to stay.

“Sometimes I go to beg,” says Talib Hamid al-Auda, a voluble man with a thick white beard looking older than his fifty years. As he speaks, his body shakes, as if he was trembling at the thought of the demeaning means by which he feeds his family. Even begging is difficult because the people in the camp are forbidden to leave it on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Suspected by Kurds of being behind a string of house robberies, though there is no evidence for this, they are natural scapegoats for any wrong-doing in their vicinity.

Refugees are getting an increasingly cool reception wherever they flee, because there are so many of them and because of the burden they put on resources. “People here blame us for forcing up rents and the price of food,” said Omar, who had taken his family to Damascus after his sister’s leg was fractured by a car bomb.

The refugees in Kalawar had no option but to flee. Of the 97 families here, all but two are Sunni Arabs. Many are from Sa’adiyah in west Baghdad where 84 bodies were found by police between 18 June and 18 July. Many are young men whose hands had been bound and who had been tortured.

“The majority left Baghdad because somebody knocked on the door of their house and told them to get out in an hour,” says Rosina Ynzenga, who runs the Spanish charity Solidarity International (SIA) which pays for a mobile clinic to visit the camp.

Sulaymaniyah municipality is antagonistic to her doing more. One Kurdish official suggested that the Arabs of Kalawar were there simply for economic reasons and should be given $200 each and sent back to Baghdad.

Mr Nayef, the mukhtar (mayor) of the camp who used to be a bulldozer driver in Baghdad, at first said nobody could speak to journalists unless we had permission from the authorities. But after we had ceremoniously written our names in a large book he relented and would, in any case, have had difficulty in stopping other refugees explaining their grievences.

Asked to list their worst problems Mr Nayef said they were the lack of school for the children, shortage of food, no kerosene to cook with, no money, no jobs and no electricity. The real answer to the question is that the Arabs of Kalawar have nothing. They have only received two cartons of food each from the International Committee of the Red Cross and a tank of clean water.

Even so they are adamant that they dare not return to Baghdad. They did not even know if their houses had been taken over by others.

Abla Abbas, a mournful looking woman in black robes, said her son had been killed because he went to sell plastic bags in the Shia district of Khadamiyah in west Baghdad. The poor in Iraq take potentially fatal risks to earn a little money.

The uncertainty of the refugees’ lives in Kalawar is mirrored in their drawn faces. While we spoke to them there were several shouting matches. One woman kept showing us a piece of paper from the local authority in Sulaymaniyah giving her the right to stay there. She regarded us nervously as if we were officials about to evict her.

There are in fact three camps at Kalawar. Although almost all the refugees are Sunni they come from different places and until a month ago they lived together. But there were continual arguments. The refugees decided that they must split into three encampments: one from Baghdad, a second from Hillah, south of Baghdad, and a third from Diyala, the mixed Sunni-Shia province that has been the scene of ferocious sectarian pogroms.

The nerve center of the nation’s police is not so much a government agency as an 11-story powder keg of factions.

BAGHDAD — The colonel pulls his Mercedes into the parking lot of the drab, 11-story concrete building, scanning the scene for suspicious cars.

Before reaching for the door handle, he studies the people loitering nearby in hopes he will be able to recognize anyone still there later in the day. He grips his pistol, the trigger cocked, wary of an ambush.

He has arrived at his office.

This is Iraq’s Ministry of Interior — the balkanized command center for the nation’s police and mirror of the deadly factions that have caused the government here to grind nearly to a halt.

The very language that Americans use to describe government — ministries, departments, agencies — belies the reality here of militias that kill under cover of police uniform and remain above the law. Until recently, one or two Interior Ministry police officers were assassinated each week while arriving or leaving the building, probably by fellow officers, senior police officials say.

That killing has been reduced, but Western diplomats still describe the Interior Ministry building as a “federation of oligarchs.” Those who work in the building, like the colonel, liken departments to hostile countries. Survival depends on keeping abreast of shifting factional alliances and turf.

On the second floor is Gen. Mahdi Gharrawi, a former national police commander. Last year, U.S. and Iraqi troops found 1,400 prisoners, mostly Sunnis, at a base he controlled in east Baghdad. Many showed signs of torture. The interior minister blocked an arrest warrant against the general this year, senior Iraqi officials confirmed.

The third- and fifth-floor administrative departments are the domain of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s Islamic Dawa Party, a Shiite group.

The sixth, home to border enforcement and the major crimes unit, belongs to the Badr Organization militia. Its leader, Deputy Minister Ahmed Khafaji, is lauded by some Western officials as an efficient administrator and suspected by others of running secret prisons.

The seventh floor is intelligence, where the Badr Organization and armed Kurdish groups struggle for control.

The ninth floor is shared by the department’s inspector general and general counsel, religious Shiites. Their offices have been at the center of efforts to purge the department’s remaining Sunni employees. The counsel’s predecessor, a Sunni, was killed a year ago.

“They have some bad things on the ninth,” says the colonel, a Sunni who, like other ministry officials, spoke on condition of anonymity to guard against retaliation.

The ministry’s computer department is on the 10th floor. Two employees were arrested there in February on suspicion of smuggling in explosives, according to police and U.S. military officials. Some Iraqi and U.S. officials say the workers intended to store bombs there. Others say they were plotting to attack the U.S. advisors stationed directly above them on the top floor.

Months after the arrests, it’s unclear whether the detainees are Sunni insurgents or followers of Muqtada Sadr, the anti-U.S. Shiite cleric whose portrait stares down from some office walls in a sign of his spreading influence in the ministry.

Partitions divide the building’s hallways, and gunmen guard the offices of deputy ministers. Senior police officials march up and down stairs rather than risk an elevator. They walk the halls flanked by bodyguards, wary of armed colleagues.

“What is in their hearts? You do not know who they belong to,” a senior officer said.

The factionalization of the ministry began quickly after Saddam Hussein’s fall. As with most Iraqi government departments, deputy ministers were appointed to represent each of the country’s main political parties. Deputies then distributed jobs among party stalwarts.

The initial winners were the Kurdish Democratic Party and the two Shiite parties, Dawa and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, which sponsors the Badr Organization. The Kurdish party is one of two factions that control Iraq’s northern provinces.

Sadr’s Al Mahdi militia started late in the patronage game but has made significant inroads, particularly among the guard force that surrounds the ministry compound.

07/30/07 “ICH” — — Huge numbers of Americans are disgusted with both the Republican and the Democratic parties right now, and are hungrily clamoring for a third alternative.

I know, I know – imagine that! What’s not to like about one party that stands for greed, murder and destruction, and another that stands by for greed, murder and destruction?

Nevertheless, somehow things are not going so swimmingly in the world of American partisan politics. The arch-Republican in the White House has job approval ratings in the mid-20s and sinking. The former Republican Congress, equally regressive, was tossed out on their ears, losing control of both houses last year. Not to be outdone, the Democrats who gained control of Congress as the expression of an angry public demanding change have spent the last seven months responding to that mandate by doing … well, virtually nothing. Now their standing in public opinion is slightly lower than Bush’s.

So it comes as no surprise that tens of millions of Americans are fed up with both parties and anxious to find something else that they can not only vote for in good conscience, but can actually win. I, too, have shared that dream, have voted third party, and have even volunteered for one during a presidential election campaign. Remember Barry Commoner? Remember his candidacy for president as the leader of the Citizen’s Party in 1980?

Yeah, well, I rest my case. Third party alternatives to hopelessly nihilistic Republicans, hopelessly equivocal Democrats, and the hopelessly self-serving lot of them make total sense except for one small problem. They can’t win.

Not literally, of course. Technically, a third party could win. It’s just that they don’t, and, short of some dramatic changes in the future, that will continue to be the case – that is, they won’t.

I don’t dispute the circular determinism in a statement like that, which is no doubt the first response in the minds of those advocating an alternative to the two bankrupt political parties now running (and ruining) the country. It’s quite correct to argue that continuing to believe that third parties can never win, and that a vote for one of them is therefore ‘wasted’, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s absolutely true that this is the first impediment to the success of a third party in America, and one which by definition must be resolved before any such party can possibly succeed. But what is too often left out of the discussion are the additional and quite enormous obstructions which are waiting right behind this first one to block the rise of a new party to power in America.

To begin with, there is the country’s ideological diversity. Compared to other democracies, ours has been historically pretty muted in this regard, though the range of popular ideological positions has increased somewhat in recent years, particularly as the Republican Party migrated from the center-right to the far right over the last few decades. But the comparative diversity of ideology in America relative to other countries is not really the point here.

What is the point is that the degree of diversity we do have is prohibitive to a successful third party arising in the United States. Unless one is contemplating the rise of multiple new parties to viability (and here we’ve transitioned from hope to fantasy, I’m afraid), the resulting difficulty posed by this ideological diversity is pretty plain to see. Lots of people, for example, are disgusted right now with George Bush and his co-conspirators in the mainstream of the Republican Party. Most loathe him from the left, thinking he is an arrogant fool who is destroying virtually all the political values they hold dear. But others loathe him with equal intensity from the right, largely for the crime of not destroying those values fast enough. Between the Harriet Miers nomination and the immigration bill debacle, no small fraction of the sixty-five percent of America currently reviling the president are cavemen even more regressive than Bush (which may seem unimaginable to progressives, but is quite literally the case). And in-between are those of the angry middle, who are seriously disgruntled, but are reluctant to lean very far in either ideological direction for a solution to their unhappiness.

What’s the relevance of all this? Well, try to imagine a third party with a presidential candidate that could be viable. Some of the current crop of disaffected voters would be happy to vote for Ralph Nader to replace Bush, but many others would equate that to living under Mao. Likewise, many of those wishing for a third party, complete with its own presidential candidate, would be delighted if someone like David Duke carried their standard. If it is imaginable for progressives that it could ever get worse than Bush/Cheney, this is certainly it. Then, of course, in the center you have the Ross Perot sort of voter, who is dissatisfied enough with existing choices to entertain alternatives, but not something ‘fringe’ in an ideological sense.

Put all this together and you have a sufficient critical mass for precisely nothing. Except perhaps maintenance of the status quo. Thus, one huge reason that the rise of an alternative third party in the United States is highly unlikely is the insufficient support for a single specific alternative, even when there is substantial general support among the electorate for some other option beyond the two parties. The idea is great in theory, and even more compelling when a significant cohort of the public says they want a third party to vote for. But unless you see redneck-pickup-truck-with-a-gunrack-driving-god-fearing-Georgia-crackers voting for Angela Davis, and unless you see long-haired-herbal-tea-drinking-Berkeley-lesbian-housing-rights-militants voting for John Bolton, forget about it. Maybe someone like Mike Bloomberg would get a healthy number votes if he ran in 2008, but the former Republican would get few from the left, nor would the Jewish mayor of New York City get many from the right.

So, after the vast bulk of voters have cast their lot once again with either Republicans or Democrats, the remaining dissenters – even if they are large in number – will dissipate their potential impact across a panoply of choices. Some will vote Green Party. Some Libertarian. Some Reform Party. Some the other Reform Party. Some Constitution, Natural Law, Populist, Taxpayers, Socialist or whatever other party is on the ballot. Even if all of the votes for these alternative parties in aggregate amounted to a numerical challenge to the Democrats and Republicans (and they are currently very far from doing so), the individual share of each of these various representations of different ideologies would completely dissipate any substantial impact, and likely any impact at all, like the air going out of a balloon.

Those are two monumental obstacles to the potential success of a third party in this country, but we still haven’t even discussed what amounts to the biggest – namely, our electoral system. The term refers to the mechanism by which votes at the ballot box are translated into parliamentary delegates (or members of Congress) in a representative democracy. That might sound painfully straightforward and obvious, but the methods available for doing this are anything but, sometimes producing (far more painfully) obscure and mathematically complicated schemes which voters sometimes don’t begin to understand. Don’t know whether you prefer the Borda count over Bucklin voting, the Condorcet method, Single Non Transferable Voting (affectionately known as SNTV), the Gallagher Index, the Sainte Laguë or d’Hondt methods (or perhaps you are all about the cloneproof Schwartz sequential dropping method, instead)? No worries, neither does just about anybody else. This confusion is not a good attribute for an electoral system to possess, but there are many other factors to consider as well, and polities are frequently experimenting trying to find the best system (none are perfect).

The question of electoral system choice may seem mundane in the extreme, but the consequences are enormous. Arguably, one of the factors which brought the Nazis to power was the flawed electoral system of the Weimar Republic, Germany’s first (and, obviously, tragically failed) experiment with democracy. But even if a given system doesn’t crash that badly, another of the consequences to the choice of electoral systems – and one which is highly relevant to the present discussion – is the number of viable political parties which they tend to produce.

All the multiple variations of electoral systems can be boiled down to essentially two types, plus a third and increasingly popular form, which is simply a hybrid of the first two. One of the two types is known as proportional representation (PR). Among other attributes, it can have a satisfying simplicity to it and, more importantly for our purposes, it tends to encourage the existence of multiple parties that are at least moderately prominent in a given system. That is because the basic principle, as the name implies, is that each party is awarded a number of legislators in parliament that is proportional to the vote it receives in a single polity-wide election. Therefore, even a small party which could only garner, say, six percent of the vote would nevertheless gain representation in the legislature. In fact, it would have six percent of the seats, which would be likely to mean, depending on the size of the body, more than thirty representatives (most lower houses of parliament – the ones with the most power – seem to be about 500-700 members in size). And, since there can be a certain (virtuous or vicious) cyclical quality to the growth or demise of political parties – such that having representation in parliament makes it easier to gain more of the same, and not having it makes it harder – this system is good news for small parties.

But there are also certain prominent downsides to PR, as well. First, progressives should remember that it wouldn’t only be lefty parties benefitting from this system in America. Where PR produces Green parties in parliament, it also produces the National Front. Second, so many parties usually means the necessity of coalitions to form governments, and that often means instability – coalitions break apart, and governments fall in-between elections, sometimes frequently. Too much instability and enter the Nazis, stage right. And, on top of all this, even PR systems have a tendency to produce two major parties alternating in government (usually in coalition with one or more smaller ones), anyhow, which somewhat defeats the purpose if our goal is get a third party to govern, not that America is anywhere remotely near converting to PR, anyhow. No one is even talking about it.

The main alternative electoral system to PR doesn’t tend to suffer from these maladies, but also doesn’t typically produce many small parties in government. This is the district model, and the way it works is to divide the polity into geographical districts and hold simultaneous elections in each. There are many variations possible on how to identify a winner from those separate mini-elections, but in the United States we use a plurality criterion. Do you have one more vote than anyone else in your district (even if you have far less than a majority, as would likely be the case in a district with multiple candidates)? Congratulations. You have a plurality, and you’re going to Congress.

It’s easy to see why such a system is hard on third parties. Let’s say there was a prominent third party in the United States – I’ll use my buddies the Greens, since they were kind enough to name their party after me! – and they won perhaps twenty-five percent of the vote nationwide, in a Congressional election cycle. A very respectable showing, no? But, of course, there is no national election, per se – only a bunch of simultaneous district contests (435 for the House representatives, every two years). Nevertheless, for the sake of exposition, let’s say that the Greens got 25 percent of the vote in every district. Let’s also say that in half the districts the Democrats get 40 percent of the vote to the Republicans’ 35 percent, and vice-versa in the other half. In a PR system, the Greens would be awarded 25 percent of the seats in the House for this showing. Under the district model, however, such as is practiced in the United States, their twenty-five percent of the votes translates into precisely zero seats in Congress (arguably disenfranchising one-fourth of the electorate).

(By the way, the presidential election works essentially the same way, and would even were we to eliminate the Electoral College. You can’t readily split the presidency like you can a parliament, so only one person can claim the prize, leaving voters for all the other candidates holding the bag, even if these losing voters represent a majority in total – as was the case, for example, in 1992, when Clinton won the presidency with only 43 percent of the popular vote.)

What does all the foregoing discussion ultimately mean? The bottom line here is this: One, we’re not likely to change electoral systems in America any time soon. Two, unless we do, it will continue to be enormously difficult for any third party to gain enough traction to achieve viability, let alone to govern. Three, even if we did opt for PR, there are serious downsides to that system as well (a hybrid seems to be the best alternative, in which half of the legislature is chosen using the district model, and the other half using PR – Germany, Italy and other democracies employ this method), not least of which would be the concurrent rise of some nasty gangs of parliamentary thugs on the rabid right who could make Cheney’s little GOP horror show seem tame by comparison. And, Four, even though it would likely provide representation in Congress, PR would still probably not bring a third party to power, except possibly as a junior partner in some sort of coalition government. Such a party would chronically occupy the role of a small fry swimming among big sharks, though it might have some improved chance over decades’ time to rise to greater prominence.

In short, for reasons involving ideological diversity, electoral mechanics and more, the third party path is not the solution to the present crisis of democracy in America, especially from the perspective of forwarding the progressive agenda.

If you’re dubious about the above theoretical analysis, feel free to try on the empirical one instead – it’s even more grim. Here are two statistics that more or less say it all. There are 535 members of Congress in America. Guess how many come from a third party. The answer is zero. Not a single one. Doesn’t that suggest rather infertile ground for such a plant to take root? But if you’re still not convinced, how about this, then: When was the last time the United States experienced the reshuffling of the party structure such that a new party rose to the level of sustained viability? The answer is about 160 years ago, with the birth of the Republican Party. That, in a country which has only had political parties for about 200 years. In other words, this country has had two primary parties vying for power for almost its entire existence, and the last time even the name of one of those changed (but not the number of them, which has essentially never changed) was 4/5’s of our history ago. I, for one, would argue that the ground for our multiparty plant has gone from infertile to downright toxic.

But here’s where the good news comes in. If the above description sounds like rather an inconceivable degree of stability for a political system spanning that many decades and myriad crises, that’s because it is. And it is this observation that brings us closer to the true remedy for our problems. How could such a rigid two-party system – of the same two parties, no less – survive against all the powerful changes, strains and pressures of the last century and a half? And these are considerable. Such a laundry list would have to include, minimally, the Civil War, Reconstruction, industrialization, immigration, expansion, imperialism, civil rights movements for minorities, women and gays, the national rise to global prominence, the Cold War, about seven major hot wars and two impeached presidents, just to get started. Why the incredible stability of the party system, then? The answer is that the American political system doesn’t tend to adopt new third parties, and it doesn’t implode from the pressures of frustrated change, because what it does instead is to accommodate various political aspirations within the malleable shells of the existing parties.

A look at either one of them amply demonstrates the point. The Republican Party was born as essentially the political vehicle for the anti-slavery movement, when the existing parties failed to provide an outlet for that rising sentiment. Could today’s regressive GOP amalgamation of robber-barons, religious troglodyte foot-soldiers and nearly outright racists possibly look any different from the party of Abe Lincoln? Indeed, the GOP of today would have been reactionary even in Lincoln’s time. So what happened? How could the party of emancipation become the party of kleptocracy? What happened was that the robber-barons stole it and morphed it, growing increasingly clever over time as to how to employ nationalism, jingoism, imperialism, racism, sexism, external bogeymen, general fear and cultural backwardness in order to line up sufficient votes, augmenting those of the richest two percent of the country, necessary to form a viable party. The examples of this are as endless as they are depressing, running from red scares to race-baiting and back again. More contemporaneously, suffice it to say that not for nothing did Karl Rove arrange to place gay marriage initiatives on the ballot in eleven states for election day 2004. (My personal fantasy is to find every fool who voted for one of those but now hates Bush and shake them vigorously by the shoulders, yelling in their faces, “Are you happy now? Isn’t it great that there won’t be any gay marriages in our crumbling excuse for a country?”)

Ahem. Uh, where was I? (Please stop me before I fantasize again.) Ah, yes – morphing parties. Similar to the GOP experience, it was not so long ago that the main component of the Democratic Party was the Solid South of white voters below the Mason-Dixon line. It was FDR who turned the party into a much broader coalition that came to include the working class, union members, Jews, Catholics, intellectuals, liberals, urban-dwellers, immigrant communities and more, as well as the white South. It was LBJ (fully knowingly, and with lots of help from the likes of Nixon, Reagan, Atwater, Rove, Bush I, Bush II and the rest) who alienated white racists, both North and South, by pursuing various civil rights agendas, principally concerning race.

In short, both parties look a lot different today than they once did, and that happened largely through the efforts of activists seeking to achieve precisely that end. And this, it seems to me, remains the only viable solution for the progressive community today – not a continuing hopeless quest for a prominent third party that has a very low probability of materializing, especially given the institutional and ideological obstacles described above.

What progressives need to do today is what regressives began doing forty years ago. We need to seize the party closest to our politics and take control of it, marginalizing DLC types like Clinton or Lieberman into irrelevance, just like the old Gerry Ford centrist wing of the Republican Party was shoved aside by the radical right. We must become the parasites that infect the host until we eventually take it over completely.

It would be lovely if there was an alternative, but to my mind the above concepts and historical precedent amply demonstrate the improbability of a third party rising to power. Moreover, even if one did eventually arise, in the meantime we continue to risk producing the Nader 2000 effect – such that following our best instincts splits the left-of-regressive vote and succeeds only in empowering the worst alternatives. (For example, imagine a race in 2008 between Clinton and Giuliani, with Gore running as the nominee of the Green Party. Clinton and Gore would collectively receive far more votes than would Giuliani, but Giuliani would be the next president, even without the Electoral College effect.)

And let’s not kid ourselves, way too many Americans presently worry if the Democratic Party is too liberal to govern, not whether it can become progressive enough. A large part of that has to do with the complete collapse over the last decades of the progressive message and especially the Party, in the arena of public debate. The American public is going to have to be deprogrammed and reprogrammed after decades of regressive Moonyism (including by the Moonies themselves). That is a separate issue, albeit one which is much better addressed by an ideology that has the benefit of a solid institutional platform from which to operate. But the point is that a third party to the left of the Democrats would not at present be anything like an easy sell. Far easier to win by turning one of the only two alternatives available to voters into a progressive party (especially when the other one has become reprehensible in the extreme).

All of which leaves two questions. First, can the Democratic Party serve that function, or is it hopelessly lost, a permanent captive to its corporate masters? I know of no evidence whatsoever that Paul Wellstone or Bernie Sanders (an independent who caucuses with the Democrats and an avowed socialist, for chrissakes) have been ostracized by party elites or subjected to attempts made either to force a change to their politics or to drum them out of the party. Ditto Barney Frank, Dennis Kucinich, Maxine Waters, John Conyers (or, should I say, the Congressman formerly known as John Conyers), or Henry Waxman. Howard Dean was something of a threat to the status quo party hacks in 2004, it’s true, but my guess is that that was mostly because it wasn’t yet hip at that time to be anti-war, and they feared that a Dean candidacy would take down the whole party with it (which, no doubt, must be why they brought in a real fighter like John Kerry to go up against Rove and the GOP). Anyhow, nowadays Dean is chairing the damn thing, so their resistance to him can’t have been that intense.

All of which suggests to me that the party is ours for the taking if we want it. Given enough Wellstones, we can own this thing and shape it into a force for true progressive change. And if you still require additional evidence that it can be done, just remember that it has been done – twice already (or even three times if we count some of Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy ideas). Both the New Deal in the Thirties and then the Great Society in the Sixties were periods of substantial and meaningful progressive flowering in American government, even if they weren’t ultimately everything we might have wanted them to become (and let’s not forget that we are dealing here with the most politically backwards populace amongst all the Western democracies). Moreover, and again following on those models, the ascension of a relatively progressive president such as perhaps Al Gore could help expedite this process from the top down.

But then comes the second question, could a progressive Democratic Party win? Again, it seems to me that both history, contemporary conditions and loads of polling data provide a pretty compelling affirmative answer. That it has happened twice suggests that it is certainly possible. That polling data consistently demonstrate the public tending to favor progressive positions on almost every issue put before them, despite decades of unanswered regressive brainwashing, is further argument that this is possible. Finally, Americans are growing increasingly anxious today as their prosperity, their empire, and their sense of security are diminishing right before their very eyes. These conditions are likely to grow more, not less, acute, particularly as Baby Boomers transition from being net contributors to the welfare state system back to being net recipients (never underestimate the depth or the power of Boomer selfishness!).

Such insecurity-inducing scenarios radicalize politics, if that’s not too strong a term, pushing the electorate either to the right or the left. One of those alternatives has just recently been tried. Its chief exemplar now has Watergate-level job approval ratings, which will only get considerably worse in the ensuing months. It is true that the public could theoretically be persuaded to turn further still to the right, but you don’t much hear those voices out there clamoring for that direction amongst the political class. Even the few remaining droolers like Bill Kristol who advocate for something idiotic like bringing Bushism to Iran now that it has demonstrated its wonderful virtues in Iraq and Afghanistan are increasingly being sneered at like the laughable but still dangerous morons they are. The right-wing experiment in American politics is a complete and utter failure, of course, but more importantly it is increasingly recognized as such. It has totally come a cropper in terms of public opinion. This is 1932 all over again. No more Hoover, no more Bush. The country began its retreat from this horror show in 2006, and would have started even earlier had not John Kerry been such an abysmal presidential candidate. It is now turning decisively to an alternative somewhere to the left of the current GOP, as it more or less must. The only question (further national security ‘emergencies’ aside, of course), is what will be there for it to turn to, and how far down that path we go from here.

Personally, I don’t give a damn about the Democratic Party (which for decades has almost never failed to disappoint anyone possessing any progressive expectations for it), or any other party. In fact, I share many of the concerns about the general pernicious effects of partisanship that the Founders held – though I also recognize that, as a practical matter, it’s pretty hard to envision doing national politics in a polity of 300 million people (and politically lazy ones, at that) without the organizing benefits and programmatic shorthand that parties bring to the table. While I don’t care about parties, what I do care about are policies. Do we have healthcare, or not? Do we rescue people after a hurricane and flood devastate their city, or not? Do we act like an predatory empire, or not? If the Democrats can deliver the right policies, then fine. If we need the Greens to do the job instead, hey, that’s groovy too. If we have to import SWAPO from southern Africa to get it done, then whatever. Heck, I’d even vote Republican (gulp) if they somehow miraculously managed to stumble into some good politics (though that’s probably about as likely as Dick Cheney volunteering to become a soldier). I could care less about the label and the organization, as long as it delivers progressive policies for the country.

As a practical matter, though, a third party – let alone a viable leftist third party – is extremely unlikely to develop for all the theoretical and historical reasons outlined above. Our mission, therefore, should be to capture the Democratic Party and lead it toward a series of increasingly progressive (and already publicly popular) legislative accomplishments, starting with ending the war and providing universal national healthcare coverage. It won’t be that hard to do, and we can thank the Dark Side in part for creating the best conditions in half a century for this opportunity (just the same, though, I think I’ll pass on sending a nice note of gratitude to Mr. Rove). After all, it’s not exactly like avoiding unnecessary wars, providing healthcare and quality education for all, pursuing economic justice, or saving our little planetary spaceship from the threat of global warming are such radical ideas that would be hard to sell.

I share the sentiment of many in the progressive community that the Democratic Party is, with a few notable exceptions, a cesspool of ambitious sell-outs, ready to mortgage any policy position or principle in service to their own petty personal gratifications. It would be wonderful, for that reason, if we could just nuke the thing and move on to something else. Wonderful, but not possible.

Fortunately, there is another alternative. I say we hijack it instead.

Eight former Black Panthers are currently in prison in California on charges related to the 1971 killing of a San Francisco police officer. Similar charges were thrown out back in 1975 after it was determined that the evidence used to indict the men was extracted by police torture. Two of the men have been held as political prisoners the past thirty years in New York State prisons, but the other six have been living regular lives, working and raising families. A ninth man is still being sought by the police.

These men, known collectively as the San Francisco 8 (SF 8) are being held on $3 million bail each. This bail is considered excessive and the men, their legal team and their supporters are trying to get it reduced so that those members of the SF 8 who are not currently serving time can go home during the upcoming legal proceedings. The struggle to gain these men’s freedom is gaining but will require much more public support. In a manner similar to the campaign waged in 1971-1972 to free Angela Davis and the ongoing campaign to free Mumia Abu Jamal, this campaign must become a widespread and international campaign.

As part of this growing effort, several supporters of the SF 8 spoke on a panel at the US Social Forum in Atlanta, Georgia in June 2007. Among the speakers were former US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and former Panther Kathleen Cleaver. Ms. Cleaver’s remarks were addressed to the mostly young audience at the forum and provided them with a historical overview of the Black Panther Party. In addition, she talked about the US government’s counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO and how the Panthers and other leftist popular organizations organized despite the police harassment and attacks. In addition, she spoke about the differences between the 1960s/1970s and now. Most importantly, she spoke about community and the need to understand the nature of how the State has been very successful in criminalizing groups and people who organize against it. To fight this phenomenon, Cleaver emphasized the need to organize and maintain popular support beyond the radical community.

When she introduced Ms. McKinney, she spoke to McKinney’s attempts to get Congress to investigate the COINTELPTO program.

In order to gather some information about the current status of the case, I recently got in touch with Claude Marks- a member of the Freedom Archives and one of the main organizers of the Free the SF 8 Defense Committee. Our exchange follows.

Ron: Hi Claude. The last time I checked in with you , most of the SF 8 had just been arrested and the authorities were working on getting the others extradited to California. Can you update the readers to where the case is now? Are the men still in jail? What is their bail?

Claude: Yes, they remain in jail and the bail is currently set at $3 million each. August 6 is when hearings on bail reduction continue – starting with Ray Boudreaux and Richard O’Neal. Arguments based on their responsible roles in their communities and to their families and countering the notion that they are flight risks, will be made. In the case of Ray Boudreaux, it is evident from the video “Legacy…” that he was fully aware of being targeted and yet, voluntarily made all of his appearances before the 2005 grand jury. Their intent is to fight the unjust charges and win!

The hope is that bail will be reduced and will be set at amounts obtainable through securing property (by California law at twice the value of the bail amount) allowing their defense to continue with them in the streets and with their families.

Ron:I know this is conjecture, but why do you think the state has set the bail so high? What are they afraid of?

Claude:I think the bail is set high as part of the state’s criminalization of them – the same reason they are brought into the public courtroom in chains and shackles.

Ron: How has the response of the public been–in San Francisco? How about the rest of the country? The world?

Claude: Support is growing tremendously – as people find out about the case they are outraged that such enormous resources are being expended to prosecute these elder of the black community. National and now international showings of “Legacy…” along with our efforts to speak widely about the case are responsible for a much broader movement being built.

Ron: Most observers agree that this case is (as the SF 8 said in their May 19, 2007 statement) “a continuation of COINTELPRO.” Can you explain how and why this is so?

Claude: The prosecution is designed to re-criminalize resistance to a repressive and racist state. The conditions that led to demands for self-determination and an end to police & government violence against the black community, that led to the ten-point platform of the Black Panther Party and the creation of community programs, still exist. The fact that more black people are in prison than in higher education, that poverty levels are unrivaled, that the future for black and brown children is so bleak makes the politics of these men and the movements they helped lead even more urgent today. The state wants to warn people that resistance to colonialism and empire is futile or comes at a very high price.

COINTELPRO’s goals and practice are not only much the same under Homeland Security and The Patriot Act – but are unencumbered by a political climate that took outrage at violations of civil and human rights in the 1970s when a Congressional investigation declared illegal the FBI led program. Today, the government, state and federal, act with impunity as long as they use the ‘T’ word. The evidence in this case – still based on the torture and brutality of police interrogators against some of these men – is now being put forth as acceptable – torture having been re-defined and also justified in the Guantanamos and Abu Ghraibs and Atticas…and the jails of New Orleans.Ron: Also, what do you all make of the recent release of the CIA documents (the so-called Family jewels)? I read a writer somewhere making the point that the release was timed to turn our attention away from the current doings of the government and its secret police. What’s your take on that?

Claude: The current regime is worse, and feeling emboldened by numbed public opinion. It is up to us to marshal the community outrage and build a movement that rejects the sense of government impunity – a movement that forces the dropping of these charges and a release of these 8 men – including the long overdue release of Jalil Muntaqim and Herman Bell who are parole eligible and have lived more than half their lives in prison behind COINTELPRO prosecutions.

Ron: In recent months, several environmental activists have been jailed for their supposed involvement in arson and other such actions against various corporate and research facilities. Without getting into the logic behind these actions and their effect, do you believe the government’s pursuit and prosecution of these activists is related at all to the government’s insistence on prosecuting the SF 8?

Claude: The so-called justice department wants to smash any and all dissent and has for years targeted the environmental and animal rights movements to make their resistance costly. The sentencing of Jeff ‘Free’ Luers to almost 28 years for property crimes by an Oregon Judge who stated that Free was being made an example to discourage the building of a movement was the opening parry of the ‘Green Scare.’ Yes, this is part of creating a chilling effect on dissent and a repressive atmosphere that selectively labels people terrorists to suit the goals of an extreme right-wing agenda.

Ron: These folks have received some pretty stiff penalties because the prosecution has been able to portray them as “terrorists.” What do you think this means in the long term for the SF 8 and for political activism of any sort?

Claude: The SF 8 will prevail because the legal case is weak and the political movement will expose the torture-induced statements and build sizeable community-based outrage at these prosecutions.

Ron: Back to the SF 8. When is the next bail reduction hearing? After that, what’s next?

Claude: Bail hearings resume August 6. Other motions will address matters like the 30+ year delay when there is no new evidence, lost evidence, as well as the unnecessary chaining and shackling of these men in court.

Ron: How can the readers support the defense? Are there buttons and bumperstickers? What about speaking engagements? And personal support for the brothers in jail?

Claude: For a list of what you can do to stay informed and contribute to building a support movement in your community check out this site

Congressional leaders are calling for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate possible perjury charges against Alberto Gonzales. As we saw during the Watergate scandal, the executive branch cannot be counted on to investigate itself.

Watergate led to the enactment of the Ethics in Government Act. Three years after Richard Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment, President Jimmy Carter asked Congress to pass a law authorizing the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate and prosecute unlawful acts by high government officials. The bill empowered the attorney general to conduct a preliminary 90-day investigation when serious allegations arose involving a high government official. President Carter, who signed the bill in 1978, declared, “I believe that this act will help to restore confidence in the integrity of our government.”

Under the act, the attorney general could drop the investigation if he determined it was unsupported by the evidence. But if he found some merit to the charges, he was required to apply to a three-judge panel of federal court judges who would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate, prosecute, and issue a report.

The referral clause of the independent counsel statute provided, “An independent counsel shall advise the House of Representatives of any substantial and credible information which such independent counsel receives, in carrying out the independent counsel’s responsibilities under this chapter, that may constitute grounds for an impeachment.” But Congress, reacting to Kenneth Starr’s witch hunt which led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment, allowed the independent counsel statute to expire by its own terms in 1999.

With the death of the independent counsel statute, the pendulum had swung back. By failing to renew the act, Congress returned the investigation of high government officials to pre-Watergate policies. Once again, the power to appoint an independent counsel would rest with the executive branch, that is, the attorney general. The Department of Justice drafted a set of regulations to guide future investigations.

Now the attorney general, not a three-judge panel, has the authority to appoint and remove special counsel to investigate top government officials. He exercises power over indictments and other prosecutorial actions, and the special counsel remains accountable to the attorney general. He can block “any investigative or prosecutorial step” he deems “inappropriate or unwarranted.”

Justice Department regulations call for the appointment of an outside special counsel when:

(1) a criminal investigation of a person or matter is warranted,

(2) the investigation or prosecution of that person or matter by a United States Attorney’s Office or litigating division of the Department of Justice would present a conflict of interest for the Department, and

(3) under the circumstances it would be in the public interest to appoint an outside Special Counsel to assume responsibility for the matter. When these three conditions are satisfied, the attorney general must select a special counsel from outside the government. (28 C.F.R. 600.1, 600.3 (2007).)

In light of material inconsistencies in Alberto Gonzales’s testimony before Congress, a criminal investigation is warranted. Gonzales, who is suspected of committing perjury,has a conflict of interest. The public interest requires that the highest prosecutor in the land be brought to justice.

Congress should appoint a permanent special counsel to investigate and advise Congress about misconduct by high government officials, beginning with Alberto Gonzales. That procedure should lead the House Judiciary Committee to initiate impeachment proceedings against Gonzales.

On July 23, Cindy Sheehan, Ray McGovern and I met with U.S. Rep. John Conyers about the issue of impeachment. We delivered a petition for impeachment with one million American signatures. While we met, 400 activists waited in the halls outside of his office along with a hoard of media to find out what the outcome of the meeting would be. The meeting was a very significant moment for the progressive movement from a historical standpoint. The movement for impeachment and the immediate reactions to why John Conyers was publicly targeted on this issue reflect how race continues to be, as my dear friend Bill Fletcher says, the tripwire for the progressive movement.

Rep. Conyers is a great mentor to me and my respect for him is unquestionable. He has been fighting for peace and justice and civil rights for decades inside and outside of Congress. He is a man for the people and for America. So, it was a truly disappointing moment on Monday, when we realized – as mentor and mentee – that we do not agree on his role as the Chairman of the U.S. House Judiciary committee to uphold our constitution by holding our President and Vice President accountable for their impeachable offensives.

After concluding our meeting I stepped into the hallway with Cindy Sheehan and Ray McGovern to inform the crowd that he refused to put impeachment back on the table. We then returned to his office and sat down, refusing to leave until Capitol Police arrested us.

Since Monday, our action has been criticized on two fronts. First, by the tedious “maintain the Democratic party line no matter what” folks who think that we should wait Bush out until November 2008 and get back at him by voting in a Democrat for President. Second, by folks who have interpreted our targeting of Rep. Conyers, a deeply respected African-American leader in Congress, as an attack that is fundamentally racist by the White leftists of the anti-war movement.

To uncritical supporters of the Democratic Party, I say this is not a time for partisan politics. To use the American people’s frustration with Bush as political leverage in the 2008 elections, and to ignore the constitutional responsibility the legislative branch has to hold the executive branch accountable through the impeachment process, flies in the face of our democracy. People are dying in Iraq because of Bush’s lies; people are being tortured in Guantanamo because of Bush’s disregard for the Constitution and international law; and the American people are loosing faith in our democracy. But, Congress doesn’t get that, and that is why their current approval rating is lower than Bush’s.

To my African-American counterparts who take issue with the White progressive anti-war movement, I understand your criticism of our recent action in Mr. Conyers office, but I do not agree. It was extremely difficult to challenge a man that means so much to African-Americans, but impeaching Bush is critical to the future of our country. We cannot let the precedent stand that Bush has established, which severely oversteps the bounds of executive power. We cannot send the message that such actions will not go unpunished, or at least unchecked.

Impeachment begins in the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary, which Rep. John Conyers chairs. He is in the position to begin the impeachment process or keep it from happening, and no other human being is in that position. In addition, Rep. Conyers is the recognized authority on Capitol Hill both on impeachment and on the impeachable offenses of Vice President Cheney and President Bush. He and his staff literally wrote the book on them before the Democrats won the majority last November: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/constitutionincrisis.

Moreover, the action on Monday was not a first resort – it was a last resort. There is no other recourse against Bush for the American people after impeachment, and if Rep. Conyers does not put forth impeachment then we have no recourse and the Democrats will have failed us.

This moment is not about race, it is not about John Conyers, and it is much bigger than the divides within our movements. This moment is about our future as a country, because humanity is at stake. The Bush administration’s hunger for war has caused so much instability in our world that we face a state of permanent wars.

The challenge we face as activists and leaders is how can we possibly bring an end to this madness when the Democrats in power are not with us? We need a broad-based movement that can hold our elected officials accountable and to create such a movement we need to address our internal divides. The reason many African-Americans have interpreted our action against Rep. Conyers as racial betrayal goes deep into the tradition of the progressive movement. How we can begin to address this is something I will discuss in an upcoming article.

In the meantime, for the sake of our country and our world, let us all work to impeach Bush and Cheney now.

The international tragedy of not learning history’s lessons can be monumental. In the case of the Iraq war the result of not heeding the past is perhaps the worst it has been in centuries.

One wonders what led the U.S. and the world to its current situation. What caused a nation once respected as a beacon of peace and freedom (whether or not that reputation was ever deserved) to descend into the immorality of a pre-emptive strike, another overthrow of a sovereign government and finally the chaos of monitoring a bloody civil war in Iraq?

As is so often the case, the answers can be found in history, a history that is often ignored amid imperial designs masquerading as paranoid thoughts of dire threats to the American way of life.

In the June 1985 issue of ‘Monthly Review’ the following was stated: “Are we going to take the position that anti-Communism justifies anything, including colonialism, interference in the affairs of other countries, and aggression? That way, let us be perfectly clear about it, lies war and more war leading ultimately to full-scale national disaster.”

Today the communist bugaboo, so effectively used by several Cold War presidents, is passé; the former Soviet Union is struggling with severe economic issues and has long since ceased to be a world leader. So a new enemy had to be invented. With Iraq sitting on much of the world’s oil supplies, and a U.S. president who, along with much of his administration, has a long history of involvement in the oil industry, radical Islam is the new big bad wolf. The attacks on the U.S. on September 11, 2001 enabled this newest monster to take a very tangible form for the American public, which threw itself behind Mr. Bush as he marched soldiers off to Afghanistan to find the perpetrator of that disaster, overthrow the repressive Taliban that was said to be hiding Osama bin Laden and oh, by the way, allow Union Oil of California to build a pipeline through the country, something the Taliban had forbidden.

The association with radical Islam was easily transferable from Afghanistan to Iraq. On February 5, 2005, then Secretary of State Colin Powell solemnly told the world from the podium of the United Nations that Iraq had not accounted for its stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons. “We have evidence these weapons existed,” said he. “What we don’t have is evidence from Iraq that they have been destroyed or where they are.”

He spoke of the nerve gas VX, stating darkly that a single drop could kill a person. That U.N. inspectors were searching the country, and receiving cooperation from Saddam Hussein as they did so, was not sufficient for Mr. Powell and his boss, Mr. Bush. The inspectors were ordered out of the country by the United States, and 130,000 American soldiers invaded, unleashing unprecedented terror upon the Iraqi people.

So Mr. Bush, a complete stranger to combat and war himself, pulled the strings, forcing these dedicated Americans unnecessarily into harm’s way. Two months later he declared victory. Yet, inexplicably, the war did not end; thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died since he stood in full uniform (which he, of course, never donned in actual battle) on the deck of the aircraft carrier the Abraham Lincoln. Four years later, with ‘victory’ both undefined and certainly unachieved by whatever definition one may want to ascribe to it, he decided to escalate the war.

As he watches for the results of his ‘surge,’ the president has either forgotten, or perhaps never learned, a vital lesson, one journalist James Cameron succinctly described regarding Vietnam. “A nation of peasants and manual workers who might have felt restive or dissatisfied under the stress of totalitarian conditions had been obliged to forget all their differences in the common sense of resistance and self-defense. From the moment the United States dropped its first bomb on the North of Vietnam, she welded the nation together unshakably.”

Certainly, this is not entirely true of Iraq, but the parallel is striking. The Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds have not forgotten their centuries-old differences, but have united in one area: their hatred for and resistance to the U.S. occupation of their country. The America presence in their country only distracts them from any possible reconciliation with each other. This reconciliation will take years to achieve, but U.S. soldiers patrolling the streets and monitoring the actions of Iraqi citizens, often killing them as they do so, will only prolong the already painful process. The beginning of the end of the war will only be achieved when the last U.S. soldier leaves.

When, one wonders, will that be? The New York Times reported that the Bush Administration foresees that U.S. soldiers will remain in Iraq at least until 2009. The current plan, developed by General David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker includes the following: “The coalition, in partnership with the government of Iraq, employs integrated political, security, economic and diplomatic means, to help the people of Iraq achieve sustainable security by the summer of 2009.” The term ‘coalition,’ of course, is a euphemism for ‘American military,’ since the American military presence in Iraq has been by far the overwhelming majority. In June of 2007 the U.S. had approximately 166,000 soldiers stationed in Iraq; the next largest contingent, numbering approximately 5,500, was from Great Britain.

So current U.S. government plans are to maintain the occupation of Iraq until at least 2009. And since the American presence in Iraq only perpetuates the violence there, one can easily predict that that date will be pushed out again and again, until such time that the American public is so fed up with the continuing waste of American lives that it finally demands an end. It took years for that to occur during the Vietnam era; one can only hope that the American public has learned the lessons the current administration has missed, and will insist on U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq sooner, rather than later.

Mankind is blindly marching straight towards the edge of the cliff. Our so-called leaders are busy filling their pockets with gold and making sure they are first in line, that they can yell louder and grab faster than all the rest of us and that they can reach farther into whatever we’re heading for. The fact that it’s a morass and that it’s going to suck us all up, nobody seems to care about.

Every one of the big guys wants to be the first one to cross the line at the goal. What goal? Total destruction, but that is not yet clear to anybody. Or so it seems. Let the show go on. Let’s kill more innocent people, let’s buy up competing corporations, let’s lead the pack of thieves in money speculation, let’s bankrupt more small companies, let’s suck up the retirement savings of the little people, let’s fool the idiots who think we’re here to govern the world. We are here to take care of ourselves and our bank accounts. Who cares about the world? Who cares about tomorrow?

All the politicians and corporate leaders of the world seem to be set on exhausting the planet, killing off all the superfluous people and having a party when it’s all over. Who is leading the pack? Well, Cheney & Co., clearly. Is there anybody left who can put the brakes on that clique? When they are busy destroying the world, when they happily plan to nuke Iran, when they start bombing the border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan, when they let the Palestinians kill each other off and yell hooray on the sidelines, is there anybody left who will stop Cheney & Co.? They are so busy dancing a victory dance because the oil and arms industries are making huge profits that they don’t even see how the planet is burning. Corporate profits are soaring, so to hell with the dollar that’s going down. It’s good for exports and who cares if we owe trillions in debt to China and Japan? We don’t intend to pay it back anyway.

The poor people are dying of AIDS and starvation. Who cares as long as the pharmaceutical industry is making a fortune? Who cares if millions of children are without health insurance? They are the children of the poor and they are not good for anything anyway.

Let the little people lose their life’s savings in the big bankruptcies, the big money holders always save themselves and their fortunes. What matters is that business goes on. We can always fool enough people into believing that such and such stock is safe. When the bottom falls out, the CEOs will already be gone with their package intact and they’ll pick up the lead somewhere else where people can be fooled into investing. As long as there is a war on, corporate profits are safe.

Iraq is in our way for taking over the world. There are more countries in the way, but let’s take one at a time. Let’s first invade and take over Iraq. Oh damn, Iraq is not going too well. Well, let the bastards kill each other off and then we’ll take over when things calm down. They’ll sort things out between themselves and we’ll play ball with the winners after the civil war is over. In the meantime, let’s nuke Iran. We can’t have an Islam world power reaching from Morocco to Indonesia.

September 11 was a godsend. What would we have done if we hadn’t been able to scare the people into paralysis and dumbness? What would we have done if it hadn’t been for Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden? There seems to be clear evidence that we are secretly supporting Al Qaeda, making sure they will not disappear. No surprise. And as for bin Laden, we have to go on pretending he’s still alive so we have a precise target in our war on terror. It’s lies and propaganda that keep the world going. It’s what we say that matters, not what we do. We can make the imbeciles believe anything we want them to believe. Repeat it often enough and it becomes the truth. We create our own reality.

If the Dems pick up some backbone and begin to realize that resistance to a dictatorship is possible, we’ll have to arrange for a repeat of the attack on the homeland. It’s essential that the executive should not in any way be limited in his power. What Cheney says stands, George will always go along and Rove is around to oil the wheels and keep the spin machine going.

The world has to see that it doesn’t serve any purpose to isolate the U.S. We don’t need the rest of the world. We are the leaders, we run the show, we decide how the Middle East is supposed to be cut up and reshaped.

Oh they say China is coming on big. That’s a lot of bull. China has no international standing and they are too heavily weighed down by poverty among their own people. After all, China is not even a civilized nation. No, there is nobody who can ever stand a chance to surpass America, the United States of America. America is the leader of the world and we have made sure that the world knows. One head of government after the other is coming on board the U.S. ship of State. Europe is veering to the right and the leaders are more and more interested in being on good terms with the giant in the west.

Besides, it’s Big Money that’s running the world and all we have to do is make sure that the big corporations are centered around us. Europe is playing our game once again and the rest of the world is sufficiently in awe of our military and financial power to want to be on good terms with us. Look at India. They were more than happy to clinch the deal about nuclear power in March 2006. That was a clever move, whoever thought of it. And as for Africa, it’s being robbed by the IMF and the World Bank and there is no way African states can ever get in our way to power. Besides, the people are dying of AIDS and that’s good riddance of useless people who are just overcrowding the planet.

We’ll just get a major stake in the oil in the Middle East and the world is ours. Israel will help us take care of Syria and Lebanon, and Palestine will never go along with our requirements for a peaceful solution with Israel so they are out of harm’s way. The Palestinians will go on self-destroying and nobody even knows that we helped kindle the fire. Smart move there. And now that we’ve poured fuel on the civil war in Iraq, they will soon self-destroy as well. As long as the different branches of Islam can’t stop the infighting, we can safely count on being the winners in the end.

They say the United States is a wounded beast. Just wait and see what we can accomplish. Nobody can beat us. We have our own people eating out of our hand since they’ve been told and retold for centuries that we’re the best, we’re the greatest, the most moral, we’re God’s chosen people! America, the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. They would never dare tear that myth apart. Patriotism and religion keep them going.

Ok, so where do we go from here? We’ll nuke Iran and then we’ll see the Iranians toe the line that we set out for them. Who ever said the United States was a loser? Just wait and see.

After four years of war, American Marines and soldiers have become socialized to atrocity. The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very little killing.

All troops, when they occupy and battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are placed in “atrocity producing situations.”

In this environment, surrounded by a hostile population, simple acts such as going to a store to buy a can of Coke means you can be killed. This constant fear and stress pushes troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. This hostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive, shadowy and hard to find.

The rage soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed over time to innocent civilians who are seen to support the insurgents. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral leap. It is a leap from killing — the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm — to murder — the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you. The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very little killing.

After four years of war, American Marines and soldiers have become socialized to atrocity. The American killing project is not described in these terms to a distant public. The politicians still speak in the abstract terms of glory, honor, and heroism, in the necessity of improving the world, in lofty phrases of political and spiritual renewal. Those who kill large numbers of people always claim it as a virtue. The campaign to rid the world of terror is expressed with this rhetoric, as if once all terrorists are destroyed evil itself will vanish.

The reality behind the myth, however, is very different. The reality and the ideal clash when soldiers and Marines return home, alienating these combat veterans from the world around them, a world that still dines out on the myth of war and the virtues of the nation. But slowly returning veterans are giving us a new narrative of the war — one that exposes the vast enterprise of industrial slaughter unleashed in Iraq for a lie and sustained because of wounded national pride and willful ignorance. “This unit sets up this traffic control point and this 18 year old kid is on top of an armored Humvee with a .50 caliber machine gun,” remembered Geoffrey Millard who served in Tikrit with the 42nd Infantry Division. “And this car speeds at him pretty quick and he makes a split second decision that that’s a suicide bomber, and he presses the butterfly trigger and puts 200 rounds in less than a minute into this vehicle. It killed the mother, a father and two kids. The boy was aged four and the daughter was aged three.”

“And they briefed this to the general,” Millard said, “and they briefed it gruesome. I mean, they had pictures. They briefed it to him. And this colonel turns around to this full division staff and says, ‘if these fucking Hadjis learned to drive, this shit wouldn’t happen.'”

Those who come back from war, like Millard and tens of thousands of other veterans, suffer not only delayed reactions to stress, but a crisis of faith. The God they knew, or thought they knew, failed them. The church or the synagogue or the mosque, which promised redemption by serving God and country, did not prepare them for the betrayal of this civic religion, for the capacity we all have for human atrocity, for the lies and myths used to mask the reality of war. War is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics and of troops by politicians. This bitter knowledge of betrayal has seeped into the ranks of American troops.

It has unleashed a new wave of embittered veterans not seen since the Vietnam War. It has made it possible for us to begin, again, to see war’s death mask.

“And then, you know, my sort of sentiment of what the fuck are we doing, that I felt that way in Iraq,” said Sergeant Ben Flanders, who estimated that he ran hundreds of convoys in Iraq. “It’s the sort of insanity of it and the fact that it reduces it. Well, I think war does anyway, but I felt like there was this enormous reduction in my compassion for people, the only thing that wound up mattering is myself and the guys that I was with. And everybody else be damned, whether you are an Iraqi, I’m sorry, I’m sorry you live here, I’m sorry this is a terrible situation, and I’m sorry that you have to deal with all of, you know, army vehicles running around and shooting, and these insurgents and all this stuff.

It’s remarkably common for a grandson to take up his grandfather’s major project. This occurred to me when I read recently of Thor Heyerdahl’s grandson taking up his mission to cross the Pacific on a raft. But what really struck me was the BBC story aired on July 23rd documenting President George W. Bush’s grandfather’s involvement in a 1933 plot to overthrow the U.S. government and install a fascist dictatorship. I knew the story, but had not considered the possibility that the grandson was trying to accomplish what his grandfather had failed to achieve.

Prescott Sheldon Bush (1895 to 1972) attended Yale University and joined the secret society known as Skull and Bones. Prescott is widely reported to have stolen the skull of Native American leader Geronimo. As far as I know, this has not actually been confirmed. In fact, Prescott seems to have had a habit of making things up. He sent letters home from World War I claiming he’d received medals for heroism. After the letters were printed in newspapers, he had to retract his claims.

If this does not yet sound like the life of a George W. Bush ancestor, try this on for size: Prescott Bush’s early business efforts tended to fail. He married the daughter of a very rich man named George Herbert Walker (the guy with the compound at Kennebunkport, Maine, that now belongs to the Bush family, and the origin of Dubya’s middle initial). Walker installed Prescott Bush as an executive in Thyssen and Flick. From then on, Prescott’s business dealings went better, and he entered politics.

Now, the name Thyssen comes from a German named Fritz Thyssen, major financial backer of the rise of Adolph Hitler. Thyssen was referred to in the New York Herald-Tribune as “Hitler’s Angel.” During the 1930s and early 1940s, and even as late as 1951, Prescott Bush was involved in business dealings with Thyssen, and was inevitably aware of both Thyssen’s political activities and the fact that the companies involved were financially benefiting the nation of Germany. In addition, the companies Prescott Bush profited from included one engaged in mining operations in Poland using slave labor from Auschwitz. Two former slave laborers have sued the U.S. government and the heirs of Prescott Bush for $40 billion.

Until the United States entered World War II it was legal for Americans to do business with Germany, but in late 1942 Prescott Bush’s businesses interests were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Among those businesses involved was the Hamburg America Lines, for which Prescott Bush served as a manager. A Congressional committee, in a report called the McCormack-Dickstein Report, found that Hamburg America Lines had offered free passage to Germany for journalists willing to write favorably about the Nazis, and had brought Nazi sympathizers to America. (Is this starting to remind anyone of our current president’s relationship to the freedom of the press?)

The McCormack-Dickstein Committee was established to investigate a homegrown American fascist plot hatched in 1933. Here’s how the BBC promoted its recent story:

“Document uncovers details of a planned coup in the USA in 1933 by right-wing American businessmen. The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell Hse & George Bush’s Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression. Mike Thomson investigates why so little is known about this biggest ever peacetime threat to American democracy.”

Actually, if you listen to the 30-minute BBC story, there is not one word of so much as speculation as to why this story is so little known. I think a clue to the answer can be found by looking into why this BBC report has not led to any U.S. media outlets picking up the story this week.

The BBC report provides a good account of the basic story. Some of the wealthiest men in America approached Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, beloved of many World War I veterans, many of them embittered by the government’s treatment of them. Prescott Bush’s group asked Butler to lead 500,000 veterans in a take-over of Washington and the White House. Butler refused and recounted the affair to the congressional committee. His account was corroborated in part by a number of witnesses, and the committee concluded that the plot was real. But the names of wealthy backers of the plot were blacked out in the committee’s records, and nobody was prosecuted. According to the BBC, President Roosevelt cut a deal. He refrained from prosecuting some of the wealthiest men in America for treason. They agreed to end Wall Street’s opposition to the New Deal.

Clearly the lack of accountability in Washington, D.C., did not begin with Nancy Pelosi taking Dubya’s impeachment off the table, or with Congress’ decision to avoid impeachment for President Ronald Reagan (a decision that arguably played a large role in installing Prescott Bush’s son George H.W. Bush as president), or with the failure to investigate the apparent deal that George H.W. Bush and others made with Iran to not release American hostages until Reagan was made president, or with the failure to prosecute Richard Nixon after he resigned. Lack of accountability is a proud tradition in our nation’s capital. Or maybe I should say our former nation’s capital. I don’t recognize the place anymore, and I credit that to George W. Bush’s efforts to fulfill his grandfather’s dream using far subtler and more effective means than a military coup.

Bush the grandson took office through a highly fraudulent election that he nonetheless lost. The Supreme Court blocked a recount of the vote and installed Dubya.

Prescott’s grandson proceeded to weaken or eliminate most of the Bill of Rights in the name of protection from a dark foreign enemy. He even tossed out habeas corpus. The grandson of Prescott, that dreamer of the 1930s, established with very little resistance that the U.S. government can kidnap, detain indefinitely on no charge, torture, and murder. The United States under Prescott Bush’s grandson adopted policies that heretofore had been considered only Nazi policies, most strikingly the willingness to openly plan and engage in aggressive wars on other nations.

At the same time, Dubya has accomplished a huge transfer of wealth within the United States from the rest of us to the extremely wealthy. He’s also effected a major privatization of public operations, including the military. And he’s kept tight control over the media.

Dubya has given himself the power to rewrite all laws with signing statements. He’s established that intentionally misleading the Congress about the need for a war is not a crime that carries any penalty. He’s given himself the right (just as Hitler did) to open anyone’s mail. He’s created illegal spying programs and then proposed to legalize them. Prescott would be so proud!

WASHINGTON, July 26 (UPI) — Iraq’s oil minister said Iraq’s oil unions are not legitimate and have no more standing in the debate over the oil law than an ordinary citizen.

“There are no legal unions in Iraq,” Hussein al-Shahristani said Wednesday in response to a question about various factions’ positions on the controversial oil law. “Those people who call themselves representatives of the oil workers have not been elected to the position.”

Shahristani spoke to UPI by phone from Baghdad.

Saddam Hussein outlawed worker organizing in the public sector; subsequent U.S. occupying powers and now the Iraqi government do not recognize the workers’ rights to organize.

Despite that, workers have come together and leveraged their power. Since 2003 they’ve blocked numerous attempts to privatize management of both oil and other facilities and stopped work over disputes — most recently early last month over the oil law and other unmet demands.

Earlier this month workers in the southern, oil-rich town of Basra marched in protest against the oil law and demanded Shahristani’s resignation.